S04E11 - Front Lawn

"Front Lawn" is the eleventh episode of Season 4 of We Can Fix Pawbert. It follows "Solo Shift", with Pawbert Lynxley two months out of prison and settled into classes, a field placement and a shared house. A Saturday of errands ends with a press pool staged outside the Pawthorne Mansion gate, and the pack has to get past it to reach their own front door.

Synopsis

Returning from a Saturday of errands, ZSI agent Luther Pawthorne, Pawbert Lynxley, and ZPD officers Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps find a press pool waiting at the Pawthorne Mansion gate. Zootopia Enquirer reporter Bree Vantage, who confronted Pawbert at Gnu York University, leads reporters from Hoofbeat News and the Gnu York Post in shouting accusations through the car windows about Pawbert's crimes and his relationship with Luther, then turns on Nick and Judy after a tabloid blogger spots them in the back seat. Luther backs out through the crowd and enters along an overgrown service road behind the property. Inside, they watch the press settle in for a siege, and Pawbert's phone floods with requests for comment after someone sells his number for fifty dollars. Judy suggests calling Chief Bogo, but Luther says a police presence would only enlarge the story. Luther's parents, Harlan and Maris Pawthorne, drive through the blockade instead. Maris names each outlet's financial ties to her board seats and to the Pawthorne Foundation while Harlan telephones their executives, and within the hour the editors recall their reporters and withdrawal notices reach Pawbert's phone. Harlan has the address flagged for removal from public registries. Over dinner the Pawthornes tell Pawbert he is family regardless of paperwork, and Maris offers him a Foundation contact for when he finishes school. That night Pawbert writes a class reflection paper contrasting Lynxley privilege with Pawthorne privilege, noting that the retractions came because the Pawthornes could make them come.

Plot

Saturday afternoon, and the pack is driving home from a hardware store, a grocery run that turned into a produce argument, and a nursery where Pawbert bought a small fern that now rides on the back seat between him and Judy. Nick is campaigning for a proper movie-night spread and Pawbert offers to make caramel corn. Two months out of prison, Pawbert is still not used to having Saturdays at all. Then the car turns onto their street, and Luther sees a van parked too close to the property line and shapes moving behind the hedges. The gate swings open automatically for the car, and the reporters come out of hiding.

They swarm the vehicle before Luther can pull through, coming from behind the hedges, out of the parked vans and across the street from under the trees. Bree Vantage, the cheetah from the Zootopia Enquirer who confronted Pawbert on the GYU campus, leads them, with a gazelle anchor from Hoofbeat News, a wildebeest from the Gnu York Post, a marten tabloid blogger and a scatter of freelancers behind her. The questions are charges: the venom he put into Judy, the four mammals he tried to kill, the house he set on fire with victims inside, the Lynxley fortune built on stolen work, his relationship with Luther. Reporters block the car front and back, so Luther stops rather than run one of them down and hand them a better story. Then the blogger spots Nick and Judy in the back seat, and the pack acquires a second scandal: two officers Pawbert once attacked are living under his roof, and the fox and the rabbit are a couple.

All three of them try to answer, and each answer produces more questions and louder ones. Pawbert cracks his window and reaches for the approach that worked on Bree at the university. Judy attempts a line about not making statements. Nick tries deflection about ice cream melting in the trunk and has it turned into a question about whether he is dismissing public safety. Luther orders the windows up, tells Pawbert not to give them the reaction they came for, and reverses the car through the crowd at a crawl before parking down the block. Anyone who knows where to look can pull the address off the property records, he says. Through the windshield they can see the press consolidating at the gate.

Luther's parents put in a service entrance decades ago for contractors and deliveries, and nobody has used it in fifteen years. He texts his mother, who confirms the code still works and says she is on her way. The access road is a gap in the fence line that the vegetation has almost closed over, and branches rake the car's sides while Pawbert holds the fern pot steady in his lap. A rusted secondary gate stands at the end of it. The code opens it, and they come out behind the garage, where nothing from the street can see them.

Inside the mansion the curtains come down and the lights stay low, and the groceries sit forgotten on the kitchen counter. Judy reports professional lighting going up at the gate: the press means to camp. Luther reads the ambush as coordinated, assembled out of sightings around the city and public property records. Pawbert's phone starts filling with requests for comment, harassment from unknown numbers, and a message from a stranger who says he paid fifty dollars for the number. Luther takes the phone out of his paw and turns it face-down. When Pawbert says the reporters are not wrong about what he did, Luther answers that they are telling a story rather than the truth, and that the story has no room in it for the testimony, the sentence served, the refusal of his uncle's offer, or his choice to come back and face accountability. Judy floats calling Bogo for officers to clear the gate. Luther refuses, because a ZPD detail at the house becomes exactly the headline the outlets want. Then his phone buzzes, and his parents are here.

Their black sedan does not slow for the press line, and reporters scatter out of its way before the gate closes behind it. Harlan and Maris Pawthorne get out, both gray wolves, neither of them in any hurry. Maris walks back down to the gate and advises the pool to stop filming, then works them outlet by outlet: to Bree, the three company boards she sits on whose advertising funds Roopert Murdock's publication, and an offer to make some calls; to the Hoofbeat anchor, the Pawthorne Foundation grant her parent company took for journalism ethics education; to the Gnu York Post, nothing at all. Harlan stays by the car with a phone to his ear, working through executives on a first-name basis about a trespassing reporter, a retraction he expects by evening, and media literacy grants that could be reconsidered, then makes one more call about Bree herself. Phones start going off across the press pool. A freelance stoat tells his colleague he is being pulled, the Hoofbeat anchor tells her cameraman to pack up, and the outlets withdraw one at a time until the street is empty. Harlan has the address flagged for removal from public registries, a process of forty-eight hours, with a legal notice waiting for anyone who trespasses after this.

