Episode Analysis - S1 E02 A Lance Of Straw

A Lance of Straw (14 Oct. 1960)



Writer: Stirling Silliphant
Director: Roger Kay
Directors of Photography: Ernest Haller; Jack A. Marta
(Details from http://www.imdb.com - click on the episode title above for more cast and crew)



The second ever episode of Route 66. I’d say Tod’s character is pretty much down pat, but Buz is still a bit weird. He spends most of this episode indulging in highly insensitive misogyny of a type that we don’t really see from him later. The idea seems to be that he’s a mannerless boy of the streets – a cruder version of the Buz we know later. I also feel like there are scenes that we’ve missed – cut for time, or perhaps by the censors? – between him and Charlotte, the female lead of the week.

There are a couple of slashy moments in this episode, and a lot of very interesting gender politics, largely spun from Katherine’s ‘lance of straw’ speech from The Taming of the Shrew that the episode title references. I feel like there’s something to be pulled out of the fact that Buz mostly interacts with Charlotte in the cabin while Tod interacts with her in the wheelhouse. Perhaps Tod interacting with her on a more masculine footing, while Buz confronts her in a feminine location. All very interesting stuff that should take more analysis than I give it here.

Screencaps are from the Shout Factory dvd release of the series.

Here are our boys again, back for more fun.

Buz is watching Tod drive, because he gets off on that kind of thing. They exchange fun banter about the fact that Tod’s college friend is no longer in Biloxi.

‘When you fish for shrimp, you go where the shrimp go,’ Tod protests.

Buz thinks that’s a motto he can live by.

Meanwhile, down at the docks, our villain of the week, Jean Boussard (played by Nico Minardos), is showing his metal by having an all out fist fight.

Also meanwhile, Charlotte Duval (Janice Rule) watches with a mixture of disinterest and disgust. There are lots of shots of hot and mildly interested Cajuns watching the fight. It’s obviously too hot or these fights happen too often for them to get very excited about it.


This episode reminds me of Bayou, starring Peter Graves. Probably because it’s set in the same place and revolves around the same ideas of Cajuns being hot-blooded and very French. I wonder if the real Cajuns resent this?

We’ve got a good idea of the relationship between Charlotte and Jean now. He invades her personal space, she resents it. He takes her net to throw around the guy he was fighting, she resents it. He’s like a child making a scene to try to get attention. She resents it. He says Charlotte Duval is his woman. She throws a fish at him and threatens him with a knife.

All the while Andre Cabateau (Thomas Gomez) has been watching, and defuses things by reminding the pair that there is enough trouble on Grand Isle, and persuades Jean to come for ‘a good cup of Cajun coffee.’ (I feel the word ‘Cajun’ is redundant here. If they are both Cajun and they usually drink Cajun style coffee, why mention that it is Cajun coffee?)

Coffee will solve everything (even pedantism). Unless you’re British, in which case it must be tea. If Andre offered Jean tea he would probably spit on him.

I don’t usually cap the titles since I've done that elsewhere, but here it is. ‘A Lance of Straw.’ It falls in an important place, I think. TopHatBlue is much more eloquent on this.

In all my Shakespeare studies I never studied The Taming of the Shrew, but the title of this episode comes from one of Kate’s soliloquies, and I think its positioning here just after the fight has been defused and Jean has been led away raises lots of questions. After all, both Jean and Charlotte have been victorious here, in their own way – Jean beat his assailant, Charlotte drove Jean away with her knife (although she needed Andre to physically remove him from the boat.)

So who has a lance of straw here? Jean who cannot conquer Charlotte but can conquer another man, or Charlotte who can instil fear and repel Jean’s advances but needs Andre to get him off the boat? They seem quite equal in many ways, which foreshadows the episode’s end.

‘You know your dad’s barges, Tod?’ Buz says on seeing the Biloxi Queen. ‘We swamped bigger than this, picnic weather, Brooklyn Heights, in our wake.’

‘Yeah,’ Tod says with the misty regret of someone who’s lost everything but his car. ‘At least this one’s still afloat,’ he adds brightly.

It turns out that their friend Mark, who owned the boat, has turned into a luscious Cajun woman. This is Tod and Buz’s luscious-woman-alert look. 

‘Looks like it’s Mark who made it,’ Buz says to Tod. 

