Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Sicily, Alaska, a Northern Exposure podcast. so I'm Anne Flynn Terrell. I'm a cabaret performer and emcee. I'm Caleb Cohart. I'm a documentary and commercial filmmaker.
Speaker: I'm Amy Gerlich. I own and run a improv and sketch comedy theater in Denver, Colorado. This is a podcast where we talk about Northern Exposure and how it's affected our lives. And we have some amazing special guests.
Speaker: Season six, episode five, The Robe. Welcome to the downturn of this show. I thought the first four episodes were palatable.
Speaker: And then when you get to episode five, it begins this really stark downturn into chaos because we are introduced two a lot of messiness. Yeah, they jumped the goat. This is when the show jumped the goat.
Speaker: Yes, they jump the goat. And in one way, it is jumping the goat because we are talking about, for those of you who haven't watched the episode yet, the devil has come to Sicily.
Speaker: And then in a totally different way, it's like a Shirley and Laverne chaos episode where, or like ah Lucy, I love Lucy, where there's too many chocolates heading down the the line. Because in our very first scene, we are introduced to Joel, who is making good on his desire to be respect in medicine and he is delving out tiny bottles because Sicily has been chosen to be part of an experimental test trial for a flu or cold drug. And he is very carefully anonymously dosing these tiny orange prescription bottles. And then a cat gets in which is crazy because- A cat apparently everybody knows ah that we've never seen everybody knows about this cat.
Speaker: okay And he makes Ed, I guess, pinky swear to not mess with any of this incredibly important task.
Speaker: Like he he has all of this. Joel is setting out all of this in the church slash town hall slash recital area. And I'm guessing the door is wide open because the cat got in.
Speaker: So there's obviously cat fur and dander in all of this, which I feel like should kind of nullify some of the study already. But I digress. um And he has it set up on a flimsy card table.
Speaker: Ed runs after, yes, the cat that we've never been introduced to, but everybody knows. And Ed upends the table and the pills go everywhere. yeah Yep. Seems some suspect. i the Immediately when he, like you said, when he had Ed deal with this, I was like, this is so not in character. There's no way that Joel would let him touch. There's no way he'd let anyone touch it.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. And why would they even be at the the church community building on a ramy table when they have a perfectly adequate medical facility in the town where Joel could be delving out the pills behind closed and locked doors? um Yeah, it's obscurely weird.
Speaker: It is, it's ah already kind of getting off to a rocky start, but then we're introduced, well, we're introduced in, I believe, the cold open to what is, i mean, I saw this goat and I was like, oh, it's Black Phillip, because I love The Witch.
Speaker: One of my favorite movies, have you all seen The Witch? Yep. Okay, great. it's fabulous movie. I see it, Caleb. It's a fabulous movie, and it deals heavily with a goat who is Black Phillip, who is the devil incarnate, just in a goat form.
Speaker: um And I see this goat, and i was like, oh, ha, ha, ha, ha. And this actor, Amy, I'm sure you could tell us all about the gentleman that plays Beelzebub. Yes, Charles Martin Smith. He has 91 credits. Incredible. I love him.
Speaker: Do you want me to read off? he does Yeah, run him down. Yeah, I mean, he's known as like a ah um kind of a character actor, but he is best known for American Graffiti, ah the 1978 version of the Buddy Holly story. um Herbie Goes Bananas, Starman, The Untouchables,
Speaker: for and the x files and deep impacts but he was just like more of a supporting uh role person and he became a director he also directed air bud one of my probably most referenced movies and improv scenes and the blind side which i didn't know that he was the director of the blind side and he was a director of a horror cult classic called trick-or-treat He was great in the Untouchables. That's an amazing movie if nobody's seen that. yeah
Speaker: He just plays one of those great character actor roles where it's like he's a governmental official. He's a pencil pusher. He's always kind of the by the books guy in everything. i don't remember which X-Files episode he was in.
Speaker: I should start writing them them down when I find them. Because, spoiler alert to all of our listeners, i got to meet Jillian Anderson and David Duchovny yesterday. wow I saw the photo. and expo, yes. it was It was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up to live my 13-year-old dreams, come to life. It was wonderful. But... Let's get back into territory of this episode.
Speaker: Instead of delving down something I would love to talk about, let's talk about my least favorite part of this episode, which is the ventriloquist dummy. Oh my God. There's so many things.
Speaker: Chris has a ventriloquist on me. Ventriloquism, famously a part of radio society. Everybody knows that you love a ventriloquist on the radio. Let's have a ventriloquist on the radio. And you know what's weird about this, though, is um the actor is pretty good at it.
