Will Riley
There’s an ice cream parlor on commercial drive that I used to really like. It’s called Dolce and Moray, and it’s many was really solid. It’s hard to screw up lemon gelato, but it’s really hard to make one that exceeds expectations. And while they manage that, sadly when they put their funds into expanding into the rest of Vancouver, they also paid a marketing team who told them they should redesign around stereotypical mafia theming their slogan is now criminally delicious and they go around calling themselves the gelato mafia on social media. They created a bunch of fake crime families based on their products, the fruta family, the choco crew, the pastry posse, the the chains flavors are all named stuff like peanut butter pie, Zano pistachio Padrino. Somehow they don’t have a banana ice cream that’s named after the Banano family. I mean, all this because a company’s name means sweet love in Italian. I don’t like it. This is off topic. Anyway. The point of all this is that the original location got burned down a while ago.
Will Riley
me and some friends walked past it one night, and I peeked through a hole in the papered over windows. It’s a freaky sight. The rest of the block is fine. But just this one building has zero places where the fire hasn’t touched. The place is pitch black, which was particularly weird when you remember the place was coded floor to ceiling in bright white tile. The smoke stained everything that much. It’s ironic, I said to my friends, the idea that a place selling ice cream could burn down. I don’t follow one of my friends said adjusting their field Robin backpack. What do you mean? Ironic? I mean, it’s a place that deals with frozen stuff, but it caught fire that’s kind of different than you’d expect. No, I don’t get it. You’re working with refrigeration units which have compressors and compressors caused fires all the time. And ice cream place would probably be more at risk of fire than other places. What do you mean by irony here? Well, yeah, I’m sure that’s true. But I mean, you get what I mean right Fire Ice, the opposites involve. It’s sort of unexpected. I don’t think it’s unexpected at all. Another friend piped in knocking mud off there, John fluevog boots. When you make ice cream, you need heat to make most of the ingredients so they can glom or eight sometimes even put them in an oven before they even get close to being frozen. There’s nothing surprising about a fire happening. All the fuel for these appliances need to be stored in big fragile Red Barrels like in a video game. It’s a high risk operation. She pulled out her phone and showed it to me. I mean, look, there’s already been like two other fires in ice cream parlor since this one. It’s unfortunate but it’s not that weird. A notification sound played. See another one just caught fire just right now. Yeah, no, I get it. But linguistically, linguistically nothing my other friend interrupted, pulling down his roots hoodie in frustration. You always do this saying totally baseless stuff and then trying to weasel your way out whenever someone pushes back even you should understand that ice cream parlor owners all make pacts with have Festus before they can open and have Festus is a jealous and temperamental God punishing the disbelievers with erupting flame. He pushed the screen of his phone towards me. He had an academic article open from the Journal of Canadian engineering titled every single ice cream establishment on the planet is currently on fire to some degree or another colon a survey. I relented. Look, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was talking about. Forget I ever said it. Thank you. One of them said as we walked off, you really need to think a bit before you just blurt out whatever and expect it to make sense to other people. I mean, not to be rude. It’s just really annoying.
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I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked off in the distance as we headed down to the Rio theatre. As we came to a flat bit in the road, I saw four or five plumes of smoke emerging from different sources across the horizon. I opened my mouth for a second then I shut it firmly.
Danger, danger, danger. Danger hasn’t come forward yet.
Just gonna sit down
Will Riley
Hey everybody, infinite danger returns yet again, you probably haven’t noticed. But there was actually a bit of a gap between recordings for the last episode and this one, I was out on business. You know, I’m managing a danger Bay podcast. So I figured I’ve got to do some gumshoe reporting and go to where the action is, as far as danger pay is concerned. So I went to neon, neon, the line The line city out in Saudi Arabia, they’re opening a danger Bay themed pavilion in the line city, as you’ve probably heard, I just went around to see the construction and to see how everything’s coming together. You know, they’ve got some orca Tang, they’ve got a replica giant sea urchin statue, you know, some of the some of the things that you would probably expect when you hear about danger Bay wildlife laws in neon being what they are, there was somebody who’d actually fashioned a whole coat made out of sea otters, and they were going around going for photo ops. So I’ve got a nice photo of me in a big sea otter count. That was kind of fun. The big highlight right now because the place is still being built is this thing that Saudi Aramco put together, it’s, I guess, you would call it a water based mural, effectively, you know, how Dubai has those various world map islands and all of that? Well, this is something meant to commemorate danger Bay, and they made this big mural. Sort of as thanks for giving all these life lessons about marine biology and nature, conservation and things like that. It’s this giant picture of an orca made entirely out of crude oil. At least I think that that’s what it was. I mean, it’s big enough that you have to use a satellite image actually figure out what it is, but I saw a picture of it. And it’s pretty orca ish. And I mean, orcas are black whales. So obviously, you’re what’s the blackest thing that Aramco has on hand? It’s its oil. So they made this basically, I guess you’d call it an organized oil spill in the ocean. And, and I mean, there’s a whole lot of valid ways that you can show off your fandom and appreciation for danger Bay as a show and all the lessons that it’s given. So I’d say that this is just as valid as any other. Granted in the interest of full disclosure, I should disclose. I was paid to be there. Danger Bay, Episode Four. It’s called salmon run and production code is one dash 003. After that little detour with Stuart Margolin and rabies, we’re back to dealing with poachers. This time, however, we’re going about catching these poachers in a slightly different way. So we had the regular action show genre and then we had the Western two episodes back. Now we’ve turned this into a detective show. We’ve got a couple of fish mysteries that need to be solved and who better to get to write your episode if you’re dealing with cop shows and mysteries then a man called Chris haddock.
Will Riley
In the modern day, Chris haddock is a pretty important person in the Canadian TV cosmology, particularly in Vancouver, because he is the writer and creator of a show called de Vinci’s inquest.
