By Djb
Props to Adam Rich, without whom this recap would have turned out just the identical way as it turned out to be. Except, clearly, for the sentence you have just finished reading.
Fade up on a faux-eerie, faux-reedy, faux-spacey, real-cheesy soundtrack ditty representing the latest in Angelo Badalamenti's one-chord opuses, this one apparently entitled "Fourth-Grade Trip to the Local Planetarium." The non-mood setting music accompanies numerous extreme close-up shots of flowers from every angle and of every shape and color that collectively redefine the term "horticultural fetishism" (if, in fact, such as expression had ever been coined for the first time) and makes me wonder aloud if my mother didn't shirk her taping responsibility this week and accidentally set the VCR to record a PBS special on the contested art of a slightly less provocative Poor Man's Robert Mapplethorpe. But alas, the fates were none-too-kind, and we pick up where we left off last week, with Harold Smith vamping around the room angrily, continuing to do all he can to take all of the "glory" out of the too-familiar Twin Peaks concept "glorified extra." He holds a hand over the bloodied left side of his face as if Christine has just pulled off the mask and revealed The Phantom of the Garden Shears underneath, and as Maddy "Hands in the Air" Ferguson and Donna "Finger Down Her Throat" Hayward cower guiltily in a corner of the room, Harold speaks his delusional mind: "I trusted you. I invested my heart and soul in you." The girls try futilely to apologize, claiming they just wanted to read Laura's diary, but Harold is clearly taking the invasion of privacy personally, ranting on, "I thought you were different. You made me feel I could return to the world and find something decent." And just as I start to actually feel bad for the guy, he lapses suddenly into Scary Delusional Guy with the wha?-inducing sentiment, "You are unclean! You have contaminated me!" He lunges at Maddy, still holding the diary, but just at this moment, the door bursts open and in runs James "Down With RU-486" Hurley to save his damsels in distress. He knocks poor Harold against a wall with the full extent of his pre-natal might, grabs Maddy and Donna, and the three make for the door. In the melee, the diary hits the ground and Donna makes a half-hearted attempt to retrieve it, hears her brittle ribcage snapping like burnt underbrush, and decides once and for all that the strenuous calisthenic exercise of "bending" is best left to those whose idea of "healthy food consumption" doesn't automatically infer a breath mint and a laxative. Harold wails but does not follow.
And so the three make their escape diary-free, stopping inches from the front door. Inside, it's Harold's turn to cower shaking in the corner as he clutches the copy of the diary that is his last tangible connection to the outside world. Okay, last time, everyone just take a deep breath and repeat after me: supermarket magazine rack. Even as this scene takes place, in fact, literally tens of remaining Twin Peaks fans are on their way down to the Food Lion and discovering thousands of unsold copies of the book, right there between the Dentyne gum Donna treats herself to as a little dietary reward she likes to call "Christmas Dinner" and the tabloid magazines advertising heinous and blatant lies such as "Starving Man Eats Himself!" or "Eric DaRe Will One Day Work in Hollywood Again!" Lies, all of them lies. James holds Donna and asks, "Did he hurt you?" And then she begins to cry as the two hug and hug. Inside, Harold looks up at the ceiling and screams miserably.
And then the opening credits finally begin to roll, implying that the full dramatic heft of the sequence could not have been quite so poignantly rendered if marred by the garish introduction of the show's ever-expanding troupe of veteran talent. Wow. What self-indulgent directorial mind could possibly have deemed her (or, y'know, his. Whichever) opening sequence so earth-shatteringly important that she would forgo the series convention and move the credits (which are now so rife with pointless extras that they threaten to outlive the episode itself and end sometime in the middle of Nightline) to a time more convenient for her and her "artistic vision." Who directed this mess? WHO? Oh, hello, Linka. So we meet again, I see. And so the credits roll and roll and then they roll some more, barely diverting our attention from a shot of a running stream at night to a shot of the fantastically innovative moodily blowing trees to an owl-not-what-it-seems. Finally, we are inside of a log cabin I don't think I've ever seen before, where Cooper carries in a dazed Audrey and places her gently on the bed. Hawk stands behind them, with two other hovering presences the viewing audience is at a loss to make out (Who ARE those people? I'd love to see the original storyboard for that shot, Linka) as Cooper reports his findings, "Sluggish pulse. Pupils constricted. Breathing slow and shallow. Needle marks. Most likely heroin." Audrey stirs on the bed and calls Cooper "Daddy" (well, in a perfect world, maybe. And even then in a purely "who's your daddy" kind of way) before opening her eyes and seeing him. She relaxes: "I prayed. I prayed that you would come. And you did." Awwwww. That would have been so much more genuinely rendered if Cooper's look of subtle protectiveness hadn't been so obscured by the name "Fumio Yamaguchi" appearing in green letters right across Cooper's mouth just then. Linka? Enough. Seriously.
