DA VINCI'S CITY HALL REVIEWS-SEASON EIGHT

• Review of Episode 106: You Have to Bleed a Little

  Finally.

  First of all, for all you Brian fans (you know who you are), he's baaaaack, the little scuzzbucket. And you will not believe how he fits into Mick's investigation. Oh, how far back that sleazeball's rep extends. Even better, Mick is a major, major player in this one, the pedophile storyline is finally bubbling to the surface, the Xena wannabes are too cowed to be more than mildly annoying and Bill has been temporarily neutered. Charlie thinks he's on to something with the missing fire notice but Bill and others are much more wary and their coalition with forces in the Fire Department against cross-training is rapidly disintegrating.

  Add to that a return of Chick in full form (investigating the grow-op shooting from last week), Maria the Pathologist and Lou the Coroner's Assistant, plus a vengeful Mick pulling Kosmo, Joe and a very nervous Kurtz into the pedophile investigation and we've finally got the set-up for one hell of a rest of the season. We're back in the saddle and not too soon.

  Minor stuff--Constable PE is still insisting that the fire notice was there on the floor after the raid, but it's disappeared. None of her colleagues remember seeing it, either. The accusation pisses off the Fire Department, which absolutely refuses to take any responsibility for the alleged notice. This causes some fractures in Charlie's coalition against cross-training, to the point where he'll probably have to hang Constable PE out to dry. Right now, he's refusing to do it, thinking he can weasel them both through this mess. It gets even more amazing when he has one of the investigators plant a notice at the scene of the grow-op bust, a false revelation that ends the ep with an impending explosion between the Police and Fire departments. Moron. Like that won't come back to bite him on the ass, especially since Chick is already suspicious about the fortuitous appearance of evidence found five days after the first CSI go-round. This may be the thing that will bring Charlie down. Music to my ears.

  Meanwhile, Da Vinci puts the female Dom minion onto the job of trying to find out who is behind a purported concerned citizens' group against the redlight district that appears taking photos of hookers at the beginning of the ep. The group leads right back to Billie Simms, who gets caught red-handed by Dom and has to agree to make said front group go away in order to get any concessions from him. He also has Friedlander get in on his plan to use the homeless squatters to acquire city control over Crab Park from the Feds and forces Bill and Charlie to get on board with him about the grow-ops. "I don't like the way this is going," Bill says as they get on the elevator after a big meeting of the Police Board. "Sounds a lot like crosstraining to me," Charlie replies.

  Meanwhile, Lloyd Manning (who gets the title line this week) has just bought the racetrack, going into business with the would-be Chinese buyers from last week. And the PM is coming to town in two weeks. Oh, and the little cow who led the fatal beating of the gay man in Stanley Park in the pilot comes in with her wussy father for questioning in the death, but is so busy rolling her eyes that she has trouble lying convincingly to a polite but suspicious Carter.

  But this is all minor stuff. The major stuff this week is the pedophile ring. Remember that cop that all of the witnesses kept saying was involved? Well, it appears that said cop was none other than Brian Curtis. I had briefly considered this when it came up, but since the incidents were in the early '90s, he seemed too young for it. Apparently, he was doing this right out of the Academy. This would explain the odd semen residue that Maria found around Rick's mouth after Brian cut his throat at the end of season six. Yep--not only is Brian a cokehead, thief, murderer and general all-round sociopathic scumbag, but he's a pedophile, too. Ick.

  On the one hand, I'm not wild about seeing Brian back, twitchy as ever and ready for more ridiculous outlaw shenanigans. On the other hand, Mick has finally decided to go after Brian personally and having a vengeful Mick on your ass is a bit like having the Greek Furies in your tail lights. Not something a bad guy would want to see but definitely something that we, the audience, will want a front row seat for. Normally, there'd be no reason for Brian to get too excited about someone on his tail. Brian knows whom to snow and doesn't seem terribly afraid of anyone who isn't threatening him directly. If he could get the drop on Kosmo and snow Joe last season, he'd be pretty cocky by this point.

