Nighttime establishing shot of About To Be Scrap Metal Memorial Police Station. The distant "thwack, thwack, thwack, crash, look out below, thwack, thwack, so then we haven't been renewed then eh?, thwack, screeeeech, run!" noises of a soundstage being dismantled and refitted for use as the future home of numerous upcoming Isuzu commercials continues just to the left of the camera's gaze, because that Davis Leisure sure is going to be a big star one day, dammit. We cut inside to find Lucy "Leprechaun 2" Moran and Deputy Andy "Scenes Deleted…Forever" Brennan sitting, heads resting against each other, pink slips tucked in their lapels, leased Porches being forklifted back to the dealership. Sounding exhausted from a twenty-nine episode commitment of talking in a high-pitched, non-threatening drawl without once driving north across the border into Effeminate County, Andy asks Lucy in a high-pitched, non-threatening drawl, "Were you afraid, Punky?" Lucy -- er, "Punky" -- responds in turn, offering a recap of last week's final moments with about seven more cumulative words (though, miraculously, even fewer sentences) than even I was able to generate on the very same topic: "I was on the stage at the Roadhouse and the lights went out and I kept thinking, 'The lights are going out, the lights are going out,' and then they did, and it all went black, and I kept thinking, 'It's so dark, what about hand signals, what good would they do us now?' And the baby! What if the lights went out in the hospital and the lights went out in the elevator?" Andy responds that he would have delivered the baby in the elevator, right there, "in front of God and everybody." Or he would start to cry and ask all bewildered why his progeny wasn't flown in by the stork, swaddling clothes included, as his increasingly yokel-ized characterization would convince us is what he believes. They look at each other, very daytime-soap-y, kiss in a way I don't need to know much about, and simultaneously say, "I love you" when they look back at each other. Awwww. These two are a match made in heaven. Well, one in heaven. The other in Leprechaun 2.
A lingering close-up on FBI Special Agent Dale "Don't Tell Her It's" Cooper eventually pans back to the rest of the conference room just down the hall. Deputy "Roswell" Hawk stands near the back wall, silent, pensive, mournful-with-the-truth-of-the-ages-that-collectively-make-an-entire-people-mournful-of-the-pensive-ages. Harry "Whose Child Is This? The War for Baby Jessica" Truman bursts into the room, riding his good steed Expositiontariat toward the horizon and into the ever-nearing sunset, explaining, "We've got deputies from three counties looking for Earle. He seems to have completely disappeared." Cooper doesn't look away from The Blackboard Of Continually Narrowing Action, reasoning speciously to Truman, "The only hope we have of finding them is somewhere in this map." David Lynch asserts his dictatorial control over the proceedings, walking out from behind the camera and onto the set, requiring Cooper to erase the entire map and write "I will not make the final plot twist of this series entirely about a blackboard" fifty times after school. Then he makes him clean the erasers by pounding them together repeatedly. As well he should. Because, well, move it along. Cooper continues to fulfill the aesthetic integrity of his clearly marked stage directions, "I am staring at the blackboard," continuing to, well, stare at the blackboard. Again, he speaks: "Loose ends. Tie them together. No matter the cost. Forty-three minutes left." Oh, sorry. I didn't realize I wasn't being paid to recap his internal dialogue here in this scene. Here's what he really says: "Giant. Little man. Fire. Fire, walk with me. Fire, walk with me." But Cooper's return to numerous episodes past is cut short straightaway, when the door to the conference room flies open, revealing Pete "Meatballs 4" Martell, looking duly pissed off and announcing, "Grand. Theft. Auto." Meh? He slams the door and actually swaggers in, continuing on, "The Log Lady stole my truck." Conveniently, Pete knows said stealer of the truck "took off on the road, toward the woods." Oooooh. The woods. I know them well. Just like this one time, here in Manhattan, we apprehended a car thief by pointing the authorities in the correct direction of "the tall building," and then caught up with them all the way out on Long Island, due to someone's Carmen-Sandiego-specific directions that they drove right past "the strip mall" and "the diner" and "that one suburban home." The whole damn state is moodily blowing, Nance. You're going to have to give us maybe just a little more than "the woods." Or…not? Cooper volleys back, "The Log Lady did not steal your truck. The Log Lady will be here in one minute." Cooper follows this moment with another furrowed glare of sudden understanding, looking up and informing Truman, "Harry, Ghostwood Forest." While Pete wanders aimlessly around the back of the set practically knocking over whatever remaining furniture isn't nailed down and muttering, "Twelve rainbow trouts in the bed," Truman looks back at the chalkboard and yokels, "Wait just a doggone minute. There's a circle of twelve sycamores. Glastonbury Grove!" Hawk suddenly remembers he's in the room too, telling us, "That's where I found the bloody towel and the pages of the diary!" Oh, is that right? Cooper notes that Glastonbury is "the legendary burial place of King Arthur," setting up the wholly pointless but really, really funny line from Pete, "King Arthur's buried in England! At least, last I heard." Wow. A chess savant and a history expert, too. All he needs now is a starring role in a high-caliber project the quality of a Meatballs 4, and he'll be Hollywood legend.
