Twin Peaks TV Show - James Marshall is a really bad actor - Twin Peaks Photos & Videos, Twin Peaks Reviews & Twin Peaks Recaps | TWoP

Recapped by Djb · Aired 02-01-1991

Fade in on darkness and unmistakable drama as Badalamenti's High Drama Flute Of I-Already-Played-These-Three-Notes-Last-Week-Not-To-Mention-The-Nineteen-Consecutive-Weeks-Before-That picks up where we left off last week, inside the police station with the dead hobo and the continuity-challenged chess game set up as before. I think. Hey, lighting supervisor? It's called an "on switch." I read about it in Premiere. If I wanted to watch Twin Peaks with this little clarity, I would have gone ahead and gouged my eyes out with a particularly jagged crust of cherry pie somewhere around the first iteration of the words "push the plug." All of which is kind of strange, considering the fact that it should be a lot lighter in there, what with the neon sign and blinking arrow pointing directly at Dead Chess Hobo and reading, "Spot The Pawn-In-The-Game Metaphor." A close-up shot on a swatch of bloody gauze pans back to The Checked Mate (don't mind me, floundering in the corner looking for an appropriate nickname that isn't, well, that one…you just go ahead, I'll catch up with you later), and a hand reaches into the frame and rips said gauze off. Doc Hayward utters his usual "I'm not a doctor, and soon I won't play a whole lot of anything on TV" variation of "Good Lord," as Cooper extracts what appears to be the pawn (geddit? Do ya? Do ya? Do ya?) from between Slobby Fischer's teeth and places it in a plastic bag marked "evidence." Cooper hands the bag to Andy, telling him, "I want this dusted for prints." Harry "Xiu Xiu: Girl Sent Down…On Me" Truman walks in and informs the assemblage, "No one saw a thing. The blackout and the fire drew everyone out of the building." Say, there's a blackout about? Truman asks how long Hey Rook Me Over has been dead, and the good doctor admits that he won't know without a formal autopsy. Cooper gets that process underway: "Doc, if you'll lift up the victim's shirt, I believe you'll find a stab wound one inch beneath the sternum, penetrating upwards, severing the aorta." Doc lifts up Chess-ter Cheetah's shirt, which reads, "I searched for Bobby Fischer and all I got was this stupid highly stylized Abdominal Contusion," beneath which is a stab wound one inch beneath the sternum, penetrating upwards, severing the aorta. Or so I am led to believe by the furtive, how-could-Cooper-know-about-the-stab-wound-one-inch-beneath-the-sternum-penetrating-upwards-severing-the-aorta stares currently ricocheting off the walls of the very, very, very dark room. Truman: "You've seen this before?" Snerk. Great line. I half-expect the camera to zoom all crazily in on Cooper, who would hold the flashlight below his chin and recount a dark-and-stormy-night tale about a man walking alone in the woods who came across a lunatic with hooks for hands and eyes that glinted as bright as the sliver horsemen of the Civil War Memorial Chess Set, and that the first man was found dead in the trunk of his car, and the story goes in the old woods that he was…"Bored to death…by chess!" Which is what I'm being right now. See the intrigue? And you thought chess was the sport of high school dorks and Russian defectors with essentially identical names no self-respecting chess-hating American has ever been able to pronounce correctly or, in truth, has really tried that hard. Well, now you know differently.

Flashlights scouring the floor, Cooper and Truman come across a tiny scrap of something (first season thematic cohesion, perhaps? No, I guess that was all lost in the fire. Stupid insurance companies) which Cooper picks up and asks, "Douglas Fir, Harry?" Which is cool, because it's totally a shout-out to their first conversation in the pilot. Harry corrects him that he has stumbled upon "Lodge Poll Pine." Cooper shrugs it off in that "when they blow moodily, they all look the damn same at this point" kind of way (oh, sorry, that's actually me doing that), and is happy for the interruption when Hawk enters the room and fills in some more gaps, on the matter of footprints: "Two sets. Same boots, one coming, one leaving. Heavier impressions on the way down." Cooper surmises: "Carrying the body." Creepy. Truman surveys the scene and poses the second most filler question in this episode's short history (a narrow runner-up to the "You've seen this before" query of a few moments back), "Are you sure Windom Earle is behind this?" Let's see. Chess set. Telltale wound. Cooper's turf. An actual, um, personals column entry in the newspaper with the word "Earle" in it accompanied by the chess move allegedly on the said chess set before them. Oh yeah, this thing's got "random attack" written all over it. What do you need, Truman, a nationally printed advertisement? Because it seems to me you even got that. But Cooper feels there's the time to greatly expound, and I have no choice but to believe he's absolutely correct: "A short time ago, a vagrant, our victim, was befriended and offered a lift. He was driven to a location beyond the ridge; his car will still be there." Blah he was stabbed once, blee he tried to get away but collapsed soon after, blarg, "Windom Earle engineered the explosion that caused the power outage. He created the diversionary fire that drew everyone out of the station, and brought the body in through this window." Indicates window. Hello, window. Cooper continues on while the rest of the show's cast members scurry around the Senate floor trying to collect enough votes to override the Presidential veto, because we're back in congressional filibuster mode here, people: "Harry, we're not gonna find any fingerprints in here. No mistakes. No slip-ups. Everything has its own rationale, precision, intelligence. Windom Earle is a genius. And he's taken his first pawn in a very sick game." Thank you, explicit "pawn" reference. That neon arrow was really fueling a migraine onset. The chess table lies forebodingly on the table. Meanwhile, the three remaining members of ABBA sit in their dark, ambiguous corner of Scandinavia, perched atop huge piles of money and watching Episode 21 on a large-screen, gold-plated television, thinking that the only way the dramatic ante of this thematic material could be upped any further is if the whole darn thing were set to synth music and performed live on the never-ostentatious Broadway stage.