The credits stop once more, just in time to join our real heroes, Donna and Slater Fetus, in another indeterminate outdoor location, monotoning their lines with all the dramatic heft of just having been asked to record a book-on-tape of the back of a cereal box. "Yawn-ee-os," in all probability. James requests of Donna, "No more plans, okay? No more going off on our own?" Donna defends her actions on the basis that "he has Laura's secret diary. He could've killed her." Oh, puh-leeeeze. HE didn't kill her! If Donna really believed that, don't you think she would have avoided that lingering and completely unafraid "On a very special Twin Peaks" moment with James three feet from the front door of the house that Harold NEVER LEAVES a few minutes back? I mean, yeah, I'll go with Donna on the truism that Harold's mental washing machine got permanently lodged on "Unbalanced Load" some time ago, but I attribute that opinion of him to the fact that he NEVER leaves his house, rather than thinking he leaves only for light chores, church on Sunday, and…to kill Laura in an abandoned train car? I'm sorry, but that theory possesses about the same narrative continuity as a Choose Your Own Adventure book read in linear page order. Either way, James tries to rationalize their recent behavior: "After Laura died, everything just went by kind of fast." Oh, yeah, this plot's been moving Mach 10. Jane, get me offa this crazy thing called Hurley Subplot! What? More? Oh, okay: "It's like, if we could put our hearts together and just keep them that way forever, we'd be safe, no matter what." Mixed metaphors ("put our hearts together"?) and biological impossibilities (um, "put our hearts together"?) notwithstanding, the two kiss and kiss as an instrumental version of "Just You" holds the soundtrack hostage yet again. God, I hate that song.
Cooper walks into Truman's mysteriously resurgent office and informs his partner, "She's through the worst of it. Heroin, Harry. This close to a lethal dose." He makes a "thisclose" pinch-of-sugar hand gesture and sits down across from Harry, still wearing the now-is-the-time-in-Twin-Peaks-when-we-dance (accentuated even further by the slicked back hair) black duds from last week's border-crossing reconnaissance mission at Jacks. Go change. We'll wait. I'm sure there are some more distracting opening credits to hold our attention around here somewhere. Cooper comments that it's "hard to imagine such cruelty," and Truman turns The Big Book o' Bad Guys, a ledger filled with mug shots he's been perusing, to face Cooper. He points out Jean Renault's face and reports, "I saw a tape on the TV in Blackie's office of you playing blackjack the night you and Big Ed went to the casino." A look of concern crosses Cooper's face as he admirably does justice to the stage direction, "While desperately trying to sew up loose ends of a combusting subplot" in his way-too-sudden realization, "Jean Renault was after me. He planned to kill me and use Audrey as bait." Wow. All that from a one-by-three-inch black-and-white profile shot. He IS good. He foreshadows that he went out of his jurisdiction twice in order to get her back, reaching into Truman's desk as he says it to extract a jump rope and a fake dorsal fin from a Halloween shark costume. He fits the fin around his back and has Harry turn the jump rope for him as he jumps, jumps, jumps the shark with each passing turn. He jumps higher and prouder and lighter and airier as if he'll never, ever come down as he adds to that, "Harry, this isn't the first time my actions have brought suffering to someone I care about in the name of doing what I had to do."
Oh, no.
Please reconsider gracing the world with the rest of that back-story, would you, Coop? Please? Cooper sits down and looks concerned, and Harry pours him a cup of coffee and tells him, "Y'know, you are the best lawman I have ever seen. But Coop? Sometimes you think too much." Cooper thanks him, and they clink coffee mugs, and Cooper tries to smile in an obligatory fashion that is supposed to signal his swelling inner turmoil but instead forces me to loudly ad-lib the line, "Dude, I could say 'fart' on national television right now. 'Cause ain't nobody watching, anyway."
