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DA VINCI'S CITY HALL REVIEWS-SEASON EIGHT
Things start to pick up this week in terms of continuity and character development--at least with the good guys. Top of the political storyline list is Bill and Charlie continuing to plot against Da Vinci. They find out about Da Vinci's attempts to replace Bill and also his plan for cross-training. Bill's and Charlie's motives remain opaque and petty, mainly because we know so little about their backgrounds, aspirations, needs, wants, loves, etc. Last week, we discovered that ol' Constable-turned-Sergeant Charlie had attitudes toward women that would have embarrassed a silverback gorilla. This week, we hear about his pathetic political aspirations (he thinks he's going to run for Chief of Police in a few years; maybe Bill's thinking he'll go for mayor?). It's becoming increasingly clear that Bill stays in power solely by relying on Charlie's unscrupulous and illegal operations.
Charlie is a real nightmare, a dinosaur who rejects any innovation whatsoever out of hand (like the redlight district and crosstraining of police and fire department officials). I still don't understand why Bill rejects these things but Charlie's motives are simple, obvious and basically incomprehensible--he lusts after naked power and he will do anything, walk over anyone, eliminate anyone in his quest for it. The amorality of his goals is flabbergasting. As the levels he's sunk to (let alone those he's willing to sink to) become more apparent, it's amazing Mick Leary was able to take him on and win last season.
Unfortunately, the parallels to a certain head of state and his vice president are a little too obvious to make Bill a real person, despite a subtle portrayal from Brian Markinson. Hrothgar Mathews, however, is bidding fair to make Charlie an even bigger monster than Brian. He remains as flat as Bill, yet, there's a fascination in his unabashed evil. "One man can't do two jobs," he keeps telling everyone in a not-so-successful attempt to intimidate them into stopping the crosstraining, repeating this week's episode title like a mantra. This is a reference to the idea that both the Police and Fire Department would end up with one Chief under the program, not something that either Charlie or Bill like at all. I still don't find these two characters at all compelling, but the two actors do make their scheming increasingly watchable as the weeks pass.
Despite the fact that Bill and Charlie are essentially caricatures, the balance of power between them and Da Vinci remains a whole lot of fun to watch. The writers avoid the whopping cliche of having everything go perfectly for Evil (even the most ridiculously coincidental things) right up until the last minute when Good turns the tables (happy ending) or gets wiped off the face of the planet (unhappy ending). Instead, we see Bill and Charlie have their attempted raid on the homeless activists last episode get thwarted (yay, Zack!) and enthusiastically throw themselves into plots and plans against Da Vinci even as Da Vinci quietly nibbles away at the Police Department's power base. We see the rats whom Bill and Charlie exploit. The leak that Da Vinci discussed with Julia the City Administrator last week, for example, comes from a woman working in Human Resources. She's looking for a nepotistic favor--she wants to see her nephew's application to the Police Department accepted. Why she feels it's perfectly okay to betray her job ethics over a beer with Charlie and the union rep we first saw last week is baffling. Yet, the casualness with which people betray the public trust and political secrets entrusted to them in their jobs seems to be an ongoing theme, especially in this episode. Some people betray, some people don't. And the ones who do and don't are not always expected.
Big cracks are starting to form in the previously monolithic power structure of Bill and Charlie's departmental goons. Charlie gets into a pissing contest with the Fire Department Chief, which may cost him big time down the road. "You're a shit-disturber; you know that?" the FD Chief tells Da Vinci later during a private meeting (stating the obvious), but that doesn't stop him from plotting with Da Vinci to continue the crosstraining program.
Meanwhile, Brian's former boss, the Narc Squad sergeant who foisted him off on Kurtz last season, also gets threatened by Bill and goes straight to Da Vinci to bitch about it. Among other things, he tells Da Vinci that most of the Narc Squad is behind the Fire Department's new program of rousting grow-ops by serving them notices for electrical inspections even though Bill adamantly opposes it. He also says that Bill has cut back on the Narc Squad's budget, forcing them to go back to the inefficient old ways of "buy and bust". This alerts Da Vinci, since he knows that the Department is way over budget. So where is all the money going?
Meanwhile, the union rep lets slip to Charlie that he has a source in City Hall, but he won't give it up. He throws his hat in as Charlie's possible replacement should Charlie run for Chief, but in the process of telling Charlie about the crosstraining, he also admits that some of the younger members in the Department like the idea of crosstraining: "Some guys are muttering about how the Fire Department is cutting their grass." This scares Charlie and makes him cry disloyalty, threatening the union rep. He is one twitchy, paranoid son of a bitch. Maybe he should be. The episode begin with the redlight district opened up, patrolled by cooperative, friendly constables, so obviously, they're not all behind Charlie. It is becoming increasingly clear that not everyone in the Department is happy with the Way Things Are under Bill. Or Charlie.
Which brings us to possibly the worst storyline the show has ever done--the Xena Wannabes. We get to see this week that they are not, in fact, working on their own at all, but have support from the very top. In fact, the episode ends with Bill staging a showy raid of a grow-op as a press junket. You can see "this will so backfire" foreshadowing stenciled across Bill's forehead as he smugly pitches his rah-rah speech to the tv. But what makes this storyline just awful, awful, awful is Constable Plucked Eyebrows (yes, I mean Jan Ferris).
