return to due South: season 3 episode 6 "Bounty Hunter"

Bounty Hunter
air date October 19, 1997

( Scene 1 )

Is it the position of this program that Benton Fraser, RCMP, is a scab? I suppose if the police are not actually striking, his answering their phones isn't actually crossing a picket line so we don't have to actually think that badly of him. But damn.

( Scene 2 )

Okay I'm not in a hurry to be sympathetic to law enforcement in general, but (a) I am in a hurry to be sympathetic to organized labor and (b) if the offer is only a couple of percentage points above the $35,580 Vecchio was pulling down when he made first grade back in "Juliet is Bleeding," then yes, it is insulting.

Dewey's outburst is likely a reference to the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, in which the Black laborers carried signs saying "I AM A MAN" (especially relevant in the face of "boy" as a racist pejorative used to deny dignity to Black men of all ages). It also feels to me like a reference to The Prisoner, in which the hero, imprisoned in a charming village where he is known only as Number Six, insists "I am not a number! I am a free man!" (and then they laugh at him); likewise, the Elephant Man says "I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!" In any case, the rest of the crowd are staring at him like he's lost the plot because the difference between him and the Elephant Man, Number Six, and the Memphis sanitation workers is that he is a White dude with a professional job who is not in any circumstances being threatened, imprisoned, or oppressed. Perhaps he feels his labor is being exploited and he deserves more fair salary and benefits; but unlike any of those he could be evoking when he says "I am a man!" he could get himself a different situation at any time. Fortunately, his colleagues seem to realize that.

( Scene 3 )

(There is no area 7.)

There are men and women both aiming their guns at Janet, so you'd think Fraser could have said "Gentlemen, ladies," but no. I suppose you wouldn't expect any different from a guy who calls his female boss "sir," but I gotta tell you, it doesn't feel as inclusive as I think they probably meant it to.

Before he was governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger used to be an action hero.

So what we've got here is presumably a single mom, because otherwise why would she be bringing her kids with her on her bounty hunting travels, am I right? And apparently unlike some single parents this show has talked to us about, she couldn't (or at any rate didn't) ditch them with their grandparents?

Credits roll.

Paul Gross
Callum Keith Rennie
Beau Starr
Camilla Scott
Tony Craig | Tom Melissis
Ramona Milano
and Gordon Pinsent as Fraser Sr.

(plus Draco the dog)

Wendy Crewson, Hugh Thompson, Jared Wall, Cecilley Carroll, Hayley Lochner, and Dean McDermott

Hugh Thompson was the name of my 8th grade math teacher. This is almost certainly not the same guy. 😄 Meanwhile, here's McDermott with an "and" credit. To the extent he's a big deal now—I don't watch reality TV, so I can only guess from what I occasionally see in commercials—this was ages before he became one, so hey, that "and" is a decent step up, good for him.

( Scene 4 )

Fraser's passive aggression is back, and no Ray is immune.

Okay, I'm coming at this scene from a number of directions, right: I'm a fan of this show; I'm an American who thinks the Second Amendment has been badly misinterpreted for a long time and there are way too many guns out there, licenses be damned; I'm pro–organized labor; I'm skeptical at best of most police departments; I'm a mom with a young kid; and I was once a girl who just wanted to be left alone to read her book. So it's hard for me to know whom to root for in this scene.

EXCEPT FOR ANNIE, WHO IS CLEARLY THE HERO OF THE PIECE at this point. Way to go, Annie! You deserve not to be parentified, and you absolutely don't have to smile if you're not feeling it, my darling, your face (just like your body) is your own. Attagirl.

Yeah so. Except for Annie. I think we are supposed to be on Janet's side here and generally against the 27th precinct staff, because Fraser is Our Hero and he's all "but people need help" irrespective of how the people being asked to provide that help are being treated, and Welsh and Huey and Kowalski have all made it clear that the union cops are (gasp!) lying about their "health," how dare they, that can't ever be right because we should all always tell the scrupulous whole truth at all times. 🙄 But as I said: pro-labor. If workers are striking for better working conditions, it is our responsibility to support them, and you'd think a professional bounty hunter who considers herself law enforcement–adjacent would be more sympathetic to her brother officers than Janet appears to be here. On the other hand: anti-cop. A police union isn't really a labor union, and even if it were, labor actions by first responders and medical professionals shouldn't be the same as those by other sectors.

