Fade up on the bare-treed, slate-skied, perpetual winter that is the Amityville-esque establishing shot of the bereaved Palmer residence. Inside, we pan from the framed prom-queen photo of Laura Palmer (a photo which seems to exist in almost as copious supply in Twin Peaks as, say, shots of wind blowing forebodingly through trees, considering there is a crumpled, blood-soaked version of that same picture somewhere in the master bedroom's recycling pile as a result of Leland's maniacal big band redux back in the second episode) across to the living room couch. Andy, whose talents apparently include artist's renderings of dream-hopping, ostensibly supernatural forces of evil (in lieu of other policeman-worthy hallmarks such as bravery, stoicism, or the ability to control one's own weeping of woeful tears in the face of human tragedy), sketches a pretty accurate depiction of Sarah Palmer's vision, seen also in Cooper's dream and known now to us as BOB. Also present are Truman, Donna, and Madeline (again, herewith "Sarah Jessy Laura Palmer," or even "SJLP," should the mood strike for me to become really cryptic and lazy), who serves coffee to a curious and peering Truman. Yeah, Truman, it's Sheryl Lee, with big red glasses and a brunette wig, prancing about with her serving tray and coffee cups, as all the while her two-dimensional blonde doppelganger on the sofa's end table somehow continues to act rings around her. I know. I can't believe it either.
Sarah continues on that her vision "looked like an animal," and I half-picture Andy's inherently childlike imagination totally running away with him as he draws a big cartoon-ish tail and ears, and maybe also a thought bubble coming out of BOB's mouth with a sentiment reading "I hate Mondays!" or "Hang in there!" Y'know. Animal. He doesn't really do that, though. Anyway. Truman asks Sarah if she has even seen this man in the real world, and she is quick to respond, "No, never." She starts to work herself into another round of hysteria unprecedented since whenever the last time it was we saw her on camera, screaming, "His face. My God, HIS FACE!" but is soon to be interrupted by the entrance of her far more lucid husband. Leland ambles into the room in a rumpled robe and even more problematic hair, apparently tousled when he officially tossed his hat into the ring for the "Most Disturbed Undead Palmer Currently In This Room Who Isn't Sarah" competition, in which he currently maintains quite the dramatic lead over all his competitors. He speaks to Sarah: "Did you tell them about the necklace? They're gonna love that one." What necklace, Harry wants to know. Leland: "She's had two visions." He flashes a ghostly smile that sends chills right up my spine and falls somewhere between wan and "egads, now that's what I call wan" on the scary-smile spectrum. If smiles had colors, that one would be puke green. Leland's gettin' freaky. And then he leaves. Sarah stands and gives chase, yelling his name angrily, as she had no apparent intention of visiting this particular hallucination again, but Truman beckons her back. Standing alone in the shot, Sarah begins to recount the second vision, and the downright solo creepiness of it all seems to necessitate her holding a flashlight up below her chin and telling a story about a man with hooks for hands who once roamed these woods and it was a dark and stormy night just like tonight and blah blah blah spoooookycakes. That doesn't happen, either. She says, "It's night. A flashlight beam moves across the ground. A hand -- a gloved hand -- lifts a rock and takes out a necklace. Broken in half. It was Laura's." The necklace Sarah describes, of course, is the half of the heart Donna and Slater Fetus buried in the forest near the end of the Pilot, and Donna looks guiltily away from the proceedings, doubtlessly thinking, "They can see through me. They can see right through me. And not in that usual way people can see through me in which, due to a combination of my pallid skin and gaunt figure, you can look closely at my body and actually see my internal organs struggling to maintain the basic tenets of human life inside of my disintegrating body."
Over on the soapy fun times of Invitation to Love, the incidental music of which is really starting to resemble the Sad Strings Theme, we pan back from a character's necklace (driving home some ambiguous connection between this show-within-a-show and the show itself I am still currently too thick to fully discern) to "Chet" and "Emerald" acting out the typical love triangles, backstabbings, and double-crossings of the daytime soap opera. The shot shows an entranced Lucy, watching the show intently from her desk at the Sheriff's Station. Truman and Andy enter, and Truman asks Lucy, "What's going on?" At which point Lucy plunges into a pretty accurate recap of the scene she has just finished watching, even ending her musings with that patented too-fine-a-point-on-it paragraph wrap-up, "Poor Chet." Truman doesn't even bother acting incredulous in clarifying, "What's going on HERE, Lucy." She tells him that Cooper is in the conference room with Dr. Jacoby, and Truman is off. Andy steps closer to Lucy's sliding glass window and asks with his own sense of melodrama, "Why couldn't I spend the night last night?" But she won't be having any of his good-guy pathos today for some reason, and she spits back an impersonal, "Will you be having coffee, Deputy Brennan?" Awwww. Poor Andy.
