Chris is fishing on the banks of a river when he sees some random flotsam and jetsam floating by.
No, not these guys.
He finds a boot. A French flag. An old-timey compass. Some chunks of ice. And a really big chunk of ice with a person in it.
[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]
Ice Man gets taken to The Brick, where Dave has to shuffle around frozen bison patties to make room in the walk-in freezer. Fleischman is (as is to be expected) skeptical that this is a body at all, much less the 100-plus-year-old one everyone immediately takes it to be. But the body came with a journal dating back to 1814 and written in French. Holling and Maggie are able to translate some of it. The journal indicates Pierre was a French soldier who came to Alaska with Napoleon… who, it turns out, missed the Battle of Waterloo… and fell in love with a local woman named Matchka… who he impregnated.
Maurice refuses to let them thaw out this potential tourist attraction, but he has Ed drill a small hole through the ice and to the body. This confirms the body is an actual body and not just a dummy. Fleischman runs some tests on a snippet of clothing, expecting to find modern synthetic materials, but in the end he has to accept that Pierre is a real person from the early 19th century. Fleischman has a lot of trouble accepting the potential historical implications of this. He has a serious existential crisis over it. If Napoleon wasn’t at Waterloo, what can you believe? What is real in history? There’s no way Napoleon skipped his most famous battle and forewent his reported years of exile and instead founded a lost tribe of French-Alaskans, right? Marilyn then tells him about the “Tellakutans.”
[When I googled “Tellakutans,” everything that came up was about Northern Exposure. These don’t seem to be a real people, even among the alternate history types.]
Ed goes to Ruth-Anne’s store, no not to be put on the waitlist to check out a book about Napoleon, but in response to the “Help Wanted” sign in the window. He needs $200 to answer an ad in a magazine and have a “professional” analyze and critique his script. He really takes to the job and bonds with Ruth-Anne in the process. He invites her over to his humble abode for a very quaint dinner, which Ruth-Anne handles with grace. Ed talks about his filmmaker dreams, and Ruth-Anne tells the story of how she came to Alaska in the 70s after the death of her husband. She’s proud of her son Rudy, a truck driver who lives in Portland and writes pastoral poetry in his spare time. Matthew, however, has squandered his promise. He’s an investment banker in Chicago.
Holling’s acting a bit weird. (You can always tell there’s something wrong when he isn’t all over Shelly.) She goes to Dr. Fleischman, concerned that she might be infertile and that Holling is going to dump her like Napoleon dumped the (apparently) infertile Josephine.
Dr. Fleischman: “And you put 2 and 2 together and came up with 22?”
Shelly: “Yeah.”
But she was way off. He doesn’t want any children. It turns out Holling, salt of the earth and humble working man, comes from royalty. It’s a secret family shame. The DeVincours were horrible, exploitative aristocrats. Holling thinks genetics are destiny and his genes are tainted, and he doesn’t want any little ones to carry on this evil.
Ed gets his script back, with harsh criticisms and the suggestion to consider a different line of work. Ruth-Anne tells Ed more about her son Matthew, the disappointing investment banker. He’d been a talented trumpet player. So she “ruined it for him,” not by telling him to quit, but by the opposite. She encouraged him too much. “An artist needs obstacles,” she says. He never had to “fight for” his art. And eventually he went to business school and left music behind–and part of his soul with it.
Maurice holds a town meeting about his plans for Pierre: a display in the center of Napoleon Square–and don’t worry, the parking will be underground so as to protect the small-town aesthetics of Cicely. But Chris has other problems with this. “Unleashing Pierre changes history,” Chris says. He rambles on for a minute about metaphysical something another and making a mockery of the memories of the soldiers who died at Waterloo. Most of the town seems to agree and thinks the body should be put back, while Maurice keeps insisting that economic development is more important than sentimentality. Fleischman, despite his own discomfort with this historical anomaly, stands up to agree with Maurice… sort of. Not in the economic sense, but out of an obligation to tell the truth. Chris retorts by splitting semantic hairs over the difference between truth and facts in what is easily the most annoying display of his freshman philosophy major qualities as of yet.
