INTELLIGENCE REVIEWS-SEASON ONE

• Review of Episode 2: A Champagne Payday

  As I was heading down Main Street past Cordova after seeing tonight's ep, damned if I didn't see a rat. A very healthy-looking brown rat. It ran under a bush, then turned and peered out nervously at me as I looked back at it before it went on about its rodenty business. I'm sure it didn't appreciate the irony.

  We start off this ep with Michael Reardon. Michael Reardon is an idiot. But he's an idiot with just enough low cunning to be highly dangerous. And Jimmy is just soft-hearted enough not to know what to do with him. Ditto Jimmy's really crazy ex, Francine. This may be why the ep ends with Mary getting laid (Don couldn't find Chinese food at the last minute when he showed up at her hotel room, but she didn't seem to mind) and Jimmy most definitively not getting any. Francine literally throws herself at him and he ends his part of the ep striding through the Chickadee with her over his shoulder (shrieking, of course) on his way out to…hail her a cab. Yup. Tommy I-can't-keep-my-pants-zipped-around-psycho-women of "Rescue Me" Jimmy is not. Looks like Jimmy will be doing the monk thing for the next little while. God help him if Francine ever finds out about Mary.

  But let's deal with Michael first. Many, many people are gunning for him this week. Expect that to go on for a long time. First, he stiffs the folks he got to set up the hit on Bill last week, a man and a woman evocatively titled "Raoul" and "Rosie". Rosie is a nutter. She breaks one of the champagne bottles Michael tried to pass off as a sort of payment on the windshield of Michael's car. "It's not good business," Raoul sadly tells Jimmy later about Michael's shafting them. Michael shines Jimmy on for a little while about the hit (mainly, I think, because Jimmy wants to believe it) until Bill's old grow-op partner, Harvey Guilford (Zak Santiago, looking spiffy both last and this week in new shades) confronts Jimmy outside the Club.

  Harvey is genuinely upset about Bill's death and gets angry with Jimmy, even after Jimmy insists he had nothing to do with it. There's a nice bit of black humor where Harvey says in distress, "You know what Bill's hobby was? Spiders!" He goes into a rant about how he's going to have to go over and clean up Bill's apartment now—including those pet spiders. Yet even Harvey seems satisfied when Jimmy pays off Raoul and Rosie with an apology and an extra two thousand ("for your trouble"). He wants to go back to working grow-ops with Jimmy. Even though Jimmy has already found a new pair of guys to replace Bill, he seems willing to take Harvey back in. Jimmy knows how to keep his people loyal. Though he tells Michael he's fine with Bill getting whacked, Jimmy's scrambling to do damage control is too frenetic to be more than just covering for his brother. It's unclear whether he would have had Bill whacked at all. Even Ronnie, when Jimmy tells him the news about Michael, hurries to dissociate himself from the hit. Though Ronnie is sometimes concerned that Jimmy can be too "soft", he recognizes that violating Jimmy's assurances of safety to someone is unwise, to say the least. Jimmy is still his boss.

  Michael, though, is a complete idiot. Gee, I already said that, didn't I? Well, it bears repeating. Michael has set up playing the Bandit to a marijuana truck driver's load against Smokey to the tune of Glenn Frey's "Smuggler's Blues" (well, okay, no, not really, but it came to mind). Any fan of 70s movies involving Burt Reynolds knows this smuggling scenario. But Michael completely screws it up by getting stopped for speeding. Then the other guy's car breaks down and Michael's "Officer Friendly" stops to help. Somehow, though, Michael's low cunning kicks in and he twigs to the two narcs Ted has put on his tail and gives them the slip. In the process, he also rescues the dope and buries it under cover of night—but whether he'll tell his new partner is anybody's guess.

  Little surprise, then, that Ted, frustrated in his designs on Jimmy, turns his attention on putting younger brother Michael back in jail (or it could still be Jimmy; this isn’t clear). He and Roger plot to lure Michael down south and sick the DEA on him, since Mary won't authorize any close surveillance of him. They'll need some better guys on the ground, though, considering how thoroughly both Michael and Mary pull the wool over their eyes this episode. Not drinking on the job might also help Ted clear his mind, especially when it comes to his wishful thinking that Jimmy is "weak" enough for the Bikers to take him down. Here's a newsflash, Ted: nobody's fooled by the old "scotch in a coffee cup at your desk at 11am" dodge anymore.

  Roger is still pushing to co-handle Jimmy (which Mary would be pushing Jimmy not to do if Jimmy were even remotely interested). Mary gets the CSIS handler, James Mallaby, on board with a plan that means she can handle Jimmy alone—she puts one of Katrina (Ona Grauer)'s girls in the Chickadee Club as a stripper and bartender, leaving Ted so far out of the loop he has to find it out from Roger after the fact. Information quality control, dontcha know.