Knock knock knock. The Log Lady enters the conference room holding -- duh -- her log, and also a jar containing some black liquid which she calls "the oil." Cooper asks her, "What did your husband say about this oil?" She responds that he told her that the oil "is an opening to a gateway." Cooper unscrews the top and sniffs it, handing it off to Truman, who mutters, "Jacoby! Scorched engine oil!" A-ha! All these hints! So cohesive when put together! How very Ghostwriter of them. Cooper tells Hawk to "bring in Ronette Pulaski," leaving out the obvious "from the set of her upcoming film, Living In Her Parents' Attic For The Last Twenty-Six Weeks," because, well, we already knew where she was.No screen seconds later, a preppied-out, bobbed-haired Ronette "Living In Her Parents' Attic For The Last Twenty-Six Weeks" Pulaski is standing in the Sheriff's Station. Cooper thanks her for coming in, and she's all, "Scale pay from a major television series versus a few sympathy bucks for mowing the lawn for my dad. You're, um, welcome." Cooper holds the Jar Of Jacoby up to Ronette's nose and asks her if she recognizes the smell. She recoils into Hawk's ocean of calming calmness, muttering, "Yes," her first non-coma word of dialogue in the entire series. So she's on a roll and adds on, "The night Laura Palmer was killed…" No one in the room remembers who Laura Palmer was or why she was so significant, so Lynch captures a shot of the room via a distant hole in the ceiling at the far corner of the room, asks us to believe that he was really too good for television directing all along, and finally gets us out of the police station for the first time in the recorded history of law enforcement.
Pete's truck motors through the dark and comes to a stop in that much-ballyhooed area of the Pacific Northwest known as "the woods." A flashlight switches on, and the voice of Windom "Witchblade" Earle rises up through the darkness, announcing, "Glastonbury Grove." He shines the flashlight onto the passenger seat, revealing the back of Annie "Lost In Space" Blackburn's head, introducing himself thusly: "I am Windom Earle." She repeats his name in surprise, which strikes me as a little odd until I remember that the emotional range of this actress compresses "confused" and "upset" and "terrified" and "resigned" and "happy" into the catch-all emotional response of "present." Earle notes the "twelve rainbow trout," which is for some reason Yoko's cue to ask, "If you're gonna kill me, why don't you get it over with?" Earle retorts that there's "plenty of time for that." Tick tock tick tock. Earle, I wholeheartedly disagree. The flashlight beam tracks across the ground, as a praying-under-her-breath Yoko Blackburn struggles periodically to get away. He carts her over to a circle of twelve sycamore trees, and Earle actually deigns to frighten us by holding the flashlight beam under his chin and telling her, "You and I have an appointment at the end of the world." Sorry, Earle, but I believe the correct line in this particular situation is, "It was a night just like this one in these very woods" and blah-blah-blah-hooks-where-his-hands-should-be-cakes. I guess you just can't be a believable woods-dwelling storytelling villain unless you've seen Meatballs enough times, huh? Which is very different than that Nance vehicle Meatballs 4, I might add. Yoko continues on, "He'll come for me," and Earle roughs her into the circle, responding, "No, he won't. The same thing happened last time, when he fell in love with my wife. I took the boy right to the edge that time." He continues trying to pull her into the circle and she continues trying to resist, but with a shriek she goes rigid and silent. Her eyes glaze over and she stares out with no expression (or perhaps this is how she's always looked) as Earle informs her, "You'll not run from me now. Not in this circle of trees. You'll come with me." He takes her hand (leaving, I might add, the eyes-glazing wonder of the circle of trees he values so highly) and walks deeper into the woods, a tall red curtain appearing ever-so-vaguely before them.
