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theleaveswant Mar. 31st, 2012 11:08 pm)
theleaveswant Mar. 31st, 2012 11:08 pm)The March Mini-Challenge at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
kink_bingo was to try something you hadn't done before. Now, I'm massively polyfannish, so creating in a new fandom or using new characters is no challenge for me, and I already had a shiny new fandom (The Unusuals! which I have already squeed about here) in mind from the get-go. Finding a kink I've never played with in my creative/transformative work on the other hand is very challenging, partly because I've been participating in KB for a few years and posted enough kinky and kink-related fanworks here and other places that I've covered most of the current list even before considering the other thing I started working on for last month's "all you can kink" challenge, which I hope to be able to show off sooner rather than later (of course this means I need to finish it first). Working in a new medium is . . . trickier now than it would have been last year, before I stuck my toes in the waters of vidding, podficcing, etc., but probably the place to stretch for the "new horizons" challenge. And I figured out all of the above on the day the challenge post went up, and have taken most of the rest of the month to settle on what to actually do, but now that I have I'm not sure what to call it (or whether it's really a new horizon, because I've written meta before including on vaguely similar themes, though I haven't used this format), so . . . yeah. Here's a selection of clips from throughout the 10-episode run of The Unusuals with transcripts and commentary/meta wherein I argue that Jason Walsh (Jeremy Renner) is a sadistic dominant top who doesn't know it yet, that could count towards "gender play" as much as to "masters doms slaves & subs" because (as I shall argue below) there's a pretty heavy conflation between dominance and masculinity in Jason's mind.
The following video is about 21 minutes long, with 3-second breaks between clips so you can watch it all one go or pause between clips, as you prefer. I've mostly tried to cut around plot spoilers both for individual episodes and for series arcs as much as was viable to make my point, but the video and commentary do contain spoilers both major and minor for various events over the course of the series. I tried very hard to not just throw in every scene of Walsh being awesome or adorable or naked (that would be at least another couple hours' worth of footage). You may want to actually watch the show (all 10 episodes available free, streaming, on YouTube, thanks to Crackle.com) before you watch/read the rest of this post.
Password is "jasonwalsh"
From Episode 1, "Pilot"
This scene follows the introduction, where Sergeant Harvey Brown (Terry Kinney) picks up Casey Shraeger (Amber Tamblyn) from where she's been stationed undercover as a street sex worker and tells her she's been transferred to Homicide to replace a detective who's just been killed; she does not get the chance to change her clothes before they go to inform the dead man's partner.
This is how we-the-audience meet Jason Walsh: cheerfully serving dubious food to people who didn't ask for it, in a diner he operates when he feels like it (and also, it turns out, lives in). He's a guy who'll do what he wants and what he thinks is best for you, without really stopping to consult you first. He's also pretty content with, even smug about, his life and his own sense of himself (which, actually, might be the most 'unusual' thing about him, among his peers at Second Squad). And he sometimes tends to focus intensely on a particular task, in this case . . .
. . . getting to his late partner's locker ASAP to clean out his contraband (which is mostly stuff that I think you probably don't want to incinerate, or definitely don't want to inhale the fumes from, but whatever). Including this scene both for how it introduces Casey and Jason by introducing them to each other, and for Jason's reaction to the fuzzy cuffs and hood. That little frown and the "are you kidding me" could mean "ugh, such shoddy workmanship, why bother" (and I'd read the hell out of that fic) but it serves my argument here better if he recognizes the objects and their (practical and social) functions, but has no personal connection to them: they are not signifiers he identifies with, even indirectly, as part of a transnational kink community. Conclusion: Jason Walsh does not belong to a kink community (and Kowalski may have but probably didn't). His continued efforts to do what he perceives as best for others without seeking input from those affected (he might be clearing out the locker to fulfill a promise to Kowalski, but I don't think so; rather I think it's his own belief that he's protecting Kowalski's widow by preventing further reputation damage or leaving her to account for illegal materials--and he probably is, even though it turns out she has no illusions about her husband's sainthood) make slightly more sense if he doesn't belong to a (sub)culture that values informed consent as highly as contemporary kink claims to, and if he doesn't spend his off-the-job hours immersed in discourses about negotiation. (Also, when Casey says "Evans", I picture this. Also also, potentially interesting tangent about ableism and perfectionism in the comments about Reach, how having eight fingers automatically disqualifies him as a sexual partner in Casey's mind but not in Jason's. Also also also, I'm pretty sure this was the audition scene for at least one of their characters.)
'I thought this was about Walsh,' you say. 'It is,' I say, 'but it is about Walsh's relational social roles, and that means it is about his relationships--with Casey, with Alvarez, and especially with Beaumont, with whom--spoiler!--he is sexually and romantically involved (at least, he will be, but I'll talk more about that below).' I love this scene, on rewatching, not only for how it introduces Allison (it's not her first scene in the episode, but the first one where she talks to Casey--who's, at this point, still the audience-proxy in the topsy-turvy world of Second Squad), and sets up rough foundations for a friendship between them (something I wish the series had built on more while it lasted), and tells us this thing about Walsh (a simple and specific way of marking him as a good person), and summarizes the dramatis personae, but for what Allison doesn't say, and what that says about her: she does not mention her partner, Henry Cole. She does not call him a religious nut or a country bumpkin. To her, he is a good and sensitive man, whom she loves like a brother, and does not like to see mocked or cut down by the other clowns they work with. I complained in my other post that it took a while for me to get a feel for Beaumont as a distinct character beyond the narrative role and stereotypes she embodied but now that I've watched the series a few (many) times through I can see things earlier in the series that didn't register or resonate before, and I like her more and more (and I'd love to talk more about her, but this commentary is still supposed to be mostly about Walsh).
And if you want to know what they're looking at, you will have to watch the episode :)
I'll talk more about Walsh sending Alvarez on a wild goose chase in a bit; for now I just want to show the pleasure he takes in it, and in being called on that pleasure-taking, and also to share the moment with the baseball card both because it's Walsh being adorable (I said I'd try not to be gratuitous with that) and to show that a) he used to be famous, in a position both where he was potentially exposed to a lot of hedonistic pleasures and excessive indulgences and where he might have to worry about his reputation if he got caught doing anything his team's sponsors disapproved of, and b) how easily he brushes it off. I'm not sure if I'd say he's more at peace with his past or disinterested in actively remembering it, but either way he takes it relatively well in stride (unlike how Casey reacts when she finds out people know she's the child of billionaires). I think it's relevant that he was a professional athlete in a culture where this means money (something he still doesn't have to worry about? he lives in the diner because the rent's cheap, but he's not hurting for cash) and celebrity (social power, people fawning and going great lengths to offer themselves to you) as well as physical prowess (on the level in which I want to argue that The Unusuals is a spiritual descendent of due South as a skewed but heartfelt buddy cop dramedy wherein the archetype of Benton Fraser has been refracted into Walsh, Cole, and Alvarez, Walsh inherited the bad-guy chasing and speech-making skills while Cole got the boy scout attributes and Alvarez the linguistic knowledge and a lot of the social awkwardness; Walsh also carries some of RayV's swagger and RayK's hair).
Back at the diner; Walsh has just made an omeletty thing which Casey tasted and then spat out.
And that's all I'm going to show you of the pilot; I could include more to show how Walsh's reaction to Casey continues to slide from skepticism and hostility to amusement towards warmth and protectiveness (and there's a scene after a shoot-out that I can only describe as aftercare, though Walsh would not know what that term meant), but that comes through as well in other episodes. Walsh is a guile hero, a smug bastard who likes to tease and push buttons and bask in his own cleverness and capacity to make other people react, and he thinks of himself as sane. It's true that he's much less obviously neurotic and in that sense at least more stable or well-adjusted than most of the people he works with (possible exceptions being Beaumont, Cole, and Sergeant Brown, and all four of them still have their own issues), but the important bit here is that he self-assesses as sane; he doesn't question the health or normality of his own thoughts and behaviours.
From Episode 2, "Boorland Day"
Starts with Casey and Jason arriving at a cordon of police cars outside an active crime scene, staying low for cover.
1. Walsh is an eternal smartass. 2. Walsh doesn't count. 3. Walsh makes smiley-face breakfasts (always, or specifically for Casey?) 4. Walsh is bad at communication--actively bad, because he promises to tell Casey what he wants from her and then doesn't; he just shoves her out of the way. This persists throughout the remainder of the series, too: Casey keeps having to ask Walsh to explain things (things meaning frequently his own actions) to her because he won't do it voluntarily. In this way he maintains an imbalanced power relationship between them (mentor-mentee) while in many other respects their partnership grows quickly into a caring friendship fairly rapidly; the overall dynamic is very much one of a wise and dickish older brother showing off for his precocious little sister. This makes sense, especially given their line of work, as a connection between his high valuation of secrets and his Machiavellian control trips, pranking, and so on: in their business, knowledge is power, control over a person's ability to access or use information is control over the person, and detective work as the accumulation of knowledge is about the accumulation of control. When Walsh tricks, confuses, or dangles information in front of people, he is displaying his skill at gaining control--basically, at domination. The problem, supported by the institutional culture he is a part of and the subcultural peer-network he's not a part of, is that he flaunts his skills in situations and excercises them on people without first obtaining consent (more examples below). PS I'm pretty sure nobody called Casey 'Pete Rose', that she made that up to appeal to Walsh and looked up names of players that would suit her analogy; she may have known the name already (I know the name from Dan Bern songs) but I don't get the impression that she's actually a huge baseball fan.
Walsh and Casey enter the precinct with one of the robbers in tow.
Setting up the game that Walsh and Beaumont play throughout this episode, announcing ascending numbers to one another every time they meet, and the fact that most of the fun, for Walsh, lies in the fact that nobody else knows what it means.
"Boorland Day" does a very good job, I think, of the post-pilot show-has-actually-been-commissioned task of being a solid second-first episode; it covers the same ground of introducing the basic information, who's who and what are they doing, but it also links back to the events of the pilot and carries on from there in a way that feels relatively natural or at least plausible enough given the setting, and starts to lay out a path for where things will go next. This scene, for example, does all of those things: it refers to the pilot, it gives information about these characters and about others offscreen, and it basically sets up Walsh and Alvarez' dynamic for the rest of the run: Alvarez desperately seeking Walsh's approval while also dedicated to his own ideas about how the precinct should run and to his own (and his wife's) career advancement, and Walsh alternately coaching him on how to break out of his shell and integrate, become part of the team (to the extent that there is a team; for most of the episodes we got, there's the Walsh and Shraeger Show and the Banks and Delahoy Show, with Alvarez, Beaumont, and Cole mostly supporting and floating between the two as needed, with more time devoted to Walsh and Shraeger), and slapping him down for not getting it right with pranks and upbraidings. This is one sadistic side of Walsh's dominance coming through: he doesn't really mean ill towards Eddie, and he wants him to succeed (at least with the goals he sets for him, because after all Walsh inherently knows best), but he does enjoy the hell out of making Alvarez miserable in order to prove his point, punish him for not doing as Walsh feels he ought to, teach him a lesson. It's dubious consent, at best, the fact that Alvarez keeps "letting" him do it and keeps wanting Walsh to like him, but there is some kind of hazy reciprocation on Alvarez' side, as I see it, and I really wish that they had the language and were in social positions where they could actually negotiate a less-damaging arrangement to serve the desires they both seem to feel (in my happilyish ever after epilogues . . .).
