return to Due South: season 2 episode 12 "Some Like It Red"

Some Like It Red
air date March 28, 1996

( Scene 1 )

It's some nice writing and performing here, how without knowing really anything about these two people we know that the young woman is not familiar with this neighborhood. (Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde, was a Depression-era bank robber and gangster. So we don't know where this young woman found the candlestick and "more where that came from" that she's selling this dude, but he is definitely accusing her of stealing it.)

( Scene 2 )

Glendullan is a distillery that is still producing single malt whisky (random detail: Scotch is spelled whisky; everything else is spelled whiskey); their 18-year-old Speyside averages about $100 a bottle here in 2022, so $500 in 1996 is preposterous. But Glendorlan, which is clearly visible on the label of the bottle Fraser drops and breaks, doesn't exist, so hell, that bottle was probably literally priceless.

Fraser is being a pedant about nicknames, but that's part of what we love about him, his pedantry. There should be a different word for this kind of nickname, though, like "The Windy City" is totally Chicago's nickname, but it's not any shorter than "Chicago." Moniker isn't quite it. I don't know, I'm stumped.

So Vecchio knows this woman from before she was a nun and is surprised that she is now a nun. And she is vehemently Not Interested in the fact that he's a cop. That's some more nice writing and nice communication in just a few seconds of performance.

Credits roll.

Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Camilla Scott, Michele Scarabelli, Marisol Nichols, Heather McComb

( Scene 3 )

Where did Vecchio do this digging?

( Scene 4 )

I am not, as I've said, a Gun Person, but I can find no evidence that there is such a gun as the Hildebrand Yankee .38—although you'd think if they just made something up the people who are Gun People would howl, so probably there is and I just can't find it? (The Yankee 38 seems to be a sailboat, which is probably cluttering up my Google results.) I do find several articles that say despite popular depictions, Eliot Ness actually seldom carried a gun, normally wearing an empty shoulder holster. (He may not even have needed a gun when he "brought down" Capone, as the latter was convicted of tax evasion rather than for any of his more violent crimes.) Anyway, when he did carry a gun, he may have favored the Detective Special, which appears to be smaller than this affair Fraser is looking at.

There is, of course, no place called Runamukluk, 1242 miles from Tuktoyaktuk or elsewhere. I am unaccountably interested by the fact that 2000 km is 1242 miles (well, 1242 3/4) and the amount of money Vecchio was insisting was due to him in "Vault" was $1242. If he had insisted he was getting his $1242.75, I'd have been even more impressed.

I like that Fraser admits it is not entirely necessary to correct Vecchio and then carries on doing it anyway. And do we think Brenda Luisi really broke her leg in the hour since Vecchio spoke to her, or do we think she agreed to take the gig to get rid of him and then split?

( Scene 5 )

Okay, apparently when your lead actor gets bored in the back half of season 2 this is what can happen.

It is simply not possible that Huey, Elaine, Welsh, and Vecchio were all taken in by this subterfuge. I'll allow Vecchio not to have been paying attention for the first ten or twenty milliseconds because he was focused on his phone call, okay, but this is a guy who met Fraser once and then the next day only made it two steps past him before realizing it was him in a different uniform; by now they've been best friends for almost two years and I'm not buying it. Maybe Huey and Elaine were both on their way to other tasks, but Elaine looked right at the mystery woman and spoke to her; maybe she was looking at the dress more than the person? Welsh stopped what he was doing and came out of his office to speak to her. One of these colleagues would have recognized Fraser, because for christ's sake, look at him: This is not a woman you've never met before, this is Benton Fraser in a wig and a dress. It is also, just to get this out of the way, not an especially flattering dress, no matter what Elaine says—although the best part of her line is "Really?" at the suggestion that you can get a great dress at Sears—nor a good wig, nor a correct lipstick color. If Fraser is trying to pass as a cisgender woman, he is doing it wrong.