Hurley House Of Horrors. Doc "Susan's Dad" Hayward applies bandages to Mike "Gilardi" Nelson's and Nadine "The Dentist II" Hurley's damaged heads, telling them, "Take some aspirin. Call me in the morning." Rivet me, oh Hippocratic dialogue! Hayward moves to the other side of the couch, and Mike leans over to Nadine, proclaiming his love for her: "All right, I've said it. And I'm glad." He leans in to kiss her, but Nadine stares back at him in horror and asks, "Who are you?" She stands up in a hurry, screaming at him, "What are you doing in my house?" She tells Ed "Under Siege 2: Dark Territory" Hurley to "make him go away," noticing Norma and asking, "What's she doing here?" She begins to whinny and cry, steeling herself against the elements by running to the far side of the room and now really bellowing, "Where are my drape runners?" And Nadine's back. Ed runs up to her, grabbing her arm and asking, "Nadine, how old are you?" A struggle ensues, Nadine wailing, "I'm thirty-five, you moron!" Mullet Mike stands up and whispers, "I'm sorry, Ed. I think I let things get a little out of hand." Norma "Kelly McQueen Foster" Jennings stands alone in the corner, looking damaged and sad. But she'll be back before any of the rest of them. That's for sure.Eileen "The Patriot" Hayward sits around her living room, looking forlornly up at a suddenly-appearing Ben "My Girl 2" Horne. "Assistant District Attorney" Donna Hayward comes barreling down the steps, packed suitcase in hand, screaming at her pleading mother, "I've heard enough!" Ben good-guy-whispers, "Donna, it isn't your parents' fault. It's mine," and Lara Flynn -- much as I like her and you guys know that I do -- just can't pull off the unbridled high drama of her response, "My parents? Who are my parents, anyway?" It's a little Lifetime to begin with, but she just screams it right into the ground. Ben attempts to keep things even with his measured assertion that "I only wanted to do good. I wanted to be good. And it felt so good to tell the truth. After all these years." On cue, the door opens and the good doctor enters the house, snarls, "Ben, DAMMIT!" and throws his briefcase down. He tells Ben to get out of his house. Ben does the most Hail Mary move known to good guys in the Good Guy X-Games, making fists with both his hands and putting them meaningfully near his chest (try it…you'll know what I'm talking about), asking, "Will, can you forgive me for what I have done to you?" From behind Doc Hayward, another figure appears at the door, and in walks -- holy crap, it's Sylvia "???" Horne! Everyone looks completely shocked, but not half as shocked as she is, as she walks out of obscurity and into the room, asking, "What are you trying to do to this family?" It's Sylvia Horne! Donna hugs the doctor emphatically, wailing, "You're my daddy! You're my daddy! You're my daddy!" in a not entirely uncreepy way, and Hayward advances on Ben, snarling, "Leave my family alone!" Ben tries to turn the other cheek, but the other cheek goes sailing into Hayward's first and right into the corner of the fireplace, knocking Ben unconscious with a big, bloody gash in his forehead. Hayward screams in fury and drops to his knees, and the most dramatic flourish of strings -- let's call it "Elegy For A Sylvia Horne" -- sends this scene to its merciful end. You guys? Sylvia! Horne!