Over at the very dark Great Northern, a fire burns and candles illuminate Rustic Northwest Quaintness Conference Room, Part Pi, and we pan over to Audrey "Now With 50% Less Family" Horne sitting in consult with Bobby "So Over Him I'm Airborne" Briggs and, again, preaching to the diverted: "If there's one thing I learned from my father before he flipped his wig, it's that a business relationship is like a sacred pact, equaled only by the closest of personal relationships, where nothing is held back." Bobby offers a noncommittal "right," though it's clear to Audrey that Bobby's attention would be compromised completely if faced with the option of listening to her versus, say, his reflexive wont to follow the path of a shiny object waved in front of his eyes. So she changes tacks, ever so slightly, "Do you wanna get rich, Bobby?" I briefly take it a bit too weirdly personally that Bobby sits up and regards Audrey with a level of intensity he never reached when he looked at me, even back when we were together. And, I thought, pretty happy. Bobby leans in and responds: "Immediately." Realizing that she needs a visual aid to keep his attention but cognizant of the fact that all of the really good, colorful toys are still being used to occupy her brother's attention (and doing a pretty passable job therein, seeing as he hasn't passed through the frame once since, correct me if I'm wrong here, Laura's funeral), Audrey grabs an ice cube out of a nearby glass (though with the amount of pretentiously-directed, mood-setting candles currently burning in that room, I'm frankly a

little surprised that a single ice cube could survive, much less the mammoth glaciers on a far-off planet millions of miles from the sun, for instance) and holds it under his nose: "Let's pretend that this is my father." Bobby stares into it, sadly, unrhetorically, responding, "An ice cube?" She shoots back an eyebrows-raised, "Right," that for some reason never fails to crack me right up. She tells Bobby to remember that their job is to help Ben return from "Limboland," before he "melts away" and leaves them with -- she opens her palm -- "nothing." The strained metaphor leaps out of her hand, limps wincingly off the set, and makes its way to the First Aid trailer to pick up an Ace bandage. Too bad the strained "pawn" metaphor got there first and commandeered them all. Greedy, injured pawn metaphor. Audrey finally makes her point, grabbing Bobby's cheeks (ew. Not like that) and demanding, "From now on, Bobby, I'm the one you suck up to." It's kind of a non-sequitur but not the worst transition in show history, as Bobby has but one follow-up question: "What about Shelley?" Yeah. What about Shelley?

