![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
when the wind is southerly
Due South trivia of the day, provided by one of the making-ofs I tracked down on YouTube: Camilla Scott, the actress who plays Thatcher, originally auditioned in the pilot for the part of Ray. It is pretty great that they were considering making Ray a woman; a small part of me is wildly sad I cannot sneakily take a vacation in an alternate universe and watch the nutty adventures of Fraser and girl!Ray. I would be so willing to ship them, too, because they have great chemistry but I never know what to do with Thatcher, since she's Fraser's boss, and neither she nor Fraser seem to know what to do with it either -- if they are buddy cops that solves that problem! I mean, it also raises new ones, but I am apparently quite prepared to happily ship Fraser with any Ray at all, even the ones who only live in alternate universes.
Only two episodes; there is no way I am actually going to get through all of due South before WisCon, but I can't actually bring myself to care, especially since You Must Remember This broke my writer's block and I spent all of yesterday writing fic.
1x11 You Must Remember This
And at the beginning of this one they've just gone to a basketball game together! Sorry, I just. BOYFRIENDS. I do not ship them in the they-are-totally-doing-it way, but I do ship them in the way where I would be very happy for them if they ever did catch a collective clue. Oh their epic bromance.
Ray and Suzanne Chapin have mad chemistry, though. Not that I am not also fond of his ill-fated thing with Irene Zuko, but in some post-CotW leg of the Trousers of Time (which is how I secretly assume due South operates: Fraser and Kowalski definitely go off looking for the Hand, but everything else in the epilogue is up for grabs and the future is gloriously uncertain) -- anyway, in some universe post-CotW, Vecchio and Suzanne meet up again, and she is mad impressed with his undercover work, and they go off to be awesome together because it is finally their time. SOMEWHERE THIS IS TRUE.
Argh, I fucking adore the scene where the four of them are playing poker and talking about love; seriously, I think it might be one of my favourite scenes in the whole show. You find out so much about all of them. Like, Gardino is pretty cynical about love, and apparently had a five-year relationship once (hello, recurring weird theme of divorce!). Huey has this wacky theory about settling for one of the two million women in the world that would be all right for you, but actually he just mostly wants to play the damn poker game. Fraser, as per usual, has his wacky set of facts -- French phrases, stuff about hamster pheromones -- but doesn't actually say anything about himself. And Vecchio, oh my god, I love the bit where he says that true love ends with marriage (theme again, wtf) which probably explains everything ever about Angela, and also makes me want to grab onto his coattails and go "Jesus Christ do not marry Stella!" I love the way Vecchio sort of ... lives in a world of stories. By which I mean, he assigns special meaning to the way his hair's cut, and has all these sweeping ideas about what love is like, and it's wonderful.
Fraser's "When it happens, how do you know?" kind of tears me up inside, by the way, and Vecchio happily answering, "You just know," is not helpful at all. Because Fraser doesn't -- his mind doesn't work like that. What he feels for Victoria is complex and scary and we'll get to that later, but he's always sort of painfully unsure about love. I'm serious, Vecchio, you couldn't've thrown the poor man a rope here? For someone who actually gets other people really well, there's a part of himself Fraser is absolutely no good with.
And here's the first Victoria monologue. (I'm pretty sure the first time I heard it was the first time I realized that I could just sit perfectly still and listen to this man speak for hours. My god.) A quick check tells me that the same people didn't write this episode and the Victoria ones, but I assume they had her planned -- or they dug the monologue so much that they went "You know what, we've got to get more out of this." And augh, I just love the way it's done, the way you never see Fraser's face, just his reflection. It's also probably the first time in the show where you get to hear him being honestly broken up about something. And Ray sleeps through it. Ahhh.
By the way, how much do I love that s1's ~epic loves~ are both criminals? I mean, Suzanne is really an undercover special agent, but I really dig the fact that the obvious arms dealer is actually one of the good guys and meanwhile Victoria is all wrong-place-wrong-time, save-me-Ben-save-me! and really awful. (It should be obvious by now that I adore Victoria. I'm going to be insufferable at the actual episode.)