Inside said conference room, Jacoby holds two ping-pong balls in his hand, places one to his ear, makes it "disappear" to hilarious comic effect, and extracts it again from his mouth, all to the great amusement of not Cooper. Maybe Cooper is more of a "got your nose" kind of FBI agent. It's difficult to say. Also, I feel like I've taken the inherent bizarreness of Jacoby's character so for granted that I forgot to mention the primary accessory that clues you into his visual craziness each and every time he's on camera: his glasses. One lens is blue and one is red, like the 3-D glasses you made your mom pick up with a Slurpee at 7-11 for the network television premiere of Jaws 3-D. Freak. Anyway, I just thought I'd mention it. And so I did. Cooper attempts something along the lines of a traditional interrogation with the good doctor, but Jacoby shoots down question after question on the basis of doctor/patient privilege, which I think might be suspended indefinitely after a patient is murdered. I'm surprised Jacoby, the consummate therapist, wouldn't know that. Wow, my respect for his professional ethos has really suffered as a result of this experience. Cooper inquires as to whether Laura's problems were "of a sexual nature," and Jacoby observes, much to my I-think-I-just-pictured-you-naked-by-accident horror, that "the problems of our entire society are of a sexual nature." Jacoby notes the map of Tibet hanging on the blackboard behind him, and he for once does the valiant thing by separating our thoughts of sex and him with a diversion on all things spiritual: "My abiding interests lie to the east as well. But only as far as Hawaii," which he pronounces as the faux-native "ha-VAI-ee." And while I cannot argue that our planet is circular in construction, thus rendering the theoretical concept of "directions" objective at best, I have to take issue with Jacoby's abiding interests as lying "east" of the Hollywood sound stage on America's west coast built to resemble a police station in a simple country town in Washington State. Also, might I add, striking distance from the westernmost coast of America. I mean sure, Lexington Avenue can be considered west of Tenth Avenue, for instance, but only under the pretense of traveling entirely around the planet IN THE OTHER DIRECTION in order to get there. Do you think that might be what Jacoby meant insofar as his "abiding interests"? I sure don't. Hawaii = west. That is all.
Cooper again expresses disbelief in Jacoby's unwillingness to help in the police investigation, and Jacoby defends himself thusly: "My own personal investigation, I suspect, will be ongoing for the rest of my life." He was unable to penetrate Laura's wall of secrets in his six months as her therapist, and his inability to help her makes him, in his own mind, an "abject failure." A suddenly appearing Truman asks Jacoby if Laura ever discussed Bobby or James in her sessions, and Jacoby dismisses the very nature of their existence with the throwaway tut-tut, "They were boys." (And as least one of them wasn't even. Yet! Ha ha . . . ha? Sigh. Y'all just e-mail me directly when the four billionth retread of that joke just plain stops being funny, m'kay? All this here recappin' has shot my objectivity right to shit, and I'm pretty much clinging to the mindset that "fetus" automatically equates with "funny" because they, y'know, start with the same letter or something. Thanks. On with the show. ["I think you're thinking of the letter 'k.' Eh?" -- Sars) Cooper point-blanks to Jacoby that Laura had sex with three men on the night she died, asking, "Were you one of them?" Jacoby tries to hem, and even harder to haw, his way into another muddled diatribe on all things good and evil in this life of Laura Palmer, but realizes he has nowhere to go with this line of questioning and settles instead for a perfectly timed, just plain defeated, "No." But before he leaves, he does throw Cooper one bone: "The night after Laura died, I followed a man that she had spoken to me about. He was driving a red Corvette. I followed him to the old Saw Mill Road and then I lost him. And that, gentlemen, is all I can tell you." The intercom buzzes in the conference room, and Lucy informs Cooper that a Gordon Cole (yay, yay, a billion times YAY) is on the line. So Jacoby leaves after informing Cooper and Truman that he'll "be in town" until "the end of the month," no doubt then departing for one of the numerous US mainland vacation attractions lying to the west of beautiful Washington State.
