Everyone’s drinking at The Brick one night, and a couple of dirty, psychotic rednecks bar patrons are having a disagreement. One of them insists the yellow lab is the best hunting dog in the world a little too aggressively, and Holling asks him to leave.
After a brief but intense standoff, the bully exits under Holling’s firm glare. Shelly is enamored.
[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]
Later, in bed, Shelly muses that Holling’s thingy isn’t like the other guys she’s been with. He’s still got that little turtleneck thing. She seems unbothered by it, but now Holling is self-conscious. He sheepishly goes to Joel for a circumcision, thinking it in style. Dr. Fleischman talks some sense into him.
One of Fleischman’s patients… or, rather, would-be patient (Fleischman never even got to touch him) dies in his waiting room. “#9” is a total unknown and has no ID on him. Joel isn’t sure how to proceed. The closest thing Cicely has to a coroner is Milt Wyman, a taxidermist. Joel and Maurice put the mystery man outside. Normally they’d stash him in Holling’s freezer, but it’s full (“a hell of a hunting season”). And now the townspeople have to take shifts watching over the body for threat of scavenging animals.
Maggie gets an old, previously misdelivered letter from her father. He’s coming to visit. Rick is out of town, which is probably fortunate. It turns out Papa O’Connell is a highfalutin’ type–a fan of astronaut war hero businessman Maurice Minnifield, for example, but very much not a fan of the unpolished types Maggie tends to date. Maggie knows this, which is why she’s led him to believe she’s seeing the town doctor.
Holling makes the mistake of telling Shelly that he almost went through with turning his turtle neck into a crew neck, or starting to tell her, at least. Before he can explain that the doctor said it was unwise, she gets so giddy that he would do that for her, that he changes his mind and decides to go through with it after all. “How many guys would get their johnny peeled just to show his babe how much he cared?” says Shelly, who thinks the procedure is something akin to a friend of hers picking out a new nose for rhinoplasty
Of course Maggie’s lies catch up to her, and she and her dad bump into her “boyfriend,” who stands there confused and unable to pick up on her practically spelling it out for him. They go on an awkward date to The Brick, where Joel privately (and rightly) scolds Maggie for the lie, for dragging him into the lie, and for acting like her family is too good for Rick. But he goes along anyway. Is he trying to help a friend? Having fun watching her twist in the wind? A bit of both?
Meanwhile, the Cicelians have come to care for #9, and a procession of townspeople comes by, one-by-one, to pay their respects. Nobody recognizes him, but they leave flowers and tokens of mourning with him as they ponder life and mortality. Chris has a really sweet line: “I think it would have made him happy, Ruth-Anne, to have somebody like you mourning.”
Over dinner, Joel is definitely having fun watching his frienemy twist in the wind, as he learns of her snooty upbringing. A young “Margaret” was a pageant queen who hated camping and wouldn’t eat at a place without linen on the table. Joel delights in making her uncomfortable, being overly affectionate and spinning lies about their life together. Maggie makes him dinner every night, it turns out. His hobbies include louge and bungie jumping. Oh, and they’ve been discussing her conversion. It turns out Peanut has neglected to tell her father that her loving boyfriend is Jewish.
A medical examiner from Juneau agrees to take #9 and perform an autopsy, but the people of Cicely will not have it. After sitting with him for the past couple days they’ve projected ideas of life and mortality on gotten to know him, and they’ve grown attached. They agree to let Joel send off some of his organs for examination, then to hold a funeral for him locally.
Joel recognizes the discrepancy between Holling’s worry and Shelly’s blissful ignorance of what a circumcision really entails. So the good doctor puts on a little show, flippantly telling Holling to drop his pants and hop up on the table while he pulls instruments out of a steaming autoclave. Anesthetic won’t be necessary for a guy as tough as Holling, of course. Then Joel finds some flimsy medical excuse not to go through with the procedure, lambasting himself for his failure until Holling and Shelly decided it’s OK and all is forgiven. The odd couple leaves, Holling’s turtleneck intact.
Maggie finds out dinner with her dad and “boyfriend” wasn’t so disastrous after all (or maybe more disastrous than she’d imagined) when her father tells her he likes Joel. She comes clean, confessing that she’s not seeing Joel and that her real boyfriend isn’t the type of guy he would approve of. On his way out of town, Mr. O’Connell Frank bumps into Joel one more time. Joel, not knowing the jig is up, keeps playing the role of Maggie’s boyfriend. Her dad just says he’s glad she has someone she can count on in Alaska. Also “Bungie jumping?”
The townspeople hold a funeral for #9, with Chris eulogizing. Recognizing that everyone was seeing their own reflection in the mystery stranger, he says “Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas… Only when we understand all is vanity, only then, it isn’t.” Maurice, displaying a typical lack of capacity for self-reflection, is confused by Chris’ speech. Maggie reads a poem. And Chris lights the pyre.
Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:
Some more classic country music:
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