A Tale of Two Mounties

Due South as a Modern Medieval Romance

P.J. Samsel

I first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of my father, and for reasons that don’t need
exploring at this juncture I’ve remained, attached as liaison with the Canadian Consulate.
– Constable Benton Fraser

We’re Mounties. We’re supposed to have ideals.

– Inspector Meg Thatcher

Copyright © 2008 P.J. Samsel

Disclaimer: all quoted dialogue © 1994-9 Due South / Alliance Atlantis Communications Corp.

Due South, the award-winning Canadian television program, centers upon the unlikely premise
of a Canadian Mountie partnering with a local American cop to solve crimes in Chicago. That in
itself might be interesting, even curiously so, but what transforms the texture of the program into
something quite remarkable is the elegant interweaving of characterization, drama, humor and
magical realism. Constable Benton Fraser, the polite, straight-laced Royal Canadian Mounted
Police officer, plucked from the Northwest Territories and put down in urban America, must not
only contend with the mean streets of Chicago and his brash American partner, Detective Ray
Vecchio, later Ray Kowalski, but also with the companionship of his selectively-deaf,
independently minded half-wolf and the usually inconvenient appearances and occasionally
useful advice of the ghost of his dead father. He must also, in the second and later seasons,
contend with his formidable superior officer, Inspector Meg Thatcher. It is this last relationship,
that between Fraser and Thatcher, that bears particular fascination and is of particular interest to
us here. In what follows, we offer what is essentially a close reading of their interaction
throughout the series, aimed particularly at a deeper understanding of the inner life and
motivation of each with respect to the other. We also offer, as a general premise, that the
relationship between them may best be understood as of a type that underpins many of our
modern conceptions of romantic love but in fact has rarely been conveyed in such a pure form
since it was first expressed in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance: that of courtly love. In
light of this, we also offer, as a general premise, that the series as a whole may best be
understood as a modern retelling of what is in essence a Medieval romance.

As a series, Due South possesses many fine virtues – clever dialogue, fine acting, quirkiness,
humor and heart – but at its core is the character of Benton Fraser. The character of Fraser: his
courtesy, generosity, decency and nobility. Although he possesses many competencies, what
defines him is his character. It is precisely this that makes him so remarkable, for he stands as an
implicit challenge to our own potentialities: all that we lack is the willing. While he is
occasionally compared to Superman in the series, he is not, being fully human both in his
limitations and his vulnerabilities. Further, while he is very much sui generis and writ large, he
can also be seen as the product of two complementary influences: a particular era and a particular
organization. The first, represented by his grandmother, instilled in him the ethic of an earlier
generation; the second, represented by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the reputation of
his father, instilled in him the ethic of the Canadian Mounties. Both of these ethics are drawn
from real life; their loss in contemporary American culture represents a real diminishment. The
RCMP, in particular, has enjoyed a profound respect for its commitment to disinterested justice,
one earned through a long history in which – despite recent troubles – it has largely been faithful
to its charge.

And then there is Meg Thatcher – Inspector Thatcher – who arrives at the Consulate on the heels
of Fraser’s near destruction by Victoria Metcalf at the end of the first season. We learn much of
Ben’s back-story, in bits and pieces, throughout the course of the series, but much of who Meg
Thatcher is, and the particular influences that have shaped her, remains a cipher. She is in
something of an odd position: a woman who has achieved high responsibility in a relatively short
amount of time in an organization that, for much of its history, has been overwhelmingly
masculine in character. In real life, the first group of female RCMP cadets was admitted for
training at Depot in Regina in 1974, while the first woman was commissioned by the Canadian
House of Commons to the officer rank of inspector – that held by Meg Thatcher – in 1992. She
is clearly intelligent, competent and hardworking and has achieved her position on the basis of
her own merit, rather than allowing herself to be chased around a desk. She is also beautiful (a
requisite nod to Camilla Scott), a fact that has likely proven as much a liability as a benefit in her
career. Certainly, while she has been mentored – mention is made of a Superintendent General
from Moose Jaw – she has also had to deflect the occasional amorous attentions of male
superiors such as the odious Henri Cloutier, a fact that may explain her semi-exile to Chicago.
Further, in dealing with predominantly male subordinates, she has likely had to overcome the
implicit assumption that a woman, and a relatively young, beautiful woman at that, is not to be
taken seriously professionally. The resultant overcompensation of her rather prickly professional
persona is entirely predictable.

Why the Mounties, though? For Ben, his decision to become a Mountie was likely as natural as
breathing. His admired if absent father – a legend in the North – was a Mountie, fully
embodying their traditional ruggedness, determination and sense of justice, and Ben is very
much his father’s son, a Fraser cut from the same cloth. As the RCMP Chief Superintendent
from the Pilot episode put the matter: “Everyone says he was the last of a breed; it’s not
true…you are.” For him not to have become a Mountie and followed in his father’s footsteps
would have been surprising. Further, his position as a Mountie is so tightly woven to his very
identity as to be virtually inseparable. For Meg, however, the situation is entirely different. As a
woman, to join the Mounties was at the very least nonconventional. Did she have a family
connection to the Force or a decisive personal interaction with one of its members? Did her
inherent temperament lead her to this kind of profession? Did she join the Mounties precisely to
escape a life of convention that she knew she couldn’t stomach? Did she have some emotional
trauma from earlier in life that led her to the profession in reaction? All of these explanations are
plausible, none decisive; we simply don’t know. She is clearly ambitious, but also clearly
possesses an integrity and sense of duty perhaps more muted in expression than is the case with
Ben, but nevertheless very much present. As she says in “We are the Eggmen”, “We’re
Mounties; we’re supposed to have ideals.” She would never have stayed with the profession, let
alone risen through its ranks, if her fundamental values were not resonant with the organization

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she serves. Yet, there is also a fundamental difference between them in their sense of identity
with their respective roles. Ben has only ever been a constable, the lowest and most common
rank, but his identity is bound up, not so much with his rank per se, but rather with being a
Mountie. Meg, as an inspector – a commissioned officer – is far more identified with her
particular rank and title, from which she draws pride, authority and a sense of self, rather than
with being a Mountie per se.

The interaction between Fraser and Thatcher is, with a few notable exceptions, largely piecemeal
throughout the series, forced to the margins of any given episode by the focus on the primary
plot involving Fraser and Vecchio or later Kowalski. Nevertheless, despite their limited
duration, the scenes between them are often the most compelling in a given episode. The entire
extent of their relationship within the canon of the series is necessarily defined by the totality of
these interactions, which may be sequentially summarized as follows:
• Her pulling of all his personnel files from Ottawa for personal review and putting him on
immediate probation – “You’ll be fine…she’s already eaten two file clerks for breakfast.” –
in “Vault” as well as his defense of his wearing his antiquated brown uniform and her firing
him over the matter – “Well, I…I would prefer... that is, if it’s all the same…um…actually I
don’t much care…Ma’am, I will not change my uniform. You’re fired. Understood.” – at the
episode’s end, the first time we see her.
• His late delivery of her singed dry-cleaning – “I thought true-blue types like you didn’t
believe in excuses, Fraser.” – and her hiding her need for reading glasses from him at the
beginning of “Witness”, as well as his discussion with her, and her remarkable anticipation
and acceptance of his motivations in deciding not to seek a transfer – “You feel that maybe in
a small way you have something to offer them. Yes, Sir. Dismissed.” – at the episode’s end.
• His chauffeuring her to the theater at the beginning of “The Promise”, his promise to her to
recover her stolen heirloom broach – “I promised the Inspector.” – and her barbed thanks to
him for its recovery – “Thank you for finding it…and don’t ever go into my office again
without permission.” – at the episode’s end.
• Her anxious inquiring as to his discretion in his formal report regarding her implied sexual
“communication” – “Yes…well…you caught me changing.” – with the subsequently arrested
museum curator – “A personal nature, Sir? Don’t be coy, Fraser.” – and her grateful relief at
the face of innocence he presents in regard to the matter at the end of “Mask”.
• Her unconscious jealousy toward the Mexican agent Anita Cortez in pushing her aside to
clean the paint from his neck herself – “We clean our own personnel here.” – at the beginning
of “The Edge”, as well as his waiving of a commendation in favor of a proposal of coffee –
“Well, what do you want? Coffee…would you care for some coffee? Um, well I don’t
think…uh, all right.” – and her delightful hesitation as to who should drive – “Yes…no…you
drive…no, I’ll drive…you.” – at the episode’s end.
• The sustained interaction between them in “We Are the Eggmen”, from her use of him to
deflect Henri Cloutier’s attentions, the only time in the series she calls him by his first name
– “Ben, I’m sorry about dinner…I won’t be too late. Too late for what?” – to her subsequent
apology for doing so in his apartment, to his interruption of her dinner with Cloutier and his
painfully bad lying – “…your car…it’s burning away…all the other cars feel threatened.” –

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to their pursuit of Buxley – “Interfere!...you always interfere.” – and her ordering him out of
his tunic – “Seven centimeters?” – and near confession of…what? to him – “I got it…you
were saying? Another time.” – in the egg incubator.
• Her discovery of his wearing perfume – “Is that perfume I smell, Fraser? Passion flower,
Ma’am.” – after he has cleaned up from cross-dressing in the cause of justice in “Some Like
It Red”.
• Her discovery – “Are you hiding something, Constable? No…no, no…yes.” – of his loss of
his Strathcona uniform boots and their replacement with sneakers, despite his best attempts at
diversion in “White Men Can’t Jump to Conclusions”.
• The sustained interaction between them in “All the Queen’s Horses”, from her ordering him
to sing to a train car full of Mounties, to his reaction at his first sight of her in red serge –
“Sir…you’ve changed” – to their intimacy over a hairpin in the stable car and his fascinated
puzzlement at her unperfumed scent – “Escada? I beg your pardon?” – to his apparent death
by falling at her hands and their subsequent reencounter, her admission of grief for him – “I
grieved for you. You did? Briefly.” – and his first compliment to her, his wounding her with
his estimation of her professional competence in the face of a hard decision – “You think I
could be that cold hearted?” – her subsequent confrontation asserting her humanity – “I’m
not made of stone.” – and their fundamental similarity – “The only difference between us is
you’re a woman and I’m not.” – their resulting passionate kiss on top of the train – “It’s
racing. Out of control? A runaway.” – followed by her repudiation from horseback of any
continuation of their shared “contact”, apart from exactly duplicated circumstances, after her
rescue.
• His admission to her of missing his shift due to being in an exotic dancer’s closet – “Well,
that’s your business of course.” – followed by her anger and jealousy at his being pawed over
by said exotic dancer during sentry duty – “Oh, dear.” – in “Body Language”.
• Her desperate cutting him off from publicly revealing their “contact” on the train – “Uh,
Constable!...that was terrific, Constable, marked improvement, but could I have a quick word
with you?” – their imagined reliving of their kiss, and his private admission to her that he has
been unable to forget it, despite her instructions – “And have you succeeded? No.” – as well
as their uniformed semaphore exchanges, his arm waving reiteration of his compliment from
the train – “Red suits you.” – and her consequent blush in “Red, White or Blue”.
• Her insistence that he must remember their shared “contact” on the train – “Fraser you don’t
remember anything about... About? You know. I do? You must.” – after he has temporarily
lost his memory from a head trauma in “Flashback”.
• His assaulting her buff interior designer, Sven, over the scent of his Eau de Pomme and his
subsequent complimenting her on her choice of curtains – “I think it would be a wonderful
complement to the woodwork, the walls and your eyes.” – in “Burning Down the House”.
• Her discovery of him spending unaccountable time in his office closet – his father’s new
office – in “Strange Bedfellows”.
• Her bothered distraction by his running full out in full uniform – “Something red going fast
always draws the eye.” – and her unconsciously imaginative admission of feelings for him –

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“I could never let him hurt you…never…not after…” – in front of Welsh, Kowalski and
Frannie in “Seeing is Believing”.
• Her dressing down of him, at least partially motivated by jealousy, for putting up Janet, the
bounty hunter, and her children at the Consulate – “…where you would bring wayward
women to satisfy animal needs in unmentionable underwear.” – in “Bounty Hunter”.
• Their coordinated disarming of Cahill – “One… Two… Me!” – at the end of “Asylum”.
• His discomfort in the face of her maternal yearnings and his flustered conversation and
abrupt departure from her office upon his father’s mentioning of “stirring” and “loins” –
“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about…Inthatcher Spector’s loins.” – the
delightful shared cab ride in which she explains that she hopes to involve him in her maternal
“process” – “That’s where you come in….So, I can count on you then to be up for this?” –
and his eventual poignant failed proposal, daisies in hand, to “incrementally” father a child
with her – “We could start with conversation…although, well, you and I have talked…we’ll
just move to the next increment… dancing, possibly…oh, not now…because there is no
music…” – in “Perfect Strangers”.
• Her flustered discovery of him in the midst of changing uniforms – “Just…just stay in
uniform, Fraser.” – and her distress that he might take the transfer to Ottawa – “Because over
the years we’ve developed a relationship…working, of course, working relationship…” – in
which she almost admits her feelings for him while desperately backpedaling, the imagined
kiss between them on the Bounty, and her waiving of his completion of his 10989B report in
“Mountie on the Bounty”.
• Her drunken, loose-limbed – “That would be the Latin influence.” – interlude with him late at
the Consulate, in which she leaves on the arm of the Spanish Ambassador – “Um, we’re
gonna continue…um, I…um.” – in “Odds”.
• Her frustrated attempt to share a glass of Christmas cheer with him and her curiously
symbolic Christmas gift to him at the 27th Precinct of a sword – “Purely ceremonial, you
don’t have to use it.” – in “Good for the Soul”.
• Her rush to the funeral home, numbed shock at seeing him laid out in a coffin and her
subsequent fainting away when he suddenly arises in “Dead Men Don’t Throw Rice”.
• Her jealousy and suspicion – “Are you here officially?” – as well as his apologetic
embarrassment – “Inspector Thatcher…sorry. For? I’m not sure.” – on her discovering him
and Maggie McKenzie in his office closet, his confused and abandoned attempt to explain the
nature of their relationship to Maggie – “I see why you like her, she… Inspector Thatcher
and I have a purely, a, a…” – her conflicted admission to Turnbull of jealous resentment
toward Maggie – “Any petty...pettiness...or something.” – in checking on her background,
her defense of him to Welsh in the face of Maggie’s flight from arrest, and her suspension of
him, while explicitly allowing him to stay at the Consulate – “Take off that uniform, clear off
your desk, bring me your files…uh, you can continue to live here, if you like…” – when he
deliberately fails to apprehend Maggie in “Hunting Season”.
• Her desire to keep him with her as her second-in-command when she transfers to Toronto and
Frannie’s forcing her to see him in terms of his own needs – “He was born on the tundra, I
mean that’s where he belongs.” – her offer to him that they can transfer together somewhere

5
more congenial to him than Toronto – “We don’t have to go you know. Up these stairs? No,
to Toronto…I mean if you don’t…we could go somewhere else.” – her reluctant realization
that life in the North, while obviously for him, is not for her and her letting go of him for the
sake of his happiness, and the last shared kiss between them by the campfire near Franklin
Bay – “So then this could be our… Possibly. Then maybe we should… Maybe…” – (original
CTV airing) in “Call of the Wild”.
And the rest is silence, apart from the – possibly symbolic? – howling of the wolves.

If Fraser’s relationship with Victoria ended badly, then his relationship with Meg Thatcher
clearly begins badly, in fact seems destined for shipwreck almost immediately. She has taken on
the open consular position vacated by Inspector Moffat’s promotion and is very much
determined to run a tight ship. Her predecessor, despite his promotion, was a fool and she has no
doubt inherited any number of unresolved consular issues from his mismanagement. Her new
Deputy Liaison Officer presents her with another set of problems: The son of a famous father,
he has turned against one of his own on the Force and taken exile in Chicago. He has a long
record of employing unorthodox methods and unreasonable heroics, quite willing to go beyond
normal policing responsibilities at the drop of a Stetson. His “liaising” with the Chicago PD’s
27th Precinct is largely a self-invented position, one her predecessor let him get away with to a
degree far in excess of his normal consular duties. His formal record is likely littered with
commendations, although he has neither sought nor received much by way of promotion. She is
immediately threatened by him in two senses: First, his professional competencies as an
individual investigator are quite remarkable, certainly superior to her own, although her
organizational and managerial competencies are superior to his. Second, and more critically, he
is, in her initial judgment, a maverick officer, one likely to disrupt the tidy, well ordered consular
world she hopes to construct and that she no doubt hopes will reflect well on her professionally
and enable her further advancement. The fact that he is too handsome for his own good (a
requisite nod to Paul Gross) likely only serves to annoy her further, as a reaction against any
implicit physical attraction she might feel.