In the precinct stairwell.
I can't help but snort at "I don't think of you as the sexual deviant type", but I suppose that does depend on what you consider deviant and whether you consider "deviant" a pejorative. Walsh doesn't appear to consider himself deviant (those raised eyebrows are one of the few indications otherwise, and can just as easily be interpreted "okay, New Girl, let's see how deep a hole you can dig or how fast you learn to put down the shovel"). Look how smoothly he redirected her inquiry, too: turned it around so that she gave up information as a show of trust and didn't get anything back (by the end of the episode they're in a better place as far as exchanging actual trust and truths, but for now the bond's not there yet). The sad consequence of this scene for me, knowing that Casey is fishing to try to discover Walsh's Big Secret, is that she's probably lying about the diary, and even if she's not, the way she talks about it suggests that she probably doesn't participate in fandom; otherwise I could quite easily see her as One of Us in that respect (or maybe she does, and just doesn't trust Walsh enough yet to tell him something so ~embarrassing~).
Casey, Walsh, Beaumont, and Alvarez are standing with a SWAT team outside a diamond store full of robbers and hostages; Walsh has just hung up the receiver on the secure line to the lead robber.
Walsh continues to lord the secret of the number game over Casey--the reason he made a point of checking in while she was watching. Walsh is impressed by Beaumont's multi-tasking because he's actually not that good at it; there are some cute moments at other points in the series where you can see him get stuck trying to switch gears--not because his mind works too slow but because it runs full-speed on one track at a time and it's hard to redirect that momentum. And I love the way Eddie's smile disappears when Walsh says his name all curt like that, like he's a sub-adult, a disobedient child or a pet, and how instantly, maybe instinctively, he responds to that tone. Why can't that be conscious and consensual?
Nighttime in the diner; Walsh is cleaning up but freezes when Beaumont comes in the door; "The Dog Days Are Over" is playing in the background.
The clip that I already shared in my other post, because it is awesome, and payoff, and nnnngh sexy. I said in the last post that this scene was one that really got me hooked on the show, made me prick up my ears for these characters and the series, took me from curious to excited to see more, not because I need a sexual/romantic relationship to care about a piece of media but because this one in particular was handled in a way that appealed to me (hiii happy consenting people who play weird games, hiii Toppy Renner) and made it easy to invest emotionally (they are like meeeee). It's also just a beautifully crafted little scene; every detail of the performance and choreography, especially in the last seconds (the laugh, the grunt, the grins as they crash into the wall, the playful roughness of it, the use of music, "show me", the hands reaching up and grabbing hold of the hooks--hold on to this), GUH. It's like they made it just to pound my buttons.
This is supposed to be (if I hadn't already spoiled it) the punchline of the running numbers gag, and the Big Reveal of Allison and Jason's extracurricular relationship. The vibe I get from it is of a young relationship, still riding the big high of (dizzying, wonderful, distracting, fun, stupid-making) NRE, but not a first time, which makes Beaumont's comment to Casey about Walsh not looking at her boobs (a week ago, in canon-time) a touch curious in retrospect (now that we know that he does look at her boobs, with permission, at least when they're off the clock). I'm pretty sure that Walsh and Beaumont were not written as dating in the pilot, that that was added later, which means either that they've been doing this less than a week or, my current preference, that they've been at it a little while longer than that and that Beaumont lied to Casey (retcon!) because, well, they just met, and because the relationship was too new and shiny and uncertain to go presenting at people, and because apparently intra-office fraternization is not forbidden (not a Sam-and-Jules situation) but discouraged (so Sergeant Brown implies), and probably because Jason likes secrets. I don't believe that they actually talked about that with any length or detail, but he may well have requested that they keep things hush-hush because "it's more fun that way."
Also, those are some convenient coat hooks, IJS. I wonder how strong they are.
From Episode 3, "One Man Band"
Opens with a shot of bare intertwined legs and sounds of kissing; more shots of hands and shoulders and faces reveal that these are Beaumont and Walsh in bed together. The phone rings and Walsh breaks off kissing to look at it.
This is actually my favourite episode of the series, by a pretty clean margin, and it was hard not to throw in a whole lot more of it (please somebody watch it and squee with me, why are you reading this if you have not watched or don't intend to watch it). I had to keep this scene in, though, for a number of reasons:
1. Jason and Allison and all their sexy body parts (including Renner's surprisingly thin ankles, what?) in bed together, covered only by a bunched-up sheet. I could stand to see a little more of that.
2. More clear evidence of them having a playfully rough relationship in which Jason manhandles Allison, a lot (and grunts attractively while he does it), but not a formal power exchange relationship with any kind of externally recognizable D/s protocols. Jason's statement "you'll hurt me anyway" implies a degree of reciprocity or switchiness in the realm of action (and we certainly know by this point that Beaumont could hurt him; we've seen the martial arts trophy on her desk, though I think her pattern of violence in the line of duty is still mostly unrevealed), or maybe more like brattiness considering some of the later evidence regarding their respective relationship roles as "the man" and "the girl".
3. Walsh defies Beaumont's warning to answer the phone, and then gets out of bed, puts on clothes, and opens the diner to let Casey in, because Casey is in the nebulous little sister territory between "this rookie that I have to deal with and look after" and "my partner who I care about" where she still needs Walsh's protection and guidance, and actually gets his attention and patience. Plus, it looks like he trusts Beaumont not to be too hurt--probably because he knows she's a detective too, she has a partner whom she loves and takes care of too: she understands, and she'd do the same for Cole.
4. This scene (and its continuation in the episode) even more than the last (making out in full view of the window) gets into the break-down between public and private that goes along with living in the diner, and what this implies about Walsh's personality and his near-fetish for secrecy. His kitchen looks out onto the street, and there's a doorless frame and a window in the wall that separates that publicly visible and sometimes publicly physically accessible (strangers show up in his kitchen and he feeds them) space from his private living quarters in the back, which are still part of a semi-functioning restaurant (is there a 'public' bathroom? Do people have to pass his bed to get to it? What about the health code?). It is a weirdly intimate/impersonal situation to be living in.
From Episode 4, "Crime Slut"
Walsh and Beaumont open the door and stumble out from inside his closet in a state of breathless disarray.
One odd thing about this show (besides the fact that it is clearly trying to kill me): it keeps making condom jokes (there's at least one other) and they don't really work? Maybe I just don't think condoms are funny. Awesome things about this scene: how wobbly they both are, how contented Allison looks, how hoarse Jason's voice is, like he's just been shouting (which, inside a metal box, would be LOUD), the smack (which didn't sound that hard, and she's wearing a towel--I think the yelp is a bit much unless she's been pre-tenderized [where is my spanking fic?]), and their overall comfort with each other and with doing things together (apparently spontaneously) that are a little, um, "creative", shall we say. It's a lovely little domestic portrait. I'm avoiding talking about what happens between this clip and the next one because I don't want to spoil the episode (it's another good one, I think), but I think there are some interesting arguments to be made based on it regarding financial power as an index/cause/symptom of unequal control in personal relationships and social structures, and about racialized, gendered & sexualized violence, and I'm annoyed that these events doesn't seem to actually get resolved or mentioned again over the rest of the series?
Back in Walsh's "bedroom" the following night; he's undressing after work.
I am fascinated and a little uncomfortable with the fact that this is the first time we see Jason and Allison talk at all about their relationship, that this is the way it goes. It can kind of understand Jason associating secrets with depth, I think that's an easy leap to make, but I question the wisdom or health of encouraging her to lie, especially because I don't really trust him not to get angry if he later discovers something that he decides, retroactively, that she should have told him earlier. I understand that I'm coming from a cultural context that explicitly prizes honest (and lengthy) communication around all sorts of things as the foundation of trust, and he apparently doesn't, but still. "How can you trust someone who doesn't have secrets" is a really strange and powerful line, for me--at once very alien and very familiar. I recognize the value of keeping secrets as keeping confidences, vouchsafing the information (power) that other people give to you, and being worthy of trust in that way, but keeping secrets for the sake of keeping secrets . . . I suppose on one level this scene is about forgiveness and reassurance, Jason telling Allison that he's not mad that she tried to hide something from him, but where it pushes beyond that into discouraging her from coming to him honestly with problems in the future, I get kind of cringey. On the other hand "take off your clothes and get in my bed" is SUPER FUCKING HOT, as is the fact that he keeps growling and smiling at the same time, not to mention SUPER TOPPY, and the fact that he immediately shoves her down instead of standing back and waiting for her to comply is, I think, very informative about him and about their relationship.
From Episode 5, "42"
I'm not showing the beginning of the episode because it seriously spoils another character's major arc up to this point, and I'm trying to minimize that if I can't avoid it completely, but for context: this episode, once again, features an early scene of Walsh and Beaumont at his place. This time Walsh gets up early and goes to the kitchen to make breakfast, instructing Beaumont to sleep in. A customer comes in, acts suspicious, then pulls a gun and fires on Walsh. Walsh grabs a shotgun from beneath the counter and fires back, chasing the man away; Beaumont's scream stops him from pursuing the shooter--a stray bullet has made its way into the back room and hit Beaumont in the abdomen. The first clip I'm showing is of Casey finding Jason sitting in his car in the parking lot outside the hospital.
Walsh'll explain his aversion to hospitals later; what I want to comment on with this clip is is, first, that Walsh stays as close to Beaumont as he can bear to, at that point, while also doing the most useful thing he can think of; that he is able to compel the hospital staff to do what he wants (bring him information from inside, even though one of the nurses points out to him that it's not her job); and he is genuinely glad for Casey, getting to lead the investigation--if he can't do it, at least they're in good hands.
Later, after Beaumont is out of surgery but Walsh still cannot bring himself to enter the hospital, he leaves the parking lot to join Casey in tracking the shooter but corrects her when she calls him Beaumont's boyfriend. This scene takes place after they discover that Cole (dun-dun-DUN) knows more than he's saying.
D'awwwww Jason you so cute, and also kinda messed up. This is one of the first times that the show starts to really unpack Jason's (very specific) ideas about what it means to be A Man, or in this case Someone's Man. He's made comments before that indicate fairly strong gender essentialist thinking (telling Casey "you're a girl, so I have to explain this thing to you", etc.), but it's here and in some later episodes that he starts to really articulate what this actually means to and for him. It's also potentially packing the charges on a bomb that will blow up in his face, as far as his paternalism and secrecy-fixation go: Jason really doesn't seem to realize that by trying to protect Beaumont's emotional health by concealing the role Cole (whom she loves and trusts) played in endangering her physical health, he is potentially betraying her trust as well (IMHO). Interesting: Walsh didn't leave until he was allowed to get closer.
Walsh finally pushes himself to visit Beaumont in the hospital.
