return to due South: season 3 episode 12 "Mountie on the Bounty part 1"

Mountie on the Bounty part 1
air date March 15, 1998

( Scene 1 )

(Kowalski didn't stress about not being able to swim when he had to drive the car into the lake, did he? How'd he get back up to the surface then?) The conversation feels familiar because it's straight out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)—in which the two leads are a couple of antiheroes running away from the cops, but never mind.

BUTCH: Damn it! Well, the way I figure it, we can either fight or give. If we give, we go to jail.
SUNDANCE: I been there already.
BUTCH: We fight, they can stay there and starve us out. Or go for position and shoot us. Might even get a rockslide started and get us that way. What else could they do?
SUNDANCE: They could surrender to us, but I wouldn't count on that. They're going for position all right. Better get ready.
BUTCH: Kid, the next time I say let's go someplace like Bolivia, let's go someplace like Bolivia.
SUNDANCE: Next time. Ready?
BUTCH: No, we'll jump!
SUNDANCE: Like hell we will.
BUTCH: No, it'll be okay. If the water's deep enough and we don't get squished to death, they'll never follow us.
SUNDANCE: How do you know?
BUTCH: Would you make a jump like that, you didn't have to?
SUNDANCE: I have to and I'm not gonna.
BUTCH: Well, we got to. Otherwise we’re dead. They're just gonna have to go back down the same way they come. Come on.
SUNDANCE: Just one clear shot, that's all I want.
BUTCH: Come on.
SUNDANCE: Uh-uh.
BUTCH: We got to.
SUNDANCE: Stop! Get away from me.
BUTCH: Why?
SUNDANCE: I wanna fight 'em!
BUTCH: They'll kill us!
SUNDANCE: Maybe.
BUTCH: You wanna die?
SUNDANCE: Do you?
BUTCH: All right. I'll jump first.
SUNDANCE: Nope.
BUTCH: Then you jump first.
SUNDANCE: No, I said!
BUTCH: What's the matter with you?
SUNDANCE: I can't swim!
BUTCH: [laughs in his face] Why, you crazy? The fall'll probably kill you!
SUNDANCE: Oh . . . [They jump.] . . . oh shit!

Are we therefore mapping Paul Gross onto Paul Newman and Rennie onto Redford? . . . (You might very well think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.)

( Scene 2 )

Okay, it's true that Fraser doesn't correct Kowalski all the time, but in Kowalski's defense, "No, I don't correct you all the time" is an example of a correction and this was definitively Not The Time, Fraser. Also, Kowalski said he was going to sock him if he didn't knock it off, and rather than knock it off, he basically taunted him into going ahead and doing it. . . . Look, violence is seldom the answer, but I'm 100% on Kowalski's side in what is really looking like a breakup.

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)

Dean McDermott, Douglas Campbell, August Schellenberg, and Jan Rubeš as Mort

( Scene 3 )

Rennie is playing guy-who-just-lost-his-best-friend (-at-least) to the hilt. I love Francesca and the sensible questions she's asking! Look how well she's doing at this civilian aide job!

( Scene 4 )

Thatcher's not wrong that generally people shouldn't change their clothes in their offices during the day; but on the other hand, if the door was closed, knocking on it wouldn't have been monumentally out of line. All the Canadians are earning demerits today.

( Scene 5 )

THE CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT
[ something something ] DOCUMENT DISTRICT 27
To the attention of: DETECTIVE RAYMOND VECCHIO
August 13, 1997

NOTIFICATION OF TRANSFER

Dear Detective Vox:

This is to inform you that we have completed our review of your performance at the Division of Detective Division are to be commended for your excellent service under [one word; extremely?] difficult circumstances.

As a result of our review, we are pleased to offer you the opportunity to transfer SOMETHING SOMETHING position of your choice within the department. Should you decide to accept this [two words], we should like to schedule a meeting to discuss the more sensitive details in person.