Maris comes through the door first and hugs her son, who had known she would come. Harlan tells Luther that Bree's editor was receptive and that she will not be following anyone for a while. Then Maris crosses to Pawbert, tells him he did not cause any of this, and straightens his collar. Over tea in the living room Harlan lays out the position: the major outlets have pulled back, the property record will be moved into a trust with no name attached, and Pawbert is not going to stop being interesting to anyone, so the only question left is how he manages it. Maris takes his phone, scrolls the flood, and blocks and deletes her way through it. When Pawbert asks why they would spend any of this on someone who is not officially anything to them, Harlan tells him he makes their son happy and that makes him family, and Maris tells him the paperwork is optional and he is theirs now. Withdrawal notices begin arriving from the Zootopia Enquirer, Hoofbeat News and the Gnu York Post.

Dinner is pasta, with Luther on the water and Pawbert on a tomato and basil sauce, while Nick puts away the groceries and finds the ice cream he had tried to save. Harlan and Nick resume an argument about a detective novel, and Maris draws Judy into a long conversation about police training. Learning that Pawbert is studying social work, Maris offers him a Pawthorne Foundation contact in reentry services for when he finishes school, and makes clear it is a contact and not a job. Six mammals sit down together and Harlan raises a glass to family however it gets defined. Pawbert mostly listens. Lynxley dinners were quiet and every word in them was weighed; this one is neither. Later, at the window over an emptied street, he tells Luther he is not used to being protected, and Luther tells him to get used to it.

The Pawthornes leave, the house goes quiet, and Pawbert sits down in the library with his laptop and the third reflection paper for his social work course, which asks how privilege operates in different systems. He writes about two families with the same fortunes and the same connections and opposite values, setting the household he grew up in, where affection was payment for obedience and was withdrawn the moment he became a liability, against the afternoon he has just watched. He also writes that the retractions arrived because the Pawthornes could make them arrive, that loving the mammals who did it does not license him to call the result clean, and that the same means serve protection and control, with restraint the only thing separating them. Luther reads the last few paragraphs over his shoulder, asks whether writing it is all right with him, and tells him to write whatever he needs to say. Pawbert saves the draft, curls against him on the couch, and says he keeps waiting for something to go wrong. Luther tells him it will not.

Key Moments

• The pack returns from Saturday errands to find reporters staged behind hedges and vans outside the mansion gate
• Bree Vantage leads the press swarm on the car, shouting Pawbert's crimes and the Lynxley fortune's origins through the glass
• A tabloid blogger spots Nick and Judy in the back seat and the pack's inter-species relationships become a second story
• Pawbert, Judy and Nick each try to answer, and each attempt produces more aggressive questions
• Luther orders the windows up and reverses the car back out through the crowd rather than drive through it
• Luther brings the pack in along the overgrown service road at the back of the property, unused for fifteen years
• The press sets up lights at the gate and settles in for a siege
• Pawbert's phone floods after someone sells his number for fifty dollars
• Luther draws the distinction between telling the truth and telling a story
• Judy proposes calling Bogo for officers; Luther refuses, because a ZPD presence would become the story
• Harlan and Maris drive through the press line without slowing
• Maris confronts the reporters outlet by outlet, naming her board seats and the Pawthorne Foundation's grant to Hoofbeat's parent company
• Harlan works the phones to the outlets' executives and to Bree Vantage's editor
• The press pool is recalled and the street empties; Harlan has the address flagged for removal from public registries
• Harlan tells Pawbert he is family because he makes their son happy; Maris tells him the paperwork is optional
• Maris triages Pawbert's phone and blocks the worst numbers, and withdrawal notices arrive from the three outlets
• The pack and the Pawthornes share a pasta dinner, and Maris offers Pawbert a Foundation contact in reentry services for when he finishes school
• Pawbert tells Luther he is not used to being protected; Luther tells him to get used to it
• Pawbert drafts a class reflection paper contrasting the Lynxley and Pawthorne uses of privilege, and refuses to call the day's outcome clean

Key Lines

Locations

• Luther's car — the drive home from errands and the swarm at the gate
• Pawthorne Mansion — front gate, foyer, living room, kitchen and library
• Service road — the contractor entrance at the back of the property, put in decades ago and unused for fifteen years; overgrown and unpaved, closed by a rusted secondary gate on a keypad code that still works

Items

• Fern — bought at the nursery on the way home; held against Pawbert's chest through the swarm and the drive in
• Pawbert's phone — his number sold to strangers for fifty dollars; flooded with press requests and harassment, then triaged and blocked by Maris
• Retraction texts — withdrawal and apology notices from the Zootopia Enquirer, Hoofbeat News and the Gnu York Post
• UNDSWUS 55 Reflection Paper #3, "Privilege in Practice" — Pawbert's class essay contrasting the Lynxley and Pawthorne uses of privilege

Notes

• Roopert Murdock, the owner of the Zootopia Enquirer mentioned by Maris, is a nod to Rupert Murdoch, the real-world media mogul. The Zootopia Enquirer itself references the National Enquirer, the American tabloid known for celebrity gossip and sensationalist journalism.