I have such mixed feelings about this scene . . . on one hand I'm rolling my eyes because that is classic manpain, and how dare Jason, and the showmakers, make this all about him, his pain and his needs and his character 'growth, when she's the one with a belly full of stitches and a drip in her arm. On the other hand, part of the problem with that pattern is there's always (or often enough) an exception for this specific instance, these specific characters, and I do think that in this specific instance, for these specific characters, it works. It makes sense for them, and the actors sell it, and hey, at least Allison's alive and can go on to have her own stories (if the show had lasted longer) instead of getting fridged (though I still feel bad for nameless dead prop girlfriend). And I kind of love that he assumes that he can order her to get better (and believes, or wants to, that it will work), and how charmed she is by him doing so, and the vulnerable bossiness of Walsh ordering Beaumont to move over so that he can climb into the bed with her, and the way you can tell he'd deny it if you suggested that the cuddle was as much for his comfort as for hers, that he's not just fulfilling a duty but actually clinging hard to the reassurance that she's still alive and real (sometimes tops need aftercare, as much as or more than bottoms). Might be significant too that when he reaches to put his arm over her, she moves his hand to a different spot on her belly--this might be making much of nothing, but could be his subconscious compulsion to push buttons and poke bruises guided his hand directly to her wound and she had to correct him because yeah, not the good pain.
No clips from Episode 6, "The Circle Line", because Allison's not in it and there aren't many stand-out scenes that add to the points I've been trying to make. Possible exception would be the paired scenes where Walsh yells at Alvarez for thinking he's better than the freaks of the Second and calls him "the biggest freak that we got", and later apologizes not by retracting Alvarez's freak identification but by including him in the freak family: "Hey, we're all freaks, aren't we? That's a good thing. To stand out, be different. It makes us good at what we do." Which is an interesting statement (we're the same because we're different), and a kindly nod to all the weirdos in the audience (let your freak flag fly). It also shows that Walsh does think of himself as a freak of some kind, although some of his other statements suggest the opposite.
From Episode 7, "The Tape Delay"
Beaumont is back at work, apparently none the worse for wear (so we know how long it takes to recover from a gunshot wound in this universe :P ); in an earlier scene she snapped at Walsh for talking to her. Walsh and Casey are pulling an all-nighter working a security detail for a VIP, currently sitting in the hall outside his hotel room.
*raises hand* Ooh! I have a good idea what kind of sex Jason is having! At least I have my imagination and some clues that make certain dynamics and activities seem more plausible than others. Beyond that prize of a brief exchange (because of course Jason likes and gets partners who scream, while Casey does not like to scream or to make her partners scream--it fits so well with what we know of their histories and personalities), this scene is useful for setting up the fight that Walsh and Beaumont are having, and the route that Walsh will, on Casey's urging, take to fix it. I considered including a whole lot more of that, both of Casey enabling Walsh's gendered reading of this situation (like many others)--asking "how long have you been dating women?" and advising him to apologize regardless of whether he believes he's right and prove that he's listening because 'that's what women want'--and of Allison taking out her frustration at work with Cole's help because it wonderfully showcases their relationship and her rather poor compartmentalization skills, but opted to leave that to your (dear readers) further investigation. Walsh doesn't specifically mention gender or relationship roles here but it's kind if coded into the baby-talk tone he takes when he reports asking "what's wrong?". It's also interesting that when Casey asks what happened, he gives Beaumont's interpretation of the situation before getting into explaining and defending his own actions, though I suspect that's probably set up that way for comedy/storytelling rather than character reasons.
In the cop bar/Chinese restaurant with Spanish signage and a menu that reads like surrealist art where the proud weirdos of the Second precinct spend a good share of their time, Beaumont is at the bar laughing with Cole, Det. Leo Banks (Harold Perrineau), and Sergeant Brown. The bartender delivers her something fancy in a martini glass.
You guys, Walsh's way of apologizing for not taking Beaumont seriously when she asks him to apologize for yelling at her in a dream is to buy her a "girly drink" to reassure her that he sees her as valuable, vulnerable, and feminine, as well as "sexy, smart, beautiful" and "totally awesome", and justifies his behaviour with the excuse that because he is a guy he says stupid things sometimes. In his head guys say stupid things sometimes and are contractually obligated to apologize to girls (the word he uses, not women--aged as well as gendered), who require regular affirmation of their delicate preciousness, who require taking-care-of. This is also the episode where Walsh tries to cheer Casey up by telling her that his mother dressed him like a girl until he was six, which is both a boon to the study of Jason Walsh's Particular Ideas about Gender Roles and a handy launching point for AU fanwork wherein Walsh is a trans man (she dressed me like a girl until I convinced her the doctors were wrong), which would add another interesting layer to JWPIaGR (it's also the only time I can remember Walsh mentioning any family).
This is also a fascinating scene for what Beaumont says about herself--I'm 50/50 on whether "me" is agreeing with or correcting Walsh's description of her as "vulnerable and feminine" when she's with him. Either way it feels euphemistic, like she's avoiding saying (or doesn't know how to say) submissive, but that's how it reads to me, like an allusion to a particular kind of D/s role dynamic: your pet, your girl, your princess. Says a lot too about Allison Beaumont's Particular Ideas about Gender Roles, that she refers to her "tough" at-work persona as "Uncle Beaumont"--Walsh isn't the only one who conflates masculinity with dominance etc.
No clips from Episode 8, "The Dentist", because while it's got some good moments between Beaumont and Cole, between Beaumont and Walsh, and between Walsh and Alvarez, it doesn't really add anything new to my argument (also features more than usual amount of Idiot Ball).
From Episode 9, "The Apology Line"
Walsh and Beaumont are in his diner at night, drinking tequila at the bar.
This is probably my least favourite episode of the series. There are some good scenes that stand okay on their own, and the performances are fine, but there are also some things that I'm not cool with for ethical and character consistency reasons, and overall I just don't feel like it hangs together that well (partly because it disrupts the arc of some character relationshops, particularly Walsh&Alvarez; I think possibly it was meant to fit earlier in the continuity? Or parts of it were?). This is one of the scenes that I think is interesing in itself but kind of unpleasant in relation to the rest of the episode, and it's significant to me for three reasons.
First, this is Jason and Allison actually talking to each other, sharing personal information--trusting each other, keeping each other's secrets. I would like to see more of this, and I hope that it signified a turning point for them as far as keeping secrets becoming a shared rather than solitary activity (potential reframing of this conversation in hindsight of the third reason notwithstanding).
Second, it's another glimpse into their respective values and insecurities: Allison feels guilty for scaring her mother (hurting someone); Jason feels guilty for faltering in his duty as A Man to protect people (particularly women, particularly women he has some sort of relationship of responsibility to); and they agree that cheating is a dump-worthy offense.
Third, Beaumont telling Walsh that seeing him drunk turns her on and his reaction to that (to get more drunk) supports my view of him as a reaction junkie, and as seeing or preferring this relationship as a source of positive reactions: he wants to do whatever will make Allison happy, not just for the sake of her happiness but for the (broadly speaking compersive) happiness that her reactions bring him, the power high of being able to make her happy. It also shows his trust in her, that he's willing to sacrifice a degree of immediate control in her presence (whether or not he's getting it back on a wider relationship scale). Here's where Walsh telling Beaumont to lie to him maybe starts to come back to bite him on the ass, in that it turns out that she has an ulterior motive for getting him drunk: she's setting him up for a prank (not cool not cool not cool, this is not what informed consent looks like, in fact it is exactly the opposite). If she lies to him, if he can't trust the 'authenticity' of her reactions, then he loses his mastery and feeling of control over his world, as well, probably, as his reliable reaction fix, because the source is no longer 'pure'. Granted, she might have done this even without his encouragement for duplicity. Either way, ruh-roh!
Casey and Walsh walking outside the next day, talking about Casey's relationship woes and her ongoing discomfort with her wealthy background.
Kind of an awkward scene, the way it slides from relationships to money to happiness to self-knowledge, but important for me because, in Walsh's own words, he is happy, and he knows himself. I believe that both claims (happiness and self-knowledge) are accurate given the information available to Walsh, but precarious in that they are both dependent on external input (new information). Also brings back the implication that money is not a worry for Walsh, and suggests that he is better able to empathize with Casey than the other detectives are because he has tasted a similar privilege stew (the wealth and status of major league baseball).
From Episode 10, "The E.I.D." *yes, 10b before 10a, because 10a is kind of 'the money shot' in terms of the argument I'm trying to make*
Beaumont and Cole are sitting at their desks, chatting about porn (they're working on a porn-related case; something Beaumont is fairly comfortable with but Cole is not).
Throwing this clip in before I get to the Really Important scene from this episode partly because it shows Beaumont's and Cole's version of the partner-sibling relationship (Big Sis Beaumont needling Cole for a rise but feeling bad when she gets one, while he shuts down the conversation for being appropriate partly because it does not fit with his sense of himself as a Good Christian and a professional and partly because sexual oversharing from Beaumont is particularly transgressive to him in a "noooo you are my sister" kind of way), but mostly because it brings to mind at leastthreefive excellent questions:
1. What did you learn from Jason's stash, Allison?
2. Where does he keep said stash and what does it contain?
3. Does he know you found it and do you two share?
4. What does Allison's stash say about her?
5. Did Jason salvage anything from Kowalski's locker while Casey wasn't looking, and if so what?
(Writing this list was a major Spanish Inquisition moment)
Walsh and Casey are walking outside the precinct at night.
Paydirt! Walsh takes for granted 1. that hairpulling occurs, 2. that it is one person's job to pull hair and the other's to have their hair pulled, and 3. that the person who pulls hair is "The Man" in the relationship, BUT ALSO 4. that the role The Man, who pulls hair, does not necessarily "correspond" to the gender of the person filling that role, outside of the context of that role (but it does colour it, to a degree--hence Walsh's description of Casey as a "shemale" [and I roll my eyes at the word, but Walsh seems to be talking exclusively about performative masculinity and femininity in particular social roles, and not about trans identity or politics]): women can be "The Man" within a relationship, and this is not in itself "a bad thing". Dominance/submission is A Thing (and a thing he assumes everyone does, because after all Walsh is sane, and happy, and knows himself--he does not, as a rule, question the health or normalcy of his own desires), though he doesn't know how to think about it in those terms, and it is a gender-coded thing: dominance is masculine, but free-floating, so that masculine/dominant and feminine/submissive can attach to subjects of any sex or gender. I am intrigued by the gap in his logic ("a cop is the man in every relationship" . . . but Beaumont is a cop, too--and Walsh values this, talking to Casey in another scene about how it is hard to date civilians because they don't understand that cops don't have a job but are the job--yet she's not a "Man" by his reckoning, in their relationship) and by how unbothered he appears by it. Casey feels that there is something wrong with Jason's argument but doesn't have a prepared or instinctive explanation for what or why (she also lacks or hasn't thought much about--hasn't connected on a subjective level with--a language of dominance and submission as filtered through kink), and when she starts to try and articulate it, she gets interrupted. I really really really wish or hope that they continued this conversation later, sometime after the rest of the (overall very strong) episode, and that Casey and Jason could somehow stumble together to the recognition that there's language for that that doesn't rely quite so much on heteronormative gender essentialism, and that they're both dominant-leaning (part of the reason I don't ship Casey/Jason: I like their non-sexual sibling dynamic, yes, but mostly I think they'd get stuck on the two-top problem and, unlike some two-top pairings who can resolve the issue with sexy, competitive, wrestling-for-dominance, just wind up cranky and mutually frustrated), or that Jason told Beaumont about it (because if she talks to him about Cole, he definitely talks to her about Casey) and she actually had some awareness of kink culture and practice and looked at him like "wait, you mean you didn't know that's what we were doing? omg, I thought you just didn't like all the frilly trappings or didn't want to be seen at public events, but are you actually telling me that you didn't know?", or, hell, that a clue-hammer get lobbed from some surprising corner (say, Alvarez) and hit Jason on the head, because I think he'd be a much safer and probably more pleasant person to be around if he had a more formal education in sex-radical politics, consent, and negotiation, and when I think about what he could do with a bigger crayon box of techniques and a little more conscious reflection . . . yowza. Dude would be fucking lethal.
