Episode 1x01: The Pilot

It is September in New York, one year after 9/11. The toxic dust is still settling in Lower Manhattan. America is At War. The Taliban has been defeated in Afghanistan, Coalition troops are securing Kabul, Karzai has been installed as President of that embattled nation. We are nearly a year away from our Mission being declared Accomplished after the unsuccessful invasion of a nation wholly unrelated to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon. The camera flies over Central Park, as if to mimic Mohamed Atta or Marwan al-Shehhi in their hijacked planes over the nearby airspace that fateful fall one year ago. It zooms into the apartment of The Browns, an affluent cosmopolitan family of four having a casual breakfast, who are about to experience a personal 9/11 of their own.

Welcome to Everwood, the show: a show about wood that lasts forever, the various treatments and finishes to use, sawing and sanding techniques, etc. This renders the artistic choice to use the pilot episode to tell the story of a family finding meaning after loss, curious but very affecting.

In the next scene we are introduced to Doc Brown, reprising his role from Back II The Future, and Back III The Future, this time played by Treat Williams of ‘Married With Children’ fame. Doc Brown is a world-renowned brain surgeon, as world renowned as brain surgeons are. He works hard, he plays hard, and he has no time for his family, likely because he hates them so much. Doc Brown is reviewing the brain scans of a Mr. Sutterbrook who has been afflicted with Glioblastoma multiforme, as Doc Brown puts it “The Great White of brain tumors” because they block the cranium's metaphorical fire exits before setting the brain’s metaphorical night club alight with metaphorical malfeasantly calibrated pyrotechnics. He explains this overwrought metaphor to Mr. and Mrs. Satterbrook who are unamused. Doc Brown drones on about how they will thank him when he saves their lives, and about how great of a brain surgeon and father he is, and long after everyone in the room had wished he’d exited ages ago, he excuses himself. At which time Mrs. Satterbrook quips to Mr. Satterbrook, “He’s as good as he is brief.” End scene.

We find Dr. Brown in his office some hours later, when his nurse comes in to tell him that his wife phoned to relay the message that he had missed his teenaged son Ephram’s piano recital and that he was a terrible husband and father. This is a message that we are led to believe he had received many times in the past. This would turn out to be the last however as we then see policemen enter the hospital lobby and a voice-over tells us “There had been, it seemed, an accident.” Doc Brown’s wife had been killed in a car wreck on the way home from Ephram’s performance, apparently under suspicious circumstances. Why had Doc Brown not attended the recital? Why did Ephram not ride home with his mother? Where was the ten year old daughter Delia during this whole ordeal? Who is Mrs. Brown’s real killer? And why? These are the questions that overshadow the remainder of the episode.

There is a brief funeral scene, where Doc Brown appears all-too-eager to bury his wife, actually shoveling the dirt onto her coffin in the middle of the ceremony, then there is a transitional scene where the narrator explains that the family was trying to cope with Mrs. Brown’s death by ‘pretending as though nothing changed, but knowing that everything had’, and this is demonstrated by the child Delia putting on baseball cap, as if to answer the audience’s question "will she ever wear a baseball cap again?" with an emphatic "yes."

In a bid to find Mrs. Brown’s killer or flee from suspicion, Doc Brown decides to quit his lucrative practice in New York and move his children to Everwood, Colorado. Before he absconds he returns to the hospital to make a shocking admission to Mr. Satterbrook, essentially telling him that he can’t save his life, that he’s been lying this whole time, and that the hospital really just tricks all of its patients into "medical treatment" so that they can publish fraudulent statistics. He then implies that Mr. Satterbrook too is not above suspicion and would be well-advised to skip town to an anonymous location like Hershey, Pennsylvania, but that he should travel by foot so as to avoid detection from law enforcement or at least be spared the murderous temper of automobiles.

Doc Brown breaks the news of the move to his children by explaining that ‘somebody told me about it (Everwood) once. It’s on a hill or maybe a mountain or maybe a hill by a mountain’ waylaying the children’s concern that their new home could be on a floodplain. Then proposing an unspoken pact to deflect each of their presumed guilt he offers the that “We’d be moving someplace for no reason at all, how great is that?” Though they all knew the reason well. Ephram protests, stating that his father had become ‘Harrison Ford in Mosquito Coast crazy’. I’ve never seen Mosquito Coast or Harrison Ford, but an entire coast covered in Mosquitos, insect, indigenous Indian or otherwise sounds crazy indeed. Eventually after an explicit bribe of a pony the children acquiesce to Doc Brown’s ludicrous cover story to move to Everwood for ‘no reason at all’ and never speak of their mother’s murder again. The gravity of the situation is not lost on the children. Ephram admonishes Delia that she should remember this moment, as the moment she “conspired with a psychopath to ruin what’s left of our pathetic lives.”

