Joel finds a map and brings Maggie with him on a quest to find a mythical city. They meet a belligerent gatekeeper and when faced with a crossroads, Joel sees his future and departs. Phil cleans out some impacted earwax for Chris but Chris sues him for malpractice when his inner ear is damaged. Maurice lets Holling know that Michelle is writing an article on restaurants for Alaska Highways magazine but she can't find any good words to describe the food at the Brick.

When Maggie's mother and her male friend, who dies, come to visit, she realizes that her luck with men runs in the family. Maurice becomes jealous of Holling's friendship with Phil. Ruth-Anne and Walt's relationship is put to the test when she has him help her out in the store.

The state of Alaska admits to Joel that they were wrong in over-extending his contract. With his release secured, Joel returns to Cicely to collect his things. Phil notices there is something wrong with Maurice's new bottled water; the effect causes males and females to reverse roles. Cal escapes and becomes a fugitive in search of an audience. The area where Joel goes does not contain a village named Greenwich.

Marilyn comes to visit an old friend in the community where Joel is living and he begins to revert to his old ways. Maurice leaves Ed in charge of his house and he returns to find Ed has taken over the place. The Vincoeurs are house hunting and make an offer on Semanski's place but only after Holling gets a few little details fixed; but does he really want it?

Maggie decides to go and see Joel in the Manonash village after she begins to have visions of him dying. The Capras are having a small get together, but the whole town seems to turn out. Marilyn brings along two friends to the party, and because they're snowed in, they stay with the Capras, whom try to figure out how to get them to leave. Ed's shaman cure for shingles has Phil intrigued, he goes to Ed's to find out the secret but finds Ed's filing system less than perfect. Using a computer, to database these notes, makes Ed afraid.

Maggie gets elected mayor. Joel invites Phil up river, for a game of golf and a test. Michelle covers Maggie's first city council meeting as mayor and Maggie makes her first motion for a centrally located dumpster but runs into opposition from the fiscal-restraint minded crowd. Maggie's power as mayor becomes a turn on for Chris. Marilyn invests money in a stud dog that doesn't want to mate.

A new doctor and his wife move to Cicely to take over Joel's practice and his house. While settling in, they get to know some quirks of the people and their new environment. After eating a trout, Ed starts to see the future. Holling tries to join the "Sons of the Tundra" and Shelly dislikes the "men only" aspect. Joel stops by and trades Holling pelts for a new knife.

Maurice sends Ed after Joel, who's moved up river; and Joel tells Ed of the few days he and Maggie spent together, where every time they got together, there was gunfire. Chris hires a contractor to improve the lot around his trailer and it turns his world upside down. When Walt goes away to check his traps, Ruth-Anne realizes that she's fallen in love and tries to fight it.

Maurice welcomes his young cousin Maurice to Cicely, hopefully to take over the family business. Charges of static electricity generate a new interest--and a new art project-- for Chris. Meanwhile sparks fly between Joel and Maggie on a Russian airline bound for St. Petersburg, where Joel is scheduled to speak at a medical convention.

Ed films Marilyn telling the story of a Russian princess and her grandfather. It seems that Lenin and Anastasia arranged to meet in Cicely to work out an agreement that would reestablish the rule of her family in Russia. Meanwhile, an all-terrain vehicle is being prototyped for the Alaskan frontier.

Satan comes to Cicely as a whirlpool salesman; he offers to fulfill Shelly's fantasy of making the Brick a major casino. Ed makes a mistake and skews the results of a cold medicine test that Joel is running for John Hopkins. Chris gets a ventriloquist's dummy and adds him to his radio show, but the dummy becomes more popular, because he "shoots straight from the hip." Maurice is convinced that Joel's cold medicine contains a new appetite suppressant and he presses Joel to tell him what it is. When that doesn't work, he gets Hayden to try to steal the information. To make her fantasy come true, all Shelly must do is burn Holling's old bathrobe.

A letter Maggie wrote to herself as a teenager makes her re-examine her current life against the ideals she had at fifteen. Shelly ignores a chain letter, and then bad luck falls on the Vincoeur household. A new barber arrives in Cicely and Chris tries to be his friend, but he doesn't want anything to do with an ex-con. A lump is discovered on Joel's head, so he goes to Anchorage and finds out the lump may be malignant, so he starts to live his life to the fullest.

Maurice's plans for a fox hunt with his visiting English noblewoman must be put on hold when the fox escapes and gets into the protective custody of Ruth-Anne. Firing Marilyn and his lack of concern for Hayden's well-being are two items that haunt Joel, Dickensian style, during his celebration of Yom Kippur. Meanwhile Holling yearns to make amends for past misdeeds.

With Renaldo, Ed participates in an investigation of possible insurance fraud being perpetrated by Hayden Keyes. Maggie & Maurice both regret their donations to the library fund-raising auction. A dollhouse from the auction, Miranda's 1st birthday, and her growth begin to depress Shelly.

Joel takes a spiritual journey to New York City after drinking orange juice that contains some Indian folk medicine and sees how life might have been. There he and his wife Shelly, a corporate lawyer, give a dinner party. Maurice is their doorman and Eugene their elevator operator; Maggie is the au pair for their kids; Bernard is in fashions and Chris is an inarticulate fashion photographer; Ed is a corporate raider; Ruth-Anne runs the internal medical partnership that Joel is trying to join; Holling is a singer who's got agoraphobia (fear of open places). Through the course of the evening, they begin to transform into their Cicelian characters.