kink_bingo was to try something you hadn't done before. Now, I'm massively polyfannish, so creating in a new fandom or using new characters is no challenge for me, and I already had a shiny new fandom (The Unusuals! which I have already squeed about here) in mind from the get-go. Finding a kink I've never played with in my creative/transformative work on the other hand is very challenging, partly because I've been participating in KB for a few years and posted enough kinky and kink-related fanworks here and other places that I've covered most of the current list even before considering the other thing I started working on for last month's "all you can kink" challenge, which I hope to be able to show off sooner rather than later (of course this means I need to finish it first). Working in a new medium is . . . trickier now than it would have been last year, before I stuck my toes in the waters of vidding, podficcing, etc., but probably the place to stretch for the "new horizons" challenge. And I figured out all of the above on the day the challenge post went up, and have taken most of the rest of the month to settle on what to actually do, but now that I have I'm not sure what to call it (or whether it's really a new horizon, because I've written meta before including on vaguely similar themes, though I haven't used this format), so . . . yeah. Here's a selection of clips from throughout the 10-episode run of The Unusuals with transcripts and commentary/meta wherein I argue that Jason Walsh (Jeremy Renner) is a sadistic dominant top who doesn't know it yet, that could count towards "gender play" as much as to "masters doms slaves & subs" because (as I shall argue below) there's a pretty heavy conflation between dominance and masculinity in Jason's mind.The following video is about 21 minutes long, with 3-second breaks between clips so you can watch it all one go or pause between clips, as you prefer. I've mostly tried to cut around plot spoilers both for individual episodes and for series arcs as much as was viable to make my point, but the video and commentary do contain spoilers both major and minor for various events over the course of the series. I tried very hard to not just throw in every scene of Walsh being awesome or adorable or naked (that would be at least another couple hours' worth of footage). You may want to actually watch the show (all 10 episodes available free, streaming, on YouTube, thanks to Crackle.com) before you watch/read the rest of this post.
Password is "jasonwalsh"
From Episode 1, "Pilot"
This scene follows the introduction, where Sergeant Harvey Brown (Terry Kinney) picks up Casey Shraeger (Amber Tamblyn) from where she's been stationed undercover as a street sex worker and tells her she's been transferred to Homicide to replace a detective who's just been killed; she does not get the chance to change her clothes before they go to inform the dead man's partner.
Customer in diner: I walk by this place all the time.
Man behind counter: Mhm.
Customer: It's never open.
Man behind counter: Well, we're open when I feel like it.
Customer: That's not much of a business plan.
Man behind counter: There you go. Pork chops! [proudly]
Customer: I'm a vegetarian. That's why I ordered a salad?
Man behind counter: No, eat it, you'll like it.
Customer: What's the red stuff?
Man behind counter: That's a Skittles reduction. [customer looks alarmed] We're out of fruit.
Sergeant Brown: Walsh. Somebody killed Kowalski.
Man behind counter [Det. Jason Walsh]: [to customer] Get out.
Customer: I just want to eat the potatoes.
Walsh: [removes apron, puts gun and badge on counter] Just get out.
Brown: This is Detective Casey Shraeger. I'm assigning her to you. [calling after Walsh as he exits the diner]
Casey: [to Brown] Sir, I'm a little confused. The man just lost his partner.
Brown: It's the NYPD, Detective. If you're not a little confused, you're not paying attention.
This is how we-the-audience meet Jason Walsh: cheerfully serving dubious food to people who didn't ask for it, in a diner he operates when he feels like it (and also, it turns out, lives in). He's a guy who'll do what he wants and what he thinks is best for you, without really stopping to consult you first. He's also pretty content with, even smug about, his life and his own sense of himself (which, actually, might be the most 'unusual' thing about him, among his peers at Second Squad). And he sometimes tends to focus intensely on a particular task, in this case . . .
Walsh: [to other cops] Can you give us a minute? Guys? Thanks. [other cops leave locker room]
Casey: We are going to visit the crime scene at some point?
Walsh: Just don't talk.
Casey: Excuse me?
Walsh: Look, no offense, but my partner just died. You're new. You're wearing too much eye makeup and a thong. Somehow I don't think you're gonna last that long. [cuts lock on Kowalski's locker]
Casey: I worked Vice undercover for two years.
Walsh: Yeah? [hands bolt-cutters to Casey]
Casey: Robbery before that. The cases I worked got closed and the perps went to jail. How do you know I'm wearing a thong?
Walsh: I am a trained detective.
Casey: [as Walsh takes a pair of fuzzy handcuffs from the locker] Lemme guess. Your library books are in here and you just want to make sure they get back on time.
Walsh: [hands Casey a duffle bag] Hold this. Tomorrow they're going to go through this locker, send everything here to Kowalski's wife. [hands Casey some spare women's clothes] Here, put this on. [continues clearing out locker] You'll hear a lot about Kowalski in the next few days. How he was a bad cop, a bully. He punched a priest one time. [under breath, looking at a leather-looking "gimp" hood: "are you kidding me?"] He choked out so many suspects they called him The Sleep Train.
Casey: [getting dressed] Is it true?
Walsh: [continuing to pack porn, weapons, drugs, etc., into duffle] He closed cases, he got things done. The rest is just whatever.
Casey: [catching Walsh putting rolls of cash in his back pocket] Hey! You're supposed to voucher that, I'm pretty sure you're not s'posed to take it.
Walsh: [looking at Casey] Did you have a partner, in Vice?
Casey: Yeah. Evans. He had eight fingers. They called him 'Reach'.
Walsh: You sleep with him?
Casey: He had eight fingers.
Walsh: So if somebody killed Reach what would you do?
Casey: . . . Whatever it took.
Walsh: Exactly. [gestures at duffle bag] Burn that. [closes locker]
. . . getting to his late partner's locker ASAP to clean out his contraband (which is mostly stuff that I think you probably don't want to incinerate, or definitely don't want to inhale the fumes from, but whatever). Including this scene both for how it introduces Casey and Jason by introducing them to each other, and for Jason's reaction to the fuzzy cuffs and hood. That little frown and the "are you kidding me" could mean "ugh, such shoddy workmanship, why bother" (and I'd read the hell out of that fic) but it serves my argument here better if he recognizes the objects and their (practical and social) functions, but has no personal connection to them: they are not signifiers he identifies with, even indirectly, as part of a transnational kink community. Conclusion: Jason Walsh does not belong to a kink community (and Kowalski may have but probably didn't). His continued efforts to do what he perceives as best for others without seeking input from those affected (he might be clearing out the locker to fulfill a promise to Kowalski, but I don't think so; rather I think it's his own belief that he's protecting Kowalski's widow by preventing further reputation damage or leaving her to account for illegal materials--and he probably is, even though it turns out she has no illusions about her husband's sainthood) make slightly more sense if he doesn't belong to a (sub)culture that values informed consent as highly as contemporary kink claims to, and if he doesn't spend his off-the-job hours immersed in discourses about negotiation. (Also, when Casey says "Evans", I picture this. Also also, potentially interesting tangent about ableism and perfectionism in the comments about Reach, how having eight fingers automatically disqualifies him as a sexual partner in Casey's mind but not in Jason's. Also also also, I'm pretty sure this was the audition scene for at least one of their characters.)
[Casey pauses in the stairwell to watch Det. Allison Beaumont (Monique Gabriela Curnen) escorting a prisoner dressed as a hot dog upstairs]
Beaumont: Hey.
Casey: Hey.
Beaumont: [stops walking] You come over from Vice?
Casey: Uh . . . guilty.
Beaumont: [amused] They made you dress like a hooker, didn't they?
Casey: I prefer 'lady of the evening'.
Hot dog: Hey, I'm supposed to have a lawyer--
Beaumont: Snack foods don't get a lawyer. [to Casey] Here's what you need to know about the Second: Alvarez talks about himself in the third person; Banks sleeps in a bulletproof vest; and yesterday Delahoy named his moustache.
Casey: [concerned] Oh. What about Walsh?
Beaumont: On the plus side he doesn't stare at your boobs when he's talking to you.
Casey: Ah. The downside?
Beaumont: I got great boobs. Why isn't he looking?
Casey: [grinning, answers her ringing phone] Shraeger.
'I thought this was about Walsh,' you say. 'It is,' I say, 'but it is about Walsh's relational social roles, and that means it is about his relationships--with Casey, with Alvarez, and especially with Beaumont, with whom--spoiler!--he is sexually and romantically involved (at least, he will be, but I'll talk more about that below).' I love this scene, on rewatching, not only for how it introduces Allison (it's not her first scene in the episode, but the first one where she talks to Casey--who's, at this point, still the audience-proxy in the topsy-turvy world of Second Squad), and sets up rough foundations for a friendship between them (something I wish the series had built on more while it lasted), and tells us this thing about Walsh (a simple and specific way of marking him as a good person), and summarizes the dramatis personae, but for what Allison doesn't say, and what that says about her: she does not mention her partner, Henry Cole. She does not call him a religious nut or a country bumpkin. To her, he is a good and sensitive man, whom she loves like a brother, and does not like to see mocked or cut down by the other clowns they work with. I complained in my other post that it took a while for me to get a feel for Beaumont as a distinct character beyond the narrative role and stereotypes she embodied but now that I've watched the series a few (many) times through I can see things earlier in the series that didn't register or resonate before, and I like her more and more (and I'd love to talk more about her, but this commentary is still supposed to be mostly about Walsh).
[Casey and Jason are about to enter a storage locker that belonged to Kowalski; Walsh has previously given Det. Eddie Alvarez (Kai Lennox) a false address to meet a nonexistent witness]
Walsh: [answering phone] Walsh.
Alvarez: Yeah. This address you gave me . . . is an empty lot.
Walsh: Who is this?
Alvarez: Who--this is--this is Eddie Alvarez.
Walsh: Oh, Eddie. I was just gonna call you. Uh, that CI reached out again, he messed up the address. He's at the Happy Shabu Shabu on Rockaway Boulevard.
Alvarez: Okay, right, okay. You--are you, uh, are you messing with me?
Walsh: No, he told me he saw Kowalski right before the murder. He thinks he knows who killed him.
Alvarez: You said to stay at Rockaway Boulevard, right?
Walsh: Shabu Shabu. [hangs up; Alvarez tries to get into his car, but it's locked and the alarm goes off]
Casey: [as locker door opens] You are an evil man.
Walsh: [chuckles wickedly]
Casey: [follows Walsh into dark locker, picks up something on the floor] Wow. [clears throat and shows it to him--it's a baseball card] Is this you?
Walsh: [monotone grunting] Yup.
Casey: You played first base for the Yankees and all you can say is [mimics grunting tone] 'yup'?
Walsh: Yup. [he looks at something on the wall as Casey pockets the card] Look at this.
