First, the opening teaser with Fraser and his new boss Inspector Thatcher. I arrived in the DS world in the middle of Season Two, and I was a little confused by the antipathy of Meg to OFM (actually, I thought she was out of her mind!). But when this episode finally rolled around the rerun schedule, I understood what the writers were trying for in this post-Victoria(n) "romance." More specifically: when I heard Meg say "I thought true-blue types like you didn't believe in excuses, Fraser" I heard a woman of the nineties, impatient with archaic notions of chivalry and perhaps even threatened by them, since they could undermine her authority and autonomy. Thoroughly Modern Meg is thus as much constrained by her contemporary career-woman manners as Old-Fashioned Fraser is by the politeness ingrained in him by his grandmother. They are both restricted by the social "rules" governing how men and women behave with each other, and they are both confused by the changes in those rules (flash forward with a grin to "The Edge" when Meg can't make up her mind who should drive, and even further forward to "ATQH" when she can't figure out who's the man and who's the woman). But Lt. Welsh probably says it best later in this episode: "Women in authority. It's a quandary."
DS played some tricky gender games in the opening of Season Two, and I confess that my feminist dander rose a bit on seeing such a plethora of shrewish career women introduced all of a sudden (Meg, Louise, Sherry). But as I look at Season Two as a whole, I see something different. Ray and Louise, it turns out in "The Mask," have been communicating just fine, their barbs and insults a kind of contentious courtship. Welsh and Sherry, it turns out in "The Promise," just need to drop their fixed grins and demarcate their territories more clearly. With Ben "the robot" (Ray's word, not mine) and Meg the woman of "stone," the progression is much slower. We perhaps get a glimpse at the reason for Meg's rigid defensiveness in "We Are the Eggmen," but for Fraser all we need do is watch the end of Season One. In "Invitation" he began to loosen up, only to loosen up completely in "Victoria's Secret" and be badly burned. It's understandable that it will take a runaway train full of unconscious Mounties headed for a nuclear disaster to get him to open up again...
But I digress (BIG time). Back to the teaser of "Witness." Clearly, Meg is impatient with Fraser's true-blueness, to the point she even calls it "stupidity." Ahh, but our wily Mountie gets a little of his own back by rsponding that stupid would have been to go back for her leather chaps. I read that line as his way of letting her in on the real stupidity of the situation: that she is sending a trained, experienced officer of the law to pick up her dry cleaning. Fraser is quite bouncy and lively later in this episode, whistling his way down the prison halls and cheerfully extolling the virtues of Will and Ariel Durant -- partly, I think, as a way to cope with the threatening environment (whistling in the dark, so to speak) but also out of -- I can only think of the word "enjoyment" to describe how he must have felt to be doing REAL police work instead of the petty errands of a hostile boss.
One more thing about the teaser, and then I promise to move on. Meg's glasses. Yet another moment when OFM lets his boss know she can't pigeonhole him as a dimwitted Dudley DoRight (or Turnbull *g*), and a moment in which we realize that Meg wants to look good in front of this man she supposedly despises.
The rest of the episode is sprinkled with classic Fraser moments: supplying Elaine with hair care products, climbing the wall like Spiderman, thanking the traffic cop kindly for the ticket, bickering with Dad over his transfer, and muttering about what a "baby" Dief is over his driving. One of my favorites is Fraser describing life in prison: "It is proving HELLISH in this place. It's absolutely remarkable how many people in here think nothing of folding, spindling, mutilating . . ." The fact that Fraser curses is amazing enough, but only he would find the "hellish" part of prison to be the collection of overdue book fines!
And, of course, there's the Infamous Milk Duds Caper, a scene that could only have been pulled off by a gifted and DS-savvy director like George Bloomfield. The opening shot of the store in the surveillance mirror sets the stage for what will be the kind of warped reality only possible on Due South; the tight close-ups of Fraser, Huey, and Gardino provide the personal intensity needed for us to take the whole thing semi-seriously (instead of groaning about how stupid it is); and the over-loud Muzak scores the scene as both absurd and mundane (like the choice of Milk Duds).
I suppose I should pay some attention to the actual story of the witness in "Witness" (although the script pays little attention to it -- the point obviously being for us to watch OFM being brave and funny in prison blues). If there is a theme in the episode, underlying Fraser's battle with Meg, Ray's with the judge, Ray and Fraser with Mr. and Mrs. Torres, Torres with Kruger, and everyone with Big Carl, then I would have to say it's the manner in which marginalized members of society are conscripted by physical and institutional violence: gavels rap, doors clang, knives stab. Because the distribution of power is unequal and unfair, the only recourse for those out of the loop (immigrants, prisoners, excommunicated Mounties) is unofficial and even illegal channels: Mrs. Torres must commit perjury to protect her husband, Fraser must steal to exact justice. It is significant, I think, that the "moral" to the story, as supplied by Big Carl, is about the need for equal and fair treatment of all human beings:
Oh, but that's a stretch. If I'm looking for something in the episode more meaningful than how fabulous PG looked in dark blue (*g*), I would be better off examining the way the show debunks traditional notions of "high" art versus "low" art: starting with Fraser's description of Proust and ending with his choice of "Sullivan's Travels" for the prison movie night. Proust is most decidedly an acquired taste; fans of his work tend to be the sort who would happily spend Saturday night deconstructing Joyce's "Ulysees." To describe the "high" art of "Remembrance of Things Past" as basically "one long run-on sentence" would be deemed blasphemy to certain serious literary scholars. But then the whole point of "Sullivan's Travels" is the social value of popular culture, of the "low" art forms like movies (and television). The irony is that in this context, the movie "Sullivan's Travels" is cast as a highbrow work, a "classic" not to be classed with movies like "The Poseidon Adventure" and "Saturday Night Fever." If indeed the point of this episode is the need for equal distribution of power and justice, perhaps the same moral applies here: that "art" like people should not be stratified along the class lines of "high" and "low," that everyone should have access to justice and Thoreau and Travolta, and that we should thank kindly those who bring to our TV screens the image of a hero who wants to make some small contributions to our lives.