Here's what's about Shelley, indeed. Cut to the darkened (no, really) interior of Chez Johnson, where a slower-than-ice-metaphors-are-strained pan across a nearly pitch black expanse stops on the refrigerator, from behind which comes the sheepish voice of Shelley "Husbands And Knives" Johnson asking, "Leo?" Nothing. More nothing. Breathing short, she hazards out from behind the fridge, just as the lights flicker on and back off, us privy to a shot of Leo's hulking (insofar as cultivating the ol' scare tactics are concerned, that coma was the best thing that could have happened to him) silhouette in an ambiguous corner somewhere. Shelley stays close to the protective appliance (ice, still sidelined indefinitely inside the First Aid trailer, silently begs Shelley not to open the freezer door), hiding on the other side and holding a moment. A big splotch of something purple-ish comes careening out nowhere and smashes into the freezer about an inch away from Shelley. She screams big and finally thinks to make for the front door, finding it locked, which would be of greater concern to me if the rest of the house weren't insulated entirely in Ziploc bags. Which are harder to lock. Awww. Raise your hands if you think the working poor are, like totally quaint. Cut to a medium shot (see, I told you someone's been reading Premiere) of the house's exterior, Shelley's "Help me!" cries a little more muted. An owl-not-what-it-seems does its owlish hooty thing from a Maybe Douglas Fir. Apparently, the owl is not what it seems. Back inside, the wheels of Leo's chair seem to move forward and backward more or less independently, and Shelley turns away from the locked door and tries out something in a contrite: "Leo? Please." Big wheels keep on turnin'. Shelley spots the back door and decides to make a run for it, but as she starts her sprint, the wheelchair springs across the floor, and it and Shelley meet at the intersection of Could See It Coming From Tacoma Street and Harping Every Horror Movie Cliché In The History Of Modern Cinema Except For The Black-And-White Shower Scene Boulevard. The wheelchair hits Shelley. Shelley hits the floor. Tight shot of one wheel spinning slower, slower, stopped. The thirty-second close-up of Shelley's blank-staring eye is mercilessly avoided.

Shelley looks up to see -- again -- only Leo's hulking silhouette (I wasn't aware that the average stint spent in the shadowlands between life and death caused one to become, in fact, Darkman, but everything I needed to know I learned from Twin Peaks, so…), holding the telltale silhouetted soap-and-sock instrument of spousal retribution. He speaks: "Bad girl." Goddamn, if someone didn't get up on the wrong side of the frontal lobotomy today. Leo lobs the sock at her feet, and after recoiling in horror, Shelley leaps up and tries the back door to find it locked. She makes it to a silverware drawer and yanks out the sharpest knife this side of a Ginsu infomercial (though if there's one person I could see ordering her knives off the television, it would be the one who sits though the commercials for the product during an average daytime episode of Invitation to Love: "Cuts through aluminum! And undead husbands, too!"), brandishing it all wildly and almost whispering, "I'll kill you." Clearly, though, she shocks audiences and Leo alike when the modifying pronoun "you" turns out to be the unfinished plastic walls of the house, which she begins to stab at wildly and shriek for help. Silhouette Sam grabs her shoulder and tosses her back, growling like a monster while his Bride of Frankenstein heaps into the corner and the knife slides across the floor. Back outside, Bobby marches up, all the unwitting savior, all the "I'll pay the rent" guy of that "You must pay the rent" game we all played when we were five. Leo rounds the corner with an axe and knocks over the table, and as Bobby makes for a window after finding the door locked, Leo's arms punches through the glass and almost takes him down. Leo's arm raises the slo-mo axe. Bobby makes it into the house via the non-insulation, and grabs at the axe just as Leo prepares to lower the boom on Shelley. Leo turns and pins Bobby up to the wall by his neck with the axe. Shelley, meanwhile, has decided that she's one "I'll be right back" away from meeting the USDA quota for the most hackneyed horror conventions ever, and grabs for the forgotten knife, plunging it into Leo's leg. He screams and limps out of the house via the nonsulation, screaming all the way. Screaming into the night. Shelley and Bobby hug. Awwww. Shelley: "But I can't pay the rent!" Bobby: "I'll pay the rent!" Shelley: "My hero!" Leo: "Curses! Foiled again!" Um. Some of that dialogue didn't really happen. Actually, Leo says, "Rats. Foiled again."

Cooper, Showgirls hair in full splendor, stretches his back and acts his way through his "I'm a tired, tired man" arsenal with the deep sighs and what-have. Searching For Slobby Fischer lies on a gurney in the middle of Truman's office, and a flashbulb photo of him (hardly the first "Say cheese! You can't! You're dead!" moment in show history) is followed by a sheet being draped over his body. As he's wheeled out of the room and the show and my brother and I realize we are quickly running out of opportunities to snicker and make fun of the word "hobo" (remember, it's 1991, people), Truman enters with two cups of coffee and hands one to Cooper, because the best part of waking up is this still-running theme in my cup. Truman confirms that there were "no fibers, no prints" found at the crime scene, adding, "If it is Earle, he didn't miss a beat." Heh. "If." I love that Truman is still holding out for the possibility that some disgruntled employee of the Parker Brothers games empire is off on a tear. Dude. It's Earle. He's checked your mate. Sunk your battleship. Connected four. It's Earle. And the already-strained "playing games" metaphor limps behind "just a pawn" and "my pappy was an ice cube" for a little medical attention of its own.