The eyes the venture you’re about to Cordova Main Street and I need someone down here
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which is one of those few TV shows this in danger bay that is explicitly set in Vancouver. Where do you think
you could drop? Well, if there’s a jumper My guess would be the second narrows. That’s getting popular.
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started in the late 90s. right on the cusp of that prestige TV moment. Diff Vinci’s inquest is a cop show in the sort of twist of this show is that the main character Dominic DaVinci, is officially not a cop. He is the Vancouver city coroner, whereas having a coroner in some TV shows has been a way to have a forensic evidence angle to the show a CSI thing basically here. The coroner does not have a medical degree. I guess you’d call Homicide. Homicide, okay. I’m gonna call he is there because he is somebody who can talk about death in a municipal politics way.
1300 oldies, five years later, Most
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of the episodes are murder mysteries. But then you can flip around and start talking about municipal politics. So there are episodes where a bad batch of heroin gets into the supply and the mystery becomes finding out where it’s coming and wondering why you want to use
the infant for burial. Or I want an explanation as to how heroin gets in a baby’s system, or
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more episodes than you’d expect about workplace safety violations, you can go off into talking about something entirely different other than a murder mystery, if you want. You’d be surprised how often characters invoke the fact that coroner’s are appointed by the provincial government and not the city. How often that actually happens in the show. It allows the character allows the main character to go whenever he wants, oh, I’m not a cop. whenever it’s convenient for the show, for him to say that he’s not a cop, even if most of the time he acts walks and talks like a cop and every other character other than Dominique DaVinci is a cop, but it does mean that more than a lot of other law and order type shows they’re able to acknowledge police botching stuff whenever it happened. A good deal of the first season of Da Vinci’s inquest revolves around the fact that there’s a serial killer on the loose, and he’s been on the loose for so long, because none of the cops were able to actually tie any of these murders together and just treated them all individually.
There is a killer out there. What if he’s operating right under our noses? You’re speculating. You don’t know that. And you’re speculating
with public money and professional reputation
and people’s lives and I forget about those but I know the junkies and know how prison that don’t pay a lot of taxes. So insult me with this, Dominic. I don’t deserve it. So I’ll tell you, Chief, you tell me to stop you just tell me drop this. I’ll drop it. I swear to God right now.
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I bring this plotline up specifically, because the cop that watches those cases is the recurring character throughout the show named Leo who is played by none other than Well, Donnelly roads,
what the hell do you mean by reopening my old cases? You think I don’t have enough work to do? Or maybe my reputation these little dirt kick? Maybe
it’s both I think they might fit
a pattern. Spiders on acid make patterns? Then us take us on please. You got the wheel.
Will Riley
Roads enjoyed working with Chris haddock enough that as danger Bay evolved and changed and Jonah and Nicole started to move into the forefront. Donnelly Rhodes was able to make a bit of time and play one of the side characters into Vinci’s inquest for a good long time. And
that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t got any friends. Or you got his employees. Your own goddamn little army of serfs.
Will Riley
It was sometimes a hard show to film because obviously, anytime Donnelly Rose was on set there were all these people with cameras, people holding out their babies, people with their rosaries. But nonetheless, the show went off pretty well. And the he was a pretty successful character in the show, when he was interviewed about the job of swapping between the characters of grant Roberts and Leo Donnelly road said something to the effect that it was fun going back to something a little more back to basics for somebody who would make mistakes and be sort of a curmudgeon, just trying
to figure out what we have here. COVID got slammed around. That’s what brought her up here for a quick bang. She got feisty, they went toe to toe at once. I’m not shocked. But
Will Riley
it was comforting to play a character with a lot more flaws. He said. At this point, Grant proper, it’s in danger. Bae was regularly grabbing full size shipping containers with one hand and throwing them at smugglers, which he said was getting a little too unrealistic. And I mean, to be fair to Donnelly roads, I do get the criticism but at the same time to be fair to danger Bae The reason he was able to do this was that rat Roberts had been cybernetically enhanced at this point. So in universe it was it did make sense. It was realistic in that sense. De Vinci’s inquest is a show that really does hold up very well. I would really recommend watching it especially the first season there’s some stuff that is really weird and wild about the show just in general, because it was trying to break the cop show format in so many ways, the amount of episodes where it turns out that there wasn’t a killer at all, or that it was just an accident or that they find out who the killer is and then the killer gets off scot free because none of the evidence is admissible. All the ways that they try to break convention of a police show is very surprising, for better or worse. There are Use scenes where danger Bay’s influence can be still felt in a weird way. Of course, I mean, the amount of times a murder assault by a clue like the wrong algae growing in someone’s fish tank or the migratory patterns of seals, it can make your eyes roll a little bit, but I mean, danger Bay casts a long shadow, of course. So it’s gonna be like that. The external history of this show is also pretty wild because the main character, dominant DaVinci, was based off of a real coroner in Vancouver, and one with a very specific political platform, which meant that this coroner was able to run for mayor on the basis that he was a character from television. And when he got to be the mayor, and then the final season of the Vinci’s inquest, is about the coroner character in that show, becoming the mayor and the show becomes about running a city. So the running of this TV show and this real life, coroners, political ambitions effectively mutually reinforced each other, not just instance of life imitating art but art actually directly influencing life almost like a sort of a magic trick. And I mean, once you take that into account, you can sort of imagine and understand why Chris crab, has Jonah Roberts do what he does nowadays, having relationships with all these popular supermodels having his character on multiple sports teams, access to nuclear launch codes, you know, the the gamma, but anyhow DaVinci is impressed is a show that definitely merits rewatch it in the current year. I mean, it’s good. I mean, it’s no danger Bay, obviously. But let’s say if you want to watch a TV show where the dad from porn or gas, murders a sex worker, and then he gets caught based off of the parasites in a potato that he ate, I guess this is the show for you. God bless.
