Intelligence, again

[bcholmes]

I finished season two of Intelligence.

Recap: Mary Spalding (Klea Scott) starts off the series as the head of the organized crime unit, with ambitions about becoming a director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Ted Altman (Matt Frewer) is her conniving second-in-command who mostly wants Spalding discredited so that he can replace her.

Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracey) is a major crime figure in marijuana distribution and other crime, although he's getting into money laundering via ATM machines and buying an off-shore bank. Early on, he agrees to share information to Mary Spalding in exchange for protection. His right-hand man, Ronnie Delmonico (John Cassini) owns the strip club that operates as their main headquarters.

There are some interesting themes going on in it:

Blurring of the Lines between Cops and Crooks: Everyone's seen the whole "look, the cops are just as unethical and violence-prone as the bad guys"-type story before. Intelligence takes this even further, as we get to watch Spalding and Reardon get more and more involved in each other's business. Spalding has good investigative reasons why she wants Reardon to make certain deals, and she tries to influence the way he handles certain interactions. Reardon feels like he's the one who's always figuring out what's going on and doing the cops' job for them.

At some level, it starts seeming like every crook of any importance is being protected by some agency or another, and that those crooks are given a free pass because they can provide intel on some other crook who is also being protected by some other agency. It's like everyone knows everything about what's going on, and the only real "problems" occur when something starts to threaten people's access to information. I find that element really amusing.

There's a great moment in the second-season finale, when Spalding knows she's being followed in her car, and she manoeuvres to catch the follower's license plate number. It's a perfect parallel to the very first scene in the pilot when Reardon is doing the same thing.

American threats to Canadian sovereignty: There are a number of interesting stories in which American operations end up being the key threat. An early storyline involves Mary suspecting an American mole is about to be promoted to a key CSIS post. Later, there's speculation about how many members of government the US might have their hooks into. There's a plot involving the CIA and American attempts to gain access to Canadian water resources. There's even an implication that the current government might be motivated to bury an investigation that exposed American influence on government policy.

Loyalty versus Outsiderness: Although in some ways, Spalding and Reardon end up being parallels to each other, there are interesting ways in which they're different. Reardon is very much at the centre of his world. He has a good relationship with everyone, even his adversaries. His primary adversary in season 1 is Dante (Fulvio Cecere of Pegasus fame), the head of the biker gang, the Disciples. Reardon and Dante are nothing but cordial and friendly with each other, even as they're plotting against each other. Spalding, on the other hand, is the complete outsider in her world. At one point, another character talks to her about how she's in these agencies that operate as old boys networks, and as a black women, she's always going to be the outsider. It's interesting than when in an environment where so much is accomplished via favours and debts, her outsiderness makes her more objective and she makes better policing decisions.