The Pilot versus Burning Down the House

[gloriana]

Hello all, a relatively new dS fan here. I'd posted this up to my journal last night, and akamine_chan thought it might be of interest here (see, I know how to pass on the blame :)) So here goes:

Having stumbled into dS back in August, I'm rewatching the canon again, especially the first and second series which I've only seen once.


So there are five deliberate echoes between the introduction of Fraser and Ray V in the Pilot, and the later introduction of Ray K.

• When Fraser first meets Ray V, Ray is in a cell pretending to be a dealer in stolen merchandise to entrap a suspected felon. After Fraser blows his cover (cue Call of the Wild for closure on that one), they have a little conversation about pretending to be who you're not (in which Fraser also blows the cover of the felon, who's really an Internal Affairs guy trying to catch Ray out). And of course the meat of Burning down the House is the question of Ray K's identity, and whether he's the person he's supposed to be. Both Rays are introduced to Fraser in false roles.
• Ray V identifies the hired killer who murdered Bob Fraser by the profile of his nose. In BdtH, Fraser takes a measurement of Ray K's nose to prove who he's not.
• When Ray V and Fraser follow the lead given to them by the hired killer's wife, and walk into the booby-trapped apartment, Ray V spots the tripwire on the floor and hurls himself across the room to push Fraser out of the way, getting himself semi-blown-up in the process. Ray K, who has at least had some warning in his briefings about what life with Fraser might be like, has the common sense to be wearing a kevlar vest in their pursuit of Greta Garbo. But he also throws himself in the path of danger to rescue Fraser. The willingness of both Rays to risk themselves for Fraser, straight off the bat when they've only just met him, are core elements of the relationship that's built up between both pairs of partners.
• In BdtH, Fraser's apartment is, obviously, burnt down. In the Pilot, Fraser's cabin is blown up (by Ray, as he escapes the hired killers). Both incidents leave Fraser homeless (as the Pilot also renders him on a larger level, as he is effectively kicked out of Canada). There are also little tracelines through to the times when Fraser destroys Ray's Riv; which might not be his home, but is certainly the thing he most cherishes. One could read this as a larger statement about the ways friendship destroys and remakes and entails pain. Or one could not :)

And the fifth had sped right back out of my mind until cbtreks reminded me of it, which is that, at the very beginning, Fraser goes on a ludicrous hunt for the guy who's overfishing, ending with the conversation with his CO saying 'a tribal elder will be contacting you...'. In BdtH the ludicrous chase is for the guy polluting,and yet again the tribal leader will be contacting the CO. Both conversations get interrupted with news of a major loss for Fraser: in the first, he finds out about his father's death; in the second, he gets the phone call from Ray that, although he doesn't know it, ends their partnership.

The cleverness of the writing for this series, and that they would bother with this sort of mirroring, has me in deep joy.