Which is really where the rubber meets the road in this scene, alas. How long a time ago 1996 was. The term "cisgender" existed by then but was not yet, I think, in widespread usage. I am not qualified to discuss the general worldwide state of cishet acceptance of queer identities in the mid-90s, but my own personal recollection is that the U.S. government was neck-deep in pretending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was inclusion. In the world of entertainment, Eddie Izzard was talking about the "crowbar separation" between transvestites and drag queens. (In 1998 she would describe herself as a "male lesbian," which sounds pretty reasonable to me as a waypoint along the road to self-realization as genderfluid, but that's literally just my read of what the words mean, because what the hell do I know about how other people feel except what they say about it?) We were also in the midst of the successes of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), both of which had sympathetic drag queen and (definitely in Priscilla, arguably in To Wong Foo) transgender characters—and which, if I'm reading this list correctly, may be among the earliest popular examples of "cross-dressing" characters who aren't hiding from anyone or anything or even necessarily putting on a performance (they are all performers, but they continue to present as women even when they're not performing, unlike, for example, the cast of The Birdcage (1996)) but simply dressing as they like and to hell with others' expectations. This very due South has had one fleeting moment with a similar character before and played it for a quick laugh, but not a mean one—Vecchio, not the person wearing the dress, was the butt of the joke.

Of course what Fraser is doing here is not being who he is but trying to convince others he's someone else. Sigh. I suppose the show is walking a fine line in that they have to have the other characters be convinced, because it's important that they believe this is a tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, deep-voiced woman, without even bothering to try to convince us, the viewers, because it's important that we know it's Benton Fraser in a wig and a dress. And/so I don't know how much weight to put on the fact that he doesn't "pass." I know trans women who absolutely do not give a shit if they look like (what people think of as) cis women, and I know trans women to whom it's very important that they do. Go figure: It takes all kinds.

I think this episode would not be made today.

( Scene 6 )

Doesn't Vecchio have a sister he's roped into unofficial police work in the past? Why can't Francesca go pretend to be a teacher for a couple of days? (Why can't Elaine?)

The Tlingit are a matrilineal society, but I have no idea if they have beliefs or practices about experiencing life as other genders do.

This light teal is a better color for Ms. Fraser than mustard would be, but I think a deeper blue would be better.

I think what frustrates me is that Fraser is trying to pass. Ms. Fraser's voice is higher, and she's carrying her body and using her hands differently than Fraser normally does, so it vaguely bothers me that she didn't get a better wig or, like, blend her rouge so she looked a little less clownish.

Vecchio's crisis of masculinity just makes me tired.

( Scene 7 )

I'm puzzled by Wanda interrupting when Ms. Fraser is talking to Ducky Melissa to tell her to ask Melissa where Celine has gone off to. Like: Thanks, kid, that's exactly what was already happening, so you can put a sock in it any time, am I right?

Also the child-bearing years thing is bizarre, but somehow I have no trouble believing it is something a substitute art teacher would say to a teenager? Ms. Fraser is using a variant of Fraser's Smooth Voice when she's urging Melissa to smile, and for a moment it makes the female impersonation oddly more convincing; I'm not kidding about how distracting that voice is. I don't see how a teacher taking over a student's project is helping the student learn anything.

The makeup is a little more evenly blended in this scene, but I still don't care for the pink lip.

( Scene 8 )

Was Vecchio's relationship with Anne before or after his relationship with Irene Zuko? Seems like he really got around in high school, huh?

( Scene 9 )

I'm interested in the "nobody's who they say they are" of Melissa's school experience, of course, which is clearly there to tee up some betrayal when she finds out Ms. Fraser is a dude, but right now she doesn't know that, so I wonder what she's talking about? Is it Wanda and her friend, who are Mean Girls? They don't seem phony to me, just mean.

Any adult sniffing (literally!) around a kid's room in a boarding school is creepy, right? But also probably totally allowed. I imagine the kids' parents sign over most or all of the kids' privacy when they send them to such places. Sigh. But Ms. Fraser is playing it correctly, earning Melissa's trust very quickly by not asking her to betray any of Celine's confidences. I suppose for that reason I will have to forgive her for the suggestion that a teenager will cause herself back problems by shoving a diary under her mattress—with a book that size under there, shouldn't the springs kind of compensate so you couldn't really feel it from on top? Isn't that part of the point of pocket sprung mattresses?—and for not acknowledging that mold is a type of fungus.

( Scene 10 )

We're with him on the pantyhose, of course. Was 1996 too early for bare legs? (He'll have had to shave to pass as a woman either way, so once you shave, why bother with nylons? Unless it helps you act the part, I suppose.)

I'm not going to look an awful lot harder for a 1930s Audemars Piguet Moonphase in 18K, though I did look back at scene 7 and we can indeed see that Todd Skolnik was wearing a gold watch on a leather band; the Googles are showing me (very beautiful) ones from the 1980s reselling for prices in the low five figures and brand-new gold Audemars Piguet watches in other collections inching closer to $100k, so let's assume that a rare Moonphase from the 1930s is worth more money than Celine (a) realizes or (b) would know what to do with.

