25 Days of Christmas #2: Due South: "Good for the Soul"

My second Christmas special this year is Due South #408: Good for the Soul. As you might guess, then, this episode is about confession. Yesterday, we talked about Paul Haggis's Catholic upbringing, which necessarily included an emphasis on confessing one's sins. His later devotion to the CoS also emphasized confession of one's shortcomings, but Mr. Haggis didn't write this episode. It was written by Peter Mohan, about whose personal life I know nothing. Of course, this episode comes so late in the series that Mr. Mohan's own beliefs are unlikely to enter into the story anyway...

As always, this review will contain spoilers.

The episode begins in a mall, as Kowalski has just gotten the must-have present for... well, he got it. Fraser stops to purchase a lovely piece of wood.

Suddenly, our heroes overhear a kerfuffle of some kind. Turns out a young waiter has enraged some guy, who slaps him. The angry guy turns out, as this is Chicago, to be a big evil mob boss, who's walked on murder charges before. Surely, Fraser's moral quest to get justice for the waiter will be defeated by the mob boss's high-priced lawyers and decades of legal inertia. Nonetheless, we can trust that Fraser will always, always, do the thing that is right, rather than the thing that is easy. So he stakes out the mob boss's club, earning a beating which is pretty upsetting to watch. As Fraser comes to realize the legal system may not see that justice is done, he expends a lot of energy trying to get Warfield, the mob boss, to confess to his crime.

This episode comes very late in the series' run, and there are a lot of established characters who must appear in this episode: Deif, Fraser's wolf, is in love with a poodle (do you call those puppies woofoodles?). Inspector Thatcher lectures Fraser about sheltering the waiter in the consulate, while Constable Turnbull is getting into the Christmas spirit with his Clint Black Christmas album. (That album, incidentally, does NOT include a song called "Santa Drives a Pickup Truck.")

If Constable Turnbull looks a bit familiar to you, perhaps you know him better as a "reality" star; he's (as of this writing) married to Tori Spelling.

There's nothing really wrong with this episode as a whole, but there's nothing particularly great about it either. It shows Fraser taking a noble ethical stand, with consequences harsher than he usually faces, but the series consistently shows us that Fraser is practically always a good person, and a better cop. This is a perfectly-good, acceptable late episode of the series, with a few really good jokes and, for some reason, an Edward Scissorhands reference.

As an episode of Due South, I rate this 5/10 -- sounds harsh, but NAME a bad Due South -- they're all at least good..
As a Christmas show, I rate this about 6/10 - plenty of music and decorations, talk of gifts and a Christmas toast at the end.

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