In the meantime, please contact me at the personnel office to discuss a bit of the possible [one word].

[The signature block is not visible off the bottom of the screen.]

August 15, 1997? How long had Kowalski been Vecchio-ing by then? About five minutes? And who's been holding onto this notification of transfer for seven goddamn months?

( Scene 6 )

Is . . . is Fraser being paid less than he should be because he's living in the consulate? Surely a government agency has pay bands and that sort of thing?

( Scene 7 )

Even-steven, right? (I mean, the fact that even as they return to the scene of their biggest fight to square up, Fraser was unable to avoid correcting Kowalski pretty much identifies one of the issues he needs to work on in therapy, right? Why is it so important to him to be right all the time?)

( Scene 8 )

10-52 is apparently the police code for "ambulance needed."

( Scene 9 )

( Scene 10 )

Francesca's shirt has never been more cropped. (And it is "shiver me timbers," but Francesca's etymology is not without its logic.)

I like how Kowalski has still had it up to here with Fraser, and Fraser knows it but still can't help correcting him and going off on his tangents anyway. There's a look in his eye when he says "that's a different story" whose subtext is "I'll shut up now," and I love it. It's taken almost four years, but he's learning.

I'd like it even better if he'd apologized to Kowalski or at least used the words "I was wrong," but baby steps, I guess.

( Scene 11 )

I'm impressed with how violent these guys aren't getting when a couple of cops come in asking questions. Also with how mad the bartender isn't that they've emptied his place, although I guess the regulars will be back tomorrow.

( Scene 12 )

It's hard to see clearly, but the number stamped on the gold bar looks like it might be 55073.

( Scene 13 )

Oh my God, Albert Sumner is still at it.

( Scene 13 continues. )

I don't know why "Blind Lou" is a meaningful name for Fraser (I mean, the guy is named Lou and he is blind, but aside from that), unless it's because Louis Braille was blind?

( Scene 14 )

Okay, "whaling as in whaling on a guy's head" is spelled the same as "whaling as in sperm," so once again Kowalski has no business correcting Francesca; but how are you going to have a whaler in the Great Lakes? Should it have been the Wailing Yankee?

Francesca has a lot of pictures taped around the edges of her computer monitor. I recognize none of the dudes in them.

The article accompanied by the picture of Billy Butler, under the heading "Local crewman drowns at sea," is about tennis. The next headline is "Israeli women on the firing line," which happens to have been the banner on page 1 of the Chicago Tribune on July 6, 1997, though I can't get a closer look at the actual page than this on account of I'm not a subscriber and the Trib's own archive site isn't working for me today. But the tennis article didn't originally come from above that Israeli Women headline. Here it is (bold is what we see on the screen):

( Come with me down a Chicago Tribune rabbit hole )

Anyway, Francesca also has a lovely floral cover on her desk lamp, which is probably a giant fire hazard, and she's taken out at the knees by the idea of Fraser leaving town, which is sad but come on, Francesca, you've been after this dude for several years at this point, it was never going to happen.

In other news, Kowalski has still had it up to here with Fraser, but who knows how angry (or otherwise emotional) librarians can get if provoked? Fraser probably has better intel on that than Kowalski does.

( Scene 15 )

ADR alert: Lou visibly said "Fitzgerald" rather than "Mackenzie" when the scene was shot and dubbed over it at a later time. We'll come back to that in a minute, but it turns out it is possible to re-record dialogue after a scene is shot, which just makes me sadder about all the times they chose not to.

Meanwhile, impersonating a blind person is probably misdemeanor fraud if you do it for the purpose of soliciting donations or concessions that you wouldn't be entitled to if you didn't have that disability. Otherwise it's just a dick move but probably not grounds for arrest. However, it is absolutely not the case that blind people's pupils don't move involuntarily.

But let's hear it for Francesca doing solid research work!