Over in an Empty Scary Room of the Great Northern, Ben sees Cooper walk in and approaches him fake-nervously: "I got your call. What happened?" Cooper reports that he was able to free Audrey "without the payment," and reports in the most deadpan of ways that "she was being held at a brothel north of the border known as One-Eyed Jacks." Ben fits so well into his too-brief role of "Cooper's worthy adversary," so it's damn amusing to see him ham it up here with a highly dramatic, "No!" Cooper continues that the Madame was partially responsible for the kidnapping, but that she was killed before Cooper had a chance to question her. "Murdered by a man named Jean Renault." Cooper continues that "he escaped," and Ben makes for the cash-stuffed briefcase with a noncommittal "too bad." But wait! There's more: "Your daughter is recovering from a drug overdose." Ben expresses what might actually border on genuine concern, and Cooper tells Ben that he'll call in the morning with further details. And then Ben advances on Cooper and gives him a big, über-sincere hug, because as smarmy-ass villains go, this scene puts him right there in the pantheon.
It's really, really unnerving how many variant shades of red plaid exist in the world. Exhibit A: The Johnson Vegetable Farm, where a glazed and lifeless Leo "Spud Mackenzie" Johnson is swathed in a red plaid blanket as Bobby wheels him clumsily into the room. Standing aside are Shelley and the health insurance provider who came to drop off the check, both looking as if a Burberry sample sale exploded over the house, the latter well-known to audiences as returning to TV Land some years later as Mr. Pitt on Seinfeld. Good for him. Pitt tells Bobby and Shelley that he really respects them for their decision (to commit insurance fraud), and is positively thrilled when Shelley informs him that she and "Cousin Bobby" will be looking out for Leo full-time. She signs the requisite papers, and Leo is officially released into their care. Pitt forks over the check, which Shelley cracks open to discover is for $700, rather than the $5,000 per month they had anticipated from the insurance company. They tell Pitt there must be some kind of mistake, but he assures them that including "state and local taxes, equipment fees, medical and maintenance costs," the cost of health care is "through the roof." But, he's relieved to say, Leo will be more than provided for with his trusty wife and cousin by his side. And so Bobby and Shelley fight for what I believe to be the first time in series history, when Shelley complains that she had to quit her job for the crazy wacky scheme, adding, "It was your bright idea to bring him here in the first place." But just as Shelley pointedly suggests, "Well, you'd better think of something for both of us," the fight reaches an abrupt conclusion when a low growling sound from the wheelchair alerts the couple that there is a third entity in the room, and that this time, a far cry from the imposing "shoes" threat of the distant past, Leo needs a new pair of Pull-Ups. Mommy? Wow.
Back at the police station, Truman sits in a conference room, telling Donna, "We already have Laura Palmer's diary." Donna renders the entire situation as silly and implausible in practice as it probably looked on paper with her assertion, "No. Her secret diary." Truman claims again that he bought the book at Genovese -- er, I mean, "retrieved her diary from her bedroom," and tells Donna, "This is a lot like the boy who cried wolf" (though, if you ask me, the contrived do-gooders-gone-sorta-kinda-evil rings a lot more like the "Three Little Prigs," har har har), adding, "The last time you played this game, Doctor Jacoby ended up in a hospital bed." He warily promises to have someone check it out, but before Lancelot Linka's directorial pacing threatens to shut down production altogether (a three-hour scene with seven actual lines such as this one tends to do that to a show), the script impedes and a black-suited man carrying a briefcase happens past the room screaming -- SCREAMING LIKE THIS -- "EXCUSE ME, I'M LOOKING FOR A SHERIFF HARRY S. TRUMAN." He walks past the room. He turns around. He reenters the room: "I'M LOOKING FOR A SHERIFF HARRY S. TRUMAN. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION'S REGIONAL BUREAU CHIEF GORDON COLE. THAT'S A REAL MOUTHFUL BUT I CAN'T HEAR MYSELF ANYWAY. I'M AGENT COOPER'S SUPERVISOR." Truman excuses himself from the non-hilarious subplot of the moment and leaves Donna time-lapsing into invisibility into the conference room (seriously, at this point in the series, you can fast-forward through a scene and actually see the girl shedding weight and internal organs. It's gross) to join this GORDON COLE out in the hall. "AND WHO DID YOU SAY YOU WERE?" Truman keeps his voice level in an attempted show of unruffled authority, "I'm Sheriff Truman." But COLE cranks up a hearing aid and warns, "YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP, SHERIFF, HEARING'S GONE. LONG STORY. GOT THESE THINGS CRANKED UP TO THE MAX." So Harry pipes it up ever so slightly, but I wouldn't say that his response of "Are you looking for Agent Cooper?" warrants the same FULL-CAPITALIZATION that accompanies Cole's every word. Perhaps his volume in this situation would be best rendered by capitalizing every other letter, like this: "ArE yOu LoOkInG fOr AgEnT cOoPeR?" But, considering that this egregious use of language is generally migraine-inducing to look at, as well as too-often found as a User Name like "I_LuV_SeTh_GrEeN" over in the Buffy forums, I will suffice it to say that COLE just can't hear his fellow lawman's speech no matter what volume he attempts. COLE lets Truman know that "ALBERT ROSENFIELD WILL NOT BE COMING BACK" (AWWWW…that is, "awwww"), but wants Truman to know that the fibers found outside of Cooper's room the night of the shooting are from a vicuna coat. "The coat was vicuna?" "SOUNDS REAL GOOD, SHERIFF, BUT I ALREADY ATE." Have you guys spent the same amount of time trying to interpret just what the holy living hell COLE thinks Truman is saying here? "Would you like some tuna?" That's as far as I've gotten. That's why they pay me the phatty bucks. Have I mentioned that COLE is played by David Lynch? C'mon, Lynch. Go take the camera. Glatter don't mind. She's got her nose too buried in the director's primer guide Fire Steal From Me: Harping the Lynchian Style for Dummies, anyway. And apparently she's not too far past the contributors page and dedications. Go ahead, Lynch. Take it. TAKE IT. Oh, never mind.
COLE continues on that the drug in the syringe found in the bathroom after the One-Armed Man ditched the scene was (further COLE capitalizations inferred, okay? My caps lock is audibly whimpering, not to mention that it looks like crap), "Albert's never seen a drug like it. A combo. Really weird stuff." Also, the papers found at the crime were from "a diary." From off-camera a scuffle ensues and the sound of screams escalates, and Hawk drags the One-Armed Man in by his, well, one arm. Gerard whimpers, "Since when is selling shoes against the law?" Truman suggests they all move to his office. COLE doesn't hear a peep. "My OfFiCe!" Oops. Wasn't going to do that anymore, was I? They depart. The conference room door flies open and Donna looks out, her sunken-from-chronic-malnourishment eyes a mixture of fear and realization. Oh, and jaundice.
Back at Ambiguous Rustic Locale, Audrey continues with her very elegant Trainspotting heroin withdrawal, except with far less excrement and a find/change on all stage directions reading "Hallucinates baby on the ceiling" to "Sleeps the restful sleep of kings." Ben and Cooper stand over her, and Ben comments that "she looks like an angel." Cooper wakes her up, and she glares at Ben when he claims repeatedly to have been so worried about her. He smarms the place up all the more: "It's times like these that make a man aware of the value of life. Every raindrop. Every sunset." Audrey patiently waits for her father to wrap up his recording session for the book-on-tape version of 14,000 Things to be Happy About (though why he would intentionally choose to leave out "Etymological dictionaries" [p. 568] and "The 'Hi and Lois' comic strip" [p. 376] will remain forever beyond my grasp of comprehension) before glaring back and accusing, "I'm aware of a lot of new things too, Daddy." She and Cooper exchange a knowing glance. Ben laments the "terrible experience" she must have had with all of those "terrible people," and she spits back in, sadly, a pretty fair foreshadowing of the dramatic actress she was to become (I'm looking your way, Boxing Helena), "I. Saw. So. Much." Ben tells Cooper that his car is outside, but Audrey chimes in that she would like Cooper to take her home instead. Ben smiles and suggests, "Maybe we can all go together?" Everyone is positively jubilant about that idea. But not as much as they would rejoice in "Bert Parks" [p. 258], I am certain.
Morning at the Hurley House of Horrors. Nadine runs in with numerous shopping bags, extolling the virtues of the lovely dress she just bought and celebrating, "You know, they didn't look at me twice when I used the charge card?" Good times, good times. She asks when her parents will be getting home from Europe, but for now loves the idea of pretending to be married to Ed while they're away. "It is neat having the place all to ourselves. We can pretend it's ours!" She jumps on couches. She punches him in the stomach. Better be careful about the ridiculous amount of scenery you're swallowing, then, or there ain't gonna be no house for you to stay all jazzed about.