Cooper inquires if the red Corvette is Leo Johnson's, to the affirmative of Truman. He also asks if there's any word yet on Jacques Renault. There is not. Cooper unearths an intercom speaker from underneath the desk, indicates it to Truman, and informs him, "Harry, this is my supervisor." The, um, speaker is? Wait, why am I even surprised? Between an intrepid tape recorder named "Diane" and a talking box named "Gordon," it must be a marvel to these simple country folk of Twin Peaks that the entire DC Bureau of the FBI is not run entirely by small, electronic devices. It's like living in the future! Cooper turns on the Gordon box and bids it good morning, and Gordon, played by David Lynch himself with just that perfect amount of look-Ma-I'm-on-TV-in-a-box bravado, starts right in, screaming, "Cooper, where do we start? The Palmer girl or Albert's new best friend, Harry Truman?" Cooper wants to cut to the chase, and he listens to the latest findings out of Washington. The twine from Laura's upper arms and the twine from her wrists prove not to be a match. The bites on her shoulders are bird bites. Albert is also faxing a reconstruction of the plastic fragment from her stomach. And now for the bad news, concerning "Albert's mano a mano with the local sheriff Truman. Albert wants this guy's badge, Coop." Cooper again shows his stripes as small-town sympathizing good guy, shouting back at the Gordon Box that Albert can file his complaint "under 'F,' for 'forget it'" and that he'll fight Albert all the way on this. Harry thanks Cooper after the Gordon Box has been stashed once more, and Cooper assures him that "the last thing I want you to worry about while I'm here is some city slicker I brought into your town relieving himself upstream." Ha ha . . . ew?
Andy interrupts this new round of high drama when he enters the conference room holding the artist's rendering of the man Sarah Palmer saw in her creepy, creepy vision. Cooper confirms that he saw the same man in his dream. Lucy buzzes in again that Hawk is on the line. Cooper picks up, listens intently, and relays the news: Hawk found the one-armed man at a motel called the Timber Falls. Give that man a hand! Oh, I mean, er -- sorry, bad taste. So very bad.
Establishing shot of the Timber Falls Motel, where there's quite a bit more action than initially anticipated. Sitting behind the wheel of a large black luxury sedan of some kind, Josie "Let's Hear It For The Boy" Packard shoots numerous photographs of an unseen target. Inside of a rustic (read: hideously decorated) room at the very same motel are Katherine and Ben, mid-devious-scheming and putting the "old" back in "old people and their on-camera coital antics," both as usual. Katherine muses over last week's successful upstaging of Josie's attempt to show the two mill ledgers to Truman. What Katherine really wants, she says, is "getting on with setting the torch to that damn mill." Outside the motel, meanwhile, the police cruiser pulls up, and Hawk informs the law-enforcing powers-that-be inside the car that the one-armed man's last name is "Gerard." Back inside, Ben proposes to Katherine that "when the mill goes up in smoke, the headline that we're after is 'Josie Packard Torches Bankrupt Mill in Insurance Fraud,' and not 'Giant Weenie Roast in the Woods.'" Katherine laughs in a sinister fashion because she revels in the failure and hardship of the downtrodden and easily manipulated. I laugh right along because Ben said "weenie." And that's a funny word.
Thicken, ye plot, I say! Thicken! Plot gladly obliges, as Truman, Cooper, and Andy approach Gerard's closed motel room door. Truman knocks and announces the police's presence, and when no response comes, Truman and Andy draw their guns. But as we well know by now, poor all-around policing skills are par for the course for Andy, and upon drawing his weapon, Andy cannot maintain a firm grip, and he drops the gun, which hits the ground, spins around, and goes off. Cooper leaps back and screams an incredulous, "JESUS!" displaying one of the few instances of pure, reflexive reaction his character gets to indulge in over the course of the entire series. Brilliant. How many recaps has it been since I last expounded endlessly and tirelessly about this best imagined character in the history of the one-hour drama? One, you say? Well, now, that's just one too many, isn't it? Yay. For. Coop.