( Scene 11 )

I'm sort of interested in the degree to which Thatcher wants to "brighten the life" of this particular male superior, given what she went through (and my interpretation of it, which I don't think is all that out there) in "We Are the Eggmen." I'm less pleased that she's having Fraser do the work for her; if it's that important to her that she get this particular bottle of Scotch for this particular superintendent then I'd think it would be important enough to hunt for herself. "I got you this thing" is a lot more of a thoughtful gift than "I had my subordinate get you this thing." At least I think so. But Thatcher's love language is Greek to me.

I definitely like "I've seen you track a snowflake back from to the cloud it came from" (though once again I wish they'd reshot until the actor could say the line in a way that made sense); I think it shows Thatcher beginning to appreciate the diligence of Fraser's investigative work. I still don't think that's a good enough reason to have him buying her Cop Dad presents, though. And then as she leaves his office, it sure looks to me like she thinks he's been neglecting the Scotch project to spend some perfume-transferring sort of time with a woman and she doesn't like it. Is she mad because he's taking attention away from the search for that bottle of whisky, or is she mad because he's coming home smelling like another woman's (that is, not her own) perfume? Thatcher's social feelings for Fraser are complex and not entirely clear even to her yet, I think.

( Scene 12 )

Near as I can tell, 420 W Lexington is a real address in Chicago, though possibly not a residential one. It seems to be in the medical district, not far from the Greyhound station, which is not the nicest-looking part of any city I've ever been to.

( Scene 13 )

Is it just me, or does this guy remind anyone else of Christopher Walken?

( Scene 14 )

That's a lot of getting out of here for one scene.

( Scene 15 )

So I guess that 911 call wasn't in time.

( Scene 16 )

I don't know why it's so hard to tell the Elizabeth Bennets of the world that they're still the lead even if the Jane Bennets are made to be more conventionally beautiful than they are—with more regular features, perhaps, or (as is usually the case) blonder hair. This young woman playing Melissa is doing good work in the awkward and lacking-self-confidence area, well done, but she's actually very pretty, and possibly part of the point is that all young women are lovely in different and unique ways, but I'd like it if any property ever would cast someone we didn't have to work so hard to believe didn't think she was pretty herself. Sit down, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger and Anne Hathaway as Mia Thermopolis. I am tired.

I don't know what to make of Ms. Fraser asking Melissa to the school dance. Like, I feel like that would be at least a little weird even if Ms. Fraser were a cis woman and a real teacher, which as far as Melissa knows she is. Right? (Also, I'm sorry, we've all bitten off a thread we couldn't break with our hands if we didn't happen to have our scissors immediately available, but is Ms. Fraser suggesting that the young women of the far north cut leather with their own front teeth? These would be the daughters of the women who chew the boiled inner bark of the poplar to make rope? Forgive me, but I believe even the remotest, most uncontacted peoples have, as far as we know, advanced enough that they use tools, and the Inuit are obviously not uncontacted, no matter whether they wish they were, which I have no idea.)

( Scene 17 )

Are Canadians unusually tall? Like Scandinavians?

( Scene 18 )

I once saw a man open the car door for his wife; she got out and, while he was closing the door, walked up to the door of a restaurant and stood there looking at it, much as Ms. Fraser did here; he scurried up and opened it, and she walked into the vestibule and stood there until he could scurry around her to open the inside door. It was astonishing. I've never been (or, as far as I can remember, met) a woman who expected that sort of deference, and if I did need my husband to help me out of the car for some reason, I'm sure I'd wait for him to finish with the car and then we'd approach the door together if I also needed him to be the one who opened it. Standing there insisting that you're helpless seems preposterous to me.

Frank Nitti was not just Capone's right-hand man but also his cousin; but it was only Ness and his G-men, not the gangsters, who were The Untouchables.

( Scene 19 )

So we already knew the proprietor was skeezy after he was chasing Celine and Todd in the van, but now our suspicions have been confirmed.

( Scene 20 )

So Melissa's investment in her relationship with Celine is deeper than we may have realized, isn't it? Based on her conversation with Ms. Fraser, she does want the boys to like her, but that doesn't negate how important it is to her that Celine like her as well. I am not taking "I love you" as a romantic statement on its own, by the way; a teenage girl telling her BFF she loves her can certainly mean she loves her like a sister and we don't need to ship them just because she used the L word. It just doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to suppose that one of the things Melissa is so insecure about is that she's in love with Celine and doesn't understand what she's feeling or why. (Also, though, this is a show where a teenager can tell her best friend "I love you" and mean she loves her like a sister, but the guy actually telling his own sister he loves her maxes out at "I care about you." Oy.)

