INTELLIGENCE REVIEWS-SEASON TWO

• Review of Season Two Premiere, Episode 15: A Man Is Framed

  Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! And Happy Columbus Day to those on the other side of the border. My, look what we got for a holiday treat.

  I really wish I could friggin' access the CBC television monthly schedule. Hell, I wish I could access the official site. The former has always been almost impossible to access because you just get the rolling Beach Ball o' Doom, but last year's version of the show's official page was actually fairly accessible. And then some fool decided to give it a sound file (not to mention some weird video background) right on the front page and stick it inside the CBC site proper. So forget actually using the site. Mountain ranges rise and fall while I'm waiting for a single page to load up. I really don't see how this promotes either the network or the show.

  Speaking of the show, lots of Jimmy and Mary this week. And Mary, despite some off-moments where she seemed overly cold last week, is back on her game. Not-quite-Silent Bob gets a fair bit of airtime, too. And did I mention, there's lots of Jimmy?

  While Mike is getting himself beaten up by the border patrol, who only later on figure out he's the brother of a fugitive (ummm...right), Jimmy finds a boat and takes off in it. Then, Bob comes to him in a seaplane and they fly up to Raoul's nice cabin on the water. Took me a minute or two to place Raoul (thought he was Colin at first, and wondered how that worked). Raoul is the guy whom Mike hired last season to kill Bill the Snitch in the season one premiere. Raoul's psycho partner, Rosie, is nowhere to be found in this episode, but that's okay, because Raoul's stalker psycho niece, Lorna, is happy to take her place. And she's got a thing for Jimmy. And when she comes on to Jimmy later that night, Jimmy doesn't say no, even though she's young enough to be his college-aged daughter. It's just a kiss and a closed door, but it's pretty obvious what happens next, since Bob has to turn up the golf on the telly to drown it out. So, that's an improvement on the coy ambiguity from last year, at least.

  Much as I cringed at Jimmy's colossal bad judgment, I did believe that he would sleep with this girl. Jimmy, let's face it, is a wackjob magnet. If a woman shows major signs of instability, he's putty in her hands. Where the hey-nonny is sister Maxine when he needs her? He is seriously codependent, though maybe he really believed Lorna when she came on to him talking about how they'd probably never see each other again and she could keep a secret, blah, blah, blah, with her tits in his face (note from the opposite side of the gender divide, boys--we know exactly what "the girls" do to your brains and that's why we use them like that). Maybe he thought sleeping with her was some sort of elaborate thank-you for making him breakfast. I'm also not entirely sure how well he managed to perform, considering he'd just gone about 36 hours without sleep and he'd been running nonstop for most of that, but hey, it's television. Maybe he napped all afternoon.

  Bob, of course, isn't thrilled by this liaison, or by the fact that Lorna was there in the first place, and says so, both to her and Jimmy. He puts the niece on notice (which she ignores), but doesn't interfere. "You can trust me," she tells him. "But I don't," he replies. I like Bob. He's knows what's what. And he knows this girl is putting off bunny-boiler vibes in waves worthy of a bad scifi flick about mind control.

  Francine, meanwhile, is bailed out, back home and suffering from withdrawal symptoms (from Jimmy not coke). She generally makes herself persona non grata with Ronnie, who is so intimidated by her that he waits until she's stomped out of the club to yell, "You keep your mouth shut, Frankie!" at her back. Much safer that way. You tell her, Ronnie.

  Poor Stella looks very withdrawn, though she assures her father over the phone that she wasn't hurt and she actually gets stuck comforting her mother (bet she misses Dad more than ever; he supports her, not the other way around). I wonder how that will all pan out later on? At any rate, the FBI decides it's okey-fine to interrogate Stella at school (and the school officials apparently think they won't get sued for letting this happen, a decision they live to regret when Francine finds out). But the most priceless Francine moment is when some tabloid reporters show up at the door and shove a microphone in Stella's face. "Honey, go ahead. I want to talk to these guys," Francine tells her daughter sweetly. Seconds later, she's grappling with the stunned film crew and shrieking, "You've got my daughter on tape! Give me the fucking tape or I'll break the camera!" Francine, thy maiden name is Hyde.

  Ronnie isn't having a good day, either, though Jimmy's second day is a lot calmer (getting laid helps with that). First, he locates John Hogarty, Jimmy's infamous cokehead banker, has him come to the club and slaps him around. Then Hogarty gets to work, fails a drug test and is promptly suspended and sent off to rehab. Ooops. That could put a crimp in the offshore bank deal, especially since there are people coming in for talks about it next week.

  Then there's Dante, who has decided that this is a fantastic opportunity to take out his rival's organization. Last week, he gloated that without their head (Jimmy), Reardon Enterprises was a ship going down. This week, he's downright salivating over the opportunity to "help" by taking out Jimmy's snitch down in Seattle. He even comes over all by himself to the club to make this generous offer and ask repeatedly, "Is Jimmy alive or dead?" He's terribly anxious to know what's going on and Ronnie plays it very cool with him.