( Scene 16 )

Con Air (1997) is an action movie in which Nicolas Cage, serving 10 years for involuntary manslaughter, is paroled and flying home on a transport jet that is hijacked and taken over by an assortment of not-at-all-paroled incarcerated dudes. (It's not relevant to Kowalski's reference, but the chaotic-good Nic Cage character goes along with the hijacking plan just until it's safe to team up with the lawful-good U.S. Marshal played by John Cusack and save the day.)

Why is Gilbert Wallace wearing a hard hat—or, more importantly, why are Fraser and Kowalski not?

The law of averages is the belief (per Wikipedia) "that a particular outcome or event will, over certain periods of time, occur at a frequency that is similar to its probability." (Wikipedia also says this belief "usually reflects . . . a poor understanding of statistics.") It's not really a law. I'll cop to relying on it or something like it when I worked out how often the Toronto Blue Jays "should" have won the World Series in "Eclipse," but I'll give myself credit for admitting that the whole rant was based on an assumption not supported by, you know. Facts. 😊 Fraser probably means to refer to the law of large numbers, though as numbers go, 30 isn't that large, is it.

It's hard for me not to still be on Kowalski's side in this argument. Fraser's being a genuine smug know-it-all here and I'm not surprised Kowalski's sick of it. And shouting "Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray." as he walks away rather than, I don't know, following him so he doesn't get too far before reminding him the car is the other way would have been a more partnerly choice he could have made.

Vecchio hung out with Fraser for two years before Fraser had got sufficiently on his nerves that bad guys could exploit the weakening spot in their relationship; Kowalski's only been here six and a half months. Something something burns twice as hot for half as long? Something?

( Scene 17 )

( Scene 18 )

Partnership is like a marriage? Like a marriage? I know I just said "twice as hot for half as long," but the show is pretty much elevating the subtext almost all the way to text at this point, isn't it. The plausible deniability is clinging for dear life to how much work the word "like" is doing. It's definitely a married-couple level of bickering Fraser and Kowalski are doing about where they left the car and the way Fraser had to have known perfectly well that Kowalski was misremembering "Henry Allen" when he said "Henry Anderson" and therefore was it actually at all important to correct him? It was not. But has Benton Fraser ever, in his life, even once let anything go?

🦗🦗🦗

Anyway, there never was a Robert Mackenzie. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald had sunk in Lake Superior with the loss of all hands in 1975, well within living memory of people who were adults when this episode was made. They'd intended to refer to the Fitzgerald as the ghost ship and to use Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" in the episode; Lightfoot's condition for releasing the song stipulated that the families of the drowned crew had to agree. Which rather than ask all 29 families for permission to fictionalize the loss of their husbands and fathers and brothers and sons—but not to dramatize it, if you see what I mean; this isn't the story of what happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald and her crew, it's suggesting that the lost ship and the lost crew (none of whose bodies were ever recovered) are still out there haunting the lake; it would be making people's drowned loved ones into a plot device—Paul Gross and series theme song and incidental music composer Jay Semko made the much more humane and sensitive choice to invent a fictitious ship for the purpose instead, whose name had the same prosody, and the Robert Mackenzie was born (and then christened and then sunk, all in one fell swoop). But apparently not until after some of the episode had already been shot, hence Blind Lou saying "Fitzgerald" in scene 15 and being dubbed; here in scene 17, we can't see the guy's mouth moving who says "Don't go looking for the Mackenzie," but I speculate may have been Gross doing the pickup himself. It is definitely Rennie as Kowalski asking why he and Fraser should risk their skinny asses chasing the Robert Mackenzie, but note that we're looking at Fraser when we hear him; and obviously Fraser's whole monologue about that ship refers to it and its invented misfortune, but the camera is pointing up at him with a foggy night sky behind him, that is, he needn't have been on the dock set or even in the same room as Rennie when he shot that speech.

