[Joel stops the duel between Maurice and Nikolai]
Hold it, hold it, hold it! This is ridiculous! Hey, we play to a very sophisticated television audience. They know Maurice is not going to kill Nikolai, and they definitely know that Nikolai is not going to kill Maurice.
Wait a minute, Fleischman. You can't just take it upon yourself to step out of character. Nobody yelled 'cut'.
Joel's right. The duel is stupid.
Can we just stick to the matter at hand?
How about the fifth revision? Where Nikolai's abscessed tooth starts acting up, and, well, he just cancels.
Glib and textually unwarranted.
What if Maurice trips and kills someone else by mistake?
Oh, great, so I'm a klutz now, huh?
Look, if there's not a duel, then what is the point of this whole story?
What's the point? The point is - man's tendency to war, but Joel here is asking us to step outside of certain events and say enough. Am I right?
Listen, whatever, it's getting cold out here.
Why don't we go on to the next scene? It's a pretty good one.
More from this episode
All quotes from this episode →More Northern Exposure quotes · These quotes come from Wikiquote's Northern Exposure pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.