Annie thinks so too, and she chases after Sam as he strides down the streets of New York to specifically request that he exclude her from any such future stunts. Sam can't believe she's not flattered that he asked her to "use your brain for five seconds." Annie reminds him that the NYPD of 1973 is not the open-minded collection of sensitive warrior-poets from whatever time and place he claims to originate from. Having been chewed out by someone he considers to be a figment of his imagination, Sam figures he's hit rock bottom on his journey and resolves to just keep walking "until I can't think up any more streets or faces or arguments or details. ... What I need to do, Annie, is to follow the yellow brick road." And what will he find, Annie wonders. "Hopefully," Sam says, "the end of the yellow brick road." Or, more likely, a pissed off Elton John demanding to know why you're playing "Baba O'Reilly" over this scene instead of his song.

The yellow brick road apparently leads into a record store -- one where Sam's mom used to take him. It was here, he tells Annie, that he bought his first Hall & Oates album before quickly correcting himself and saying Led Zeppelin instead. Ostensibly, that's because Hall & Oates hadn't been invented by scientists yet in 1973, but really, no one should admit to buying a Hall & Oates record. And I say this as a man who has a vinyl Buckner & Garcia LP of Pacman Fever cluttering up a closet somewhere. As they walk through the record store, Sam explains to Annie how one day vinyl records give way to compact discs and MP3 players -- he leaves out the part about the piracy and the RIAA lawsuits, maybe because he just noticed the soundbooths where you can rock out to your favorite Who song without anybody on the outside hearing Roger Daltrey bellowing out about how everyone's wasted. And you know why those booths are so sound-proof? Because they're lined with acoustical padding -- coarse, synthetic acoustical padding. Suddenly, that mysterious fiber we keep finding under the victims' fingernails isn't quite that mysterious anymore. "It's the end of the yellow brick road," Sam says triumphantly.