Martell Manse under the cover of darkness. Because this show apparently takes place on the radio or was written with the liberal assistance of The Big Book Of Loudly Uttered Shakespearean Asides, Brother Andrew narrates his entire sequence of replacing the key in the cake plate with an identical copy and informing us, "I knew I'd seen it somewhere. Safety deposit box. They'll never notice the difference." Iago away, Brother Andrew. But Brother Andrew is not alone, turning to see Pete, who offers the sorrowful, "Oh, Andrew." Brother Andrew offers a wholly unremorseful "Goodnight, Pete," and ambles off, sorry that the dramatic ante was not upped by the sudden, non-sequitur reemergence of Sylvia Horne. One per episode, I guess. That's too bad. Because there's nothing about her that doesn't scream "spin-off."Cooper and Truman pull up behind Pete's abandoned truck. Their flashlight beam tracks the ground to the sycamore trees, and Cooper informs Truman, "I have to go on alone." He takes the flashlight and walks deeper into the woods, the trees done blow moodily, the crickets done chirp forebodingly, the owls done be not what they seem. Cooper shines the flashlight on the center of the trees and reminds us that it's "the opening to a gateway." He switches the flashlight off and watches the curtains appear. We cut to Truman's POV as we watch Cooper walk behind them and disappear. Truman mutters a kick-ass "my God." Oh, Harry. We have not even begun. Cooper walks inside the Black Lodge, and we catch only a glimpse of the red curtains and the black-and-white zig-zag floor pattern before Strobe-a-palooza kicks up and we see only flashes. Cooper walks into the room from his dream in Episode 2, and from behind another curtain The Little Man From Another Place dances out, happy too for this lucrative reunion special. He takes a seat in one of the chairs -- awwww, tiny man in a big chair! -- and looks into the room, where legendary jazz singer Jimmy Scott belts out an impassioned version of "Under the Sycamore Trees." Because, get it? Dude, this club rocks. Back in real Twin Peaks, they've got the cut-rate Mazzy Star wannabe of Julee Cruise. The booking agent for the dark side has clearly got a lot more connections. They should get him to record the theme song for season three. For all we know, maybe they already have. The song ends and Jimmy Scott sadly vaporizes, and we cut for but a moment back to the woods, where Andy wanders around asking, "Sheriff Truman?" Truman calls out that he's "over here," and that cuts us to commercial with a drama I guess they thought jazz and velvet and strobes never could have. Odd, that.
Yeah, but when Lynch's trees blow moodily, it, like, really MEANS something. Establishing shots of said spooky trees and a brief return to the Ronette Pulaski Memorial Physical Assault Bridge cuts us back to the woods by day. Truman and Andy sit to each other on a log, Truman noting, "It's been about ten hours since he went in there." Moody silence prevails until Andy decides on something to say:Andy: Do you want a thermos of coffee?Incidentally, that exchange takes somewhere in the range of two full minutes to execute. But by this time, Harry has become preoccupied with the center of the sycamore trees, and does not respond. Which is too bad. Because the dramatic action of the entire series hinges on whether or not he wanted pie.
Harry: Yeah.
Andy: Do you want a plate special?
Harry: Yeah.
Andy: Do you want dessert?
Harry: Yeah.
Andy: Do you want pie? Harry? Harry? Harry?
And now, more paced brilliance. We cut to an interior location we've never seen before to find an older woman sitting at a desk, sound asleep. A name plaque reading "new accounts" sits on her desk. From a door behind her, Audrey "Helena" Horne enters and bids an old, extremely-slow-walking man a "good morning." Oldest Man Ever asks if there's anything he can do for her. She walks to a locked gate in front of the vault, and unearths a pair of handcuffs from her bag, chaining herself to the gate. She tells him, "You can call the Twin Peaks Gazette" and ask to speak to the editor. He is confused. He is old. His glasses are black and gigantic. Audrey takes over: "Tell him that Audrey Horne has chained herself to the Twin Peaks Savings & Loan vault in protest of their financial ties to the Ghostwood Development Project and that I intend to stay here until a town meeting is held to debate the future of our environment and specifically the effect of the Ghostwood project upon it. K?" Old gets increasingly more flummoxed until Audrey gives him a chore he can handle: "And can I get a glass of water, please?" With agonizing slowness, Old walks to the farthest end of the room possible, talking almost a full minute to walk from the vault to the water cooler. Once there, he fills a glass, and turns around to walk very slowly back to her. Facing her again, he realizes she won't be able to drink the water, seeing as both hands are chained behind her, so he tips the glass forward and she takes a sip. Final tally on the water-bearing subplot: almost four full minutes. We like to call that "David Lynch's final fuck you to ABC," or, alternately, in the style of the big Time-Warner yanking of their ABC affiliates earlier this year, "David Lynch has taken ABC away from you." If you're ever on the hunt for one of those rare "it was funnier last February" kind of quips I know you people so enjoy.