Next we are transported to Everwood, Colorado. The camera pans over the town of Everwood as it had done earlier in Manhattan perhaps foreshadowing another imminent attack. The narrator boasts of Everwood having one of America’s first opera houses, its oldest gold mine, and the 3rd largest chili cook off, as a way to give weight to the town as a potential target for terrorism.

We see Doc Brown in the kitchen of his new house cooking Delia hash browns for breakfast. When he places them in front of her she recoils, “Do I have to eat these? They don’t smell right,” no doubt suspicious that her life might still be in danger. A bus honks outside. “Where’s my lunch?" the child asks apprehensively. Foiled, Doc Brown gives Delia some cash to buy her own lunch because he hadn’t thought she’d be around long enough to necessitate him making her a lunch, and sends her away to her first day at a new school.

Delia finds her bus driver blaring jazz, and dressed like Jason Voorhees sans hockey mask. He tells her that Rosemary Clooney playing on the radio is a good omen, and she boards the bus to find out.

Inside the house Doc Brown offers to give Ephram a ride to school. Ephram, suspicious as well, declines and insists on riding his bike.

Once the children have left for school Doc Brown goes out to his front porch. He sees someone unfamiliar in his garden. Confused about what is, and is not, a plant, he says to the small person “You’re not a plant,” seeking reassurance. “I’m a boy” the boy responds. The boy’s mother comes and retrieves her child from Doc Brown’s yard sensing his unstable aura, setting up a theme for the rest of the episode - Doc Brown’s weakening grasp on reality.

In the school parking lot some unfamiliar children remark on Ephram’s dyed-red hair, asking, he thinks facetiously, ‘did they run out of green at the store?’ When Ephram fails to respond, a friend of the boy who posed the question seeks earnest clarification ‘My friend asked you a question - did they run out of green at the store?’ Ephram suggests there is a language barrier and we do not find out if the store had in fact run out of green.

Inside the school a young girl approaches Ephram and tells him that ever since Time Magazine did an article on his father (and, I assume, the suspicious circumstances of his mother’s death) it’s ‘all anyone can talk about’ - Time Magazine being the only publication allowed public distribution in this dystopian hamlet. Ephram plays it coy insisting he has no idea why they moved to Everwood. Intrigued, Amy suggests they eat lunch sometime, presumably together.

In the next scene, local realtor Mrs. Baxworth is walking Doc Brown around town to show him office spaces for lease. She hints at his dark past letting him know that everybody is wondering what he’s doing there, then she attempts to lighten the mood by bringing up someone’s supposition that he was there at the behest of the federal government to conduct top secret brain research, after which is an exchange of very uncomfortable looks indicating that there may be something to this supposition that he is not at liberty to speak freely about.

They walk by an elderly man pestering a man, who it turns out is another doctor, to give him free medical advice on the street, and as the doctor explains the intricacies of medical examinations and protocol we are meant to balk at his arrogance and governmental red tape. This exchange serves as some sort of metaphor that is never fleshed out.

Mrs. Baxworth shows Doc Brown an office that he finds unsuitable when he becomes transfixed by an odor which he claims is a rare Parisian perfume. He follows the scent, walking through the middle of traffic causing several collisions, as New Yorkers do, and it brings him to a condemned train station. The scent apparently is that of dust and rotted animal corpses, but it compels the doctor to break into to the building, tearing away the boards nailing it shut.

“What is this place?” he asks. Mrs. Baxworth explains that “This offensive monstrosity was the train depot until the city shut it down”. What happened here that was so offensive and monstrous that it caused the government to shutter its doors? Doc Brown is compelled to find out. They make their way inside the depot, to the filth and feces covered main hall and Doc Brown asks Mrs. Baxworth “What do you see here?” She says something stupid and he pronounces, *record scratch* “No Mrs. Baxworth, my new office.”

Then we cut to a wet dream of Ephram’s where he explains the show’s main theme via Manga to Amy. “The hero’s civilian life is as important as their secret identity. It’s not just Clark Kent waiting to turn into Superman, it’s Superman waiting to turn into Clark Kent.” Then they listen to Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” and Amy explains that this song about the shared commitment of a long-term monogamous relationship is actually about a girl’s dual desire to be held and ravaged simultaneously, “not in literal sense, it's more primal”. Then she instructs him to take off her clothes, and they make out. Ephram wakes up, lifts the covers, and sees ejaculate all over his lap. The whole thing is very disturbing.

Next is an inane exchange between Doc Brown and the town’s only other doctor, Dr. Abbott about parking spaces and the bloodlines of the town doctors, at the end of which Dr. Abbott rightly dismisses Doc Brown as a nutbag.

