It’s a chilly morning, and Fleischman visits Chris, who has a cow now. Through their conversation, we learn that the sensitive artist’s next work will be to catapult said cow into the air. Or maybe not this cow. It just doesn’t feel like the right one. But he’s definitely going to fling a cow. Fleischman does not understand the point of this cruel act. Chris says it’s to create a “pure moment.” Then he offers Fleischman some “fresh” milk.

Yeah. We’re there. It’s that episode.

[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]

While Chris works to build his catapult and find the perfect cow–

You know what? No. I’m not going to keep up with this stupid plot throughout this review. Chris wants to fling a cow. Fleischman argues that it’s cruel. And he’s not being obtuse about another culture this time. He’s 100% right. Everyone else seems to think it’s cool. There’s a bunch of pseudo-intellectual jerking off about art and blah blah blah. I’ll get to it again when it resolves at the end of the episode.

Anyway, Maggie is worried about an upcoming visit from her mother, after oddly not being invited along to their annual Christmas vacation. She’s wearing pink and lace again and agonizing over how little Ruth-Anne’s store has to offer for a very particular woman used to her routine and a certain level of luxury. There’s no more orange marmalade (for her English muffin), and the only lemon juice (hot lemon water–good for the complexion) is in a little squeeze bottle.

A real-life chimney sweep comes by Fleischman’s office to pick up the key to his cabin. He’s awkward and defensive and clumsily denies it when Joel indicates that he looks familiar. Joel just can’t shake the feeling that he’s seen “Bob” (“just Bob”) somewhere before.

To be fair, he does look familiar.

Maggie’s mom comes to town and pretends to be polite while being passive-aggressive and nit-picky. And it turns out she’s not there to apologize about Christmas. She’s there because she and Maggie’s father are getting a divorce. And apparently Maggie is the last to find out. But Mrs. (soon to be Ms.) O’Connell quickly goes from withholding information to spewing too much of it, as she complains about her passionless marriage and the frequency and inadequacy of the sex with Papa O’Connell. Maggie leaves to be alone with her thoughts drink at The Brick and ramble to a very patient Holling. She’d always rebelled against her parents’ picket fences and manicured lawns, matching sweaters, hoity-toity well-to-do American ideal of a perfect life… only to find out that her parents had been miserable. The perfection she’d been rebelling against never existed.

Joel receives a 4-month-old golf magazine and suddenly realizes who “Bob” is. He’s Larry Coe–a professional golfer who, a few years ago, missed an easy putt, lost the Masters, and then dropped off the face of the Earth. It turns out Cicely is off the face of the Earth. Joel tells him he knows who he really is. And while I think he honestly meant well, viewing Larry Coe as a professional he admires in a sport he is passionate about, the golfer-in-hiding thinks he just sees him as the guy who choked and blew the big moment.

Maggie comes home from The Brick to find her house engulfed in flames. And worse, it’s her mother’s fault, having left a towel to dry on the space heater. Maggie, staying at Shelly’s that night: “First she ruins my life, and then she ruins my life!”

Marilyn brings in a box of “stuff” from her tribe, and Shelly tries to be positive about everybody chipping in to help. Marilyn (right in front of Maggie): “Uh huh. ’cause she’s homeless.”

Joel tells the gang at The Brick that the unassuming chimney sweep is actually the Larry Coe, and they don’t seem to care. Maybe he blew the big game on purpose. Some people would rather not be famous, and a career change every now and then is a healthy thing. Joel is baffled by these weirdos.

Maggie’s mom drops another incendiary on her by strongly hinting that she burned her house down on purpose, as a sick sort of favor–some kind of a cleansing act, to help her start anew. She’d waited 58 years to metaphorically burn her own house down (and she even confesses that she almost literally did it once too), and she doesn’t want that for her daughter. Maggie insists she has no such metaphorical house to burn. She doesn’t live a passionless life of comfort and dull luxuries. She’s a pilot in Alaska! “I know, dear” her mother says, patronizingly.

Bob/Larry finishes up his chimney job and is soon headed to Greenland to start fresh again, now that Joel has spilled the beans. Joel takes him to the woods, where he and Ed have set up a little putting green, recreating his infamous missed shot. The former golf pro is skeptical, but he plays along and sinks the putt just fine. “Feel better now?” he asks Fleischman, who does.