Old returns to a desk right near the water cooler to put down the glass, but doubles back when he sees Brother Andrew and Pete enter the bank. Old screams, "You! But the funeral! And all of the flowers! And the choir boys!" Even Pete is done with the Magically Reappearing Brother Andrew bit, so he clears it up in a hurry -- "He's alive" -- and gets to the matter of opening the safety deposit box with the key from the cake plate. Andrew approaches Audrey and asks her why she's chained to the bank vault. She volleys, "Civil disobedience," and they push the gate and her open and enter the vault. The three stare for an excessively long period of time, until Old finally takes the key and offers to the find the box that they're looking for. He walks up to a box and hands the key back to Andrew, who informs Pete, "We've come to the end of the long road, Pete. And here we are." He opens the box to see a note, on which is written "Got you, Andrew. Love, Thomas." The note leans against a whole mess of wires, and as it starts to beep, the two back away in horror. Cut to an exterior bank shot, where an explosion sends the windows exploding and Old's black glasses sailing across the street and into a nearby tree.Double R. Major "Major General George S. Hammond" Briggs and his long-suffering wife do a bit more canoodling that we need to see, right there in a booth. At the counter, an on-shift Shelley "La Filmette" Johnson and paying customer Bobby "Ghost Dad" Briggs snuggle in a far more socially acceptable fashion. Bobby slams his hand on the counter and proudly proclaims, "I think we should get married." Shelley responds that she's still wearing Leo's ring, and Bobby volleys back, "Leo's probably up in the woods having the time of his life." Cut to a quick shot of Leo strung up in the woods, having something just south of the time of his life. Back in the Double R, Dr. "Dr. Hayden" Jacoby ushers Sarah "Gone In Sixty Seconds" Palmer in the front door, and they head toward the Major's table. Jacoby informs him, "Sarah here had a message for you she thought was important." They sit down at the table and Sarah, after breathing heavily for a moment, speaks in a low growly voice that is very, very, very much not her own, "I'm in the Black Lodge with Dale Cooper." A quick shot of the hallway in the Lodge accompanies the backwards-talking sound of The Little Man From Another Place telling us, "Time wasting for you." Small fry…you don't even know the half of it.
