Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to c Sicily, Alaska, a Northern Exposure podcast. 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 six, full upright position.
Speaker: Well, we have a little bit of extra money for a new set in this episode. We are going to have a trapped in a fishbowl episode for part of it. And what I can only describe as worse than anything you could get from a chat GPT prompt for the rest of the episode. So first of all, Joel is going to Russia.
Speaker: with Maggie and they kiss in the most gross and unpassionate way I have ever seen two characters kiss on a television show. We're also going to be introduced to Maurice's cousin, Maurice.
Speaker: who comes in from out of town. Yes, he's a Dutton, of course, but he is still Maurice. Yeah, but isn't that... i When I heard that, I was like, oh, Yellowstone, the Duttons. Yeah, that's what I heard as well. I know that that's a thing Yellowstone. that explains a lot of their behavior then, because they're not bright people either. They're just rich ranchers.
Speaker: Not just rich ranchers. I mean, yes, Maurice is the the family boy that has made the most good, ah
Speaker: It's a very interesting episode. The least amount of romance because, yeah, since Joel and Maggie got together, it's felt less like they were ever together than ever before.
Speaker: Yeah. yeah The longer they are with each other, the more it feels like these characters have never met. Not just that they don't like each other, but that they don't even know each other. It's not even a ah passionate, dispassionate. It's just, have we introduced them to each other yet?
Speaker: yeah They feel so strange. So yes, Joel has offered this all expense paid trip to Russia so he could speak and he gets, you know, a plus one because he doesn't have a wife. He offers it to Maggie who's so excited and has this weird interjection where she calls it the USSR. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah Which hadn't been a thing for quite a while, but okay. I guess maybe we wanted to endear ourselves to the people who remember Russia as the USSR. Make USSR great again. She's definitely a mua. She's a Maggie's a mua.
Speaker: God. um So yeah, they they paid for access to a secondary location, which is falling apart Russian airline.
Speaker: that That thing was such a set yeah from a movie. Do you ever notice like in TV shows too, whenever you see a set, a plane set, it's a third the length of a normal set. yes Like yeah those planes are the size of like a little Cessna.
Speaker: but yet they're as wide as a 747. That's always been a pet peeve of mine, and they really leaned into it hard on this one too. I think it's interesting that you guys think that they paid for that. I feel like, again, I saw it as like saving money. Somebody was like, we're going to get chuck this set piece. Yeah, it's on the back lot. I bet it was just on a back lot somewhere. and yeah yeah whoever Whatever production company, Paramount or whoever had it, and they just jumped on it.
Speaker: Yeah. yeah Yeah. It was, um, yes, you're right. Either way, it was just a bad set. It looked bad to begin with, but then it was just made even worse by saying, oh this is clearly like ah an old Soviet airline and my least favorite subplot of this whole episode. And really, I'm so angry that I had to watch this episode twice because Chris is falling in love with And is fascinated by electricity. Oh, shit. I've got some thoughts on this one. Yep, you should. I expect everybody to have some thoughts on this C plot. You know, I also have an issue that came up in the very first scene, which I think speaks to Amy's philosophy that the budgets have dropped.
Speaker: We see Shelly and Holling walking back from the store with like a wagon full of food and everything. Where the hell's Randy? Who takes care of Randy when these two are out? Do they just leave her behind? No. can't afford child actors at this point because you know you got to pay extra for them so i think that they just eliminate her for most of the scenes oh randy is just we don't we don't talk about randy randy is taking care of herself um she's in saskatchewan visiting her grandma oh she took the yeah she took the snowmobile out
Speaker: Yeah. She took the snowmobile off to Canada. So Chris is getting zapped by static electricity, which naturally means Chris is about to become fully fascinated with electricity.
Speaker: I hate this part, y'all. really hate it. wants to get inside of electricity. Ugh. We've always had, yes, uh, we've always had yes ah Chris needs to become fascinated with some element of art or an artistic desire in every season. But wow, they really decided to kill.