Maggie’s mom apologizes for making “a mess of things,” but claims she didn’t mean to. It’s not really clear how consciously intentional the fire was. And as with Joel and the putting reenactment, it’s not clear how much it was actually meant to help the other person and not just offer herself some catharsis. Now she’s on her way to France, for a bicycle tour. Burn your daughter’s house down, be smug about it, then go on vacation. No big deal.

The Cow Thing:

Chris spends about half the episode trying to perfect his stupid piece of performance art–that is, until Ed mentions its resemblance to a Monty Python gag.

He gives up, and sinks into a depressed state.

Maurice may not understand this cow flinging nonsense, but he does understand that giving up is cowardly. So he scolds Chris, encouraging him to look at Maggie as an example of someone showing bravery in the face of real loss. Compelled by this, and the thought that creation comes from destruction, he picks through the smoldering rubble of her cabin for inspiration. He settles on the perfect thing, and the episode ends with him making a speech and flinging the charred remains of her piano.

Because of the cow thing, this is an the infamous episode. When I first got back into Northern Exposure, I was surprised to see how early in the show it was. We’re a little past the half-way mark of the third season (out of six). And because the first couple seasons are so short, we’re only 29 episodes in (out of 110). Either way you look at it, we’re not even halfway through the series.

“Jump the shark” is an overused phrase in television criticism. It doesn’t just mean when a show does something dumb; it means when a show does something so irredeemably bad you know its good days are over.

Remember when this show was about a bunch of high schoolers in the 50s?

This isn’t that.

Nor is it to “nuke the fridge,” when a piece of media does something so utterly ridiculous and over-the-top that you can’t take it seriously anymore.

Sigh.

No, this isn’t that either.

It’s worth emphasizing that ultimately Chris didn’t even fling the cow.

So why is this one so reviled? It’s honestly not too bad an episode, overall. It’s not the worst episode in the series. Hell, it’s not even the worst one we’ve seen so far. The Maggie stuff was ambiguous in a good way. It makes you question things, like is she actually better off now? Does she only pretend to be brave and not a creature of comfortable but unfulfilling habit? Does starting anew necessarily mean destroying the old? And I liked the C-plot with the golfer, though I wish we’d gotten a real resolution to it. Does he feel better now? Does he stay? Did he at least see that Joel genuinely admired him and cared about his mental well-being?

People hate the cow flinging plot because it’s smug and self-important. Like if you were a fan of this show at the time and you had to defend it from a friend who said it was pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, this episode probably made you wonder if your friend was right.

Northern Exposure fans hate “Burning Down the House” for the same reason Simpsons fans hate “The Principal and the Pauper.” They’re not terrible episodes in a vacuum, but TV doesn’t exist in a vacuum–at least not smart TV with a dedicated audience. The writing tells the audience what the writers feel about the show, about themselves, and about them–the audience. And this time, the audience feels insulted. It doesn’t connect with Chris and his artistic vision, or even Shelly, who doesn’t get what’s going on but thinks it’s cool. This time, the audience is Maurice, who doesn’t quite understand why this is “art,” and Fleischman, who recognizes that the act itself is indefensible. The audience is baffled and grossed out.

And thus, I propose a new trope name: A show or movie has “flung the cow” when it has its head insufferably lodged up its ass over its own artistic merits.

Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:

– Fleischman makes a Donald Trump reference a minute into the episode. Gross.

– Little plastic squeezer lemons… It’s funny how you can totally be unaware of something’s absence–even forget it existed–and then seeing one reminds you it used to be a common thing.

– Ruthe-Anne wears a shirt with little cows, chickens, and hearts printed all over it.

– Chris: “The human soul chooses to profess itself in a profound profusion of ways.” Shut up. Just shut up.

– I know the point of Maggie’s fuzzy sweaters and pink mittens and such is that this is her acting out of character, but I think the outfits are cute.

– Bob/Larry should grow a beard or something.

– Fun Shelly Earring Alert!: Cows, of course. And the blue vinyl records make another appearance. There’s also some… owls? Cats? I don’t know. Looks like a creature with big eyes.

– The putt reenactment is reminiscent of Maggie and Holling reenacting Joel’s date with Elaine.

– Post-fire, Maggie’s mom wears one of Ruth-Anne’s BINGO swaetshirts with a pink dinosaur(?) on it. Sorry, Amazon Prime no longer streams the show so I’m watching on another, grainier service.

– The piano is flung, of course, to the tune of Blue Danube Waltz.

– I guess the “catapult” was technically a trebuchet?