Throwing on a scrap of clothing and running to the window, Ben gets out of the bed as Katherine comments, "Gunplay. Sounds serious." It's not. It's funny. Much like the word "weenie," for one recent example. Truman again calls Gerard's name, then kicks down the door and runs in, guns a-blazin'. Gerard has just stepped out of the shower and is clad in only a towel, most of his left side concealed inside of a free-standing bureau. Truman, lacking logic, cries, "Put your hands where I can see 'em." And so the one-armed man steps into full view, and much to the gasping, collective surprise of not me, the one-armed man has only -- no, really -- one arm. Back in the Coital Suite, Ben steps away from the window and announces that he's going to "give little Elvis a bath," and I grimace momentarily at the crude phallic allusion before noticing that Ben has, in fact, extracted a small Elvis figurine from seeming nowhere. And then I laugh heartily at the bizarre visual pun, and because, shrouded phallic allusion or no shrouded phallic allusion, I think once more of that most engaging and sustaining joke this far this episode: "weenie." Too rich, too rich. Anyway, Ben and little Elvis are off for some sudsy fun times, but as he picks up a pair of pants to bring into the bathroom, he fails to notice something drop out of the pocket and hit the floor. Once left to her mischievous devices, Katherine picks it up, leans back on the bed, and takes to studying what is a $1000 poker chip from One-Eyed Jacks. Uh-oh. Is it possible that virtuous Ben Horne is not the most faithful philandering business partner Twin Peaks has to offer? God forbid Ben should be seeking his sexual thrills elsewhere. Like, for instance, with a hooker. Or like, for instance, with his wife.
Back inside of Gerard's room, Truman shows the one-armed man the sketch of BOB, but Gerard swears he's never seen him before. Cooper asks if Gerard has a friend named Bob, and he confirms that he does indeed. His best friend, a veterinarian named Bob Lydecker, has been in a coma, and that's why he's been skulking around the hospital just lately. Hawk hangs up the room phone and informs the group that Gerard has no criminal record. Cooper asks how he lost the arm, and Gerard responds that it happened in a car accident. He had been selling pharmaceuticals door to door. Andy, meanwhile, has taken his brand of investigative sleuthing to a suitcase on a dresser across the room, and with the wrong push of the wrong button, the case bursts open and out spills -- quirks ahoy -- a whole lotta shoes. Cooper's barely concealed look of increasing disgust is most delightful to behold. Anyway, Gerard's a shoe salesman now. Cooper, far less interested in the Payless product-placement campaign threatening to overtake this entire sequence, returns to the traditional line of questioning. He wants to know if the missing arm had a tattoo. It did. Yeah, well, what did it say? And after a brief pause followed by a slightly more protracted bursting into tears, Gerard looks mournfully down and wails, "It said . . . MOM!" Outside, after this probing interview, Hawk notices a fresh patch of oil in an abandoned parking space and informs Truman, "The car was already staked out when I got here. With Josie Packard."
Hey look! It's Donna and Audrey! And they're in school! And here I was all snarking on about how these kids never attend classes. Actually, I never even mentioned it. But I guess an eternally "open campus" policy is just one of the many benefits of attending high school in your late twenties. Hell, if the girls in my school had looked anything like this, I might have actually gone as far as asking one to the prom. And I definitely, definitely would have been turned down flat. And quite resolutely, I might add. Anyway, we're inside the little girl's room at Twin Peaks High. Audrey lights a cigarette and walks in on Donna applying make-up. She speaks the line I should have used as my graduation quote to go underneath my senior photo, if I had been brave and/or original enough to forgo the hackneyed cutesiness of Shel Silverstein or Oh, The Places You'll Go or whatever the hell I ended up using: "I've been doing some research. In real life, there is no algebra." And you should know, sister. 'Cause you're thirty. Donna suggests that Audrey "run away and join the circus," but Audrey eschews escape in lieu of her other developing future plan: "A tall, dark, and handsome stranger falls madly in love with me, takes me away to a life of mystery and international intrigue." Donna unnecessarily volleys, "You mean the FBI agent?" No, good-girl dud. She means MacGyver, of course, Audrey's renegade-dream-mystery-man contemporary with the original airing of this show. What say we just let Audrey do all the talking from now on, 'kay? 