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DA VINCI'S CITY HALL REVIEWS-SEASON EIGHT
I always get a kick out of catching the tail end of Commander in Chief and then watching Boston Legal after watching this show. This week was especially surreal ("You strayed...with livestock?!" being but one priceless moment on BL), but it sure does make Tuesday night a fun ride for those of us within a hundred miles of each side of the border.
As we swing into week three, as usual, I start getting into a wee slump. The really juicy stuff hasn't kicked in yet and the establishment of necessary groundwork is getting a mite tedious in some areas, while frustratingly slow in others. It always makes me prefer re-watching the early episodes of a season in retrospect to watching them the first time round. It's easier to keep up with the early establishment of storylines by watching chunks of three or four hours. Mick and mayhem, for example, don't usually start going out together until at least episodes four and five, if previous seasons are any indication, but since Mick and mayhem are usually a couple well worth waiting for, I'm okay with that. But there are so many elements here that some things may drag a bit. That said, there are some great parts of this episode that make it well worth watching, some good parts that get you from one great part to another, some not-so-good parts that you just sit through, some bad parts that may make you yawn or irritate you and some ugly stuff that will make you either cover your eyes or roll them.
First up, the great stuff—can we give a big old hand to Stephen E. Miller for having way too much fun this week playing Zack? And I don't just mean squeaking the title line in under the wire in the last ten minutes (he's showing a guy how to roll an impromptu cigarette. I'll assume that's tobacco, since it's Zack). Zack does more growing in this single hour than he has in seven seasons on Da Vinci. That's saying something, considering he got his moments from time to time in DVI, especially when he found out Da Vinci had hit on his very capable amazon of a daughter, Ramona. In this ep, he gets to be an advisor and a leader to the homeless people he's spying on, he gets a nice conversation with Da Vinci, he gets to run and hide and kick a little butt. What's not to love about Zack this week? Woohoo! You go, guy!
One very interesting thing is that CBC chose to show "It's Backwards Day" yesterday. For those of you who've forgotten, that's the one they did in real time on a shoestring budget in season three. It's fun to compare Zack's rant about junkies and the homeless in that ep to how he reacts to an attack on his little group in this one. Bill gets impatient with the situation just as Friedland is organizing everybody to move over to Crab Park and sends in the goons to break everybody up. Poor Friedland (who gets not so much to do this week) gets roughed up and arrested. This leaves Zack in a terrible jam (not to mention in charge) and forces him to organize everybody and send them in small groups to Crab Park. In the process, he nearly gets arrested himself, but fights off his attacker and leaves him gagging in the street. For those of you who have downloaded the trailer from the DVCH site (which appears to be down at the moment, for some reason), this is the part where a guy gets headbutted and knocked down. He makes a frantic call to Da Vinci to call off the dogs near the end of the ep, but Da Vinci is (ahem) spending the night with Billie the horse racing queen. So, Da Vinci has a nice night and Zack does not. Poor old Zack. I hope he gets paid real good for this job.
As you can imagine, the ending of the episode is quite tense, and while yeah, the juxtaposition of fun and violence in a scene is probably older than The Godfather, this is still especially well done. Since we know the context of this scene, we know the meaning of it. However, it resembles, in a large way, the very first scene of the pilot. Having read the CBC blurbs for future episodes, I'm finding that particular scene especially significant in who appears and who doesn't.
On to the good. We get to see the actress who played Brenda (the councilman's stripper girlfriend) in a new role as the Crown Prosecutor. For a minute there, I thought she was the new Homicide sergeant and perked up, but apparently not. We get the actress who played the doomed Darcy Charlie as the president of an association of prostitutes whom Da Vinci woos about the new proposed redlight district. Boy, does she look different. Take away those birth control glasses and baggy clothes and put her in some nice duds and she cleans up great. The actress carries it off well, too. Her voice is the same, though, allowing for a classier dialect (no "okeydokey, Dominic" this time round). We also get to see Carter and his partner solve the gay-bashing case (though it doesn't look like they'll be able to prosecute it), busting a bunch of girl gangbangers, and we get to see the cheerful black woman constable with the short, corn-rowed hair who corrected Da Vinci on "Ass-Covering Day". The writers sure know how to use their day-players.
There is also a very creepy scene between Da Vinci and Lloyd Manning. The current racetrack owner is abandoning ship and Da Vinci wants Manning to buy the place, promising to put in the slot machines as a money-maker. Manning is coy about it, but seems interested and they look to be heading toward a deal. However, this may not be such a hot idea on Da Vinci's part. Manning is a charmer, but you know, there's something just a bit off about him. In fact, I'm going to take a wild-assed guess that Manning and Mick's investigation will collide somewhere soon down the road and that Da Vinci will have to make some hard decisions between political expediency on one side and justice and friendship on the other. It would be a perfect example of Haddock's claim that the show is all about how "the political is criminal and the criminal is political", but we will, of course, find out soon enough how that goes. I think I know where Da Vinci would fall if that happened, but we'll see. And we'll see if Mick will trust him to make the right decision.