Happy living times. Things that made her so special to us. Those memories make us the other thing For Colored Girls.
Will Riley
The cold open for this show, starts off with some really good eye candy. We’ve got a guy standing in the middle of a stream, and he’s showing off this really cool basically a rocket propelled net gun like some real GI Joe Show. You see things like this and cartoons a lot. But the real thing is way cooler. And it’s actually way harder to animate than what it is in real life. He pulls the trigger and a big swath of rope come sneaking out the grappling hook at the end lodges into a rock. And then there’s this big wide net that is going across the entirety of this stream and it’s gonna catch a whole bunch of salmon. out of season salmon, I might add, even before we find about the out of season salmon, of course, this guy is very poacher coded. And I mean, he does have a great fit. He’s got this green plaid, and these chunky black boots with bronze accents that really pop and he’s obviously very proud of these boots because he’s tucked his pants into him. So everybody on camera can see how cool this guy’s boots are holding a giant GI Joe rope gun like this. You can see the merchandising opportunity for a danger Bay toy line. And obviously that’s what they were pushing for. And sure enough, the net gun is in the first line of DB action figures, although they gave the net gun accessory to Hagen begs this figure, which is sort of a inconsistency there. But hey, I mean, it’s cool. I think they call it punk. I mean, I’ve got some of my DB action figures around the house right now. I’m looking at my glass case right now I’ve got a Arctic assault Nicole and a rooftop pursuit grant Roberts they’re both personal favorites. The poacher tells his comrade in crime that they still need to check another cabin. So we have a first person view of hands pushing a branch out of the way to observe a cabin in a creepy voyeuristic way. Possibly. It’s not in good shape as far as cabins are concerned and all the windows are like an inch wide. Oh firewood is stacked out in front. They’re trying to make this cabin look spooky. But really, it just looks a little dilapidated. I mean, it’s a real fixer upper. I mean today at the market it would only go for like 2 million or something. It’s not that big of an investment, the theme song plays and then we’ve got an establishing shot of Roberts Island, though it’s not the same perfect 360 view we’ve seen a good few times during act breaks. This is like a brand new shot of the Roberts household. Joyce the pontoon plane pilot walks into the Roberts house with a big fresh fish wrapped in newspaper danger the river otter shows up wandering in trying to get a bite down, you can’t turn around. Hi. Hi there, Violet. So remember that there was a river otter in this show, like she was the crux of how this show came to be. And the show is named after her and she just disappears so often. Like this is the first time that we’ve seen danger in forever. Joyce has showed up to have dinner with the Roberts family. And grant is just sitting there chopping random vegetables in front and he’s got a big pan. I love the stock way that random vegetables are put in front of grants cutting board. I’m not exactly sure what grant can cook when what you’ve got in front of you are three beefsteak tomatoes, white onion chopped at a random thickness and then a single thumb sized red radish the Roberts kids joke around got
here just the nick of time the kids are about to stage a food drive I’m wasting away you
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can see that they’re playing a board game as they wait for the food to come. It’s a board game called probe which is a sort of a word guessing game. It’s one of these word a likes I suppose you call it I checked recent reviews of this game because I’ve never heard a pro before. The number one review just says a play hangman instead it’s got an average rating of 5.8 on board game geek.com. Joyce pulls this salmon out of the newspaper and it is like massive it is a whole salmon and it is fully grown wait to you cast your eyes on
Matthew Keeley
this little beard and
I will have that fileted up in a nanosecond
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it is probably going from her waist all the way up to the top of her head. This thing is huge.
Where do you get this vision?
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Grant sees the fish and he’s initially impressed. But then he immediately gets suspicious particularly about the size. Probably because he’s in charge of the aquarium. He knows how much money Joyce is making and looks at it and goes no, no, you’re not getting paid enough to afford a fish that big. I made sure of it turns out Joyce bought this salmon from what she calls a couple of hustlers selling it out of the back of their truck, a couple of hustlers were selling them from the back of their camper at the dock. Obviously there’s tons of different shady things that you can sell in shady ways out of the back of your truck. But hearing this phrase used in an IK theological context is a little odd. They said it was fresh. I know
the eyeballs aren’t even glazed over yet mine are from hunger. The point is the commercial fishing season is closed and to be butchers
Will Riley
the fishing out of season it just never ends. It seems punching that guy off a boat did nothing at all. Tellingly grants concern about buying poached fish I mean fish that was stolen by other people, not the actual dish of poached fish. His concerns about poached fish don’t really have anything to do with the environmental concerns that you would expect. He’s not really worried about that he starts talking about the profits that are being cut into for law abiding fisheries.
The hatcheries have been taking enormous losses and if it keeps up they could go out of business.
Will Riley
Also one little inconsistency Grant was probably expecting a fish was coming in or otherwise he wouldn’t be preparing to cook a fish I’d like was he expecting he to get a frozen fish this whole time? What was he What was he doing all this random chopping around for? Grant Roberts officially declares that dinner is postponed so that he can do Crime Scene Investigation on a salmon
this fish is going to help tell us where those poachers are operating from this fish is now evidence and you can’t eat evidence he
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starts looking at the damage done by the gill net. And as goofy as all of this is this sort of detective work is fun to watch. You can tell in this early for hire episode that Chris haddock has an ambition to make police shows and to make detective dramas. You can tell like he’s he’s got the procedure down already. But
we do know that this visual was swimming upstream to the northwest hatchery when it was trapped. How can you tell that the adipose fin is missing? That’s how Norwest marks their salmon. So we know it was gotten the river below the hatchery. A hookah got slammed around. That’s what brought her up here for a quick bang, she got feisty, and they went toe to toe by looking
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at the marks that all these different fisheries make on these fish, he can tell this sort of geographic radius that the poaching must have occurred at conveniently, it turns out that there are people who already live in that radius that the Roberts family are already familiar with. Hey,
that’d be near uncle Burton uncle collies place. Oh, that two brothers real nice.
