return to due South: season 3 episode 13 "Mountie on the Bounty part 2"

Mountie on the Bounty part 2
air date March 22, 1998

( Scene 1 )

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, Janet Wright, August Schellenberg, and Jan Rubeš as Mort

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It's so interesting to me how Turnbull saying "If we find the robbers, we'll find Constable Fraser" was so stupid but Welsh saying Huey and Dewey had better find their friends before they find the stolen treasure is exactly right.

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In this instance, I am with Fraser; I think it's Kowalski who is arguing. (Although fair enough, this would not be a time in my life in which I would be interested in a "bright side.")

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My favorite part of this scene is that when Francesca, Thatcher, Turnbull, and Welsh crowd around the phone, Diefenbaker crowds the closest. Good dog.

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Okay so if Turnbull has a learning disability, how much of his quirkiness makes more sense? (I mean, maybe none. Maybe he's got a learning disability and is a goofball.)

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Dewey answers "high school" quickly enough that either he's got that excuse in his pocket for every time a sex worker recognizes him or it's actually true. He's also got his plans all thought through for what he'd do if he weren't a cop. Vaaaguely interesting.

( Scene 11 )

Fraser pronounces "Gödel" as if it were spelled "Godel," and he was Austrian (and then German after the Anschluß, but); and his Incompleteness Theorem doesn't say that everything he says is untrue but that a formal mathematical system sufficiently powerful and complete to represent everything that is true will also be able to represent self-contradictions, such as "This statement is false," and if it can’t represent that sort of thing in the same form as true statements, it is incomplete. But this isn't really the time for Fraser and Kowalski to get into metamathematics, surely. (Kowalski is indeed yelling at him, and I find it quite sweet that in this one instance, Fraser is calling him on it.)

In case you're interested in timing it yourself, Fraser went under at 7:52 on the DVD and Kowalski at 7:56, and they breached at 9:46, for a total of 110 or 114 seconds. I can hold my breath (in or out) for about 30 seconds before I begin to get Quite Uncomfortable, and/but that's without (a) swimming while I'm doing it or (b) the adrenaline of knowing I have to keep going or I won't be able to breathe ever again. Fraser and Kowalski are both much more athletic and fit than I am, but I'm a trained singer, so my breath control is not, you know. Something I haven't thought about before now. Basically, I'm calling shenanigans on the two minutes underwater and trying for as long as possible to avoid talking about what happened at 8:50, the three seconds of "buddy breathing," which, okay, is that what we're going to call it? Really? I mean, I suppose whatever gets you through your day, Kowalski, because fair enough, I concede it was 1998 but at this point the plausible deniability is itself gasping and near death, isn't it. I mean to say. Well done thanking the guy for literally saving your life rather than preferring to die with your compulsory heteronormativity intact, dude, but I do appreciate how for viewers who were persuaded by the "buddy breathing" explanation and relaxing into their "no homo" comfort zones, the scene literally ends with literal sparks literally flying.

On which note, I think I'd have liked it if they'd been able to make it an even more explicit reference to The Empire Strikes Back:

LEIA: Let go of me.
HAN: Shh. [He is holding onto her where she fell into him when the Millennium Falcon shook; he is listening to the noises in the cave outside.]
LEIA: Let go, please.
HAN: Don't get excited.
LEIA: Captain, being held by you isn't quite enough to get me excited.
HAN: [setting her back on her feet] Sorry, sweetheart. [inspired grin as he leaves the cockpit] Ain't got time for anything else.

( Scene 12 )

It is charming that what Dewey would buy if money were no object would be real estate, and what Huey would buy would be . . . a fancy toy. Okay, not a toy, it's a professional tool for a studio musician or one-man band. It's probably still not even in the same order of magnitude as buying a comedy club, right? I mean what we're learning here is that Dewey? is miserable as a cop, and Huey just thinks he knows what would help him really get the most out of his free time.

( Scene 13 )

I have no idea if a fire extinguisher that size (and it does look pretty big, not your little under-the-kitchen-sink job) has enough oomph to lift a grown man high enough in the air that he'd be able to see a golden eagle, nor what the odds are that the pair of them would go (a) straight up rather than off at (b) wildly different angles, but never mind. The real issue is, I feel like what needs to happen here is rather than magically get out of the fire extinguisher harnesses he'd rigged up and drop them to the bottom of the lake, Fraser needs to lash Kowalski to something buoyant (did they really not pass a single flotation device in their travels through the sinking ship?!) or, at least, lay him on his back so he can breathe air; pass whatever harness material he was using (a fire hose, I guess) under Kowalski's arms; and tow him as he does the swimming his own goddamn self rather than swimming ahead and assuming that the guy he "taught" to swim three minutes ago will be able to follow.

We've heard about Clyde River before.