Speaker: um He's not doing it. Well, he is in a couple of scenes, but then there are very clear scenes where his neck and his mouth are not even moving and they just dub clearly a voice. But if the first couple you can see he he he's not bad, but then he very much is not doing it.
Speaker: Yeah, I did a little bit of a deep dive and everything that I found says that it was a separate person talking, that he never actually was doing it ever. Damn, it even sounded like his voice a little bit. So that separate person was really good. Yeah. I agree. I mean I think it was him, the what was alluded to in what I read was that he recorded all of it.
Speaker: And somebody else read the lines off screen. Oh, it was one of those um Audrey Hepburn, yeah My Fair Lady things where she recorded all of the audio and then they dubbed over her. So maybe, yeah, because I also saw his throat moving for a lot of it.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, he's pretty good. But then yeah maybe he took a crack at it, but sucked so bad. He was doing things to make it look like he was, but like you could, like there's nothing going on in his mouth at all. Well, that was the only redeeming factor of this storyline that I had was that he was good at it. And now that the illusion has been ripped from my eyes, now the whole episode has no redeeming quality. This was for sure a kill episode. I was watching this. I was like, this had to be the first kill episode.
Speaker: Had to be. When you say kill an episode, what do you mean? When they brought in the producer who was basically told to kill the show. I think this was like a him being like, okay, we hook people in for the first four and then we just destroy everything.
Speaker: Burn it all down. Yeah. They knew at this point too that Rob Morrow was out. like It was clear he was gone. And he's just...
Speaker: Ever so greasy in every episode. It's like they were doubling down on some strange hair gel situation. I think I talk about this a few times in my notes, but it gets disgusting.
Speaker: It gets really gross. The further along we get into this. um So at this point, Ed has not told Joel about anything and the entire town has been given their pills.
Speaker: Everybody, everybody knows that they are a part of the study. And of course it's a blind study. So nobody knows, Which they got, but of course they all think they're getting the effective doses. Like everybody thinks that they are going to be cured of the common cold and they all have these wild placebo effects that are happening to all of them, which i appreciate. And i wanted to drop in an anecdote. Have you all heard about the extra strength placebo effect?
Speaker: No. I mean, I think have, but go ahead. Yeah, it's the test subjects were given either the placebo knowingly, or knowingly the extra strength placebo. And the extra strength placebo worked better than the regular strength placebo, which is all sugar pills. Yeah, yeah yeah the the human brain is incredible. What the human brain can come up with is incredible.
Speaker: God, Stevie is in everything. um let's get back to my favorite plot line the Roger Brewster plot line I like the devil I thought it was a lot of fun this is the only thing and maybe it was because of his like it was kind of an X-Files-y feel he comes into the all ladies book club to show them his ah not hot tub but like a whirlpool foot soak kind of thing that turns your bathtub into a jacuzzi not a jacuzzi it looks nice He's a door-to-door salesman, but I got to tell you, he'd have me at InstaSpa because I looked at that thing and went, I will have one, please.
Speaker: I looked at it and said, this is just a vacuum going backwards. Probably, but it looked like it had multiple holes all around it. You got to get the mat with the vacuum. Exactly. Very relaxing to hear a vacuum right by your head while you're taking a nice warm bath too. The most relaxing. The most relaxing. I'll have to say I was like, maybe I was... um uh kind of like oh this sucks because i didn't tell you guys but zach and i went up to breckenridge we always like to go on off-season times because no one's around so we did the weekend between memorial day and um kids graduating and So anyways, i our pool was um not functioning, but they had two hot tubs. So and no one was there. So we had these two hot tubs at night by ourself. And then the next day we were um bummed about the pool and they were like, we'll send you to another Hyatt. We ended up going to like the super fancy Breckenridge Hyatt.
Speaker: pool completely to ourselves indoor pool that you swim underneath a thing to go to an outdoor pool they had a water slide they had two huge hot tubs and when we got there it was snowing but warm so that's the way to do it we're like swimming in the outside with like fog and mist is like coming up and like snow is coming and we were both like this is so cool But then the hot tubs were so strong bubble-wise. was like, I'm in heaven. so i think And then I watched this episode and I was like, that looks like a bunch of bullshit.
Speaker: ah See, i I have not had that amazing full experience, nor have I had a hot tub. I have been dreaming about a hot tub. My my month has been insanity with gigs and work and things. And all I want is like a night and a hot tub.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I was loving this and i loved Amy. You'll likely remember these. Caleb, I don't know if you'll remember these, but the special gift that Roger gives everybody is these little bath kits and they've got these little balls in them that were bath oils that would make your tub better.