They’ve been living there forever. Well, for two years, actually.
Will Riley
So we cut to them. And it turns out that they were the ones living in that old cabin in the woods that was ominously looked at in the cold open.
Never could get over or you
couldn’t do that. Just a sense of texture. Ah, smell at
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air. Because uncle Kelly is blind. There are some great poetic so for all the random stuff that conjures up a patriotic and naturalist idea of BC.
I love this place. Bert, Bert. Yeah. Does that big old cedar still have an eagle’s nest on top? Yep. She’s still there. Kelly. What about the bottoms? There’s still snow on him.
Bonds are still air. snows gone.
Yes, it’s still just as beautiful as it ever was living
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the Canadian equivalent of the American Yeoman farmer living off the land. Except it’s a little more fish oriented. Hi,
smell that air.
Will Riley
Those fish. Now, quick, weird question, but a legitimate one. We’ve got two men living together into their old age. I mean, it’s a burden to release scenario. You know, are they are these? Are these characters brothers as they claim or are they brothers with quote marks around them? I mean, obviously, one of them is blind, so you have somebody else who’s caring for them. But I mean, like Chris haddock has a very modern bent to all of his writing. So it wouldn’t surprise me if these characters were at some point written to be an actual couple. I’ve only very recently had the concept of GM colts explained to me,
brothers, they’ve been living there forever.
Let’s go get some old wood.
Will Riley
There’s a quick bit of exposition that they give out that they don’t own the land anymore, but they’re allowed to live on it and to collect salmon off the land when it’s in season. This will prove to be important later on, which we still own it.
Don’t make much difference who owns the land Collie? It’s all on loan from the good Lord anyway. Rich or poor.
Life continues to be good if you’re welcome at this point great road waterfront mansion now valued at $82 million. And he’s in good company or at least rich company it’s all on loans when the good Lord anyway. Rich or poor. I guess. Come on, come on. Let’s
Will Riley
go get some oh, we’re also another trademark of Chris Haddix. Writing he loves to talk about legal special cases like this, like how I mentioned in future shows like The Vinci’s inquest, the fact that certain characters have different bosses or are are cops but are not cops based off of certain legal details. This is something that Chris haddock likes to write about. So having a character who lives in a house and lives off of the land around the house, but technically doesn’t own all of it. These are legal deadzones that Chris haddock likes to write about a lot. Burton Kelly leave their house so that they can go pick up some old wood and they do so in a truly antique looking pickup. Like between this and that wharf rat episode. The people running this show really love their depression era of February this is like a Grapes of Wrath style pickup truck. As they leave the music gets suspenseful. We see some guys in a campervan, watching them go they slide something into this little lockbox on the brother’s property and then they leave that’s my tracks alright Fred, I’m calling the cops now. Right. And as the shady people in the campervan leave, they leave so quickly they almost hit France Jeep with his kids inside and in the first little bit of genuine action of this show.
Will Riley
And that is immediately dissipated. After the Roberts recollect their thoughts. They finally meet up with Bert and Cali, Jonah and Nicole. There’s a long scene where Burton Cali reminisce with Grant and the kids about life and living in such a beautiful place in British Columbia. A lot of stuff talking about how great BC is that some
salmon smoked. And I know we saw it and we smelled it to why
you must have grown half a foot.
If you’ve got time, after you finish your business, why don’t you all come back to our place, Brad case that salmon.
Will Riley
And because we established via the salmon CSI scene that this is going to be a mystery episode. They’re effectively getting out of the way, establishing that Burton Calais are the most innocent men to ever walked God’s green earth, whatever thing they’re gonna get set up with in this episode.
All right, red, I’m calling in the cops now.
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We’re just establishing right now before any sort of moral complexity or uncertainty can creep into the episode that these people you know, whatever they get accused of, they didn’t do it and you can be sure of that
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grant takes this criminal evidence fish up to the fishery that he’s sourced it to. This is an interesting setting for the cameras to have their eye on. Wild Salmon is a big part of Vancouver’s culinary culture, as you can imagine, because it’s nearby and wild in particular, everybody will definitely tell you and they’re and they’re correct that wild salmon tastes better than farmed salmon. But what they don’t really show you is that facilities where they catch and process wild salmon look incredibly similar to where they farm a salmon. It’s just a matter of, well do we move them into this pan? Or do we grow them in this pen, but it looks almost exactly the same.
For babies, when they come back fully grown and raised
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to eat, you aren’t catching them truly wild like you would if you were catching them in a boat. If you are running a commercial Fordist model of wild salmon production, you’ve got a building that all these fish end up coming back to of their own volition. So it is still so it’s still effectively a factory farm even if the fish is while grant meets up with the fishery owner and the fishery owner to inspect the fish, it just lifts the fish and just puts it right up against his eyeballs. Like he’s rubbing his face in it looking for details. This is one
of ours. And I really appreciate this, you know, this is one more link in the chain of evidence against those guilty parties.