And if you want to know what they're looking at, you will have to watch the episode :)
I'll talk more about Walsh sending Alvarez on a wild goose chase in a bit; for now I just want to show the pleasure he takes in it, and in being called on that pleasure-taking, and also to share the moment with the baseball card both because it's Walsh being adorable (I said I'd try not to be gratuitous with that) and to show that a) he used to be famous, in a position both where he was potentially exposed to a lot of hedonistic pleasures and excessive indulgences and where he might have to worry about his reputation if he got caught doing anything his team's sponsors disapproved of, and b) how easily he brushes it off. I'm not sure if I'd say he's more at peace with his past or disinterested in actively remembering it, but either way he takes it relatively well in stride (unlike how Casey reacts when she finds out people know she's the child of billionaires). I think it's relevant that he was a professional athlete in a culture where this means money (something he still doesn't have to worry about? he lives in the diner because the rent's cheap, but he's not hurting for cash) and celebrity (social power, people fawning and going great lengths to offer themselves to you) as well as physical prowess (on the level in which I want to argue that The Unusuals is a spiritual descendent of due South as a skewed but heartfelt buddy cop dramedy wherein the archetype of Benton Fraser has been refracted into Walsh, Cole, and Alvarez, Walsh inherited the bad-guy chasing and speech-making skills while Cole got the boy scout attributes and Alvarez the linguistic knowledge and a lot of the social awkwardness; Walsh also carries some of RayV's swagger and RayK's hair).
Back at the diner; Walsh has just made an omeletty thing which Casey tasted and then spat out.
Casey: So, how does a guy go from playing baseball to becoming a New York City police officer?
Walsh: [with his mouth full] Here's the difference between you and me: you think people shouldn't keep secrets. I think that we are our secrets.
Casey: I have secrets.
Walsh: [smiles] The vibrator in your bedside table is not a secret. [rubs his eyes with the back of his hand] You know what a cop is to most people? A garbageman. We go through people's trash, look for clues, clean up their mess. That's the job, right? It kills our marriages, our kids hate us, we start drinking more. But our secrets, that's what keeps us sane. [whistles and taps on his own temple]
Casey: What's your secret?
Walsh: [looks at her, smiling faintly, then answers his ringing phone] Walsh.
Casey: [mimicking under her breath] Walsh.
Walsh: [on phone] No, I remember.
And that's all I'm going to show you of the pilot; I could include more to show how Walsh's reaction to Casey continues to slide from skepticism and hostility to amusement towards warmth and protectiveness (and there's a scene after a shoot-out that I can only describe as aftercare, though Walsh would not know what that term meant), but that comes through as well in other episodes. Walsh is a guile hero, a smug bastard who likes to tease and push buttons and bask in his own cleverness and capacity to make other people react, and he thinks of himself as sane. It's true that he's much less obviously neurotic and in that sense at least more stable or well-adjusted than most of the people he works with (possible exceptions being Beaumont, Cole, and Sergeant Brown, and all four of them still have their own issues), but the important bit here is that he self-assesses as sane; he doesn't question the health or normality of his own thoughts and behaviours.
From Episode 2, "Boorland Day"
Starts with Casey and Jason arriving at a cordon of police cars outside an active crime scene, staying low for cover.
Walsh: [to uniformed officers already on scene] Well what have we got?
Man in ski mask standing on diorama in bank: This is a robbery! Get down! Get down on the ground!
Uniformed officer: Witness called it in; four guys with masks, they went in there about five minutes ago.
Walsh: Okay.
Casey: What do you want to do?
Walsh: Well, I could use some waffles. My breakfast didn't stick.
Casey: What--no seriously, come on. Walsh. New partnership? Are you a three-and-then-go guy or go-on-three, which one?
Walsh: Yeah . . . I don't count.
Casey: See, that's good to know. [Robbers emerge from bank, Walsh takes up a firing position]
Walsh: Police! Don't move! [Robbers run; Walsh and Casey run after them. One robber turns and fires at them; Walsh shoves Casey out of the way into a pile of garbage bags]
Walsh: [in voice over as Casey falls] I don't know, it's just different.
[Flashback to 30 minutes earlier; Walsh and Casey are in the diner. Walsh is cooking, Casey sits on a stool at the bar.]
Casey: Different how?
Walsh: It's hard to explain. I've worked at three other precincts, and none of them were like the Second precinct. [sets plate of food (an egg-eyes and ketchup-smile face on top of a pancake) in front of Casey; she frowns at it] Maybe it's the criminals; we get a lot of oddballs and nutjobs. Heck, maybe it's just us, the cops. I don't know.
Casey: You know when I worked Vice undercover, they'd call me 'Pete Rose'. [Walsh chuckles and Casey laughs] You know why they called me Pete Rose?
Walsh: Well, either you like to slide head-first, or you're the utility player.
Casey: Exactly. See, I can do everything: the interviews, the research, dress up like a hooker. So whatever you need, just tell me.
Walsh: Okay. I will. Well, you know, in the meantime, just keep your knees bent and roll with things because, at the Second Squad, nothing is what you think it is.
1. Walsh is an eternal smartass. 2. Walsh doesn't count. 3. Walsh makes smiley-face breakfasts (always, or specifically for Casey?) 4. Walsh is bad at communication--actively bad, because he promises to tell Casey what he wants from her and then doesn't; he just shoves her out of the way. This persists throughout the remainder of the series, too: Casey keeps having to ask Walsh to explain things (things meaning frequently his own actions) to her because he won't do it voluntarily. In this way he maintains an imbalanced power relationship between them (mentor-mentee) while in many other respects their partnership grows quickly into a caring friendship fairly rapidly; the overall dynamic is very much one of a wise and dickish older brother showing off for his precocious little sister. This makes sense, especially given their line of work, as a connection between his high valuation of secrets and his Machiavellian control trips, pranking, and so on: in their business, knowledge is power, control over a person's ability to access or use information is control over the person, and detective work as the accumulation of knowledge is about the accumulation of control. When Walsh tricks, confuses, or dangles information in front of people, he is displaying his skill at gaining control--basically, at domination. The problem, supported by the institutional culture he is a part of and the subcultural peer-network he's not a part of, is that he flaunts his skills in situations and excercises them on people without first obtaining consent (more examples below). PS I'm pretty sure nobody called Casey 'Pete Rose', that she made that up to appeal to Walsh and looked up names of players that would suit her analogy; she may have known the name already (I know the name from Dan Bern songs) but I don't get the impression that she's actually a huge baseball fan.
Walsh and Casey enter the precinct with one of the robbers in tow.
Prisoner being escorted to holding cell: [telling them that they can't hold him] You know I'm only sixteen.
Casey: You should have thought of that before you went cash-skiing on Essex Street.
Walsh: [to Beaumont, who passes them on their way to the cell] Thirty-six.
Beaumont: Forty-one.
Casey: What was that about?
Walsh: [grinning] Wouldn't you like to know.
Setting up the game that Walsh and Beaumont play throughout this episode, announcing ascending numbers to one another every time they meet, and the fact that most of the fun, for Walsh, lies in the fact that nobody else knows what it means.
Alvarez: [stopping Walsh in the hall as he leaves an interview room with Casey and their teenage bankrobber] Hey, Walsh, got a sec?
Casey: I'll take him. [leads prisoner away, leaving Walsh with Alvarez]
Walsh: Alright, yeah.
Alvarez: I just wanted to say, uh, no hard feelings about last week.
Walsh: Last week? [they start walking down the hall]
Alvarez: Yeah, the wild goose chase you sent me on? You know, Shabu Shabu?
Walsh: Ah.
Alvarez: I know that you were probably just feeling upset about Kowalski, so . . .
Walsh: No, just trying to teach you a lesson.
Alvarez: Oh.
Walsh: [stops walking and rubs his eye] How long you been working here, Eddie?
Alvarez: It'll be a year on Friday.
Walsh: Ah, see, how wonderful. What's Delahoy's first name?
Alvarez: Um . . .
Walsh: [softly] Eric.
Alvarez: [echoing] Eric.
Walsh: How old's Banks?
Alvarez: Ff--Banks? Fwuh. Well, he's . . .
Walsh: Forty-two! He talks about it all the time, Eddie, the year he's gonna die? [makes "spooky" hand gesture]
Alvarez: Yeah, I. I must have missed that.
Walsh: You see, this is what I'm talking about, Eddie. You've been here a year, and you don't know anything about us.
Alvarez: You're right. I should familiarize myself with people's personnel files.
Walsh: No, Eddie. Maybe just come have a beer with us sometime. Stop being such a snob.
"Boorland Day" does a very good job, I think, of the post-pilot show-has-actually-been-commissioned task of being a solid second-first episode; it covers the same ground of introducing the basic information, who's who and what are they doing, but it also links back to the events of the pilot and carries on from there in a way that feels relatively natural or at least plausible enough given the setting, and starts to lay out a path for where things will go next. This scene, for example, does all of those things: it refers to the pilot, it gives information about these characters and about others offscreen, and it basically sets up Walsh and Alvarez' dynamic for the rest of the run: Alvarez desperately seeking Walsh's approval while also dedicated to his own ideas about how the precinct should run and to his own (and his wife's) career advancement, and Walsh alternately coaching him on how to break out of his shell and integrate, become part of the team (to the extent that there is a team; for most of the episodes we got, there's the Walsh and Shraeger Show and the Banks and Delahoy Show, with Alvarez, Beaumont, and Cole mostly supporting and floating between the two as needed, with more time devoted to Walsh and Shraeger), and slapping him down for not getting it right with pranks and upbraidings. This is one sadistic side of Walsh's dominance coming through: he doesn't really mean ill towards Eddie, and he wants him to succeed (at least with the goals he sets for him, because after all Walsh inherently knows best), but he does enjoy the hell out of making Alvarez miserable in order to prove his point, punish him for not doing as Walsh feels he ought to, teach him a lesson. It's dubious consent, at best, the fact that Alvarez keeps "letting" him do it and keeps wanting Walsh to like him, but there is some kind of hazy reciprocation on Alvarez' side, as I see it, and I really wish that they had the language and were in social positions where they could actually negotiate a less-damaging arrangement to serve the desires they both seem to feel (in my happilyish ever after epilogues . . .).
In the precinct stairwell.
Casey: Listen, I think it's time that we have the conversation.
Walsh: The conversation?
Casey: The 'porn stash' conversation.
Walsh: Big porn fan, are you?
Casey: No, like, [stops Walsh on the landing] listen--the 'what do we do if something happens' conversation.
Random uniformed officer passing on stairs: How you doing, Detective?
Walsh: [to uniformed officer] Hey.
Casey: [clears throat and crosses arms] When Kowalski died, you went straight to his locker. You got rid of all of his contraband.
Walsh: We've been partners a week . . . you're thinking about me dying?
Casey: Well, is it too early?
Walsh: Ah, I suppose not. So, what do you got? Hm? Drugs, guns, Nazi plate under the bed?
Casey: No. I have a diary, that I wouldn't want anyone to read.
Walsh: A diary? Like, 'Davis was mean to me today', that kind of thing?
Casey: No! Sexual . . . stories . . . about me. You know.
Walsh: Fine. Where is it?
Casey: It's in a locked box, in my closet.
Walsh: Okay, great. [starts to walk away; Casey stops him]
Casey: Nup--what about you?
