The spotlight falls on Cynthia Geary, Janine Turner, and Darren Burrows as Shelly, Maggie, and Ed, respectively, all get significant character dimension in "Sex, Lies and Ed's Tapes" to help build the ensemble cast of "Northern Exposure," but despite some nice framing by director Sandy Smolan, this episode, scripted by series creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey, feels like a holding action although it does illustrate their method of using three distinct storylines that would become a series trademark.
Guess what? Turns out Shelly isn't pregnant after all---she's had a hysterical pregnancy brought on by her love for Holling. Shelly also experienced the same phenomenon with Wayne Jones (Brandon Douglas) back in her native Saskatchewan; (not-so) coincidentally, Wayne arrives in Cicely---looking to get a divorce from Shelly, which gives Holling, unaware that she was even married, a literal pain in the neck when it seizes up on him.
Meanwhile, Joel discovers a cyst on Maggie's boyfriend Rick Pederson (Grant Goodeve), who becomes alarmed and asks Joel to remove it to be biopsied. Rick is well-aware of Maggie's history of boyfriends who have all died during their relationship with her, and Goodeve gets an amusing turn fleshing out his minor character in his scenes with Rob Morrow and Turner, the latter particularly as Maggie and Rick await his biopsy results.
Finally, Maurice, having let Ed use his Macintosh to write his screenplay, becomes exasperated at his conspicuous lack of production: Gripped with writer's block, Ed can only visualize variations of existing movies, including "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Midnight Cowboy"---and check Morrow's impressive impersonation of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo along with his throwaway reference to the now-notorious Donald Trump---until he has a talk with Joel. That last displays the series' leitmotif of using fantasy sequences to illustrate the characters' inner lives, which helped to imbue "Northern Exposure" with such remarkable character development, while series composer David Schwartz's native flute-driven "Woody the Indian" underscoring Ed here would become a recurring musical cue.
Douglas manages the sullen truculence appropriate for his still-a-boy hockey player Wayne; accordingly, Douglas's scenes with Geary have the requisite vapidity, underscored by the canny use of Motley Crue's overwrought power ballad "Without You" on the soundtrack, as Geary reveals her performance limitations. Much better are her scenes with veteran John Cullum, who is quietly developing his Holling well past the initial caricature of a backwoods bumpkin. "Sex, Lies and Ed's Tapes" also highlights the Native American angle in typically wry fashion, particularly Jeffrey Carpentier's gloriously hammy cameo as an emcee at a tribal talent show that features Elaine Miles's Marilyn, although much of this episode smacks of contrivance. Still, the show's underlying intelligence, empathy, and charm cannot be disguised.
REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?