Speaker: like homicide slick. Yeah. If you put your foot down after you put one of these little bath balls into your bathtub, your whole tub became so slippery that you weren't able to ever get traction until you really cleaned out your tub. Do you remember those? Yeah.
Speaker: I don't, I've never heard of those, but it makes sense that the devil would try to steal your soul and then kill you in the bathtub. Exactly. But of course, oh no, Roger didn't have one for Shelly.
Speaker: Not one for our sweet, naive Shelly. No, because we have to have the dumbest plotline in Shelly's history for the rest of this show. It's so dumb. It's so bad. it's It's truly as if the IQ of the show collectively just left the room. Yep.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. But like i someone has to grope Shelly. It's been a while. It's been a minute. You know, Noah's groping while she's pregnant. Let's go back to this old trope of somebody be gross to the youngest person in the cast. Yep. Let's do that.
Speaker: um So Roger leaves, but he promises Shelly something special. Um, I like all of the town thinking that they're on the pill, thinking that they're on the active pill and like Maurice thinks it's an appetite suppressant. Um, oh gosh, what is the bearded fellows name? Let me find his, um, yeah, the, Hayden, Hayden, yeah, Hayden speed or something. Yeah. because He thinks it's an amphetamine. Yeah.
Speaker: He's like, yeah, I loaded wood all day long and I didn't even notice. um And then we naturally we come back to Roger. Roger feels really terrible. So he brings Shelly a Black Sabbath at the Cow Palace bootleg tape. and then tries to feel Shelly up.
Speaker: To which she's like, my husband is in the literal next room. And it wouldn't even matter if he was in the next room because that was disgusting. And all of the devils came for sad. That was yeah so dumb.
Speaker: It felt so, and it felt like he, the actor knew it was out of character and Shelly knew it was out of character. And they were like, let's just get through this terrible scene. Let's just do it.
Speaker: yeah He asks about her deepest wish. And for no reason at all, it's the legalization of gambling. Yeah. Oh, my God. What?
Speaker: And not just the legalization, but to turn the brick into Caesar's Palace? Like a full-on Vegas? ah That space is 250 square feet at best. Come on, man. That is so...
Speaker: utterly insane and out of character for her uh where the hell are these stories coming from they were given to a freshman community college creative writing class that is the writing staff for this season it's horrific it talk about i mean there's like oh something out of left field for a character that might have been quietly alluded to for the previous seasons but never Have we ever? In fact, I think that Shelley has hated the idea of betting and gambling a lot in the past because of her religious background that they have for this character.
Speaker: What the hell? This is going to be a trend moving forward, at least for the next few episodes, where they just throw out the canon of these characters from the last six years and force them into situations that are so unnatural and so uncharacteristic. They're literally betraying these characters that we've all come to know and love so i guess if you want to kill a show that is that's how you it perfect way to kill a show truly yes yeah your characters completely different people yeah yeah and if you'll notice i have not been talking a lot about esau because i really hated that plot line so i didn't write a lot that So if you have anything that you want to say about how the whole town loves this dummy and they'll invite Chris over to dinners and then immediately snub him.
Speaker: The most intellectually interesting man in the town who has an incredible life, just like everybody has. But when he puts the dummy down, they're like, go home.
Speaker: i There is one thing I wrote about Esau. it kind of I wrote it now and then I followed up with it later where I was like, you know, i actually like his opinion on air. I like that Chris is this very philosophical duopoly of thought, right? And always has been. And then like he can see the yin and the yang of every side.
Speaker: Esau is just here. Here it is straight to the point. And so it's a great alter ego of Chris that where we get to see maybe a side of him that is more sure and direct. I think it was betrayed through using a ventriloquist dummy. What an amazing opportunity to use somebody like Bernard or somebody from his past that is also his alter ego that can be where, where Bernard is,
Speaker: the same, but different also kind of a duopoly of thought. Maybe there's another character in their life. They share that could be more of the direct, I don't know, but yeah, there was something about just like revealing his id and super id and super ego and all this crap that was just like, what, what are we doing here? This is great. yeah But that's the one thing I liked about you saw was just his directness.