Meanwhile, I can't tell how the show wants us to feel about the fact that Janet doesn't really have control of her kids, but Kowalski is 100% wrong to say they're immature and Fraser is 100% right to point out that they are children; sure, there's a range of childlike behaviors, but nothing these kids are doing is age-inappropriate, and they've apparently driven to Chicago from Billings, Montana, in a pickup truck, so a little cabin fever isn't a huge surprise. (I'm actually judging Kowalski a little harshly here for being so immediately down on these kids. Haven't we established that he wanted kids of his own? Has he met enough children in his life to know that you don't actually get to pick what your kids turn out to be like?)

And finally, the gun thing. Sigh. Fraser says 39,595 gun deaths in the United States "last year," that is, 1996, of which 1,441 were accidental, for a rate of about 3.6%. (Meaning 96.4% of gun deaths were deliberate, which is worse, right? Isn't that worse?) For funsies, I googled "gun deaths usa 1996" and found that the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention published a paper in 1999 for which the most recent data they could get was from 1996, in which they said 34,040 people died from gunfire in that year, with 3% of those deaths being unintentional. So the percentage tracks, even if Fraser has an extra 5k fatalities OJJDP didn't know about. (The CDC doesn't know about them either, apparently, but it says 1,134 of the 34,040 firearm deaths in '96 were unintentional, which is 3.8%, so there you go.) I also googled "accidental gun deaths" and found this analysis of the sorting of non–self inflicted fatal gunshot wounds, which is the only thing I could find even approaching relevance to Janet's claim that less than half of one percent of accidental firearm deaths involved licensed professionals. I imagine her point is supposed to be that the majority of "true" "accidents" are caused by people who have little or no experience or training in firearm handling, and "and there were circumstances in each of those cases" probably means there were extenuating circumstances in each of those cases, which I guess is supposed to make it okay that she's waving a loaded gun around in Francesca and Fraser and Kowalski's faces while looking in the other direction because she's distracted and frustrated by her children, who by the way are also still in the room? Like that kind of negligence is no problem, because don't worry, she's a licensed professional? None of this counts as a circumstance, unlike (for example) the accidental death of Irene Zuko in front of Fraser's very eyes, who was caught in the cross-fire among three licensed (or at least very experienced) professional firearm users, one of whom was an actual sworn police officer?

I didn't even spend a ton of time trying to sift through the statistics and the reports (I noped out not long after I read "for example, a child killing a playmate after mistaking a gun for a toy," because I CANNOT), and I'm so mad about both Janet's gun apologia and Fraser's immediate capitulation that I can't actually even see straight.

( Scene 5 )

My favorite person in this scene is still Annie, who is sitting in the passenger seat of the truck looking at the map, minding her own business, and wearing her seatbelt, unlike her mother. My second-favorite person is the little sister, who correctly points out that stuffed toys cannot be injured.

( Scene 6 )

I thought Fraser had offered to help look after the kids, i.e., that he was the babysitter?

( Scene 7 )

Aw, et tu, Annie?

( Scene 8 )

I don't know why Fraser is suddenly so precious about kicking doors in, as if he'd never seen anyone do that (nor done so himself) before.

( Scene 9 )

Fraser can bring his passive aggressive bullshit to any situation, can't he? But she clearly knows she's wrong to take the money (or is she? it's not clear to me whether bounty hunters employed by bail bondsmen count as law enforcement for the purposes of asset forfeiture, which okay is routinely abused so I guess the question is not whether she's wrong to take the money—she is—but whether she's allowed to take the money), so he doesn't need to lay it on any thicker.