'Kay. Audrey is more than happy to oblige, displaying her investigative acumen concerning what she's unearthed about Laura's life and death. She reveals her true intentions: "Maybe he'll [MacGyver, of course] realize that I'm the woman of his dreams because I'm gonna help him figure out who killed Laura." And she needs Donna's help. Audrey tells Donna that she knows about Laura's secret relationship with James and her widely recognized cocaine addiction. Donna implies that it's time for Audrey to tell her something she didn't already know. So Audrey tells Donna that Laura was seeing Jacoby. And that, it is clear, Donna did not know. Donna turns from the mirror and stops brushing her hair, which does not bode well for the future of her grooming ritual, considering she still has an entire body's worth of anorexic down to mold and sculpt when she finishes with the hair on her head. Also, Audrey adds, she thinks there is a connection between Laura and One-Eyed Jacks. Donna expresses some surprise at this as well, but rationalizes that "it sure would explain a few things." Audrey lapses into a patented round of detached musing: "You know, I think about it. I think about Laura being in a place like that and I get all shivery. But it's like a hot cold, like when you hold an ice cube on your skin for a long time." Oh, THAT kind of shivery. Bereft of either the proper mood-neutralizing prescription or what Audrey probably refers to as "oooh, those little purple pills that make my brain feel less tingly," Donna is forced to resort to strong-arm tactics in bringing Audrey mentally back into the room. Donna agrees to help, with the single stipulation that whatever they learn, they'll keep to themselves. And then my ten-year-old tape hiccups and an analog strip of moving black tape briefly jumps its tracks and Donna goes all white and fuzzy and her line sounds a great deal like, "Fromp, fromp, fromp, b'gar!" Which I have a little trouble believing is exactly what she said. Considering that's really more of an Audrey sentiment. Audrey, speaking of whom, joins us back in the land of lucidity, checking in on this planet long enough to tell Donna that Laura and Ronette both worked "at the perfume counter at my father's department store." Audrey tosses her cigarette in the sink, and turns on her heel to leave the bathroom, sexily sauntering out because if she doesn't hurry, she's going to be late getting back to class. Yeah. Right.
Now y'all know how much I love Norma, right? 'Cause I do. So it always surprises me just how "eh, who cares" I find the whole Hank/prison/blah arc the more it develops. Norma waits outside of something called the "Hearing Room," and the husband we were introduced to only by name last week makes his first follically challenged (no, he's not bald. Quite the opposite, actually. In fact, his egregiously copious mop looks a bit like Bobby's friend Mike's hair did back in the Pilot. Can we call Hank "Mullet II: Electric Boogaloo" for handy reference, then? Just for now? Okay, forget it then) appearance. He tells a radiant Norma that he has no right to ask for this favor, but "you've got to back me up in there, Norma. Please. I gotta get out." He also knows that she has no reason to believe him, but "I swear on my life, I have changed." If by "change" you mean that he has become FAR MORE EEEEEVIL than he has ever been before, of course.
Inside said hearing room, Hank takes on a strangely Alec Baldwin-y vocal quality we never hear again as he recounts the fates that put him in prison (manslaughter) and begs the parole board for mercy. Norma reluctantly goes to bat for her husband, telling the parole board that she'll give him a job at the Double R to assist in his return to polite society. They'll let her know by the end of the day, and the scene ends with a sinister pan down to reveal Hank holding a domino in his hands with three dots on each half. Oooooooh. Games.
The police cruiser pulls up in front of two gas pumps, prompting Cooper to recount, "In my dream, Mike said he and BOB lived above a convenience store." Which is what I guess they're in front of. And right to which is a sign reading "Lydecker Animal Clinic," and then below it, "Aid to the fromp, fromp, b'gar." Hey, just the same as in the scene with Donna and Audrey. Damn tape interference. Did somebody say DVD? Hmmm? Inside the office, we are greeted by a brilliant shot of a gigantic long-necked animal of some kind tied to a leash and taking up most of the upholstered waiting room. Cut to Cooper showing an aged secretary the sketch of BOB, and the woman responds that the man in the picture is most definitely not esteemed Twin Peaks veterinarian Bob Lydecker. Truman beckons Cooper away from the secretary, telling him he thinks this search is getting maybe a little unfocused. But right in the middle of the two of them going nose to nose as Cooper defends his methods, the long-necked animal walks right up to Cooper, glares directly into his eyes, snorts loudly, and moves on. And you've got to give it up for Kyle MacLachlan, as there is about a zero percent chance of that moment being staged. And if you take a peak to the right side of the screen just then, you'll notice Michael Ontkean looking down, around, and just about anywhere but at Cooper, as if he's on the verge of an inappropriate giggle not seen since one came out of me at the inception and first iteration of that great comedy buzzword -- I speak, of course, of the word "weenie." Andy reappears then with a requested spool of twine from the -- how do you say? -- convenience store. Cooper somehow concludes that "the bird that attacked Laura Palmer is a client of this office," and then they confiscate all of Lydecker's files. Hee hee. "Weenie."