Meg’s initial judgment and course of action with respect to Ben are, again, entirely predictable.
She is compelled to assert her authority, bend him to her will, and, if unsuccessful, get rid of him
before he becomes a thorn in her side and cause of professional embarrassment. Their initial
exchange in “Vault” over his brown uniform is quite telling: She has, we are informed,
immediately put him on probation following a review of his record. He tries to assure her of his
loyalty, an issue that will recur between them repeatedly, both professionally and personally:
“With respect, Ma’am, I have always considered myself to be a diligent officer who has
conducted himself with loyalty and obedience.” Ultimately, however, his sense of tradition,
honor and integrity as a Mountie in connection to the older uniform overweigh his obeying of her
request that he upgrade to the current fashion. She sees this as a direct challenge to her authority
and decides for the second option: she fires him. Almost. Perhaps half ruse, half truth, he cannot
be gotten rid of so abruptly. She suggests he seriously consider a transfer, and continues to work
him to her will by sending him on demeaning errands, which he executes faithfully. In his
exchange with her over the saving of her mohair sweater if not her leather chaps, he at once
communicates to her that he is willing to go to lengths to prove his loyalty but that he also sees
completely through the pretension of her using him in this way. A subtle yet telling detail at the
beginning of “Witness” is her removal of her reading glasses when in his presence, something

6
she would appear to do only with him. If she were merely concerned with asserting her
authority, she might well choose to leave them on to lend her greater gravitas. No, she wants to
appear attractive in front of this man, even while she is in the midst of trying to get rid of him;
further, the action is too deliberate to be unconscious. He of course perceives the ruse and calls
her on it, but does he know what it signifies? By the episode’s end, she has come to understand
better who he is and has at least provisionally accepted him as her junior officer, even granting
him one of her rare smiles during her interview with him. As he attempts to explain to her his
motivations for not seeking a transfer, she displays both unexpected insight and compassion:
“While I find the prospect of returning home appealing, I would prefer not to leave at this
time…I’ve come to feel that I, um… You feel that maybe in a small way you have something to
offer them. Yes, Sir. Dismissed.”

If he was called upon to prove his professional loyalty to her as his superior officer in “Witness”,
in “The Promise”, he demonstrates loyalty of another order. The initial scene, with his
chauffeuring her to the theater and his repeated, polite refusals to violate various traffic laws to
suit her convenience in a sense echoes his earlier speech from “Vault” regarding his brown
uniform and the tradition it represents. In each case, he is compelled to choose between obeying
her arbitrary command and obeying a larger notion of justice and the traditions and regulations
that serve it, and in each case he chooses the latter; he is loyal to her, but that loyalty is
circumscribed within a larger precommitment, one that they both at least formally share. When
her family heirloom broach is stolen by street urchins, he attempts to recover it while working to
solve a larger, interrelated crime. This attempt is neither merely one of professional police work,
nor is it a professional duty towards a superior officer; rather, it is driven by a personal promise
he has made to her: “I promised the Inspector.” The broach in question is, after all, an entirely
personal item, having no bearing on consular affairs. Although it is never made explicit in the
episode, we begin to understand something more of the nature of their relationship, for there is a
clear echo of something deeply archaic here. At least one commentator has perceptively
observed that Ben is, if anything, a kind of “knight errant”: deeply committed to what are
essentially chivalric ideals, but wandering far from his home in a strange land. As such, Meg is,
as his superior officer, his lord to whom he is pledged in formal service; here, recall his exchange
with Frannie concerning his oath as an RCMP officer in “Odds”: “Like about the Queen and
Inspector Thatcher? Well, I am loyal to them both…” She is also – although neither of them
quite realize it yet – his lady, to whom he has pledged himself in service of courtly love. The
recovery of her broach is a quest he has pledged to her, one that he will fulfill. Nor is it the only
personal quest she charges him with, for we see it again with respect to a rare vintage bottle of
Scotch in “Some Like It Red” and again he honors her and fulfills the pledge she has charged
him with. His offer to help her with her maternal “process” in “Perfect Strangers”, while greatly
complicated by the misunderstanding between them, is yet another instance in which he pledges
his service to her. Having made it clear to him that she had meant adoption, we in fact see him
in the later episode “Odds” reviewing her adoption papers, having taken up the actual charge she
had intended, despite her rejection of him.

The conventions of courtly love (amour courtois), or fine love (fin’amor) find their first
expression in eleventh century Provence and their first decisive literary treatment in Chrétien de
Troyes’ Lancelot, le chevalier de la charrette. The conception and sentiment of courtly love was
a decisive break with notions of love as concieved both in classical antiquity as well as in most

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other cultures; the same decisive turn of sentiment directly underlies our own present
conceptions of romantic love and the romanticization of marriage that has eventually come to
displace it. The character of courtly love may be usefully summarized by quoting from C.S.
Lewis’ seminal treatment of the subject, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
(1936):
The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a hightly specialized sort, whose characteristics
may be ennumerated as Humility, Courtesty, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover
is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent
acquiesences to her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a
service of love closely modeled on the service which a feudal vassal owes his lord. The lover
is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my
lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalization of
love’. (p.2)
The parallels of this to the relationship between Meg and Ben are clear enough. She is, in a very
real sense, his liege just as he is her man. His most common term of address for her – “Sir” –
may be taken as directly equivalent to the earlier address of midons or “my Lord”. She, like a
noble lady, is at once of high status as well as daungerous or cool and aloof. He must
demonstrate his worth and loyalty through service of love, fulfilling her demands, accepting her
rebukes. Of the four summary characteristics that Lewis enumerates, the last – carried over in
inverted form from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria – is not to be found in their relationship, although the
first three are certainly present. The characteristic of adultery has undergone a slight
modification here, for the girding source of that ‘adultery’ is not that the lady is married – at that
earlier time, it must be remembered, marriage had nothing to do with love and any love
relationship, as Lewis makes clear, had necessarily to be conceived as adulterous – but rather
that the regulations and ethics of the larger institution to which both are bound in service
ostensibly forbid any intimacy between them. As in courtly love, the relation between them is
neither strictly platonic nor one of sexual satisfaction, but is rather based upon a refined and
ennobled sexual attraction. Given all this, one must understand that to judge Meg by the
standards of modern romantic love is to judge her wrongly; she is, to all intents, a noble lady,
and must be judged in the terms that befit her: those of courtly love.

With this broad understanding, one sees also that the entire arc of the series is essentially that of
a Medieval romance, echoing the tradition expressed in such works as Queste del Saint Graal,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,
Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso or even Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Further, while Don Quixote famously subverts the genre, Due South specifically reclaims it: if
Sancho Panza, the practical realist, has to handhold Don Quixote, the idealistic dreamer, Fraser,
the chivalric innocent, is usually far wiser than either Vecchio or Kowalski, the jaded flatfoots; if
Don Quixote tilts uselessly at windmills, Fraser often comes up against matters of surprising
social relevance; if Don Quixote’s lady, Dulcinea del Toboso, is essentially his own imaginative
fantasy, for Fraser, Meg Thatcher is all too real. One sees also just how essential Meg Thatcher
is to the series as a whole, for while the genre of medieval romance focuses upon knightly deeds
and adventures, deeds and adventures that serve to form the central plots of the various episodes,
these only find meaning within the larger context of chivalric service. There may also be a
subtle connection to Fraser’s reiterated compliment – “Red suits you.” – for while a knight
would wear his lady’s colors, Meg’s color – the red of her serge – is rarely displayed by her,

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although often by him. Further, Kowalski’s term of unendearment for her – “Ice Queen” – also
perhaps hints at the archaic resonance of her character. There is much in the series that is quirky,
ironic and even mocking and we do not mean to suggest an exact accord with the earlier genre,
but it does seem obvious that the overall structure and tone of the series is too close to this genre,
and to the conventions of courtly love that undergird it, for the similarity to have been anything
but deliberate – whether consciously or unconsciously – on the part of the writers. This does not
imply that either Meg or Ben see themselves in this manner; they almost certainly do not. While
Ben has been instilled with notions of chivalry and possibly courtly love in his upbringing – and
here see his explicit discussion of chivalrous behavior in the first season episode “Heaven and
Earth” – he certianly does not see himself as a reembodiment of medieval knighthood. For Meg,
the situation is clearer still, for she is more modern in formation and outlook than Ben; she wants
to achieve as a modern career woman and is certainly not interested in being any knight’s lady,
whether in modern guise or otherwise.

To return to his recovery of her broach in “The Promise”, when she goes to his office to thank
him, she is grateful, but also protective of her boundaries, which Ben violates in innocence twice:
professionally, by his having placed the broach on her desk; personally, by letting his gaze linger
on her lapel, where the broach is pinned. The apparent violation of her personal boundaries is no
doubt the more annoying to her, but, rather than raise this, she displaces her barb to the matter of
her professional boundaries, warning him away from her office: “Thank you for finding it…and
don’t ever go into my office again without permission; that’s my first and last warning.” This
may well also simply be a disinclination to yield her authority: although she knows that thanks
are in order and she is sincere in giving them, she does not want to be indebted to him; the
barbed warning is a way for her to seize once again the high ground she has just given him. In
“Mask”, she is faced with another kind of indebtedness, and he with another kind of loyalty. At
the beginning of the episode, she has set her eye on the museum curator, Mr. Robinson. She
shows herself in short order to be perfectly self-confident sexually and perfectly comfortable and
capable of initiating a liaison: “Really…I love Pensacola…where is that exactly?” Although
nothing is made explicit, it is strongly implied that she has slept with the man, as indicated in her
exchange over her untucked shirt with Vecchio – “Nice shirt. Yes...well...you caught me
changing.” – as well as her near confession to Ben at the episode’s end: “You know damn well I
had…‘communication’…with the curator outside of office hours…look I had one perfectly
innocent lunch with a criminal…all right…one lunch and one dinner...and a couple of drinks...I
think...” The problem, of course, is that the man is revealed to be a criminal and she is
concerned about the reflection of this on her formal record. The problem is not the sex, although
she is keenly embarrassed at having to broach the subject with Ben, but rather the sex with a
criminal. Meg is, for better or worse, a modern woman with modern mores, although she is
certainly not loose: apart from a brief lusting over her buff interior designer, Sven, and a drunken
evening with the Spanish Ambassador, this is the only occasion in which we see her sexually
relating to a man other than Ben.

The particular conflation of issues of loyalty and innocence in her confrontation with Ben in his
office at the end of “Mask” is what renders the encounter between them so fascinatingly
ambiguous. He holds a damaging advantage over her, should he choose to exercise it: all he
need do is include a statement regarding her liaison with the curator in his formal report. He has
no intention of doing so, but he must convey this to her in a way that neither threatens her nor

9
leaves her specifically indebted to him; to do otherwise would be at once ignoble and a failure of
loyalty, an exchanging of one kind of advantage for another. He protests his innocence of any
knowledge of a liaison, something that comes far too easily, given the face of sexual innocence
that he habitually wears. This is, of course, the perfect solution to his dilemma, and he takes it.
Ironically, it was almost certainly this same desire that she not feel indebted to him that led him
to place the recovered broach on her desk unseen, rather than delivering it to her in person in
“The Promise”, a choice leading in turn to her sharp correction. In his office, she goes through a
triple reaction with respect to his protestations: at first, convinced that he is leading her on and
still may well report her; then, after he reiterates his innocence, considering the possibility that
he really is as innocent and naïve as he claims; finally, with a narrowing of her eyes, deciding
that he knows perfectly well what has occurred between her and the curator but will never admit
this to her nor report her precisely because of his nobility and loyalty to her. As he tells her:
“Sir. What? Quite honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about. Oh…good…thank you.
Yes, Sir.” It is significant that her last words to him are again those of thanks. He, of course,
does not acknowledge them as such, replying noncommittally and remaining poker-faced
throughout, but there is an unspoken indebtedness between them nevertheless, one she knows he
will never call her on.

It is interesting here to reflect on the tacit signification of clothing in these encounters between
them. For Ben, he typically only ever appears before her in either his red serge dress uniform –
which, for better or worse, he inhabits with greater frequency as the series progresses – or his
brown field uniform, either in tunic or jacket, respectively, or in his shirtsleeves. The hated blue
uniform is only seen briefly in “Vault” and we never see him in it while in her presence; it is
possible he has never worn it in her presence. His red union suit comes in for brief appearances.
Significantly, in these early encounters, whenever she seeks him out, whether in his office as in
“The Promise” and “Mask” or at his home as in “We are the Eggmen”, he is dressed in the
shirtsleeves of his brown uniform, the very uniform she ordered him out of in their first formal
meeting. One recalls with foreshadowing when she orders him out of his red uniform tunic in
the egg incubator in “We are the Eggmen” – “Take off your tunic, Constable, that’s an order.” –
and again orders him out of his uniform when she formally suspends him in “Hunting Season” –
“Take off that uniform, clear off your desk, bring me your files.” – leading to the delightful,
outraged double entendre of Ben’s father: “That woman has been trying since day one to get you
out of your uniform.” Out of the mouths of ghosts… Ironically, and as a testament to her deep,
conflicted vacillation with respect to him, having accidentally caught him out of uniform and in
his boxers and undershirt in the beginning of “Mountie on the Bounty”, she, in a flustered panic,
immediately orders him back into it: “Just…just stay in uniform, Fraser.” Not, however, before
whipping her reading glasses to her face – the only time she wears her reading glasses in front of
him – for a brief closer look. The situation ironically echoes and inverts her earlier sexual
indiscretion in “Mask” – “Nice shirt. Yes...well...you caught me changing.” – for that is what she
has literally done with respect to him. Similarly, in “Bounty Hunter”, she comes across him in a
state of somewhat less indecorous undress, sleeping in the hallway outside his office in his red
union suit, and proceeds to dress down a man already dressed down, ending her diatribe with a
reference to his “unmentionable underwear” that simultaneously reveals her outrage and jealousy
at his having put up a woman and her children in the Consulate and her flustered agitation at his
present appearance. To return to the matter of his uniform, that he should be in his brown
uniform shirtsleeves in his office is unsurprising: he is in his own element in a professional

10
context and not at formal attention or even parade rest. That he should be in his uniform at home
– and we frequently see him there in the shirtsleeves of his brown uniform or the henley of his
red uniform – signals an important fact: he is a Mountie, and this is in no way a persona that he
removes at the end of the working day. His living at the Consulate in later seasons is another
indication of this fact, a deliberate extension of his professional persona to his private life. He
even sleeps in uniform, for his red union suit is, to all indications, a part of his overall uniform
kit, as are his boxers and undershirt, for we see him and Turnbull in nearly identical uniform
undress in “Mountie on the Bounty” and “Asylum”, respectively. The very fact that he irons and
starches his boxers, although bizarrely endearing, again suggests that he is simply caring for his
uniform, just as he might polish his boots or brush his tunic.

When she finds him in his brown uniform, after having fired him over it, she never
acknowledges this fact, either for good or ill; she has simply accepted it as one of his many
givens. Like the dog that did not bark in the night, the blue uniform is notable precisely because
of its continuing absence: Meg Thatcher, the Inspector, she who must be obeyed, has let him win
that argument; although she would not want it publicly aired, she is more bluff and bluster than
she would have him, or us, believe. There is another, much larger dog in the night, one upon
which the entire premise of the series is based: she never prohibits Ben’s continued involvement
at the Chicago PD’s 27th Precinct. In “The Deal”, prior to her appearance at the Consulate, Ben
is at the Precinct, again, and Welsh, in a moment of gentle bluntness, raises the matter of his
anomalous presence among them: “…you have nothing better to do with your life than hang
around here and help us solve crimes? No, Sir.” She will rail against this involvement, as in
“The Promise” when she informs him, in no uncertain terms, just exactly what her priorities are
with respect to the recovery of her broach: “I thought I made it clear you are not here to clean up
America…this is their problem.” Similarly – and to return to the uniform – when he tries to
justify, in “White Men Can’t Jump to Conclusions”, the loss of his uniform Strathcona boots, as
he was at the time saving a life, the explanation cuts no ice with her: “The life you saved, was
this person a Canadian?” She will not, however, prohibit him from his involvement. While he
clearly has regular shifts and consular duties that he executes with diligence, his close,
continuing involvement with the Chicago PD is something exceptional, unprecedented and
largely self-invented. For a senior officer desperately keen on running a tight consular ship, her
allowance of this freedom to him, however tacit, is nothing short of remarkable.