Of course we don't know why Fraser was under a drilling platform in a fjord near there, and Kowalski won't let him tell us.

( Scene 14 )

. . . I don't know, Francesca, Thatcher is an actual sworn law enforcement officer and you're an employee of the Chicago Police Department, but that doesn't mean that together you are a Chicago police officer, you know what I mean?

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I like how in the background while Francesca is going all nonsensical on the guy, Thatcher is looking at Welsh like "???" and he's just letting it happen, so eventually Thatcher just goes with it.

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Oh, Huey. (Also, why is Huey wearing glasses all of a sudden?)

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We've talked about PCBs before. I don't know if Fraser would be able to taste them in crude oil—strike that, I don't know if a normal person would be able to taste them in crude oil—but here we are.

( Scene 19 )

No, Turnbull, ordinals would be fourth, seventh, eighth, fifth. What you have is four little cardinal numbers.

Sometimes I think it would be cool to have a job where you could just yell "Somebody $DO-A-THING" and everyone around would jump to it.

Anyway, Thatcher with the knowledge! 47° latitude 85° longitude is actually in eastern Kazakhstan, near the border with China, but in the circumstances it's not unreasonable for everyone to understand without specifying that they're talking about 47° latitude –85° longitude, which is indeed in Lake Superior, and on the Canadian side at that:

And everyone in the room, not to say everyone in the lake, is lucky that she knows that off the top of her head.

( Scene 20 )

( Scene 21 )

I didn't see any X marking the spot on Butler's chest map or anything, but whatever, our secondary heroes are solving the case, which is what's important.

( Scene 22 )

Thank you, Constable Exposition.

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Henderson and Thompson are common enough names, so it may not be relevant that one of the HMS Bounty mutineers was named Thompson and one of the Pitcairn Islands, where the mutineers eventually settled, is named Henderson Island.

So Fraser and Kowalski have stolen the crew members' clothes like Han and Luke stealing armor from TK-421 and the other stormtrooper who came to search the Millennium Falcon, but Han and Luke had smuggling compartments they could hide people and things in. It's fair enough for Fraser and Kowalski to have left Henderson and Thompson looking post-coitally passed out as they did, but (a) how did they get their clothes changed so fast and (b) what did they do with their own clothes? Kowalski was just wearing jeans and a quilted flannel jacket of some kind (which he took off when Fraser was teaching him to swim but got back again, apparently), but what's happened to Fraser's red tunic, jodhpurs, and boots he spent all that time wearing in and will have to replace himself if he loses them? (I was going to ask (c) why did they need Henderson and Thompson's underwear?, and then I realized who's to say Henderson and Thompson were even wearing underwear, and now I'm upset.)

( Scene 23 )

I'm sure Thatcher wouldn't call a sergeant, whom she outranks, "sir," if it weren't for the muscle memory of being yelled at. One is interested in this incident to which the sergeant refers, because Thatcher looks pretty uncomfortable at the mention of it.

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Yes, thank you, Bob, what Fraser actually means is "I love you, too, Ray," and he should say it

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I think I like Sgt. Thorne. If the Frasers and Frobishers and (before they went rogue) Gerrards of the RCMP are going to be all backwoods tracking experts, why not have a dedicated sailing master as well? I mean she's a little mixed up with her British naval history, the Spanish Armada having been defeated in 1588, 170 years before Lord Nelson was even born (who, as we know, contributed to the defeat of the French, but also, okay, fair enough, the Spanish).

( Scene 26 )

I'm not terribly interested in why Bob and Buck fell out, but it's vaguely interesting that they'd have been in a position where they had to work together to save each other's lives if it had been that long since they'd even spoken to each other. Here's the Nahanni River:

Anyway, it's not that Fraser is wrong to say there's no particular reason to go the way Kowalski wants to go, but I think the weakness in his argument is, he doesn't actually have a reason not to. So why not go with one of Ray's hunches? It's worked for him before.

( Scene 27 )

I can't tell if this Bounty is the Bounty, the replica of HMS Bounty that was built for Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and appeared in half a dozen movies before she sank in Hurricane Sandy in 2012, or just some other ship with "Bounty" painted on her hull. (The credits shout out both Canadian Mariner and Seaway Queen, both of which played the roles of freighters in this episode; there's not a syllable said about what ship played the role of the Bounty.)

( Scene 28 )

I don't believe we have ever heard Fraser use language as strong as "oh my God" before. . . . Okay, no, he called Gerrard a son of a bitch right to his face, so it's not that his mouth has always been squeaky clean. But seriously, was anyone else as surprised as I just was to hear him say "oh, my God" rather than "great Scott"?

