It's the Little Things That Chafe the Most

A couple months ago I rewatched Due South on my cheap DVDs.  The third season (or sometimes like on YouTube they call it 3rd & 4th seasons) featured some major changes as the show moved from CBS to CTV in Canada.  I never really liked this third season.  The last time I rewatched the show in 2018 I didn't even watch it but I decided to give it a watch this time to see if I liked it any better.

The answer:  not really.  It's more than just casting changes.  There were little things that bugged me.  A lot of it had to do with the main character, Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  In the first season the character comes to Chicago from the Northwest Territories and so is a bit naive about how things work in a big American city.

In the second season it starts to get sillier but then in the third season, by which time the creator and other major producers and writers had all left, it goes even farther.  For one thing, Fraser often seems like he's on the autism spectrum now.  I mean every time someone asks who he is, he starts saying, "I came here on the trail of the killers of my father but for reasons that don't need explored I've stayed as a liaison at the Canadian embassy."  He never said that in the previous two seasons, so why is he doing it now?  And when he wanted to get his partner Ray's attention, he would say, "Ray, Ray, Ray..." like he's the freaking Rain Man or a little kid.  And what happened to his brown uniform?  It shows up in one scene but otherwise he's always wearing his red uniform, which while recognizable would be like a Navy/Marines/Army/Air Force officer wearing his/her dress blue or white or black uniform everywhere.  Which they don't do.  I mean that would also be like you or I wearing a tuxedo or cocktail dress when going grocery shopping or to the gas station or whatever.  It doesn't make sense.  

Then there's the way everyone in the police station yells, "Gun!" every time someone pulls a gun.  They never did that before.  And just the overall tone of some stories.  The two-part episode "Mountie on the Bounty" uses an actual Scooby-Doo plot where some polluters create a fake ghost ship to scare other ships from their dump site.  Jinkies!

That's the problem not just with this show but a lot of sequels or prequels or revivals.  In TV, movies, and books.  Because so often the property is changing writers and/or actors and are taking place sometimes decades apart.  There are all these small differences that make these things annoying to watch or read. 

Like the Star Wars prequels or Star Trek Enterprise or the Star Trek reboots where it's supposed to be the past from previous stuff and yet everything looks better.  Or in Discovery where the Klingons and uniforms and displays all looked a lot different than the original Trek that was supposed to be just a few years later.  That's a pretty massive leap backwards.  Or in The Last Jedi where suddenly we were going by Neil deGraase Tyson rules of space travel and Luke could use a power no Jedi had ever used before.  In the old Star Wars and Star Trek novels it was frequently a problem where a new writer would take over and their characterization would be off with people doing things out of character.  Or like Dave Wolverton's infamous Courtship of Princess Leia where the Rebels suddenly had dozens of captured Star Destroyers they were using and shit like that.

Common sense fails can be annoying too.  Like when I was watching an episode of the quirky Canadian drama Being Erica.  The titular character and two friends (one of them very pregnant) go to a movie.  the pregnant friend has been complaining about having to piss a lot...so she sits in the middle of the row.  Then she ends up pissing herself because she can't get out in time.  Um, wait, if you knew you had a weak bladder, why the fuck didn't you sit at the end of the row?  So you could easily get out and go piss?  Duuuuuh.

Maybe I'm just too anal but the little things matter.  When characters act different or the sets or technology don't make sense in the context of what already exists or people just act like morons, I get annoyed.  Maybe it's just my accounting brain that wants things to add up.  Or maybe it's my writer brain that wants stories to be consistent.  No matter what, this kind of shit really irks me and I wish they would stop.

Marvel has been less guilty of this stuff than most.  Though sometimes it's annoying how plot points from the solo movies and Avengers movies don't really fit together all that well.  Like at the end of Spider-Man Homecoming where he rejects the offer to be in the Avengers and then a couple months later in Infinity War he's hanging out with Tony Stark in space in the "Iron Spider" armor he had rejected.  Or like at the end of Dr. Strange he's still a novice at magic but in Ragnarok and Infinity War he's suddenly a Sorcerer Supreme.  Maybe he used the Time Stone to learn faster?  There's other stuff I've probably noted in reviews.

I think what helps Marvel is they have been making these movies consistently for 14 years now without any huge gaps.  And a lot of the same people like Kevin Feige have been involved from the beginning so there's at least someone around who might be able to manage some consistency.  It's too bad other franchises can't do the same.

(On a side note about Due South Season 3, it's also pretty stupid how they replaced Fraser's partner Ray Vecchio.  They say he had to go undercover and then bring in a guy to pretend to be him who looks nothing and sounds nothing like him.  And then it's confusing because some people would know him as Ray Vecchio but other people would know him as Stanley "Ray" Kowalski and so wouldn't they blow the secret?  Especially since Kowalski as a rookie was involved in a high-profile case that went to death row and was getting a lot of media attention.  The whole thing was dumb and pointless.  They could have just said Ray Vecchio had gone to Washington or something for some big task force or something and this other guy was transferred in to cover his cases without taking his name or anything.  Fraser and new Ray work a case and become friends and everything else just works normally from there.  That's just another thing that stuck in my craw.  But then I have a pretty sensitive craw.)