The red tunic, the Stetson, and the dark horse form an image recognized around the world, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is younger and far more complicated than the postcard. It was created in 1920 by merging the Dominion Police with the Royal North-West Mounted Police, a frontier force founded in 1873 to control First Nations and Metis populations and clear the way for settlement. Its officers arrested, prosecuted, and jailed the same people, and later removed Indigenous children to residential schools. Meanwhile pulp magazines and film studios were selling the world a polite hero who always gets his man.

This episode measures the gap between the symbol and the institution. It follows the force through undercover infiltration of political groups, the scandal that cost it its intelligence branch, and the subsidized contracts that turned it into the local police for most of the country. It then looks at what that sprawl has cost: officers killed at Mayerthorpe in 2005 and Moncton in 2014, a criminal conviction under the Canada Labour Code for failing to equip its members, and a long reckoning over how it treated women in its own ranks.

• The famous slogan traces to an 1877 report from Fort Benton, Montana, noting that two Mounties who had lost their horses still caught three whiskey smugglers.
• The McDonald Commission found that the security service had burned down a barn and stolen membership documents from the Parti Quebecois. In 1984 its intelligence work passed to a new civilian agency, CSIS.
• Under contract policing the federal government paid 60 percent of the cost, and by 1950 eight of the ten provinces had disbanded their own provincial forces.
• A review after Moncton found officers lacked C8 carbine rifles that leadership had been told to issue years earlier.
• Women were first admitted in 1974. In 2016 the force apologized to female employees and set up a $100 million compensation fund, and in 2018 it appointed its first permanent female commissioner.