( Scene 29 )

So Fraser apparently knew that there was a tall ship Bounty on Lake Superior? Because otherwise, even if what he was surprised by was that this non-freighter what-sort-of-vessel-have-we-found-on-the-radar object was in the water with them, how could he have guessed what name to call her by when they came to the surface?

( Scene 30 )

I think I'd like it if when Thomas said "Talk like a puppet? What does that mean?" Francesca had said "I'm asking the questions here, [nonsensical epithet]." Ah well. Bygones. (A Hercules is a transport aircraft that can use unprepared runways for takeoff and landing, so it would be a good plane to load with something you were trying to steal and then fly somewhere nobody could find you.)

We're about 75 minutes into a 90-minute two-parter, so it makes sense that this is where the summing-up is about to begin. But knowing now that this was where we were going with the Mackenzie storyline, holy shit, yes, it was right to make something up rather than use the Edmund Fitzgerald.

( Scene 31 )

First of all, "Thank you for that expository information"?, Fraser, you can shove that up your — secondly, I'm with Kowalski, why is it always up to them? But thirdly, I have so many questions about the relative positions of the various watercraft right now. The Henry Allen sank at 47°N 85°W (which is, by the way, according to Google Maps, practically on top of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald). The Whaling Yankee was within about half a mile of it at the time, and either not moving (or not moving much) or coming toward the Henry Allen's last position, or else Fraser and Kowalski could have swum for it forever and never got there. So let's assume that when they came aboard, the Whaling Yankee was also at or near 47°N 85°W. That appears to be very approximately 10 miles (or, apparently, about 8.7 nautical miles) from land, a largely undeveloped area of western Ontario that is nevertheless crossed by the Trans-Canada Highway, where it's safe to assume Thatcher and everybody boarded the Bounty. Fraser and Kowalski were in that wee submersible heading . . . some direction or other, just away from the Whaling Yankee, though if they'd been thinking about it the smart thing would have been to face east or south, if they could find it, so they'd hit land as soon as possible. Anyway, the fanciest modern submersibles apparently max out at about 20 knots, so I don't guess that yellow thing Fraser was driving could probably manage more than, what, five knots? Maybe ten at the outside? So they'd have to have been going full speed for at least a couple of hours to get to where the Bounty, sitting at anchor, could see them. (Actually longer, because they were going for long enough to get sweaty and argue about it before they turned left and started traveling toward the Bounty in the first place.) And now it sounds like Fraser is asking Thorne to sail the Bounty to 47°N 85°W, figuring the Whaling Yankee will be right where they left her? Top speed for a sailing ship of that size is apparently about 14 knots, so Thorne thinks they're about seven-ish nautical miles away, which lines up with my extremely scientific estimates (measuring how many widths of my thumb fit on my screen between the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the Coppermine Point Lighthouse). Even though the Whaling Yankee could probably pull 15 knots and would, if her crew had any sense, be doing so and in the opposite direction. Not that they have any suspicion the Bounty is after them—although they do know Fraser and Kowalski got away in the submersible, so they no longer think the cops are at the bottom of the lake and they're safe.

My point is basically: Huh?!

Also, how handy for Fraser that Thorne happened to have a uniform in storage on her ship, including boots, in exactly his size and specifications. 🙄

( Scene 32 )

Then how was he good enough friends with Captain Smithers for the latter to teach young Benton his first knot?

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🤦‍♀️

Okay all right I'll stay here for a couple of minutes to say: I'm tired of Fraser and Thatcher, and I'm cranky about the soft homophobia of snickering over Turnbull and the boatswain and making them arm wrestle in a "romance" montage where everyone else gets to put their face on someone they at least like the look of. (I mean, these are not burgeoning Relationships, because as we've observed Fraser and Thatcher are Never Going To Happen and all the other "couples" have only been acquainted for about six minutes of our time or about an hour of theirs.) I can't really tell what Kowalski and the blonde Mountie are talking about; her line "Time to go" is my best guess, and other than that they're just saying place names, right? How does Fraser get from the wheel where he was talking with Bob to the outside of the railing? And are Welsh and Turnbull going to throw themselves at their respective interlocutors in full view of the whole rest of the ship's crew? It's really only Diefenbaker and the border collie who are exhibiting any kind of discretion.

Or are they? If the sun is setting even though it's noon, is this montage even really happening or is it all in someone's imagination? Of course Fraser is with Thatcher and Kowalski is with a pretty young woman who's really kind of taking charge of that kiss to get some distance from the fact that the last mouths Fraser and Kowalski had their mouths on were each other's. This is true whether the events of the montage happened or whether they didn't. But because of the weird timing of the sunset and Bob Fraser rattling on about romance, I feel like this whole brief sequence is happening in Fraser's office closet, if you see what I mean.

( Scene 33 )

I'm absolutely not an expert, but I don't feel like that's how radar works? That is, your radio wave will bounce back to you and you can tell a thing's size, but that's about all you can tell? Not whether it has an engine or not?