Her reasons for this are never spoken, but we may infer something of them by a consideration of
their distinct natural professional roles, specifically, those of field officer and desk officer. By its
nature, consular work is largely desk work, yet Ben – by natural inclination, background and
commitment to the active pursuit of justice – is essentially a field officer. By the exile of his
position, he is forced to adapt himself to desk work. His involvement with the Chicago PD is a
means, first and foremost, to specifically reclaim his role as a field officer. Meg has been a field
officer, but is one no longer. In his first exchange with Vecchio regarding her in “Vault”, he
defends her, despite his wearing the hated blue uniform: “She’s not a field officer, mind you, but
she’s a very fine officer, a woman of considerable character.” On top of the runaway train in
“All the Queen’s Horses”, she angrily asserts their similarity: “You received medals for
fieldwork, so did I.” Tracking a car to a church parking lot in “Say Amen”, she admits: “No
Fraser, I’ve been behind a desk too long…this is exactly what I need…fieldwork gets the blood
pumping.” She has excelled at fieldwork in the past, and, while she is perfectly competent in the

11
desk, diplomatic and managerial duties of her consular work, some part of her clearly misses
being out in the field. She has been a field officer, but is one no longer: with advancement
comes a desk. She has reviewed his formal record, knows of his medals and commendations for
fieldwork and understands exactly what kind of officer he is, for she too has been that kind of
officer. She recognizes just how important this kind of work is to him and, in a sustained act of
hidden compassion, gives him his freedom. Despite the additional burden of paperwork this will
inevitably bring; despite the occasional embarrassments she will have to resolve. This is Meg –
not the Dragon Lady, not the Ice Queen, not made of stone – the Meg who, never more lovely,
shines briefly through the mask in “Witness”: “You feel that maybe in a small way you have
something to offer them.” This is the true face she will never show; not to us, not to the world.
All of her challenging of him – the blue uniform, the dry-cleaning errands, the sentry duty, the
dressing downs, even the prickly irritability – all of this is so much posturing around the
margins; all the things that really matter to him – his involvement in police work, his partnership
with the two Rays, the companionship of his wolf – all of this she leaves completely untouched.

To return to the question of clothing, the interaction between them in “White Men Can’t Jump to
Conclusions” over the loss of his uniform Strathcona boots is one of the many minor interactions
where he finds himself explaining his ludicrous situation du jure to her. Another classic example
is his return to the Consulate in “Body Language”, in which he attempts to explain just why he
has missed shift: “Would you care to tell me where you’ve been? Well I…I’ve been in a closet,
Ma’am. Any particular closet? An exotic dancer’s closet. Well, that’s your business of course.”
Another is her discovery, in “Some Like It Red”, of his wearing perfume after he has cleaned up
from cross-dressing in the cause of justice: “Is that perfume I smell, Fraser? Passion flower,
Ma’am.” A third is her discovery in “Strange Bedfellows”, after his having completed a battery
of psychological tests, of his spending time in his office closet, to which he responds: “Perhaps
the tests need some refining. Perhaps.” A fourth is her inquiry, as she is about to depart her
office for vacation in “Asylum”, as to just who has called on her line: “Who is it?” Kowalski, on
the other end, says, “Fraser, I’m in a hurry,” and he immediately responds to her: “It’s a man in a
hurry.” In each case, he gives her a reasonably honest, if carefully unelaborated answer to justify
the apparently unjustifiable. His trademark indirection is here fully in play, about which much
more will be said shortly. What he does not do to her – and does not do well – is directly lie.
His more or less straight answers do not always place him in a good light – frequently they do
not – but he gives them anyway. The situation with his uniform boots, or lack thereof, plays
differently. He sits at his desk in his dress reds, apart from the minor substitution of sneakers for
Strathconas. She comes into his office and he immediately hides his feet under the desk: “Is
there a good reason why you’re not standing at attention, Constable? I beg your pardon? You
heard me. Yes, I did.” He moves the garbage can between the desk and wall and stands up
behind it, his feet out of view: “Why did you do that? Do what? You moved the garbage can in
front of your feet. Did I? Are you hiding something, Constable? No…no, no…yes.” He is
desperate for an indirect solution to his dilemma and she will not let him have it; forced into a
corner, he attempts a lie, but cannot sustain it. Why does he feel compelled to take it so far? The
loss of his boots, while unfortunate, was not his fault. The lie runs hard against his ingrained
morality while also placing him in a certain amount of peril. The answer, one suspects, is, quite
simply, shame.

12
In his remarkable speech to her at the end of “Vault”, he tells us everything we need to know
about what the uniform means to him: “However, this uniform…I have worn this uniform with
pride my entire career, as my father wore his and many before him…to me it is much more than
just a…a piece of cloth…it is a tradition that links me to every officer who has ever worn it and
acquitted himself with honor and integrity…while it is not the current fashion, I would be hard
pressed to change it without feeling that I had, in some way, betrayed that tradition.” This is
Benton Fraser at his most eloquent and heartfelt. The resonance to everything he holds dear –
justice, honor, integrity, tradition, even family – is perfectly evident. To wear the uniform is a
fundamental matter of pride, despite the fact that, as he confesses in “Red, White or Blue” to
Vecchio: “I mean, the thing itches…it itches three hundred and sixty five days of the year.”
Despite the fact that, as he concurs with Maggie’s comment in “Hunting Season”: “Yeah, they’re
an attention getter, all right…whether you want them to be or not.” The uniform also represents
the sacred institutions of government, evoking the principles of “peace, order and good
government” that form the founding basis of Canada’s Constitution under the sovereignty of the
Queen of England. In “Mountie and Soul”, a gang member compliments him: “That’s a bad ass
outfit.” To which he, having no ear for street rap, takes immediate umbrage, complaining to
Kowalski sotto voce: “They insulted the uniform.” The lingo clarified, ever polite, he turns to
the man and comments: “Yes, Sir, it is bad…it is red serge and it represents the Queen.” A
woman to whom he bears certain obligations, as we know from his conversation, gesturing to the
Queen’s obligatory portrait, at the end of “Mountie Sings the Blues”: “The things I do for you.”
One of the two women to whom he is expressly loyal, as we know from his conversation with
Frannie in “Odds”: “Like about the Queen and Inspector Thatcher? Well I am loyal to them
both…” In “Flashback”, one of the first things he notices, and is appalled by, upon the recovery
of his memory is the wretched state of his uniform: “Great Scott, Ray, look at my uniform!” The
uniform is a kind of sacred trust, an obligation that he has taken on with his office and is
privileged to bear. We will have occasion to consider at length Ben’s fundamental sense of
piety, but it is clear that the uniform is bound up in this and that, by wearing sneakers with his
red serge, he feels that he has, quite simply, profaned it. Thus, his sense of shame and his deep
unwillingness to be seen by his superior officer in that state.

While Ben is rarely out of uniform, Meg is rarely in it, far preferring modern feminine career
apparel to her red serge. This is apparently a feminine prerogative, one she is happy to exercise.
Not having quite such limited wardrobe choices as he, she consequently makes more costume
changes. When we first see her in “Vault”, steely eyed and about to abbreviate the tenure of her
Deputy Liaison Officer, she is dressed in a charcoal tweed blazer. When we next see her in the
beginning of “Witness”, she is dressed in a dark brown suit jacket and blouse, her pink, slightly
singed mohair sweater in his hands. At the end of the same episode, when she has accepted him
as her junior officer, she is dressed in an open collared white blouse, her appearance at once
softened and feminized. At the beginning of “The Promise”, chauffeured to the theater, she is
dressed in a purple formal gown, appearing at once feminine and regal. At the end of the same
episode, when she appears in his office to thank him for the return of broach, she is dressed in a
charcoal tweed pantsuit with a high black turtleneck, broach pinned to her lapel. At the end of
“Mask”, when she appears in his office to inquire as to the nature of his formal report, she is
dressed in a black cocktail dress. In “The Edge”, she will appear in a pink dress suit for her
fateful intervention with her constable’s neck and again, in a black cocktail dress for their fateful
coffee outing. What is worth noticing in all of this flurry of material is how closely her wardrobe

13
corresponds to, and comments on, the various interactions between them. In their first two
meetings in her office, she is severely professional in appearance, as befits the occasions at hand:
termination and humiliation, respectively. In the third meeting, where she at last accepts him,
her appearance – a simple white silk blouse and softened hair – is almost ethereal, as if she has
unarmored her persona and shown something of her true self. Further, instead of sitting behind
her desk, in a position of authority, as she has before, she is standing gracefully, meeting him as
an equal. In the car, at the beginning of “The Promise”, she is once again imperious, and once
again, her wardrobe, a regally purple evening gown, reflects this. Her gown, although perfectly
contemporary, bears a certain resonance to something archaic, for if, in her office by day, she
appears as a modern career woman, here, she could pass for a lady at court. At the Precinct, she
is once again in a dark dress suit for the dressing down she gives regarding the search for her
broach, and again, the clothes make the woman.

When she first comes to his office following his return of her broach, she is, for the first time,
indebted to him, compelled by courtesy to acknowledge that indebtedness, and unwilling to
accept the vulnerability accompanying it. She comes armored for the occasion, in severe colors,
almost masculine in a tweed pantsuit and turtleneck. It is at once ironic and significant that she
is covered to the chin, for that is precisely the line of demarcation she thinks his eye to be
drifting below. Yet she has worn the broach, the badge of his recent service, which of course
draws his eye. Does this already reflect an internal tension that she bears toward him, or does
she wear it simply out of courtesy? When she next comes to his office, her appearance is
completely reversed, feminized in a black cocktail dress, as perhaps befits the matter of sexual
impropriety she is there to contain. It is not that she wishes to appear feminized before him, but
that, for better or worse, that is her state: in her prior visit, she armored herself against possible
vulnerability; here, she is vulnerable and cannot help it. A telling moment comes when, in her
agitation, she knocks a pencil holder onto the floor; they both kneel down to retrieve the pencils
as she continues her explanation, and both look repeatedly from the floor to one another as she
recalls in piecemeal just how far her social interaction with the curator went. Their sudden
proximity increases her sexual vulnerability, but, just as he declares his innocence of any
knowledge of impropriety, so too is his gaze innocent in where it falls. Before, she was armored
against such a gaze and thought, wrongly, that he had looked upon her; now, she is vulnerable to
it and knows that he has not. In “The Edge”, to be discussed further, she is dressed in a pink
dress suit, at once professional and feminine, for the training exercise post-mortem in Welsh’s
office, and, indeed, her internal conflict between professional propriety and the desire of her
heart is precisely what becomes of issue in her jealous reaction to the Mexican agent Anita
Cortez. In “Red, White or Blue”, also to be discussed further, she is once again in a pink dress
suit during their interview with the RCMP public relations expert, and, once again, we see the
internal conflict between professional propriety and the desire of her heart as she inquires
whether Ben has forgotten their “contact” on the train as she has ordered, desperate that he
remember everything, as she does. Finally, at the end of “The Edge”, they are at a formal black-
tie reception, he smartly turned out in the formal waiter’s uniform he has appropriated for his
disguise, she elegant in a formal black cocktail dress. It is, to all intents, the modern echo of a
court scene and the interaction bears some of the formality of the occasion.

All of this is to say that, as a rule, her choice of clothing appears to be highly symbolic. To
extend this slightly, consider again the articles of her clothing from the combusted dry-cleaners

14
in “Witness”: he has saved her pink mohair sweater, although not, alas, her leather chaps. The
thought of Meg with leather chaps strikes one a slightly preposterous, although, perhaps given
her later involvement with the Musical Ride, the notion is not quite so farfetched. The thought
of taking leather chaps to a dry-cleaners, however, remains dubious. Given this, let us consider
the possibility that the immolated chaps are intended as a metaphor. We already have an insight
into what her pink dress suit may signify, and a pink mohair sweater – feminine, soft and warm –
might well be taken to signify her – slightly singed – inner self or heart. Her leather chaps are
both literally and symbolically a kind of armoring: the fact that they are intended for wear on the
legs suggests that the armoring is sexual; alternatively, it may relate to her role as a Mountie,
given their traditional equestrian associations. Both interpretations are persuasive. Consider
now the conversation between them regarding these items: “…I was only able to save this…I’m
afraid it’s a little singed. You ran into a burning building to save a mohair sweater? Yes, Sir.
Pardon me if that sounds like pure stupidity. Yes, Sir. You don’t agree. No, Sir…stupidity would
have been if I ran back in for your leather chaps.” Taken metaphorically, she wants her heart to
remain defended, even to its undoing, and considers him a fool for wishing to save it. He is
willing to risk his heart, even himself, to save her own, but not her defenses, her armor, her
persona, which must perish if her heart is to be saved. The burning building is itself perhaps
metaphoric of love or passionate attraction, in which the very real risk he runs is precisely that of
getting burned.

The matter of his apparent sexual innocence requires additional consideration. We know that he
was raised mostly by his grandparents in the relative isolation of small communities, moving
around a fair amount, that a normal family life was disrupted by the early death of his mother,
the frequent absence of his father and a lack of siblings, and that his upbringing was profoundly
conservative in character. His closest social contacts, apart from his immediate family and
occasional friends, were likely Inuit, to whom he would have been at best an accepted outsider.
He was forced by his commitment to justice to incarcerate the one love of his life, carried a torch
for her for ten years, only to discover that his love, or what he thought was love, was a
vulnerability that she would have destroyed him with, were it not for the intervention of the
bullet that nearly killed and certainly saved him. He is sexually conservative, extremely prudent
in matters of the heart, courteous to a fault and more handsome than he knows what to do with.
Given his guardedness, he will only rarely initiate any kind of sexual advance, yet given his
handsomeness and manners, his finds himself frequently the object of sexual advances by
women. One wonders if this was a true in Canada as it seems to be in America, or if Canadian
politeness and reserve has spared him much of this prior to his relocation to Chicago. Given his
sense of courtesy, he finds it difficult to deal with such advances in a direct matter. Thus the
indirect approach, at which is an absolute master; he has an entire set of strategies that he
employs regularly, of which the most common is simply the appearance of innocent sexual
naïveté. A classic example, from “Invitation to Romance”, is when a female postal office worker
drops a hint: “I get off at four. Well then I won’t keep you…you must have a lot to do…thank
you kindly.” Extremely efficient, clean and no one’s feelings get hurt. He has displaced sexual
discomfort, which is not a useful social response, with sexual naïveté, which is. An instance
where the one shines through the other is during Welsh’s meditation on “women in authority” in
“Witness” in which he claims, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” The awkward speed
of his retreat from Welsh’s office immediately belies his words, for he understands well enough
what Welsh is talking about and is profoundly discomforted by it. Of course, the very fact that

15
he is standing in Welsh’s office, rather than in Thatcher’s, explaining how he is about to go
undercover in prison, is itself a rather large act of social indirection.

A certain amount of the ruse is real enough, for, although he is neither innocent of love or
passionate desire nor virginal – Victoria, if not others, has seen to that – he is certainly not
broadly experienced. Nevertheless, throughout the series, he displays a keen insight into human
emotions and motivations in a variety of contexts. Further, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of
a wide variety of topics, no doubt including human sexuality, having even helped to deliver
children. He would have others, including us, believe the face of innocence he projects, yet he is
perfectly capable of acting decisively when occasion demands. Consider again Meg’s advances
toward the museum curator in “Mask”, which occasions the exchange between Vecchio and
Fraser, in which he appears the clueless naïf: “She wants him. For what?” Compare this to his
semaphored compliment to Meg – “Red suits you.” – in “Red, White or Blue”, in which he
understands perfectly well what he had done and what its hopeful implications are; Vecchio
inquires as to their exchange, and again he plays the innocent, but Vecchio, who knows him too
well, will have none of it: “Don’t try to deflect this. Deflect what? You know what I’m talking
about. Well, no, Ray, actually, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” In general, any time
Ben claims not to know what someone is talking about is a time to pay very close attention to
what lies behind his words. The word “deflect” here recalls the earlier instance of the term in the
exchange between himself and Meg in his apartment in “We are the Eggmen”, in which she
apologizes to him for involving him in her earlier ruse: “It’s just that…there have been occasions
in my career where I have found it necessary to um… Deflect?” He is so readily able to finish
her sentence because the strategy of social deflection is something he understands all too well.
Sometimes, simple innocence is insufficient as a strategy and he must resort to other means, such
as simple stonewalling, as in the exchange between Vecchio and himself at the end of the same
episode: “You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed Inspector Thatcher is a good looking woman?
Well, that wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on, Ray. So you do notice. I didn’t say
that. Ah.” Actually, coming from him, this is a remarkably frank and open admission of his
appreciation of her beauty.