Anyway, though, why is she so strapped for cash that she and her kids are sleeping in the truck? Didn't she tell Francesca there's good money in bounty hunting?

( Scene 10 )

So Fraser finds this woman compelling. He's been strangely taken with her ever since Francesca said "She's a bounty hunter;" he stammered to a halt in the face of her bullshit handgun safety claims; he's found himself kind of staring at her and had to get it together quickly twice in the past two scenes (talking about the scat in the city, which is totally the sort of romantic conversation you do have when you're finding out you have a ton in common with someone you just met 🙄; and then here where, having pulled her to safety out of shotgun range, he lay there gazing at her with his hand on her arm for a lingering moment and had to be reminded that there were bad guys still present). I am also, and is it just me?, feeling a strong Fraser-and-Vecchio vibe as they're walking back to the truck mutually apologizing for having fucked up that bust.

( Scene 11 )

So the "scumbag" (who may well be a scumbag, we don't know enough about him to say, all we know is that he's a bail jumper with at least one armed individual chasing him in addition to herself) "took" his $300 (back). I'm not saying that's not a serious bummer for Janet and her kids, but she still can't deny it wasn't her money. (If this family weren't so white and the police weren't all out with "flu," some other city employee would be along right about now to take the kids into foster care.)

( Scene 12 )

Apparently whether Turnbull is for real is an open question.

Bobby Orr is a retired hockey player and seems to be a real mensch. k.d. lang is a singer who has been out since 1992, hence Turnbull's "obvious reasons" reference, though frankly of course it wouldn't have been right to house a straight man and a straight woman (or in fact any two people irrespective of their genders or sexualities) in the same guest suite at the same time if they weren't previously involved or even acquainted with each other, would it? Of course not. Which should be the obvious reason.

Anyway, this episode aired October 19, 1997, and Diana, Princess of Wales, had died on August 31 of that year, but the episode must have been filmed long before that or I don't think they'd probably have had the kids ask about her in this casual way. "Fergie" refers to Sarah, Duchess of York, whose birth name was Sarah Ferguson and who had divorced Prince Andrew in 1996.

( Scene 13 )

No matter where and how Fraser is living, nobody can actually believe it.

( Scene 14 )

Cousins? Douglas and Dwayne? Fraser said he didn't have any other family after Bob died. Whose children were Douglas and Dwayne, and what happened to (a) them and (b) their parent who was, presumably, Bob's sibling?

( Scene 15 )

Turnbull has Toad in the breast pocket of his tunic, which I'm not sure I realized had a breast pocket before now. (Okay I mean yes Fraser had a whole loose-thread-on-the-button situation in "An Invitation to Romance," but it was not clear in that episode that the pocket was functional rather than decorative. Although on the one hand a faux or decorative pocket doesn't seem like it's their style, on the other hand [gestures to the red uniform in general].) He also has one star on his left sleeve, meaning he's been in the service for more than five years—not much more, though, because when we met him in "Bird in the Hand" he had no stars. And he's actually doing the best he can with these kids, the care of whom should in no way be any of his responsibility, but he's stuck with them because Fraser is turning out to be a shockingly bad boss.

Gulliver's Travels is indeed a story about a man who travels around the world—several worlds, actually—having adventures. It's deeper than that, actually, a pretty biting satire, but it's fine for Turnbull to present it as a rollicking adventure tale, which is one of the things it was satirizing. The first of the lands Gulliver visits is Lilliput, where everything is very small and he appears to be a giant, hence his asking the kids if their dad is a giant; apparently the kids' dad is off on adventures and that's why the kids are living in the truck with their mom.

( Scene 16 )

The car's license plate is RCW 139. IT'S BACK.