Then we are taken to a lookout above Everwood where Amy has brought an ejaculate-less Ephram to show him the town’s many churches when we find out that Ephram is Jewish. He downplays this explaining that only his mother was Jewish and she’s dead so it’s OK. He then asks Amy why she is talking to him, possibly because he is suffering from the same mental malady as his father. She dismisses this and tells him that he has a tragic lonely thing going on and that she ‘digs that’. He asks if she listens to Al Green, and she asks who Al Green is, then they exchange furtive glances and let the question remain unanswered.

They walk back to class, from the mountain, and in the school parking lot, where the students apparently spend most of their time, Amy runs into the boys that were confused about what hair-coloring the store had run out of earlier. One is her brother (portrayed by a young Chris Pratt). "Dad’s gonna skin your ass when he finds out you're hanging out with that kid," he warns her, giving the audience a glimpse of the abusive home life of the two. Amy warns him that he’d better not tell their dad about it or she will delete his collection of Bible-themed pornography. After she walks away, the brother’s friend remarks “Dude she is smooth” apropos of nothing.

Next we see Doc Brown, hanging a sign for another theme of the show “Doctor Brown Family Practice” outside of the condemned train depot. Delia is there, and she tells her father that the sign is crooked. Doc Brown, now speaking to the audience about their own family life, replies “Sure, if you look at it straight on it’s crooked, but if you just lean a little bit it’s perfect”.

Then a lady on a motorcycle pulls up, dismounts and goes into pseudo-military-speak about having been an army nurse, and asks Doc Brown for a job. He doesn’t say no, which means she’s hired.

Back at home Delia tries to play the piano and Ephram practically throws her across the room for doing so. Then she gets sent to bed by Doc Brown. They take their piano playing very seriously. Doc Brown then goes to his bedroom where he has a hallucination of his dead wife telling him to grow a beard because he would look ‘distinguished’, and he accuses her of wanting to sleep with his Uncle Norman. Delia walks in to find her father swaying back and forth with his eyes closed, caressing his stomach.

The next day we are greeted with a feisty exchange between doctors Brown and Abbot:

Doc Brown - “Morning doctor.”
Dr. Abbott - “It was.”
Doc Brown - “You know your office is back there.” (pointing toward Dr. Abbott’s office)
Dr. Abbott - “I know where it is, I'm getting a cup of coffee.”
Doc Brown - “I was thinking last night you look vaguely familiar to me.”
Dr. Abbott - “Maybe I remind you of one of the inmates at one of the asylum you broke out of.”
Doc Brown - “It’s my first day you want to wish me good luck?
Dr. Abbott - “Oh it’ll take more than luck to launch the USS Wacko, but what the hey, good luck. Now if you’re done blathering one us us has patients to attend to.”
Doc Brown - “Have a nice day.”
Dr. Abbott - “Whatever.”

Dr. Abbott is a real bitch.

Inside the fetid train depot which is now Doc Brown’s office, motorcycle lady Edna Harper has begun work as Doc Brown’s nurse. Mrs. Baxworth comes in for no reason, and reluctantly reveals that she is having neck problems. Doc Brown, after much convincing, is allowed by the woman that came to the doctor’s office with a medical problem to let him examine her. Afterwards he tells her that he is not charging any of his patients - get this - for anything. She is flabbergasted. We are floored. This crazy doctor is taking capitalism by the balls and turning this rancid train station into ground zero in the War Against Doctors. Who will win? The answer is - us. Us will win for four more season’s worth of episodes.

We then see Delia’s bus driver, Irv, playing on the playground with the grade-school children, which is apparently part of his duties as bus driver. He sees Delia sitting alone on a bench lost in thought. He goes over to disturb her. She asks if he can keep a secret. He tells her, without giving second thought to the implications, that he can. She tells him she thinks her dad is sick because he is hallucinating his dead wife. After silently dismissing schizophrenia as a possibility he diagnoses Doc Brown with a ‘distraught heart’. He tells her, without offering any medical or psychological credentials, there is no cure for it. And leaves her to sit with that.

Ephram’s school day is not going much better. Chris Pratt’s character (Bright) tries to seduce him in the woods, and lashes out at Ephram when he spurns his advances, Ephram attacks Bright, Bright attacks Ephram, Amy shows up and attacks Bright, and they all end up in the school at the principal’s office, going there apparently of their own accord. Here we learn Bright and Amy are Dr. Abbott’s children. We learn this when Bright taunts Ephram “My sister forgot to tell you? My dad’s the real doctor in this town” in the “my dad owns a dealership” tone of voice. This scrum lands Ephram in hot water with Doc Brown who verbally abuses Ephram in front of their neighbor. His neighbor, loving a good talking-down-to of children, invites Doc Brown in for coffee. She is an attractive married woman with an absentee husband, setting up potential romantic interests, romantic conflicts, and romantic conflicts of interest in future romantic episodes.