Realizing a golden opportunity to wrap up some of this show's gayer subplots and get things moving in a legitimate direction again, Truman glosses Episodes 18-20 with the throwaway (not that I'm complaining), "Did you hear anything from Denise?" Turns out, Cooper has: "The Bureau and the DEA cleared me of all criminal charges, but the suspension still stands. I'm waiting to hear from Gordon." My, how convenient. All of it, really. Buh-bye, Girlie Mulder. See you in Playing God. And also its far more intriguing follow-up, Playing Tea Leoni's Beard, Or Is It The Other Way Around? Meanwhile, Truman reminds Cooper, "Well, you're still my deputy…" and I always think he's poised to add, "…and the coffee's been out for over an hour, so a fresh pot probably wouldn't kill you." But he doesn't say that. But I think he should. Because I think Coop's advancing in the department a little too quickly, don't you? Truman offers Deputy Cooper the Earle case, and Cooper accepts it readily. They clink coffee mugs. Actually, it's more of a ceramic "thwack." I'm drinking coffee right now, too. Can I take the Earle case? I've only been a TPPD deputy for five fewer seconds than Cooper. Hawk makes his way in to let Cooper and Truman know that he's pissed that Truman gave white man the case and that he's suing for racial discrimination because he's been stuck doing the exact same henchman bullshit work every single day of his miserable career. Or not. What he really does is confirm that a car was found on a logging road and, as predicted, there were no identifying prints. Recapping, Hawk continues on that Hank "If That Is Your Real Name" Jennings missed his appointment at Dead Plot Farm last week because, as Hank reported it, "He was hit by a bus" and ended up in the hospital. Which is a fabulous ruse, considering the omnipresence of the Twin Peaks Public Transportation Authority. Hawk cuffed him to the bed and booked him for parole violations. Good. Go. Rot. Stupid Hank. Hawk starts to leave, and then suddenly remembers oh, say, the most important life-and-death matter he could have come to report: "Oh. Shelley Johnson called. She said Leo came to last night, attacked her, and ran off into the woods." Cooper's worried enough about that to give it "Holy Smokes" treatment, but Hawk barely even remembered to disseminate that information to the rest of the law-enforcing presences. Shoddy-ass police work like that, it's no wonder he didn't get that Earle case after all, eh? Eh?

Out in the front of the police station, Andy undergoes some wacky hijinks with a plastic glove (I guess he only cries at the loss of human life when the victim is, like, really, really pretty and stuff), which flies across the room and sticks to the window that separates Lucy's desk from the rest of the station. Lucy stares at it, a little horrified, which is kind of funny considering the latex-y, condom-like imagery of the glove. Andy leans in and tells Lucy that they have to talk "about Nicky." Don't do it, people. It just can't end well. Sigh. Okay, fine. But remember how well things were going until now? Pretty well, actually. "We think he murdered his parents." Lucy reminds Andy that the kid is all of nine years old, and Andy pulls off a pretty good line in whispering his contention that Nicky was "six at the time of the crime." True to form of every conversation that the two of them have had since the first minute of the show, Lucy gets all mad and tells Andy that he's a big, dumb simpleton. She promises to "get to the bottom of this right away" (which, translated, hopefully means "drop it like an ABC exec with an itchy trigger finger is about to drop this whole show"), and storms away, snapping Andy's other glove in his hand. Ah, Nicky. How your jinks grow ever higher.

Aw, crap. We're back at The Marshlands, where an always unflattering shot of James "Suckling Prig" Hurley still working on the Jaguar is interrupted by the arrival of a middle-aged bald man in a red and black jumpsuit who introduces himself as "Jeffrey Marsh." He's heard good things about James and fillercakes, and Evelyn sidles herself into the frame all uninvited, eyes hidden behind her Hell's Grannies glasses, looking more and more generally embarrassed to be there at all. Jeffrey hauls his lumpy old self into the Jaguar and tells James, "Maybe, after I take her for a spin, we'll talk shop. Sounds like we have a mutual love. Cars." Thanks. I thought he meant "window treatments." James, cognizant of the fact that he's sanded out the scratches and replaced all the fluids -- even up to and including the amniotic fluid, perhaps -- seeks to make his escape: "Yeah, well, I'm kind of overdue as it is." No kidding, folks. That's really what he says. "Overdue." I'm just going to sign my recapping check right over to the writer of this episode, if it's all the same to everyone (and it looks, quite frankly, like he can use it…is this some kind Frost Family Event Spectacular, I wonder? Strange. I always thought nepotism was a good thing. Until this scene, that is). Evelyn insists that James will be sticking around, adding, "There are plenty of things I could find for him to do." James, overdue (sorry, but I'll never be over it) for other unfinished tasks, excuses himself and walks off. Jeffrey calls James a "nice kid" (he might be one day, but he's not quite at "kid" status yet, friend) starts the car and peels off. Close-up on Evelyn as the far-off sound of a car crashing at a very fast speed Jeffrey could have in no way achieved without James having installed a 0-60 in the amount of seconds it took me to stop caring about anything going on with these people. Evelyn looks down mournfully. "Overdue." This episode rules, people.