Ben often acts decisively, if guardedly, with respect to Meg, often mixing both direct and
indirect approaches. A particularly brilliant moment is when he visits the new Consulate in
“Burning Down the House”. He is busily trying to determine if the Consulate has been targeted
for arson, if he can possibly deal with Turnbull, if the interior designer, given his scent, is the
possible arsonist and if Kowalski is or is not his old partner Vecchio. He is a man in a hurry, but
of course notices – while in no way acknowledging or expressing jealousy – Meg’s response of
naked lust towards her buff interior designer, Sven; rushing out to pursue the arsonist, he pauses,
notices her choice of curtain material and tosses off a compliment – “I think it would be a
wonderful complement to the woodwork, the walls and your eyes.” – that completely turns her
head. He has been absent for a month on vacation in Canada, out of her life, and, with an
efficiency that is breathtaking, subtly reaffirms his attraction to her, deftly recaptures her
attentions and likely neutralizes a rival. None of this is to suggest that Ben is calculatingly
manipulative, although this is certainly true at times. Rather, he has over time found or molded a
set of social responses that work well enough and have become comfortably reflexive. There is
here a double level at work, that of persona and person; Ben plays the innocent because he
fundamentally is innocent, but his innocence is one of purity of heart rather than of ignorance or

16
inexperience. His innocence ironically forces him into a social imposture as the best means of
preserving it. He no doubt wishes it were otherwise, as he obliquely admits in a telling exchange
with Vecchio in “Red, White or Blue”: “I’ve never hated you, Ray…I’ve envied you, maybe.
Envied me? I’m not proud of it but you have a kind of freedom I wish I had…a sort of existential
honesty.” For, of course, Ray is frequently bluntly open in a way that Ben rarely allows himself
to be.

The nature of his innocence can also be clarified in terms of his character as a kind of
contemporary knight errant, for his essential purity of heart is a direct reflection of this earlier
knightly virtue. Further, many of his virtues of character, particularly taken in concert, may be
seen as so many direct continuations of earlier knightly virtues, such as courage, generosity,
prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude and nobility. Another, related aspect of his character in
which this association is expressed is in what could be termed his fundamental piety. While he is
respectful of conventional and even nonconventional religiosity, as we see in his interactions
with Catholicism, Voodoo and Evangelicalism, his piety is most evident in relation to the
traditions of the Canadian First Peoples, particularly the Inuit. We see this in his frequent
evocation of Inuit stories and experiences as a means of expressing wisdom or insight, as well as
in his respect for specific objects, such as the Tsimshian transformation masks and sweat lodge
in “Mask” and the Inuit Inukshuk in “Seeing is Believing”. He is at some pains to clarify their
spiritual import to his oblivious associates, as when he explains to Vecchio the distinction
between a sauna and a sweat lodge – “A sauna eases tired muscles…the purpose of a sweat is for
spiritual purification.” – or when he explains to Kowalski the nature of an Inukshuk – “Oh, it’s
not just stones, Ray…an Inukshuk embodies the human spirit.” His piety and sense of the sacred
are perhaps most clearly evident in his outrage at the violation of a sacred object: “You
committed a murder, and you used an Inukshuk as cover…that trespass will haunt you…you
violated a sacred thing.” Note that, despite his commitment to justice, he is more outraged by the
sacred violation than by the murder itself. His sense of the sacred is also evident in his relation
to virgin nature, which he loves with an abiding passion and which is his true home. The
backflooding of the hydroelectric dam in the Pilot episode is also a violation of the sacred, one
that profoundly angers and saddens him.

In “Witness”, Ben has demonstrated his professional loyalty to Meg, and is eventually accepted
by her. In “The Promise”, he has fulfilled the quest she has charged him with and has
demonstrated his personal loyalty to her. In “Mask”, he has demonstrated another kind of
personal loyalty, that of discretion. In all of this, he has served her faithfully, but has made no
advance toward her. She has accepted him professionally and guardedly acknowledged her
thanks to him personally, but has made no advance toward him. All of this changes in “The
Edge”, when Canadian icy reserve runs up against Mexican fiery directness in the person of
special agent Anita Cortez. In Welsh’s office, Cortez proceeds to set about cleaning the pellet
paint from the botched training exercise from Ben’s neck. Meg suddenly finds herself in an
internal struggle between propriety and jealousy, a brief struggle that propriety handily loses.
Rushing over, she forcefully takes the Mexican’s place – “Thank you, we clean our own
personnel here.” – and proceeds with cleaning Ben’s neck herself. Ben is perfectly still in all of
this, neither welcoming nor avoiding her, but neither is he oblivious; he studies her intently, until
realization of her rather public impropriety finally dawns upon her and she abandons her project,
rushing from the room. If her earlier removal of her reading glasses in his presence in “Witness”

17
was a subtle and possibly ambiguous signal of her interest, the cleaning of his neck is all too
obvious. She had not intended to betray herself to him in this way, and yet she has and must deal
with the consequences, consequences that will be shortly forthcoming. An open question is how
much her own feelings for him have been unclarified for her before this moment; she would
likely have denied to herself that she had any inappropriate attraction to her junior officer and
yet, when the trial comes, she finds that she is compelled to act out of a jealousy she had not
even known was there. Her heart has laid a claim on him and, even if she has no idea what to do
with the man, she will be damned if she will allow another to steal him from her.

At the end of the episode, having saved the Canadian trade representative, he is challenged by
Meg as to what he expects by way of reward. He carefully shifts the ground of the discussion
from the professional to the personal, waiving both a plum security detail and a commendation in
favor of an offer of coffee with her. If she had not earlier tipped her hand, he almost certainly
would not have done any such thing, but, just as her sudden jealousy has revealed her interest in
him, his seemingly innocent offer has quite deliberately revealed his interest to her. Suddenly,
having laid a claim on him, she must decide what to do with him. In what is no doubt a sense of
internal panic, she equivocates – “Um, well I don’t think, uh, all right.” – and he nearly abandons
the offer before she suddenly accepts. Then the equivocation happens all over again with respect
to who should drive: “Fine…get the car. Uh, do you want to drive? Yes…no…you drive…no,
I’ll drive…you. Understood.” The beauty of this exchange is precisely the bleeding through of
personal and professional roles, for if this were a purely professional matter, he would most
likely drive as a matter of course, as he has before. But, of course, it is and most certainly is not
a professional matter, and Meg barely knows how to negotiate it. Having taken the initiative in
asking her out, he hands it back to her by asking her if she wishes to drive, understanding just
how important a sense of control is to her. She accepts reflexively, then, not wanting to appear
domineering in what is after all a social context, declines. Then, not wanting the appearance of
his having to chauffer her, accepts again, before realizing that she has once again inappropriately
asserted control and declines again. There are perhaps five different social determinations
confusedly interpenetrating here: the default position of his driving her as her junior officer, her
desire to drive in order to take back control of the situation she has just placed herself in, her
consideration not to drive in order to avoid the awkward appearance of her desire for control, her
consideration as to whether he should drive, given that that they are suddenly interacting as man
and woman rather than as officers and her consideration that he should not drive precisely
because she is suddenly relating to him as a man rather than formally as a junior officer. It is no
wonder she equivocates as she does. Ben, poker-faced as ever, simply acknowledges her choice.
One is curious to know how their coffee date went, but all this happens offstage and is never
referred to afterward; nevertheless, it must have been a reasonable success, as their subsequent
exchanges in immediately following episodes bear none of the hallmarks of recent social
disaster.

In “We are the Eggmen”, the lawsuit against the Canadian government occasioned by Ben’s
recent act of consideration towards a chicken farmer leads to a visit from Meg’s former Ottawa
superior, the odious Henri Cloutier, a man whose attentions she is desperate to deflect. She
seizes the opportunity Ben’s return to the Consulate affords and calls him into her office to make
introductions. After Cloutier makes known his dinner intentions involving her and Ben is about
to leave, Meg deliberately presents Ben to him as her boyfriend: “Ben, I’m sorry about dinner…I

18
won’t be too late.” Her use of his first name whips him around on a dime before he can reach the
door: “Too late for what? Too late for…dinner…dismissed.” To all appearances, he has been
genuinely taken aback by the exchange and she has to order him out the door before he can
inadvertently ruin her ruse. On the face of it, Ben really is the innocent naïf, as his lack of
immediate understanding as to her intentions is hardly of help to her. However, one must bear in
mind that he knows nothing of Cloutier or of Meg’s unfortunate history with him, has been
absent from their immediately prior exchange – “Ottawa misses you.” – and has barely had any
interaction with the two of them, and that on purely professional concerns. He has no prior
notion of her need for any kind of deflection. Further, the last we saw of them in “The Edge”,
they had interacted socially over coffee for the first time, a watershed moment in their early
relationship. He may well consider that, just as he took the initiative the last time round in
inviting her to coffee, she is taking an unexpected initiative toward him in turn. But the
circumstances are odd in the extreme: intimately addressing him by his first name, in front of a
senior RCMP legal counsel rather than in private and without any context as to what she might
be referring to. His response is not entirely unsurprising, nor his puzzlement at her response in
turn. That she has presented the imposture of their being in a relationship is perhaps natural, as
she has simply moved to ward off a sexual advance with a sexual deflection in turn as the most
fitting response to her predicament. Nevertheless, there is here a subtle ambiguity, for what her
heart secretly wants, unknown and unspoken even to herself just as her heart’s jealousy was
earlier, is precisely what she is presenting: to be in a relationship with this man. As such, her
words are at once a public imposture and private wish; her heart has found a way to speak them
despite the barriers of her propriety and better judgment. Ironically, Cloutier, by necessitating
the ruse, is the one who has made this possible.

Her presentation of the two of them to Cloutier as in a relationship leads to an interesting

question: presumably, there are RCMP regulations against sexual fraternization between junior
and senior officers within a chain of command; this would seem to be inferred as a primary
motive for avoidance and hesitation between them throughout the series, although the details of
said regulations are never clarified. Yet, here she is, obliquely portraying him as her boyfriend
to a senior RCMP legal counsel in direct violation of said regulations. Cloutier himself has
obviously played fast and loose with any such regulations for a long time, so she may feel safe in
doing so, despite her distrust of him, as it would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black; she
has also raised the matter in such an oblique manner – “Yes, well, we both know I like to keep
my personal life personal.” – that she is likely confident she can deny everything if she is ever
called on it. It is interesting to note that, as far as we have reference to, Cloutier is, perversely,
the man, apart from Ben, with whom she has had the most significant interaction of any sexual
character; the fact that it is thoroughly one-sided, harassing and abusive may tell us much about
the armoring she habitually wears. There is a kind of curious inversion between the dynamic of
this exchange and that in “Mask”, for there, Ben offered his deliberate loyalty to her in his
discretion regarding a real relationship, or at least liaison, in order to protect her, whereas here,
she assumes his loyalty, offered only after the fact, in supporting her assertion of a false
relationship in order to protect her. It is also a curious inversion, as well as a very good thing,
that in the first instance, he took action in indirect denial, whereas in this second instance, she
has taken action in direct imposture, for Ben, while excelling in aversion, is a terrible liar. This
falls in direct consequence of his mastery of indirection and discomfort with direct engagement,
as well as his discomfort with deliberate dishonesty. As an aside, a brilliant moment of

19
conflation of indirection and complete honesty occurs in the first season episode, “A Hawk and a
Handsaw”, where, in being committed for psychiatric evaluation, he tells the straight truth
regarding his background in such as way that it is taken for complete delusion. That Meg feels
able to assume his loyalty is also significant, as he has earned her trust enough for her to risk
running this deception without his foreknowledge or approval; she knows implicitly that he will
support her. He has also earned her respect enough that she feels compelled to seek him out that
very evening – although this is motivated in part by her desire to pack Cloutier onto the earliest
possible flight back to Ottawa – to make her apologies for the presumption, apologies that he
accepts without hesitation. Again, she is in his personal debt, and again, he minimizes that
indebtedness.

The dynamic between them in his apartment, the first and only time she visits, bears its own
interest: she is shocked at the neighborhood, shocked at his apartment, shocked at the way he
lives. After wildly averting herself from the sight of his bed, she quickly settles in the safe
neutrality of his kitchen, where he proceeds to do something utterly, prosaically domestic: he
cooks her an egg, served on a camp plate. There is a moment here also of pure understanding on
her part into just who he is that echoes the moment in her interview with him in “Witness”
regarding his decision to not seek a transfer: “You feel that maybe in a small way you have
something to offer them.” Here, having eaten the egg while he has described its unique virtues,
she admits, “Oh, now I get it…in spite of the fact that he filed a lawsuit against you, you believe
you can show him the error of his ways, appeal to his conscience and save his soul for the pure
pursuit of his God given talent.” In each case, there is a grudging but sincere acceptance of his
basic, if inconveniently excessive goodness. His apartment, and later, his living quarters at the
Consulate, are deliberately simple, the closest urban approximation to a cabin in the wilderness.
It may be a slum tenement, but everything is clean, orderly and spare. This deliberate simplicity
of life, no doubt encouraged by the ruinous exchange rate imposed on his wages, is another
aspect of his character; ostentation would sit very poorly on him indeed. He understands now
that she wants his help in deflecting Cloutier, and the following night he does his best to offer
her this, interrupting Cloutier’s attempt at a romantic dinner with a concocted emergency:
“…your car…it’s burning away…all the other cars feel threatened.” She knows this to be a
transparent fabrication, as does Cloutier, who immediately calls him on it. She understands that
he is trying, in his own rather flailing way, to protect her. She is faced with a decision: to play it
safe with her career and endure another night or few of innuendoes from Cloutier, or to take a
stand and leave with Ben. She has played it safe for a long time, for eight long torturous months
with Cloutier before she got out. For the good of her career, her advancement. Somewhere in
the midst of that, principle was sacrificed to expediency. Although Ben himself is perfectly
willing to socially deflect, rather than take a direct stand, something of his high-mindedness has
perhaps inspired her: she takes a stand, directly confronts Cloutier, damn the consequences, and
leaves with Ben. Earlier, in “The Promise”, when Ben’s gaze lingered on her lapel, she might
well have suspected him to be another of those men, like Cloutier and all the rest she has had to
dodge. Now, having learned to trust him, and forced to consider the two of them in juxtaposition,
she knows that he is nothing like Cloutier. When she leaves the table, she is not merely leaving:
she is leaving with Ben, and says precisely as much: “I’m going with Constable Fraser, you do
what you want about that.”

20
The consequence of this, unbeknownst to her at the time or she might well have rethought her
decision, is that she will soon find herself trapped with him in an overheating egg incubator that
will likely kill them if they don’t escape. He finds himself in need of a wire to bypass the lock
mechanism; “Seven centimeters?” she inquires, and proceeds to order him out of his tunic: “Take
off your tunic, Constable, that’s an order.” She is deliberately provocative, smiling slyly and
offering no explanation, challenging him to disobey her. After a wild moment of panicked
uncertainty, he complies, only to find her pull the needed wire from his uniform collar. Just as
he had shifted the interaction between them from the professional to the personal level in asking
her to coffee in “The Edge”, so here, she appears to shift the interaction between them from the
professional to the personal, issuing an apparently arbitrary command to strip him out of an
article of his clothing. In the end, the command is justified, but the shift of interaction to the
personal is real enough between them. She has, in effect, teased him and he immediately
responds in kind, in a rare moment of humor, by pretending to be electrocuted when he employs
the wire in the lock mechanism. She panics for a moment, afraid for him, until he relents and
admits to the joke. In effect, while she has challenged his sexual guardedness, he in turn has
challenged her emotional guardedness. That they are able to tease one another in such a way
speaks to their growing comfort with one another outside of strict professional roles. As matters
heat up, and she begins to seriously contemplate the possibility that they may not escape, she
nearly succumbs to a moment of direct honesty with him, and again, the ground quite explicitly
shifts from the professional to the personal: “…as your commanding officer, I just wanted to say
that…as someone you work for, I just wanted to say that…as someone you work with, I just
wanted to tell you…” Whatever is in her heart remains unsaid, leaving speculation in its wake,
for, at that inopportune moment, he succeeds in bypassing the lock mechanism: “I got it…you
were saying? Another time.” There are really two questions here: what would she have said and
why did he keep her from saying it? He could readily have delayed until she had a chance to
speak her heart. Upon reflection, it seems fairly clear what she might have said: she would not
have admitted to a physical or emotional attraction to him, still less love, which she almost
certainly does not yet feel for him; she would likely have acknowledged that she thought him a
fine officer and a valued colleague, and that she was grateful to him for the loyalty and help that
he had variously offered her. For her, this would qualify as a major confession, but Ben does not
let her say it. He has a fair notion of what she is likely to confess, is perfectly aware of her
awkward discomfort, and again works to minimize her sense of indebtedness to him, particularly
any expression of it forced from her in extremis. They make good their escape and proceed to do
battle with eggs to free the chicken farmer, Buxley, from his captors; in so doing, they are no
longer commanding and subordinate officers, but colleagues working smoothly together
professionally to overcome their circumstances. This is a temporary lapse on her part, but
nevertheless, they have traveled a long way from the imperious haughtiness she displayed toward
him in “The Promise” when he had called her to the 27th Precinct to identify the waif who has
stolen her broach.

