The story begins with our protagonist, Dr. Joel Fleischman, talking to a businessman on a long flight. Joel, a bright young Jewish New Yorker who’d always dreamed of being a doctor, found a way to pay for tuition at a prestigious medical school. The state of Alaska (presumably short on physicians) agreed to foot the bill, under the condition that he would move there and work for four years. Joel doesn’t seem too worried, or at least he’s trying not to seem too worried. Anchorage isn’t exactly the Siberian tundra after all. Joel and his law student girlfriend agree it’ll be great!… or at least “definitely doable.” The passenger he’s explaining all this to just sighs and wishes the young doctor a sardonic “good luck.”

[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music]

Joel gets to Anchorage, suitcases and golf clubs in tow, where he’s told he’s not needed… so he’ll be going somewhere else, just a bus ride away. But he’ll love it, he’s told. The French Riviera’s got nothing on The Last Frontier. “Once you have experienced Alaska,” his contact insists “everything else pales in comparison.” Joel’s being sent to Cicely. And if he doesn’t like it, he can leave.

Of course we the audience know where this is going, and that, for starters, “a bus ride away” belies the fact that it is a very long bus ride indeed. And so Joel, in suit jacket and tie, gets dumped on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. He’s eventually picked up by Ed Chigliak, a young Native American man who immediately starts asking him his opinions on music. Ed is friendly, chatty, pop-culture obsessed, lacking in common sense and socially inept. He’s like Abed Nadir, nearly two decades before Community.

And here we have a prime example of why I am so pumped to have access to Northern Exposure with most of the original music intact, as the perplexed Joel and cheerful Ed bounce down the road in a beat up old pickup truck blasting Richard Berry’s Louie Louie.

Ed unceremoniously ditches the very confused and vexed Dr., who manages to find his way to the home of Maurice Minnifeld, one of my favorite TV characters of all time. (And I’ll ask you not to confuse this with favorite people. He is, in fact, more than a little bit of a jerk.) The Northern Exposure writers have explained that Maurice–a good old boy from the heartland turned Marine war hero turned astronaut–is meant to represent America, good and bad. He’s a hard-working entrepreneur, but he’s greedy. He’s a bit of a bigot, but he believes in equal opportunity. Etc.

After the ticker tape parades were over, Maurice moved to Alaska, bought a bunch of acreage, started a newspaper and a radio station, and became a sort of patriarch/benefactor/investor of the little town of Cicely–and the one who arranged to have Fleischman sent there. And now he’s beyond pleased with himself to have “a Jew doctor from New York City.” Maurice shows the increasingly perturbed Joel around the tinier-than-expected town and the boarded up dump of a small suite which, it turns out, is to be his office.

Fleischman runs to the town bar, The Brick, to find a payphone. He first calls his contact in Anchorage, then his law student girlfriend Elaine, trying to find a way out of his contract. Or at least out of Cicely. This being the time before the ubiquity of cell phones, he spends a chunk of the rest of the episode waiting for a call, much to the mutual chagrin of himself and a bunch of dirty psychotic rednecks the bar patrons.

While waiting by the payphone, Joel meets Holling Vincoeur, a friendly older bartender who, Joel learns, is at risk of having his brains blown out by Maurice. Some time earlier, Maurice had brought home a young beauty queen, Shelly, to be his bride. But Miss Northwest Passage instead fell for Holling. And the two former friends haven’t spoken since.

We then meet Maggie O’Connell, and in easily his jerkiest moment of the episode (if not the series) Joel automatically assumes this strong-willed and attractive woman is a sex worker propositioning him. But it turns out Maggie is his landlord, there to take him to his cabin outside of town. She’s also a pilot, who runs an air taxi service over the Alaskan wilderness.

Joel doesn’t get much sleep, as he is grossed out by rats in his cabin. The next morning, lacking a vehicle, he runs the 7 miles into town in his Columbia sweatshirt, where he meets the kindly shopkeeper Ruth-Anne, who greets the doctor by name right away, and who sincerely seems to want to help… but who doesn’t know what a bagel is.

He goes to his office (now reasonably fixed up) where he meets with a bunch of waiting patients and his assistant/secretary/whatever she’s supposed to be, the almost eerily silent and delightfully unflappable Marilyn, who is there for “the job.” And despite insisting he is not their doctor and “there is no job,” he starts to see his patients: a guy who has been hot and achy for three years, a beaver with a toothache, and a man who has been shot by his wife. (We’ll come back to this one.)

Joel’s duties are interrupted when he is summed to join Maurice out on a lake. Maurice makes it clear he is very unhappy with his Jew doctor from New York trying to bail on his debt to “the good people of Alaska.” Joel rebuffs his threats with a tough-guy New Yorker speech about how he won’t be intimidated by “strong-arm cowboy crap”… just before he screams and cowers as Maurice fires his shotgun at a duck. Good job, badass New Yorker, but you’re not in Flushing anymore.

Joel gets drunk with Maggie at The Brick that night, and she tells the story of her move from the Midwest to Alaska–about a writer boyfriend who froze to death on a mountain. Joel wakes up, hungover, at Maggie’s place, where he meets her current boyfriend, Rick. Back at the office, he gets a repeat visit from the patient who’d been shot the previous day. This time, his wife stabbed him. And this time, she’s there. I really don’t like the use of domestic abuse as a source of sitcom humor. So I appreciate that the doctor tells this woman how close she came to seriously harming or killing her husband. As Joel plays marriage counselor, the show arguably handles the situation with a little too much levity… but at least it doesn’t mine it for cheap laughs.

Joel finally gets the call from Elaine and the final word on his contract: Trying to leave will result in a lengthy fine or and a lengthy prison sentence. For the next four years, Dr. Joel Fleischman belongs to Cicely, Alaska. After an understandable little freakout, Joel reaches acceptance and munches on a moose burger with Ed at the 9th Annual Arrowhead County Summer Wonderland Festival.

At the festival, Maurice and Holling make their peace, and no heads are blown off.

Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:

• They say “show, don’t tell,” but Northern Exposure immediately breaks that rule, having its lead jabber away at a half-interested airplane passenger. But it feels natural and does a good job of setting up the premise of the series.
• Maurice insists the two ladies who founded Cicely were “just good friends,” “rumor and innuendo notwithstanding,” hinting at Maurice’s homophobia as well as a backstory the show will get into later.
• Northern Exposure was mostly filmed in and around the town of Roslyn, Washington–hence “Roslyn’s Cafe.”
• Fleischman on waiting to hear from his “attorney”: “These are very, very complex legal issues here, and they take quite some time to sort out. Besides, she’s got finals.”
• Joel walking out into his first morning in rural Washington Alaska: “Oh my god!” It’s unclear if he’s shocked by the remoteness of the location, stunned by the natural beauty, or a combination of both.
• The curt way he talks to Ruth-Anne really is the way a lot of New Yorkers talk to shop or restaurant staff, I learned when I moved to New York and experienced my own fish-out-of-water misadventures.
• Was not knowing what a bagel is realistic for the time and place?
• Marilyn: “I’ll stitch him up.”
• Maurice tearfully confesses that he doesn’t know what it feels like to be in love. It seems Shelly was just a trophy for him. I admire, hate, and pity the man all at once.
• I want Ed’s Neil Young T-shirt.