Tracy's bicycle

[brightknightie]

Did you remember that Tracy has a bicycle? It's against the white wall perpendicular to her front door in her brightly-lit apartment entryway, where some folks might put a coat rack, shoe rack, umbrella stand, small table to drop keys on, or the like.

(I had occasion to rewatch "Avenging Angel." That prop leaped out at me as if I'd never seen it before.)

Off the top of my head, I don't recall any stories ever mentioning Tracy as a bicyclist, neither as a sport, a hobby, nor just an occasional way of getting around. It could be something she used to do but doesn't anymore for some reason. Or it could be something she still does all the time off-screen.

This of course brings to mind Nick's never-used-on-screen motorcycle, and Vachon's rarely-used-on-screen motorcycle. Maybe the show couldn't afford the insurance for bicycle riding, either. But such a reference for the character could have been an excellent thing, to round her out more. We got precious few canonical indications of how she spent her time outside work, or whether she put anything aside when she became a homicide detective and gained that wrinkle in her reality.

Comments

[greerwatson]

I'm quite familiar with the bicycle since I did the wiki page about Tracy's apartment! Inside the door is a pretty common place to put a bike in an apartment, especially downtown where thefts are frequent. The parallel with the motorbikes is a good one. I'm sure TPTB didn't want the actress using it, if only because street scenes downtown would require literally moving the bike from the studio to the location site. (Such a nuisance.) But, yes: insurance probably had more to do with it.

I agree that the bicycle seems oddly absent from fan fiction. We get more references to Tracy's car, which is obviously familiar to everyone since we see her in it when Vachon drives it from the airport hangar. (A memorable scene.) It makes sense for her to drive to work, though. It wouldn't be very practical to use a bike—though, in truth, she and Nick mostly used the Caddy instead of splitting up to interview different witnesses.

Downtown Toronto is not a good place to ride a bike, and was even worse in the 90s. The suburbs are even more dangerous, except round the back streets. (Suburban main roads are quite wide and fast.) So why does Tracy even have a bike? Perhaps it's a hangover from her student years? I can see her riding it round campus, getting a car as a graduation present and mostly using that thereafter, yet hanging onto her trusty old bike partly for auld lang's syne and partly because she intends to use it ... sometime.

It's possible she rides it on the weekend: there are some off-road paved biking routes.

[brightknightie]

It could have been a potent character accent, to have had her mention bicycling a few times in passing, as something she doesn't get to do much anymore, or something she looks forward to doing eventually, or perhaps even that she's thinking of selling her bike, as it's just cluttering up her entryway these days.

The first half of third season deluges us with pieces of information about Tracy, but so few knit together, and so little about how she spends her time outside work... The idea that she spends it watching The Jerry Show seems hard to reconcile with her usual demeanor, otherwise, though perhaps there's a certain appeal, if subconscious, in seeing families' dark secrets so exposed, where her family invests heavily in a false front...

[pj1228]

Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember having seen the bike at some point.
The fact that she doesn't use it on-screen may be related to working the nightshift. We hardly get to see what she does during the day when she's not working. Also as Greer pointed out, I think riding a bike in downtown Toronto was not as popular in the 90s as it is today where many bike lanes have appeared and rental bike stations have popped up in many places.

[brightknightie]

Yes, for sure: neither her work nor the night shift lend themselves to bicycles. And most of third season is set in the fall and winter, when a heated car would have even more to recommend it.

I just think that it would have been nice if we knew a little more about what Tracy enjoys, other than The Jerry Show and satellite television, and bicycling could have been it. She could have mentioning bicycling in dialogue, either in reference to herself, or in knowing something about a case because she knows about bicycling, even...

Just a thought.