This episode could be the subject of an essay on the objectification of woman. Impossible that Charlotte could work on the boat. She must be romantically involved with Tod and Buz’s friend. There they are, lusting after her, while she’s about six feet away from them. They haven’t even spoken to her, they’re so caught up in their speculations.

But no. Charlotte tells them ‘he’s gone to Montana.’ The shrimp season was so bad he sold up and moved out.

‘Now there’s a man that really follows the shrimp,’ Buz quips.

Tod is so incredulous when Charlotte tells him she is the captain that she explodes. She was perfectly calm until then. That would seem like the emotional reaction of a silly woman if you didn’t consider that she probably encounters this everywhere she goes, and is sick of it. She moves towards him, ranting, and Buz makes stupid faces behind her and Tod gives bewildered looks back. No wonder the poor woman is disenchanted with men if this is what happens every time she encounters them.

‘Just a woman, huh?’ she asks Tod. ‘Just a clown in make up, a masquerade, a something to dance on a string at the command of any passing man. So what does she know about the sea?’

What Charlotte has learnt has been passed down from her grandfather to her father, to her – a traditional hand-down of knowledge with an untraditional twist. That’s something solid against the puppetry and masquerade that she sees as inherent in a woman’s life – or at least, a woman’s life in regard to men. We see that that she knows the reality of a woman’s life having seen her own mother subjected to it. Drudgery on the one hand, and being reduced to a mere extension of her husband on the other.

Tod and Buz laugh at her all through this. Unsurprisingly she chases them off with a knife.

Charlotte manages to get Buz’s hand with the knife. Tod turns nursemaid.

‘Let me see,’ he says.

‘Aww, it’s nothing,’ Buz says, because he’s tough, but Tod insists on taking him to get it fixed.

Charlotte comes to find them again, concerned.

‘You two are good friends, yes?’ she asks.

‘We just sort of happen to be travelling in the same direction,’ Buz says. Buz, you’re not fooling us. Not for an instant.

Suddenly everything’s forgotten. Perhaps she thinks the drawing of blood is payment enough for their inexcusable rudeness. They are hired to crew the Biloxi Queen, and Charlotte tacitly demonstrates her abilities. She immediately takes command of them, telling them to go out and buy food and ice, and does the mental arithmetic necessary to work out the costs. She’s no fool. Tod and Buz only have six or seven dollars to their names, though.

It’s interesting that her mental arithmetic is mirrored by Tod’s as he works out how much money they could make from the shrimp. Equality, perhaps?

This is really just an excuse to screencap the Tod’n’Buz love/friendship/whatever your interpretation is.

And this is – well… Just go with your own thoughts.

This is where Tod and Buz meet Andre, when Charlotte sends them to ask for a place to stay – and find out just what social stereotypes Charlotte is fighting against. Andre thinks she should marry and have twelve children. Her parents are dead, so it’s time for her to marry, presumably because a woman cannot support herself. I can’t work out whether Buz looks approving at the twelve kids idea, or if he’s just tacitly laughing at Andre because he seems as much of a Cajun cliché as the rest of them.

But Andre is not such a cliché as we think he is. He’s a proper storybook figure – the agent who stands in the wings and causes things to happen. He thinks Charlotte should have twelve children, but he also thinks that she should be allowed to captain her boat, and that Jean should show his softer side. He is working to make people happy, not to make them conform to stereotypes.

We learn here that Charlotte would rather compare herself to Joan of Arc than have twelve children, which makes her crazy in Andre’s book. Andre is not a man for extremes.

Then Andre sees a ‘man of war bird’ making towards the mainland, and as always it’s an omen. It’s the foreshadowing of a storm – physical and metaphorical.

Well, this is just pretty. Tod and Charlotte watching one of the fishing boats returning as the ice is loaded on board their own boat. The boat is returning too soon. It's not a good sign for their own prospects of netting shrimp.

Jean’s boat is the Conquistador. A reflection of his motive in the story, perhaps?
I love Route 66 for these glimpses of real places and real things. I can almost smell the scent of the sea.

Andre is like the old grandfather of the docks. Everyone comes to him to speak of their problems. 

‘What is the heart(?) of a man, Andre?’ Jean asks (he’s rather hard to understand) ‘He’s a machine, no? The eyes, they see, the ears they hear, they take a problem and she go round and round in the brain. I see and I hear. My friends, they are in trouble.’

We see something of what Jean is made of here. He may be a chauvinistic ass, but he wants to mortgage his boat to help pay for the other fishermen who are in trouble. He won’t, however, help Charlotte as Andre suggests he does, because ‘she is a woman.’