I have to note here that Mick doesn't get much to do in this one, even though Ian Tracey gets billed ahead of Brian Markinson. However, there is some interesting stuff and one quite moving scene. I'm going to note these things down because I think they're major foreshadowing for something ugly. Mick is tracking down the stories that Clarke Messner told him last week and he's not getting very far. He goes to see one Native activist (the shot of him waiting outside looking like a schoolboy waiting for the bus, while the guy mulls over whether he wants to talk to him, is fun and shows Tracey's ability to act in character from literally any angle). The activist says that the stories are probably wish-fulfillment fantasies that the rent boys traded around because what was more fun—getting smacked around by some low-life cruising Boystown or getting screwed in style as part of the High Life? He also points out that these stories have been around for at least three generations. When Mick asks for specifics, the man mentions suicides that were written up as accidents—more names for Mick's growing list of victims. Cody, the possible lead from last week, was one of these "accidents", so he won't be telling anyone anything. He stepped in front of a car. The activist doesn't hold out much hope for Mick getting anywhere. If this group exists, it's rich and powerful and will shut Mick down before he has a chance to get anywhere. Obviously, this guy has never seen Mick undercover.
The list of possible suspects remains thin, but the activist does remember that in the stories around the time of the two boys' disappearance, a talk show host was possibly involved. The only real lead Mick has is that the guy was done up not long after the disappearances for rape. When Mick checks up on this with a guy from Sex Crimes (not Bobby, alas. Callum Keith Rennie's character appears to be gone for good), though, the guy gives him the same song and dance about the stories being an urban legend. He says that he can't do anything without witnesses or other corroborating evidence. I suppose it makes sense. What would you want to believe—that this was just a myth or that the same pedophile ring had been operating in your area for the past three generations? Talk about a twenty-first century version of the Hellfire Club. Just when it seems Mick is on a wild goose chase, the pendulum swings in favor of the latter, nasty option. Mick goes back to Clarke Messner, who confesses that he went with one of the dead boys one night and they both got gangraped in a big hotel. This is quite a moving scene, especially since neither Glen Gould nor Ian Tracey overplay it. But it's clear that Messner is taking a huge chance trusting Mick with his tale and that Mick fully recognizes that. Messner further says that a cop and a big Native guy were involved, but he couldn't identify anybody because he was blindfolded. The ring widens.
Moving on to the bad...well, it's good and it's bad. On the plus side, we get to see a lot of how Bill and Charlie operate. Bill gives Charlie general directives and Charlie does all of the dirty work so that Bill can stay above reproach. We see them working the Police Union representative and cooking up dirty tricks against Da Vinci. Charlie has quite the little network of spies going, even one in Friedland's merry band of homeless folks. In fact, he learns about Da Vinci's redlight district when a moronic construction worker blurts it out to a passing constable (whoops). This is good and useful stuff to watch to catch up on what the bad guys are doing and I have to say that Brian Markinson and Hrothgar Matthews do an excellent job of selling these two slimeballs as realistic human beings. They get a lot to do in this ep and they have good warlock/familiar chemistry here.
The problem is the absolute lack of any evidence that Bill has any higher motivation than going after Da Vinci. He seems convinced that he can stay in for another two years and outlast Da Vinci. Fair enough, but why get into a pissing contest with him? What's in it for him, aside from the distant promise of raw power if he survives? He knows full well that Da Vinci will go after him if he raises the red flag and in this episode, go after him Da Vinci most certainly does. Da Vinci is not interested in how much it will cost the city or how much it will disrupt things to get rid of Bill. He sees (quite rightly) that Bill is a destructive influence and rams through an audit on Bill's books. Bill is not the least bit happy about this, though he insists to Charlie that he can duck it. Naturally, this makes one wonder just what Bill has on his books that he doesn't want Da Vinci to see. It's the first real hint of why Bill is doing what he's doing. But we're going to need to see a lot more, and soon, because Bill has all of the depth of a paper cut right now. If he and Charlie had had mustaches, they would have been twirling them this week. In fact, all of the police constables would have, and that's not good.
Let's conclude with the ugly and its name is Constable Jan Ferris. Looking back at the pilot, I see that she was actually in that briefly, at the police shooting. There wasn't much on that one this week, though we did see Joe have a conversation with someone who noted that transferring from IAD to Homicide was unusual, to say the least. Joe's grumpy reaction just emphasized further that this was really a demotion. Pity we didn't get any more of that, or of him and Kosmo.
Meanwhile, Jan Ferris and her merry band of Xena wannabes continued with the grow-op raiding thing. Only, this time, they went in and find it empty (which was the only part of this idiotic storyline that brought a smile to my face). Seems the fire department stuck a notice on the door saying they were going to come inspect the place's wiring in two days and the grow-op guys booked. Infuriated, Ferris did what any idiot with no tact would do and went to bitch out a fire department member, in broad daylight and full view of his colleagues. Oh, yeah. That's a good way of winning friends and influencing people. Ferris, being the center of this plotline, is critical to selling it. If you don't buy her, you won't buy this storyline. Well, I don't buy her. The actress playing her is just awful. She walks around with a swagger and a perpetual smirk on her face, when she's not screaming at somebody. Her idea of acting seems to be to arch her painful-looking plucked eyebrows and bare her teeth. Ick. This kind of attitude works coming from someone like Venus Terzo, who can make Kosmo likeable in even her most PMS moments and can easily convince you that not one, but two, Leary brothers would fall hard for her. But this girl ain't no Venus Terzo and Jan Ferris ain't no Angela Kosmo. She doesn't even possess the twitchy, sociopathic charm that John Cassini and Colin Cunningham infused into Dino and Brian. Please, writers, do something horrible to her quick and/or write her out of the show. She's terrible.
Next week: One Man Two Jobs.
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This page was last updated on 11/9/2005
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