Speaker: I wrote, um, Esau was all the things that Chris really wanted to say. like I feel like they always were playing around with this idea of him and his voice and his intellect. And like this was a really interesting way for me. I'm not a fan of ventriloquism, but I thought it was an interesting way to show that thing about Chris where it's like Chris is it's like he wants to be intellectual he wants to sound smart um you know that was the whole purpose of him reading books and and studying in jail so when he got out he could sound smart, which is funny to me because um i'm I've brought this up a couple times, but I'm still watching that Australian soap opera prison Prisoner. um I'm on episode 200. And one of their biggest things is
Speaker: learning how to sound smart so when they get out, they can get better jobs. So it's like a plot point throughout the whole series. um And it's all about sounding smart.
Speaker: a look I actually really like your perspective on this too, that Esau is everything Chris wanted to say. really great potential in that storyline. ah The show betrayed it by introducing it here and then deleting it from existence. That's the problem with this is like, now the episodes are let's introduce something big. Now let's delete it from existence for the rest of the run.
Speaker: ah So frustrating. um Yes. Oh, and I have a question for you. Did you know, did you notice that Shelly's earrings in this episode were oranges?
Speaker: I was like, why are they not apples? Yeah. Okay, i want to talk about the last earrings that she has. i went to I went to Moose Chick because Moose Chick has a pretty good um read on all of her earrings. But Moose Chick was like, I think they're like houses. No, they're at the top of a shark and it is eating a swimmer.
Speaker: and the swimmer's legs are dangling out the bottom of it. It's an amazing, it's they are amazing Jaws earrings like I have never seen before. They are great. But yes, it definitely should have been an apple.
Speaker: Like, yes, if if this is our Eve who is being tempted by by the snake, it 100% should have been an apple. I was like, what is going on? Like, I noticed them even more because they were off.
Speaker: Yeah. No, you're right. it's almost It's almost obnoxiously intentionally yeah goading us to say, hey, did you like these characters?
Speaker: We're going to make you hate them. Yes. When you say there's something off about Shelley's earrings, that brought up something that I've really started to notice. And I've noticed it pretty strongly since the New York episode where Shelley played Joel's wife in his fantasy. Yeah.
Speaker: She has changed. Cynthia Gearing is approaching this completely different. there is ah There's a maturity to Shelly now. um And I don't know if it was Cynthia's choice or the writing choice or what, but the whimsy and the youthful energy of Shelly is gone. And so a lot of, I feel like a lot of her moves this season are falling very flat. And I really started to notice that in this one where she seems very serious. And this has kind of been, um,
Speaker: Yeah, she's taken the character in a very serious vein. And so I don't buy some of her her moves this go around, do you know? Yeah. Well, let's flip that script and let's get into the very unserious plot line that they gave her after this point in which the devil says, to get legalized gambling in the state of Alaska, you must burn your husband's robe.
Speaker: Yeah. Betrayal. You must betray your husband's, ah just a simple betrayal. That's all it is. It doesn't have to be ah catastrophic. She doesn't have to have an affair. She just has to destroy something that he loves. That's it.
Speaker: That's all. um Which is probably the most nuanced part of the whole episode. Because meanwhile, Hayden is planning an Ocean's Eleven heist to get into Joel's office to figure out who has been given the placebo and who has the regular. Yeah, sure. Can back it up to the fact that Maurice is actually planning the mastermind Ocean's Eleven heist and he's using Hayden as his pawn? So now all of a sudden, Maurice is a criminal mastermind to start a drug empire? This is nuts.
Speaker: This whole thing's just nutter butter. Well, he just wanted it for himself. That's all. I don't think he was trying to start at anything. He just wanted cheap drugs. Then he could start pawning them off to Sicilians and then selling them in the drugstore. Yeah, but just so, like, Mr. Astronaut America turning to criminal mastermindery seems so absurd.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, no, like, well, he was trying to compound drugs. The writers this season did not watch the previous five seasons. Yeah. Well, he also is slightly unethical when it comes to money, which we know.
Speaker: Yeah. You know? i love, I will say one of my favorite parts of this episode was when Joel confronts Hayden because they figure out immediately that it was Hayden who broke in. And Hayden, within like four seconds gives up Maurice. Like all Joel has to do is look at Hayden and be like, Hey, I think he just says the word, Hey. yeah And Hayden is like, Maurice put me up. is I swear to God, like the worst person to go into business with is Hayden. Hayden's going to give you up in a heartbeat. I love him.
Speaker: Okay. There was one other part that I liked where Shelly comes in to talk to Chris because she has been offered this opportunity by the devil. And she says, She comes up, he's working on something. She says, do you think that you could go to hell for burning a bathrobe?
Speaker: And Chris was so taken aback. He was like, I think I'm going to need you to run that by me one more time. It was, it was just a funny little moment. And then we got back into the crap.
