Some thoughts on 'Odds'

[mekare]

I watched Odds and have some *cough* thoughts about the famous massage scene (there‘s also a fic rec): https://mekare.dreamwidth.org/93981.html

I‘d also love to hear some thoughts on how much manipulation is going on there on Fraser‘s side (that Lady Shoes is manipulating is a given I believe).

Comments

[verushka70]

Wow, sorry this reply is so late... apparently I am not getting notices in my email from ds-noticeboard. (I can't use my cell phone for social media at work, nor can I get to DW, LJ, or AO3 at work all day on the work computers... they're blocked... so I rely on email notices to tell me when people post to comms...)

My understanding, via some old interviews with PG around the time the 3rd season was in original broadcast*, was that Odds was the "we couldn't get Melina Kanakaredes to come back as Victoria due to scheduling conflicts, so we wrote another femme fatale-based plot instead" effort by PG and the writers. I do not have those interviews; they were online, on web sites which are long gone.

But if you look at Denny Scarpa, she is kind of Victoria-like. Taking care of herself first, playing angles, playing Fraser. Only he's wise to her in ways he wasn't during Victoria's Secret - and one could argue it was his (and Vecchio's) experiences in VS that led to Fraser's "I'm learning" attitude towards bluffing.

On the original DS email discussion listserv at the time of the original broadcast of that episode, some of the S1-S2/Vecchio stalwarts who didn't like what PG was doing with Fraser remarked rather unfavorably on Fraser's un-Fraser-like behavior at the end of that ep, when he fakes like he's going to drop Scarpa by switching his hands. It wasn't the only S3(/S4) episode to which some people reacted with "Fraser would never do that" thoughts... but it was one of them, that I remember.

OTOH, Scarpa isn't like Victoria in some ways - most notably in that she's not trying to teach Fraser a lesson about what he did to her in the past -- they have no past relationship. Scarpa is in pursuit of vigilante justice against the man who killed her brother when she wasn't there to protect him. So in that respect, although she was highly manipulative of Fraser, she didn't have the same agenda as Victoria at all.

And one would think, given Fraser's typically more sympathetic attitude towards certain criminals (and his own fraught relationship and baggage with his own parents/grandparents/family)that he would have been more sympathetic towards Scarpa, even though she was clearly pursuing justice outside the law, presumably because she would never be able to get any legal dirt on the rich guy who killed her brother.

So when you get to the end of the ep, and you realize Fraser's been playing dumb for almost the whole time and he's been manipulating her while she was trying to manipulate him... it is kind of shocking, because he doesn't typically lack sympathy towards criminals (or anyone) who've been wronged, and doesn't typically behave in a less than professional and courteous manner... which switching which hand you're holding of a person who almost fell off a 3rd or 4th floor drop doesn't exactly exemplify... know what I mean?

So while that did seem somewhat ooc for Fraser to many fans, it can also be read as "Fraser learned his lesson after Victoria." Although then that also introduces some inconsistencies, like why doesn't Fraser seem or behave more betrayed than he is in canon by Janet the bounty hunter? She also uses him and withholds information. She doesn't directly lie to him like Scarpa (a black lie), but she lies by omission (a white lie). So what gives? Dead!Bob is more indignant and suspicious of Janet initially than Fraser is. Weird, huh?

*in the US, S3 and S4 were broadcast as one long American TV season, back when network show seasons typically started in August or September, and ran for 20-24 episodes until May or June. For US viewers, it was kind of irritating when the DVDs first came out -- you couldn't buy the entire (US) S3 on one DVD set, like you had with S1 and S2... you had to buy S3 for the first half of American S3, and buy S4 for the second half of the American dS S3 episodes... making the last season of dS twice as expensive for American viewers. Boo.