DA VINCI'S CITY HALL REVIEWS-SEASON EIGHT

• Review of Episode 105: Put Down the Hose, Pick Up a Gun

  Oooooer. Sarah Jane Redmond in the credits? And Ian Tracey high up in this week's credits? Can we say "apocalyptic Kurtz-Leary hoedown"? Alas, no. All we see is Joe and Kosmo hitting her up near the end of the episode for a possible undercover operator for the Asian gangs in their investigation of the Kumar shooting. No Mick in sight. We even see Mick and Charlie together--again, nada on that front. The period between last season and this season is like the missing time in UFO abductions. You get hints, but forget getting brought up to speed on the real story. Anyway, Kurtz is typically unhelpful and apparently still in the Department and still head of Homicide. Why? Who the hell knows? Maybe she's blackmailing Bill about their affair.

  There is a sleazy young drug dealer on a bike who keeps getting busted by bike cops down in the redlight district. This storyline does nothing for me, but I should mention it since it came up last week and starts off this week. That indicates to me that it will become something important, though it could just be a lead-in for the political shenanigans later on in the episode that are drummed up to discredit the redlight district and link it to Da Vinci's crosstraining proposal. The two cops who keep shaking the dealer down appear to be part of the "street crew" that has been harassing street people for years and who killed Darcy Charlie. Charlie mentions the crew this week in a conversation with Bill. Apparently, neither of them has any issues with the legality of having one's own bully gang of cops.

  Charlie has started strongarming Bill into doing whatever he wants. Bill is so blinded by his hatred of Da Vinci that he is letting Charlie do it. It's about revenge for Bill, but Charlie, it seems clear, is out for naked power. He pushes for an organized task force, for example, after a shooting at a grow-op. Then, when Da Vinci responds by dropping the proposal in the trash and going forward with the cross-training before anyone can exploit the tragedy more, Charlie tries to spin it again by telling everyone that Da Vinci is the one taking advantage of it. What happens when it gets out that he tried to spin it first? For example, the Fire Department union guy may be stupid enough not to check up on Charlie's fairy stories, but the Police union rep is looking increasingly doubtful. And the Vice Squad sergeant, Parminder, is very much not on board the Bill Train, despite Charlie's promises of more support. Bill has been starving out Vice so long that he's pretty much lost any hope of support from that quarter. What's amazing is that he seems unaware of this. Or even more amazing, he just doesn't care.

  In fact, when Da Vinci ends the episode by storming into Bill's office and telling Bill to shape up or ship out, Charlie seems to think winding up Da Vinci is a great accomplishment, especially after Da Vinci goes off on him, calling him "a jumped-up little prick" on the way out. Which he, of course, is. He and Bill don't seem to understand that Da Vinci has everyone on the Police Board behind him save for their rather colorless snitch. Pissing off the Mayor is a bad idea, even if you're the Police Chief.

  But the same cockiness that let Mick slip Vin Tuan out from under Charlie is quickly working up to Charlie's downfall. He is rude to the wrong people and only friendly to those who agree with him. This erodes any support for him, let alone Bill, while building up no new or broad-ranging allies. Meanwhile, he and Bill are so wrapped up in their plotting that they consistently underestimate the opposition. This is their first fatal flaw, since they cannot believe that Da Vinci might have so many allies in so many places. Hell, half of the time, they don't even know who the opposition is. Their encounters with Mick and Chick in this ep prove that. Both are deadly enemies whom neither Charlie nor Bill takes seriously because they're quiet and polite. You'd think Charlie would have learned not to underestimate Mick, at least, but apparently not.

  Second fatal flaw--Charlie and Bill hear no dissenting voices and listen only to people who have no brains or who see it in their best interests to tell Charlie what he wants to hear (i.e. union reps). Take, for example, the Vice President of the Fire union, who utters the title line. He's exactly the kind of musclebound moron on the FD that we used to groan about when I was working as an EMT on rescue squads. He confirms this opinion of mine by making snarky comments about the city paramedics. Idiot.