Double R. Ed shares a booth with Doc Hayward, fretting, "Nadine wants to start dating boys. And I don't know what to say." Damn. Three cheers for the first-season, deader-than-deadpan delivery of that line. Doc even ups the ante, taking a sip of coffee and wondering, "Is she sexually active?" Ed tells the good doctor that he wakes up every morning "feeling like [he's] been hit by a timber truck," and Doc again explains away something about "the extra adrenaline," which is so not the direct result of what even happened to Nadine in the first place and was only sufficiently explained in detail once, to be found in Wendy Robie's classic 70s self-helf tome, When Bad Things Happen To Contractually Obligated Actresses. Ed worries that her sexual acumen could "kill" a younger man. Thanks for that mental burn. Hayward suggests that Ed tell Nadine to "be home by nine o'clock on school nights." Thankfully, Norma sashays over to the table just in time to expunge from my mind not only the mental image of having sex with Cap'n Nadine, but actually having the kind of sex that causes you to die. She delivers her one line, "extra potatoes," in a way that makes me feel like I'm maybe over-recapping a little today. You really care that she said "extra potatoes," do you? Unless, of course, "extra potatoes" means sex. Which I think it does. Either way, it shifts the focus of conversation to Doc Hayward's concern about SlaterFetusGate '91, and he confides in Ed, "Donna took the van this morning, said something about looking for James. Is there anything I need to be worried about?" Ed replies that James is "out west a couple of hours," and that Donna is bringing him money. Doc says some harmless old man thing about how difficult it is to be a parent and leaves. Norma swoops in and sits down. Hello. Hello. Norma recaps that Hank is in the hospital, apparently having claimed that "a tree fell on him" (a bus? A tree? How…ambiguous), and Ed tells Norma that the tree was "a redwood called Nadine." Norma smiles at the folly of it all, and as the Badalamenti composition "Putting The Dumb Back In Dombrowski," which we haven't heard since the ten-minute flashback of the young Horne Brothers in their childhood bedroom way back in Episode God Knows What, Norma tells Ed that Hank is going back to prison. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! Ed suggests that they "rent a cabin," and doesn't care who finds out. Hands are held. Awwww. Their tender lovemaking would not have the power to kill. I can't believe I just wrote that.

My short-shrift treatment of every scene that unfolds at The Marshlands (you're, um, welcome) continues as we cut back to the long noir night of the soul that is this subplot. Evelyn enters James's room to find him listening to some kind of sporting match (football? Basketball?") on an unseen radio. He walks out of the bathroom, finishing putting on his shirt. Augh! Take care of it off-camera, Pasty Cline. He tells her that he's leaving. She kisses him all passionately, and he pushes her away with the worst line in this history of the televised medium, "It's wrong," only to have that distinction trumped by Evelyn's line, "Love isn't wrong, James!" Oh, Corpus Christi, this is suicide-inducing. She's afraid of James leaving her alone with Jeffrey. Damn. This sporting match on the radio is deafening. What a strange directorial decision on the part of this Uli Edel, who has almost never missed a step while helming such award-lavished projects as Body of Evidence and the Jonathan Lipnicki starrer The Little Vampire, about a wacky vampire and his little friend with the eight pound head (which, curiously, features an actor who goes by the name Jake D'Arcy, who may or may not share familial ties with Jan D'Arcy, the once and future Sylvia Horne…coincidence?). Anyway. If these were the old, high-energy, Glatter-skewing days, I would probably have nicknamed this whole episode "Uli's Gold." Just so you know.