The following day we are greeted to yet another Doc Brown/Doc Abbott exchange. This time Dr. Abbott warns Doc Brown to keep Doc Brown’s son away from his daughter. Doc Brown calls Dr. Abbott’s daughter a crack-whore. Then Dr. Abbott throws a slow pitch down the middle, “If you're so smart, where are all your patients?”

“They're just gathering outside of my office right now.” *Crack* Homerun! A CROWD of people are lined up outside of Doc Brown’s office as if it were medical Black Friday or outside of the Great Mosque of Mecca on the first day of Hajj.

Let’s talk about the public health epidemic in Everwood, Colorado. There are at least 20 people lined up to see Doc Brown. That’s all I could count in the frame, but the line seemed to extend down the block, who knows how many people are actually in acute need of medical attention. For a town the size of Everwood this is a very troubling sign. According to the CDC only 86% of adults and 92% of children have contact with a health official annually, and only 52.2% of those contacts are with a primary care physician. Most recent US Census data shows that the population of Colorado is comprised of 24.4% children (age 0-18) and 75.6% age 18+. So, for a town of 9,000 people there should only be approximately 11 primary care doctor visits TOTAL per day. Here, we have 20+ patients lined up outside of one of two operating primary care facilities in the town before it even opens up. What has caused this troubling need for medical care in Everwood? Does Dr. Brown have something to do with it? Maybe there are secret government experiments occurring in this small town. Or maybe the explanation is more nefarious than that.

Nurse Edna pulls up on her motorcycle and is confronted by Dr. Abbott, who it turns out is *record scratch* her son! She used to work for him but he fired her because he is racist and she started dating bus driver Irv, who is black. “Move it or lose it” she demands of Dr. Abbott at one point in classic Nurse Edna style.

We cut to outside of Ephram’s locker, Amy is apologizing to Ephram for the attack in the woods. We find out she has a boyfriend and she wants Ephram to go to Denver to visit him. It’s 4 hours away by bus so they have to leave now, or I guess they won't be there four hours from now. The school-aged boy who picks up his own dry cleaning tells her “That was on my list of things to do today between picking up my dry cleaning and chopping off my hand”. Then they go anyway, the two school children, by themselves, to Denver, four hours away, by bus, to see Amy’s boyfriend. He’s in a coma, and Amy wants Ephram to convince his dad fix his brain. By this point Ephram is so bored with the ordeal he wishes he were the one in the coma. We are too, and the show’s writers sense this so we abruptly return to Doc Brown’s office.

Edna explains to Doc Brown that she started dating Irv after Dr. Abbott’s father died, that Dr. Abbott, “worshipped his pops, never got on with him, but he sure did worship him. Truth is they were exactly alike.”

At this Doc Brown asks the question no one is thinking “Is it possible for a father and son who don’t get along to actually have something in common?”

Edna indulges this treacle, “In my experience when a father and son don’t get along it usually means they got everything in common.”

We hear the familiar horn honk. It’s Irv. He’s arrived to pick up Edna and I guess load her motorcycle onto the bus.

We end up back at The Brown’s house with Doc Brown preparing dinner. He instructs Delia to go down to the basement to get the silverware, where she will undoubtedly face a gauntlet of booby traps. Doc Brown then has another hallucination where his wife tells him that if she dies he should go to Everwood Colorado, because it’s what heaven is like - a closed down train depot, lots of disease, interracial marriage is forbidden - and also he has to be a doctor there that doesn’t charge money. Realizing he has prematurely fulfilled his hallucination’s wishes, he snaps to and Delia is still there. She tells him he has a distraught heart, and they cry about this until they hear piano playing.

They go to the piano room where they find Ephram at the keys. Doc Brown makes faces for a solid ten seconds try to figure out how to ask ‘how was your day?’ Then he asks it.

“It was OK. I found out I’m in love with a girl who's in love with a guy in a coma, other than that it was a nice day”.

Doc apologizes for calling Ephram a bastard. Ephram goads him about his beard but says it looks distinguished. Everything has come full circle.

“You play so well.”
“Mom used to say I have your hands.”

Not to let anything go unsaid, the narrator underscores, “There they sat father and son like they were sitting together for the first time.”

Then forebodingly continues, “No, I wasn’t there the day Doctor Brown’s life changed forever but I was around for many days thereafter when he and his family would call Everwood their home” as the camera pans ominously out the window suggesting the perspective of the narrator as that of someone lurking outside of the family’s home watching their every move, waiting for the right time to strike.

- Bub