Oh, Ray, baby, you just lost all your points. (Boyfriend points? Good friend points? I don't know.) He says, "Has this kind of thing ever happened to you?" and Fraser says, "Well, I -- I, uh --" and Ray just overrides him with, "No, of course not, you're a Mountie. What does a Mountie know about women." Bad Ray. No empathy biscuit. I remember leaving the Vecchio seasons with the strong impression that Ray loves Fraser, but doesn't necessarily understand him. I don't know if Kowalski gets an empathy biscuit but I slightly suspect he does.
This is also the first episode where Diefenbaker's fast-food addiction is made much of. Oh Dief. And I love how Fraser's quite terrified that Diefenbaker could've been hurt, but the moment he sees Dief's okay, it's all straight spine and "Oh. Out of doughnuts, are we?" Oh Fraser's sometimes Bob-like inability to express his feelings!
Apparently as of s1 Ray's been a cop for nine years. Or maybe been a detective nine years? But he said 'on the force' so I assume he means been a cop in general. So he was at least in his mid-twenties when he went to the Academy; maybe he did college before that, or some other jobs. (Or the timelines are just screwy, because I know some of Kowalski's citations do not match up timewise with when he was a rookie in Ladies' Man, so maybe I should disregard everything dS says ever having to do with numbers.)
Oh my god and Suzanne was staying in a hotel with the Revolving Door Of Angst. I would be so completely unsurprised if they'd used the same place for the Victoria scenes.
One does have to wonder how Fraser got a nice swirly picture of Victoria in the fall if they knew each other for a sum total of roughly a week trying to survive in the snow, but that is what convenient retcon for the sake of the story is for! I think it would be equally poignant for Fraser to have honestly loved someone once and it to have not worked out for normal-people reasons -- that woman with the autumn trees in that picture, she could be someone else; except that I'm not sure Fraser is capable of that depth of emotion and that kind of hurt without being gun-shy for a while afterwards.
1x12 A Hawk and a Handsaw
I see that in this episode Ray has a brother! I think I will try to promptly forget this, because Ray makes a lot more sense if he's The Brother with a couple of sisters to protect and get exasperated with and things. Do not make up family members just for throwaway Freud jokes, show!
Aw, Dief has a thing for Dr. Pearson, the forensics woman! That's where that line about Dief being transfixed by blond hair comes from. (And yet there is a total of one fic ever about Dief liking to stare creepily at Kowalski because of his hair. There should be more.)
"It's a rather long story; it takes exactly two hours to tell." That cracks me up, especially because the pilot only takes an hour forty. Whence the extra twenty minutes, Frase? Also it actually breaks my heart a little that Fraser can easily get committed for just telling the truth about the pilot, which is before anything seriously wacky happens to him. And he only has to mention Diefenbaker, not even his father's ghost. I just. Oh Fraser. (And another parenthetical fic lament/suggestion/whatever, since I seem to be doing these: there should totally be a story about how Fraser really is crazy and committed, a la that one s6 episode of Buffy. It would be alarmingly easy to pull off believably, and would probably break me a bit, and now I want to write it. Fuck.) Also, god, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that my introduction to Paul Gross was Slings & Arrows, but watching him play crazy/pretend to be crazy/hold meaningful and interesting conversations with crazy people/&c makes me really irrationally delighted.
And I love that even when he is in his hospital clothes Fraser gets to keep his hat. I think the word I am looking for is 'precious,' which I hope does not sound condescending in this context, because I just, I adore him. <3
Oh my god, I already knew Fraser is awesome but he just started discussing the theory of subjective reality with a mental patient. Of course Fraser's the sort of person who believes every viewpoint is equally valid and worthy of consideration; it's especially wonderful that he can do that given that the show presents him as pretty much always having his moral compass due north, as it were -- Fraser pretty much always knows the right response to any given (moral) situation, which implies some sort of absolute truth, which he just rejected out of hand by acknowledging that reality is mostly a matter of mass belief. Which works in reverse too, I suppose: Fraser does often believe things solidly enough that he convinces other people to believe them too, and they become reality.
At some point I have to actually gather my thoughts coherently about this and explain all the reasons why Fraser is almost entirely unique and quite possibly my single favourite character ever, but those thoughts should probably be structured in a less episodic way.