The imperiousness is once again fully in place at the beginning of “All the Queen’s Horses”,
where she intimidates a train car full of Mounties into statuary simply by being her charming
professional self: “Why are they staring at me? I suspect they’re terrified, Ma’am.” One wonders
just how much Ben is here speaking also for himself. We must be frank: Meg is not an easy
woman to love, let alone spend time in the same room with, and this is true for Ben far more than
for others, given his professionally subordinate position and the power that she wields over him

21
by her formal authority. Further, professional regulations and ethics preclude any significant
involvement he might contemplate, even if the personal barriers in question were not so
formidable. In the beginning of their interaction, he needs to assure her of his formal loyalty as
an officer in order to ensure his professional survival. He does so. He then both serves and
protects her in matters of an entirely personal nature, something that, on the face of it, could
simply be taken as motivated at once by his basic goodness as well as by a desire to ease the
formal tension of their professional relationship. He has not yet revealed his heart, not to us, not
even to his wolf. Alright, half-wolf. One suspects, however, that, unlike her, he knows his heart,
although he does not necessarily trust it: an inner-ear imbalance is always a possibility to be
considered. When he invites her to coffee, he tips his hand to us as well as to her. He knows her
to be attracted to him; her earlier jealously has informed him of that. Yet, half the women in
Chicago, it seems, are attracted to him: this is hardly a novel situation in his recent experience.
Further, her earlier actions and general attitude have made it clear that this attraction is not
something she welcomes. Both nobility and prudence, not to mention his habitual sexual
avoidance, would dictate that he simply not acknowledge her earlier inadvertent advance and
carry on as if it had never happened. This, he resolutely refuses to do. There can be only one
explanation: he has set his heart on her, however tentatively, and will follow that leading. But
why? Ultimately, love is a strange mystery, one resistant to analysis, but we will try anyway.
Having already discussed his sexuality, it is necessary to return to the matter of Victoria.

In “You Must Remember This”, he recalls to a sleeping Vecchio the most significant memory he
has of Victoria – huddled with her in the lee side of a mountain crag – the one he has held in his
heart for ten years: “I was delirious…I almost gave up…the only thing I had to hold onto was the
sound of her voice, which never wavered…she recited a poem; you know a funny thing, I must
have heard that poem a thousand times that night…I never heard the words; it
ended…badly…she had a…she had a darkness inside her…and the most beautiful voice…the
most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard.” It is important to note that the sight of her forms no
part of his memory. The distinction between her voice and the sight of her is an issue returned to
repeatedly. In the confessional in “Victoria’s Secret”, he says to Father Behan: “Oh I guess I’m
not really sure if I saw her or I just wanted to see her or I saw her because she’s the one person I
can’t face.” Later, confronting his father’s ghost regarding his mother, he angrily asserts:
“…you never saw who she was…you never saw her when she was angry, you never saw her
when she was frightened, never saw her when she was brave or when she was petty…you never
saw her.” He thinks he has seen her, has seen enough of her to unsettle him, but he has never
really seen her. He knows that “she had a darkness inside her,” he confesses to his father that
“she scares the hell out of me,” and asserts to him that “I know who she is.” He does not. Her
criminal accomplice, Jolly, back for retribution, accuses to him: “You think you know her?…you
don’t!” What he knows of her is her voice and the words she spoke that he never heard. In
“Victoria’s Secret”, he again tells the story of his meeting with her: “I don’t remember losing
consciousness but I do remember being aware that I was dying…and then I heard her voice…she
was reciting a poem over and over…I couldn’t make out the words but I couldn’t stop listening;
she had the most beautiful voice…it was as though I had known her forever across a thousand
lifetimes…”

22
The poem, the one her voice speaks over and over as he lies dying in the blizzard and his own
voice speaks over and over as he lies dying again on the train platform, is “The Windhover” by
the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The Windhover
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The poem is immensely subtle and has been subject to extensive and varied literary interpretation
that we will not touch upon here. Why, however, is Victoria speaking this poem? It is at once
an explicitly and implicitly religious poem, dedicated “To Christ our Lord”, although it is more
than likely that she never speaks this dedication. We would propose that she is speaking it to the
Constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who has tracked her, found her and will no
doubt bring her back to face justice and incarceration because she is quite deliberately singing
her freedom, or, failing that, his destruction. The poem, on the literal level, is about the flight
and fall of a high-flying falcon, but it is shot through with certain chivalric resonances, as in the
opening lines, “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin…” and
the further line, “Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!” The use of French
medieval chivalric terms is quite explicit: minion, dauphin, chevalier, even falcon, which evokes
the medieval art of falconry. Although written in the nineteenth century, it is a deliberately
medieval poem, as much in its use of rhythm and assonance as in its choice of language. The
turning of the poem comes perhaps with the line “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride,
plume, here – Buckle!” It is poem about descent from on high, specifically, the descent of Christ
– the Falcon – into the world for the sake of its salvation.

It is not clear when Ben at last caught up to her at Fortitude Pass, but he recalls that, after he had
staked a lean-to to shelter them, “It snowed for a day and a night and a day.” Given this, he may
well have found her in the morning of that fateful day and Victoria, speaking this poem, may
well be speaking it of him. He is the “morning’s minion” that she has “caught this morning”; he
is – evoking his identity as a Mountie – the “Falcon, in his riding.” He is at once beauty and
menace to her: “…a billion – Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!” She needs
him to give her her freedom, to descend from his high principles and show her mercy, clemency

23
and sympathy and sings this to him in the poem. How can a poem yield her freedom? Recall the
opening words: “I caught this morning morning’s minion”. On the face of it, he has caught her,
but here, she asserts that she has in fact caught him. Recall now his experience of her: “…and
then I heard her voice…she was reciting a poem over and over…I couldn’t make out the words
but I couldn’t stop listening; she had the most beautiful voice…it was as though I had known her
forever across a thousand lifetimes…” And again: “…the only thing I had to hold onto was the
sound of her voice, which never wavered…she recited a poem; you know a funny thing, I must
have heard that poem a thousand times that night…I never heard the words.” He is delirious, on
the edge of unconsciousness, feels that he is dying; his entire experience is collapsed to the
sound of her voice repeating over and over again words he can hear, is compelled to listen to, but
cannot grasp; he is transfixed by the beauty of her voice and the sudden conviction that he has
known her forever. Now, we begin to understand just what Victoria is and what she is doing:
just as he is, essentially, a chevalier, she is, to all intents, a sorceress and she is casting an
enchantment.

She nearly succeeds. He is convinced that he loves her, that she is the only woman he has ever
loved, feels that he has known her forever and that he needs her. The storm breaks, and they
eventually make their way to the nearest town. As he tells Father Behan: “We camped that night
just outside the town in sight of the church steeple and I held her in my arms and she asked me to
let her go.” It wounds him to the core and wracks him with a guilt that he will carry for a
decade, but, in the end, he cannot abandon his high principles, his devotion to duty, his
commitment to justice. Much later, in “Odds”, he recalls: “You know my father used to say that
duty was a passion…maybe the only one that really counted.” Again, in “Bird in the Hand”,
Gerrard, his father’s friend and killer, remarks: “You are just like your father…you put duty
before everything else; duty to the Force, duty to your friends…even duty to your enemies…I
can’t say I understand it, but I admire it.” His passion for duty has, simply and narrowly,
overweighed his passion for her. It has not, however, negated it. Ten years later, she is released
from prison and goes to Chicago for retribution. All that time, he has not seen through the
enchantment and is still carrying it, along with the added burden of his guilt. He had not seen
her then, does not see her now, and has never known her. Again, he tracks her and thinks that he
has caught her, and, again, he is mistaken, for she has caught him. She forges his love and his
guilt into a weapon to destroy him with, and here, the enchantment worked through the poem
takes on a second, subjacent meaning, for there are two kinds of fall present in the poem: mercy
and destruction. The final line of the poem, evoking the brilliant breaking open of dark embers,
is, perhaps, the last working of her enchantment upon him, his own quite literal broken and
bleeding fall from her side onto the train platform: “…ah my dear – Fall, gall themselves, and
gash gold-vermilion.” As a final gift from her as he lies dying, he at last takes on the words that
he could never hear; it is all he has ever really known of her and all he is left with.

With this understanding of Victoria, the woman who had dominated his heart until her near
destruction of him at last set him free of her, let us turn once again to Meg. The two women are,
in a way, superficially similar – long-tressed, raven-haired, flashing-eyed beauties – but there the
resemblance abruptly ends. If Meg is the lady he has set his heart upon, Victoria is a sorceress
whose path he has had the misfortune to cross. Despite their beauty, it is not clear just how
much significance this bears for him: he seems to have no significant memory of Victoria’s
beauty, apart from her voice, while he never admits to a recognition of Meg’s beauty, which,

24
given his guardedness, tells very little; he seems more or less oblivious to his own
handsomeness, as we see in an exchange in “The Blue Line” with a media relations woman:
“Has anyone ever told you you have phenomenal bone structure? Yes, a starving Inuit.” On the
contrary, what he specifically highlights with respect to each woman is an insight into their
interiority: apart from her voice, his only description of Victoria is that “she had a darkness
inside her,” while his first description of Meg is that “…she’s a very fine officer, a woman of
considerable character.” We begin to see that, just as for Meg, he is nothing like Cloutier, so for
him, she is nothing like Victoria. The depth of his perception, however tenuous, is remarkable,
as the interiority of neither woman is easy to grasp, for while Victoria weaves a spell, Meg wears
a mask. His devotion to duty is, as we have seen, greater than his passion for Victoria or his
loyalty to Meg. Nevertheless, with Victoria, his passion ran hard against his duty, whereas with
Meg, his loyalty is largely conflated with it. Both women are attracted to him, but while Victoria
is seductively manipulative, Meg is willfully resistant. Both women are dangerous for him, but
while Victoria’s danger is that of destruction, Meg’s is that of authority. With Victoria, he loses
both his identity and himself, whereas with Meg, she is an anchor for his identity. Victoria
appears externally vulnerable, but is internally dark; Meg is externally fractious, but internally
strong. His experience of their voices is also telling: Victoria’s voice – an enchantingly
seductive siren’s call – is perhaps the most beautiful he has ever heard. Meg’s voice – her
singing voice particularly, as we hear in “Say Amen” – is perfectly lovely when she allows; she
hardly ever does so. Her normal voice, the voice that not infrequently snaps his head back, is the
voice of command. In “Seeing is Believing”, she calls to him – “Fraser.” – at which he turns to
Kowalski who, in his typically delicate fashion, captures the essence of that voice: “Duty calls.
Bellows, more like it.” Again, in “Call of the Wild”, she comes to him – “Fraser.” – and again
he turns to Kowalski: “Duty. Barks.” Her voice is, in fact, her badge of office: not the uniform,
which she rarely wears, not her physical authority, which, as a relatively young, beautiful
woman, she possesses in limited measure, but her voice.

If this were all Meg were, all he saw in her, the cold, authoritarian figure with the voice of
command, he might well spend his days in respectful deference, but he would never have
approached her in the way that he has, quite regardless of whether she had made any advance,
whether inadvertent or intentional, towards him. What he does see in her are perhaps three
qualities: an intelligence and capability that he respects; a strength of character that he admires,
despite her lapses; a compassion well cloaked by formal authority that he sporadically glimpses.
He sees something else, perhaps, as well: a mirror of himself. She too is of home but in a strange
land; she too is committed to serve an organization to which he has given his life; she too guards
her heart, her self, from all comers, if not with a mask of innocence then with one of thorns. She
is as a rose in which only the thorns show, the bloom hidden deep. He thought he had seen
Victoria, that he knew her, a mistake that very nearly proved his undoing. He made the noble
blunder of offering her his loyalty, hoping that it would be enough, trusting that it would be
reciprocated, never asking if he could trust her in turn; as she accused to him: “I’m not exactly a
trusting person…people tend to let me down. Not this time.” He had guarded his heart for a
decade bearing a love and a guilt that turned to ashes; he guards it now from a betrayal and a
brokenness. In “Odds”, when Denny Scarpa – Ladyshoes – tries to use him as a catspaw, he sees
through her use of him and puts her off with indirection; she kisses him and asks: “…why can’t
you trust me? Who says I don’t?” In “Hunting Season”, when Maggie is suspected of murder,
Meg reproaches: “I’m sorry, Fraser, but you have to learn people can’t be trusted.” She needn’t

25
have bothered: Victoria taught him this lesson well, although it is a credit to his basic,
unshakable goodness that he has not fully taken it to heart. He has barely recovered from the
wounding he has received when Meg first comes to the Consulate and proceeds to professionally
savage him. As Vecchio comments to him in “Vault”, appalled for him at her punishing him
with the new uniform: “Fraser, this woman hates you. I believe so, yes.” Yet, astonishingly,
however gradually, however guardedly, he opens his heart to the possibility of her. He would
never have done so if he did not believe that, despite professional appearances to the contrary, he
could trust her with it.

Somewhere in Illinois, the Mounties of the Musical Ride tour have been rendered unconscious
by paralytic gas, the train upon which they are bound hijacked by terrorists, and the two of them,
along with his father and Buck Frobisher, are once more thrown in extremis. After briefly
parting company to consult with Buck, he returns to find her out of her formal black dress and –
for the first time he has ever seen – in her uniform: “Sir…you’ve changed.” An inspector’s
uniform, with insignia, sleeve and collar markings and reversed Sam Browne, as appropriate, but
the uniform of a Mountie nonetheless. He has always been perfectly well aware that she is a
Mountie, but, in a concrete sense, has never seen her as such. For the first time – courtesy of the
perverse humor of the lead terrorist, Randal Bolt – he does so, and is struck perhaps by two
simultaneous reactions: her full formal authority and her close similarity. Bolt proceeds to walk
them at gunpoint to the horse car and again, in a spirit of playful menace, proceeds to handcuff
them together, facing each other with arms encircling one another. After he leaves them, Meg
lures the guard within knee range and, working in smooth partnership, they handily dispatch the
man. There is a moment where, in their forced proximity, in the flush of their immediate small
triumph, she looks upon him with a warmth and even admiration we have never before seen.
Struck by inspiration, he inquires – “May I? May you what?” – and proceeds to nuzzle in her
hair in quest of a hairpin with which to spring the handcuffs. The scene plays out: the
businesslike near kissing as they try to jointly open the hairpin with their teeth, the drop and
retrieval of said hairpin from her cleavage and their eventual escape from confinement. As he
works his handcuffs with the hairpin, his face near her hair, he tries to resolve her scent –
“Escada? I beg your pardon? The fragrance you’re wearing. No. Cartier? No. Chanel? Please.” –
only to find that it is entirely natural to her. The man who can resolve the scent of a half-wolf
from a Lhasa Apso cannot place her at all and finds himself at once perplexed and fascinated. In
all of this, their awkward, forced physical intimacy, while eased by their professionalism and the
seriousness of the situation they find themselves in, is nevertheless a moment of emotional
intimacy as well.