Ack! Bobby porn! Pause. PAUSE! Everyone just shut. Up. And sit down. No, actually, just leave. I need this moment entirely to myself. Anyway, he and Shelley are practically mid-deed right there at the Johnson kitchen table, Bobby intermittently stopping the love to complain about "that James Hurley. Seeing Laura behind my back." Good thing for Bobby that his other girlfriend is still alive to listen patiently to such rational complaints. Poor Shelley. Bobby continues on that he's going to "fix him," and Shelley turns the action her-ward in insisting, "Fix me first." Oh! Are we taking numbers? Fix me second! Dibs! I have dibs on the Bobby fixing. Um, anyway. Bobby wants to know when Leo is due back, and Shelley tells him not to worry because Leo is "with his friend. That creepy Jacques." Bobby immediately makes the Renault connection, due in no small part to the significant lack of Twin Peaks residents who go by the name of Jacques. Process of Fat Canuck Elimination, I believe they call this process just over the border. Anyway, Bobby "thinks" Renault and Leo were selling drugs. Maybe even to Laura! Does he "think" that because he was the middleman? That could be why. And speaking of being messed up in some kind of dubious shit, Shelley shows Bobby the bloody shirt she found in Leo's truck two days after the murder. Bobby announces optimistically that "Leo isn't going to be a problem for us anymore" and commandeers the shirt for his own curious needs. Shelley wants to play too in this game of murder and death, and she pulls a gun from within a nearby drawer. Bobby asks her if she knows how to use it, and Shelley unbuttons the entire top of her waitress uniform and brandishes the gun against her bra, weenie-style, between her fingers and her chest. Yeah, she knows how to use it, all right. But in case further training is required, she coyly tells him, "I thought you could teach me. Teach me, Bobby." Dibs! Bobby, incidentally, wears a workman's shirt from an auto shop or a gas station with the sewn on name "Dick." In case you weren't choking on the already enormous (and continuing to grow) phallic imagery of this entire episode thus far. ["Heh -- 'choking.'" -- Sars]
The four law enforcers carry the extent of the Lydecker files back into the Sheriff Station. Truman tells Lucy to go through the files and pull out the names of all the bird owners. Over in the conference room, Andy apologizes to Cooper for his pitiable shooting display back at the Timber Falls, and Truman walks in and tells Andy to "meet us downstairs at the pistol range." On his way down, Andy passes Lucy and attempts to engage her in conversation about the accident, but she rebuffs him on the grounds that she has been burdened with the daunting task of examining the files, "so you'll have to excuse me, please." All ultra-professional. She's angry. Apropos of nothing, did y'all hear the Victoria Jackson is going to be in a new, ahem, "comedy" starring herself and MTV's apotheosis of accidental, unearned fame in the history of modern pop culture, non-"Downtown" Julie Brown? The other one. With the red hair. So I guess I lied when I said her career was in the toilet. In fact, it is far past the toilet stage, deep below the earth in the abandoned sewers with the alligators, lurking underneath New York City.
Down at the shooting range in the basement of the Sheriff's Station, Cooper informs Andy, Truman, and Hawk that, in light of this morning's accident, they need "practice and plenty of it." Cooper, intent on bonding like men in this firearm-heavy underworld, asks Andy about the tension between him and Lucy, and Andy becomes pathos-bound again in reporting that she won't talk to him and he has no idea why. Cooper attests, "In the grand design, women were drawn from a different set of blueprints." I guess this is how men feel inclined to talk when in the presence of their own gender and waving their weenie guns around. And so they fire at the supplied targets at the other end of the range, and Andy's machismo proves to be compromised even further by an inability to shoot anything but blanks. Still bonding, Hawk takes this opportunity to ask Cooper if he has ever been married. He has not. But I fear that Cooper's back-story-free-mysterious-out-of-towner characterization is going to be compromised in lieu of a fleshed-out, lovelorn sap of an agent. And it does happen eventually. In a little part of the show I like to affectionately refer to as "much of the second season." But for now, he suffices it to say that he once knew someone who, among other pithy Necco candy heart sentiments including "Be mine" and "You're keen," taught him as well "the pain of a broken heart." Speaking of which, I accidentally stumbled over Heather Graham being interviewed on Regis this morning. I hate her for every moment she spends on Earth with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. For reasons many of you are already familiar with, I actually did like her in Boogie Nights. But by then it was already way too late.