A shot of a disturbingly hairless male abdomen and hands buckling a belt in extremely close-up "Ab Cam" cuts to Josie lying on a couch, trying to cover herself up in what appears to be a dress made out of maroon velvet. Jonathan stands above her and drops a white envelope on the table containing a "one-way ticket. Seattle, Hong Kong." She claims she has one more day, and that she has "waited five years" for her "insurance money," and oh yeah, "Ben Horne hasn't paid me yet, either." Huh? Where? What's going on? Who is this man and why do I care? Oh, wait. I don't care. So I will gloss mercilessly past the part about Jonathan telling Josie, "Mr. Eckhardt will make it more than worth your while" and threatening to kill Sheriff Truman if she's not on the plane that takes off at midnight. She frowns and looks very, very sad, as if she's at least 14,000 things away from breaking into a jubilant smile, as we must upon thinking of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as dictated on page 232.
And now, the worst scene ever. Maddy sits outside (Outside! During the day! I don't think we've been outside during the day since the rocks-and-bottles halcyon days a thousand episodes since. Or, in the linear time of the show itself, "a few hours ago") on a dock overlooking a lake. James pulls up behind her on his motorcycle. Dismount. He walks over and sits down to her. "I think I owe you an apology." She responds, "Not really," and by the noncommittal response, I wait for a pregnant moment for her to add, "If by 'not really,' you mean 'the entire television-owning populace of the planet Earth." But, of course, that would have kept this scene from achieving the status of Worst Scene Ever, and I've already mentioned that avoiding that status was simply not to be. He continues that he "felt something" for her, but wasn't sure what it was. She helps him out: "You looked at me and saw Laura." He agrees. Maddy: "You want to know something kind of strange? I liked it." Ew. Maddy recounts her past with Laura, saying, "When we were growing up, Laura and I were so close it was scary." Even though I'm sure I remember her saying something when she first slapped on the Elvira-with-bangs brunette wig and rolled into town about she and her cousin never really being that close, but whatever. Either way, "when she died suddenly, I got the chance to be Laura. At least, other people saw me that way. Like the way you looked at me. I liked that, too." James counters that "it was wrong," and I stifle a game show runner-up's Lifetime Supply of James-as-Fetus Jokes (he's too young for her, he only loves her when she's lactating, blah blah blah) because, really, you've heard 'em all before. Stupid lifetime supply. More? More: "For a while, I got to be somebody different. Now I'm just me again." Yup, now she's just her. Sheryl Lee, Twin Peaks Convention Hostess Extraordinaire at the Hiawatha Room in the Best Western in Mitchell, South Dakota and future star of the UPN classic LA Doctors. No wonder she loved being someone else. Maddy tells James that he and Donna belong together. And then James actually says these words: "Well, if you really love someone, it's like this bright light is shining on you all the time, and you're right in it, and it's great. But I just don't think you can be that way all the time." Maddy thinks that you can. James wants to "make the way [his] heart feel[s] last forever. Pretty weird." Maddy tells him she's going home tomorrow. She only came to Twin Peaks for Laura's funeral, "but now it's time to go." He's sad, but she's expected back in Montana. And, really, if anyone needs to be sympathetic to the duel concepts of "setting a due date" and "cutting the cord," it has so got to be James Hurley. Thank you, lifetime supply. She kisses him and leaves. Total dreck. Really.
Ben's office. He hands Josie a glass of wine, and toasts "to the fire." She stage-directs a smile for a moment and then looks up a close approximation of "coy" in her "English to Suck, Suck to English" dictionary as she vamps, "I've got the contracts with Pete's signature and I want my money." She takes another envelope out of her pocket and tells him that until she has her money, he won't be getting "this." Oooh, "this." The center of all dramatic tension in the scene. And I have absolutely no idea what it is. Ben plays it cool and tells her he just doesn't have the cash, but "as soon as the contract payments arrive from Iceland," he'll cut her a percentage. She says she's not leaving without the dough and, well, Ben does just enough acting for the both of them as he walks over to his desk and guesses that she is "under some kind of pressure." She warns him not "to play games," and he coyly (actually coyly. Nice work, Ben) repeats the word before taking a key out of his pocket, leaning in on her across the desk, and reporting, "Josie, this key unlocks my personal hotel safe. Now, in that safe, I have put together a fascinating dossier on you, my dear, and your late husband Andrew's little boat that went 'boom.' So you behave yourself, lady, or believe me when I say that I will bury you." And she leans across the desk from him, unearths her own key, and pretty much repeats the same speech verbatim, except for the part where she completely forgot to translate it from Suck this time. He takes the five-million-dollar check from Tojamura out of his desk and signs it over to her. She proclaims their relationship "finished," and just before she's out the door, he calls her back and congratulates her: "Well played." She looks one more time around his completely wooden office and wonders why she feels such a strong familial bond with the end table. Soon enough, Josie. Soon enough.
