DA VINCI'S CITY HALL REVIEWS-SEASON EIGHT
Brian's back again, as is Bob Kelly (Da Vinci's former boss). And local blues legend, Jim Byrnes, shows up as a constituent who will probably be coming back (kewl). Many things come back to bite many people on the ass this week. Strangely enough, none of these people is Dominic Da Vinci. "We had a pretty good day, I guess, eh?" he tells the Dom minions at the end of the ep. He's about the only one this week.
Mick Leary, for example, has an absolutely horrible day, the worst he could think of at this time. The episode begins with Brian making a night-time phone call on the street, where he is asked to do a job. Mick then comes in the next morning to discover that his laptop has been stolen out of the office, along with pertinent files in the pedophile case and the identities of the two witnesses. Though Mick does appear to have back-ups, "It's bad enough," he tells Claire with the kind of frustrated despair we saw a lot of back in DVI's season three.
The laptop isn't stolen directly by Brian, since we see the thief's face, but one has to assume that he's behind it. He's got a real nose for finding a desperate stooge and squeezing him or her like a zit. I can't decide if Colin Cunningham's portrayal is flatter than before or not. However, the meeting between Brian, Sleazoid lawyer and Dubreau is very interesting. Brin tries to shmooze up a sense of old friends/old times with Dubreau, even calling him "Jimmy-Jim" and flattering him that he's done very well for himself over the years. Smarmy Dubreau is much less enthusiastic, holding Brian at arm's length. He gives Brian an errand (to find Manny Zappata and lean on him), then dismisses him like the errand boy for rich pervs that he is. Brian gets that old look of disappointment that he always gets when he realizes, for a brief moment, that terrorizing street trash is as high as he will ever get in the cosmic hierarchy of power. Brian is not stupid, something that Dubreau has apparently forgotten. It would be amusing for the audience if Brian were the final witness who turns on everybody in an attempt to cut a deal and squirm his way out from under what's coming down on him--but I doubt Mick would be amused by such a deal. More on that in a bit.
Bill and Charlie's run of bad karma continues as their little love affair hits the rocks. Charlie is trying really hard to cover his ass regarding the grow-op blow-up. Bill is trying to cover his own ass with the missing women's case, which is suddenly arising like a phoenix out of his pissing contest with Da Vinci over the redlight zone. He even gets his policewoman secretary onto it (which made me wonder if he's already casting around for a Charlie-replacement). Bill tries to spin it to the press that letting the missing women cases slide over the years occurred because the department doesn't have enough personnel (and not, say, because his once-and-perhaps-future forbidden fruit on the sideboard, Sheila Kurtz, sent a major witness packing several years ago). Da Vinci spins it right back, leaving Bill floundering and finally ready to make a deal.
Meanwhile, Bill tells Charlie to keep Constable PE far, far away from her would-be love interest's funeral. Charlie conveys the bad news (which doesn't thrill her) and later strongly suggests that she take a Horsemen undercover job back east. Needless to say, she's even less thrilled by that. They're starting to scrape her off their shoes. I almost feel sorry for her (okay, maybe even that's a stretch). Charlie gets very tense after one of the Xena wannabes says she's surprised to hear about the grow-op notice being found because she doesn't believe there ever was one. In fact, she thinks Constable PE is getting a wee bit out there (like she just noticed this). This puts Charlie on the spot, since not even Bill believes that the notice is real. "There isn't a good angle on this no matter which way I look at it," he snarls at Charlie. "Jesus Christ. It looks to everybody like somebody planted this notice after the fact. [which, of course, somebody did] Five days later, they find the thing? Come on!" So, Charlie's attempt to cover up and embarrass both Mick and Chick goes down not well at all.