( Scene 21 )

Aw, this poor old guy. I don't know why Vecchio needs to talk to his apparently Mob-connected uncle to work out that there's a stash of Prohibition-era stuff under the school given that he and Fraser have already determined exactly that, but here we are. Although—Vecchio is a second-generation immigrant, as he said in "Starman," so what's the deal with Uncle Lorenzo? Capone went to prison in 1932, ages before Vecchio's parents would have arrived in the United States. So Lorenzo, who is the brother or possibly the uncle of one of them, emigrated that much earlier and was mixed up with Capone's Chicago Outfit. How much was Vecchio's parent involved with that family business, do you think? That'd probably have a lot to do with why Vecchio's father hated cops.

Also, it does not appear that Capone ever had a brother-in-law named Vito Masucci; his wife was Irish (née Mary Coughlin), and the married name of his only sister to survive childhood, Mafalda, was Maritote.

( Scene 22 )

It's like every maintenance crew in Chicago is actually criminals in disguise.

( Scene 23 )

I don't know a lot of nuns, but I'd be surprised if any of them were particularly good makeup artists, especially on other people. Maybe I'm making unwarranted assumptions. Meanwhile, I'm puzzled by Ms. Fraser being so comfortable giving a teenage girl advice about what to do when a teenage boy is interested in her, given Constable Fraser's complete inability to form coherent sentences when a grown woman is interested in him. I guess the difference is (a) the teenage girl is receptive to the teenage boy's attention, not to mention (b) Fraser does know something of what's going on in the teenage boy's head, while the grown women are (so he thinks) a closed book to him.

Anyway, the mid-90s feeling of the school dance feels legit to me as I remember the mid-90s, except for the punch—although I don't remember what we'd have had to drink instead. (And except for a kid who's already fretting about her social standing hanging around with a teacher—I'd expect her to have gone full wallflower—but every unhappy family is unhappy in its particular way, as the fellow said, so just because I don't recognize this coping strategy doesn't mean it isn't real.)

( Scene 24 )

Sigh.

They had to do the do-si-do so they could tango toward the camera rather than away from it with Vecchio leading and Ms. Fraser following (or at least their arms and hands in those positions; it definitely looks like Ms. Fraser is leading from the following position, doesn't it, though I will be taking no wink-wink questions at this time). The dancing itself begins slightly goofy and advances to the positively Pythonesque, doesn't it? What's with the pirouettes?

( Scene 25 )

( Scene 26 )

Ms. Fraser running is not only unladylike, she is also unFraserlike, by which I mean, when Constable Fraser is wearing his normal trousers and shoes or boots he doesn't run with as wide-kneed and duck-footed a gait as we see here (in, of course, the effort to show the disguise is now just an outfit; this is the moment when Fraser switches back from being Ms. Fraser to being Benton Fraser in a dress).

( Scene 27 )

I'm not sure why this story needs Wanda and her friend, whose name is apparently Tiff. They're not really mean enough to be Mean Girls, are they?

( Scene 28 )

Is this fellow connected in any way to Senator Johnstone? 👀

I like Celine being even more upset when she realizes that now Melissa is in danger.

( Scene 29 )

I don't know, I might have preferred spending a minute or so on the whole explanation rather than that visit to Uncle Lorenzo and whatever that was all about.

( Scene 30 )

Wanda and Tiff are appropriately frightened of Johnstone and his goons, which to me is another reason we don't need them, really—they're not adding anything we don't get from Celine and Melissa. Why are they here?

( Scene 31 )

. . . are Wanda and Tiff just there so someone (besides Our Heroes) is still in peril when Celine and Melissa are both brave enough to run?

( Scene 32 )

Find someone who looks at you the way Fraser looks at that bottle after he's caught it.

So I feel like, given her earlier comment about how no one is ever who they really say they are, Melissa handles the outing of Ms. Fraser a lot better than one might have expected? Meanwhile, once the bad guys were disarmed, I guess it's possible one or more of the girls might have thought it was a good idea to recover their guns, and I think it's good that nothing of that sort actually happened.

( Scene 33 )

Wanda and Tiff's exchange would have made more sense if Tiff had said "We almost, like, got killed" or even "We almost got, like, killed" or if Wanda had said something like "We were almost actually killed, you dip." Mixing the "we were" and "we got" as they did made the dialogue not land properly.