I'm not sure freelancing (which Fraser has also done, so his "understanding" of this "common practice" might come from, you know, his own experience doing personal security for Mark Smithbauer) isn't scabbing, but Kowalski seems to feel like taking 20 bucks off Fraser absolves him? I don't know, on the one hand I want to see the "negotiation" as Kowalski saying, basically, I want to help you out but I'm not allowed, so sure, toss me a dub and that way it won't be official police work, but on the other hand, this is a guy who just used the word "overstand" in a sentence, apparently because it's the opposite of understand—years before GWB would give us "misunderestimate," (although Fraser suggested just two weeks ago that Kowalski might say "overstand," so . . . I don't know, it's possible these episodes were aired in a different order than they were filmed?)—and while I don't care to speculate about Ray Kowalski's voting patterns (on the one hand, cop; on the other hand, Illinois), I do suspect he'd have kind of instinctively understood W's malapropisms, don't you? I mean, if there was ever anyone who would have agreed what you needed to do was make the pie higher.

( Scene 17 )

We can't see the kids' faces when they stare at Turnbull, but they probably look not unlike the Children of the Damned.

( Scene 18 )

It is not all right! You can't just leave other people in charge of your kids without the knowledge of (a) those people and ideally (b) your kids. (It's also not all right for Fraser to have ducked out the way he did, but at least Turnbull knew he was going.)

( Scene 18 continues. )

How the hell did Torrance get in that car so fast when he was climbing a rope ladder into (presumably) a loft above the horse barn? The timing of this mini-chase is opaque to me. What is transparent is that Kowalski does not dig the vibe between Fraser and Janet.

( Scene 19 )

UP. MUCH. THERE.

I am (as I have said) not unsympathetic to Janet, and as disappointed as I am in some of the choices Fraser is making in this episode he is still Our Hero, and the chemistry is back on: I find the sexual tension here plausible. It doesn't hurt that he's out of that red uniform for about the second time this season, wearing a dark blue waffle knit henley (or if not a henley, something with a notched collar) and, in the low light, looking great in it. Janet isn't my type, but she's certainly his: "sturdy," as Bob says, knows her way around a gun fight, not likely to get lost in the back country, plus she's got the long dark hair we know he's partial to—she won't need her fingers warming up in his mouth and she's not his boss, so she's got all the advantages of both Victoria and Thatcher and none of the disadvantages, plus she comes with a family en suite. (However: husband to settle up with? I mean, sure, the kids have a dad, but he's apparently not entirely out of the picture despite Robbie's belief that he's off around the world having adventures? Uh-oh, danger, Will Robinson.) No wonder lonely Fraser is smitten.

But what was the original plan before Janet said she was going to go sleep in the other room with the kids and Fraser insisted that she take his office and he'd make other arrangements? He was going to sleep in there with her? Isn't he living in there camping overnight on a single folding cot? Wouldn't that be tough to share? And didn't he just meet her today? Bob Fraser (even though he says "radio-ologist" instead of "radiologist"—do we think these are different jobs?—and even though he thinks you build houses on brick foundations) is right (I was going to say for once, but that's not fair to him, which is to say not fair to Fraser, because I still say Bob is Ben's subconscious) that rushing into things is a bad idea. (I'm not positive we should uncritically grant him "you need somebody" either, come to that.) The flashback through the history of their acquaintance doesn't belabor the point, but their relationship is a total of about eight hours old. I'm not saying you can't meet someone and Just Know they're the one for you—that's apparently what Fraser did with Victoria—but it's almost certainly a terrible idea to meet someone and then fuck her behind your desk that same night down the hall from where her kids are sleeping on your boss's office floor (and your subordinate is still somewhere in the building where, as far as we know, there are no locks on any of the doors).

Anyway, we haven't done a map in a minute. Recall that there is no Fortitude Pass; there is also no Fortitude Bay, and I don't know how far you could hike from Chilkoot Pass in four days, but it'll be to somewhere in the Yukon—

—which, does he have a place up there? Bob had a cabin somewhere in the north, but (a) we never really knew where, and anyway (b) it burned down and (c) Fraser and Vecchio never did get up there to rebuild it. ???

I am judging Janet for having a toothbrush with her but no toothpaste. Come on, lady.

( Scene 20 )

So Turnbull may in fact have cracked.

