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

[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...