  Still, it's becoming obvious to everyone, even Ronnie, that Ronnie can't replace Jimmy. Ronnie admits this when he meets with Jimmy at the cabin and tries to persuade him to give the ATM machines to Dante, since they're already being starved by the interruption of cash flow caused by Jimmy's sudden legal problems. Jimmy insists on coming back to Vancouver so that he can set up a meeting with Dante. He knows full well that giving up the ATM machines would be a fatal weakness. Ronnie wants him to go to Costa Rica, probably permanently, where Francine and Stella will join him. Jimmy resists this idea, as well as the idea of going up to Prince Rupert. He is itching to get back into action. By the end of the episode, he is cleverly slipping back into the club under cover of a little-old-lady hat and behind a staged fight between a blonde (looked like Gloria) and a guy outside the club. Strangely enough, he has Lorna with him. Cue the theme from Fatal Attraction for later.

  Meanwhile, the false peace between Dante and Reardon Shipping blows sky-high when Mike gets out and discovers from his partner that the Two-Bit (his new bar) has been firebombed, probably by Dante's Disciples. In a rage, Mike goes for a drive-by past Dante's place and blows out his front window, just as Dante is on the phone getting a warning call from Ronnie. It's played as a moment of pitch-black humor a la Mike's shakedown of the Two-Bit's former owner as Dante gets a dose of his own medicine and has to bite the broken glass on his own floor. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bully.

  Meanwhile, back in Seattle, George seems to get a bit of luck: the bullets pulled from the dead agent at the shoot-out is a nine-millimeter rounds (both Jimmy's rigged gun and the DEA team's guns were from the same source, after all), but too damaged to match to any guns. They can't find the bullet that killed the homeless guy in the alley. The idiot who shot the homeless guy, and blew the whole thing in the first place by screaming "Gun!", still apparently thinks that Jimmy shot the homeless guy. Sure. And there's this bridge in New York that's always up for sale.

  George relays the good news to Ted, who's rethinking his previous attack of conscience. Ted knows that Jimmy has gone to ground somewhere in the Southern Mainland, but as long as the gun never turns up, he and George are golden. Things really seem to be looking good as Mary meets with Ted and Weathers from the FBI and makes Ted head of the investigation into catching Jimmy. Ted even gets to make a heavy-handed raid on the Chickadee with a SWAT team, where he does such nice things as ordering Sweet stripsearched and having Phil Coombs, Jimmy's lawyer, assault-rifle-whipped. All of this is basically to get an excuse to put in a wire. Considering OCU's previous lack of success with surveillance on the club, you have to wonder what Ted's thinking is, but as we already know he does his thinking with bad scotch, that's almost a non sequitur.

  Mary initial conciliatory attitude may seem strange, but she has her hands full. She has just been made temporary head of the Western Division of CSIS. Both she and the Inspector General, Daniel Boudreau, are anxious to bury Royden's death. At first, it looks as though she might be trying to bury Jimmy, as well. There are some nice scenes in this whole sequence. After Mary finds out about her promotion, she tells Martin and then asks him to be her right-hand man (no mention of poor Katarina this week). This makes Martin all perky and he asks to be present when she tells the bad news to Mallaby, so that he can gloat. Mallaby is, as Mary puts it later to the Inspector General, "predictably pissed off" when she tells him about her promotion over his head, especially when she silkily adds her "condolences" for Royden's death. "I know you two were close."

  Later, the Inspector General has another, private, dinner with Mary and puts the moves on her. Though she admits finding him "distracting" (well, she's not wrong there), she also notes that he's married and, "I have a very short attention span for married men." He takes the rejection equably, though we'll see how that affects her job prospects down the road.

  But her apparent indifference to Jimmy's fate is only feigned. While she tells Weathers that she sees no reason not to cooperate, and sets up Ted as head of the investigation, she is trying to contact Jimmy via his friends. So, I guess Ted is still to be the sacrificial goat down the road. She contacts Ronnie through Sweet, but Ronnie blows her off at first (he does apologize to Sweet, though). Ronnie then tells Bob, who passes it along. Jimmy asks Bob if he thinks responding is a good idea. Bob shrugs. "Couldn't hurt," he says. One could say the same thing about a root canal at this point in Jimmy's life. So, Jimmy talks to Mary.

  Her first question, of course, is if he actually committed the crimes. He says he never even fired the gun and that he got it from Morgan (the snitch). When she asks him if he can get to the gun to her, he readily agrees and sends it via the lawyer. He also tells her he was set up to be killed and she's willing to entertain his theory until she gets more proof. When she next meets with Weathers, she drops the pretense of cooperation--unless Weathers can prove to her that Jimmy wasn't set up, he'll have a hell of a time extraditing his suspect. She suggests that Weathers get her Jimmy's gun--not mentioning, of course, that she's about to get it from the source. Ah, Ted and George. It may take a wee while, but your Thanksgiving turkeys are so cooked.

  ---

  Next week: A Man Underground: Jimmy hides out in the Chickadee's wine cellar while Mary tests his gun for evidence to clear him and plays footsie with the Inspector General.

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This page was last updated on 10/9/2007