Cooper focuses his energy instead on shooting, as he and Truman unload their rounds on the targets. While the targets are being reeled in from the other end of the range, Hawk suddenly delivers his own homily on male/female relations, in what I believe to be his longest speech in the entirely of the show's run. In celebration of this fact, here it is:
Hawk: One woman can make you fly like an eagle. Another can give you the strength of a lion. But only one in the cycle of life can fill your heart with wonder and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy. I wrote that for my girlfriend.
Cooper: Local gal?
Hawk: Diane Shapiro. Ph.D, Brandeis.
Now THAT'S what I call me some male bonding.
On the intercom at the pistol range, Lucy breaks in with her report that the Lydecker files are, strangely, "organized alphabetically by the name of the pets," a snag that will doubtlessly extend the amount of time it would have taken to just go "through the bird file," as Truman had initially suggested. Unfazed, Cooper comments that they'll be needing some more coffee, he guesses. Quality all around. Quirk has its good name back in prime time.
Over at the Double R, my two best gals Norma and Shelley discuss the foibles of "having one man too many." Shelley tells of her memories of Leo before marriage, telling Norma that as a boyfriend he was "a flashy guy in a hot car" (sounds like she, too, was angling for a long-term commitment leading to nuptials with the suddenly ubiquitous MacGyver. Go figure), but she has since discovered that "all he was looking for was a maid he didn't have to pay." Sad Shelley. And speaking of problematic sham marriages with low-life criminals, convicted or otherwise, Shelley asks if Norma told Hank that she's "divorcing him for Ed?" Huh? Gasp! Yippee! And did I mention huzzah? Have I mentioned I love the two of them together? Sadly, though, Norma did not stand up to Hank in this way at the hearing. Norma suggests that they forget their troubles and go for a complete makeover, her treat. Cute. But during this sequence, Slater Fetus soils the celluloid just by virtue of walking through the shot on his way to use the phone. Cut to him on the phone with Donna, with whom he arranges to meet later that night because she has "things to tell him." But as he hangs up the phone, he spots Sally Jessy Laura Palmer across the diner, and toddles over to introduce himself with that socially acceptable salutation for the ages, "Who are you?" She explains her relation to Laura and tells him she's from Missoula (that's in Montana!) and some other filler stuff, including a stiffly rendered "joke" about how her cooking is bad. Ha. Why, she's just about the funniest cameo cousin to drop in on a small TV town since Blair's stand-up comedienne cousin Jerry came for an extended visit on Facts of Life. Back behind the counter and through a rather intense patch of unimaginable videotape interference (again, I hear there's a DVD being released), Norma discovers via a phone call that Hank did -- or did not -- get his parole. She hangs up the white, fuzzy phone and mutters something to Shelley about Hank, I think, "Coming home." So there you go.
Over at the Horne place, Ben pedals like the dickens on a stationary exercise bike while talking to Jerry on a decade-old cordless phone approximately the size of Seattle. Apparently, he is still hell-bent on conquering that lucrative and untapped market of Scandinavian real estate. Terminating his call, he turns to face Audrey, who has quietly slipped into the room. She asks him if he is ashamed of her, and Ben responds that he wishes he could count on her more. Why, what a marvelous coincidence, she retorts, adopting her most "I'm lying. But I'm lying reeeeally well" puppy-dog pathos: "I saw a friend of mine cut down like a flower that had just begun to bloom." This development, Audrey attests, led to the epiphany that she wants to "change [her] life." Finally regarding her seriously, Ben stops pedaling and steps off the bike. She wants to go to work for the good of the family business and its future. At, say, Horne's department store. At, oh, I don't know, the perfume counter. Ben hugs her, finally convinced that her sudden bout with self-actualization is both genuine and sustaining. They exchange lovey father/daughter words until the phone rings, and the call is one Ben needs to take alone. He arranges to meet the caller "down by the river in a half an hour. And be discreet."