Walsh: What about me? W-what am I hiding? [pause] Well, what do you think, Case?
Casey: I--look, I don't think of you as the sexual deviant type or . . . [Walsh raises eyebrows, looks at her for a long pause until Casey nods] I know what it is: you write poetry. [Casey walks away and Jason laughs, then follows]
Walsh: You're good.
Casey: Don't forget it.
I can't help but snort at "I don't think of you as the sexual deviant type", but I suppose that does depend on what you consider deviant and whether you consider "deviant" a pejorative. Walsh doesn't appear to consider himself deviant (those raised eyebrows are one of the few indications otherwise, and can just as easily be interpreted "okay, New Girl, let's see how deep a hole you can dig or how fast you learn to put down the shovel"). Look how smoothly he redirected her inquiry, too: turned it around so that she gave up information as a show of trust and didn't get anything back (by the end of the episode they're in a better place as far as exchanging actual trust and truths, but for now the bond's not there yet). The sad consequence of this scene for me, knowing that Casey is fishing to try to discover Walsh's Big Secret, is that she's probably lying about the diary, and even if she's not, the way she talks about it suggests that she probably doesn't participate in fandom; otherwise I could quite easily see her as One of Us in that respect (or maybe she does, and just doesn't trust Walsh enough yet to tell him something so ~embarrassing~).
Casey, Walsh, Beaumont, and Alvarez are standing with a SWAT team outside a diamond store full of robbers and hostages; Walsh has just hung up the receiver on the secure line to the lead robber.
Casey: What'd he say?
Walsh: [ignores Casey and goes to stand near Beaumont] Get my message?
Beaumont: Yeah. Triple digits, nice.
Walsh: Yeah. You?
Beaumont: Two-twelve.
Walsh: [looks at her, surprised] Really? With all this going on.
Beaumont: [smugly] Hmm. It's all about the multi-tasking, my friend.
Walsh: Impressive. [starts walking away, back to Casey and Alvarez]
Beaumont: Thank you.
Casey: What was that all about?
Walsh: Nothing. Alvarez? Me and the new girl here are going to go over to the hospital. See if we can't talk to the dad. Nobody gets in 'til we get back, okay?
Alvarez: Yeah, okay, I can't promise . . . [smirking] if Homeboy gets jumpy, things might get tactical.
Walsh: Eddie. No one gets in. [Alvarez sighs; Casey and Walsh leave]
Walsh continues to lord the secret of the number game over Casey--the reason he made a point of checking in while she was watching. Walsh is impressed by Beaumont's multi-tasking because he's actually not that good at it; there are some cute moments at other points in the series where you can see him get stuck trying to switch gears--not because his mind works too slow but because it runs full-speed on one track at a time and it's hard to redirect that momentum. And I love the way Eddie's smile disappears when Walsh says his name all curt like that, like he's a sub-adult, a disobedient child or a pet, and how instantly, maybe instinctively, he responds to that tone. Why can't that be conscious and consensual?
Nighttime in the diner; Walsh is cleaning up but freezes when Beaumont comes in the door; "The Dog Days Are Over" is playing in the background.
Beaumont: Three-thirty-one.
Walsh: Six-oh-eight.
Beaumont: Wow. You thought about having sex with me six hundred and eight times today. [she takes off her coat and scarf and Walsh puts down his dishes and cloth] What happened? Earlier you were only at one-nineteen.
Walsh: Well, I like to finish strong.
Beaumont: Yeah? [Walsh grunts, grabs her by the upper arms and shoves her against the wall] Show me. [they laugh and kiss; Beaumont puts her arms around Walsh's neck, then he pushes her arms above her head against the wall, crossing her wrists and wrapping her hands around the coat hooks screwed into the wall above her]
The clip that I already shared in my other post, because it is awesome, and payoff, and nnnngh sexy. I said in the last post that this scene was one that really got me hooked on the show, made me prick up my ears for these characters and the series, took me from curious to excited to see more, not because I need a sexual/romantic relationship to care about a piece of media but because this one in particular was handled in a way that appealed to me (hiii happy consenting people who play weird games, hiii Toppy Renner) and made it easy to invest emotionally (they are like meeeee). It's also just a beautifully crafted little scene; every detail of the performance and choreography, especially in the last seconds (the laugh, the grunt, the grins as they crash into the wall, the playful roughness of it, the use of music, "show me", the hands reaching up and grabbing hold of the hooks--hold on to this), GUH. It's like they made it just to pound my buttons.
This is supposed to be (if I hadn't already spoiled it) the punchline of the running numbers gag, and the Big Reveal of Allison and Jason's extracurricular relationship. The vibe I get from it is of a young relationship, still riding the big high of (dizzying, wonderful, distracting, fun, stupid-making) NRE, but not a first time, which makes Beaumont's comment to Casey about Walsh not looking at her boobs (a week ago, in canon-time) a touch curious in retrospect (now that we know that he does look at her boobs, with permission, at least when they're off the clock). I'm pretty sure that Walsh and Beaumont were not written as dating in the pilot, that that was added later, which means either that they've been doing this less than a week or, my current preference, that they've been at it a little while longer than that and that Beaumont lied to Casey (retcon!) because, well, they just met, and because the relationship was too new and shiny and uncertain to go presenting at people, and because apparently intra-office fraternization is not forbidden (not a Sam-and-Jules situation) but discouraged (so Sergeant Brown implies), and probably because Jason likes secrets. I don't believe that they actually talked about that with any length or detail, but he may well have requested that they keep things hush-hush because "it's more fun that way."
Also, those are some convenient coat hooks, IJS. I wonder how strong they are.
From Episode 3, "One Man Band"
Opens with a shot of bare intertwined legs and sounds of kissing; more shots of hands and shoulders and faces reveal that these are Beaumont and Walsh in bed together. The phone rings and Walsh breaks off kissing to look at it.
Beaumont: [sing-song] Answer that and I'll hurt you . . .
Walsh: [grunts and rolls them over so he can reach the phone] You're gonna hurt me anyway. [answers the phone; Beaumont keeps giggling and kissing his neck] Walsh?
Casey, on the phone: Hey, Walsh, it's Shraeger. Open up, I'm outside.
Walsh: Aw . . . sure. [sighs and tosses the phone away on the bed; looks at Beaumont] I gotta get this. [more kissing]
This is actually my favourite episode of the series, by a pretty clean margin, and it was hard not to throw in a whole lot more of it (please somebody watch it and squee with me, why are you reading this if you have not watched or don't intend to watch it). I had to keep this scene in, though, for a number of reasons:
1. Jason and Allison and all their sexy body parts (including Renner's surprisingly thin ankles, what?) in bed together, covered only by a bunched-up sheet. I could stand to see a little more of that.
2. More clear evidence of them having a playfully rough relationship in which Jason manhandles Allison, a lot (and grunts attractively while he does it), but not a formal power exchange relationship with any kind of externally recognizable D/s protocols. Jason's statement "you'll hurt me anyway" implies a degree of reciprocity or switchiness in the realm of action (and we certainly know by this point that Beaumont could hurt him; we've seen the martial arts trophy on her desk, though I think her pattern of violence in the line of duty is still mostly unrevealed), or maybe more like brattiness considering some of the later evidence regarding their respective relationship roles as "the man" and "the girl".
3. Walsh defies Beaumont's warning to answer the phone, and then gets out of bed, puts on clothes, and opens the diner to let Casey in, because Casey is in the nebulous little sister territory between "this rookie that I have to deal with and look after" and "my partner who I care about" where she still needs Walsh's protection and guidance, and actually gets his attention and patience. Plus, it looks like he trusts Beaumont not to be too hurt--probably because he knows she's a detective too, she has a partner whom she loves and takes care of too: she understands, and she'd do the same for Cole.
4. This scene (and its continuation in the episode) even more than the last (making out in full view of the window) gets into the break-down between public and private that goes along with living in the diner, and what this implies about Walsh's personality and his near-fetish for secrecy. His kitchen looks out onto the street, and there's a doorless frame and a window in the wall that separates that publicly visible and sometimes publicly physically accessible (strangers show up in his kitchen and he feeds them) space from his private living quarters in the back, which are still part of a semi-functioning restaurant (is there a 'public' bathroom? Do people have to pass his bed to get to it? What about the health code?). It is a weirdly intimate/impersonal situation to be living in.
From Episode 4, "Crime Slut"
Walsh and Beaumont open the door and stumble out from inside his closet in a state of breathless disarray.
Beaumont: [wrapping her body in a towel] That was interesting.
Walsh: Yeah, the raincoat kind of ruined it though.
Beaumont: Oh, please. Nobody likes wearing them but they're safe.
Walsh: No, I meant the actual raincoat. You, uh, you want some coffee?
Beaumont: [sighing] Yeah. [Walsh growls and smacks her ass as he passes her; she jumps] Ow! [she laughs; then her phone rings]
One odd thing about this show (besides the fact that it is clearly trying to kill me): it keeps making condom jokes (there's at least one other) and they don't really work? Maybe I just don't think condoms are funny. Awesome things about this scene: how wobbly they both are, how contented Allison looks, how hoarse Jason's voice is, like he's just been shouting (which, inside a metal box, would be LOUD), the smack (which didn't sound that hard, and she's wearing a towel--I think the yelp is a bit much unless she's been pre-tenderized [where is my spanking fic?]), and their overall comfort with each other and with doing things together (apparently spontaneously) that are a little, um, "creative", shall we say. It's a lovely little domestic portrait. I'm avoiding talking about what happens between this clip and the next one because I don't want to spoil the episode (it's another good one, I think), but I think there are some interesting arguments to be made based on it regarding financial power as an index/cause/symptom of unequal control in personal relationships and social structures, and about racialized, gendered & sexualized violence, and I'm annoyed that these events doesn't seem to actually get resolved or mentioned again over the rest of the series?
Back in Walsh's "bedroom" the following night; he's undressing after work.
Beaumont: I know it seems like I have it all together, but I just, I don't.
Walsh: Wait, are you--are you apologizing for being human? Is that what you're doing?
Beaumont: No, I--
Walsh: Because I've got news for you: if I wanted shallow and uncomplicated, I'd date that newscaster again. [approaches Beaumont, starts stripping away her badge and gun, touching her body and face] I like girls with secrets. I like girls who lie. How can you trust someone who doesn't have secrets? Hm?
Beaumont: I have secrets.
Walsh: ["interested"] You do?
Beaumont: [grinning] Yeah. And, um. And I can lie.
Walsh: [strips off her windbreaker with a growl] Take off your clothes, and get in my bed. [grabs her by the upper arms and pushes her, laughing, down onto the bed]
I am fascinated and a little uncomfortable with the fact that this is the first time we see Jason and Allison talk at all about their relationship, that this is the way it goes. It can kind of understand Jason associating secrets with depth, I think that's an easy leap to make, but I question the wisdom or health of encouraging her to lie, especially because I don't really trust him not to get angry if he later discovers something that he decides, retroactively, that she should have told him earlier. I understand that I'm coming from a cultural context that explicitly prizes honest (and lengthy) communication around all sorts of things as the foundation of trust, and he apparently doesn't, but still. "How can you trust someone who doesn't have secrets" is a really strange and powerful line, for me--at once very alien and very familiar. I recognize the value of keeping secrets as keeping confidences, vouchsafing the information (power) that other people give to you, and being worthy of trust in that way, but keeping secrets for the sake of keeping secrets . . . I suppose on one level this scene is about forgiveness and reassurance, Jason telling Allison that he's not mad that she tried to hide something from him, but where it pushes beyond that into discouraging her from coming to him honestly with problems in the future, I get kind of cringey. On the other hand "take off your clothes and get in my bed" is SUPER FUCKING HOT, as is the fact that he keeps growling and smiling at the same time, not to mention SUPER TOPPY, and the fact that he immediately shoves her down instead of standing back and waiting for her to comply is, I think, very informative about him and about their relationship.
