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DA VINCI'S CITY HALL REVIEWS-SEASON EIGHT
This is it, people, the final one. And there ain't no more unless Haddock gets that tv-movie he's talking about doing. How was it? Well...as a penultimate episode, or better yet, the episode before the penultimate episode, it would have been great. The end scene, where the rank and file of Fire and Rescue and Police decide they've had enough with the brass at Police Headquarters and show up on Dom's doorstep demanding a full investigation into who was really responsible for the grow-op shooting, like a mob of peasants showing up at the palace demanding justice from the King against his nobles, is a fine aural and visual image. It's particularly fine if you've ever driven an ambulance or fire truck Code 3 (i.e. with lights, siren, air horn and whatever else you've got on the rig that makes a noise and bright, flashing lights) at frightening speeds through the streets of a city at night. I have. A colleague of mine once said that driving Code 3 gave him a hard-on. It's a pretty wild and addictive experience and those peasants—I mean officers from both departments--would definitely have their blood up once they arrived on Dom's doorstep.
As such, it's a real hoot when Dom gets the title line and then asks his minions how they like their scotch. They both like it with ice, but it seems somebody forgot to get it. So, it's straight up for all three. "The only way to go," says Dom and that's the last line of the series. It's gonna be a long night and it doesn't look good for the Bill and Charlie Revue.
We also get some unexpected bonuses. For example: GO LOU! Yes, that's right, O my droogs--after too many episodes of absence, Lou is the guy who finds the evidence that screws the VPD to the wall. I love it! And the Mick stuff was wonderful as far as it went. Mick saves Dom's butt in this one, just as we always knew he would. His report on the grow-op scatters the forces of Darkness gathering around Dom and puts them into rout. And even a last-minute save engineered by Charlie under extreme pressure by Bill probably won't help them.
But as a season finale—nay, a series finale? No, it didn't work very well. At all. I felt as if I were watching the first half of a two-hour season finale, not the season finale itself. I was fine with the idea that some storylines would not get resolved. In fact, some (like the homeless squat one with Zack and Friedland/Franklin) ended the way they should have. It's okay for that kind of storyline to have a tail that we never see because it makes the friendship between the two of them and their mutual coming clean a few eps ago the real climax of the story. We see Zack worrying that Franklin is getting back into a gambling kick and Franklin in denial. But Franklin was always going to be up to some kind of trouble and Zack was always going to worry about it. So, that works. It's also fun to see Jim Byrnes one more time as Dom asks him to take care of his little Roger Woo racetrack problem. Plus, Lloyd Manning shows his true colors in a titanic hissy fit when the American company that got his coveted contract refuses to roll over and play dead. In fact, they're determined to take him on tit for tat with claimed evidence he's been buying and influencing in local politics for the past ten years.
It's one thing not to resolve some storylines—but all of them? Yes, that's right, not a single storyline is resolved in this finale. Worse, the writers would have had ample time to wrap things up with some satisfaction if they had cut out the bloat and let things play out to a natural conclusion (rather than giving in to their season long habit of throwing in an artificial monkey wrench into a plot engine just when a resolution looked imminent). If Chris Haddock wants to have any more successful series, he needs to relearn how to END A STORY. Brian? Kills a witness before the first commercial and never appears again. Dubreau? Comes back to Canada for no good reason and gets arrested—and Mick is nowhere to be seen. Yep--Dubreau goes down and Brian does not. That gay-bashing storyline that could have been wrapped up in a single ep? Here it is, growing quite rancid, lingering into this ep for no reason whatsoever. There just is no reason for this storyline to clutter up any of the precious airtime left to the show and that's entirely the fault of the writers. And toward the end, they drop in a few new storylines that add nothing to the proceedings--Bill Rosen gets beaten up in broad daylight on the street by a couple of constables so badly he ends up in the hospital. How the hell does that resolve anything?
The grow-op storyline? Ends on the aforementioned cliffhanger. It's a funny cliffhanger that bodes well for Da Vinci, but it's still a fucking cliffhanger.
Also, is Constable P.E. just congenitally stupid? Because that's how she acts in this ep. I did not believe for one second that anybody remotely in touch with Planet Earth would fall on her sword at the suggestion of Charlie Klotchko for immunity from obviously trumped-up charges on clearly planted evidence. I would have been screaming for a lawyer in that situation. Nor could I fathom why she would lie to Mick in his interview with her. It served her absolutely no purpose to lie to someone outside of the poisoned loop she was caught in, someone with no agenda that she knew of who might have investigated her story and corroborated it. So, why do it? It was just a case of a character being Dumb on Cue and that's bad writing, period.