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Yes, we see what you did there, the boys are back to communicating well, etc. etc. Even though you're hitting us over the head with it, it makes me happy.

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Okay, "Andy Calhoon oblique-stroke Vic Hester" is funny.

But I mean, I don't know what else to tell you. "Right now, my friend, you're in the Dominion of Canada" is such an odd flex, and yet the next minute or so is so good. It's good enough that I'll forgive them for the following things:

• As I said 47°N 85°W is already in Canadian waters, so they shouldn't have needed to wait.
• The six men Wallace murdered in the process of all his dastardly deeds were the six guards killed in the robbery at the Federal Reserve bank, who were mentioned precisely once before and it took me forever even to remember that.
• I'd like it if Fraser had caught the gun a little less awkwardly, but I get that there wasn't room in the shot as it was composed for him to catch it with his arm outstretched, and who knows how many takes they took and decided this was the best one.

I think this is only the second time (after "The Wild Bunch") that we've seen Fraser fire a gun, and we should have known that even in Canada he'd prefer to shoot to inconvenience rather than shoot to kill or even to wound. Bones s4 e10 "The Passenger in the Oven" has a moment where Booth has to hurry and get someone arrested before a plane lands, and he reads the Miranda warning as fast as he can and finishes "can and will be used against you in a court of law because this is the United States of America" just before the wheels touch down, which is cool in those circumstances, and Fraser swaggering out from behind those barrels and catching the gun in midair and then not shooting Wallace with it is cooler than that.

I don't know, maybe I'm still just enjoying our heroes getting their groove back. The communication! The fact that Kowalski said no and Fraser didn't override him but changed the call until he found one they could both work with! ❤️❤️❤️

The lake they call Gitche Gumee is Lake Superior, whose name is ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯ ᑭᒋᑲᒥ Anishinaabe gichigami 'Anishinaabe's great sea' in Ojibwe. Longfellow spelled it "Gitche Gumee," and then Lightfoot sang about "the big lake they call Gitche Gumee," so that's what the line is doing here, but (a) in real life the /u/ vowel is a mystery and (b) all five of the Great Lakes are gichigamiin 'great seas,' whose proper Indigenous names are

• Anishinaabe gichigami (Superior)
• Ininwewi gichigami Illinois' great sea (Michigan)
• Naadowewi gichigami Iroquois' great sea (Huron, of which the northern part is Waaseyaagami wiikwed 'Shining Waters bay,' known in English as Georgian Bay)
• Waabishkiigoo gichigami neutral great sea (Erie)
• Niigani gichigami leading great sea (Ontario)

Also, I say again: It would have been extremely wrong to use the Edmund Fitzgerald in this episode, with or without the Gordon Lightfoot song—it would in fact have been using the crew's names and reputations for their own purposes, as Fraser points out Wallace has done to the crew of the Robert Mackenzie—and I'm glad they went the other way with that decision.

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Despite the Afterschool Special nature of this final conversation—from now on, Fraser will go with his gut more often and Kowalski will think things through!—it's good that our heroes have confirmed they're going to stay put for now. Fraser may be homesick, but Ottawa wouldn't really scratch that itch for him, would it? Everything would be (a) clean and (b) in the metric system, but otherwise how would it be better than living in Chicago, where at least he knows a handful of people, some of whom like him? (Some of whom may even like him a lot, if that's how you're reading Kowalski.) And on what basis does Kowalski think he could get his own life and his own name back if he takes the transfer out of the 27th precinct to anywhere else he wants to go in the department, which was offered to him in a letter addressed to Ray Vecchio? In short, neither of them would gain anything by taking their respective transfers, and they'd lose each other, which even if all they are is each other's best friend, is a lot to lose. So the decisions to turn the transfer down is sensible on both their parts.

I note that Welsh may still have a brief future with Thorne, but Turnbull is getting exactly nowhere with the boatswain and whatever was between Kowalski and the blonde Mountie was wrapped up off-screen. I assume that Diefenbaker and the border collie, however, are going to enjoy as much of each other's company as they can before the Chicago and western Ontario contingents separate when the ship reaches—wherever it's going. In the final scene, the sun is setting off its starboard bow, meaning they're heading a little south of west, so they're sailing for what, Marquette, Michigan?

What has happened to Wallace and Hester and the rest of the crew of the Whaling Yankee? What has happened to the Whaling Yankee herself? Presumably the relevant Coast Guard will have arrived by then to take charge of everyone (and sorted out which Coast Guard, U.S. or Canadian, has the responsibility). But how are Fraser and Kowalski going to get back to Sault Ste. Marie and pick up the car?

Cumulative body count: 34
Red uniform: Except when he steals civvies from either Henderson or Thompson

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