Jean is as much a stereotype of a man as he wants Charlotte to be of a woman. Andre suggests a woman wants to see the child inside instead of just fists and muscle, but he insists, ‘I am a man.’

Andre tells him ‘these two boys from the north’ are ‘planning to help Charlotte take Biloxi Queen outside.’ Interesting choice of words there. Charlotte is a woman, and her place is inside, in the home. Tod and Buz will help her move out of the domestic sphere of the shoreline and into the outer world of the ocean. 

Tod and Buz are the pied pipers of Grand Isle.

Tod woos the little kid by offering to give him a spin in the Corvette. He’d get arrested for that nowadays. The kid tells them that Jean will throw them in the Bayou. So Buz bribes him with pop (he’d get arrested too) and asks if Jean ever gets thrown in the water. Buz senses a challenge!

Speak of the devil. Jean comes to challenge them. Tod gets free and easy with his baguette. Buz is just itching for a fight. They start to do the ‘Tod’s the talker, Buz is the puncher’ routine again.

Wham! Buz strikes. Tod is quietly amused.

Buz’s hand is sore, but Buz is happy because he just punched someone and Tod is happy because he got to watch Buz punch someone. All is right with the world.

Now, this is a nice shot. Jean is in the bar nursing his bruised ego, and Andre is looking for him, all shot through the juke box.

I like this too. What a pair these two are. Andre teases him about having a weak jaw, Jean protests it was a lucky punch. Andre thinks this is an opportunity for Charlotte to see the vulnerability in him and fall in love. Andre seems surprisingly supportive of Charlotte’s ambition to be a captain. Jean thinks that when Charlotte loses her boat she will come running to him.

There Charlotte is, on her boat, defying expectations again. She has been reading. I thought that in the sixties women were allowed to read – but perhaps not to read books on the rights of women. Just wait until Germaine Greer gets released onto the scene…

Andre has come to wake her up and berate her for not being like the others. I don’t think his heart’s in it, though. He looks to her as the last hope for finding the shrimp. He feels a connection to her through his connection with her father, who was his friend. His main motivation for coming is to tell her she needs to start for the shrimp right now, not to tell her to be a good little woman.

Tod is unwakeable. She tells him he has to get to the dock as fast as he can. He looks as her blearily and falls back asleep.

Sensing woman, Buz is already awake and leaning over the edge of the bunk (always on top, as someone has noted – was it TopHatBlue?). Awake, naked (I’m sure), under a thin white sheet. Oh yes :-)

‘Tod, he gets eight hours. Me, I get what I can, when I can,’ he says, and you’re not entirely sure he’s talking about sleep. I wish there were a little more of naked-Buz-under-a-sheet, but alas, there is not.

Oh, to have Buz grab at me like that…

Buz is bewildered at the enigma that is woman. She comes to him in the night, wakes him up, and tries to get him out of bed to chase shrimp. This isn’t his idea of how things should work.

Ah, symbolism. The cockerel is showing us that it is morning, but it’s also an apt metaphor for the strutting troop of men and potential men coming down the dock. They are peeved because the hen has gone out before they were awake to do the traditionally masculine work.

‘Someday. Someday you know how it feel,’ Jean tells the boy. He really is a cockerel in training.

Andre, the old man of the dock, is dismayed by Jean’s impulsive and macho behaviour.

Everything is ideal as the Biloxi Queen motors out into the ocean. The sky is blue, the music is jaunty, a froth of water rises at the bow. All is right with the world, and waiting for something to turn it all around.

And Charlotte is beautifully happy where she likes to be best, at the wheel of her boat.

Charlotte hands the wheel over to Tod. Tod and Buz wonder about radar, about charts and instruments. Charlotte has none. She trusts in God, and has everything in her head. She is a very self-centred person (and I don’t necessarily mean that negatively). It doesn’t occur to her to think what Tod and Buz would do if she were incapacitated.

‘And recipes?’ Buz asks, putting his male chauvinist pig hat on again. ‘When do you start cooking dinner?’

‘Me? I am captain, not cook,’ she replies disdainfully.

Oh, Buz, you are not doing yourself a service here. He actually makes a worse face than this, but I can’t bring myself to screencap it.

[EDIT - after a week or two of mulling I've given myself the distance to be able to cap that horrible face. Here it is.

Shudder.]