They make their way out of the horse car and he proceeds to lure one of the terrorists on top of
the train. A fight ensues, they grapple, and she, coming up the ladder behind, straightarms the
man’s leg, unexpectedly sending both tumbling off into the ravine below as she cries after his
falling form. Afterwards, in a rare moment of disclosure with Buck and an unseen Fraser Sr.,
she takes responsibility as senior officer for his loss, but also grieves for him: “He drove me
crazy, that’s no secret, but lately I had started to think, I mean I had started to feel…” The
responsible commanding officer – and her sense of responsibility is never more evident than
when she is on this train – has been overtaken by the woman grieving for a man for whom she
has grown to care. Just as, in the immediacy of a rival, something within her had been
galvanized and she had been consumed with an unexpected jealously, so here, in the immediacy

26
of loss, she is consumed with an unexpected grief. Just as that earlier reaction had resolved
emotions she had not even been fully aware of, so here, at last, she realizes that she cares deeply
for this man, perhaps even loves him. Yet she is the ranking officer and she will not abandon
that responsibility even in the face of grief; she soldiers on: “You’re right Sergeant, we’ve got a
train to stop…we have to push on.” Between cars, he suddenly reappears, having regained the
train. She is astonished at his unexpected return to her; he is relieved to find her safe, but is
concentrated on resolving their situation, brushing off his apparent death: “That’s not important,
what is important… Not important?...I grieved for you! You did?” She needs him to understand
what his apparent loss had meant to her, how deeply it had scored her, yet, having done so, the
habitual guardedness reasserts itself: “Briefly.” He ponders the implications of this disclosure
for a moment and replies with a compliment: “Red suits you.” It is a remarkable compliment,
perhaps the nearest he ever comes to telling her that he thinks her beautiful. At once personal
and professional, he has complimented both the woman and the officer, for red suits her as both.
As such, it enables him to toe the delicate line of propriety between them, its deliberate
ambiguity allowing him to say more than he would otherwise dare. She is caught up in the echo
of her grief, the fear of their situation, her feelings for him and his sudden, if guarded
reciprocation. He pushes on, explaining to her that, given the risk of nuclear catastrophe, the
authorities will likely destroy the train if they cannot stop it. She is appalled at the possibility
and he tries to make her see its likelihood: “Put yourself in their position, wouldn’t you do the
same? You think I could be that cold hearted? Forgive me, Ma’am but I would have thought you
more than up to the challenge.” He has paid her a compliment as an officer, as someone
responsible enough to make a hard choice without flinching, but she hears his words as a woman,
wounded to the core by a man she respects and cares for: “Is that what you think of me?”

This is the essential ambiguity, perhaps even tragedy, of who Meg is. She has fought hard to
gain the position and respect that she has won. She wants everyone to see the capable officer,
the figure of authority, and not the woman. She wants him to see her this way, as his superior
officer, and he does. At that moment, he responds to her as she would have him, sees her as she
would have him, and it wounds her. She, who has only ever wanted him to see the officer, is
crying out for him to recognize her humanity, her femininity, her heart. Seeing danger
approaching, she pushes down her vulnerability, reasserting her role as an officer, moving them
on to the ladder and out of sight. On top of the train, she reproaches him: “Actually Fraser, I am
upset; what makes you think we’re so different?...you graduated first of your class, and so did I;
you received medals for fieldwork, so did I; you wear red serge, I wear red serge…the only
difference between us is you’re a woman and I’m not.” She wants him to respect her as she
respects him, but more importantly, she wants him to see her as a person. The final slip speaks
to the gender reversed character of their professional relationship, she assertive and
commanding, he submissive and obedient; for better or worse, it seems, a woman in her position
is not unlike a man. She needs for him to see her, to see that she is not some unfeeling monster
of authority – “I’m not made of stone.” – and he acknowledges that he has seen her, that he
knows her, there behind the mask she wears so well: “I’m very much aware of that. Are you?
Yes. You are? I know you have a heart and I think it beats just the same as mine. You think it
does? Yes.” He sees and respects her as an officer, but has also seen enough to know the woman
behind that role, in all her strength, courage, compassion, vulnerability, isolation and even pain.
She has protected her heart for so long that she must now struggle against her own resistance to
expose it. Yet he has told her that he has seen her, that he knows her heart. She cares for him,

27
has only recently grieved for him, would dearly like to trust him, to open herself to him. Does he
know her? She challenges him and he answers for them both: “What about right now? It’s
racing. Out of control? A runaway.” At last, the physical and emotional attraction that they have
felt for one another, the suspended tension and danger of their situation and their sudden naked
acknowledgement of one another combine to bridge the chasm of formal propriety that has long
separated them, and they kiss. Passionately. Until they are at last interrupted by Buck, warning
them away to the caboose, where the enemy is gathering. Returning to the rear car, she again
assumes responsibility as ranking officer, insisting that she be first through the door. After an
unfortunate delay, he follows her, only to find her on the caboose, held at gunpoint, her face a
mixture of fear and rigid control. Just as she had thought him lost to her, only to find him again,
so he, having at last made his way to her, to Meg – his Meg, if he dared think it – across the
months and hours, is almost immediately faced with losing her.

He has served her and protected her faithfully and he will protect her now, even if he does not
see a way, even if it means abandoning his larger duty. He had complimented her as an officer
on her ability to make a tough decision despite the cost, but now, faced with almost the same
dilemma he had posed to her, he finds that he cannot abandon her, cannot sacrifice her. The
bomb is on the train, not the caboose, and that is where his duty lies, where the greater good must
be served. Yet, when Bolt proceeds to decouple the caboose from the train, leaving Meg and the
terrorists far behind, he prepares to leap the space between, to join her, defend her, save her if he
can. Only Buck’s grip on his Sam Browne prevents him: “Priorities, Son.” Eyes storming, jaw
clenched, he must stand and watch her recede from his sight, not knowing if he will ever see her
alive again. The words that he whispered to Vecchio as he lay dying beside another train – “I
should be with her.” – are the same words that he leaves unsaid here; he bears them in his heart
nonetheless, the unspoken token of his love for her. Faced with Buck’s consolation, he at last
turns away, replying as an officer with words that belie his heart: “She’s my superior
officer…that’s all.” At last able to stop the train and prevent the catastrophe, he rides to her
rescue in company with the revived Mounties of the Musical Ride, foils Bolt’s escape and takes
her up behind him on horseback. As the riders return to the train, a sense of normality returns as
well, and with it the reassertion of her professional persona, with all of its accompanying
proprieties; she informs him: “You realize, Fraser, that what happened between us can never
repeat itself.” The door that so briefly opened has been slammed shut once again and he, ever a
child of the North, has been left out in the cold. She has said what she feels she must as an
officer, but, suddenly contemplating the terrible finality of the word “never”, she adds a clause:
“…unless of course the exact same circumstances were to repeat themselves.” He proceeds to
spell out to her just exactly how hollow this clause is, and she admits to it. Whatever had been
growing between them has finally come to a head, has flowered into a brief, precious intimacy
and has now been cut down. By her. He has offered her his service, his protection, his heart and
it has not been enough. She has been jealous for him, grieved for him, respected him, trusted
him, cared for him and it has not been enough. She has made herself perfectly clear. He should
respect her wishes, abandon the field, try to recover his heart and move on. He does not.

The potentially catastrophic outcome of the terrorist seizure of the Musical Ride train and its
dramatic prevention by members of the RCMP, Constable Fraser among them, generates a
frenzy of media interest. In the beginning of “Red, White or Blue”, he finds himself in the midst
of being coached by the RCMP media relations expert sent to help the RCMP capitalize on the

28
opportunity for good public relations. Prior to this, Meg has not only told him that what
happened between them on the train could, barring an act of God, never repeat itself; she has
also, at some point offstage, ordered him to forget it ever happened. Ben, the dutiful junior
officer, has acquiesced to both her decisions. Meg, whatever her heart has prompted, is clearly
concerned about the negative impact upon her professional image and reputation, not to mention
private embarrassment, should word of her inappropriate activity with her subordinate ever
circulate. The decisions she has handed down to him are, first and foremost, damage control.
The media relations expert proceeds to hand him an opportunity: “…I’d like us to focus on the
details…now I want you to tell us how you got from the horse car to the engine room.” That is
to say, what happened as he ran across the top of the train with the Inspector? He can, of course,
give the sanitized version of the story, leaving out the confrontation, conversation and kiss. He
should give this version, in accordance with Meg’s earlier command. He does not. In a moment
of indirection combined with absolute honesty worthy of his early conflation during his
psychiatric evaluation in “Hawk and a Handsaw”, he proceeds to tell the media relations expert
exactly what happened: “Ah…well…um…I followed Inspector Thatcher up the ladder, we then
ran along the top of the train…Inspector Thatcher stopped, turned, we engaged in a conversation
that led to us discovering ourselves…” Hearing this and knowing exactly what he is going to
say, and, more importantly, the kind of attention the media would give it should they learn of it,
Meg has no choice but to intervene: “Uh, Constable!...that was terrific, Constable, marked
improvement, but could I have a quick word with you?” He has no intention of revealing their
amorous interaction to the media relations expert, he is perfectly well aware that Meg is
watching his every move and word like a hawk precisely because she is concerned that he might
disclose something of that interaction, and he deliberately phrases his description – “…that led to
us discovering ourselves…” – to not reveal to the media expert what is coming next, yet clearly
signal this to Meg, and furthermore, give her time to do something about it. He knows she will
jump into the breach and she predictably obliges him. Why does he do it?

He is forcing her to confront the issue she has recently forcibly buried and is skillfully using the
leverage that the RCMP media relations expert and the offstage presence of the media hounds
baying at the door provide him with. It is a dangerous game, as most are where Meg is involved,
and he risks significant backlash. Whereas in “Mask”, he employed his habitual face of
innocence to protect her, here, he employs it to protect himself, giving every impression that he
was simply responding to the media expert’s question. Meg takes him aside to perform
additional damage control: “Fraser, our…um…what would be the word for it? Contact?
Contact…yes…that’s a good word; our…contact…in my opinion, is not something that is
needing to be publicly aired. Since it had no bearing on the outcome of the event, I agree.” He
does not let it rest there, but, having opened the issue between them, raises the matter of her
command that he forget their “contact” in order to deliberately evoke the memory of it:
“Furthermore, Sir, I followed your instructions and I’ve tried to…uh…erase the…contact…from
my memory.” It is an elegant reversal, for while his words would deny their contact, they are
belied by the very pauses and look he gives her. She replies: “You have. Yes. And have you
succeeded?” Here again, the fundamental tension that Meg bears is explicitly evident in her face
and response. She cares for this man, perhaps loves him, and, in all likelihood, far from
banishing the memory of their contact from her own mind, she treasures it. As an officer, she
needs for him to have forgotten it, to have buried the matter; as a woman, she desperately wants
him to remember everything about their brief intimacy, as she does. Her words – “And have you

29
succeeded?” – bear a dread of either possible response. He closes his eyes and leans his head
down, as if to concentrate better on the question she has posed, but the action subtly recollects
that of leaning in for a kiss. She too closes her eyes and they are both back on top of the train,
the wind whipping through her hair, his lips on hers, his hand caressing the nape of her neck, his
other firm on the small of her back, the feel of him under her own hands. He brings his head up,
opens his eyes and, looking upon her with both love and tenderness, answers: “No.” At that
moment, the new Constable comes in with coffee and the two jump apart, she echoing the very
words they spoke to Buck Frobisher on top of the train: “We were just…”

Following their contact, she had ordered him to erase it from his memory, secretly hoping that he
would remember everything. In “Flashback”, he actually has lost his memory from a concussive
injury, and in fact remembers nothing of their contact. Faced with the loss of his forgetting and
the sudden isolation that she is the only one in the world who now bears that memory, she drops
all pretence of professional proprieties: “Fraser, you don’t remember anything about… About?
You know. I do? You must.” Having ordered him to forget, she now insists that he remember.
He eventually does regain his memory at episode’s end; although nothing is ever made of it, he
knows without a doubt that, despite her formal instructions to the contrary, she very much wants
him to hold the remembrance of that brief intimacy. The three scenes – the finding of the
hairpin, the kiss atop the train and the remembrance in the conference room – should perhaps be
understood as a kind of triptych, the first and third scenes serving to bookend the central kiss, as
rehearsal and remembrance, respectively. The near-identical blocking of the scenes makes this
explicit: handcuffed together in the horse car, he leans in to her in what appears to be a kiss, but
in fact is a search in her hair; standing close in the conference room, he leans in to her in what
again appears to be a kiss, but in fact is a nod of concentrated remembering. When, in the
remainder of “Red, White or Blue”, the Bolt brothers take over the Justice Building in the midst
of Randal Bolt’s trial for the train hijacking, the two Mounties again work smoothly together to
defeat their circumstances, despite their being in different buildings. If she had earlier
demonstrated her sense of responsibility as a senior officer in “All the Queen’s Horses”, here,
she demonstrates her competence, outthinking an entire FBI field command team,
communicating via semaphore with Ben across buildings, even flattening the ever annoying
Agent Ford with a well disguised backhand after he has called her “Darling” one too many times.
The situation finally resolved, Ben stands with Vecchio on top of the Justice Building savoring
the moment. She signals to him via semaphore from the plaza below: “You have duties,
Constable.” He responds in turn – “Understood.” – then pauses, takes a breath, and adds: “Red
suits you,” for she had once again donned her red serge for the court appearance. He has, in
effect, shouted a compliment from a rooftop to her that only she can hear, the perfect
combination of public declaration and private whisper. Just as he recollected to her in the
beginning of the episode their moment of intimate contact on the train, so here he is quite
deliberately recollecting and reiterating his earlier compliment to her after she had admitted to
him that she had cared enough for him to have grieved for him. After he has initially signaled
“Understood”, she continues to look up at him, perhaps waiting for him to signal “End
communication” as he has before, but perhaps hoping for something more. Although he cannot
see it, when he reiterates his compliment to her, she first drops her eyes forward, chagrined, but
then turns her face away, her eyes marked with a mixture of hope and wistfulness.

30
In “Seeing is Believing”, an episode that owes much to Rashomon, the two Mounties, along with
Welsh, Kowalski and Frannie, try to recollect the details of a murder each has earlier witnessed.
As Meg insists upon her version of the events, Kowalski asks her: “Did you actually see the
knife in her hand? Well, no, but I was a little distracted…Constable Fraser was running after the
shoplifter…you know, the uniform, the motion, the legs, driving like pistons, pumping like
steel…” Suddenly recollected from her fevered remembrance to face the embarassed silence of
the others, she abruptly concludes: “something red going fast always draws the eye.” Later, as
she imaginatively reconstructs the scene of the murder, the other man in the scene she is
imagining turns into Ben in her mind’s eye and she speaks from her imaginative vision, while
physically stroking his cheek: “I could never let him hurt you…never…not after…” He recalls
her to her present circumstances – “Sir?...Sir?” – and then, in response to Frannie’s inquiry –
“Not after what?” – miscalculates: “I think Inspector Thatcher is referring to an incident on a
train.” Meg immediately cuts him off sharply: “Fraser. Understood.” Her next words, although
ostensibly referring to the murder, may bear a double layer of meaning, given her recent
imaginative inclusion of him in her recollection: “What I’m trying to say is that it is possible to
feel so strongly for another person that you would do anything to protect them.” Is she speaking
something here of her own feelings for him? Another exchange that may bear a double layer of
meaning is when she comments: “It is possible for a man and a woman to develop a personal,
platonic relationship based on friendship, a shared sense of values and mutual respect.”
Kowalski immediately mocks this exalted vision – “Yeah, on Mars, maybe.” – but Ben defends
her: ”Oh, no, here on Earth as well, Ray…I think it happens all the time.” Here too, they would
seem to be speaking of their own professional interaction, at least in some vision of idealized
propriety. Ironically, of course, this does capture a very real aspect of their professional
relationship, while also conveniently smoothing over all of its inherent tension. In general, what
would seem to be most telling regarding her two inadvertent semi-public imaginative disclosures
in this episode is just how much Ben seems to have invaded her imaginative life. Although we
are never privy to her daydreams or dreams, one must wonder to what degree he features in these
as well. In other words, she would seem to have it bad for him.