  Kristina is a Russian girl intent on getting a visa to stay in Canada. Ronnie takes an instant shine to her. Sweet does not. I see a massive cat fight in Kristina's future. It's a shame to still see so little of Katrina (though I got a kick out of the boat and the tiger dress, so Katrina). But Kristina, as Ronnie himself immediately recognizes, is something special herself. We also get an interesting tidbit about Ronnie—he only contracts with his girls through an agent, though he makes an exception for Kristina.

  Mary makes another coup after she discovers that Randy Bingham (the squirrelly, biker-controlled stockbroker that dippidee-do Casey Whelan married in the pilot) is running a shipment of guns to Africa. What to do? She calls Jimmy ("Your girlfriend," Ronnie calls her when Jimmy takes the call at the Chickadee) and asks his advice. After a little run through a few illegal suggestions that don't much help Mary, Jimmy suggests freaking out Bingham, though he won't say how he'll do it. Bingham owes Jimmy lots of money and Jimmy has earlier warned a friend/client off him. He calls Bingham "a shipwreck". Jimmy gets Rene to shake Bingham's tree by talking up the guns to him as if everybody knows about them. A hysterically paranoid Bingham then calls off the shipment. Mission accomplished.

  Yep, Mary's having a good week. Don Fraser even asks her if she's got a job for him yet. His, it seems, is going south after a three-year investigation went belly-up. This would explain why he appears at her apartment door by arrangement just before the end credits for a little bit of late-night commiseration. And the ex-hubby makes no appearance this week, either in name or deed. Plus, Mary has a long-term goal to turn the mole in the OCU to her side. "Everyone has something to hide," she tells Mallaby when he asks her how she'll do it. Boy, does she know. All in all, very good week for Mary.

  The Perils of Jimmy Reardon serial, however, continues unabated. On top of the slowmo train wreck that is Michael Reardon, there is the hurricane known as Francine. Camille ("Bring me a tequila!) Sullivan is having way too much fun chewing scenery as a 21st century Lady Macbeth of Vancouver (if Macbeth had had the brains to get a divorce instead of killing his king). I confess that I haven't had this much fun watching a complete cow like Francine since the last time I saw "Mildred Pierce". Sullivan should never play good girls ever again. Move over Sherry Palmer of 24; there's a new bitch goddess in town.

  If you thought the Reardon vs. Reardon domestic dispute last week was something else, check out Francine's attempted seduction of Jimmy at the Chickadee this week—after waltzing in with yet another loser. "You left and stole all my friends from me," she declares as she tries to drag him down onto the couch inside the office for a little slap-and-tickle. "You abandoned me. You abandoned me and left me with nothing! Oh, please, please, please try to get together again just one more time!" Two seconds later, she's imperiously demanding the aforementioned tequila when Jimmy rejects her and a few seconds after that, she's shrieking in fury as Jimmy carries her out over his shoulder. Priceless.

  Needless to say, Jimmy is absolutely desperate to get rid of sweet little Francine, the ex from Hell. But then his lawyer points out that while they can certainly string Francine up as a drug addict and slut, Jimmy's background will also come out in court. In a worst-case scenario, they could both be found unfit with Stella put in care. The lawyer suggest that Jimmy have Francine (who originally came from England) busted on a major drug trafficking charge and deported, but Jimmy balks at it. He wants Francine to back off and he wants full custody of Stella for obvious reasons, but he won't deprive Stella of her mother. I'm sure that some viewers will try to put nasty motivations to Jimmy and Mary's actions, but I kinda like that each one has definite scruples that trip him or her up. It makes both of them more sympathetic but also more unpredictable.

  Finally, there's Maxine Reardon, of whom we still see far too little. But at least she gets two scenes, this time, and one of them isn't even with Jimmy. In the first scene, she reminds Jimmy that he needs to do something about their cash problem. Jimmy then decides to set up a money laundering system involving cash machines and charges those interested in laundering their money through it 20 percent. Maxine, meanwhile, goes to a banker for a business loan of five million (which she gets). She also gives the guy a photo along with a little family history: their grandfather once found himself being outrun by an American patrol, so he holed his boat and fled, losing a shipment of 200 cases of scotch. The banker flirtatiously suggests they go looking for the boat someday. Good Lord, this is a Canadian show, all right. Everybody but the lead is getting a little romantic action. Francine doesn't count. She gives new meaning to the term "ball and chain".

  Next week: Eps 3: There's an attempted murder at the Chickadee and Francine steps up her campaign to get Jimmy back—using Stella as bait, of course.

  ---

You are visitor number

View Page Stats See who's visiting this page.

This page was last updated on 10/23/2006