Jack Haines is sitting outside a CW bar drinking in his car.  He overheard a conversation that his wife is meeting another man there.  He takes a gun from the glove compartment and turns it into a CCW bar.

He walks around inside but doesn’t see her.  He orders a beer and listens to the singer.  Haines is stunned by what he is hearing.  The song is jarring and baffles him.  Is this for real?  Are other people hearing the same thing he is?  Which is the same effect country music has on me.

He hears aspects of his own life in the singer’s words.  The bartender says the old man just wandered in out of the storm, so they let him open for the house band.  He says the man was so good he didn’t even notice he was “blind as a bat.”  If coming in at night wearing opaque welding goggles and a thousand yard stare didn’t tip off the bartender, maybe his eyesight isn’t so great either.

The singer comes over and asks how Haines like the song.  “Kind of hits you where you live, don’t it?  That’s what it was meant to do.”  Haines asks how the man knows all about him.  He replies, “I don’t know everything, just the bad things.”  He says he has been “blessed or cursed.  The sounds just come to me when I’m around certain people.”  He tells Haines he knows what he is about to do, and it will cause everyone pain.

Haines spots his wife in the bar with another dude.  Just when he is about to make his move, he realizes it is just a stranger hitting on her.  The singer reminds him just how close he came to killing an innocent man.  Yada yada . . .

It is another perplexing third season episode.  There have been several that were as good as anything this run of the series every did.  Too many, however, fell into the same old traps of happy endings, maudlin stories, and those dreadful, insipid scores.

This was one of the good ones.  It was serious, but not somber.  Romantic but not sappy.  And, thank God, it had a soundtrack rather than a score.  That could have gone very wrong.  They happened to find an interesting actor with an engaging, twangy voice.  I completely bought him as the mysterious blind man.   I even enjoyed his singing and I’m not really a country fan.  That was some lucky or shrewd casting because he carries the episode.  The other actors are stiffs or insanely hammy.

And, yeah, it’s another TZ happy ending.  But that’s OK sometimes.