Back in Black. Cooper and Tiny Tim bless us all, everyone, by returning to the seats they occupied during The Dream, TLMFAP finally looking directly at Cooper and speaking the backwards/forwards words, "When you see me again, it won't be me." Not cryptic enough for me, Mr. Lynch. Maybe time you could have him speaking in backwards and in French. TLMFAP shifts in his seat and lets Cooper know, "This is the waiting room." Cooper looks around with that perplexed look of, "Well, then, where are the out-of-date Newsweeks heralding, "Ivan Boeski arrested on fraud charges," because, in reality, it's still only 1991. Cooper sits silently. TLMFAP asks Cooper, "Would you like come coffee?" and pauses just another second before he sweetens the deal: "Some of your friends are here." Laura "L.A. Doctors" makes her reappearance on the scene, entering from behind Cooper and sitting down in the chair to TLMFAP. She bids Cooper a pretty cohesive backwards hello before holding out her wrist and flicking out her index and middle fingers. She adds on, "I'll see you again in 25 years." Dude. Her backwards/forwards voice is kick-ass good. Perhaps that's the actorly talent she decided to perfect, not realizing just how niche that skill really is. She adds the word "Meanwhile," holds her heads up in a modelesque, what's-behind-curtain-number-three pose, and disappears. When Cooper looks the chair is empty, but a moment later The Elderly Room Service Waiter makes his resurgence, holding a cup of coffee. He and TLMFAP exchange a spirited "Hallelujah!" Awww. It's so nice to see short and tall bond just like brothers. The Elderly Room Service Waiter stands up with the cup of coffee, repeating the word "coffee" once for each of the six steps he takes. When Cooper looks up again, The Elderly Room Service Waiter has morphed into My Giant, who returns to his chair and observes, "One and the same." His backwards/forwards voice isn't quite as admirable as some, so he disappears in a damn hurry. Now TLMFAP rubs his hands together, and Cooper finally moves to pick up the cup of coffee. He holds it up and out to show up that the liquid has solidified into some kind of Spencer Gifts novelty gag. It's not coffee at all! Or…or is it? Cooper makes to pour it out again, but this time the liquid is actually liquid, and he spills about half the cup. And even right here in the middle of this otherwordly drug trip, Cooper still has the wherewithal to look kind of embarrassed. And this is why we love him. Cooper regards TLMFAP, who watches Cooper pour out a half a cup of really viscous sludge (did the waitress at my diner work in The Waiting Room back in the early 90s?), and TLMFAP looks off-camera and compliments, "Wow, Bob, wow." And then, for the sake of franchise-branding, he adds, "Fire walk with me." A piercing scream accompanies a shot of roaring flames somewhere, and when we cut back to the Black Lodge, Cooper is under the strobe once more. That right there is a damn strong cup of coffee. And hot! Cooper exits this waiting room and walks back into the hallway. Across the hall and at the other end, he finds another opening in the curtain. He enters to find the room identical to the one he's just left, and goes back down the hall to the first room to find TLMFAP telling him, "Wrong way." Cooper goes back into the hall and back to the other room, which is again the same room. Into this room walks TLMFAP, but he's all shaking and laughing and crazy and his voice bears a strikingly giggly similarity to Crusty the Clown crying (I'd never noticed it before, but give it a try and let me know what you think). Into the room walks Maddy, decked all in black, who informs Cooper, "I'm Maddy. Watch out for my cousin." Cooper exits that room as well, as he should. Back inside the first room now, the curtains are still there but all of the furniture is gone. Cooper stands for a moment and then walks in further, looking down to see TLMFAP convulsing madly and eventually getting around to grimacing the word "doppelganger!" Cooper, in extreme close-up, looks remarkably concerned about this new development, but not even half as much as he does in the shot, one of Laura Palmer. She repeats the word "meanwhile" while maintaining the same prom queen pose she struck before -- vogue vogue vogue vogue -- and then begins to scream wildly as the strobe kicks up anew. She climbs from red couch to red couch and then right up to the Cooper POV Camera, screaming, screaming, screaming.Cooper thinks it might be time to get out of that room, but with only one other option, how far is he gonna get? Back in the other room, the strobe cuts out again, but Cooper looks down to regard a thick pool of blood that came from his reappearing abdomen wound. He puts a hand to it and stumbles back into the hallway, following the trail of blood back into Room #1. On the floor of that room lies another, blood-soaked Cooper (doppelganger!), entwined with a woman in a god-awful sundress who he refers to as "Caroline." The bloodied thing sits up, and Cooper notices that the woman lying with the other Cooper is, in fact, Annie. Strobe. Cooper yells "Annie" repeatedly until it ceases to be a source of fear and is practically a whispered question. Back in the room, another Annie Blackburn (doppelganger!) stands waiting for Cooper, her poofy black Miss Twin Peaks dress once again on. She stands still for a moment and then walks right up to him as he enters, speaking backwards, "Dale. I saw the face of the man who killed me." Cooper asks "The man who killed you?", and Annie explains, "It was my husband." Cooper again asks, "Annie?" Annie, knowing her character as well as she has since her first appearance, asks, "Who's Annie?" Cooper looks at her again to find he's talking to Caroline, her eyes all blanked out and creepy and milky white. And then Annie appears again, putting a hand up to Cooper's cheek and comforting him, "You must be mistaken. I'm alive." Damn. Still alive. Nothing good does happen in this evil place, I guess. Cooper looks back to find that he is now face-to-face with milky-eyed Laura, who screams again and turns into Windom. Windom smiles broadly: "Dale Cooper." Annie now appears to them both, standing with her arms crossed, all, "Do something, boys. These here shoulder pads aren't going to be in style forever." Then she vaporizes. Bye-bye, Annie.
