Last night, Thomas and I watched the last episode of season 5 of Northern Exposure. I never watched the show in its original run; I was a Twin Peaks fan. So for the last 3 years, I've been taking in the show in seasons as it has been released to box set. There's one left to go.
Season 5 was a particularly strong batch of episodes, many of which moved me to tears. I sat and wept continuously for almost the entire half an hour leading up to the birth of Miranda Bliss Tamboe Vincoeur. Thomas and I often finish an episode by talking about how much we'd love to live in Cicely, Alaska, despite the cold, the bears and the dark.
Last night, Joel finished the episode by saying, "I'm one of you now. I'm Cicelian." And I thought, ultimately, that's the message and the draw of this show, that every single person, whether from New York or Grosse Point, Seattle or Topeka, looks at that place and finds a part of his or her self there. Maybe it's also that we all have some pioneer spirit left, or a desire to leave it all behind and find a simpler world, or one in which everyone fits in because there is nothing to do but pull together during the long, dark, frozen winters.
Today, in light of the Virginia Tech shootings, all of those options seem pretty appealing.