Speaker: Um, so Ed, sorry. Oh, Going back, I missed the part where Ruthann has an occult book in the basement, and they're looking at pictures of the devil. And then Ed, who also believes that Roger is the devil, just draws a pair of glasses on what I'm guessing is like a three to four hundred year old book. This thing yeah looks like the necromancer. yeah this This is an incredible book she's got in her basement.
Speaker: And she draws the glasses on the double nitpicky thing. um But when Ed draws those glasses, you can see him physically draw little circles.
Speaker: And then when they cut to the photo, they're elaborately drawn rectangle glasses. Yeah. Yeah. That just threw me off. i was like, wait, what? It's just, there's no care for continuity. No, no. The attention to detail is gone.
Speaker: hu The one thing that um bothered me too was how quickly Joel got over Ed's mishap. Oh yeah. So Ed comes clean. Finally, Ed can't handle it anymore. He's clearly bothered by this, but not by the fact that the actual devil is in town.
Speaker: The thing that's eating away at him is the fact that he messed up the Johns Hopkins study. So he comes clean and ah in your minds, what would Joel have done?
Speaker: got ah somehow got Ed fired from his current jobs, um probably reported him to John Hopkins. he would have been thrown him under the bus to try and save his own career or like get the study restarted or something. Catastrophic. It would have been a catastrophic mishap, which at the base of it is Joel's fault, which is why I think that he doesn't go absolutely Pompeii.
Speaker: I mean, Joel left Ed in there. It was joe Joel's fault. He said, you know, pinky swear. Also, your windows were open and the cat got in. So, um so Shelly starts to burn the robe very near the end. And then she pulls it out of the fire. She has she has proven herself to be a worthy soul.
Speaker: Which i don't know. This is where it starts to lose it for me because he's targeting just people who are pure of heart, but everybody's got a little sulliness in their soul. Everybody's a little dark, so I don't understand...
Speaker: Yeah, he he was saying how Shelly's is bread and butter because she is so faithful, but he also loves to target women because of the sea of estrogen. This show in this season has taken a very misogynistic tone, um which we'll also get to see when our new doctor arrives here in a bit. But there's something, i don't know if you guys felt this.
Speaker: Because this there was a lot of whimsy and fantasy that could have been interjected into this episode. Yeah. Much like the prior seasons, which were very fantas fantastical and whimsical.
Speaker: And I feel like they're trying to go there, but there's a heaviness now. There's something going on. It's either behind the scenes and it's coming through to the surface There was in inner turmoil with the cast, something, but there just feels to be this presence of a heaviness yeah that isn't allowing the whimsy to take flight.
Speaker: Well, did you feel, Caleb, that it was money? like I feel like they ah like everything down to like making Chris's storyline with the ventriloquist doll and not doing any kind of effects, even practical effects with the devil, I was like, their budget must have got...
Speaker: stripped and cut down. I mean, I guess they have a ventriloquist dummy. It just felt like a lead brick in the stomach. These episodes feel plodding.
Speaker: It feels like they aren't able to operate within a confined space and they're just hitting up against the walls yeah in really uncomfortable ways. um The dummy leaves.
Speaker: Things go back to normal. The devil leaves. Things go back to normal. Joel is okay with the study being a catastrophic failure, even though Johns Hopkins was his ultimate goal as a doctor. And we're all back to normal. So basically, nobody changes.
Speaker: Yeah, we're Seinfeld now, but not funny. Yeah, and yeah Maggie was only in that one scene in the very beginning when she hosted the Yeah, she introduced... Very brief. She was the reason the devil came to town. She was our catalyst for chaos, at least that little bit of chaos.
Speaker: We're also starting see a lot of guests and new characters introduced. um This has been going on for a little bit here, and we're not relying on the ensemble as much. I wonder if Who knows? Maybe there was just like scheduling issues because they were all starting to do other things outside now. Yeah. um Maybe they just I mean, we know that um the guy playing hauling couldn't stand Rob at this point because.
Speaker: he felt that Rob ruined the show with his contract negotiations. That's that's available on IMDB trivia. So yeah, you maybe there was just a lot of inner strife and they couldn't put people in the same room and that lended to some of this lead in the stomach.
Speaker: Yeah. Could be. um But shall we continue down this yellow brick road? Any final thoughts on this episode? No. I'm glad I've watched it and don't have to again. I had to watch this one twice because once I watched it just kind of in the background and then I remembered I had to host these episodes so I had to go back and watch it with intention.
Speaker: So i took one for the team. Actually I had to watch both this episode and the next one.