The other side of the carefree joy that Charlotte feels at sea. She visits an island which has little more than wreckage and a cross on it. 

Tod and Buz seem confused and saddened by this downbeat moment, but nevertheless manage to continue looking beautiful.

Buz says, ‘She isn’t even speaking to me.’

Gee, Buz, I wonder why?

As she kneels at the cross she hears a bell begin to toll…

‘Quick. There is little time. I hear the bell of Father Dupois,’ she tells them. Tod and Buz don’t hear it, but she tells them, ‘That bell rings only where there is danger… We say the finger of God taps the bell to warn the men at sea. Allons.’

Buz manages to stay silent through a whole speech, without uttering any misogynistic platitudes. And he even looks happy.

‘You take, huh?’ she says to Buz, asking him to take the wheel. For some reason he nods at Tod and Tod takes it instead. I’m not sure why. It’s as if Buz is trying to keep Tod and Charlotte in the same position, guiding the boat, while he tends to other things. Does he have a latent fear of being in control? Is it because Tod is predominantly the driver when they’re in the car? Perhaps some of those dominance/subordination issues from Black November have been carried over here.

Charlotte tells them the stirring story of how when she was nineteen her father went out to fetch Father Dupois, during a hurricane. Neither of them returned.

Tod and Buz are saddened again. Apparently they have no way to respond to this tale – so Buz asks brightly, ‘Anyone game for my turtle sauce piquant?’

‘It’s the only thing he can make,’ Tod adds.

Aww. That’s like when you’re in the depths of depression and dad offers you a cup of tea.

‘Whatever you make, I like,’ Charlotte tells him.

A strange role reversal has taken place since Buz asked Charlotte when she was going to cook. He won’t take the wheel, and offers to prepare food. Why is Buz suddenly playing the part of the woman, after all his jibes? What happened to suddenly make this peace between them, since Buz said she wasn’t even speaking to him?

On the Conquistador (rarrr) Jean is out looking for Charlotte, or shrimp, or something to restore his manliness. The storm is starting to brew. I think his feelings of jealousy are transmuting into real concern.

The clouds are gathering and Charlotte is obviously worried. Tod comes out of the cabin.

‘I’ll take over now,’ Tod says. ‘You go eat. Go on. We can handle it.’

We? What ‘we’? Tod and his penis?

Inside, Buz is doing his chef act, and whistling as he serves the food. I find this very attractive.

They have a little laugh over how good Buz’s cooking is. Then Buz sighs as if a great sadness has overcome his soul.

‘You know, some day, you’re going to have to do something about that,’ he says.

‘About what?’ Charlotte asks.

‘The fact that you’re not a man, no matter how much you might wanna be.’

‘I would rather be a barracuda than a man like most men,’ she tells him.

Buz is mistaking wanting to be a man for wanting to do things that traditionally a man does. These are not the same things. He calls her out for the fact that she has a bookshelf full of books about the rights of women, biographies of strong women and suchlike. I agree with him here in a way – not that she shouldn’t read these things, but that only reading these things will give her a distorted view of life. But really, telling a woman that she shouldn’t read (or write) is one of the biggest issues that there has been through the ages. It’s a huge thing, and it’s interesting and brave that this episode raises it, since I would have thought that by the 1960s views were pretty much turning towards thinking women should read and write rather than that they should not. I think that along with Buz’s obviously chauvinistic behaviour and the fact that he is now in the cabin succeeding at the traditionally feminine chore of cooking, the story would tend to support Charlotte. Of course, it’s hard to tell in this era of change which side of the fence the scriptwriters might be falling on. What is obvious to us might not be obvious to them, and vice versa.

(On an objectification-of-Buz sidenote, his arms are looking rather lovely here.)

‘This is not a war,’ Buz tells Charlotte.

Charlotte begs to differ. She outlines the life of drudgery of a Cajun woman, specifically her own mother. ‘What does she do all her life? She wait.’

That, I think, is the most telling line. Life should not be about waiting and waiting and then dying after an empty life. Charlotte wants to act, not to wait.

Buz looks as if he’s being swayed by this speech – but then he says, ‘I don’t believe you. That’s not what you really want. That’s only what you think you want. No woman can be independent. Not really.’ (Note: she didn’t say she wanted that – she said she wanted to share the sea with her husband.) ‘You just can’t be!’

Yeah, good argument Buz. A woman can’t be independent because she can’t be independent. Surely the scriptwriters meant us to side with Charlotte here?