(It doesn't sound like he says the ship left the pier at Thunder Bay headed for the steel mills of Detroit, but that's definitely the lyric in the song, and also, what else could he be saying? All I've got is that at about 5:30 in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", Lightfoot sings "Dee-troy-it," apparently because in that verse he suddenly cares about scansion; so maybe Paul Gross was nodding in that direction even though by the time he recorded this monologue he was talking about the Robert Mackenzie instead. I am confident, as a person who grew up in Cleveland, that nobody who has ever lived within a hundred miles of a Great Lake has ever pronounced the name of that city in that way.)

Sault Ste. Marie is 470 miles from Chicago via (eventually) I-75 through the mainland of Michigan or 489 miles via I-43 through Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. Google Maps makes it seven or eight hours of driving, though Kowalski could probably do it in more like six if he put his foot down (and granted that he'd be driving in the middle of the night). Assuming they're having this conversation before about 2:00 a.m., they should be able to get there in enough time, though maybe not, you know. Safely.

( Scene 18 )

So they drove all night, probably stopping once or twice to gas up the car and get themselves some food. They've got to be exhausted as well as kind of rumpled and grody. Why does the show never acknowledge the ickiness of wearing the same clothes for days at a time? Is it because it's distracted by how suspenders outline a nicely built dude's back and shoulders, or is that just me?

( Scene 19 )

Kowalski's question about everyone in Canada knowing one another is 100 percent fair. Maybe it's just that Bob Fraser knew everyone? How was he in the Mounties for 35 years or more and living in a series of who-knows-where in the far north but still had a close enough friendship with a Great Lakes shipping captain that the fellow could teach Benton Fraser some number of knots (and Benton Fraser would remember him all these years later)? I think it would have made more sense if Smithers here had been an old friend of Fraser's grandparents'.

The lightning quick knot-tying is sped up just as the typing was in "Spy vs. Spy," which makes me think we're in Kowalski's POV for a moment here. (Not for long, because naturally he wouldn't be able to see Bob Fraser.)

I'm not sure about the "Moor on the Dardanelles" reference. The Dardanelles is the strait connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean Sea (and thus separating the Gallipoli peninsula from the Asian part of Turkey). It used to be called the Hellespont; is Smithers referring to Othello's (the Moor of Venice) consuming rage at what he thinks is Desdemona's betrayal? Iago suggests Othello might change his mind back and love her again, and Othello says no:

Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.

( Scene 20 )

I can see where sailors would be superstitious, but I guess I don't see how a crew made up of guys who pick up gigs here and there at Union Halls isn't all "strange crew."

( Scene 21 )

The whole scene, except Welsh's first line, is shot from Diefenbaker's POV, which means it's in black and white, kind of distorted visually, and with subtitles because of course the dog is deaf. I'm not kidding when I say I feel like some choices are getting made because DPs are getting bored. Also, though, if Thatcher and Turnbull represent the entire non-Fraser resources of the Canadian consulate, and they're both here at the 27th precinct, then who (if anyone) is minding the store?

Nevertheless, the fact that Fraser and Kowalski didn't call and leave someone a message is shocking.

( Scene 22 )

Fraser misses out the verses about Barrett assembling the crew in the first place and about the Antelope getting pitched on her side, Barrett being smashed like a bowl of eggs, and the narrator losing both of his legs (which is why he's lying rather than standing there in his 23rd year), but the crew don't seem to mind, singing along with all this enthusiasm. Of course I don't see why Kowalski can't be the one to inform the captain that the second superstitious crewman has a radio in his locker (nor why the guy shouldn't have a radio in his locker, for that matter).

I don't know who was responsible for dressing Fraser in this dingy cream-colored cable-knit sweater with the collar all frayed, or if it's the same person who dressed him in a (bulkier, but otherwise) cream-colored cable-knit sweater with a frayed collar in the pilot, but can I just say damn, wardrobe friend?!