From Episode 5, "42"
I'm not showing the beginning of the episode because it seriously spoils another character's major arc up to this point, and I'm trying to minimize that if I can't avoid it completely, but for context: this episode, once again, features an early scene of Walsh and Beaumont at his place. This time Walsh gets up early and goes to the kitchen to make breakfast, instructing Beaumont to sleep in. A customer comes in, acts suspicious, then pulls a gun and fires on Walsh. Walsh grabs a shotgun from beneath the counter and fires back, chasing the man away; Beaumont's scream stops him from pursuing the shooter--a stray bullet has made its way into the back room and hit Beaumont in the abdomen. The first clip I'm showing is of Casey finding Jason sitting in his car in the parking lot outside the hospital.
Casey: [settling into car] Hi.
Walsh: Hi.
Casey: How's Beaumont?
Walsh: Not good. They're operating.
Casey: So what're we doing?
Walsh: Dark brown hair, it's greasy, it's worn back.
Sketch artist [revealed to have been sitting behind Casey all along]: This would be a lot easier if I could sit in the front.
Casey [sighs]: CSU found bullets in the diner wall. Also picked up some fingerprints off the counter. [looks at Walsh clutching the steering wheel] What, do you not like hospitals?
Walsh: No, I'm fine. Nurses come out every fifteen minutes, give me updates.
Casey: No, but it's the point, you know. Go inside, you pace, show your support.
Walsh: She's in surgery, okay? I mean there's doctors there, that I--I'd rather just wait in the car. If that's alright with you.
Casey: Yeah, no, yep, no, yeah. [pause] What I was trying to say was, y'know, if you wanted to talk about . . . about how you're feeling.
Walsh: [changing the subject] So Brown made you lead on this?
Casey: . . . Yeah.
Walsh: That's good.
Walsh'll explain his aversion to hospitals later; what I want to comment on with this clip is is, first, that Walsh stays as close to Beaumont as he can bear to, at that point, while also doing the most useful thing he can think of; that he is able to compel the hospital staff to do what he wants (bring him information from inside, even though one of the nurses points out to him that it's not her job); and he is genuinely glad for Casey, getting to lead the investigation--if he can't do it, at least they're in good hands.
Later, after Beaumont is out of surgery but Walsh still cannot bring himself to enter the hospital, he leaves the parking lot to join Casey in tracking the shooter but corrects her when she calls him Beaumont's boyfriend. This scene takes place after they discover that Cole (dun-dun-DUN) knows more than he's saying.
Casey: Walsh, we have to tell Sergeant Brown!
Walsh: No.
Casey: What--why not?!
Walsh: Look, I had a three-hour dinner with Beaumont last night. You know what she talked about the entire time? Cole's wedding. She loves him, and this would kill her.
Casey: U-um. I thought you weren't her boyfriend.
Walsh: I'm not. Twelve-year-olds have boyfriends. I'm her man.
D'awwwww Jason you so cute, and also kinda messed up. This is one of the first times that the show starts to really unpack Jason's (very specific) ideas about what it means to be A Man, or in this case Someone's Man. He's made comments before that indicate fairly strong gender essentialist thinking (telling Casey "you're a girl, so I have to explain this thing to you", etc.), but it's here and in some later episodes that he starts to really articulate what this actually means to and for him. It's also potentially packing the charges on a bomb that will blow up in his face, as far as his paternalism and secrecy-fixation go: Jason really doesn't seem to realize that by trying to protect Beaumont's emotional health by concealing the role Cole (whom she loves and trusts) played in endangering her physical health, he is potentially betraying her trust as well (IMHO). Interesting: Walsh didn't leave until he was allowed to get closer.
Walsh finally pushes himself to visit Beaumont in the hospital.
Beaumont: Where you been?
Walsh: Catching bad guys.
Beaumont: How'd that go?
Walsh: [shrugs] He is dead. Listen, Al, I need to--to tell you something. When I was twenty-two I had a girlfriend . . . she was murdered. She didn't die right away; she was in the hospital for a week.
Beaumont: Jason, I'm so sorry.
Walsh: So I need you to get better, and get out of here. Okay?
Beaumont: 'Kay. [smiles] Promise.
Walsh: Alright, now move over. [he waits for Beaumont to make room for him, wincing, then climbs into the bed beside her and snuggles his head against her shoulder]
I have such mixed feelings about this scene . . . on one hand I'm rolling my eyes because that is classic manpain, and how dare Jason, and the showmakers, make this all about him, his pain and his needs and his character 'growth, when she's the one with a belly full of stitches and a drip in her arm. On the other hand, part of the problem with that pattern is there's always (or often enough) an exception for this specific instance, these specific characters, and I do think that in this specific instance, for these specific characters, it works. It makes sense for them, and the actors sell it, and hey, at least Allison's alive and can go on to have her own stories (if the show had lasted longer) instead of getting fridged (though I still feel bad for nameless dead prop girlfriend). And I kind of love that he assumes that he can order her to get better (and believes, or wants to, that it will work), and how charmed she is by him doing so, and the vulnerable bossiness of Walsh ordering Beaumont to move over so that he can climb into the bed with her, and the way you can tell he'd deny it if you suggested that the cuddle was as much for his comfort as for hers, that he's not just fulfilling a duty but actually clinging hard to the reassurance that she's still alive and real (sometimes tops need aftercare, as much as or more than bottoms). Might be significant too that when he reaches to put his arm over her, she moves his hand to a different spot on her belly--this might be making much of nothing, but could be his subconscious compulsion to push buttons and poke bruises guided his hand directly to her wound and she had to correct him because yeah, not the good pain.
No clips from Episode 6, "The Circle Line", because Allison's not in it and there aren't many stand-out scenes that add to the points I've been trying to make. Possible exception would be the paired scenes where Walsh yells at Alvarez for thinking he's better than the freaks of the Second and calls him "the biggest freak that we got", and later apologizes not by retracting Alvarez's freak identification but by including him in the freak family: "Hey, we're all freaks, aren't we? That's a good thing. To stand out, be different. It makes us good at what we do." Which is an interesting statement (we're the same because we're different), and a kindly nod to all the weirdos in the audience (let your freak flag fly). It also shows that Walsh does think of himself as a freak of some kind, although some of his other statements suggest the opposite.
From Episode 7, "The Tape Delay"
Beaumont is back at work, apparently none the worse for wear (so we know how long it takes to recover from a gunshot wound in this universe :P ); in an earlier scene she snapped at Walsh for talking to her. Walsh and Casey are pulling an all-nighter working a security detail for a VIP, currently sitting in the hall outside his hotel room.
Casey: [rubbing her eyes to stay awake while Walsh reads his newspaper half out loud] So are you going to tell me, uh, what happened earlier? That thing with Beaumont?
Walsh: I doubt it.
Casey: Come on. You guys have a fight or something? Tell me, I'm bored.
Walsh: I yelled at her.
Casey: Why?
Walsh: I don't know, it was in her dream.
Casey: What?
Walsh: [drops newspaper and looks at Casey] Look, I-I wake up this morning, and Beaumont's just sitting there at the end of my bed staring at me, which is creepy, so I ask Beaumont, 'what's wrong?' She says that I yelled at her in her dream.
Casey: Huh.
Walsh: Apparently she thinks this is something that I should apologize for, and I told her, like, well, it didn't really happen, it was a dream, the whole thing's ridiculous. So I--
Casey: Wait wait, you didn't say that, did you?
Walsh: Well, yeah!
Casey: Ohh . . . [rolls her eyes]
Walsh: And she asked if I was calling her ridiculous, and then the whole thing just kind of . . . went downhill from there, you know. I don't know. [sound of a woman screaming from offscreen; Walsh and Casey turn to both look] Is that a sex scream?
Casey: [frowns at him] I don't know what kind of sex you're having.
Walsh: I think it's coming from the stairwell.
Casey: I'm going to go check it out.
*raises hand* Ooh! I have a good idea what kind of sex Jason is having! At least I have my imagination and some clues that make certain dynamics and activities seem more plausible than others. Beyond that prize of a brief exchange (because of course Jason likes and gets partners who scream, while Casey does not like to scream or to make her partners scream--it fits so well with what we know of their histories and personalities), this scene is useful for setting up the fight that Walsh and Beaumont are having, and the route that Walsh will, on Casey's urging, take to fix it. I considered including a whole lot more of that, both of Casey enabling Walsh's gendered reading of this situation (like many others)--asking "how long have you been dating women?" and advising him to apologize regardless of whether he believes he's right and prove that he's listening because 'that's what women want'--and of Allison taking out her frustration at work with Cole's help because it wonderfully showcases their relationship and her rather poor compartmentalization skills, but opted to leave that to your (dear readers) further investigation. Walsh doesn't specifically mention gender or relationship roles here but it's kind if coded into the baby-talk tone he takes when he reports asking "what's wrong?". It's also interesting that when Casey asks what happened, he gives Beaumont's interpretation of the situation before getting into explaining and defending his own actions, though I suspect that's probably set up that way for comedy/storytelling rather than character reasons.
In the cop bar/Chinese restaurant with Spanish signage and a menu that reads like surrealist art where the proud weirdos of the Second precinct spend a good share of their time, Beaumont is at the bar laughing with Cole, Det. Leo Banks (Harold Perrineau), and Sergeant Brown. The bartender delivers her something fancy in a martini glass.
Bartender: From the gentleman over there. [he points]
Beaumont: [frowns and picks up the glass] Excuse me, gentlemen. [she carries the glass to a table by the wall, where Jason makes room for her to sit beside him] Um. You got me, uh, a girly drink?
Walsh: Yeah. For a sexy, smart, beautiful, totally awesome . . . girl.
Beaumont: Is this your way of apologizing?
Walsh: Well, I--yeah, I'm a guy, okay. I stay stupid things, sometimes.
Beaumont: Look, I . . . When I'm on the job, I have to be tough. I gotta be Uncle Beaumont. But when I'm with you, I need to be . . .
Walsh: [nodding] Vulnerable and feminine.
Beaumont: Me.
Walsh: Yep. You know, and I'm glad that I'm the only one who gets to see you that way.
Beaumont: [smiling] Me too.
Walsh: Mmhmm.
Beaumont: So you wanna see me that way right now?
Walsh: Yes I do.
Beaumont: Okay.
Walsh: Let's get out of here.