Charlie's response is a classic Tom Ripley, but without the brains--he turns on Bill. He immediately starts spinning things to the police and fire union reps that Bill is too big a coward to stand up to Da Vinci. After a mutual bitch session about the brass, Charlie persuades the other two to try a little blue flu and stall Da Vinci, on the basis that crosstraining will reduce the number of jobs. Why the fire department rep actually believes a thing Charlie says after last week is beyond me, but hey, we've already established that he's as dumb as a box of rocks. There is also the wee problem that the fire and rescue chief, who has been around since season one of DVI, is leaning on Komori (Da Vinci's erstwhile ally in the fire department) to cut loose from his association with Da Vinci. However, Dom is about the pull the rug out from under everyone with his plan to trade fifty new constables to Bill in exchange for cooperation on the redlight zone. Da Vinci even gets the male Dom minion to shmooze Charlie to keep him happy and not looking too hard at what is happening. Methinks Charlie and Bill are outmatched.
Dom is really settling in his new role. He fields a lot of stuff and stays pretty much on top of the surfboard throughout the ep. When Billie Simms, for example, tries to slide her plan for a sugar refinery through under his nose, Dom tacks on some low-cost housing near the waterfront. Manning later explains to him why Billie is being such an easy mark--she's desperate to get this development plan through. Otherwise, her board of developers will push her out.
Dom's old boss Bob Kelly also shows up (he's back!) and gives Dom some serious advice about what to do about Bill. Why replace Bill immediately when he could just change the system, which is what's really broken in the first place? Get Bill on board for the hard decisions, the ones where everybody's looking for a scapegoat, Wise Bob says, while concentrating on changing the system around him. "Make Bill the bad guy...Otherwise, you'll be replacing chiefs forever and a day."
Bob has just come from back east, where he's been working with some federal heavy hitters who are anxious to see the Dom-Bill feud settled. He does not appear to be working as the Chief Coroner anymore, since he shows no awareness of Mick's cases or the break-in at the Coroner's Office and has to be filled in on the local political situation by Da Vinci. We never do see a boss for Mick (save for Dom) the way we used to see for Da Vinci. It actually looks as though Mick could be completely in charge of that office, for the moment. Pretty stressful for a brand-new coroner to have that much responsibility dumped on him from day one.
Zack, as usual, may be about to shake things up, just as the Horsemen are threatening to move in on the homeless squat down at Crab Park (Bill gets the title line when he calls Da Vinci and warns him about this). He's still down at the homeless squat, against Da Vinci's insistence, and he's just found out something funny about Friedland. A guy recognizes Friedland in the market but as a Mike Franklin. Friedland insists it's a case of mistaken identity. Zack, being a suspicious old goat, checks up on the two names anyway. He discovers that Joe Friedland died as a infant and Mike Franklin was a history teacher back east who disappeared after a boating accident back in the '80s. Ooooh. Where does this little piggy go?
We get to see Carter and his partner again (yaaayyy) after Psycho Katie, the girl who beat the gay man to death in Stanley Park in the pilot, breaks the arm of a classmate. Katie assumes that this girl has ratted her out and, like any budding psychopath, has responded accordingly. The girl hadn't said anything before, but Carter convinces her to do it after the assault. Seems dear, sweet Katie has been bragging around the school for months that she did the deed, but nobody had the guts to go to the police. Katie was the one who came up with the idea to "go find a faggot" and beat him up. She is, therefore, the ringleader. She may be too young to face murder charges, but she's old enough to get sent to a juvenile psych ward where she won't be bothering anyone for a little while. Jason Horne gets wind of the arrest and asks Carter about it. Carter is guarded, because he doesn't want to lose this one through a media screw-up. But he does give Horne a sense that the case is moving toward being solved as a hate crime.
Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the gay pedophile ring is growing and mutating. As I noted before, Mick's laptop was stolen. But Claire does locate a photo of one of the dead boys, Garth, on the internet. She and Mick go undercover at a hotel they suspect was the site of the photograph. She takes pictures of it and Mick subsequently traces both Dubreau and the radio talk-show host to this building, through their membership in a men's club called "The Century Club". This is an intriguing, and possibly direct, link between Dubreau and the actual murders (as opposed to just the ring). When Kosmo and Joe question where the link to Brian comes in, Mick points out that Zappata is the witness for Dubreau and Brian's assault. Kosmo and Joe have also talked to a (female, of course) former partner of Brian's on the Street Crew from back in the '90s. She confirms that Brian was heavily involved in buy-and-busts in Boystown and would disappear for days at a time. It seems clear that Brian has been playing gangster on a police timeclock since right after the Academy.