In “Bounty Hunter”, Ben crosses paths with a professional bounty hunter, Janet Morse, a woman
with three children, and, unbeknownst to him, a deadbeat husband. They feel an attraction for
one another and, for whatever its worth, Ben’s father, on the lookout for the possibility of
grandchildren despite being deceased, approves of the match. With the reappearance and capture
of her husband, it becomes perfectly clear to Ben that nothing was ever to come of it. The
presence of her children highlights, or perhaps awakens, his longing for a normal family life,
with children of his own. At the Consulate, he compliments her on her children: “You have
beautiful children. They’re rats…but you know, when you see them like this, you remember why
you really wanted them. You’re lucky. Yeah, I am.” What he is left with as she turns at last to
leave is an overriding sense of his own isolation; speaking to his father with tears in his eyes, he
asks: “Dad, when you were alone out there without Mom, did you ever feel lonely? Oh, every
second, Son…every second. That’s what I thought.” His sense of loneliness is something he no
doubt frequently bears, and occasionally speaks to. In “Invitation to Romance”, he observes:
“…it’s easier to think you’re in love than it is to accept that you’re alone.” In “Eclipse”, he
admits: “…I am acquainted with loss, and on occasion loneliness.” He is in quasi-exile from his
native country, compelled to live in an urban environment unsuited to his nature, in his mid-
thirties without a wife or family or any prospect thereof, his relationship with Victoria having

31
ended badly twice, his quasi-relationship with Meg perpetually frustrated. In “Perfect
Strangers”, the situation with Meg takes an unexpected turn. Faced with the ticking of her own
biological clock and her own sudden longing for a child, she turns to him. In a difficult
interview at the Consulate with a visiting Canadian general, Ben tactfully defends her
professionally; following the General’s departure, she thanks him: “Fraser, I’m afraid that I may
sometimes underestimate you. Not without justification, I’m sure. Still, it’s comforting to know
that I can think of you as a partner as well as a subordinate.” His father is convinced, as he so
tactfully puts it, of a “stirring in her loins,” further asserting: “She wants you, Son, and I imagine
by God that she’s going to get you, too.” He, of course, thinks his father has been out of
circulation too long: “There’s nothing stirring in anyone’s loins.” In the taxi ride to the 27th
Precinct house later, she inadvertently sits on ice left on the far end of the back seat, being forced
to move and sit close to him in consequence. She comes out with what has been on her mind:
“I’ve been thinking lately about having a child.” In a beautiful bit of apparently innocent
comedic innuendo, she continues: “It’s an enormous undertaking…and you know me, I mean, I
wouldn’t even know how to start…that’s where you come in…” Here, he shifts uncomfortably
in light of this astonishing disclosure and she pauses: “Is your seat wet too?...anyway, I was
thinking, with all your experience in the field, that you might be the kind of man who would
know a thing or two about this sort of business; I was hoping to involve you in the
process…we’d have to be discrete, and naturally I’d want to get the whole thing over with as
quickly as possible…so I can count on you then to be up for this?” He hardly knows what to
make of this and responds only briefly and noncommittally. As she walks past Kowalski in the
Precinct building, he notices the wetness on the seat of the Ice Queen’s pantsuit and turns to Ben:
“Wh-what? Oh, uh, she was sitting on ice. That’s cold.” In what may be understood as a meta-
observation by Ben on her apparent volte-face, he stammers out: “Well, yes…but it melted.”

The particular fascination and poignancy of the premise of “Perfect Strangers” is precisely that
he understands her to be asking him to father a child with her, and, as such, there is a particularly
sharp tension established between the themes of service and consummation. She has not asked
him for a relationship, still less for marriage, nor has she expressed love for him. As far as he
can make out, she is asking him to lie with her for the sake of conceiving a child and that is all;
his helping to raise the child, his being a partner to her, even that their proposed lovemaking be
passionate, none of this is on offer. If anything, she would seem to be specifically excluding all
this: “We’d have to be discrete, and naturally I’d want to get the whole thing over with as
quickly as possible.” He is loyal to her; he wants to be of service to her, as he has been before,
yet to accept the terms he has understood would be at once profoundly wounding and anathema
to his sense of responsibility. Still too, he has not given up the hope of a relationship with her, of
a real consummation, not one that is simply physical and hollow; in some corner of his heart, he
may even quietly hoard the dream of making a family with her. For him to reject her request
would be to abandon his sense of loyalty to her as well as whatever hope he might still have for
something more between them. For him to accept her request would be to offer her his service at
a cost too high for him to bear. He might well have considered proposing marriage if he thought
himself ready and that she might say yes, but, given her past rejections, he wisely guards his
heart and resists. He opts for a fourth option – the only potentially good option available to him
and the one we see – to tentatively accept her offer in the hopes of limiting the exposure of his
heart and of “incrementally” changing the terms. He comes to her office, freshly groomed, a
bouquet of daisies in hand, and in his own inveterately roundabout way, replies to what he has

32
understood to be her earlier proposal. Having no idea what he is going on about, she asks him to
get to the point and he tries to oblige her: “The point is that I just think that things like this
should be done incrementally…perhaps we could start with conversation, and, uh…although,
well, you and I have talked so I suppose we could bypass that; we’ll just move to the next
increment…dancing, possibly; oh, not now…not now, of course, because there is no music,
although, you know, my parents used to dance without music all the time; I recall a time in my
childhood when…” Between the sight of the daisies and the mention of his parents, she finally
understands just what he has been trying to say. He is, in essence, and with whatever
qualifications, offering to father her child. She had meant adoption.

As much as he was earlier astonished at her proposal, so she is now astonished at his acceptance,
all the more so as it is to a proposal she had not intended to make. The matter on offer is so
utterly beyond the bounds of propriety that normally circumscribe them that neither can speak to
it: “Fraser? Sir? You didn’t think that I...? I don’t think that you...? Well, when I asked that you
be part of the process, you didn’t think that I was suggesting...? That you were
suggesting...? Well, that you...? That I...? Because that would be... No, no, no, I mean, that would
be...” She is at once shocked and embarrassed, both at his misunderstanding of her intention as
well as at the inescapably physical aspect of what he is offering. At last, she clarifies just what
she had intended – “I meant adoption, Fraser.” – and the full measure of his folly is revealed to
him. He is at once mortified and heartbroken, his expression suddenly ashen. She sees this, sees
just what coming here and making this offer has cost him and what it now costs him further, and
her heart goes to him, her face full of sympathy and tenderness. She also sees something further:
given who he is, she knows, however tacitly, that somewhere, perhaps far down the road of the
offer he has made, lies a proposal of marriage; he will not father her children under terms less
than this. His incidental mention of his own parents in his roundabout proposal – “…although,
you know, my parents used to dance without music all the time.” – also makes clear what lies in
his heart. While he would never say it, she understands implicitly what he is offering. She may,
perhaps, not yet see that he would never have made the offer he had if he did not truly love her.
His folly made clear, there is nothing for him to do but depart the scene with as much tattered
grace as he can muster; he composes his features and asks her formally: “Sir, may I…?” She
replies with tenderness and an edge of hope, perhaps even that, despite the blow, he may ask to
have this dance, the one with no music: ”May you what?” He cannot see it, cannot see her, can
only see his own pain, and simply replies: “Be dismissed?” She had meant adoption, not all that
he is unexpectedly offering, and just as she has come to grasp the larger implications, the
moment is lost to her; she can only respond with regret, as she bows her head with a sense of
foreclosure: “If you wish.” He turns to depart, only to turn back again and offer her the flowers
he has been holding – “Oh…I found these.” – before finally leaving. She can only watch him
go. Her rejection of him, however unintended, is a terrible closure as well as a wound; he
remains loyal to her but he will never again take the initiative toward her as he has earlier. The
final exchange between them makes this closure explicit, for it deliberately echoes the opening
gesture of physical intimacy between them, handcuffed together in the stable car of a runaway
train: “May I? May you what?”, followed by his nuzzling her hair in search of a hairpin. What
had opened there has closed here: he is left holding his ruined heart and she is left holding his
abandoned flowers.

33
In the beginning of “Mountie on the Bounty”, she comes to his office, stumbling upon him in a
state of uniform undress: “Just…just stay in uniform, Fraser.” Despite her fluster, she presses on
with the matter that has brought her: “I have something for you.” She hands him a transfer that
has just come for him: “To Ottawa.” He considers it for a moment and with a sense of rising
panic, she asks him: “Well, you’re not going to take it, are you? Well, I haven’t… Because over
the years we’ve developed a relationship…working, of course, working relationship, and you
might be hard to replace…cost-wise…I mean, not everybody would live here in his
underwear…uh, work…live in a place where he works.” Reduced to incoherence, she has no
choice but to groan and abruptly retreat out the door. Apart from the momentary fluster at
catching him changing uniforms, the larger concern at hand is her fear of losing him. It is a fear
we will see again in “Call of the Wild” when she wants to keep him with her as she plans a
transfer to Toronto, and, seeing his desire to go somewhere more congenial, is willing to change
those plans to keep from losing him: “We don’t have to go you know. Up these stairs? No, to
Toronto…I mean if you don’t…we could go somewhere else.” The fear of losing him is also
closely bound to her jealousy for him, something we witness repeatedly through the series. She
was jealous of Anita Cortez, the Mexican agent in “The Edge”, as she competed for neck
cleaning privileges; jealous of Ida Banks, the exotic dancer in “Body Language”, pawing him
while on sentry duty; jealous of Janet Morse, the bounty hunter in “Bounty Hunter”, who she
finds sleeping in the Consulate; jealous of Maggie McKenzie, the RCMP Constable and his
unknown sister in “Hunting Season”, who she finds spending unaccountable time with him in his
office closet. If she had been aware of the offstage presence of Denny Scarpa, the card shark
swimming in his spare union suit in “Odds”, she would no doubt have pulled herself into
sobriety to be jealous of her as well. To return to the matter of the transfer in his office, she is
desperate that he stay with her and not accept it; she wants to appeal to their relationship –
“Because over the years we’ve developed a relationship…” – but of course cannot admit to this –
“working, of course, working relationship”; she wants to appeal to what he means to her –
“…you might be hard to replace…” – but of course cannot admit to this either – “…cost-
wise…”. She loves him, cannot bear the thought of losing him, will not tell him what he means
to her and will not let him love her as he would. All of this is on display later in the episode
when, at last rescued with Kowalski from the submersible, he is reunited with her on board the
replica of the HMS Bounty. She comes to him, wanting perhaps to share what she had felt for
him when he was in danger and her relief for him at present, but of course does no such thing:
“Fraser, I, uh… Sir? I’m…glad you’re alive.” The kiss they subsequently share is almost
certainly imaginative, part of Fraser Sr.’s evocation of the romance of the sea; what is less clear
is just whose imagination it occupies: hers, his, both of theirs, or his father’s?

In “Odds”, she puts in a brief appearance, prancing into the Consulate late at night, inebriated,
and finding him in the hallway: “Fraser!...Fraser, Fraser, Fraser, Fraser, Fraser…off duty and still
working; you really gotta learn to relax…I mean, look at me….how do…how do I seem? How
do you seem, Sir? Yeah…I mean, do I seem tense to you? Uh, no, Sir…you appear to be very
loose-limbed. That would be the Latin influence.” While in the middle of this extraordinary
declamation, she proceeds to drape her arm over him as if he were the back of a particularly
comfortable couch, sliding her hand over him as she dances closely around him. She continues:
“I was having tapas with the Spanish Ambassador; he’s remarkably erudite, learned, well-read
and really, really, really hot blooded.” At that moment, the very Ambassador appears in the
Consulate doorway, similarly sloshed, singing “Volare”. She gestures: “See what I mean?; um,

34
we’re gonna continue…um, I…um; I have a really high level, power…um…meeting at 0900
hours, so I’m gonna be late.” As astonishing a spectacle as this is on her part, his reaction is
almost as remarkable for its very neutrality: he does not try to care for her, to protect her from
the potential consequences of her present state, even to fend off a rival, as he had with her buff
Scandinavian interior decorator in “Burning Down the House”. As she drunkenly trips out the
door on the arm of the Spanish Ambassador, off to continue with him that hot blooded activity
whereof she could not bring herself to speak, he simply watches her go. The Consulate quiet
once more, he sadly turns to review her adoption papers. The entire situation is so utterly
uncharacteristic of everything we know of Meg as to be difficult to reconcile to intelligibility.
Why has she done it? Control, propriety and reserve are the very watchwords she lives by and
here, she has seemingly abandoned all. A possible answer lies in the very non-relationship she
torturedly enjoys with her junior officer. She has come to love him, will not allow herself to
have him, is burdened with the memory of their past intimacy, and must deal with his continuing
daily presence in her life. It is, or could well be, a kind of exquisitely slow-burning hell for her.
The recent debacle over their miscommunication regarding adoption may no doubt weigh upon
her as well, for it was a closure as much for her as for him. He had misunderstood and made her
an offer that was in the end tantamount to one of marriage; he had caught her wholly unprepared
and she had not been able to say the right thing, did not even know what that might have been.
He had made himself vulnerable to her to a degree he never had before, hoping that she might
accept him, and she had wounded him to the core with her inadvertent rejection. Worse, she
knows in her heart that, barring some exceptional intervention, he will never allow himself to be
that vulnerable before her again. She had never meant to hurt him so and it was a wound for her
that she had caused him that pain; yet another rejection on top of all the others she has given him.

She had managed to find some precarious equilibrium in her interaction with him where she
could keep him near her but safely at arm’s length; both the adoption debacle and the recent
threat of his transfer have disturbed that delicate balance. At least he has not left her, she can be
grateful for that, but he has put a formal distance between them that had not previously been
there. We know something of his loneliness, but little if anything of her own. She no doubt is
lonely at times and must deal with this as best she can in her own way. She is, in fact, almost
completely isolated, without a man in her life, without children, without, it seems, significant
friends or close family, even without a pet. She has given herself to her career and that, for
better or worse, must be her primary consolation. So, she has allowed herself to get drunk, to do
so in the company of a man conveniently unlike her reserved and guarded junior officer –
“…he’s…really, really, really hot blooded.” – and then, in the presence of that same officer who,
it may be assumed, she has at some level sought out, knowing he would likely be at the
Consulate after hours, she proceeds to both drape herself over him in a gesture of intimacy not
seen since the train and to declaim the virtues of the man she has been busy getting drunk with,
at once throwing herself at him and throwing a rival in his face. And, of course, she lectures him
on, of all things she might possibly bear expertise in, the importance of relaxation: “…you really
gotta learn to relax…I mean, look at me….how do…how do I seem?” She is, of course,
speaking to her own need and only secondarily to his, for it is precisely the tension she bears –
intrinsically, by the burden of her position and, most significantly, with respect to him – that has
in all likelihood led her to this pass. The moment was convenient, the man was interested and it
was a way for her to temporarily lay aside the tension of her situation. It is notable that she is
relating to this other man while drunk and not sober, for this is yet another curse of her situation

35
with her junior officer: she loves him, she will not have him, but, loving him, she cannot have
anyone else either. What does the Spanish Ambassador mean to her? Absolutely nothing. In all
likelihood, she doesn’t even know the man’s name. On the contrary, she goes so far as to use the
man to try to goad some reaction, some jealousy, anything, out of Ben, all to no avail. In the
end, all she is left with is the hangover.

In a curious inversion of the scene in “Odds”, in “Good for the Soul” she is perfectly sober once
more and, it being the season, she attempts to share some Christmas cheer with him, bringing in
a decanter and glasses: “Fraser, I thought perhaps a little seasonal…cheer.” The presence of
unexpected guests he has brought frustrates her plans once again, which come to naught. Later,
at the Precinct house, as everyone exchanges presents, she offers him a formal dress sword: “It’s
a sword. A sword, I see.” Dewey, seeing the gift over Fraser’s shoulder, snidely remarks: “Ah,
calling Dr. Freud.” Embarrassed by the observation, she quickly qualifies: “Purely ceremonial,
you don’t have to use it. I see…it’s very nice.” As a gift bearing at once signification and
symbolism, the sword she has offered can be understood, as Dewey would have it, in a crudely
phallic way and even, at some level, should be understood in this manner. One could go even
further and suggest an association with Frannie’s trashy romance novel “Sword of Desire” in
“Seeing is Believing”, a book that will appear again in other circumstances in “Likely Story”.
Why is Meg giving him this sword? Certainly, she is trying to heal the rift between them that
had widened in consequence of their misunderstanding over her desire for a child, and perhaps
also in consequence of her subsequent drunken display. She is also trying to signal, in her own
oblique and guarded way and at this particularly suitable season, something of what he means to
her. It is a fine sword; purely in monetary terms, it is a lavish present, which of course bears its
own signification. One can understand the gift in terms of her sexual desire for him, but there is
no compelling reason to limit any interpretation to this level alone. It is a profoundly traditional
object, at once perfectly suited to his own deeply traditional character as well as speaking to the
larger traditions of service that they both share as RCMP officers. Judging from the guard and
blade, it in fact appears to be an officer’s cavalry saber, possibly even RCMP regulation issue.
The sword carries an entire raft of traditional symbolic associations, almost none of which are
sexual or phallic in character. Most significantly, the sword symbolizes power, authority, justice,
courage, valor, strength; it is the preeminent symbol of knighthood and of the knightly virtues.
In offering him the sword, she is at some level acknowledging and honoring these qualities she
knows him to possess. The gift may also be understood in some sense as at once an investiture
and a token of esteem, just as a noble lady might give to a favored knight. It may, in fact, be
understood specifically as her token, particularly in professional terms, for her commissioned
officer’s dress serge uniform bears its Sam Browne reversed specifically to support the officer’s
dress sword, worn on the left as part of the full ceremonial uniform. By offering him the sword,
she has thus honored him both personally and professionally. The gift might even be seen as an
elegant reciprocation of his reiterated compliment to her – “Red suits you.” – which
acknowledged and esteemed her both personally and professionally as well.