Beaumont: [laughing] Come on. [they get up from the table and head towards the door]
You guys, Walsh's way of apologizing for not taking Beaumont seriously when she asks him to apologize for yelling at her in a dream is to buy her a "girly drink" to reassure her that he sees her as valuable, vulnerable, and feminine, as well as "sexy, smart, beautiful" and "totally awesome", and justifies his behaviour with the excuse that because he is a guy he says stupid things sometimes. In his head guys say stupid things sometimes and are contractually obligated to apologize to girls (the word he uses, not women--aged as well as gendered), who require regular affirmation of their delicate preciousness, who require taking-care-of. This is also the episode where Walsh tries to cheer Casey up by telling her that his mother dressed him like a girl until he was six, which is both a boon to the study of Jason Walsh's Particular Ideas about Gender Roles and a handy launching point for AU fanwork wherein Walsh is a trans man (she dressed me like a girl until I convinced her the doctors were wrong), which would add another interesting layer to JWPIaGR (it's also the only time I can remember Walsh mentioning any family).
This is also a fascinating scene for what Beaumont says about herself--I'm 50/50 on whether "me" is agreeing with or correcting Walsh's description of her as "vulnerable and feminine" when she's with him. Either way it feels euphemistic, like she's avoiding saying (or doesn't know how to say) submissive, but that's how it reads to me, like an allusion to a particular kind of D/s role dynamic: your pet, your girl, your princess. Says a lot too about Allison Beaumont's Particular Ideas about Gender Roles, that she refers to her "tough" at-work persona as "Uncle Beaumont"--Walsh isn't the only one who conflates masculinity with dominance etc.
No clips from Episode 8, "The Dentist", because while it's got some good moments between Beaumont and Cole, between Beaumont and Walsh, and between Walsh and Alvarez, it doesn't really add anything new to my argument (also features more than usual amount of Idiot Ball).
From Episode 9, "The Apology Line"
Walsh and Beaumont are in his diner at night, drinking tequila at the bar.
Beaumont: So we have this case, the apology line, and it got me thinking about things that I've done in my life that I never apologized for.
Walsh: Yeah? Like making me go to the opera?
Beaumont: Hey, you said you liked that.
Walsh: You know what, [drinks shot] I was just trying to have sex with you.
Beaumont: I was going to have sex with you no matter what.
Walsh: ["shocked"] What?!
Beaumont: [laughs] No, I mean . . . like my mom. I--I ran away from home once, and I was gone for six days, and she must have been terrified, and I never said I was sorry. [shakes her head and pours another shot] Don't you have things you feel guilty about?
Walsh: I kicked a girl out of my car once. It was after a party, and the girl I'd been dating for a year--I caught her in the coat room making out with some other guy. So, she was giving me a hard time on the way home so I pulled over and said 'get out!'
Beaumont: Well she cheated on you. I'd--I would have thrown her out.
Walsh: Naw, but it was wrong. It was two in the morning, it was . . . middle of nowhere. I should have took her home and then broke up with her. But it felt good.
Beaumont: Here's to things that make you feel good. [raises shot in toast]
Walsh: [looking at shot] Alright. Wow. [downs it] I'm a--I'm a mess. [pushes off the counter onto his feet and sways] And I think I'm a little drunk.
Beaumont: Well that's good, because I'm a little turned on. [kisses him]
Walsh: You are? So what happens if I get really drunk?
Beaumont: I may lose my mind. [giggles]
Walsh: [grabs the bottle and takes a swig from it] Let's go.
This is probably my least favourite episode of the series. There are some good scenes that stand okay on their own, and the performances are fine, but there are also some things that I'm not cool with for ethical and character consistency reasons, and overall I just don't feel like it hangs together that well (partly because it disrupts the arc of some character relationshops, particularly Walsh&Alvarez; I think possibly it was meant to fit earlier in the continuity? Or parts of it were?). This is one of the scenes that I think is interesing in itself but kind of unpleasant in relation to the rest of the episode, and it's significant to me for three reasons.
First, this is Jason and Allison actually talking to each other, sharing personal information--trusting each other, keeping each other's secrets. I would like to see more of this, and I hope that it signified a turning point for them as far as keeping secrets becoming a shared rather than solitary activity (potential reframing of this conversation in hindsight of the third reason notwithstanding).
Second, it's another glimpse into their respective values and insecurities: Allison feels guilty for scaring her mother (hurting someone); Jason feels guilty for faltering in his duty as A Man to protect people (particularly women, particularly women he has some sort of relationship of responsibility to); and they agree that cheating is a dump-worthy offense.
Third, Beaumont telling Walsh that seeing him drunk turns her on and his reaction to that (to get more drunk) supports my view of him as a reaction junkie, and as seeing or preferring this relationship as a source of positive reactions: he wants to do whatever will make Allison happy, not just for the sake of her happiness but for the (broadly speaking compersive) happiness that her reactions bring him, the power high of being able to make her happy. It also shows his trust in her, that he's willing to sacrifice a degree of immediate control in her presence (whether or not he's getting it back on a wider relationship scale). Here's where Walsh telling Beaumont to lie to him maybe starts to come back to bite him on the ass, in that it turns out that she has an ulterior motive for getting him drunk: she's setting him up for a prank (not cool not cool not cool, this is not what informed consent looks like, in fact it is exactly the opposite). If she lies to him, if he can't trust the 'authenticity' of her reactions, then he loses his mastery and feeling of control over his world, as well, probably, as his reliable reaction fix, because the source is no longer 'pure'. Granted, she might have done this even without his encouragement for duplicity. Either way, ruh-roh!
Casey and Walsh walking outside the next day, talking about Casey's relationship woes and her ongoing discomfort with her wealthy background.
Walsh: There's nothing wrong with having money, Case. Y'know, people just want to live a comfortable life, and be happy.
Casey: Are you happy?
Walsh: Yeah, I am, because I know myself. I think, your problem is, is that you're still two people. You're the cop, and the rich girl. And until you can accept where you come from and who you really are, I think it's going to be pretty hard to be happy.
Kind of an awkward scene, the way it slides from relationships to money to happiness to self-knowledge, but important for me because, in Walsh's own words, he is happy, and he knows himself. I believe that both claims (happiness and self-knowledge) are accurate given the information available to Walsh, but precarious in that they are both dependent on external input (new information). Also brings back the implication that money is not a worry for Walsh, and suggests that he is better able to empathize with Casey than the other detectives are because he has tasted a similar privilege stew (the wealth and status of major league baseball).
From Episode 10, "The E.I.D." *yes, 10b before 10a, because 10a is kind of 'the money shot' in terms of the argument I'm trying to make*
Beaumont and Cole are sitting at their desks, chatting about porn (they're working on a porn-related case; something Beaumont is fairly comfortable with but Cole is not).
Beaumont: First thing I do when I date a guy is I look for his stash. You can tell a lot about a man by the dirty movies he enjoys.
Cole: Okay, this conversation is inappropriate on so many levels. I'm gonna go do some work. [gets up from his desk]
Beaumont: Oh come on, Cole.
Throwing this clip in before I get to the Really Important scene from this episode partly because it shows Beaumont's and Cole's version of the partner-sibling relationship (Big Sis Beaumont needling Cole for a rise but feeling bad when she gets one, while he shuts down the conversation for being appropriate partly because it does not fit with his sense of himself as a Good Christian and a professional and partly because sexual oversharing from Beaumont is particularly transgressive to him in a "noooo you are my sister" kind of way), but mostly because it brings to mind at least
1. What did you learn from Jason's stash, Allison?
2. Where does he keep said stash and what does it contain?
3. Does he know you found it and do you two share?
4. What does Allison's stash say about her?
5. Did Jason salvage anything from Kowalski's locker while Casey wasn't looking, and if so what?
(Writing this list was a major Spanish Inquisition moment)
Walsh and Casey are walking outside the precinct at night.
Casey: Do I strike you as the kind of person to be the man in a relationship?
Walsh: Yes.
Casey: Seriously, come on. Davis [her boyfriend] is mad at me. He says I won't let him be the man, whatever that means.
Walsh: Alright, let me ask you this: who pulls whose hair, in bed?
Casey: [laughs] Oh, that's--that's none of your business.
Walsh: [laughs] Well, there you have it. You're a shemale.
Casey: What--a shemale? No I'm not!
Walsh: Hey, come on, it's not a bad thing.
Casey: No!
Walsh: You're a cop, okay? A cop is the man in every relationship.
Casey: W--a woman doesn't have to be a man to be powerful in a relationship.
Walsh: [dismissively, reaching for car door] Whatever.
Distraught woman: [runs up to Casey] Are you police?
Paydirt! Walsh takes for granted 1. that hairpulling occurs, 2. that it is one person's job to pull hair and the other's to have their hair pulled, and 3. that the person who pulls hair is "The Man" in the relationship, BUT ALSO 4. that the role The Man, who pulls hair, does not necessarily "correspond" to the gender of the person filling that role, outside of the context of that role (but it does colour it, to a degree--hence Walsh's description of Casey as a "shemale" [and I roll my eyes at the word, but Walsh seems to be talking exclusively about performative masculinity and femininity in particular social roles, and not about trans identity or politics]): women can be "The Man" within a relationship, and this is not in itself "a bad thing". Dominance/submission is A Thing (and a thing he assumes everyone does, because after all Walsh is sane, and happy, and knows himself--he does not, as a rule, question the health or normalcy of his own desires), though he doesn't know how to think about it in those terms, and it is a gender-coded thing: dominance is masculine, but free-floating, so that masculine/dominant and feminine/submissive can attach to subjects of any sex or gender. I am intrigued by the gap in his logic ("a cop is the man in every relationship" . . . but Beaumont is a cop, too--and Walsh values this, talking to Casey in another scene about how it is hard to date civilians because they don't understand that cops don't have a job but are the job--yet she's not a "Man" by his reckoning, in their relationship) and by how unbothered he appears by it. Casey feels that there is something wrong with Jason's argument but doesn't have a prepared or instinctive explanation for what or why (she also lacks or hasn't thought much about--hasn't connected on a subjective level with--a language of dominance and submission as filtered through kink), and when she starts to try and articulate it, she gets interrupted. I really really really wish or hope that they continued this conversation later, sometime after the rest of the (overall very strong) episode, and that Casey and Jason could somehow stumble together to the recognition that there's language for that that doesn't rely quite so much on heteronormative gender essentialism, and that they're both dominant-leaning (part of the reason I don't ship Casey/Jason: I like their non-sexual sibling dynamic, yes, but mostly I think they'd get stuck on the two-top problem and, unlike some two-top pairings who can resolve the issue with sexy, competitive, wrestling-for-dominance, just wind up cranky and mutually frustrated), or that Jason told Beaumont about it (because if she talks to him about Cole, he definitely talks to her about Casey) and she actually had some awareness of kink culture and practice and looked at him like "wait, you mean you didn't know that's what we were doing? omg, I thought you just didn't like all the frilly trappings or didn't want to be seen at public events, but are you actually telling me that you didn't know?", or, hell, that a clue-hammer get lobbed from some surprising corner (say, Alvarez) and hit Jason on the head, because I think he'd be a much safer and probably more pleasant person to be around if he had a more formal education in sex-radical politics, consent, and negotiation, and when I think about what he could do with a bigger crayon box of techniques and a little more conscious reflection . . . yowza. Dude would be fucking lethal.
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Okay admittedly I haven't read your meta yet as I'm still happily stuck on the vid clips pretty of Jason/Jeremy. However I added this to my memories to read and devour when I have a little more time. Also upgrading and adding the show to my must have now list!
Thank you, you made my Monday =)
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PS: cute icon.