‘The only way a woman can win the battle you’re fighting, Charlotte, is to let herself lose it,’ Buz says.

Again, great argument. What on earth is he trying to say here? Is he somehow trying to reference that speech from The Taming of the Shrew, and actually suggesting she should feign capitulation in order to retain her power? Somehow I don’t think so.

‘First I die,’ Charlotte responds.

The scene in the cabin fades out to the image of flags whipping in the growing wind. Hurricane Audrey is coming. The metaphorical hurricane in Charlotte’s mind is echoed by the real hurricane sweeping the land. Pathetic fallacy at its best.

The US Coastguard is as you would expect it to be. Well lit, well equipped, all American and not a Cajun accent in sight. They’re trying to contact Jean in the Conquistador, but they get no response.

Meanwhile, on the Conquistador, we learn that the antenna has broken off in the wind. Jean can hear Father Dupois’s bell, too. Jean crosses himself. In the vernacular, he’s saying, ‘Bugger.’

But out with the Biloxi Queen there is a strange calm – and then joy! Charlotte thinks they have found the shrimp.

Tod is at the wheel again. Where’s Buz? Doing womanly things in the cabin, perhaps?

Well, he is inside, but he’s sitting on his berth shoving his hand deep into his boot for some reason. Tod tells him Charlotte thinks they’ve found the shrimp.

‘I looked outside,’ Buz says. ‘All I saw was red red sky – and you know what they say.’

‘I’ll bite – what do they say?’

‘It’s the calm before the – er – storm jazz. You know – red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.’

‘Shakespeare?’ Tod asks, and Buz is incredulous that Tod thinks that ‘red sky in the morning’ might be Shakespeare, until he realises that Tod has just found The Taming Of The Shrew next to Buz on the bunk. (Actually I wouldn't be surprised if it were from Shakespeare. It's not, but plenty is.)

I like the little play here on knowledge and ignorance. Charlotte has found the shrimp due to her vast bank of acquired knowledge. All Buz has to inform him is the ‘red sky in the morning’ proverb. Score one for Charlotte in the men vs women battle. And then poor Buz also gets battered by Tod’s incredulity that he should be dipping into Shakespeare. Not what a rough and ready guy like Buz should be reading. That’s Tod’s preserve, the Yale graduate. (Or not graduate, depending on which episode you watch.)

Doesn’t Buz look like he’s found Charlotte’s journal and he’s sneakily sharing it with his school friends? Actually, Buz has been reading The Taming Of The Shrew for tips on how to handle Charlotte. He ‘quotes,’

‘and now I see her lances are but straw / her strength as weak, her weaknesses past compare.’

This is interesting. For a start, the passage is actually,

‘My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown.
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.’

Is Buz intentionally choosing to misquote, to turn the scene into something coming from a man and spoken of a woman, instead of spoken by a woman of women? If he is, it only invalidates his arguments further. The ‘seeming to be most which we indeed least are’ echoes his earlier, ‘That’s not what you really want. That’s only what you think you want.’

Actually, let’s just paste the whole speech here and compare it to this episode.

Fie, fie! Unknit that threat'ning unkind brow
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds, (and hurricanes, fair Cajun women?)
And in no sense is meet or amiable.                                
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body                (Now this is an interesting
To painful labor both by sea and land,                          passage after Charlotte’s
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,               speech about her mother)
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience—
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband.
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,                (again – this is interesting.
My heart as great, my reason haply more,                  If her mind has been big,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown.          her reason more, then she has
But now I see our lances are but straws,                         no reason to capitulate.)
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.


Personally (having not studied this play at all, so I’m only going by this single passage) I’d take this as pretence/irony. The final line of the play, ‘'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so,’ really does speak of beautiful Shakespearean dual meanings. No one, I would think, would truly believe that Katherine has been tamed – rather that she has pulled the wool over her husband’s eyes. There’s far too much exaggeration of the softness and necessary obedience of a woman here to make me believe it’s meant as truth rather than veiled sarcasm. (I’m sorry, it’s been too long since I studied literature, and it’s too late at night. I’ve lost all the necessary phrases for this.)

Anyway, I would like to analyse this more, but I’m too sleepy. Suffice to say, I believe Buz comes up worst here. He is misquoting to his own ends, to make the passage refer to Charlotte. He’s ignoring any of the subtleties that suggest the passage does not mean what it seems to at first glance. And this is against the backdrop of Charlotte’s immense knowledge of sailing and fishing vs Buz’s knowledge of one old saying.