Windom cracks up, stopping abruptly to look at Dale and alert him, "If you give me your soul, I'll let Annie live." Cooper doesn't miss a beat: "I will." Windom stabs Cooper in the stomach -- twice -- and the earlier inferno returns before cutting us to a shot of Earle and BOB in strobe, yelling. BOB grabs Windom's neck and demands he "be quiet!" Windom freezes all animated with his hands out, and BOB looks up to Cooper and slowly lets him know, "He's wrong. He can’t ask for your soul. I will take his." Cooper watches as BOB extracts a fireball from Windom's head, and BOB cracks up at the general evilness of it all and allows Cooper a moment to escape. Behind them, another Cooper enters from a location at which the real Cooper did not exit (Dop! Pel! Gang! Er!), and we note that this new Cooper is milky-eyed as well. He puts an arm around BOB and they crack up like old frat buddies from Black Lodge University.Real Cooper strides back into the hall, and out from behind another portion of the curtain, Leland "Scream At The Sound Of The Beep" Palmer appears, milky-eyed, to let Cooper know, "I did not kill anybody." Incorrect. But it's so damn nice to see him again. Cooper skirts past him, and the other Cooper walks out just after. Doppelganger Cooper and Leland share a laugh as well. Now the two Coopers chase each other from room to room, and we quickly lose track of who is chasing who and why. Not like the "why" has been anywhere near apparent for the past thirty minutes or so, but at least now we're being destabilized as a plot device. I think. The two of them run toward the exit, just beyond the waiting room.
The woods. A bright red light shines near the sycamore trees, and Truman jumps up to seeing Annie and Cooper lying unconscious. An establishing shot of the waterfall takes us to the show's final resting place, inside of Cooper's hotel room. Doc Hayward and Truman sit vigil at his bed, and as he stirs and opens his eyes, Hayward notes, "There he is." Cooper tries to lift his head and delivers with an unusually foreshadowed sense of steeliness in his voice, "I wasn't sleeping." He pauses for a moment and asks the question of grave importance: "Annie? How's Annie?" Truman informs him that "she's gonna be just fine. She's in the hospital." Another silent moment goes by, and Cooper tells them, "I have to brush my teeth." Truman helps him out of bed, and a PJ'ed Cooper makes his way toward the bathroom, stopping at the door to repeat, "I need to brush my teeth." Truman tries to sound encouraging, but when Cooper disappears behind the door, Truman and Hayward exchange that patented glance of "looks like it must have been the doppelganger that made it out of the Black Lodge" that I know you and I have all made a billion times in our own lives. Cooper shuts the door behind him and walks toward the sink. He takes his toothbrush out of the holder and daintily opens the cap of the toothpaste. Rather than applying the toothpaste to the brush, however, he gleefully begins to squeeze it into the sink. This lasts until no more toothpaste is left to gleefully squeeze, so Cooper has to go to the big fuck-the-housekeeping-staff trick in his arsenal. He tilts his head back from the mirror, and then brings it forward with a noisy, yucky little slam. Truman looks toward the door with a concerned "Coop?" Back inside, a bloody-headed Cooper looks into the shattered mirror and sees the many-prismed reflection of BOB staring back at him. They turn their mashed-head reflections in the same direction, both grinning really, really meanly, and Cooper turns toward the camera and starts cracking up, repeating over and over and over again: "How's Annie? How's Annie? How's Annie?" Bye-bye, Cooper. Bye-bye, sanity. Bye-bye, show.