A close-up of a chess board with two pawns facing each other right in the middle (I guess this is the kind of chess game that starts with "Checkmate" and works its way systematically backwards until all of the pieces are in their starting position, but whatever) pans back to display Cooper in Truman's office, staring at the game. Truman asks after the significance of the chess game in all this, and Cooper has the answer at the ready, "Because Windom Earle and I played a game every day for three years." Oh, yawn. I wouldn't want to do something I enjoyed every day for three years, much less stare at those silly little pieces and continually ask my increasingly infuriated partner, "Wait, the horse guy is the one who makes the little L thing, right?" Cooper continues that Earle thought all of life could be explained in chess. Well, the whole second season of Twin Peaks can be, and here goes: it's boring. Cooper confirms that it's now his turn to win, and has published his response in The Twin Peaks Gazette and can now only wait. Truman tells Cooper that he's really going to need some more information than he currently has, and -- sound the alarm, it's a backstory alert -- Cooper responds, "Harry, I brought some baggage to town I haven't told you about." And here's some of it: Windom Earle was Cooper's partner. Four years ago, they were to protect a material witness in a federal crime. "Carolyn." She and Cooper fell in love, and because he let his guard down while allegedly protecting her, whoever the bad guys were did their bad guy thing and attacked them, wounding him and killing her dead (the aforementioned abdominal gash). The killer was never found. Windom Earle went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and had been institutionalized until his recent escape. Truman wonders why Earle would take a little federal negligence so dern seriously, and, well, Cooper knows the answer to that, too: "Caroline was Windom Earle's wife." Which would be a hell of a lot more dramatic if her name didn't just change from "Carolyn" to "Caroline" in less than twenty cumulative seconds of screen time. Oh, also? Yeah, um, Cooper thinks Earle might have been the one who killed her. Who? Caroline. Lyn. Whatever. Strained metaphors now being sent to an adjunct medical tent somewhere across the ABC lot over to the set of Major Dad, Cooper piles 'em higher and deeper: "Windom Earle's mind is like a diamond. It's cold. And hard. And brilliant." Cooper thinks Earle feigned the insanity that got him put in the white jacket with the locks on the back, but "at some point, he lost the ability to distinguish between what's right and wrong." Like a diamond. Oh, sorry. I guess that one's actually a simile.

Back at the bar "Wallie's," in which Slater Fetus first encountered Evelyn in the long, dark night of Strega's soul, Evelyn is once again seated at the bar. Out of nowhere walks Donna "Methuselover" Hayward, who orders a coffee (no extra potatoes today, thanks) and tells the bartender, "I'm looking for a biker named James." Evelyn slides over. "James Hurley?" Yah, that's the James. Evelyn lies that he did some work for her but now he's gone, "to Mexico, I think." Evelyn tells Donna to take off and go home, claiming "it would be better." Oh, that's so true. Dissolve back to James leaning against a poll in silhouette (Uli digs that effect, oh yes he does), as the Badalamenti hit parade continues as "Just You" fades up on the soundtrack. Did they, like, release a compilation album the week this episode aired or what?

Great Northern. We're inside of Ben's office, which is really coming together. An electric train circles the tiny campsite, which Ben overlooks. Audrey enters the office accompanying Brother Jerry (if there were ever a perfect time for a wacky sitcom applause track to herald the appearance of a character, this would so be it), who tries to nab his brother's attention by calling, "Ben?" Makes enough sense to me. A stage whisper from an unseen corner of the room advises Jerry that "[h]e prefers General," and we cut to Doctor Jacoby (welcome back, entire cast…this was so the first episode after the "getting this show back on track or getting yourself cancelled if you don't" network meeting) sitting high in a chair in a corner. Jerry takes off his hat. "General?" Ben looks up and smiles broad: "Jeb!" Ben thinks he's a General named Jeb. Ben lapses back into his Southern accent and speeches about Confederate victory, and Jerry leans in and tries to get a word in edgewise. But can't. Jacoby surmises that if Ben can reverse the South's tiny scale model defeat, "he in turn will reverse his own emotional setbacks." Wow. Did he learn psychological theory in a correspondence course taught entirely out of textbook entitled Psych! or what? Ben stands up and screams something about "the March on Washington," picking up a Confederate flag and switching on a giant and mysteriously-appearing fan so his symbol of Southern pride can blow, though not all that moodily, to my great surprise. Jacoby plays along, standing up and launching into a rousing chorus of "Dixieland" that rings outside and, we are to believe, gets lost in the waterfall outside. This is such throwaway dumbness. And yet I rather enjoy it all the same. Take the amusement where you can get it. Somebody emblazon that across the Twin Peaks season two crest, would you?

Police station. Major Briggs stumbles in the front door, slams into the wall outside of Lucy's desk, chokes out, "I need to see the Sheriff," and hits the floor. Lucy utters an I'm-sort-of-concerned cry of concern, checks herself out in her compact's mirror for absolutely no discernable reason, and we cut to inside of Truman's office. Again. I didn't know sets could negotiate for screen time, 'cause we've been spending quite a bit of time here lately. Briggs seems stabilized, so he embarks on one of his rambling thousand word sentences, this one describing his meeting with the Air Force folk: "Frankly, I'm worried. When my superiors questioned me about my disappearance, they exhibited a degree of suspicion and intolerance bordering on the paranoiac." He admits now that "their motivation in the search for the White Lodge is not ideological pure." Too. Many. Big. Words. He believes that he was taken to said lodge of whiteness during his disappearance, and all he knows from this experience is that "there is trouble ahead." Cooper: "What kind of trouble." Briggs doesn't know. So he leaves. Would it be cliché for me to ask if the point of that scene was "classified"? Perhaps it would, good reader. Perhaps it would.

