At Uncle Dale's house, Drew discusses memorial plans in the kitchen with Uncle Dale, Bill Banyan, and Charles Dean. The trio of older men continues pressuring Drew to bury Mitch in Elizabethtown, while Drew puts his foot down and cites his mother's wish for cremation. Finally, Drew rises from his chair and offers an impassioned speech about how they do things in California, a geographical gaffe which breaks the tension in the room and leaves all parties in stitches.

Jessie bursts into the room to inform the other male adults that his band, Ruckus, will reunite for one night only at Mitch's memorial. This news is greeted with thunderous indifference.

Successful in placating his elders (though no closer to reaching an actual decision), Drew turns his attention to the cabal of rowdy children swarming noisily in the living room. He puts on a video called "Rusty's Learning to Listen, part 8," in which a man with a hard hat blows up a house. The children are immediately silenced.

Back in the kitchen, Uncle Dale lavishes praise upon Drew for "taking an interest in Jessie," until he is distracted by a gas flame on the stove and suddenly sprints across town to halt his father's cremation. Unfortunately, he is too late. Drew leaves with Mitch's ashes in an urn, which he buckles into the front seat of his rental car.

By virtue of her vengeful predilection for cremation, it appears Hollie Baylor is sending the Elizabethtown Council of Elders to an early grave; their panicked pleas for Drew not to set their beloved Mitch aflame even include Bill Banyan's gruesome proposal of "partial cremation." Being that Elizabethtown's collective distress regarding Mitch's final arrangements is all part of Hollie's personal revenge on Bill Banyan, perhaps it is not unreasonable to suggest that even as these men draw their last breath to curse her name, Hollie Baylor will be standing at their death beds wearing safety goggles an holding a lit blowtorch.

Nevertheless, the evidence for Mitch's worthiness of such devotion, and the reverie of anyone living south of the Mason-Dixon line, continues to pile up. In this clip, we see that Mitch has founded a daycare facility in Uncle Dale's living room, though the adults left in charge of Mitch Baylor's Home for Wayward Children seem clueless as to managing the kids, many behaving in a recoiling fashion which indicates they've never laid eyes on human offspring before.

It could easily be said that Drew's crime against geography is less forgivable than Claire's not only because it crosses more state lines, but also because the realm of actual human behavior does not encompass forgetting what state you live in. On the other hand, this blunder signals important character development for Drew: after days of feeling like a stranger amongst his own family, not to mention an entire town who surely knew his father better than he did, Drew is finally able to bond with the Council of Elders on the common ground of stupidity.

Meanwhile, the only parent in the movie who has expressed any desire to be close to his son, a defeated Jessie slouches on the sofa until Drew cues up the magical videotape. Seeing as none of the characters in this sequence bear any hallmarks of rational human behavior, it is perfectly natural that a room full of noisy children falls instantly silent at the sight of a man stepping out of a truck. Even Samson clams up at the sight of a house blown to smithereens, doubtlessly overwhelmed with new possibilities for how to eradicate the gang of bozos surrounding him.

Also significant here is the first major event in Elizabethtown since Mitch's death: Mitch's cremation. While it initially appears that Drew's chronic passivity is to blame for the "accidental" incineration of his father's smiling corpse, in fact it stands to reason that Drew had long since dropped Mitch off at the crematorium by the time he invited the Council of Elders over to further debate burial vs. cremation. Although there is something to be said for Elizabethtown's contagious idiocy, it is not to let Drew off the hook for apparently forgetting what Mitch was up to entirely until reminded by a household appliance.

Finally, there is Uncle Dale's comment to Drew about taking an interest in Jessie, which is exactly nonsense.