Of course, the funny thing here is that he’s looking for tips in this on ‘how to handle the skipper.’ But she doesn’t need handling. She just needs a crew who works for her.

Tod doesn’t give Buz a response. He just looks at him, and urges, ‘Come on, come on.’ (strangely it sounds like he’s been dubbed with Buz’s voice.) He does give Buz one of those rather patronising looks, though, so maybe he’s thinking, ‘Oh, Buz…’

No excuse. I just like this shot. Buz looks like a happy school boy about to be let out to play.

Outside on the deck, waiting for the hurricane, lowering the nets, and oddly the music sounds like it’s from Star Trek.

They’re just discussing fishing techniques, but by god they’re pretty while they do it. There’s a sense of menace. The fishing will take two hours but the storm is gathering.

This is all just prettiness. I hadn’t noticed Buz’s belt. It’s pleasing on him.

And this is prettiness for fans of winches and suchlike.

And, joy! They have found the shrimp! Lobster shrimp, I think she says, which draw the highest price. After all her crossing herself and speaking of God, I like the way she is kneeling now in reverence and an attitude of prayer at the shrimp.

‘Thank you, papa,’ Charlotte says, looking toward heaven. ‘Charlotte, she thank you. All of Grand Isle thank you, they say you are still the best man on the fleet.’

‘They might even say that about you, skipper,’ Buz tells her.

So what has changed? Is he trying to flatter her? Have his opinions changed now she has proved herself capable of doing the masculine task of tracking down and capturing her prey?

‘The storm is nearing, so we only have two hour and then we must run for Grand Isle,’ Charlotte says. ‘But don’t worry. Papa show me how to cross many time.’

‘Except once, just once, he didn’t,’ Buz says.

Oh, Buz, you giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other. Charlotte’s joy disappears. Tod gives Buz one of those looks, like he took a street sweeper to a silver service dinner. Buz, we know you’re from Hell’s Kitchen, but do you have to be an ass?

‘I guess you had to say that, huh?’ Tod asks.

‘Yeah. I had to,’ Buz nods.

‘Yeah,’ Tod echoes resignedly, as if he knows it’s no good trying to get Buz to change. Buz will be Buz.

Why, Buz? Why did you have to say that? Why are you acting like the abusive half of a psychologically abusive relationship?

Because Tod looked like he was going to sneeze in that last shot, here he is looking freckly and disgusted at Buz.

And here’s Buz looking handsome as compensation for him being an idiot.

Now it’s really stormy. Stormy in earnest. Stormy because the gods are angry at Buz, perhaps.

In the wheelhouse of the Biloxi Queen Charlotte is being masculine again, trying to steer the ship through the storm instead of hiding in the cabin with her head under a blanket, swooning. Tod stands by her. He wants to take the wheel, but she tells him to help Buz, instead. I wonder if Tod was hoping he would be washed overboard in the dark?

I don’t know where this footage is from, whether it’s real or a model – but I wouldn’t fancy being on that boat.

I will forgive Buz all his MCP, early-characterisation sins just for being sweaty and dirty in the engine room. He can say what he likes. I’m not listening any more. I’m just gazing at his grease-streaked arms and the way the t-shirt hugs his torso.

Let’s have another shot of him down there, just to gratuitously exploit him as a sex object.

I think I’ve missed something. A second ago Buz was all sweaty in the engine room. Now he’s up on deck with Tod in oilskins. I’d like to have more shots of them getting liberally plastered in seawater, but they don’t cap so well in the dark in black oilskins. They see a light off the starboard bow. I wonder if it’s Klingons?

There’s a man in the water! Black water, black sky, blurry film. That doesn’t cap so well either.

Inside Charlotte is still wrestling with the wheel, but she’s somehow managed to hear the cries of the man in the water, over the noises of the storm. Tod somehow knows she’s heard too, because he comes in and says, ‘Just off the starboard. Twenty or thirty yards,’ and she says, ‘Okay,’ as if she knows exactly what he means. Sometimes I wonder if they cut this massively for length.

(There follows a long sequence of what I think now must be a model of the Biloxi Queen crashing through waves with two figures standing on deck that you never see move, and shots of a man in the sea, and Charlotte looking determined at the wheel, and close-ups of Tod and Buz getting lashed by waves on the deck. Screencapping would prove fun if I thought the images would be viewable, but they’re just too dark and grainy.)