Will Riley
And they start talking about the potential places that the poaching might be coming from. Now I’m just going to spoil this whole thing. The fishery owner is in on the poaching in some way. And he is making money out of it. He has specific ends for why this poaching is happening. And the reason that I’m totally comfortable telling you that that’s what’s going to be revealed in this episode is that you look at this guy and you see that Chris haddock has made sure he is dressed every bit like a Colombo villa. My man has a three piece suit made out of corduroy bell bottom khakis, the legs are flared so that you can see his squared off boot just perfectly. That guy’s got a tie that has three different shades of earth tones on it. You look at him and the way that he’s dressed and you immediately imagine him going, why Lieutenant? Surely you’ve heard of a poke a bowl before. Now, to be sure the corduroy jacket is doing a lot of the work here. Steven Young is a handsome guy, but he doesn’t exactly have the physiognomy to be a Columbo his tan is just too orange and he’s got such fluffy hair that doesn’t quite fit the same bill. Basically Imagine if every episode of Colombo didn’t have the killer being hit orchestra conductor or the heiress of an ad agency fortune, but people who manage car dealerships instead it’s
always a pleasure to see you doctor robbers, but if you don’t mind, I’m running a little late and I am a very busy man. So if you could please make this brief. Then
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you’ve properly conjured in your head, the image I’m trying to lay out here. So here’s how this fishery owners personal episode of Colombo is going to go. Let’s call it let’s call it Peter Falk is Columbia who in Larson by law So when
I bought this property, I made an agreement with the original owners, they could stay here for the rest of their lives catch as much fish as they needed for their own personal use those two old men, they got greedy,
they broke up just to bid it you don’t think the big brothers had anything to do with it? I don’t think I know do anything like what you’re accusing them of. It’s not in their characters.
Dr. A bow change.
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steeping Young is planning to force the old man off of the land by marking them falsely as the poachers in this case. The obvious evidence that it’s a fraud is right there because I certainly don’t
think too old men in their 70s one of the blind qualify as hustlers Do you
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probably not exactly capable of an advanced poaching operation, let alone operating and action figure net gun so some of the obviousness of the fact that it’s a fraud is sort of intentional, because it’s meant to bring up a sense of indignation in the viewer as well as the morally upright characters in the show of seeing an obviously innocent person getting accused, but the fact that you are trying to establish to the cop that a old a blind band, probably roughly 70 years old, is capable of firing a GI Joe action figure net gun. It hardly seems admissible in court. Like I don’t see how far this scam would actually be able to run in real life. Grant and the owner keep arguing at length about how absurd these accusations obviously are. And what’s really great is that the owner starts gesturing at Grant using the fish in his hand he starts pointing at stuff and people with the fish that he’s holding
this whole thing is ridiculous. You don’t have a case against the backs of God evidence,
more evidence, tangible evidence, and I’m not allowed to disclose it right now. You see it’s with the police they’re taken care
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- So he says it’s a police matter now obviously, this man doesn’t understand what the chain of command is in Vancouver the police answered a grant not the other way around
10 minutes my son’s in that same area. Can you help us with this helicopter have a ground weird
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shot as this is going on? Jonah and Nicole are watching off at a distance as this argument goes. And they’re standing behind a big lineup of pressurized hoses probably for air. But I mean, there’s a weird visual going on here. As all this betrayal is going on in front of them. There’s a big row of what look like guns just sitting behind the characters. As the plot keeps speeding up here when Jonah and Nicole and grant all get back to Burton Kelly’s place. The cops are already there. The main police officer there is interrogating Burton Collie and you know giving them a big browbeating you’ve got a search warrant, Sergeant, I can get one the police officer has a disconcerting number of open buttons on his shirt. I guess it’s a hot day but it seems very unprofessional. You’re getting a life altering criminal accusation and you can see the undershirt of the guy doing it doesn’t seem that dignified. So we see the obvious reason that they chose one of these characters to be blind. Kelly has been told to open up the eyes shed. This was the box that those suspicious people in the van walked into and out of at the beginning of the episode, Kelly unlocks it as he’s asked the flings at wide open.
There you go. Look for yourselves. There’s no fish in there.
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What’s the matter, Bert? And he goes you see there’s no fish here. Would you leave us alone and sure enough, it is just full of salmon. A little too much of a comic mishap for what the actual consequences are going to be here which is which is placing eviction and criminal charges on to 70 year olds eviction criminal charges
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now because Chris haddock is a very good writer, he already knows that everybody’s sussed out that this Colombo villain guy is the bad guy in this episode.
The only one I can possibly think of is Mr. Clements instead
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of having a plotline where everybody goes, well, who could have possibly done this without ever acknowledging the one guy with a big badge on him that says I am evil. Everybody in the show knows what kind of episode they’re currently experiencing. So they all immediately point their fingers to the fishery owner and start trying to get the dirt on him. There’s a
couple of things that I want to go dig into Just hang tight. What
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follows is a weird little plot inconsistency if you ask me, despite the fact that this show has established for a good long while that grant Roberts is effectively the law. In this case, he sets burden Kelly up with a good lawyer rather than just taking the law into his own hands.
I call Dick Parker. He’s a legal Eagle. If anybody can help you, he’s the one. There are
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some scenes of grant Roberts talking to this lawyer over the phone. Apparently to get into a highfalutin lawyering mood grant puts on some classical music over the sound system, or about
your fee. I’ll take care of it. A year of house calls for your snazzy Schnauzers How many did she have?
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Hey, there’s some funny lines here between this imaginary lawyer over the phone. But the involvement of a lawyer at all, to me is kind of odd here. Grant has always been the renaissance man in this show. He can ride a boat. He knows about all these different underwater animals. He can ride a horse he knows about how to deal with rabies and so on and so on. It would make sense if grant just became their lawyer. It nobody would bat an eye if Grant was the lawyer. This lawyer in this particular episode seems to basically just exist to ensure that whenever grant does next in this episode technically isn’t vigilantism. You figure
the best defense is a good offense. Okay, I’ll go down to the land title’s office first thing in the morning. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate it.
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I mean, eventually, this all gets cleared up in later seasons of danger Bay. You’ll remember this episode in Season 10. I believe it was where Grant had to win multiple court cases representing himself in the same day and he did it with with a plum I might add.