I think the story Fraser tells about his father getting quiet and thin and not shaving after Caroline died is possibly the best Bob story in the whole show. That story seems to fit a Caroline-died-of-natural-causes world, but I suppose it's equally likely that Bob came home after chasing Muldoon and did his depression then. My god, can I give the entire Fraser clan a GIANT HUG?
I am particularly fond of this episode too. I wonder what the magical ingredient is? (Since the other two so far I really adore are Manhunt and Gift of the Wheelman, maybe the answer is 'Talking about Bob.' Heh.)
Only two episodes; there is no way I am actually going to get through all of due South before WisCon, but I can't actually bring myself to care, especially since You Must Remember This broke my writer's block and I spent all of yesterday writing fic.
1x11 You Must Remember This
And at the beginning of this one they've just gone to a basketball game together! Sorry, I just. BOYFRIENDS. I do not ship them in the they-are-totally-doing-it way, but I do ship them in the way where I would be very happy for them if they ever did catch a collective clue. Oh their epic bromance.
Ray and Suzanne Chapin have mad chemistry, though. Not that I am not also fond of his ill-fated thing with Irene Zuko, but in some post-CotW leg of the Trousers of Time (which is how I secretly assume due South operates: Fraser and Kowalski definitely go off looking for the Hand, but everything else in the epilogue is up for grabs and the future is gloriously uncertain) -- anyway, in some universe post-CotW, Vecchio and Suzanne meet up again, and she is mad impressed with his undercover work, and they go off to be awesome together because it is finally their time. SOMEWHERE THIS IS TRUE.
Argh, I fucking adore the scene where the four of them are playing poker and talking about love; seriously, I think it might be one of my favourite scenes in the whole show. You find out so much about all of them. Like, Gardino is pretty cynical about love, and apparently had a five-year relationship once (hello, recurring weird theme of divorce!). Huey has this wacky theory about settling for one of the two million women in the world that would be all right for you, but actually he just mostly wants to play the damn poker game. Fraser, as per usual, has his wacky set of facts -- French phrases, stuff about hamster pheromones -- but doesn't actually say anything about himself. And Vecchio, oh my god, I love the bit where he says that true love ends with marriage (theme again, wtf) which probably explains everything ever about Angela, and also makes me want to grab onto his coattails and go "Jesus Christ do not marry Stella!" I love the way Vecchio sort of ... lives in a world of stories. By which I mean, he assigns special meaning to the way his hair's cut, and has all these sweeping ideas about what love is like, and it's wonderful.
Fraser's "When it happens, how do you know?" kind of tears me up inside, by the way, and Vecchio happily answering, "You just know," is not helpful at all. Because Fraser doesn't -- his mind doesn't work like that. What he feels for Victoria is complex and scary and we'll get to that later, but he's always sort of painfully unsure about love. I'm serious, Vecchio, you couldn't've thrown the poor man a rope here? For someone who actually gets other people really well, there's a part of himself Fraser is absolutely no good with.
And here's the first Victoria monologue. (I'm pretty sure the first time I heard it was the first time I realized that I could just sit perfectly still and listen to this man speak for hours. My god.) A quick check tells me that the same people didn't write this episode and the Victoria ones, but I assume they had her planned -- or they dug the monologue so much that they went "You know what, we've got to get more out of this." And augh, I just love the way it's done, the way you never see Fraser's face, just his reflection. It's also probably the first time in the show where you get to hear him being honestly broken up about something. And Ray sleeps through it. Ahhh.
By the way, how much do I love that s1's ~epic loves~ are both criminals? I mean, Suzanne is really an undercover special agent, but I really dig the fact that the obvious arms dealer is actually one of the good guys and meanwhile Victoria is all wrong-place-wrong-time, save-me-Ben-save-me! and really awful. (It should be obvious by now that I adore Victoria. I'm going to be insufferable at the actual episode.)
Oh, Ray, baby, you just lost all your points. (Boyfriend points? Good friend points? I don't know.) He says, "Has this kind of thing ever happened to you?" and Fraser says, "Well, I -- I, uh --" and Ray just overrides him with, "No, of course not, you're a Mountie. What does a Mountie know about women." Bad Ray. No empathy biscuit. I remember leaving the Vecchio seasons with the strong impression that Ray loves Fraser, but doesn't necessarily understand him. I don't know if Kowalski gets an empathy biscuit but I slightly suspect he does.
