Please note: this post was cross-posted from firefly-dreaming.com.
Lately, I’ve had both Claire, the bank manager, whose bank was robbed, and Doug MacRay, a lifelong Charlestown resident who was the leader of the four-man Townie gang who’d robbed Claire’s bank, wearing Hallowe’en masks and ninja outfits, forced her to open the safe at gunpoint, and then took her as a hostage by driving her to a beach in Boston after blindfolding her to make sure she didn’t see anything, and then forcing her to walk on the beach until she felt the water on her toes, on my mind a great deal, for some reason. They let her go, physically unharmed, although rather traumatized by the whole incident, which included “Jem’s” near-fatal beating of Claire’s assistant manager, and Claire ends up quitting her job as the bank manager, as a result.
Ironically, one is supposed to root for Doug MacRay for ultimately having outwitted the FBI and gotten away, at least in part due to being tipped off by Claire, but, unlike many people, I have not been able to do that. Doug is clearly not the nice guy that he comes across as, even though he came from a dysfunctional family (his mother ran off when he was about six years old and, ten years later, when Doug was a teen, his father was sent to prison to serve a lifetime sentence for bank robbery and murder) and grew up in a rough and tough neighborhood. He’d had a chance, as a young man, at around 20, to turn his life around, by being a professional Hockey Player for the Bruins, and not end up like his father, but, due to his own arrogance, nastiness, cocky behavior, and fooling around with drugs and alcohol during his early twenties, he totally blew that chance, and went into the bank-robbing business, like his father. At one point, he’d also gotten into a nasty fight with another guy on his own hockey team, thus getting him kicked out of the Bruins for good.