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It’s a new day and grant goes to meet up with Burton Collie again, the establishing shot of grant coming back is pretty interesting. I have to say the kinds of things people with visual handicaps are capable of doing is pretty astonishing. But we start this scene with Burt and Kelly repairing their vintage Grapes of Wrath era truck and it’s cuddly. The blind one who’s getting his hands into the engine and turning the screws and bolts cuddly. The blind one is the one putting out his hand go asking for, you know, a five eighths wrench or whatever and then immediately going back and fixing the thing. I don’t doubt that that’s definitely something that somebody with a visual handicap is able to do. But the fact that it is done without any sort of mention from any of the characters. Like if there was some sort of dialogue explaining how Kali does it, or somebody on the screen is surprised and impressed that this is something the blind guy can do. Then it might make more sense from a narrative perspective. But the blind guy casually doing antique automotive mechanics is just presented without word. If I was Kelly’s lawyer, I would probably tell him you got to stop doing that around people. I’m trying to make sure that we can establish that you can’t use this GI Joe net gun. I
certainly don’t think two old men in their 70s one of the blind qualify as hustlers. Obviously
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this man couldn’t operate the GI Joe net gun and then somebody’s got a photo of you, Dixon, your Model T. This whole case falls apart. Thanks. I
appreciate it. Think about your fee. I’ll
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take care of it. Joe Nicole asked her dad. Hey dad, I know that we’ve established that everybody here thinks that the fishery owner is the guy in on this scam. But do you mind if we just go upstream anyway to see if a log jam might be the cause of the fish not showing up?
Can you say that log jams can block the fish from getting up river to the hatchery. Can we go check it then?
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Okay, but be careful. Hey, Dad, we’re gonna go get kidnapped so that the last act has stakes Is that okay? Yeah, sure. Just remember to wear a coat dear.
Bye. Go ahead. Kids have fun
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returns to the fishery ready to confront Steven young again. Steven Young is still dressed very much the same. He’s taken his jacket off, but he’s still got his fancy vest. He switched ties to three different earth tones. This show came out in 1984. But they are doing their level bass and making the Colombo parallels here to make sure that this guy is dressed as 70s as you could possibly manage. The entire scene here is very ADR are going out of sync, I’ll bet you anything is because the fishery is still in operation as they’re filming this thing that or because the entire place is going to smell like fish, they are probably closing up their noses as much as they can or they just can’t stop coughing. The new little wrinkle to this fish plus that’s going on here is that the fishery owner only lets Burton Cali live on their land so that he could buy it from them for a cheaper price.
Those are copies of the four bids made on the back property when it came up for auction, including yours. One of them was twice what you paid for the property the other two just a little bit less. And despite that you
got the property. Why? Because I’m the one that allowed the BEX to stay on the property. And you were the only
one who agreed to that condition. Why was that compassion? It shouldn’t be
very hard for you to understand Mr. Roberts. But yes, it was compassion or was it greed at this
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point, the Colombo parallels are just getting to self evident at least in terms of the scripting. The villain here just looks at Grant Roberts and literally just says the line.
You have no proof of my intentions or of my deeds, which
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is just a perfect Colombo line. You just say the same line with Lieutenant in front of it and you just have a Colombo line. Now lieutenants You have no proof of my intentions or my teens. But for the sake of your argument, let’s pretend that I did murder the steel magnate with a nice block.
The fact is that I am on very solid ground and these are out. So Dr. Rabbits are you that that’s the dog.
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As this is all going on Joe Nicole go and look for that mystery log jam. Jonah just immediately jumps up on a rock and just goes and that just seems like an admission of how contrived this is.
I guess I better be careful.
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Today, Nicole likes Jonah’s bad puns but won’t admit it. She goes daily, which is exactly what she said to her dad just a few episodes ago. By mistake. You’re so silly sometimes. I don’t think that they’re trying to make You’re so silly sometimes a catchphrase but they go back to that. Well, pretty often here is they continue searching Jonah steps up onto a bone dry rock and then just immediately trips somehow. Better be careful. Today it’s almost unintentional slap stick here. Jonah proceeds to fall down the river and fall and fall and all just bouncing off of rocks and tumbling around. And whoever is doing his stunt work here is getting his money worth. He is just getting thrown around like a rag. Then irony of ironies, Jonah is saved and he’s saved by discovering a fishing nets that’s across the stream. So the very crime that they’re trying to stop has actually saved Jonah’s life. They’ll catch fish, all right, even big ones. Because they find the NIF Joan and Nicole are able to stop exactly where the poachers will show up. They hear noise and they find the poachers driving around. The poachers, Jonah and Nicole are watching from afar. They’re looking at these poachers from behind a tree. And the show needs to visually cement the fact that what these poachers are doing is not above board or skeezy in some way, because otherwise, it’s just like, oh, some people picked up some fish and then they put it in their car. What what are we doing here? The way they choose to establish it though, is that they showed that the hustlers have been storing all their fish in garbage cans full of ice, like to visually demonstrate that there is ice in them in the first place. One of the poachers opens like a comically small bag of ice and puts it into a big metal trash can. Like there’s not even enough ice in there to cool a Punchbowl at the high school prom. Like was this a detail that Joyce deliberately obscured from the Roberts so they wouldn’t think that they were eating a really gross fish or something she just said I bought it off the back of a truck. You could have said I bought it off the back of a truck. I saw them pull it out of a big trashcan. They said it was fresh after watching this happen. In an amazing harebrained move,
I’m going to go take a look inside their camper camera. No, just me. Jonah
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just opens up the back of this camper van and jumps in in order to follow where they’re going. Better make sure you got the door shot tight
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in effect, Jonah has kidnapped himself. He just lets them drive it to wherever they’re going. And Nicole just sits there. He has basically just left Nicole there to fend for herself. Even though he’s done it deliberately. He instantly looks out of the window at Nicole with a face to just says I’ve just made a huge mistake. I shouldn’t have done this
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Nicole regroups with her dad, and they immediately start trying to find where the hell this camper van went. He
hidden a camper. That crazy cat which way did they go? And
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Jonah, in a fit of resourcefulness goes for the strangest version of Ariadne thread out of the labyrinth I’ve ever seen. Jonah reaches into these garbage cans opens up the sunroof in this camper and just starts throwing it out the roof and that creates a trail for grant to follow, leaving a trail of facts. So for my Canadian listeners, if you were ever wondering where that famous phrase fish on a dirt road came from, it was from this episode. In the US the equivalent would be I suppose a trail of breadcrumbs. But in Canada fish on a dirt road has basically supplanted the use of that term. So if you’re an American and you’re reading a Canadian news source that’s talking about well what’s a Canadian story that an American might read? If you’re reading something and it says you know the fish on a dirt road that led to the mayor’s crack smoking video. That’s that’s where the that’s where that term is coming from. The visual here of dead fish just continuing to flop vertically out of a sunroof is quite great. I can see why this imagery caught on so well. It carries over to DaVinci inquest as well of course because since Chris had a came up with the idea he had the rights to it, so there’s lots of lines in there where they go well we got to follow these fish down this dirt road to catch this murderer. You know, things like that
fodder under the bed, there was a lot of blood we figured she’d been raped and then hit over the head with a hatchet or something. Things that made her so special to us. Those memories make us the other thing for colored pearls at once a my chocolate to
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grip picks up the receiver for his radio, which comes standard with all Vancouver Aquarium pursuit vehicles. And he gets into contact with the open shirt cop. Sergeant Watson, what’s the problem?