Unfortunately for Mick, this evidence isn't much on its own, as he soon finds out after the theft of his laptop. It leaves Mick scrambling to cover his ass with his two main witnesses--Clarke Messner and Manny Zappata. He calls Messner and warns him. Messner is cool about this, at first--until Brian pays him a visit. Soon, Messner is back in Mick's office, singing a different song. He doesn't feel that the youth center he's trying to get going would be served well by his going after its biggest patron (ignoring the big, fat problem that letting a longtime pedophile become a backer for a youth center is a lot like siccing a cheetah on a preschool field trip to the zoo). "I'm over it, you know?" he says, clearly not. "It happened and I moved on."
Ian Tracey has always had a talent for playing his characters with a very high level of audience identification, possibly even better than Nick Campbell. You may never feel more that you are being spoken for by a character than when Mick quietly tells Messner, "No, I don't agree with that, Clarke." Mick seems calm, but when he begs Messner to reconsider, he stutters the way he always does when he is severely distressed and he keeps twitching as if Messner is sticking him with needles. Messner is too frightened, though, to change his story back and Mick lets him leave without pressuring him any further. After Messner leaves, though, Mick immediately calls Kosmo, visibly torn between fury and tears. Kosmo is happy to hear from him, but less happy with his news. She has bad news of her own--she and Joe took Manny for a ride and Manny told them flat out that Brian has intimidated him into backing down on his statement. "So, what's happening?" Joe asks as she hangs up. "Shit out of luck," she replies in disgust. "They got to both witnesses."
I'm not entirely sure what's going on between Kosmo and Mick these days. They have the old easy familiarity that they had when they were together in Homicide, which shuts out poor Joe whenever the three of them are having a conference. New viewers will be wondering if they're seeing each other on the sly. Old viewers will be wondering how the geography of their already complicated relationship has changed since last season. It's that damned missing-time thing again. However, it's looking more and more as though the two of them are finally engaged in an extracurricular relationship while keeping it quiet. Neither one would see it as anybody's business but their own.
Also, Kosmo knows clandestine things about Mick's investigation that even Joe doesn't and it's pretty obvious that Mick hasn't been telling them to her on the clock. I think it's unlikely that this pedophile thing will fracture that relationship. Kosmo is far more aware of Mick's quirks than pretty much anyone alive (with the possible exception of Leo Shannon). She has no issues with them because he's always watched her back, something that probably no other guy, ever, has done for her. But it's beyond clear at this point that Mick is taking this investigation as personally as he did the investigation into Will Summers' death last season. He treats Messner and Zappata as fellow victims, not just as potential witnesses. He wants Dubreau's ass, and not in any way that Dubreau will enjoy.
I have to end with Jim Byrnes' short scene with Nick Campbell (my goodness, does he tower over Campbell!). Byrnes is a well known figure in Vancouver, for his careers both as a blues musician and as an actor. If you've watched Highlander, Wiseguy or a number of other genre entries, you've seen him. Here, he plays a local community representative down near Billie Simms' proposed development with his usual sardonic panache. The guy wants a new road to deal with the traffic congestion and jobs in the sugar refinery for at least some of his people. And he's willing to back Da Vinci up on keeping Crab Park and the slot machines at the racetrack to get it. Here's hoping that means he'll be a political player that we'll see again.
So, while I'm not overly thrilled that they've stopped so soon before the holidays, at least they did it with a kick-ass episode that ends with a few truly evil cliffhangers. Merry Christmas and see you in the New Year!
Next week: Nothing next week, with Da Vinci off for Christmas. But according to the ads, it'll be back January 10. Six episodes left. I'll include more info on the episode list as it comes in.
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This page was last updated on 5/9/2006
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