This is also the first episode where Diefenbaker's fast-food addiction is made much of. Oh Dief. And I love how Fraser's quite terrified that Diefenbaker could've been hurt, but the moment he sees Dief's okay, it's all straight spine and "Oh. Out of doughnuts, are we?" Oh Fraser's sometimes Bob-like inability to express his feelings!
Apparently as of s1 Ray's been a cop for nine years. Or maybe been a detective nine years? But he said 'on the force' so I assume he means been a cop in general. So he was at least in his mid-twenties when he went to the Academy; maybe he did college before that, or some other jobs. (Or the timelines are just screwy, because I know some of Kowalski's citations do not match up timewise with when he was a rookie in Ladies' Man, so maybe I should disregard everything dS says ever having to do with numbers.)
Oh my god and Suzanne was staying in a hotel with the Revolving Door Of Angst. I would be so completely unsurprised if they'd used the same place for the Victoria scenes.
One does have to wonder how Fraser got a nice swirly picture of Victoria in the fall if they knew each other for a sum total of roughly a week trying to survive in the snow, but that is what convenient retcon for the sake of the story is for! I think it would be equally poignant for Fraser to have honestly loved someone once and it to have not worked out for normal-people reasons -- that woman with the autumn trees in that picture, she could be someone else; except that I'm not sure Fraser is capable of that depth of emotion and that kind of hurt without being gun-shy for a while afterwards.
1x12 A Hawk and a Handsaw
I see that in this episode Ray has a brother! I think I will try to promptly forget this, because Ray makes a lot more sense if he's The Brother with a couple of sisters to protect and get exasperated with and things. Do not make up family members just for throwaway Freud jokes, show!
Aw, Dief has a thing for Dr. Pearson, the forensics woman! That's where that line about Dief being transfixed by blond hair comes from. (And yet there is a total of one fic ever about Dief liking to stare creepily at Kowalski because of his hair. There should be more.)
"It's a rather long story; it takes exactly two hours to tell." That cracks me up, especially because the pilot only takes an hour forty. Whence the extra twenty minutes, Frase? Also it actually breaks my heart a little that Fraser can easily get committed for just telling the truth about the pilot, which is before anything seriously wacky happens to him. And he only has to mention Diefenbaker, not even his father's ghost. I just. Oh Fraser. (And another parenthetical fic lament/suggestion/whatever, since I seem to be doing these: there should totally be a story about how Fraser really is crazy and committed, a la that one s6 episode of Buffy. It would be alarmingly easy to pull off believably, and would probably break me a bit, and now I want to write it. Fuck.) Also, god, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that my introduction to Paul Gross was Slings & Arrows, but watching him play crazy/pretend to be crazy/hold meaningful and interesting conversations with crazy people/&c makes me really irrationally delighted.
And I love that even when he is in his hospital clothes Fraser gets to keep his hat. I think the word I am looking for is 'precious,' which I hope does not sound condescending in this context, because I just, I adore him. <3
Oh my god, I already knew Fraser is awesome but he just started discussing the theory of subjective reality with a mental patient. Of course Fraser's the sort of person who believes every viewpoint is equally valid and worthy of consideration; it's especially wonderful that he can do that given that the show presents him as pretty much always having his moral compass due north, as it were -- Fraser pretty much always knows the right response to any given (moral) situation, which implies some sort of absolute truth, which he just rejected out of hand by acknowledging that reality is mostly a matter of mass belief. Which works in reverse too, I suppose: Fraser does often believe things solidly enough that he convinces other people to believe them too, and they become reality.
At some point I have to actually gather my thoughts coherently about this and explain all the reasons why Fraser is almost entirely unique and quite possibly my single favourite character ever, but those thoughts should probably be structured in a less episodic way.
I think the story Fraser tells about his father getting quiet and thin and not shaving after Caroline died is possibly the best Bob story in the whole show. That story seems to fit a Caroline-died-of-natural-causes world, but I suppose it's equally likely that Bob came home after chasing Muldoon and did his depression then. My god, can I give the entire Fraser clan a GIANT HUG?