Speaker: Chris. Yeah. we've We've come a long way from the cow fling and the Aurora Borealis. Yeah. I don't think we need to spend much time talking about Maggie and Joel because really it's a, let's put a brand new couple together in a tight confined space so that all of their little eccentricities come out. She becomes frustrated with him. He becomes frustrated with her for less reasons. And then there's smoking on the plane and they decide to,
Speaker: Do you want me to spoil it? for Should we just get this out of the way? Yeah. I mean, I can i can interject some of the earlier things I thought about this. Please. I thought it was interesting that Joel was getting embarrassed by Maggie raising her voice a little on the plane. I don't feel like I've ever seen that as a thing. um i also thought this was the breakup moment.
Speaker: I had forgotten that it turned into a proposal, and I was like, what the hell like yeah and that's pretty much all i had to say about it i just thought it was kind of absurd can you guys clarify one point for me because i was a little confused um i gotta be honest i even have a note in one of these of like my add kicked in so hard during these that at one point i realized i'd been scrolling my email for six minutes and forgot to watch the show but i didn't want to go back so Are they in Russia on this plane? No. They're in the United States. They haven't even taken off.
Speaker: Yeah. They have not taken off. They're probably in Anchorage. The flight attendants by law would have to speak English. Even in the 90s, they wouldn't be allowed to stay on a plane for 24 hours. Yeah. No like they used to you used to be able to have i mean They used to make you sit on them for longer than three hours. Now you can't. But even back then by law, they wouldn't have allowed you to.
Speaker: um this makes no sense because I was also confused at the end when they rush off the plane. they're like, now the plane's going to take off. And they're like, no, we're getting off. i was like wait, aren't they in Russia?
Speaker: um So thank you for that clarification because now it's even dumber. Yeah. They've just stopped caring. yeah Everybody has stopped caring.
Speaker: Speaking of stopping caring, we decided to go back to Maurice's plot line. Unless Caleb, you have anything else to say about the airplane? I got nothing. Great. Love it. Love it.
Speaker: ah So Maurice has baby Maurice who like, if he can't have a son that he conceived during wartime, let's just give him a nephew, a cousin. Let's give him some other kind of distantly relative family member who, oh no, he thinks he's an idiot because he works at a gas station because let's insult people who do things.
Speaker: basic necessary tasks for society, which everybody in this community does except for Maurice. yeah Everybody basically serves the community except for Maurice. I think it's an overcompensation for where Maurice grew up. um I'm probably going way too deep on this. ah Maurice grew up in Tulsa, which if you grow up in a very blue collar agricultural community and your goal is to get out of that community,
Speaker: I think a lot of times you overcompensate with maybe your view towards the people that you grew up with because you you like to look down on them as a way to justify your own reason for leaving.
Speaker: um And it takes a while. Now, at Maurice's age, he should have come around to the fact that that's that's noble work and that's hard and a lot of people, like not everybody can do it. But yeah, I don't, I'm i'm reading way too much into this, but I can just, i could empathize with the fact that having come from a similar community Sometimes you you find yourself looking down on it as a way to justify your own ambitions to like move on up to the city. You know what I mean? Except you're right, Anne. He didn't move to the city. He moved to Sicily, Alaska, which the community is even smaller than Tulsa. You'd think his entire empire is built off of the backs of blue-collar workers. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, he doesn't make anything. Maurice doesn't create anything. Maurice is trying to invest in things. He is trying to use his money to make more money. Meanwhile, Ruthann runs the store. Joel, even though he's annoying, is working on healing people. ah Holling is running a restaurant that feeds people.
Speaker: He's the only one who's not doing labor. Ed does all of the work for him. Yeah, which is interesting because the whole point of the character or his whole want and motivation is to create a town. So he has his toes in everything. Everybody's business, all the actual businesses, except, well, we you know, of course we know that Ruthann's store, she finally owned herself at a certain point. But like,
Speaker: you know he He thinks he is creating this entire thing. okay Which is great when you look at it in contrast to like where he's at now and how much we know him compared to that episode, Sicily, where it's like he was the bully bad guy who also...