  This week, the grow-op busts blow wide open. Let's deal with the little liars first. Having the Xena wannabes hit the bar, let down their hair (literally) and get slimed over by their male colleagues did absolutely nothing to increase their credibility. Watching Constable Plucked Eyebrows hit on the chick who was hero-worshipping her last week (enough with the man-hating bull-dyke clichés!) engaged my gag reflex, especially when she acted as slimy as her male colleagues--but of course, why would a woman act any better than a man toward another woman? Watching her would-be love interest (they said her name but I just didn't care) get killed in a botched grow-op left me only with a keen regret that it wasn't a clean sweep. That would have meant we wouldn't have to watch any of these twits ever again. Instead, we got treated to Constable PE's solemn interview with the Police Union rep, who was talking about merely the possibility of the case going to Internal Affairs.

  Now, let me get this straight--in the Josie Hutchins debacle, Mick fires twice after being fired upon, doesn't even fire the fatal round, and eventually falls apart because everybody feels he was responsible for Josie's death because they all assume he must have been sleeping with her (that old "if she's hot and she likes you, you must have been banging her" assumption). This chick hits on another woman in a bar, then empties her gun into a perp who blows said would-be love interest's head off and there are no repercussions? Say what? Please, do we at least get to see this woman shoot herself? And sooner rather than later, because she is vomit-inducing. I haven't wanted to see a character die this badly since Brian slunk off into the darkness. I don't even want to see Charlie die as badly--though seeing him staked out in his skivvies on a rock with pig shit and ants smeared all over him would work. The main difference is that I want Charlie to rot in Hell because Hrothgar Mathews is a very good actor. I want Jan Ferris to rot in Hell because the actress is so very appalling that it's painful to watch her not selling this character.

  It's a damned shame, too, because seeing a strong lesbian cop on the Department could have been cool. Instead, it's an ungodly cock-up. The only interesting thing about her in any of this is in the interview with the union rep when she insists that she saw a Fire Department notice on the floor afterward but it never got collected for evidence (Hmm. The Bad Guys aren't the only ones messing about with evidence, then). She never explains why she didn't bother to look for a notice before they went in. Yeah, it was dark, but they knew it was a risk and they could have felt for the thing.

  The grow-op screw-up has big fall-out and is the inevitable tragicomedy of errors from start to finish that we were waiting for. It begins with the Fire Department sneaking out to tag a grow-op because Charlie has been raising such a big stink about the program that they can't do it openly. A few constables come by, off-the-clock, to give their support. Here is the dissatisfaction at the ground level that the union rep and Parminder the Vice sergeant have been talking about. Incidentally, on the recycled actors front, one of the Fire Department reps is played by the actress whose cardsharp character tried to see Mick's winning hand in season two's "The Lottery". Good to see her again. She plays a glammed-up bitch very well and she doesn't do too badly playing an opposite type here, either. She may show up again.

  Meanwhile, the Xena wannabes bust a meth dealer who fingers the grow-op. They do the usual drill and go in after dark, but there's trouble with the door, alerting a guy inside long enough to get a shotgun. Constable PE's would-be love interest goes in first, standing right there in the doorway like a dumbass and of course, she gets a blast in the face. There's a kind of irony to that, considering that she was pretty in the blonde, rather vacant, corn-fed way that Josie was. Constable PE comes roaring in and empties her gun into the guy, who is trying to hide behind a mattress. Needless to say, he dies and she cries and I didn't give a damn about any of the three of them.

  It gets interesting afterward with Bill and Charlie trying to peddle the situation to their advantage for all they're worth. This is why we see Da Vinci encountering roadblocks throughout the episode with angry businesswomen and his own people about the cross-training and the redlight district. In fact, he has to back down temporarily on the female aboriginal replacement for Bill (bummer! She sounds like fun) that he wanted to interview, as part of an attempt to separate the redlight district and crosstraining issues. We also see Bill's plant in the homeless camp snitching to Bill about Da Vinci's meeting with Friedland. Da Vinci wants Zack to pull out (but Zack doesn't) and Friedland to stay in Crab Park so that the City can claim the disputed jurisdiction over it. He wants to keep them there a good eight or nine months. Friedland later has an uncomfortable (for Zack) conversation with Zack about agents provocateurs. I did wonder if the writers would lay that historical connection right out. They did. But it also begs the question of what Friedland wants out of all of this. Who is he working for?

