It’s the spookiest of nights: Halloween! Joel’s at home, microwaving dinner. Chris announces on the radio that Officer Semanski has “given Maurice a reprieve” and is back in town. (Yay! I like her!) Joel gets a knock on his cabin door: It’s a strange little man trick or treating in a devil costume. In typical Joel fashion, he refuses to give anything to this grown man demanding candy in the middle of the night at his remote cabin. So the guy Silly Strings him. Joel chases after him, only to run into a post on his porch.

[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]

In town the next morning, a yellow cab from New York drops off a Fleischman in a snazzy suit with slicked-back hair and a cigarette dangling from his lips. The scumbag Joel doppelganger writes the cabbie a check, bids adieu to the woman in the back seat (“Your husband is a lucky man!”) and then immediately hits on a baffled Maggie.

A real sloppy steaks kind of guy.

Maggie is all the more baffled when she walks into The Brick and sees Fleischman, dressed in his normal early 90s attire and being only his usual amount of jerk and not this sleezy mega-jerk she just passed. (He rudely complains to Shelly about the bathroom not having paper towels.) She thinks he’s messing with her and that Shelly is joining in on it. But Joel realizes what’s happening… his twin brother is in town! And

You know what? Time Out! What the hell is going on here?

I did some googling and spoiled the ending for myself. I just had to know: This is a dream, right? I mean of course it is. Except it doesn’t feel like one. I mean, who dreams of stuff that doesn’t even involve them?

And does an “it was all just a dream” ending really make “evil twin brother I never mentioned” better? It’s a dumb cliche used as a Trojan horse to let in an even dumber cliche.

I was not looking forward to finishing this dumb episode or writing a review about it.

But then it occurred to me: Season 1 had 8 episodes. Season 2 had 7. Season 3 has 23. Twenty-three episodes of a network sitcom. They’re not all going to be Emmy-worthy, brilliant bits of character development, or insightful looks at the human condition. Jules Et Joel is what TV Tropes calls a bizarro episode. Basically, it’s an episode where weird shit happens. It exists outside of any continuity or canon, and the events that occur within it are probably never spoken of again. And you know what? If the Northern Exposure writers wanted to have fun for Halloween and do a bizarro episode, I say fine. I’ll take it over rehashing a love triangle or having Joel regress into hating the townspeople or something.

A smart sitcom can have a bizarro episode, as a treat.

So anyway, yeah. Joel has a twin brother named Jules. They appear together on screen via some Parent Trap-esque camera trickery. Jules is obnoxious, rude, and creepy. He’s flawed in all the ways the neurotic Joel isn’t. And he’s come to Alaska to run from some of his troubles back home. Jules proposes that he and Joel switch places for a while to escape their respective lives.

Jules is, as I have said, obnoxious, rude, and creepy. And yeah, that’s the point. But still… it’s too much. As a viewer, the more enjoyable part of the arrangement is the other side of the coin: seeing what someone with an abundance of self-confidence thinks of the neurotic and anxious Joel, via the way he acts as him. And if you take this all as a dream, there’s an extra layer here: This is how Joel’s subconscious sees Joel via someone without the curse of anxiety acting as him. While “Jules” runs illegal gambling scams, “Joel” whines about garbage and cholesterol and undercooked fish.

There’s a B plot in which Chris is being stalked and terrorized by the trick or treater, who in dream world is a mad bomber type. There are whole scenes with Chris that don’t even have Joel or Jules in them. Again: This does not make much sense as a dream. Whatever.

Joel-as-Jules is playing card shark in The Brick when Officer Semanski comes in for dinner and immediately arrests him. Joel shares a jail cell with a bunch of biker-looking guys and Sigmund Freud, who psychoanalyses him. (Freud does, I mean. Not the biker guys.) In talking to Freud, Joel realizes he might actually have some stuff in common with Jules, in the form of some of his baser instincts. His desires for Maggie, for one.

Meanwhile, Jules breaks his promise not to practice medicine. Him faking his way through being a physician–and in particular this physician–is pretty funny. “Let’s test your reflexes… BOO!” He also makes some strides towards seducing Maggie. Dream Maggie sure is slow to pick up on what’s obviously going on here.

Chris makes peace with the mad bomber. Joel gets out of Jail. Jules goes back to New York. Joel and Maggie have a dinner date.

And then Joel comes to. He’d been knocked out on his porch when a couple hunters passing by found him. Now he’s woken up, surrounded by loved ones. This is done in the style of The Wizard of OZ, complete with “And you were there, and you” and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Oh, and the hunters were from Kansas.

Miscellaneous Notes, Quotes, and Anecdotes:

– Is anyone familiar with “Trick or treat, money or eats?” I’d never heard that variation before.

– I love that everything that happens in Cicely is reported on the radio. There’s no privacy here! Of course, in real life it would drive me crazy.

– I wish this bizarro episode had been Halloween-themed. A yearly Northern Exposure answer to Treehouse of Horror would have been a fun tradition.

– When Maggie thinks Joel and Shelly are messing with her, she makes a reference to Gaslight, years before “gaslighting” would become a common term.

– A Cicelian asks if his test results have come in. “Dr.” Fleischman: “Uh, yeah, and you got an A.”

– Ed sees right through the Prince and the Pauper/Pudd’nhead Wilson game the brothers are playing. So does Marilyn.

– This song plays in The Brick:

– I hope Officer Semanski is back for more than just arresting Joel in a dream this one time.

– Joel calls out the flaws in Freud’s psychoanalysis. Along with his pretty astute comments about anthropology’s treatment of Margaret Mead in an earlier episode, it seems he was a really good student of the social sciences.

– Maggie (Dream Maggie, at least) does a practice Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks in advance. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

– For someone who lives by a lake so remote it doesn’t have a name, a whole bunch of people happened to come by that night.

– “Being human’s a complicated gig, so give that old dark night of the soul a hug and howl the eternal yes.” –Nietzsche, allegedly