I don't have a ton of use for the Vecchio-and-Annie C plot. Vecchio's whole romantic history is leaving me a little cold, to be honest. He and Annie were apparently involved enough for her dad to be angry enough that Vecchio thought she was maybe shamed into going into orders (so I'm going to guess somewhere between second and third base?—to use absolutely antiquated baseball metaphors that I have no doubt Vecchio himself would be one hundred percent fluent with—not that I have a good sense of how far would have been Too Far for a nice girl from a Catholic family in what I'm still going to assume was the late 1970s). Some time within about a two-year radius of that, he and Irene Zuko were involved enough that he was familiar with the drapes on her four-poster bed. Later on (maybe? as an adult?), he was involved with someone at some point who, at 2:00 a.m. one summer night, asked him where he thought the relationship was going; with someone else whom he may have been engaged to and then left at the altar, who subsequently married someone else; plus he was married at least once for some number of years. And yet all the numbers in his address book are out of date and women barely look him in the eye when they're telling him to get lost. I'm having a hard time remaining interested myself.

I APPRECIATE MELISSA TELLING FRASER THE COLOR OF HIS WIG WAS WRONG. I'm unable to sufficiently express my relief at the fact that the show admits this to us. It is almost enough to make me feel a little better about the gender-presentation-as-a-joke of it all. Because unlike (for example) the sainted Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo, Fraser is in fact lying to everyone who thinks Ms. Fraser is a woman. Like, we can hold onto the truth that trans women are women (which isn't what Vecchio means when he says "I like a woman who is, you know, a woman," but [heavy sigh] it was 1996) (On the other hand, four episodes ago he said "If I was wearing a dress, I'd be a woman," which . . . which is it, Vecchio? Is it that only women wear dresses, or that only people who wear dresses are women? In Vecchio World, I mean, because out here in the real world neither of those things is true, but here we are.) and still admit that he was in fact pretending. (He did own those clothes and that hair and those breasts, so they were his, but not in the way he and Melissa meant, of course. I have to mention it, though, because of this scene from The Pirates of Penzance:

MAJOR-GENERAL: I came here to humble myself before the tombs of my ancestors, and to implore their pardon for having brought dishonor on the family escutcheon.
FREDERIC: But you forget, sir, you only bought the property a year ago. The stucco on your baronial castle is scarcely dry.
MAJOR-GENERAL: Frederic, in this chapel there are ancestors. You cannot deny that. Now, with the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don't know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose they are now, and I shudder to think that their descendant by purchase—if I may so describe myself—has brought dishonor on what I have no doubt was an unstained escutcheon.

I mean to say. That hair and those clothes didn't belong to anyone else, did they? Nor the breasts, which this is the second time the show has focused on breasts in particular; does someone have a hangup?) However: This is also another example of an episode finishing up with Our Heroes solving the case and the bad guys apparently getting locked away and all that, but the fate of the person or persons who had been imperiled being completely unknown to us. What I mean to say is: What's going to happen to Celine?!

The episode title is a play on Some Like It Hot, a 1959 movie in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witness a crime and then hide from the criminals by posing as women. (Tony Curtis falls in love with Marilyn Monroe and admits he's been lying to her about being a woman, but she loves him anyway; Jack Lemmon becomes engaged to a millionaire expecting to divorce him and get half his assets when the deception is uncovered, but when he tells his fiancé he's actually a man, the fellow says, in one of the greatest last lines of any film ever, "Well, nobody's perfect.")

Cumulative body count: 21
Red uniform: In the bar at the beginning of the episode; in the back of the car after changing out of Ms. Fraser's dress; in the consulate being scolded by Inspector Thatcher; outside the school at the end of the case

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a triumph

5yo: Mom, today [best friend L] said rainbows are only for girls. But I told him they're not only for girls, because I like rainbows too.
me: Good for you. What did L say?
5: He said "oh, I didn't know that."
me: Oh, good. Do you think there are things that are only for girls?
5: No. Because flowers aren't only for girls, for example.
me: I think that's right. But are there things that are only for boys?
5: No. Everyone can like what they want.
me: Yes they can.
5: Tomorrow I'm going to tell L that everyone can like what they want.

❤️❤️❤️

(I try to ask open-ended questions rather than yes/no questions in this kind of situation, but I can't always think of the phrasing in the moment, hence "do you think . . .", which I try not to load with any tone or anything. I also tried to mask my relief that L's response was "oh, I didn't know that" rather than any type of doubling down.)