Season 6, 23 Episodes - So Long Joel, Goodbye Cicely

[BlackberryJam]

Bringing this over from the general discussion thread.

S6E8 or is it E7?. Up River - This a big one. This post is LONG. 

Just a note before I start, what’s listed on IMDb as S6E6 Zarya, an episode about Anastasia of Russia, actually aired for me in S5. So Up River is IMDb S8E8 but in Prime streaming, it’s S6E7.

Catching up to where we are:

In episode 5 Joel was doing a medical study with placebos. Ed knocks the pill jars over and confuses the placebos with the medication, screwing up the study. Joel is understandably pissed as he now looks like an idiot to Johns Hopkins, which was funding the study. So more of Joel’s career circling the drain. However, he forgives Ed fairly quickly. Burrows’ acting is fantastic. He makes Ed’s guilt palpable. 

B-stories. Chris gets rid of his stupid puppet. Shelley says what she wants most in the world is to make gambling legal in Alaska. Seriously, wtf? 

Episode 6/7. Maurice has his young cousin/heir come visit, also named Maurice. The kid gets all stressed by the pressure, blah blah. Such a weak B-story, but Barry Corbin does what he can with the material. Chris also has a B-story about electricity and art. Whatever. Don’t care. 

Joel and Maggie, an established couple(?) are heading to Russia for Joel to give a talk. They are flying on a Russian airline. Something goes wrong with the plane and they are stuck on the runway for …a day? It’s difficult to tell. Maggie and Joel bicker. Turner seems to be a little lost in what she’s supposed to be doing. At the end of the episode, Joel and Maggie get engaged. 

Continuity issue: It’s been mentioned many times that no one locks their door, but when Joel and Maggie arrive back at her place, she spends a lot of time searching for her keys while they stand on the front porch. They banter during this and decide to move in together.

Which brings us to S6E7/8, Up River. The episode starts with Maurice pissed as Joel has been AWOL for two weeks. He went to go deliver a baby and never returned. Maurice sends Ed out to find Joel. 

B-story is Chris remodeling his camper and the contractor does crap work and doesn’t show..blah blah blah. Walt is away and Ruth-Anne is missing him and acknowledging she’s in love with him. (Although they’ve been banging for a while, but sure.)

Ed heads up river and finds Joel in a …I’m not calling it a village. Six, maybe eight shacks/huts. Joel is softening hides. From this point forward, the Burrows/Morrow scenes are just fantastic. Morrow is as natural softening hides, canning fruit and stringing up fish as he was throwing around medical jargon. He’s still Joel, but a changed Joel.

Joel invites Ed to stay to discuss how he (Joel) got to this place, so there are a lot of flashbacks. 

Joel has moved in with Maggie. They are making out and laughing. They end up in bed and her shotgun goes off, destroying the bedside lamp and leaving multiple holes in the wall. Joel is upset, but Maggie is all “whoopsie, an accident with my gun, giggle giggle.” Okay, this is the same Maggie whose boyfriends die in freakish accidents, and she’s fine with stray bullets. 

Next night, they are making out on the couch and Hayden accidentally shoots his gun through Maggie’s window, barely missing Joel and Maggie. Again, Joel is understandably upset and Maggie thinks it’s no big deal and kind of funny.

 These scenes are interspersed with Chris and his contractor and then Joel and Ed in the village with Joel telling the story. Joel’s hair is enormous. Joel speaks the language of the villagers and even goes spear fishing with them. You can see on Ed’s face that Joel’s proficiency makes Ed feel inadequate. 

Joel continues the story. A third night of Maggie and Joel. She’s in bed in a slinky nightie. He comes to bed, a problem with the dental floss, he’s tired, etc, but she is clearly in the mood. Joel is …haha…gunshy. Cut to the next morning, Joel arrives at work and Eugene is in his office, repairing a window. Eugene’s relative’s antique gun accidentally and shot out the window at the exact moment Joel and Maggie were getting it on. Joel is upset and feels that something is going on. 

Joel meets Maggie in the street and tells her about the musket blowing out the window. She is AGAIN nonchalant about it. Joel says he’s a rational person, but clearly something is going on, even if there is no logic.

Now Maggie’s response to this has been weird and uncharacteristic all along, and Turner is struggling with the material. Maggie responds that Joel is just embarrassed about his sexual performance the night before. This is bad, bad writing. 

Move to that evening. Joel finds that Maggie has brought her gun back into the house and hidden it from him under the couch. She says it’s fine because they will be in the bedroom. Joel is pissed. As the conversation continues, she reveals that the gunshot near misses have TURNED HER ON.

Again, Maggie has had multiple boyfriends die in weird circumstances and yes, we are to believe that curse is broken after Mike and her bangathon with Joel, but the fact she is aroused by being accidentally shot at while making out with Joel? Idiotic doesn’t even begin to describe it. 

Joel is appalled at her reaction. She tells him, “No sex tonight,” as if Joel is begging for it but Morrow is playing it like, “the very presence of a gun in the house has killed any libido I may have had tonight, or possibly ever.”