  But Mick scares the hell out of him as no one else ever has, not even Kosmo. The writers and two actors have always played Brian off of Mick as a sort of anti-Mick, deeply jealous of Mick's apparent success in Homicide and resentful of Mick's low-key contempt ever since their first meeting, when Kosmo and Mick cut him dead at the end of season six's Bury My Own Bones. Mick is an alpha male and Brian is an alpha male wannabe. I'm still not thrilled by the lack of personal stuff, but with Mick and Brian in each other's sights, it seems a dead cert we'll be getting lots of dirt on those two. This deathmatch is long overdue.

  We get Mick right off the bat after Da Vinci's opening the ep with a visit to the redlight district and an encounter with Billie's front group. After that, we see Mick meeting with Claire and Clarke Messner in a quiet little Chinese diner. Mick warns Messner that things could get ugly with Dubreau involved, but Messner insists that he can take it.

  But the heat hits right away, with the sleazoid lawyer who was killing his clients last year showing up in Mick's office as Dubreau's attorney (mais oui). I got a kick out of Mick batting his eyes and blithely lying to him while in full Dumb Canuck mode. Mick assures Sleazoid that he's not going to call Dubreau in as a witness on any inquest (which is true, as far as it goes, since Mick really wants to bring Dubreau down for good on criminal charges of pedophilia and rape). As soon as Sleazoid leaves, though, Mick jumps into action, furious at having Dubreau come after him sooner than he'd hoped. He'd be even less happy to see Brian show up for the first time this season, meeting with the Sleazoid and apparently still working the street for the Narcotics Squad. Sleazoid wants Brian to "take a meeting" with Dubreau. This doesn't look good for Mick's witnesses, not at all.

  Meanwhile, Expositional Claire discovers the name of the street hustler who stabbed Dubreau, a Manny Zapata. Manny has since got clean and works as a roofer. He just happens to be played by the guy who played the young rent boy, Rick, who famously told Mick, "You don't wanna go down on grandpa straight" in season one's "Final Chapter". However, Manny a different (albeit similar) character from Rick. Manny claims that Brian was in the same car as him and Dubreau and that they both attacked him after Dubreau drugged him. He also says that Brian got him arrested afterward and smeared him to get the charges dropped.

  After this, Mick meets with Maria, who says that there is no obvious trauma on the skeletons of the two dead boys, but that she did find a fiber on the ankle of one that turned out to be rope. He was probably tied up. Mick sends it over to Homicide, asking first for Chick. But since Chick is busy with the grow-op disaster, Claire gets Kosmo instead. I wasn't hugely happy to see Mick act to Claire as if Kosmo were someone he knew only casually. On the other hand, he'd clearly confided something to Kosmo before she shows up with Joe. She already knows about Mick's investigation, while Joe confesses, "I'm not familiar with any of this." But what Mick was telling her and whether or not this was, say, pillow talk or what, remains unclear. This brought up the spectre of the past few week's sense of X-Files-ish missing time between seasons again, not to mention the still near-total lack of a personal life for any of the characters, which did not please me. We don't need any more of that just-the-facts crap this season.

  That said, the look on Kosmo and Joe's faces when Mick shows them the name of the arresting officer on Manny's arrest report is priceless. "Holy shit," says Kosmo, in the understatement of the season, "it's Brian Curtis."

  "This is your lucky day," Mick cheerfully tells Joe. "We're going all the way with this one." When Kosmo and Joe question whether Manny will testify, Mick notes that Manny has already given his statements and that they were thrown out, thanks to Brian. But, "it doesn't matter," he adds fiercely, announcing the main event of the season (the Bill and Charlie Revue was just the warm-up act). "We're gonna go after this one and we're gonna bury them all."

  Mick on the warpath, with every bad guy from previous seasons that's still out on the street in his sights. I've got my ticket. How about you?

  Next week: Ready to Call in the Horses: Charlie's little fire notice bombshell blows up and Mick teams up with Kosmo and Joe on the pedophile ring.

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This page was last updated on 5/9/2006