This is Grant Roberts, chasing some poachers. They’ve got my son in the back of their camper and
I need to help What’s your location and direction of travel?
I’m heading east on the hatchery road.
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Basically commanding the cop to give chase to this particular van
Robbins make a 10 minute quaysides in that same area. Robert, can you help us with this helicopter have a look it might take a little while
join up we get about two minutes for
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Grant says all of this is happening in North Vancouver. Which to me feels sort of hard to believe because primarily I live in modern North Vancouver. And I’d like to know where these quiet unpaved roads are now, beyond manicured bike routes or things that are explicitly advertised to people as hiking trails. I could see I’m not an exceedingly outdoorsy person. But I wonder where places like this exist in North Vancouver now where I could actually have some social interaction with somebody rather than having isolation be the entire point. If so much of these parts of the city are built around enforcing solitude on people. I’d rather have that happen in the woods among trees and grass than I would in the outdoor moles that dot the landscape here grant and open shirt cop give chase they step on the gas. There’s something very melancholy about these shots of these dead fish just laying solitary and silent on the gravel road. I guess it feels like food waste like somebody’s left a wedding cake upside down on somebody’s unkempt lawn. It’s very much the same feeling as when Glen Campbell saying about the cake in the rain, but dead fish on a gravel road isn’t as glamorous an image I suppose. The campervan hits a bump in the road and one of these fish that Jonah has been throwing up through the sunroof ends up on the poachers windshield, so they stopped the car the poachers immediately confront Jonah the violinist in the soundtrack gets nutty with it for no reason all of a sudden, where’d that come from?
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But then he attacks them with a fish clearly they’re trying for something slap sticky here. Luckily the cops have arrived right before they get in
Are you all right?
Jonah, you shouldn’t have done that. Boy, are you gonna get it?
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Evidently off camera. These poachers just immediately give up everything that they know about their connection to the fishery owner. So the next shot we see is the fishery guy, the Colombo villain just going off to prison.
They’ve also admitted that they’re the ones that planted the salmon on the backs. Well, it wouldn’t
know anything about that. And what this is all about
lieutenant, they’re willing to testify in court that you paid them to do it.
You’re not going to believe that those two men are Who said anything about those two. All right, Lieutenant, you claim that I planted these paintings. Suppose you proved cabal whoever obviously is trying to cop a plea for a lesser sentence by blaming it on an innocent man,
like you did to the banks.
But I want to steal from myself.
Sorry to disappoint you Lieutenant. Fingerprints won’t help you at all. My fingerprints are all over those paintings
to do you’re under arrest for grand theft and conspiracy.
Wait a minute, you can’t do that I
can and if you don’t want another charge against you for resisting arrest you better do as I say turn around. Turn around
this entrapment. It’s a setup that’s all you you touch those paintings just now while I wasn’t looking, you saw him do it didn’t do. You put your prints on those paintings while you were bent over watching them and they were working on it. He touched them you thought you
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not going to say another word until my lawyer is present. Now for some reason, they bring up an extra plot point right at the end here. Instead of the straightforward scam of forcing Burton Cali off of their land, they need to add this extra little bit of the fishery owner was evidently having the poachers steal the salmon off of every other legal fishery around the area. And
you’re a clever and a devious man, Mr. Clemens, and I suspect an equal opportunity thief that you have meant stealing from all the other hatcheries as well, you know, if everybody went bankrupt, he could pick up everything for a song.
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I don’t know how he manages to do this between him and just two other poachers, there really seem to be only three employees in this entire fishery, including himself. The reason for all of this being added right at the end, seems to really just be sprinkled in. So that Grant’s original statement at the beginning about not supporting poachers and supporting real legitimate businessman type fisheries.
The hatcheries have been taking enormous losses and if it keeps up they could go out of business doesn’t
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get overturned. I mean, there’s only one legitimate fishery that we’ve seen in this show and it’s turned out to be incredibly corrupt. So why the hell wouldn’t you just buy fish off the back of a truck? If it’s not going to be morally that different? We instead need to get told right at the end? Oh, no, there are legal fisheries somewhere that aren’t doing this illegal stuff. Trust us. We didn’t show you them here. But you know, just trust us you can buy your fish and not feel that bad. Even a show with environmental messages as simple and uncontroversial as danger obey seem to struggle when it has to engage with the law or business for even a second it starts to crumble pretty quickly. But I want to steal
from my South
dark Robert says you’re not stealing from yourself. You’re stealing from your stockholders and then feathering your nest.