Speaker: ran the town but he ran it out of fear you know um and this now we're in a place where it's like he does think that he um has given everybody everything but it's truly comes down to yet again fear because one one misstep you lose your job uh because maurice somehow is tied into it you know um even hauling in his restaurant I ah wouldn't doubt that Maurice gave him the startup money for that, you know, to be able to buy the building or, you know, whatever. He's just a mobster. He's got something on everybody. Yep. ye
Speaker: Yep. Yep. And it is also interesting because it's kind of a regression from where we're introduced to Maurice at the very beginning. Like he was an outside outdoorsy kind of guy hunting, fishing, at least doing some things. And then more and more, he has just become a businessman who is only interested in his moneymaking money making money.
Speaker: he brings Maurice into his life and into his business because he wants to make him a man whose money makes money. So he puts him into the lumber world and, oh, it looks like he's very good at math. So let's use that money skill to make more money until he realizes oopsie doodled and he was giving people the price for budget lumber while selling them the best lumber. i think we've been trying to not talk about electricity, everybody. I think we've been avoiding You mean Ziggy Stardust and the electric spectrum? You mean Elvis Spaceman, Chris?
Speaker: When you talk about the most T-Moo astronaut special effect costume thing that would have been charming had it maybe been in the first season...
Speaker: That's what we get into. And as I was watching this final scene, um because I don't have a lot more to say other than like Maurice has his love hate relationship. It was exactly the relationship with his son. Oh, he's terrible. Oh, he's okay. It's family. He loves to do what he loves to do at the end.
Speaker: By the way, let's never see this character again, even though he's now a permanent fixture working at the garage. Yeah, exactly. Also, um how does that differ from any of our other characters who are just like, he's never been mentioned before, but is now an ingrained part of society anyway. Yeah. um So yeah, Chris needs to get inside of electricity.
Speaker: So what is the only way to get inside of electricity? We all know the answer to this. That's by Sitting in a bathtub and being ah held above ground by a very large magnet. yeah so i a good job i had Good job. I had so many issues with this because anybody that knows anything about magnetism knows that that's bullshit and this isn't the way it works. he like slowly so He's sitting in the cast iron stove or tub and he's slowly being raised. This electromagnet, which is basically like you would find at any scrapyard or anything, is running off of
Speaker: yeah a transformer on the back of a flatbed truck that would power New York city. Um, but anyway, he like slowly starts to hover up a little bit in this bathtub with this metal platform on it. An electromagnet is on off and it is instantaneous. so if you flick this bad boy on, Chris is getting sucked up immediately. Like the science behind it was bad. the visual effects behind it were bad. It was clearly like they were raising him on a crane.
Speaker: um And it just didn't so it was such a letdown. Okay, a few seasons ago when the budgets aren't even that big, we fling an entire piano with a trebuchet that we have made.
Speaker: that is just glorious. And we had the Aurora Borealis, which was this great interactive piece of art that the whole town comes around. All of his artistic endeavors have been this building thing and where we discover a new thing about Chris, which also lends to society itself. And now we have the most ghetto magnet rig on the planet with a surplus bathtub that they don't even sell in real physics. I think even the people sitting around the townspeople were looking at this going like, well, we've hit rock bottom.
Speaker: That was my only note. My only last note of the episode was i enjoyed watching the crowd and seeing how many extras were looking at it like, what the actual F is happening?
Speaker: They look so disappointed because they were probably like, I'm going to be an extra on a hit show. This is so exciting. I've seen this show being promoted. What the F? What? is and And I wrote at the end,
Speaker: And a freeze frame. And then bad rock music. All we needed was a high five. All we needed was a high five. I worry it's all downhill from here. I was right. And I was right.
Speaker: ah Any final thoughts? Nope. I hated it. Thanks. I hated it.