This week, we discover that she's (wait for it, now) a lesbian. And not just a lesbian, but the stereotypical, ball-busting butch lesbian with no social skills that men always seem to label every woman who gets ahead in male-dominated professions. As a woman who has worked for most of her adult life in male-dominated professions, "I think I'm insulted," to quote Constable PE, herself. No, take that back--I am insulted. This storyline is horrible. It might have worked if they had cast actresses who looked believable as cops, but none of these fresh-faced brats looks as if she'd last five minutes in the rough-and-tumble of a man's world. Swaggering, cursing like a sailor and acting all glowering fem-macho will get you laughed right out of such a job in real life. Compared to them, Mick's psycho-stalker, Constable Josie Hutchins, was a model of realism. Write these women out! Please!
Moving on to a tough female cop who's actually believable, Kosmo finally goes for Joe's nuts and good for her. And thank God we're finally seeing some wrap-up from last year, not to mention some personal stuff. The excuse is a case that they got last week--two drive-bys on identical white vans in the same neighborhood. One appears to have been a case of mistaken identity, but which one? One of the dead guys is an ex-constable named Vijay Kumar who was cut loose from the Department for childhood connections to some heavy hitters in the Sikh community. Shades of Mick's connections to his murdered childhood friend, drug runner Will Summers from last year, arise here. The shades get heavier when a Judy Roemer from the Organized Crime Unit approaches Kosmo and Joe and tells them that she was a buddy of Kumar and that he'd brought her a bunch of info only a month before, things that could take down a lot of bad people in the Indian community. She's played by the same woman who played Will's wife last season. Hmm.
Kosmo, no surprise, finds that Kumar's murder hits a little too close to home and says so. When Joe finally asks her to lay her cards on the table, she says that she doesn't appreciate the fact that he smeared her good name. When he says it was just his job and what does she want from him, she says that she wants to hear him say that he was wrong. Surprise, surprise--his reply is: "I was wrong." She isn't satisfied and tells him that maybe he should tell Internal Affairs that. Big surprise, when he goes to check up on Kumar's file with a buddy in Internal, he does just that. In fact, he tries to strong-arm the guy into closing her file (which just happened to be his last case for IAD before he transferred to Homicide) for good. The guy accuses him of having a thing for Kosmo--because she's a beautiful woman, I presume and hey, why else would he try to set the record straight with his own partner? Joe laughs this off, but you do have to wonder why he's so determined to set that record straight now when he was calling her paranoid and disturbed last season. So, Joe is a stand-up mensch, after all. Sorry, Joe. Methinks Kosmo's heart still belongs to her ex-partner.
Speaking of said ex-partner, Alice--I mean, Mick--follows up on his lead from last week. And he does it in a nice new coat. Hmm, moving up a bit in the world, sartorially speaking, after all. He finds the talk-show host, but as with Cody last week, too late. Boy, is this case cold. The man has died a month before. His wife (played by the actress who played the prostitute who was very nearly Charlie Josephs' last victim in Little Sister) is floating down the River Denial, claiming that the molestation charge that ended her husband's career back in the 1980s was just the revenge of a lying, angry nephew. His daughter, however, knows better. She shows up at the Coroner's office with a box of polaroids of naked young boys. One of them is Cody, the witness from last week who had stepped in front of a car after being gangraped by a pedophile ring.
When Mick gives the box to the Sex Crimes cop, Jorge, the cop is noncommital, saying there is no way to place the photos (and therefore, the crimes) in Vancouver. "These could have been taken in Copenhagen," he says, as if that would close the case. What, would they not care about pedophilia in Copenhagen? The fact that Cody was a local rent boy (not one from Copenhagen), and is clearly identifiable in one of the photos, doesn't make him any more enthused. Mick has to beg him to cross-check the photos against any known pedophile rings and when the guy walks off with the box, you can't help thinking this will be last anybody will see of it. Hopefully, Mick at least scanned the photos. He's a smart boy. He probably did. He knows he's way out on a broken limb.
Da Vinci, meanwhile, is thrilled when Manning proves willing to buy the racetrack. He even ignores a last-minute offer by a Chinese family, the Wus. Manning continues to charm Da Vinci, but there is a constant undercurrent of brutality, of corruption, swirling around him, such as the conversation he's having on the phone when Da Vinci steps onto the boat in this episode. I keep thinking that Manning and Mick's investigation will collide sometime down the road. Let's just hope that if that happens, Da Vinci is willing to pick one of his most loyal friends from the old days and a bunch of dead aboriginal kids over a racetrack and a very rich and charming political ally. It could be a very difficult decision. Either way, I think that the pedophile storyline is the one that is going to rip everything open and crash political and criminal together into one, big smash-up at the end of the season. Can't wait. This is easily the most fascinating and compelling storyline of this season so far, even though it's also the one taking its sweet time unfolding underneath all of the others.
Finally, there's some wrap-up of the Zack storyline from last week. It's a couple of days after the raid and Da Vinci doesn't know what happened until Zack calls him up to bitch him out. Da Vinci isn't happy about the raid, but he's even less happy to hear that Zack has taken a leadership role at the camp. Zack is romping right into agent provocateur territory and a political minefield and Da Vinci wants to send someone else in. But instead, Zack finds himself getting in deeper when Friedland (Charles Martin Smith directing again this week) unexpectedly takes off for a few days and leaves him in charge. Oh, Zack. What are you getting yourself into, my friend?
Next week: Put Down the Hose, Pick Up a Gun: Da Vinci negotiates a tenuous compromise with Bill. Then, a grow-op raid goes kablooey and the whole situation goes straight to Hell in a handbasket. Happy days, then.
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This page was last updated on 11/16/2005
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