And now, the best scene ever. And so it goes with second-season Twin Peaks. Over at Chez Johnson, the festive tones of kazoos ring out in the background while an extreme close-up on Leo wearing sunglasses and a pointy party hat, festooned -- yes, "festooned," I say -- in multicolored party streamers, and with a kazoo of his own that hangs loosely from his mouth while Leo quietly emits the static hum of perpetual sameness that we've felt in some way or another throughout every scene of this episode so far. Shelley and Bobby wear their hats with a bit more joviality as they dance around behind him, and they stop just long enough to toast (Shelley with a highball glass filled with Jack Daniel's, Bobby with the rest of the bottle), "To Leo!" Bobby explains the gala circumstances: "We sorta figured with you gettin' out and all, well, what the hell. We wanted to give you a little party. Our way of saying, 'Hey, welcome home.'" Shelley climbs on the table right in front of Leo and offers a drunkenly sincere, "Welcome home, darling!" Heh. Bobby leans down to the table and all but mounts her right there while recounting all of the qualities that made Leo such a "class act, top to bottom" when he was still a functioning member of bedpan-free society. "Leo Johnson, wife beater," for instance. "Soap in a sock! Internal injuries and barely leaves a bruise." Bobby is genuinely impressed. The new man of the house then picks up Leo's party hat and snaps it back down to his head via the forgotten comedy prop of the thin elastic band, extolling the continued virtues of "Leo Johnson, murderer! Hanging your wife up like a piece of meat, leaving her to burn. Don't let anybody ever tell you you don't know how to treat a woman." He walks away and over to Shelley, who is sitting in a corner laughing. Bobby: "Leo Johnson. This is your life." He picks Shelley up and deposits her on the table right in front of him. "You deserve it. Every damn minute." And then the mounting goes full-force, as tawdry doings begin to ensue. The low moaning continues. Shelley looks up at Leo's face as Bobby is on top of her, and Leo appears to inch forward just a fraction. Shelley freaks out and leaps off the table. She thinks this whole thing is kind of creepy. Gee, you think? Bobby apologizes to Leo and observes, "I don't want to exploit him or anything," as we cut back over to Leo the guest of honor doing a pretty good impression indeed of "exploited." Bobby removes the hat. Oh, that's better. He adds, "Doc Hayward said you needed familiar stimulus. So we figured, what the hell? Kazoos." Again, heh. Bobby remembers that they bought him a cake. It's a welcome-home kind of cake with candles and frosting and the like. Bobby puts it down in front of him and adds, "Ice cream!" He slaps his new buddy on the back and makes for the ice cream, but the sheer force of it sends Leo face down into the icing. Bobby wacky-hijinks his way back over and pulls him out, commenting, "Good thing we didn't light the candles." They start laughing again. Sorry for the ol' cut-and-dry on that scene, folks. That shit totally recaps itself.