I am particularly fond of this episode too. I wonder what the magical ingredient is? (Since the other two so far I really adore are Manhunt and Gift of the Wheelman, maybe the answer is 'Talking about Bob.' Heh.)
no subject
no subject
I am pretty sure Geoffrey is mortified by this. And why the hell does one of his delusions involve Ellen as a Russian spy? And why in God's name is she apparently also his mother? (Seriously, they used Martha Burns twice in dS, once as the ghost of Fraser's mother, and Paul Gross in the commentary for that episode reportedly said "I should probably get therapy for that," and in conclusion I love him.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I love it because it validates the tiny part of me that desires this also. XD
no subject
And augh, I just love the way it's done, the way you never see Fraser's face, just his reflection.
A world of yes to both of these. I want an all Paul Gross, all the time radio station of stories. And to spend forever in the moments of stillness that the show creates around the Victoria story - everything else in the world just stops while Fraser talks about her.
... going on to thinking about Hawk and a Handsaw right after writing what I just did, I am now struck by the way that those moments of stillness are often also created around stories about Bob. Oh Fraser. This is how you talk about the people who couldn't love you the way you wanted them to.
This particular Bob story is the one that moves me, probably, more than anything else we hear about or from Bob in the entire show. His journals are lovely, his cluelessness can be hilarious, etc, but this. This is how Bob was capable of loving, once. I may have meta-ed about it, once. (Dreamwidth repost here, if you prefer.)
no subject
...Oh god, you're right. Heh, the more I think about Fraser the more gutpunched I feel. In a good way, but still ...!
I think I want an all Paul Gross, all the time radio station of stories too. I mean, at this point I have watched MotB an absolutely shameful number of times, and can probably recite most of it from memory, and yet I go absolutely still and quiet for the Robert Mackenzie speech. I suspect I don't even really need to breathe when he's monologing.
Going to look at the meta. :D
no subject
Maybe the two hours is including commercials?
He looks so young in that picture!
no subject
And oh my god, yes. He is so tiny first season. <3
no subject
... of course, now that I've found it, I won't be able to go to bed until I've read it. *facepalms*
no subject
I've had the idea of a story where Fraser doesn't really see ghosts, but is in fact mentally ill, in my head for a while, but I don't think I'll ever write it. The thing is, I'd want it to be in unreliable-narrator Fraser POV and only reveal after a while what's going on. And I don't think I can pull that off. I would love to read a story on this theme, though.
no subject
And that is pretty much exactly what I want to do. Whether or not I can pull it off either, I don't yet know, but I really want to try.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-05-27 10:28 am (UTC)(link)I really enjoy your take on the episodes and hope you will continue writing meta about all of them.
"there should totally be a story about how Fraser really is crazy and committed, a la that one s6 episode of Buffy"
I know of one heartbreaking story where Fraser cracked and Kowalski is taking care of him. It's "Ordinary Days" by busaikko (http://busaikko.livejournal.com/74044.html#cutid1). It's a great story told from Kowalki's POV and how he deals with it all.
Sorry, I didn't figure out how use OpenID and don't have a Dreamwidth account and I'm not sure if any htm coding would work here, so you just get the bare links and quotes.
Leonandra@livejournal.com
no subject
Due South trivia of the day, provided by one of the making-ofs I tracked down on YouTube: Camilla Scott, the actress who plays Thatcher, originally auditioned in the pilot for the part of Ray.
...OMG!!!eleventy!!!! Dear multiverse, WHY do I not live in the universe where this happened? Not that I don't love both Rays as they are, especially RayV, but that would've been so cool. (Although I also like Meg as a Mountie, because then we can have the all-too-infrequently-used plot device of Fraser and Thatcher Do Weird Mountie Shit Completely In Sync, Much to Ray's Amusement and/or Horror.)
Now I have this sprawling AU taking shape in my head. Hmmm. It's having to share space with this other sprawling AU where Fraser and Thatcher met at Depot, got into a relationship, and then did something Good and Right, But Impolitic, that gets them both exiled to Chicago, where they have adventures with Ray (and do weird Mountie shit that amuses and/or horrifies him).