INTELLIGENCE REVIEWS-SEASON TWO

• Review of Season Two Premiere, Episode 14: A Man Escapes

  Oooh. Go Sweet.

  Lots of fun, this episode. Some things are missing, alas: notably, the lovely Don Fraser. And Bob gets hardly anything to do, though Shane Meier gets to yell down the phone at the DEA. But Sweet, bless her, gets to show her mettle and, good Lord, is Ted actually turning into a good bad guy? Or is that a bad good guy? Either way, I'm liking the new attacks of conscience.

  "I'm not sitting here while you gun a man down," he snarls at George in the car while they wait for Jimmy to figure out how to resolve his personal cliffhanger (the guy's only been stuck there for eight months). Ted's not able to do much about his moral dilemma in this ep, but it's clear that when he told George he wanted Jimmy to go down, he meant it strictly in the legal/metaphorical sense. And don't think that makes him either a nice guy or any less dangerous. Quite the opposite. For example, when he finally answers Mary's calls (once he's safely back in B.C.) he claims that he'd been in the hospital with an intestinal blockage, not down in Seattle watching a DEA sting go belly up. Well, we always knew Ted was full of it.

  Speaking of the sting (and the cliffhanger), Jimmy lives. And escapes. And as it turns out, Jimmy has to do it pretty much all himself, as his friends are cut off and herded away from him. But Sweet and Mike are able to get through and get him over the border. The story starts off with Jimmy in the washroom, washing his face, sticking the gun in his belt, looking terrified. He still really needs a haircut, though having it constantly in his face is a good way to show his frazzled state of mind throughout this ep. It's Captain Kirk stuck amongst the Klingons. And like Kirk, this Jimmy outthinks his foes by doing exactly what they would never do in his position, and therefore think he never would do, either. As Francine and Stella (boy, can she shriek) are being detained in their hotel room by a couple of guys who look like cops, but sure don't act like they have any actual authority aside from their guns, Jimmy walks back out into the restaurant, AKA, the lions' den.

  First, he quietly extracts a confession from his rat.

  "Take the money and go," the guy tells him when he gets back to the table. "I'll pay for the meal."

  "Is that the signal to take me out?" Jimmy asks the guy. "You're a dead man, you know that." But then he does a 180 and adds, "I'm not gonna get myself killed over a few hundred pounds of weed. I'm giving myself up; you understand me?" Lifting his hands, he pulls up his shirt to show that the gun is still in his waistband and yells, "I'm giving up the gun!"

  "Gun!" somebody shrieks and the supposedly well-oiled machine falls to pieces in a hail of friendly fire. The snitch is shot, but not killed (George later threatens him that he'd better keep quiet). One cop goes down in front of the kitchen door, shot dead by another cop across the room. Taking advantage of this, Jimmy leaps over the body and blasts out into the kitchen. The back door is locked, but he finds a stairway and climbs up it, out onto the roof, over an extension, down into the alleyway and behind a dumpster, where he flushes out a homeless man. Jimmy tries to warn the guy, but the guy runs and is shot dead by one of Jimmy's pursuers. In the confusion, because the cops think they've killed their man, Jimmy is able to run away, disappearing into the night. When Francine hears this over the radio, she attacks one of the pseudocops, shrieking, "I'll kill you!" before the guy backhands her.

  And this is just in the first five minutes.

  Now, let's move on to a minirant about my least favorite bits, since they were rather few and far between--namely, that the bad guys were, with one happy exception (Ted), far too stupid to live. Further, there was a ridiculous amount of police brutality: women backhanded, children cophandled, brothers gut-slugged and backhanded. After a while, it started to sound like a sequel to Alice's Restaurant. I don't mind law enforcement agencies, American or Canadian, being portrayed as having some bad apples. But I've worked with police and they just don't have that kind of leeway (not to mention the psychological damage of shooting both a civilian and one of your own guys--I sure wouldn't ever want to work in a team that out of control ever again, let alone be one of them). Further, this show is coming from Chris Haddock, who did an excellent job in the earlier seasons of DVI of showing why cops can't get away with that kind of crap. Can we just tone it down, please? While I was watching Francine go for a cop's eyes, I was sitting there, mentally racking up the career-ending charges for half the DEA, if such a thing really were to occur, and rolling my eyes.

  I could buy this if it were just George the DEA Guy and his gang pulling this nonsense, but unfortunately, the episode lost some serious cred in the last scene by having border guards beat up Mike just for hanging out too close to the border. Look, I grew up on the other side of the border--THEY DON'T DO THAT. They can't. They're understaffed and generally outgunned by the local population (you should see some of the hand cannons deer hunters bring to the Great North Woods). And have you ever seen what the Canadian-U.S. border looks like? You're lucky if you can see a mile for the trees on large sections of it near both coasts. Try policing that and being a hardass about it; see how far you'll get. And yes, I've been over the border since 9/11; it's not like that. Sheesh.

  However, the reason why George and his crowd are somewhat credible in this is that it's becoming increasingly clear that George is working, ah, off the books, as it were. Yes, the reason why George's team looked like a rival gang last season is because they basically are a rival gang. They're as illegal as all get-out. And George is as jittery as any other sociopath when the wolves are a little too close to the door. So, needless to say, George is anxious to get everybody on board, which leads to the other nice surprise--Ted's balking, and for the very interesting reason that he has a conscience deep down in that Grinchy heart of his.