Trouble afoot! Six TV feet away! Over in the interrogation room, Doctor Jacoby welcomes Cooper, Truman, and Andy. He is standing behind the Mayor's brother's widow, and informs the men, "I have just spent almost the last twenty-four hours with this charming young lady, and…" Whoa whoa WHOA! Hold on, Doctor Strangeclock. Weren't you just at the Great Northern? In that exact same outfit? Whatever. Jacoby claims that she is in no way responsible for the Mayor's brother's death. Everyone gazes again at her deniable beauty, because this is obviously one of those isolated logging towns where the men outnumber the women ten zillion to that chick. You guys? There's an actual whorehouse five miles away. Get over it. Go there. And leave this, this bit o'silliness behind.

But behind us it will never, ever be. Cooper for some reason sees fit to congratulate the widow, who responds, "Thank you. I never could have done it without Doctor Jacoby." Done what, Robyn? What's going on? See, remember how well things were going before they started filming only every other page of the script? Poor Scott Frost, with his work only 50% represented suddenly. Anyway, the men coo for a moment, but are called to arms once more when a scream from outside the room sends them all running to find a disgruntled Mayor standing in the station's entryway, brandishing an extremely long and antique-ish rifle that appears to be have stolen from the Ben Horne Confederacy set. Like, I can picture him going on a shooting rampage and having to stop for extended periods of time after each shot to jam the arrow into his musket, or something. Anyway, Mayorcakes, and he tells them all to freeze, adding, "Anybody moves and I'll blast her into Kingdom Come. And the hippie, too." And his little dog, too, I'll bet. Cooper puts his hands up and proposes the solution: "Why don't we let Lana and the Mayor talk things over together…alone." Now who in the holy hell is Lana? Oh, yeah. The Mayor takes the gun with him and they close the door behind them. And wait. And wait. Suddenly, Cooper decides it's time to go back in, and Lana's all kissy-lovey with the Mayor. "We've decided to adopt a child!" He says that. They leave. With additional footage shot on location in Hell.

A non-Badalamenti-composed piece of classical piano (which could really stand to use Julee Cruise on vocals or…nah, just kidding) accompanies establishing shots of The Ugly Totem Pole Museum, so it's quite the shock when we land not in the interior of that space, but rather in the Packard kitchen. Pete stands at the counter reading a piece of paper, registers a general look of ain't-I-just-a-dang-varmint-fool and yells to no one in particular, "Hot dogs!" Wha?-inducing pause. "We forgot the hot dogs!" In walks Katherine, her usual amount of mannish officiousness at fever pitch, yelling, "Pete!" He is caught in his own world of sadness and pain, fretting, rather hilariously, I feel inclined to add, "We forgot the weenies!" Wow, if that isn't just about the most disgusting thing he could have…"All beef with the skin on 'em!" Well. I stand corrected, Pete, don't I? Katherine registers a look of you-forgot-the-all-beef-weenies-some-time-ago-old-man-if-you-know-what-I-mean-and-I-think-you-do, changing the subject at hand, informing him that she has something she'd like to show him. She stops to ask if Pete ever wondered how she survived and where she went for protection and shelter back in the days of her mysterious disappearance. With quite the Piper Laurie flourish, she throws the door to her office open, revealing a gray-haired and interestingly dressed (those are some pretty wide pins on that pinstripe suit, friend), rather elderly man holding a cane and intoning in a British accent, "Pete Martell." I kind of expect him to hold out his arms and wail in return, "Poor Man's John Gielgud!" But alas, it was not to be. It's Andrew, Katherine's non-dead brother and Josie's non-dead ex-husband. Who, truth be told, might have died of natural causes sometime during the Polk administration if the forces of homicide hadn't taken care of him first. Ew. Josie voluntarily married this fossil fuel at, like, twelve. No wonder she was so enthusiastic about the prospect of directing Autumn in New York. It's all her life story and shit. Anyway, he's not really dead. Pete asked who tried to kill him, and Katherine tries to imbue this weird plot transition line with some amount of drama when she fairly screams, "Does the name Thomas Eckhardt mean anything to you?" Pete looks how I feel. And that feeling is, "Er…no?" Eckhardt and Andrew were business partners until Andrew "got the better of him on a piece of business" (that's right, folks. That's all the explanation we're gonna get), and Eckhardt planned "for six years" to kill his former partner. And Josie? Well, she worked for Eckhardt. So, Andrew surmises, if he sits around near Josie, Eckhardt will come for her eventually, "like a rat to cheese." One more strained metaphor and the U.S. Army is going to have to build a makeshift hospital right there where they're standing.