It’s all on loan from the good Lord anyway. Rich or poor,
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I guess. But let’s forget all about that.
You know you were right about one thing Clemens. I am out and you’re in in the slammer for a very long time. We did it.
It looks like they’re wearing the robe. Oh, that’s great.
They may even be better off.
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I guess. Come on. Come on. Let’s go get some old wood. We end on a nice shot of enjoying the plots denouement he the Roberts and these 70 year old burden Ernie guys enjoying the fruit of their labor eating a whole bunch of smoked salmon.
Victory assures
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with what looks like a carton of whole milk. Just a delicious refreshing meal of smoked salmon and a glass a whole milk dairy companies don’t really change their color coding that often. And if it is the same BC dairy company that I’m looking at that’s that’s the whole milk color. Just like I’ve got, you know, a blue cap and a blue carton for my skim milk it Yes, I drink skim. Do not do not DM me about it. Do not get angry with me about the fact that I drink skim.
Well, if somebody said balls well, as long as that somebody doesn’t get crazy and go jumping on trucks and trying to play super calm.
All right, all right, I get the message. Loud and clear.
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So looking back, pretty solid episode, I would say. It’s fun to see the danger Bay still trying to add more and more genres that they can play with. Having this switch over to a detective show for an episode is kind of fun. And they ended up getting inadvertently what are the most prominent writers of Canadian detective shows in the future. You can see the danger of a really was fated to be the grand success that it was because they kept on getting all of these talented people into their show, basically entirely by accident. It really is a kind of episode that you couldn’t have written in any other show but danger Bay, even if it is taking this orthogonal angle by being a detective show and sort of switching the genre up a bit. You can’t really have a TV show other than this one where you elaborate on fish crimes.
This fish is now evidence and you can eat
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evidence and do some sleuthing to deal with you know larcenous salmon. Chris haddock understands the assignment here
the other thing for colored pearls
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All righty, another episode down the tubes. I enjoyed watching that episode quite a bit. I mean arguably, danger Bay doesn’t really get going until the concept of telepathy is introduced. But really these fish crime episodes are a lot of fun to watch. Chris haddock really is a great TV show van. If you’ve never heard of him, you really should give his shows a watch in particular did Vinci’s inquest after I’d finished talking about the Vinci’s inquest, I didn’t realize I’d taken up about 10 minutes of the timeline, I was enjoying it so much. He cares about his art. I mean, he could have been making millions and millions of dollars producing episodes of danger Bay, but he walked away from the money. Anyhow, just a quick little synopsis of today’s danger Bay episode and I’ll see you on the other side.
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Nicole Roberts tumbles towards a 750 foot waterfall tossed back and forth by the rapids. Every warning in her enhanced neural interface is going off at once. Good thing none of my circuitry is exposed. She quips glancing off yet another rock on the way down. As she falls over the edge we go into slow motion flashing back to a lesson her old blind sensei taught her back in season 24 Nicole calmly breathes in twice for every three sharp exhales visualizing a purple octagon over her left shoulder all the while when she makes contact with the heart or ground a massive crater forms around her as she lands on her feet totally unscathed. taking a minute to collect your thoughts after the 750 foot fall, Nicole calls on Amis the weapons AI transplanted into her mind. Find the nearest human heat signature. She says the poachers that threw me down those rapids weren’t just following Council orders. They were trying to hide something further downstream from me. Us a miss retorts over ADR threw us down those rapids. The onscreen color palette shifts to a heat vision rainbow. They may not have even been real poachers. Nicole contemplates you saw the cuts along the top of their right ears correct. But when you’re inducted into the poachers Council, you get slices along the left here. They could be members of the schismatic order prevalent around the Revelstoke area. But why would they make their way all the way down here? I couldn’t really catch much of a look at them anyhow, they use their grappling hooks to get in and out of there so fast. Nicole follows the nearest heat signature to the middle of a gravel road. A poachers corpses lying in the dead center of the path. It’s blood still warm. Another heat signature is visible off in the distance. But Nicole already knows what’s going on. She turns off her heat vision Jonah’s been through here, Nicole continues along the path following the trail of elaborately sliced poacher bodies like a thread through a labyrinth of blood. Whether she is heading for the exit of this labyrinth, or this labyrinth particular Minotaur she does not know. Nicole flashes back to a conversation she had earlier in the day with a man and a dark purple suit. For the sake of your argument, he says Leguizamo initially. Let’s say that I actually was some sort of transdimensional SEER it shouldn’t be a what point would there be in me setting up a base of operations by the river? It wouldn’t exactly be a fitting location for my species. Hypothetically speaking, of course, the next body Nicola comes across, he’s holding a salmon. Ah, memories she thinks to herself, but slowly, Nicole’s wistful smile transforms into a blood curdling scream, as she sees that the fish’s scaly exterior has begun to sprout. The purple spines of a saltwater sea urchin Well, looks like the gears are turning there. It was pretty fortunate that Nicole had to drop more than 750 feet. If the drop was like 650 feet or less that purple octagon method would have just been useless. That’s it for me today. Thanks again to all my listeners for following me along here. Special thanks, of course to Saudi Aramco, as well as the visionary foresight of Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi vision 2030 plan if you’re in a traveling mood check out the tours of Vancouver that I wrote for the app questo I get a nice little percentage on those just full disclosure otherwise just find my socials I’m chasm cave que SMKV danger comes from below. See you later guys.