  Let's get back to the main event: the resolution of the cliffhanger we spent the summer waiting for. Was it worth it? Oh, hell, yeah. Ironically, the really intriguing, juicy stuff last year always seemed to be happening during Mary's machinations while poor Jimmy was stuck wheeling and dealing. Haddock has said that it wasn't as interesting with everything going Jimmy's way. I wouldn't say that everything was going Jimmy's way last year, but Tracey is definitely having more fun playing Jimmy with his back to the wall. Mary and her gang are just as juicy as last year, but the boardroom chess games at the OCU in this ep were almost (thought not quite) dull in comparison to Jimmy's escape.

  Mary has got her hands full dealing with Royden's murder from last season. At first, she and Martin are quite mean to Katarina. It quickly becomes clear why: they both think she killed Royden, even though she denies it. Mary quietly tells Martin to squirrel her away from the police: "Soften her up for me. Throw a scare into her; do what you have to." So much for "girl talk".

  She also tries to wrap the Vancouver Homicide detective we saw last season, Ogawa (Hiro Kanagawa), around her little finger. This is only partially successful, as Ogawa is his own man. "You're gonna have to promise me full disclosure," he tells Mary, who of course, isn't about to do that. I like Ogawa. Kanagawa makes him hostile toward Mary while making us like him, too: "I'll interview her with the lights out. And wear a blindfold," he says when he finds out Katarina was a witness. When Mary tells him, "I've got political masters that I answer to," he shoots back, "That's bullshit! I got political masters, too!" His hostility is understandable; Mary is using him and this isn't one of her nicer sides.

  Neither is her treatment of Katarina. Katarina desperately says she'll do anything for Mary, if only Mary won't throw her out of the country. Katarina knows perfectly well that she's in a very bad position. Mary responds coldly and walks out. Hmm. Can this friendship be saved?

  Mary has a few surprises waiting for her, too. Mallaby (John Mann) is furious that she kept him out of the loop about Royden. But she has the mysterious Inspector General on her side, a smooth-talking French-Canadian who not only shows an interest in making her the next western regional head of CSIS over Mallaby, but also an interest in her personally. He's fun. He's probably a creep, but he's still fun. Also a fun new character is the cynical FBI agent, Carl Weathers, dogging George. He knows George is doing a tapdance, even though he's not sure about what just yet.

  As Mary's investigation of Royden's death progresses, it starts to look as though maybe Bob didn't arrange it after all. Royden was killed by a hypodermic shot to the neck. Mary, unaware that Ronnie had put the hit out on Royden, immediately focuses on the CIA, figuring that Royden's handlers murdered him to keep him quiet. But the big shock comes when she finds out about Jimmy's near-death experience--from the news.

  Ronnie finds out when Jimmy calls him in the middle of a fight with Sweet. There's a fair bit of Ronnie in this, but he's mainly on the phone, doing Jimmy-season-one-type expositional stuff. "Apparently, I'm expendable," Sweet says right before the phone rings, as Ronnie is whining that customers will be mad if she doesn't go on. Well, there is that sign outside saying, "Sweet all week." As soon as she finds out what's going on, though, she volunteers to go down south to pick up Jimmy, becoming indispensable once more.

  Ronnie has been worrying about the banker disappearing with a dancer and Jimmy's 15 million in cash, but this turns out to be false alarm, as he's just sleeping off a bender at her house. Jimmy's freaked out call from Seacouver (no real American locations or small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were harmed in the filming of this show) puts everything back into perspective. Jimmy is rattled, but resourceful. First, he trades clothes with a homeless guy as well as getting a bike. Then, at Bob's suggestion, he steals a car from a gas station to get out of town and later trades the car to a kid for a dirt bike while trying to avoid a road block near the border. Ahh, that dirt bike. I had one of those in Africa. Nearly drowned underneath it in a flash flood. Those suckers are heavy.

  Later, Jimmy meets up with Sweet and they head for the border, where Mike is waiting (and gets busted by border cops). The bruises are worth it, though, as Jimmy is able to escape over the border in the confusion, ending the episode. Notable in this latter part of the episode is the clever use of GPS satellite locators to set up rendezvous on the fly and of disposable cell phones to keep the cops from triangulating a position and trapping Jimmy. As far as I could tell, this was the main reason why George's associates detained Francine and Stella (very illegally) in their hotel room, to catch him in an ill-considered phone call.

  I want to close out with a bit of meditation on Ian Tracey's performance in this episode. Damn. Can this man act or what? I knew he was holding back last season. He is at the very top of his game in this episode, helped by the fact that all of this action and running around is right up his alley. He has a great gift for both physical comedy and action and easily gets across the image of Jimmy as a rat in a deadly maze. It's not just that, though. Actresses in our culture can get away with a lot of high emotion and scenery chewing in roles, but men have a much harder time doing gut emotion that isn't along the same line of anger, rage and...well, more anger without looking like wimps. Tracey, however, acts right from the gut (sweaty terror, mostly, in this ep) without looking the least bit like a wuss. If anything, he makes Jimmy look even bigger than life. A modern-day outlaw.

  ---

  Next week: Jimmy is back over the border, but his legal troubles have only just begun. Let the games begin.

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This page was last updated on 10/2/2007