The scene begins with the ol' extreme close-up of an ear with a hearing aid in it (oh, David Lynch so suggested that shot. But here's a little directing hint for you, Linka…he was ONLY KIDDING) and cuts to COLE's profile as Cooper walks into the police station. Cooper snaps and points to where COLE is sitting before he even looks over, and COLE announces Cooper's name. Cooper approaches and the two shake hands, Cooper commenting, "I hope you haven't been waiting too long," and COLE responds, "I didn't just get here, I've been waiting the whole afternoon to see you," taking another very dangerous step toward exhausting a very cliché joke that would have been funny only if used very judiciously. Like, once. Fifty years ago on an Abbott and Costello special. COLE: "Cooper, you remind me today of a small, Mexican chihuahua." What? WHAT? I cannot watch that line often enough, yet each viewing brings me no closer to an understanding of WTF he's talking about. COLE says he needs to speak with Cooper in private, and Cooper asks Harry if they can use his office just a moment before COLE loudly (duh) suggests, "You might want to ask the Sheriff if we can use his office." Get it? Because he didn't hear it when Cooper asked? What's that? You say you don't know who's on third? Inside Cooper's office, COLE launches into a speech that begins, "I believe in secrecy, Coop…I didn't want to say anything in front of the men." But, y'know, he's screaming. So Hawk and Truman can plainly hear all when COLE passes along this: "It's Albert's opinion you might be getting in over your head again." He fears for Cooper's safety and compares his getting injured to some behemoth-like back-story about "Pittsburgh." Cooper promises that he is "A-okay," and when Cooper tries to bring it all back to the rather befuddling "Lynch has left the building!" comment about the Mexican chihuahua, COLE is quick to change the subject again as Truman enters the room to tell them he can hear everything. Cooper invited him in. COLE suggests that Cooper invite Truman in. Thanks. We get it. COLE plot develops as he hands Cooper a plain white envelope, "an anonymous letter sent to home base with your name on it. Looks kind of familiar, doesn't it?" Cooper opens it. It's a small piece of paper with the typed letters, "P to K-4." Cooper: "It's a chess deal." COLE: "Looks like a chess deal." Me: wail of frustration and a resigned sigh that admits, "Yeesh. A running gag." The note is, as we learn from Cooper, "an opening move from Windom Earl." Let the beginning of the end begin!
Hey, look. Another commercial for Cop Rock. And this one with no music. No music at all. Go. Figure.
We're alone inside of Ben's office, whose voice we hear approaching and admitting, "I have a much better sense of what you've been through in the last few weeks." He and Leland enter as Ben says, "I need you back here," though I suspect this may have something more to do with the financial concern that when Scrooge McHorne goes swimming through his giant vaults of cash before bed tonight, there will be five million fewer dollars padding the deep end. That's a little joke for those of you still bothering to follow the plot, by the way. Leland sits on the couch. Ben continues, "If it weren't for your indictment, I could drop you into your old slot." He really needs to know that Leland is okay. Leland stands excitedly and says, "I'm a hundred percent. A hundred and ten percent." Ben gestures that sit-back-down-you're-soiling-the-sanity-in-here patronizing hand gesture, and Leland apologizes like a five-year-old and takes a seat. Ben continues, "We've taken a payment from the Icelanders on Ghostwood. But there's a group from the Orient that wants in in the worst way." Ben needs to buy time. Leland, previously distracted, responds without blinking, looking the picture of the non-demonically-possessed lawyer with a litany of legalese words I literally only know from crossword puzzles and John Grisham novels like Resurvey and Caymans and Escrow. Ben is incredibly impressed, and this time he allows Leland to stand and the two share a tender moment which almost ends in them actually hugging. But they don't, opting instead for standing like a nervous co-ed couple at the Seventh Grade Dance when "Eternal Flame" came on (blah blah blah 1990). It's a very Costanza/Seinfeld moment, indeed.
Truman walks into the Packard house to find Strangely Hairless Jonathan carrying Josie's luggage out the front door. Josie introduces him as "my assistant, Mr. Lee," and tells Harry that she is "going away." He wants her to stay. She sold the mill. "It's over. I'm going home." For the love of all things holy, Truman, do NOT try and stop her again. She cries and apologizes, and Jonathan enters for a moment but Truman sends him back out. She makes for the door and Harry cries out a futile "I love you." End. END!!!