They rescue one man, that I think must be Jean.

‘Henri, Francois, they are still in the water!’ he cries.

This whole sequence makes me think that the author must be sympathetic to Charlotte’s views more than to Buz’s views. The turnaround of having the heroine (or the heroine’s crew at least) rescue her suitor out of the water seems to confirm that this is an episode more in sympathy with Charlotte’s right to take a masculine role than it is disapproving of it.

This is why I think this must be a model. Tod and Buz on the deck here look like they’re made of clothes pegs, and they don’t move a muscle. I suppose it's a model or the real ship with dummies on board. If it is a model, I wonder where they did the model shots? Back in LA or somewhere near where they were filming?

The next morning, signified by a clear sky, the lowering of warning flags, stretching and coffee. Hurricane Audrey has dissipated.

On the radio the coastguards hear that a shrimp trawler is heading in, returning to Grand Isle. There is relief all round.

It’s like a foreshadowing of Titanic. Well, except that Titanic is rubbish… Buz comes up to the prow of the boat where Charlotte stands. She’s close to where boats would traditionally have a carved female figurehead, but she’s much more than that on her boat.

Tod is alone in the wheelhouse, looking pretty.

‘How does it feel?’ Buz asks, startling Charlotte. She is crying.

Buz has a sympathetic but slightly condescending look on. He’s about to say something insensitive and sexist.

And here it comes. ‘You pack the whole enchilada. You found the shrimp. You proved you were a better man than the best they had to offer. Today is kingdom come day.’

This would not seem so bad, but he says it like an accusation, as if he’s accusing her of stealing a starving child’s last meal.

‘You are the most cruel man in the whole world,’ she tells him.

Yes, Buz. Yes, you are.

Again, I could almost forgive him his idiocy just for being pretty. To be fair to Buz, he’s in his infancy. This is only his second episode. The writers, I will have to assume, are just getting their handle on him.

‘Oh, no, skipper,’ Buz says. ‘I’m just the guy you let your hair down with. I’m the guy you finally were a woman with. I never even held your hand.’

What does he mean by this? I can’t imagine he was intimate with her – especially not with the ‘I never even held your hand’ statement – unless he means they had torrid but not tender sex in the cabin while Tod was at the wheel? I can’t quite imagine that. Although, if he offered it, I think you would have to be a saint to turn him down…

‘Oh, Buz,’ Charlotte says, laying her hand on his. That could be the kind of tone one uses with a stupid but well-meaning child.

So he lays his hand over hers, and smiles ruefully. Does that mean he didn’t get sex after all?

‘You’re almost home, skipper,’ he says.

Let’s have a gratuitous close up of his arm muscles and his belt and chest. I mean, he was mean to Charlotte all through the episode. I don’t see the harm in objectifying him as a sex object in return.

Charlotte has the look of someone who needs a jolly good cry. I don’t blame her. She’s come through the storm, proved herself as the captain of her ship, skirted along the edge of death at sea, and her mind is whirling with all that that means.

On the dock the men are gathered to see the ship come in, in a wonderful reversal of the concept of the women left behind and waiting for their menfolk to return.

The crew of the Biloxi Queen get a standing ovation.

Buz is gratuitously pretty as he prepares to haul Andre on board.

The hold is full of shrimp. Tod is justly proud. (Let me just point out that anyone who has been properly brought up with the Queen’s English would call these prawns, thank you very much.)

While Tod and Andre gloat over the shrimp Jean and the little boy (whose name I either have forgotten or never knew) share a nice, understated and tender moment. In this moment of triumph it’s easy to forget that Jean almost died, and lost his boat too. At this point it’s impossible to tell if his crew were rescued too.

Jean seems like a different man. He looks humbled.

Andre was right all along. Charlotte notices this change in him, and no longer seems repelled by Jean’s presence.

‘A true Duval!’ Andre hails Charlotte.

‘Did you send Jean after me?’ she asks him seriously, but Andre tells her that ‘no one sends Jean Boussard where he does not choose to go.’

‘Because of me he lost the Conquistador,’ Charlotte says. So we’ll assume he didn’t also lose the crew.

Again the name of Jean’s boat seems pertinent. Because of Charlotte the Conquistador has been vanquished. She tells Andre that he must write a paper that gives her boat to Jean. When he has earned enough money to buy his own boat again she will take her boat back and go to sea again.

