Holling is telling jokes at The Brick when Ed comes in with news: Jesse the bear is dead.
[Cue moose strutting to funky jazz music.]
Chris announces that the aurora borealis is putting on a display. Just then, a very 80s-early 90s stereotypical group of Japanese tourists comes by, all smiles, giggles, and photography. They’re thrilled to meet Maurice, the famous astronaut–though Maurice isn’t thrilled to learn they’re staying at the hotel run by sodomites fairies homosexuals Ron and Eric.
Ed and Holling find Jesse’s skeleton in the woods. It seems he’d died sometime the previous summer. It also seems Jesse, despite all reasonable expectations of a violent death, ultimately met his end peacefully of old age. Back at The Brick, Holling bristles at the idea of celebrating Jesse’s death. Shelly points out his hypocrisy, and he storms off.
Later, he tells Joel the harrowing story about his fight with Jesse
and how he crawled back to camp, kept alive only by his desire for revenge.
“Ever since then, I knew that Jesse was out there, waiting for me. And now… he’s gone.”
Ruth-Anne’s store gets a mysterious package, addressed to an unfamiliar name and covered in stamps and postal markings from having traveled around the world for some years. When nobody comes to claim it, the people of Cicely are dying to figure out what’s inside. When shaking and guessing doesn’t cut it, they go to Dr. Fleischman for an X-ray. On (absolutely correct) legal and moral principles, he refuses.
Maurice is pissed that Ron and Eric (“the dynamic duo”) are making money hand over fist from the shitty property he overcharged them for, and he’s surprised when they come to offer him money to visit with their Japanese guests. Maurice is also surprised (and visibly uncomfortable) to learn that Eric is a fellow Marine. He scolds them for their sinful, perverse lifestyle, then kicks them out. Eric leaves with a “Semper fi.”
Some friends of Holling’s, not properly reading the room, mount Jesse’s skeleton in The Brick.
Ed: “Do you think he’d go over better by the cigarette machine?”
Some Japanese tourists show up at Maurice’s house to (you guessed it) take pictures. Maurice is grumpy and bigoted, but he likes flattery. So he invites them in for a very self-indulgent tour. To his credit, he shuts down their racist snickering at a picture of his son, Duk Won. But by and large, the Japanese tourists are delighted to get to know the astronaut, and he begrudgingly has to accept that he enjoys talking to them.
Holling confuses Shelly by setting out to find Jesse–not this pile of bones, but the real Jesse, who he says is in Widow-Maker Cave, a place apparently dangerous enough to have truly earned such a foreboding name.
Maggie gets an X-ray of the package from a friend who works at an airport, but it’s only so helpful. The box is full of odds and ends, and the only way to really know what’s in it is to open it. Ruth-Anne calls a town meeting.
The town meeting is headed by Shelly, of course, being the former mayor’s almost-wife. Officially, an unclaimed package is supposed to be sent to an office in San Francisco, where it will ultimately be opened. So why shouldn’t they open it? Despite Joel’s impassioned plea for the sanctity of the Postal Service, the people of Cicely vote to open.
Maurice goes to The Sourdough Inn to find that Ron and Eric have decorated it in traditional Japanese style. He rambles on with his NASA stories, and the tourists seem to enjoy it… to a point. As soon as the aurora borealis becomes visible, they suddenly lose interest in the aging astronaut and run off in pairs. It turns out there’s a Japanese “folk wisdom” about conceiving gifted children under the northern lights. Maurice had just been a fun diversion until particles in the upper atmosphere put on their show. Maurice is at first disturbed, but he eventually develops a surprisingly healthy view of things. These people had traveled to his beloved state at some expense, “and they did it just to improve the next generation.” Maurice also has to give Ron and Eric some credit for their own foresight and dedication to their business.
The townspeople open the box, which is filled with seemingly random stuff along with a letter. It turns out an 8-year old kid had intended for the package to go around the world, gathering objects representing the various locations it had visited. After some deliberation, the people of Cicely opt to put one of Fleischman’s thermometers in the box. “It’s been in the mouth of everyone in town,” after all. They spin the globe and point, and the box is sent off to Bharwana, India.
Holling stumbles back into the bar, battered and bruised but in good spirits. He’d found Jesse, in a sense. The bear is dead, but the spirit of adventure lives on. He buries the bones in the woods and says a few words in his honor.
This fitting and beautiful song plays:
Miscellaneous notes, quotes, and anecdotes:
– I really, truly hate that pig joke.
– Chris says Voyager 1 is 7.2 billion km from Earth and making its way out of our solar system. I don’t know if that number was accurate at the time, but it is now over 25 billion km from Earth. It officially left the solar system in 2012.
– Holling, defending Jesse’s honor: “Jesse’s twice the man you are, and he’s a bear!”
– Fun Shelly Earrings Alert!: Plates and silverware. Also a couple other pairs I can’t see on the grainy streaming service I’m using now. Bummer.
– At home, Maurice wears a NASA robe.
– Maurice has a samurai suit of armor given to him by Hirohito. I guess I’d never thought much about what he did after the war… turns out he lived until 1989.
– With the Aurora Borealis and its southern sibling, the Aurora Australis, the process of particles colliding with atoms in the atmosphere, creating light, is called “excitation.” Seems fitting.
– Googling “japanese conceiving under northern lights” brings up some articles claiming this is a thing, and some claiming it’s a myth. Did Northern Exposure invent this?
– Some of the random guesses were oddly correct, like Marilyn saying the box sounded like it had seashells in it, and Joel recognizing castanets on the blurry X-ray.
– The idea to send the box around the world in such a way seems pretty implausible.
– Also it’s been like 6 years. Send it back to the kid already.
– ALSO a thermometer is the dumbest idea. So lame.
– Shelly: (concerned for a cheerful, battered Holling) “Did you bonk your head?”
Holling: (smiling) “Several times!”
– Chris reads Paddle to the Sea over the airwaves. I’m not familiar with the book.
– I’m glad Jesse died a natural death and that Holling came to peace with him in the end.
– There is a serious line of thinking (of which I agree) that calls for the preservation of big, wild places and big, wild animals in part because there is a human need for such existential danger.
– Henry David Thoreau: “All good things are wild and free.”