Content Warning: This episode deals with suicide.

Joel is alone in his cabin one night, writing a letter to a former med school classmate. He really tries to convince his friend (and, I think, himself) that he’s fine, actually. The dark and quiet of a remote Alaskan night is great, truly. He feels lucky to be where he is. Very, very, very lucky.

But he looks around and makes sure his golf club is within reach.

[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]

Dr. Fleischman goes into his office one morning, asking Marilyn if there’s some sort of Alaskan phenomenon that might explain why he’s heard what sounds like a human voice in his cabin. She says no.

Eve comes in. You remember her, the one who assaulted and kidnapped him previously. Partner to the lunatic Adam. She has a laundry list of things supposedly wrong with her. Despite not wanting to humor “the Mozart of hypochondriacs,” he tells her he’ll give her a full physical if she goes away right after.

Maurice is excited for an upcoming visit from his old Commanding Officer from Korea, Colonel McKern. He clearly has great admiration for this man of honor who “never took anything from anybody.”

At The Brick, Joel tells Ruth-Anne and Holling about the voice. They tell him it wasn’t an animal. “Jack’s back.” Decades ago, Jack had lived in Joel’s cabin. After shooting himself, he wrote “ALONE” on the wall in his blood before dying. Joel is disgusted with Maggie for not telling him his cabin was the site of a grisly suicide. A rattled Joel who totally doesn’t believe in ghosts has Ed over late at night to play cards, but eventually of course Ed has to leave.

Fleischman comes into his office to find that Marilyn has been replaced by Eve, who assures him that she is fully qualified because she has spent so much time in a doctor’s office. She might actually have a point here. There’s a patient waiting, and Eve has done a perfectly competent job of taking his information and giving him a preliminary examination.

Colonel McKern gets to town, and Maurice proudly shows him off to everyone. The two go fishing and talk as they pass a flask back and forth. Colonel McKern tells Maurice that he’s trying to build a lodge in Montana. It’s an exciting opportunity, but he’s having trouble getting together the money. He self-consciously asks Maurice if he wants to invest.

Joel goes to Ruth-Anne’s, where Eve is discussing medicine the way a sommelier discusses wine.

“Ah, Mylanta definitely has its place. It’s unpretentious, simple, very consistent. It goes beautifully with decongestants.”

But Joel is there to see the town’s records about Jack. He’s surprised to learn he was a young, unmarried geologist who had moved to Alaska to find gold. Why would a man with so much life ahead of him end it? Ruth-Anne reminds Joel that his cabin was even more remote in the 1940s and that it’s easy to lose perspective when snowed in alone all winter. Ruth-Anne gives Joel a few of Jack’s personal effects.

On air, Chris discusses the end of Oedipus–a man who committed heinous crimes and was punished not by imprisonment or death but by being completely shunned. Isolation is the ultimate torture. Eve eats dinner at The Brick, where she drives the other patrons crazy by imagining diseases everywhere.

Joel looks through Jack’s things back at his cabin: his glasses, his pipe, his copy of Roget’s Thesaurus with notes in the margins. Maggie comes by with a guest–an exorcist and former priest, it turns out. Joel is of course skeptical, but takes a “hey why not?” attitude… until he finds out that the priest intends to send Jack to hell, suicide being a mortal sin, after all. Joel sends him away.

Eve goes to Dr. Fleischman’s office for a follow-up. He apologizes. Her symptoms weren’t imaginary–but it also isn’t some rare neurological condition or deadly genetic defect. She’s pregnant. The woman who cheerfully thought she had Marfan syndrome is pretty upset about the miracle of life. She and Adam never planned on children. They have so many things going on–Adam writing a column for The New Republic being one absurd example of many.

Maurice writes his check to his old CO, and then he crashes his car into a tree. While getting checked out, he tells Fleischman a war story about the Colonel’s heroism in battle and his humility after. Maurice is self-aware enough here to understand that he wrecked the car because he was distraught about his hero turning out to have feet of clay. “Don’t tell me that he’s only human” he says “I’ve got all the humans I can use.”

Hanging out at The Brick late at night to avoid going home, Joel obsesses over who Jack was. Maggie tells him the obvious: he sees himself in this young, solitary intellectual who met a grim end in that lonely cabin. She calls him out on his “just passing through” mentality. He’s gone through a lot of effort to keep everyone at arm’s length and treat Cicely as an unfortunate bump in the road of his life. “If a rock hit you tomorrow, we’d shake our heads, toast your memory, but then Maurice would just buy another doctor.” Jeez, O’Connell.

Chris gives some dubious history lesson about how we have cities because of ritualized mourning of the dead. Stick to prose and poetry, disc jockey.

Maurice bids an awkward farewell to his embarrassed hero. Just before leaving, the Colonel admits to never having become an astronaut not because he was too much of a wild spirit to be contained in a can, but for the simple reason that nobody asked him.

Fleischman throws a party in his cabin, where Eve (already dramatically rubbing her belly) ponders what kind of illnesses her baby is going to have. Maurice is back to telling war stories about his old CO.

Joel didn’t need an exorcist. He needed a housewarming.

Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:

– Chris has the Election Day haircut and clean-shaven face again.

– Fleischman tells Marilyn to renew the subscription to The New Yorker–for 3 years, not 4. He has “3 years, 8 months, 22 days, and 15 hours” left in Alaska? Of a 4-year contract? All that’s happened so far has taken place in little over 3 months?

– When Eve runs into his office, Dr. Fleischman hides behind Marilyn.

– It’s bitterly cold out, but Shelly eats a push pop.

– Joel wears a different Columbia sweatshirt in this one. It has the sleeves cut off, and he wears long sleeves under it. Ed dressed similarly in a previous episode. Was this an early 90s thing?

– Before The Brick was The Brick, it was The Bearded Nail.

– I’m sorry, but the ending scene with this song playing over the Shining-esque party photos is (unintentionally?) creepy.