Dude, if "gratuitous close-ups on inanimate objects" were going to be my legacy, I'd rather just die penniless and in obscurity, thanks very much. This time, a put-on-your-3D-glasses cigar practically bursts through the picture tube and into my living room, establishing us, well, nowhere (added to FloralCam, HearingAidCam and BuckleCam from earlier in the episode) before cutting to Ben and Ka -- I mean, "Tojamura" finishing dinner in the Great Northern dining room. Tojamura gruffs, "You have my cashier's check for five million. I have nothing. Why?" Ben retorts that he's trying to be careful in this small community, to learn as much as possible about his investors. Tojamura tells Ben that he's wasting their time. Ben is trying to be careful in the wake of the fire. "I know all about fire," Tojamura harps. "My family was at Nagasaki." Ben looks downcast and apologizes. And then, from just about out of nowhere, the cocktail music kicks up into the introduction of a grand musical number, it seems, as the almost-forgotten "Leland & Psychosis: Together Again for the Very First Time" Tour '90 kicks up in earnest once more as the white-haired ingénue wows the crowd with my personal favorite of Leland's, "Getting to Know You." As Ben rises to end this and Tojamura steps aside to the bar, Leland is just getting to the "you are precisely my cup of tea" section, and he steps off the small stage and up to a couple at a nearby table: "And where might you folks be from, sir?" The man interactively responds that they are from Twin Peaks, and Leland goes right with it, asking, "How 'bout those Steeplejacks, huh?" Ben walks on stage and attempts to wrestle Leland off, but Leland makes him a part of the act and the two dance more closely than they did previously and sing the end of the song together. Freakin' hilarious. Huge applause. Leland tells them, "Great Northern audiences are the greatest audiences in the world." The crowd offers a big campy "Awwww." Ben finally gains control of the microphone and quietly tells Leland, "Temporary insanity. Hopefully some of these people will be on your jury. You'll be home free." Hey, Ben got in on the old cabaret routine himself. Good night! Good night, folks! I'll be here all week! Be good to your waitresses! Over at the bar, a happily resurgent Pete Martell turns to an unnecessarily mysterious (or, as the case may well be in this particular situation, not) Tojamura and asks if he likes musicals. He says no. "Not even Fiddler on the Roof? It made me weep like a little baby." Stony silence, followed by "I find adherence to fantasy troubling and unreasonable." Get it? GET IT? Of course you get it.
And, finally, we're in the conference room at the Sheriff's Station, where Cooper, Truman, Hawk, and COLE stand over a writhing One-Armed Man. He's begging for his medication, shrilly claiming, "I can feel the change." More screamed-to-the-skies technical jargon from COLE about the periodic table of elements and the suburban New Jersey garage working in symbiosis to create this intravenous cocktail, and Cooper somehow deduces that the One-Armed Man has several more personalities than he does opposable thumbs. Truman insists that they give him the injection, but COLE's insistence that "if you give him the drug, Coop, you'll never see the other side" takes precedence as the One-Armed Man lapses into something resembling seizure mode before suddenly sitting up in the chair and becoming a smooth-ass Tony Clifton, in comparison to the traveling shoe-salesman Latka, when he intones (in the same voice he did in Cooper's dream), "There is no need for medicine. I am not in pain." Cooper asks who this new presence is, and we learn that he is "Mike, an inhabiting spirit." BOB, we learn, was Mike's "familiar." Cooper asks what BOB wants, and Mike goes all sinister and answers, "He is BOB, eager for fun. He wears a smile. Everybody run." And the last time we watched the series in its entirety just before I started recapping it, by the time we hit this episode we were so overtired and hopped up on the sugar from the donuts and caffeine from the black coffee that all seven of us burst out laughing and missed the entire rest of the episode. Because it rhymes, see. BOB and Mike, then, are -- no, really -- parasitic spirits who find a human host and "feed." Philip Gerard is Mike's "host," and BOB "requires a human host. He feeds on fear and the pleasures. They are his children." Mike lapses into his dreamspeak, and he and Cooper speak together, "Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see," and then Mike takes a solo with the rest: "One chants out between two worlds, fire walk with me." Ooooh, scary. Ooooh, derivative of self. Develop, oh ye plot: Mike continues on that he developed a certain fondness for Gerard, and takes him on as a human host for one purpose: to stop BOB from killing again. "This is his true face," he observes, looking at the artist's rendering. "But few can see it. The gifted. And the damned." Mwah ha ha ha ha. So, Cooper asks, "Is BOB near us now?" He is, and has been "for nearly forty years. A large house made of wood. Surrounded by trees. The house is filled with many rooms, each alike. But occupied by different souls night after night." A look of realization crosses Cooper's face, and Cooper yells out, "The Great Northern Hotel!" We cut to a shot of the exterior of that very building, though I imagine it would have behooved the director to have opted instead for an extreme close-up shot on, say, the bellhop's hat or an unattended piece of luggage, so much more effectively would that random inanimate signature put too fine a point on the final Glatteresquian image available for our faux-artsy viewing pleasure this week.