We begin with a rare sight: Chris in the morning–at night! The moon is full, and it’s messing with everyone’s sleep and driving them crazy.

Yep, that’s what the episode is about.

[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music]

Joel is back in his meadow golf course, with Ed caddying. He slices (I think that’s the term), and while looking for his ball, he finds a large bear bare footprint. And so Dr. Fleischman learns of Adam, a mysterious humanoid troublemaker who lives in the woods near Cicely. What does he look like? Big. Broad-shouldered. Flat-top head. Kind of hulking. Green. Oh wait no, that’s Frankenstein. But the locals “have been blaming every transgression, every mutilation, and every petty theft for the last 15 years on some character that nobody has ever seen before,” according to Ruth-Anne. Though even she has to acknowledge that someone or something broke into a place and stole a Cuisinart and Holy Bible. Maggie helps her newly-spooked tenant to beef up security at his cabin, and the two bicker (of course) about the existence of Adam.

Back at the brick, the food sucks and the coffee tastes like fish. The usual cook, Dave, has skipped town to find someplace to sleep. Running from the moon seems silly to me, as does everyone in this town looking disheveled and exhausted and half-mad because the moon is full. Do they do this every month?

What’re you gonna do. It’s Cicely.

Ed accidentally spills the beans that Chris has been pre-recording his shows at night so he can work on an art project by day. Now Maurice is mad–and I don’t blame him. Wasn’t Chris arguing with Maurice about control of his morning show just a couple episodes ago? Maurice goes down to Chris’ place to chew him out and finds him (and the latest woman he found out in the wilderness) welding a big metal sculpture–a tribute to the Aurora Borealis.

A stranger shows up on a motorcycle and having no idea where he is. Over breakfast at The Brick, Bernard explains to Chris that weird dreams compelled him to quit his job, sell his condo in Portland, and head north on a motorcycle until he found himself on the cusp of the new Alaskan Riviera. Chris and Bernard hit it off really well. They sync up seemingly on a psychic level–having the same vision for the Aurora Borealis art piece, kicking ass at a game of bridge, and just generally being on the same wavelength to an uncanny degree.

Dr. Fleischman has to pay an odd house call to a ranger in a remote fire lookout tower. It’s my dream job, but Ranger Burns seems both starved for human interaction and very stressed over the hundreds of square miles of forest he is responsible for. The doctor gives him some migraine medication and then heads back towards civilization Cicely. But his truck breaks down on a logging road after dark, stranding him even more in the middle of nowhere than usual.

He wakes up to a hulking, hairy figure of a man hovering over the truck, and he follows him to a lantern-lit, cookbook-filled cabin in the woods. Joel’s host is beyond grumpy. “I don’t like people barging in on me! I don’t like people! You are a person, and I don’t like people, you understand me?!” he bellows. But Joel being Joel, will not shut up. And he refuses to believe this is Adam. The Arrowhead County Bogeyman is not the kind of guy who stirs noodles in a wok. But Adam refers to Joel’s “lousy golf swing,” and Joel sees his huge feet…

The two have a gourmet meal, complete with wine, as Joel yammers and an angry Adam yells threats at him. Adam doesn’t want to talk about his mysterious past… except he does. A lot. And he constantly contradicts himself. He’s a former POW, hiding from his demons out in the Alaskan wilderness for the past 15 years. Except he knows of an obscure little restaurant in Manhattan that Joel mentions, claiming to have gone to cooking school in Buffalo with the chef there. There’s really no telling what comes out of Adam’s mouth is real and what’s nonsense, but the one constant seems to be that he is a master chef. He even gives Joel a very grouchy cooking lesson.

Meanwhile, Chris and Bernard find out that they have some things in common. Chris started his art project at the same time Bernard started having weird dreams. They both had a father who was frequently on the road for work. And when they fall asleep, they share a recurring daddy-issues-themed nightmare.

Joel wakes up alone in the cabin to find that his host has left him labelled carafes of both decaf and regular coffee. He finds his truck in working order, and he drives back to Cicely. Nobody believes his story about the Sasquatch Gourmand, even though this explains the theft of the Cuisinart and the Bible. (He’d confused it for a cookbook.)

Over breakfast, the mounting number of things Chris and Bernard find they have in common finally leads them to realize they are brothers. Daddy was a traveling man. Holling: “I knew something was up by the way they played bridge.” Bernard heads home, he and his newly-found half-brother having completed their art project and now sharing a profound understanding and a deep bond.

Joel takes a skeptical Maggie and Ed to the site of Adam’s cabin, but they find it derelict and abandoned. Even Joel starts to wonder if he’d dreamt the whole thing. But at the last minute, Ed finds a garlic press on the ground. Joel has been vindicated. Adam is real, and he’s out there, watching, and making sure not to overdo it with the cumin.

Nobody really gets the Aurora Borealis art piece (least of all Maurice), but I think it’s nice.

Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:

Lots of moon-themed music in this episode (Moonlight Sonata, Moon River, Bad Moon Rising). I’m not sure every musical piece here is the same as originally in the episode, but it’s another great example of why elevator music replacements just don’t cut it for this show.

Ed: “We had a black logger here once, but he left.” Why? “I guess he wasn’t into drinking beer and fighting.”

Shelly, asking Chris about the collective unconscious: “Do they tour, or do they just cut records?”

More stock hawk screams for the wilderness scenes, almost to the point of seeming intentionally comical.

Joel makes a full moon/Letterman joke I don’t understand at all.

Joel, to Adam: “Come back! You can rip me off, just don’t leave me here!”

“The unconscious is revealed through imagery of our dreams, which express our innermost fears and our desires” — Carl Jung. Or maybe Vincent Price.

“While I know much about the collective unconscious, I don’t know how to drive!” — Carl Jung

As helpless and scared as Joel is in the outdoors, he seems rather unrattled by a large, angry man yelling threats at him. He’s very much a New Yorker.

Watching these episodes as a teenager on the Hallmark Channel in the early 2000s, Adam always disappointed me as a character. I wanted something about him to be definitive and real. Something other than cooking, I mean. Make him a Vietnam vet, or a CIA agent, or an asshole genius, or whatever. Have one trait or backstory that sticks. Anything other than a compulsive liar with a strange affinity for fine food. But an older me appreciates him more. Having been in some places that attract an unusual variety of folks (academic programs for nontraditional students, certain pockets of the military, a quirky little town in the middle of nowhere), I’ve come to learn something about interesting people: Oftentimes, “interesting” is another word for weird. Cicely draws interesting people. Adam is weird.

That does it for Season 1! Thanks for tuning in!