What would Fraser and the crew of the Henry Allen have made of the TikTok sea shanty revival during the COVID-19 pandemic, I wonder? Conversely, what did Kowalski make of this singalong? Was he the only person in the room who didn't know what was happening when Fraser started singing? I'm reminded of a time when I was about 17 at a medium-sized extended family gathering. My aunt had a sound system with speakers on her large covered deck, so she always had music piped out there at dinner time as if she lived in a restaurant, and we were all having dinner minding our business—gosh, how many of us were there? Her family was six, possibly including a couple of girlfriends who might have been there with my cousins; our family was four; my other uncle and aunt would have been there; I can't remember if my grandparents were there or not; and almost certainly up to half a dozen other family members from further-out branches on the tree, for a total of at least something like 15 or 20 people, of whom I was the second-youngest (the youngest of all being my brother, three years behind me). So the chatter and laughter will, you understand, have drowned out the background music pretty comprehensively. And then all of a sudden, every single person at the table except my brother and me sang the chorus of "The Witch Doctor" by David Seville, a song of whose existence I had previously been unaware.

Try to imagine being a teenager, in a perfectly normal dinnertime conversation, and out of nowhere everyone around you is singing "♫ ooh, eeh, ooh aah aah, ting tang walla-walla bing-bang! ♫" x2 and then resuming the conversation as if this had not just happened:

• I'd never heard the song before;
• I couldn't hear the speakers so I didn't know it had been playing;
• I absolutely did not understand what was happening to my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and for a moment was really afraid that either they were losing their minds or I was losing mine;
• My brother somehow did know the song and could hear it playing on the speakers, so he knew they were singing along and didn't see what I was so freaked out about.

I think Kowalski handled Fraser's bursting into song pretty well, considering.

In other news, I don't know what to do about Kowalski asking if the food comes with instructions. That's the kind of thing Ray Vecchio might have said about Chinese food or, I suppose, Kowalski might reasonably say about "foreign" food of any variety, but what he's got on his plate is some sort of stew with what looks like a couple of potatoes in it, and Fraser is buttering a slice of bread. "Open mouth, put in" is not really a mystery here. Maybe Kowalski is confused by the stew not being in a bowl? He drinks instant coffee with candy in it, so it's not like he's a gourmand all of a sudden.

( Scene 23 )

Look at our girl being all competent at her job! (Also, I for one appreciate the "yellow is a soothing color" callback, even if no one else does.)

( Scene 24 )

Oh dear.

( Scene 25 )

I don't have a ton of confidence in this captain, I have to say.

( Scene 26 )

Wikipedia, of course, has information about the running bowline knot, but it does not include anything about squirrels.

( Scene 27 )

Why would the Whaling Yankee have guns in the first place? These are cargo vessels, not warships.

I think the captain is supposed to be the last one off the ship after having made sure everyone else got off safely, right? So if he had someone who refused to leave the ship, he'd be okay to go without him, but in this case, shouldn't the captain be staying and helping Fraser find Kowalski? Instead of making this one half-assed attempt to get Fraser to abandon Kowalski and then buggering off himself? 🤨

( Scene 28 )

I mean, I appreciate how the two of them call for each other in this sort of emergency. ❤️

( Scene 29 )

I think the bucket was supposed to give Kowalski a little more of an air bubble; the water level under there should have stayed lower than the water level outside it? Because while he was cuffed to the railing he couldn't stand up, so he'd have drowned a lot sooner than Fraser. But I'm not sure it gave him an air bubble at all. I'm also not sure this was exactly the right moment for Fraser to give in and let Kowalski have his way.

The title of this episode, of course, refers to Mutiny on the Bounty, or possibly to the actual mutiny on the actual HMS Bounty, and fair enough, Hester and his buddy do intend to mutiny on the Henry Allen, but otherwise . . . "Mountie" sounds a little like "mutiny" and the story is taking place on a ship, is what they have in common.

Cumulative body count: 34
Red uniform: The whole episode except when he's in the ratty frayed sweater

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