  Meanwhile, Bill and Charlie's pushing backfires in that they are trying to goad Da Vinci into doing the cross-training ahead of schedule and that's exactly what he does. Hence Charlie's glee at the end of the ep. But Bill and Charlie have not banked on the level of dissatisfaction with them on the street. Their power base looks set to fracture over this and they don't even know it yet.

  Back at the grow-op debacle, Bill distracts Mick while Charlie hurries the Xena wannabes off stage. Mick assures Bill that he doesn't want any kind of press involved, anymore than Bill does ("I'm in no rush to open my mouth, here"), then asks to speak to the constables. Bill, of course, says that they've already gone downtown and lawyered up, then insists that they were executing a warrant. Charlie comes up and tries to snow Mick, too, chivvying him off toward the house. As usual, this is Bill and Charlie missing the forest for the trees, as it is inside the house that Mick gets together with Chick and they establish something very damning about the raid--the wannabes not only tried to bust the door down, but they failed to get through because the door only opened from the inside out. Pretty stupid of them not to notice that. Worse, Mick later finds out that the guy inside had a bust for assault with a deadly weapon. If the wannabes really had a warrant, they would have known about that. Whoops. Talk about busted.

  While Mick and Chick are discovering Very Bad Things inside the grow-op, Bill and Charlie are a-plotting without all of the facts outside. "I don't want to be reading about any police negligence here," Bill tells Charlie. "I'd be surprised if this wasn't connected to some organized crime group." Charlie takes the obvious hint and tries to sow it with Chick, who proves less than fertile ground for it.

  Not only are both Bill and Charlie blissfully unaware that Mick has just snowed them with his "dumb canuck" routine and is establishing both police negligence and the lack of a warrant at the very moment that they're plotting outside and not only is Charlie unaware of Chick's past as a CSIS spook when he later calls him into his office for the hint-sowing, but they are both completely unaware that Joe and Kosmo are establishing connections with Judy Roemer inside the Organized Crime Unit even as Charlie is working toward some sort of super OCU for the city (not something that the current OCU is liable to appreciate). So, the claim of an organized crime connection is not likely to hold up. I suppose Bill will know about the Kumar investigation by next week, though, since Kosmo and Joe are trying to get Kurtz to give them another narc on the inside and Kurtz may well still be Bill's bit on the side. She sure as hell doesn't have any other job credentials up her skirt.

  Finally, this brings us to my ongoing favorite storyline, which is revving up slowly like a late-season hurricane down in the South Atlantic. Yep, that would be Mick's pedophile investigation. He appears earlier than usual (at the first quarter hour, right before the commercial), picking up Clarke Messner in his car and showing him those polaroids. Ha. I knew he was smart enough to keep copies, but it's good to see confirmation of it. "I didn't know they took photos," Messner says, looking sick. "Am I in any of these?"

  "I don't think so," Mick reassures him. But that doesn't mean there aren't more out there.

  Messner proves very useful this week. He's able to identify the room in the polaroids as being in the same hotel room that he visited. Claire still isn't growing on me, and I still miss Helen, but she does find the hotel, El Mirador. It burned down, but the owner was a James Dubreau, a heavy hitter in Vancouver Development Land, and guess what? He's still alive. A live suspect! Finally! He's on the books because he got stabbed a few years back by a kid who claimed that Dubreau drugged his drink. The kid later retracted his statement (this is starting to sound very familiar). When Mick takes Messner out for a ride, Messner ID's Dubreau as one of the men in the hotel room. And sleazy Dubreau is getting into a car with a dark-haired young man in a leather jacket who looks an awful lot like a trick. We finally see the size and shape of the tiger that Mick has by the tail--one of them, anyway. That's some tiger.

  Frankly, we need more of this storyline, not less. Why Mick is so stuck on going after these guys, for one thing. More background on what's happening with the Kumar case would be nice, too. Bill and Charlie are interesting to a certain extent, but if they end up being on center stage for the whole season, it's gonna get tired quick. They just aren't very deep and I'm already impatient to see them go down.

  Next week: You Have to Bleed a Little: An uneasy peace settles over the botched grow-op bust. Kosmo and Joe discover new and not-so-groovy things about their drive-by dead guy and an old enemy comes back to haunt Mick in his new job and investigation.

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This page was last updated on 5/9/2006