Back at the police station, the Gordon Cole box calls in to tell Cooper that Albert is faxing over his reconstruction of the plastic piece removed from Laura's stomach. Gordon also moves along the bird search subplot, zeroing in that the bird bites on Laura's shoulder were made by a "parrot or a mynah bird." Hawk brings in the fax, and the plastic piece turns out to be a half-dissolved poker chip from One-Eyed Jacks. Note, if you will, further reference to the letter "J." And voila! At just this moment, Andy discovers a bird named "Waldo," a mynah bird belonging to Jacques (and Andy goes phonetic with the last name) Renault. And so they're off to, as Cooper states, "make a house call."
Over in an apartment complex of some kind and back under the cover of darkness, they skulk up to Jacques's second floor pad and knock on the door. Inside, Bobby gets snagged mid-planting Leo's bloody shirt, and he takes off out the window at the first knock. The police know someone has gone out the window, and Hawk gives chase in the police cruiser under the assumption that Jacques leapt out the window and ran into the night faster than a four-wheel-drive automobile with blaring sirens and a sharp-shooting tracker behind the wheel. When in reality, if it had been the obese Canuck trying to make a fast break by foot out of a second-story window rather than a sleek and nubile eighteen-year-old varsity football player, Truman could have leisurely opened the door and handcuffed Renault attempting to grease himself through the window frame with the lubricant of his own copious perspiration and shouting, "Au secours, au secours!" in the most unlikely simulation of a poorly delivered French accent this side of seventies disco hit "Voulez Vous Couchez Avec Moi." Cooper, meanwhile, takes the bait in picking up Leo's bloody shirt and identifying the connection between the truck driver and the aforementioned obese Canuck.
And speaking of Leo and his connection to every underworld low life character, rich and poor, that Twin Peaks has to offer, he waits in the woods for yet another late-night secret meeting. And up walks Ben Horne, up to all sorts of no good. After chiding Leo for showing up to their "secret meeting" in a bright red sports car and asking about his other business ventures with obese Canucks and the brothers who are also not Canucks but play one on TV, Leo responds that he has ceased his corporate dealings with the Renault brothers (Bernard's dead body lies tied in burlap under a nearby tree. Wait, I'm dumb. Who killed Bernard?) and Ben gets to the business at hand. After all, Ben promises, "Hank said that you were gifted. I believe him." Hank = bad man. Got it. Thanks. Anyway, Ben is employing Leo's devious assistance in a familiar scheme: "Insurance investigator should reason arson." Money changes hands. Light the match in "three nights."
Meanwhile, over in another corner of the same highly populated woods, Slater Fetus partakes in actions that, for once, kick someone else's mother in the stomach. Donna and the unborn retrace their well-trod steps back toward the buried heart necklace and discover that it is, as Sarah Palmer's vision indicated, quite missing. A dramatically swelling orchestral chord cues a quick panning back to reveal an owl staring down at the couple, who again insist on getting all nookie-fied even at the intense protest of my last three meals, all of which simultaneously try to fight their way up my throat at the spectacle of it all. Even the animal kingdom seems to be lodging an official complaint at the prospect of watching Donna smooch James yet again. I mean, I'm totally, TOTALLY in support of a woman's right to choose, but this kind of choosing with a fetus sort of traverses the boundaries of legality, now doesn't it? Not to mention good taste.
Packard Mill. Josie picks up a ringing phone to hear Truman's voice tell her that he "got a break in the Palmer case" and can't come see her tonight. Before they hang up, he asks her if she was at the Timber Falls Motel earlier in the day (she was) and she attempts to elegantly act both evasive and romantic at the same time (she can't, hard as she may try). So instead she hangs up on him. Pete enters the room, and they talk about fishing and like-minded Pete activities, thereby solidifying a subtly anti-Katherine alliance and explicitly exhibiting their ever-growing friendship. She again botches a simple English phrase. Everyone on the planet groans simultaneously. The good people of Berlitz roll their eyes and withdraw their poorly allocated product-placed advertising dollars. Shut up, Josie.
Pete is off to bed as Josie sorts the mail. She cracks open an envelope containing an enlarged photocopy of a domino with three dots on each half. The phone rings. It's Hank, calling from prison to ask, "Did you get my message?" She looks fearful as usual, coming to grips with the knowledge that only a drastic change can assist her in these ambiguously troubled times. She's holding out for a hero. Clearly, only MacGyver can save her now.