In “Dead Men Don’t Throw Rice”, he poses as, of all things, a corpse – making use of the
secretions from the Bouga toad to simulate death – in order to help uncover the missing body of
a mob victim. No one apart from Kowalski and Welsh are to know of his undercover imposture
of a cadaver, but word leaks out and spreads like wildfire through the Precinct house that Fraser
is dead and lying in repose in a nearby funeral home. There is a mad rush by all concerned to

36
both see if the rumor can possibly be true and to pay their respects to a man they have come to
regard as one of them. Ever formal, he makes a natural stiff as people pile into the chapel of the
funeral home to view him. The Consulate, too, is informed and Meg and Turnbull also rush to
funeral home. Both run to his coffin and she, not saying a word, simply stands looking upon his
face in numb shock, swaying ever so slightly as the minutes tick by. Eventually, he is aroused
from his stupor by Frannie’s scream and sits bolt upright in the coffin, causing everyone not
aware of the imposture, Meg included, to faint dead away. As the detectives left standing remark
at the scene: “It looks like Jonestown in here. At least it’s quiet. Way I like it.” She had grieved
for him once, on the train, when she thought he had certainly been killed from the fall into the
ravine below. She had not even known she had loved him then, but she had grieved for him, and
it had only been brief on account of his sudden reappearance, well and unharmed. Even after he
had returned to her, the echo of that grief had reverberated painfully. She has had cause to fear
for him since then, as when he was on the ghost ship in Lake Superior, and has had, less gravely,
cause to fear losing him to a transfer or the arms of another woman. To not only fear him dead,
but to see him laid out before her, impossibly handsome in death as in life, the keening grief
rising within her, is more than she can bear. She cannot believe he is gone, gone from her life,
everything she had borne for him, for so long never said, now never to be said. She cannot take
it in, cannot feel, cannot think, cannot cry out for him, cannot weep for him. She can only stand
there and look upon him, the rush of noise in her ears, her eyes half-unseeing. She never told
him that she loved him, never told him a tenth of what he meant to her. And now she never will.
She had never let him love her, never let him give her all that he would have. And now he never
will. He had offered to father her child, with everything unspoken that that implied. And now
she will never have that child, his child. She has at last what she has always demanded: to be
barren and alone. When she at last faints away and the oblivion of unconsciousness embraces
her, it comes as a welcome mercy.

In “Hunting Season”, Constable Maggie McKenzie, fresh from the Territories, has come to
Chicago on the trail of two men. She seeks out Ben’s help to track them down and he agrees to
assist her. They share a great deal in common: the friendship of their parents, their comfort with
life in the northern wilds, their love of pemmican, their uncomplicated generosity, their
commitment to justice, their keenly honed ability to examine a crime scene by taste. She is like a
blessed reminder of his own life, the one he had left behind when he had taken exile in Chicago,
like the sudden embodiment of all the homesickness he bears. She can see his father. He is
strangely comfortable with her, attracted to her, all too like her. She even wears the uniform.
Reminiscing with her and his father in his office closet, they hear a knock on the door: “Duty
calls, Son.” The door opens to reveal Meg, Turnbull close behind: “Constable Fraser. Inspector
Thatcher…sorry. For? I’m not sure.” Profoundly embarrassed, he attempts an explanation:
“Constable McKenzie is here on the trail of some suspects, Sir. In your closet? At the moment,
yes. Why wasn’t I informed?” Maggie valiantly attempts to smooth things over: “Pemmican? I
couldn’t possibly.” In all this, Meg’s voice, far from its usual sharpness, is like the purr of a
great cat: sweet, but with barely concealed menace. She has no wish to play the shrew before
this woman, but her resentment and jealousy at Maggie’s unexpected presence and proximity to
Ben are all too evident. She departs and Maggie observes to him: “I see why you like her, she…
Inspector Thatcher and I have a purely, a, a…” He can’t even find words for what it is he and
the Inspector have; it would simplify things if he could simply say platonic, professional, proper,
but all of these are completely inadequate: the matter is far to tortured and convoluted for that.

37
As an interesting aside, it seems that, for Ben, there’s something about a woman in uniform: just
as he had been pleasantly surprised at Meg’s changing into her serge on the train – “Sir…you’ve
changed.” – so much so that he had complimented her on it, twice, so, having first seen Maggie
in her dress reds, he is disappointed the next morning to find her out of them: “I see that you’re,
uh, well, you’re out of uniform.”

Later, Meg proceeds to wrestle with her moral qualms regarding checking on Maggie’s
credentials, given her unexpected appearance in Chicago. As she explains to Turnbull: “I don’t
want to feel as though I’m acting on any petty… Emotions? No, of course not!...any
petty…pettiness…or something.” Jealous resentment winning out over her qualms and
Turnbull’s advice, she makes the call. And discovers to her great satisfaction that Maggie has
been suspended from the Force. In consequence of this disclosure, Maggie falls under suspicion
for a recent murder in Chicago that Ben may have led her to the victim of and for which she
promptly evades possible arrest. Meg subsequently meets with Welsh and the others in his office
to discuss the matter and repeatedly defends Ben to Welsh regarding his involvement in the
situation: she has been jealous of Maggie, but now is protective of Ben. Later, troubled by the
fact that Maggie can see his father, he is able to gather sufficient evidence to convince himself
that his father is hers as well and that she is, in fact, his half-sister, the only living family he has.
The revelation is quickly followed by his discovery of Maggie breaking into the Consulate to
retrieve her pack; after a heated discussion, she runs out the entrance, straight past a surprised
Meg, who orders him to apprehend her: “Stop her, Constable!” Conflicted between family and
duty, he can only stand and look on as she flees. It is a clear violation of his duty as an officer
and Meg, as his superior, feels she has no choice but to suspend him: “She’s one of us but she
broke the law; it was your duty to bring her in; you had her and you let her get away. Yes, Sir.
This would be an appropriate time to offer some sort of explanation, Constable. There’s nothing
I can say, Sir. I’m sorry, Fraser, but you give me no other choice.” Ceremoniously cutting his
lanyard, she orders: “Take off that uniform, clear off your desk, bring me your files. Yes, Sir.”
Now, he and Maggie have this in common as well. Even having suspended him, Meg wants to
keep him close to her, adding: “Uh, you can continue to live here, if you like, until you make
some other kind of arrangements. Thank you, Sir.” Why has she suspended him? It is perhaps
less an act of punishment than of protection. Just as she had defended him to Welsh earlier, she
is here trying to defend him from Maggie, who she now sees as a loose cannon trying to make
use of him for her own retributive ends. She has acted to protect him before, as when he had
gone missing with Kowalski in “Mountie on the Bounty”, when she had proposed to Welsh that
they join forces to look for them: “I think we should mount a coordinated search effort; I am
offering you the entire resources of the Canadian Consulate. And those would be? Constable
Turnbull and myself…and the wolf.” Here, she acts to protect him again: in suspending him, she
is perhaps trying to shock him from his attachment to the woman, to awaken him to the gravity
of the situation she sees him in. There is neither malice nor satisfaction in the act: she deeply
regrets having to do it. As his commanding officer, the enforcement of discipline is a duty she
must carry out; as a woman who cares deeply for him, that same discipline is a way, she hopes in
the end, to keep him safe with her.

In “Call of the Wild”, a plot by Fraser Sr.’s old nemesis Holloway Muldoon to sell Russian nerve
gas to terrorists is uncovered. Describing the potential large-scale peril of the situation to Welsh,
Meg adds: “It’s really quite exciting. Exciting? Well, at the risk of sounding self absorbed, a

38
successful resolution to a case of this magnitude could provide me with a promotion and a
transfer to Toronto.” Frannie is suddenly hopeful that, with Meg removed from the scene and
Ben staying on, perhaps even replacing her, things might soon be looking up between them.
Inquiring as to the possibility, she immediately has these hopes dashed by Meg’s curt response:
“Constable Fraser is my second-in-command; he’s coming with me.” Frannie, realizing that he
is in all likelihood passing out of her life and that she will never have him, tries at least to force
Meg to see him in terms of his needs. She takes her into the observation room adjoining an
interview room where Ben and the others are in the midst of interrogating a remarkably large
man: “Look at him…incredible isn’t he? He’s huge…I’d say at least 400… No, not him;
Fraser…look at him.” She pushes on: “He was born on the tundra, I mean that’s where he
belongs…you’ll kill him if you take him to Toronto. That’s a bit drastic, don’t you think? Look
I’ve been to Toronto, OK?; trust me nothing can survive there…look at him, I mean really look
at him.” There, unseen behind the one-way glass, Meg looks at him, and sees him, not as a
subordinate she has come increasingly to rely upon, not even as a man whom she has come to
love, not in terms of her own needs and desires, but in terms of what his own needs might be.
There is tenderness, longing and loss in that look, for she can see the choice she must make
already rising before her; she has long feared losing him and now she fears letting him go. Later,
at the Consulate, she breaks the news to him of their impending transfer: “We’re going home,
Sir? If we’re present for the capture of Muldoon, we could virtually guarantee ourselves a
transfer.” After a digression on Buck Frobisher’s digestion, she continues: “Do you ever think
about it Fraser? Digestive problems? Home. Oh, home…yes. As do I…the air, the shopping, the
cafe lattés…I miss Toronto like you’d miss an old boyfriend you’d discarded… Toronto,
Sir…I’m sorry, it’s just when you say home, well I…well I tend to think a little further north.
Oh.” Both here and in her earlier interaction with Welsh, Meg displays a selfishness and
ugliness of character out of keeping with much of what we know of her; much of this should
simply be taken as a kind of contrasting foil for what is to come.

Later, as she and Ben chase Muldoon up a flight of stairs, she pauses and turns to him: “We
don’t have to go, you know. Up these stairs? No, to Toronto…I mean, if you don’t…we could go
somewhere else. Understood.” She wants to keep him with her; even if she will not have him,
she cannot bear to lose him from her life. She had not thought sufficiently in terms of what his
own desire might be until Frannie had forced the issue upon her. She is disturbed when he
subsequently confirms Frannie’s insight as to where home for him really lies. She misses
Toronto but would miss him more, and tries to make a way for them to stay together that will
address his own desire for home, even if it means abandoning hers. Having reached the top of
the stairs, they at last confront Muldoon on, of all things, an indoor Ferris wheel; when Muldoon
leaves a nerve gas bomb on one of the crossbeams, they work in smooth unison while suspended
upside down to successfully defuse it. Their synchronized countdown – “One… Two… Three.”
– recalls their earlier coordination – “One… Two… Me!” – in disarming Cahill at the end of
“Asylum”. In fact, every time the two of them are forced by extremity to disregard the formality
of superior and subordinate rank, they work in partnership together brilliantly: doing battle with
eggs, handcuffed together on the train, semaphoring between buildings, disarming a man holding
her at gunpoint and now defusing a bomb. In a humorous scene in “Mountie Sings the Blues”,
she rails against the security concerns of her colleagues in another ministry: “Danger!...as if
those pencil-neck geeks in Industry, Trade and Commerce would know danger if it jumped up
and pierced their spleen with an ice pick…I know danger. I live danger,” the last said as she

39
fiercely licks the seal of an envelope. Ben, deadpan as usual, simply responds: “Indeed you do,
Sir.” The scene is played for irony, but the fact is, despite her pretensions to a desk, she has
lived danger and will do so again. What she does not care for is discomfort. After flying first
class on AirCanada – “Chicken?...fish?...full body massage?” – she endures a frozen journey by
dogsled to the RCMP outpost near Franklin Bay; as she remarks to Turnbull when they at last
arrive: “Worst four hours of my life.” Having dismounted from the sled, she inquires of
Frobisher: “What I need is a good hot bath. Well, nothing in the way of a bath here…never felt
the need for it myself…though there are people who do go outside and roll around in the snow.”

After various adventures and misadventures, Ben and Kowalski manage to join Frobisher’s
detachment of Mounties. At last reunited with Ben, having made camp for the night, she seeks
him out and takes him aside: “I’ve been thinking about the matter of our transfer; you know, I
look out at this cold, barren, empty landscape, where any mistake could be your last, where
you’re surrounded by endless miles of silence with only yourself for company and I, and I can’t
think of a life less appealing…but obviously, it’s where you belong. Yes Sir, I think it is.” She
has come to know firsthand that she cannot bear life in the North, but, seeing him here, knows
also that this is his true home. She could possibly force the issue, order him to come to Toronto
with her, attempt to block any subsequent request for transfer he might make. She knows she
cannot. She loves him and as a final act of that love, she must let go of him. In what is the most
selfless gesture she has ever made toward him, she gives him his freedom. The compassion she
showed to him long ago in “Witness” – accepting him as her subordinate, giving him the
unspoken freedom to pursue fieldwork – has come full circle and completed itself. She had not
loved him then; now, caring for him, it is at once easier and so much harder. He understands
what she is doing and its consequence for both of them; as she tells him of her incompatibility
with the life he loves – “…I can’t think of a life less appealing…” – he knows is it the final
foreclosure of any happiness together they might have still tenuously hoped for. He can only
hang his head at the sadness of it. He has loved her for a long time – since the train, if not before
– and, even if he had distanced himself from her after their misunderstanding over her desire for
a child, he has never ceased being loyal to her or caring for her. He is loyal to her even now, has
served and protected her, and if she asked him to come to Toronto, he would likely come with
her to serve her there. She gives him his freedom; despite the wound their parting is for both of
them, he accepts her gift. In a last gesture of intimacy, she turns to him: “So then this could be
our… Possibly. Then maybe we should… Maybe…” And they tenderly kiss one last final time.
The scene cuts away to the sight of tents illumined from within by lantern light and the sudden
howling of men and wolves.

Two questions remain. First, they kiss, but only in the original CTV airing, and not in
subsequent airings or recorded releases of the episode. Somewhere, the decision was made that
the scene should be cut. Why? Why deny them – and the audience – that intimacy? Even in the
cut version, it is clear that they do kiss, even if unseen. Second, does the scene of tents and
howling cut to immediately following their kiss bear any larger signification? Upon reflection, it
seems clear that it does; the reason may be found in, of all things, the work of Alfred Hitchcock.
The influence of Hitchcock’s work on various episodes of the series is telling: the title of “The
Man Who Knew Too Little” is borrowed from his The Man Who Knew Too Much; the plot of
“Victoria’s Secret” closely follows his North by Northwest, even showing clips from the movie,
with Ben and Victoria discussing the motives of Eve Kendall; the plot of “Letting Go” is

40
modeled on his Rear Window; the plot of “Perfect Strangers” closely resembles his Strangers on
a Train. A particular stylistic device that Hitchcock made occasional use of was that of symbolic
innuendo, the classic example being North by Northwest – certainly the most decisive Hitchcock
film upon the series generally – which ends with a passionate kiss followed by a cutaway scene
of a train going into a tunnel. And of course, being near Franklin Bay on the northern edge of
the Northwest Territories, they are, quite literally and by any reasonable reckoning, north by
northwest. We would suggest that the two adjacent scenes – the final tender kiss shared between
them and the sight of warmly inviting tents and howling men and wolves – bear much the same
symbolic intent, and that the two of them do share a last, sole consummation before parting.
Given the love they have for one another, the tension they have long borne for one another and
the need of both for catharsis, one would wish this for them, as well as the privacy that the
howling of wolves affords.

The canon has ended, the curtain has closed and they have gone their separate ways. Each has
gone to a greater isolation: he to the barren, uninhabited North in search of the mythical hand of
Franklin, she to the clandestine world of mirrors and masks of the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service. So much of this tale between them has been about their respective isolation, how it has
been at once a protection and a prison for them, and how the love they bore for one another
struggled and ultimately failed to overcome it. God willing, they will each find love – even,
perhaps, each other – again, somewhere, some time offstage, but love in this world is a rare and
precious thing. Frannie, of all people, in “Heaven and Earth”, saw more clearly than either of
them just what was at stake: “You are so afraid to reach out for something that you really
want…you know what happens to people like you?...they get old, they get alone and they
die…and they never know.” One would wish better for them than this, and pray that they find it.

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