Thatcher is right, of course; even if Janet and her kids were Canadians, it wouldn't be the consulate's responsibility to literally house them. If Fraser wanted to help, as he obviously did, he could have put them up at his own home OH WAIT

He could have paid himself for them to stay in a hotel. Dude makes what must be a reasonable salary and has literally no expenses. If he can lend Tyree Cameron bail money he can lend Janet Morse a night's worth of hotel fare. I mean, that is, he can call it a loan if he wants and if it makes Janet feel better, but it wouldn't actually kill him to just give her the cost of a night in a hotel and a hot meal for her kids, and frankly if he wants to stay there with them (or on the floor outside their door or wherever) the odds that his father will turn up to talk him out of it go way, way down.

( Scene 21 )

I feel like Kowalski is being unnecessarily antagonistic to both Francesca (who is right to call him on his habit of correcting her for getting things "wrong" that don't make a damn bit of difference) and Janet, although I still think Janet should stfu about the blue flu. That is, I think she should back off the police department's labor action, but I don't see why Kowalski is assuming she's in cahoots with the hit men who are apparently also pursuing Bradley Torrance. I also don't know why she invokes Mother Teresa (St. Teresa of Calcutta) in particular as an example of someone the police wouldn't even lift a finger for, but by October 1997 it was true that she couldn't walk, because like the Princess of Wales, she had died earlier that year. (In fact, I remember in the days following Diana's death, when talking heads everywhere were going on and on about her charitable work—which had been considerable—at some point someone, I think it was Michael Douglas, saying something like "Look, it's very sad that she died, but the way people are carrying on about her philanthropic work, I mean, my God, how are they going to top that when someone like Mother Teresa dies?" and then six days later she did. Whoops.) She'd been in poor health for a year or so before her death, so Kowalski's assessment that she couldn't walk at the time this episode was filmed is probably accurate. 😏

( Scene 22 )

I don't know about that trike. Are we supposed to take that guy seriously?

( Scene 23 )

Aha, so this is the husband she needs to settle up with, and Kowalski was right, there was something she wasn't telling them back in scene 11, but it wasn't what he thought it was. (Only she's been lying to Fraser this whole time.) So they were married in January 1986 and it's now October 1997, so I return to the estimate that Annie is not older than 11. Also, you don't lay claim to a stake; you stake a claim. She'd have needed another noun to finish that sentence, "I staked my claim to this $WHATEVER"—probably "loser"—but then the sentence would have made a damn bit of sense. And: I simply do not believe that a bear hunting, construction working, oil rigging, trick riding Montana girl who got married in a Baptist church would know, much less use, the word "schmuck."

( Scene 24 )

I am delighted by Fraser politely taking his leave of the bounty hunters and the bartender. I am less delighted by Kowalski's use of "fart-hammers," which feels to me like a period-appropriate but nevertheless extremely tiresome homophobic slur. (I normally heard "fart-knocker," but given Kowalski's verbal imprecision (despite his haranguing Francesca for her verbal imprecision, which he honestly probably does because he's self-conscious about his own), this tracks.)

( Scene 25 )

First of all, Torrance's excuse—that it dings his self-respect for his wife to be the breadwinner—is indeed extreme horseshit that we are still dealing with 25 years later; I can't find the article I'm thinking of right now, but how about the one where a woman quit the business she had founded, instantly affecting not only her own income but that of all her laid-off employees, because her less-employed husband couldn't deal with child care responsibilities while the kid was home from school or day care during the pandemic. GRAR. (My own husband out-earns me by about 2:1 and didn't qualify for CARES Act extraordinary leave in the beginning of the everyone-who-could-conceivably-stay-home-was-doing-so phase, but in general when our kid can't go to school we share the disruption equally. He does not get nor even expect special recognition for this, because he is not an asshole.)

Secondly, if Janet is the breadwinner, and for the past six months she has had one less family member than usual to support, why doesn't she have the cash (or credit? it's 1997, don't people have plastic money, even in Montana?) to stay in a motel?