Next day, Joel goes to see Chris, as Joel is doing pharmacy delivery. Chris has made peace with his contractor. Chris and Joel talk. Chris is all about, “losing your mind to find it.” Whatever. They put handprints in the concrete together.

Joel goes back to Maggie to tell her he’s ready to open himself up to all the possibilities of their relationship. She’s been crying. She gives him a cashmere sweater vest. He talks to her about how fighting can be healthy and have their relationship develop and grow. He knows he has to be more open. She tells him to move out. He tells her he has to be less controlling and more accepting. She tells him he exhausts her. Maggie wants someone who can let go a little. (All I can think is, Yeah because Mike really let go, didn’t he?) Turner’s tears seem real here, even if what is coming out of her mouth is nonsense.

Back to Joel and Ed. Joel then talks about being at the village, finding out they have no running water or electricity and no phones. He realizes he can let go of everything there and asks them if he can stay.

Joel says he’s found he needs time with nothing, just time to be with himself. Ed wonders if he should stay, and Joel asks him if this “nothing” is what Ed needs. 

Joel walks Ed to his boat. He asks Ed to tell Maggie that he thinks of her every day. Ed asks Joel if he’ll ever come back. Joel responds something like, “whatever happens happens.” Joel tells Ed he’ll be in touch and they hug.

I don’t know if this was Burrows and Morrow’s last scene together, but the camaraderie feels so real. I actually teared up. Even after all the annoying Maggie nonsense and the continuity backslide with Walt and Ruth-Anne, not to mention a really weak primal scream from Chris, I still got choked up by Morrow and Burrows. I also don’t know if those two remained friends, but they sold that scene as two close friends saying goodbye, possibly forever.

This episode is definitely worth a separate rewatch for the Ed and Joel scenes.

 

Edited January 29 by BlackberryJam

[possibilities]

Thanks for starting the thread.

Maggie's mom was recast, wasn't she? Debra Mooney was not her mom in the earlier episodes. 

In the final episode, Maggie is described as "a no show" at Maurice's community vacation when everyone is arriving and getting room assignments. Later, when she shows up, she tells Chris she turned around and came back to be there, that she couldn't get on the plane because she'd rather be with him.

Did I miss when they said where she was going by plane before she changed her mind? It didn't sound like one of her routine small plane jobs. Were they saying, but not saying, that she had planned to go see Joel, but changed her mind? Or did they say it and I missed it?

[BlackberryJam]

I only have the answer to one of these questions. Bibi Besch played Maggie’s mom in two episodes. Unfortunately, she passed away from breast cancer in 1996. I’m assuming she was not healthy enough or was unwilling to come back for The Mommy’s Curse.

As to the final episode, …I haven’t watched it…yet. I’ve only watched 3 episodes after Joel left. Instead, I started S1 again. I did watch the closing sequence.

ETA: I wanted to mention about Up River. When Hayden shoots through Maggie’s window, Joel pulls her down onto the floor and shouts that it’s a drive by shooting. Such a NY reaction. 

Edited January 29 by BlackberryJam

[possibilities]

Thanks for the info on the re-cast.

There is a song in the final episode that has been in my head since I watched it last week. 

I don't dislike the after-Joel eps as much as you do, but there was definitely a major shift in tone. I wound up thinking Teri Polo's character was much more interesting than her husband's, and I also noticed they seriously moved away from the doctoring aspect of the character and toward more of an ensemble with the townsfolk rather than a "fish out of water as main character" focus. In some ways, I think that benefitted the show, because they stopped doing the whiplash thing with Joel and Maggie. But there is also a much lower level of intensity, it almost felt like everybody was tired.

[BlackberryJam]

I hit the Little Italy episode and found myself super annoyed. I think I mentioned that Paul Provenza is terrible at acting like a doctor. I felt like he was miscast. They could have done a similar role with maybe...I'm trying to think of Italian-America actors who were knocking around at the time, Stanley Tucci? Matt LeBlanc? OH Giancarlo Esposito! Imagining anyone of those in the role automatically makes Phil Capra better. 

Teri Polo is good. I've liked her in several things. 

The show had been moved around on the schedule, at least once, maybe twice, and it ended up opposite some very strong other shows, so I think the cast new things were coming to an end. On top of that David Chase had become showrunner and he didn't like the show as it existed. He went on to make The Sopranos. 

Janine Turner was also sick at the end of S6. 

I do think the show was going to have an expiration date. Once Joel's contract was up, he was either going to have to transform and choose to stay or leave. We were always seeing the town through Joel's eyes. 

[possibilities]

Oh, it definitely had the feeling of a show on its last gasps, but I didn't dislike it enough to stop watching. 

I didn't know Janine Turner was ill.

Why would you give a show to someone who hated it? That seems like the network wanted it to fail.

[BlackberryJam]

Janine was dealing with gallbladder issues, which can be incredibly painful.

I wonder about the cost of filming in Seattle?

With Morrow leaving, it might have become more trouble than it was worth.