Jean is listening to this and seems stunned. It’s hard to know how he will react.

But he says to Andre, ‘Andre, you are right, I’m a pig. I’m a cochon pig. I choke with my pride, but all the time it’s not the pride – it’s the heart! It’s a heart so full with love for you, Charlotte, that it stopped me from saying what I say right now. I cannot take your boat. I cannot take you. I was not good enough man for you. I didn’t even go to the storm to save you – just went because I wanted to drag you back. That’s how I started, but instead I – ’

And he breaks off and falls into her arms. What wonderful gender reversals after this ambiguous episode. Yes, Charlotte has capitulated a small amount in that she has offered to give up her boat – but only temporarily. She has saved Jean physically, financially and romantically.

Andre is pleased. He’s acted as the wise old man through all of this, orchestrating the young folks’ lives, and it worked out without harm to any of them.

Aww, Buz looks sad. His MCP stance in this episode borders on comic relief. Stirling Silliphant must, must, have been aware of the ironies of Buz’s behaviour in this episode. He must have been using him as a stock figure of masculine and sexist values.

Yes, they must have been aware. I mean, there’s even something slightly feminine – traditionally feminine – in the way he stands sadly clutching at the rope, as if he has been unlucky in love. And he’s also very pretty. Did I mention that?

‘Can a boat not have two capitans?’ Andre asks wisely as Jean and Charlotte continue to hug. He can’t resist guiding their fates a little further. He nods. ‘A boat can have two capitan.’ And there’s the moral of this story. All men – and women – can be equal, once the pride on both sides has been washed away.

Poor Buz is still sad. Poor, sad Buz. (These continued shots of him in very similar poses have nothing to do with the fact that he looks pretty in them. Nothing at all. Tod is looking rather handsome too, I should mention.)

Our heroes are moving on again. Buz didn’t get the chance to say anything else stunningly insensitive to Charlotte. The car manages to rival Buz for prettiness.

A nice shot of a road sign again. I wonder if they meant this to be a theme for the end of the episodes?

Tod pulls a packet of cigarettes out from inside the rolled up sleeping bag and offers Buz one. Tod, don’t you know that Buz doesn’t like smoking? He only pretends to smoke to make you and the scriptwriters and sponsors happy. He won’t smoke it, and that’s just a waste of a cigarette for you.

See. Buz does not put the cigarette in his mouth, while Tod does.

He puts it in to light it. There’s a rare sight.

But he keeps it out of his mouth as much as possible. It must be horrible having to act smoking if you don’t smoke. He puts it to his lips again after a bit but almost certainly does not drag on it. I like Buz for not smoking :-)

Buz is still sad and troubled.

‘At least we’re rich,’ Tod smiles. ‘Almost.’

Buz doesn’t care about the money. He’s too busy being sadly pretty.

‘Say, aren’t you the fellow who once said, speaking about girls, they’re all nice kids,’ Tod reminds him.

‘Yeah, I’m the fellow. That’s me,’ Buz says sadly.

Buz, surely you didn’t fall in love with Charlotte? Was that what all that masculine posturing was about?

But then Buz suddenly brightens up, and points at the water, saying, ‘Look!’

A small library of ducks, or a flock of books, is floating by. Nothing cheers Buz more than seeing wet books, it seems.

‘House cleaning day on the Biloxi Queen,’ Buz says. ‘Goodbye to Queen Bess and Florence Nightingale. Susan B. Anthony.’

‘And Charlotte Duval?’ Tod asks.

‘And Charlotte Duval,’ Buz nods, sounding rather more melancholy. I wonder does Tod mean the literal fact that they won’t see Charlotte again, or is he being metaphorical. Does Tod believe that the Charlotte Duval that they knew no longer exists now she has got rid of her books?

But smiles spread all round. Perhaps Buz can reconcile himself to leaving her behind if she’s also given up her books on female strength. There’s something of that speech from The Taming of the Shrew here. The appearance of capitulation to appease the men. Buz is appeased. Hoodwinked, flattered, and appeased.

And Buz throws his cigarette joyfully after the books. See, Tod? He took two puffs on it at most, and one of those was for lighting it and one I think he didn’t inhale. Don’t give him cigarettes again. It’s like throwing money away. While you’re at it, give up smoking yourself.

A tacitly slashy moment. Shh. Let me enjoy it.

Goodbye, boys. See you next time.