And I have to say, as grossed out as I am by Maurice’s greed and total disregard for the sanctity of human remains here, I am beyond annoyed by and embarrassed for the cowardice and intellectual dishonesty Chris is championing. Mr. “Sometimes you have to be bad to know you’re alive” and “Give that ol’ dark night of the soul a hug and howl the eternal yes” is advocating for the suppression of history because it might make people uncomfortable. I’m no philosopher. I cannot (and don’t care to) debate the difference between “truth” and “facts,” but I will say this: If you are promoting the act of hiding evidence, you are not on the side of truth, facts, or history.
Fortunately(?) the meeting is interrupted when three leather jacketed and short but tough-looking guys come in and say “We have come for the body.” [Someone on r/northernexposure pointed out that they seem to be speaking a mix of an indigenous language (Tlingit?) and French.]
Fleischman visits Pierre in the freezer at The Brick and has a dream that he is in Poland, witnessing his ancestors observe Passover. His Christmas Carol-esque guide is Elijah himself, come to see Joel. Does he want to help prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah, or does he want to sell cheap souvenirs? After waking, he takes his concerns to Maurice, who dismisses them. A dead body is an empty vessel, a relic of the past. And he won’t let the past (or, [ugh] “half-pint half-breeds”) get in the way of his town’s future.
Holling tells Shelly about his ugly family history and supposedly tainted genes. She feigns anger over 200 years of his family being “total jerks,” but is clearly more relieved that he’s not going to leave her for a girl with “copper plumbing.” Back at the store, Ruth-Anne encourages Ed. He can do anything he puts his mind towards, be it labelling cans or screenwriting. Ed quotes William Goldman, who said “Nobody in Hollywood knows anything.” But Ed knows one thing: He’s never paying some jerk $200 to read one of his scripts again. “They can stand in line to see the movie just like everyone else.” Joel gets sick from his freezer nap, and Maggie takes care of him while he raves about the weight of human history in his genes. Pierre goes missing from The Brick’s freezer, and later we see the Tallakutans paddling him down a river as Marilyn watches on.
Gonna go ahead and say this episode started out strong but became a huge disappointment. A dude frozen in a glacier is fun. A potential rewrite of a major historical event and figure is exciting. The ethics of what to do with–and who owns–a mysterious corpse is interesting. So is the question of how much our genes are our destiny. Philosophical masturbation over some imagined metaphysical crisis is lame. And some made-up on the spot yet hardly touched-upon fringe history is a waste of time.
And I might hate Chris more in this episode than in the upcoming cow-flinging debacle…
…might.
Miscellaneous Notes, Quotes, and Anecdotes:
– There have been a few cases of old corpses found frozen in glaciers (the most famous being Otzi) but they’re typically pretty desiccated and not so picturesque. Dr. Fleischman’s initial skepticism is correct. Or would be anywhere other than Cicely.
– Maggie, defending her French: “I had a semester at the Sorbonne.”
– Shelly, on Napoleon: “I always thought it was funny them naming a guy after a little flakey pastry” and “Who quits the business when they’re at the top of the charts?”
– Maurice, on Fleischman: “Now, you’re a scientist. But more important, you’re a New Yorker. You were born with an innate skepticism, a natural sense of superiority in the way of the world.”
– This nice song plays at The Brick: 
– I love how Ed completely and immediately understands and sympathizes with Ruth-Anne’s disappointment in her investment banker son.
– I’m not sure I believe this stuff about an artist needing obstacles. Parents: Please encourage your children to pursue and develop their talents.
– Fun Shelly Earrings Alert: Nothing new, but she wears a bunch of my favorites in this episode: hula girls, tropical fish, and green dice.
– Ed wears his oft-repeated Neil Young shirt and a Los Angeles Rams sweatshirt. Again, I really love the realism of repeated outfits in this show. And Ed’s clothes, realistically and true to character, look like he got them out of a donation bin.
– I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to understand this, but the Tellakutans must be short because they are descendants of the famously (but inaccurately) short Napoleon.
– Did Marilyn help them take the body? She is, as always, like a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a colorful coat and leggings.