Eric's internet is still broken, Nicole's love life will remain a mystery, and VaShaun wants prosthetic eyes in ocean blue with his signature written across them in silver. That is the first fifteen minutes.

From there the table question gets real: if you knew the sight was not coming back, would you get designer eyes? Eric, of the Epitome Show Band and president of LEOTO, would rather put the money in designer frames. Nicole would ask what the doctor is not telling you about the long term. VaShaun already has the color picked out.

October is Blindness Awareness Month, and the second half earns it. Eric talks about keeping it moving and the Helen Keller line he may or may not be quoting right. VaShaun tells the story of the Atlantic Station pole, and of being born three months premature, living half in and half out for decades, and finally loving being blind. Nicole, the show's moderator, goes the other way: she has not fully embraced it, she is still fighting the air, and she is doing it while taking sailing classes, braille courses and a trip where American Airlines called the night before to set up her assistance. Both things can be true at once, and that is the point.

Also in here: tequila testing versus tasting, jerk chicken pizza, egg water, chargrilled oysters, and what happens when a prosthetic eye ends up on a bar.

Next week: what happens to family and even friends when the sight goes.

Eric went to a high school homecoming game and came home with a topic, because somewhere in the stands five different colognes were competing for the same air. So this is the fragrance episode. It turns out VaShaun owns more than 500 of them and runs a YouTube channel called Sense of Smell, which explains the title and several other things.

Nicole wears Mugler, Angel and Alien, both refillable, and would like everyone to wash their winter coat once a week so they do not leave the house smelling like fried chicken. Eric wears his light, because certain things make his wife sneeze, and the sneeze messes up the squeeze. That became a song about four seconds later. Eric also went full granddaddy weekend in old school Obsession last year and got so many compliments, because nobody had smelled it in years, which led to a roll call of Drakkar Noir, Issey Miyake and whatever else is still sitting on VaShaun's dresser.

The turn is the question Nicole's sister keeps raising: are blind people's senses sharper because they cannot see? The panel's answer is no, they just get used more, the same as any muscle. From there it goes to AI, where VaShaun makes the case that for blind users it is only typing and listening, which we have done for decades, and Nicole makes the case her kids make against it.

Also: a Red Lobster gig with one outlet per room, Nicole's undisclosed birthday tour, BARD Mobile, and two separate on air requests for sponsorship from companies we had just finished insulting.

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Nicole was asleep. She says the culprit is the Sandman, and that if you set the call for ten she will be asleep at 9:50. By the time she gets here Eric has already turned into a robot once, which turns out to be foreshadowing, because there is a storm where Nicole is and her audio spends a good part of the episode breaking into pieces.

Underneath the technical difficulties, this one turned into the episode where everybody finally explains what they actually do for a living, and why.

Nicole owns and operates vending machines across the state through the Business Enterprise Program. A friend planted the idea when she was 17 and did not own two nickels; she started at 32. Eric is a mediator, sitting between people who have filed against each other and seeing whether they can settle it before a judge does it for them. He also ran 39 vending machines in the 90s, wrapping a thousand dollars in quarters a week. VaShaun's introduction to vending was being homeless and getting five dollars a machine from a woman named Shirley Barksdale.

The turn is what everybody wanted to be instead. Nicole wanted to be a pediatrician. Eric wanted to teach. Both were told, in those words, that they could not, because they could not see. Eric eventually found a rehab counselor who did not say no. She said "tell me how would that work," and he was in school the next semester.

Also: how Fedora Outlier got its name, a ten year overnight success, and the best sign off this show has produced so far.

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