( Scene 26 )

My favorite comedy prisoner-digging-his-own-grave scene (which I agree should be a rare thing) is Ewan McGregor in A Life Less Ordinary (1997), about which the only thing I actually remember is himself being handed a shovel in the desert, and when he asks if they aren't just going to shoot him, and they say they are, he says "Then I don't see why I should dig!" (Maybe there was also some bad karaoke by Cameron Diaz.)

( Scene 27 )

That hasn't stopped him before.

( Scene 27 continues. )

Fraser, you are a Mountie.

I don't know why Bradley is worth $1200. Is that the fee Janet is going to get from the bail bondsman if she returns him?

Again with the power:weight ratio of a vehicle with even a small engine vs. a single animal. I think the bike should be able to outrun the horses. But I'm happy to entertain discussion!

( Scene 27 continues to continue. )

The self-negging is too much for me, particularly because bro, you leapt onto a running horse. I know it was your stunt man who did it, but it was cool. Don't sell yourself short.

Anyway, the Vegreville painted egg is real.

( Scene 28 )

Fraser is still out of uniform, and when he stands up in the blue jeans and the flannel and the clean-cut compared to Bradley Torrance's beardy gruffness, that's the point at which I feel like Fraser and Janet belong in a Hallmark movie.

In all honesty, though, he gives good wistful in this scene, and I frankly can't tell if he's jealous of Bradley Torrance or of the kids. That is, we haven't known before this episode that Fraser particularly wants a family, and maybe he hasn't necessarily wanted one before now, but in this scene he sure does seem that way. I'm hearing Emile de Becque singing "This Nearly Was Mine" over here.

Close to my heart she came
Only to fly away,
Only to fly as day flies from moonlight
Now, now I'm alone,
Still dreaming of paradise,
Still saying that paradise
Once nearly was mine.

(Although Emile de Becque knew Nellie Forbush for longer than a single day before she left him.) But it's not just that he wishes he had what Torrance has, right? He's also—look, those kids have been missing their dad for six months and now they've got him back, and look how happy they are, and Fraser missed his dad for like a year and a half at a time, and is he not seeing himself in those kids too? ISN'T HE?! And I mean now that Torrance is back he's going to step back and not try to continue auditioning for the role of stepdad, but if he isn't thinking about and regretting several or many aspects of his own childhood here, I'll eat a bug.

He also quite gallantly does not correct Kowalski's "whole eight yards" (it should of course be "whole nine yards"), because he is not himself insecure about his occasional failures to come up with the correct expression (lock our load, hole in my bag of marbles, etc.).

( Scene 29 )

Aww, Fraser. So that's it: He's not sad to be losing Janet and her kids specifically, but he's so lonely he's ready to cry about it in a police station and she was his first chance at companionship in—well, so he apparently didn't consider that there was any path forward with Thatcher, or they'd be on it, right? So his first chance since Victoria. Listen, watching a woman you barely know but have decided you're in love with (or could be) leave you, whether it's on a train while you lie on the platform bleeding from a gunshot wound or whether it's to rejoin her no-account husband because her kids need both parents in their lives—sure, plenty of wounds in both cases. But like: If Janet and Bradley aren't getting back together, couldn't she and Fraser ("Hat Boy") have a relationship if, as seems to be the case, they both wanted one? Of course, he'd have to move to Montana, because it doesn't sound like she's prepared to stay in Chicago. Maybe that's it; she likes him fine, but at the end of the day, she recognizes that she just met him and uprooting her family at this point might be a little premature.

The kiss was good, though.

Anyway, here's Kowalski being a good friend. He recognizes that his buddy is hurting now that Janet is gone, and the correct way to comfort your friend is not to tell him all the ways she was no good for him and he's better off without her, which he may well want to do given how he didn't like her from the start of the episode to the finish, but to take him to dinner and give him a hug and assure him he'll be okay, all of which he does. A+ friend and partner work, well done.

Cumulative body count: 25
Red uniform: The first day of the episode, but not that evening and not the second day

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