Furthermore, how does that get Bill off when Mick has Constable Winters' statement that Charlie talked to the Xena wannabes after the shooting and shooed them off in a car with their lawyer without giving Mick time to debrief them first? Well, it shouldn't. Charlie should not have been standing at the end of this episode, no matter how you slice it. How many times did Charlie have to lie to Ferris and her cronies or threaten them or break a promise or let them down after promising them something before they got a clue? Did Ferris, at least, not notice that every time she went to him for help, things got lots worse and nobody would talk to her? I mean, come on. She was certainly paranoid enough to see it coming, since she turns on her two buddies at a pool hall early in the ep. She knows somebody is screwing her over, so her not getting a clue is frankly unbelievable. Basing a major turn of events on the unlikely continued stupidity of not just one, but several, characters putting the welfare of their bosses above their own is a bad, Bad, STUPID idea. I just thought I'd point that out. The show professes to be cynical and then doesn't give us characters acting in favor of the Lowest Common Denominator (i.e. their own perceived self-interest) simply to further the storyline. Sure, you can end a story on a cynical note, but this wasn't an ending. It just kept going on and on and on and on and on and I got seriously tired of it.
Part of the problem was the acting. You will have not see worse acting by an actress playing a lesbian character since whatshername the blonde ADA "came out" at the end of her last Law&Order ep. God, how horrible it was to watch this woman play "mental breakdown" with a little frown and putting a hand to her forehead after being treated to Ian Tracey's acting tour-de-force seasons four through six as Mick disintegrated and haltingly put himself back together in Frankenstein-monster-like fashion in the shadow of the Ministry of Truth—sorry, the Vancouver Police Department. Sure, Mick's story went on and on and on and on, too, but Tracey made it realistic (Rome wasn't built in a day and you don't just bounce back from a complete nervous breakdown) and also deeply moving. In fact, I thought it was unrealistic to let that go the way they did at the beginning of this season, with Mick suddenly all better. But more on that in the season wrap-up.
I do have to say that this ep clips along. It had damned well better, of course, it being the season finale and all. Two murders and several confrontations occur before the first commercial, not least the closest we will ever get to seeing Brian actually commit a murder. We see the little weasel hotel manager go into a building and Brian following him wearing gloves. Later, Kosmo and Joe arrive at the hotel where the weasel has been found dead on the stairs with his head bashed in. They recognize him and grimly note another Dubreau witness down for the count. Really, how many witnesses need to get whacked or intimidated in the vicinity of Brian before they at least try putting these people in some sort of protective custody? Worse, however, is not just the idea of Brian getting away with murder one more time, but that he is not seen or mentioned again thereafter. So, a major storyline and a major ongoing villain are simply dumped without explanation within the first fifteen minutes and nobody, not even Kosmo, seems to care. How does that work?
Similarly, the pedophile storyline is sorta, kinda, quickly wrapped up with Kosmo and Joe meeting with Sleazoid Lawyer. He wants immunity for Dubreau if he testifies against other pedophiles who want to come back from Costa Rica with false names and passports. Why does he want to come back? Is money getting tight? Have the Costa Ricans hinted broadly that they don't like harboring known pedophiles from El Canada? Who knows? Haddock and Co. couldn't be arsed to give us even a single line of dialogue that explains things. Kosmo and Joe make no promises, so, of course, when Dubreau shows up, they arrest him. He's surprised (why? They made no promises!) and shocked. I did get a wee charge out of seeing Kosmo get to cuff him and take him in (boy is he a lot bigger than she is). She should get some satisfaction out of the past few years' work in that. But where the hell was Mick?! Not only was he not there and not only did we never find out what his big obsession with this case was, but he spent the entire ep so focused on the grow-op thing that the pedophile storyline might as well not have existed for him. This was a head-spinning turn for viewers who had been watching him clamp down on this one like a pitbull on Angel Dust all season long. Where was the payoff there? Why have all that build-up with Mick's vow before Christmas to "bury them all" if it wasn't going to go anywhere? Writers, here's a little piece of advice--if a character on a show vows to "bury them all", whoever "they" may be, I want to see him/her either do it or go down trying.
It's a pity, because the show started out really well and was going great guns until 9:52 p.m. If they had cut from that scene with Kosmo and Joe busting Dubreau to the final scene, it would have worked so much better. As it was, we were left with a lot of drawn-out loose ends and no explanations. Let's hope Haddock learns from this before he starts in on the Intelligence scripts or that one will sink at the dock, even considering the competition. Those previews of that new series "At the Hotel" sucked horribly. If that's the kind of thing that's replacing DVCH, I won't be watching CBC very much from now on, that's for sure.
Next week: Well, there is no next week, since this is the season finale and CBC has seen fit to cancel the show. However, in lieu of the tv-movie that may or may not happen next fall, I'll be doing a seasonal wrap-up later this week. And after that, a review of the Intelligence pilot. I will also do reviews of the Intelligence eps when they come up in the fall (or hopefully, sooner).
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This page was last updated on 3/1/2006
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