By Djb

Truman asks after the significance of the chess game in all this, and Cooper has the answer at the ready, "Because Windom Earle and I played a game every day for three years." Oh, yawn. I wouldn't want to do something I enjoyed every day for three years, much less stare at those silly little pieces and continually ask my increasingly infuriated partner, "Wait, the horse guy is the one who makes the little L thing, right?" Cooper continues that Earle thought all of life could be explained in chess. Well, the whole second season of Twin Peaks can be, and here goes: it's boring. Cooper confirms that it's now his turn to win, and has published his response in The Twin Peaks Gazette and can now only wait. Truman tells Cooper that he's really going to need some more information than he currently has, and -- sound the alarm, it's a backstory alert -- Cooper responds, "Harry, I brought some baggage to town I haven't told you about." And here's some of it: Windom Earle was Cooper's partner. Four years ago, they were to protect a material witness in a federal crime. "Carolyn." She and Cooper fell in love, and because he let his guard down while allegedly protecting her, whoever the bad guys were did their bad guy thing and attacked them, wounding him and killing her dead (the aforementioned abdominal gash). The killer was never found. Windom Earle went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and had been institutionalized until his recent escape. Truman wonders why Earle would take a little federal negligence so dern seriously, and, well, Cooper knows the answer to that, too: "Caroline was Windom Earle's wife." Which would be a hell of a lot more dramatic if her name didn't just change from "Carolyn" to "Caroline" in less than twenty cumulative seconds of screen time. Oh, also? Yeah, um, Cooper thinks Earle might have been the one who killed her. Who? Caroline. Lyn. Whatever. Strained metaphors now being sent to an adjunct medical tent somewhere across the ABC lot over to the set of Major Dad, Cooper piles 'em higher and deeper: "Windom Earle's mind is like a diamond. It's cold. And hard. And brilliant." Cooper thinks Earle feigned the insanity that got him put in the white jacket with the locks on the back, but "at some point, he lost the ability to distinguish between what's right and wrong." Like a diamond. Oh, sorry. I guess that one's actually a simile.

By Djb

But behind us it will never, ever be. Cooper for some reason sees fit to congratulate the widow, who responds, "Thank you. I never could have done it without Doctor Jacoby." Done what, Robyn? What's going on? See, remember how well things were going before they started filming only every other page of the script? Poor Scott Frost, with his work only 50\% represented suddenly. Anyway, the men coo for a moment, but are called to arms once more when a scream from outside the room sends them all running to find a disgruntled Mayor standing in the station's entryway, brandishing an extremely long and antique-ish rifle that appears to be have stolen from the Ben Horne Confederacy set. Like, I can picture him going on a shooting rampage and having to stop for extended periods of time after each shot to jam the arrow into his musket, or something. Anyway, Mayorcakes, and he tells them all to freeze, adding, "Anybody moves and I'll blast her into Kingdom Come. And the hippie, too." And his little dog, too, I'll bet. Cooper puts his hands up and proposes the solution: "Why don't we let Lana and the Mayor talk things over together…alone." Now who in the holy hell is Lana? Oh, yeah. The Mayor takes the gun with him and they close the door behind them. And wait. And wait. Suddenly, Cooper decides it's time to go back in, and Lana's all kissy-lovey with the Mayor. "We've decided to adopt a child!" He says that. They leave. With additional footage shot on location in Hell.

By Djb

Meanwhile, a quick cut to the lobby of the Great Northern finds a woman at the desk checking in for an "Eckhardt. Thomas Eckhardt." The woman nods toward a fire in a fireplace, and a close-up shot of a cheesily-coifed guy with cheap black sunglasses looks all sinister. Nobody yells, "Poor Man's John Gielgud's Former Partner!" And, sadly, no one ever will.

Doc Hayward calls Andy and Dick into a room at the police station to let him know that, in fact, Little Nicky is not the devil. Man. Peeling off the hideous subplots, one by one. The mood must have been really interesting on the set that day. Meanwhile, Truman approaches Cooper holding a piece of paper and informs him, "This just came over the wire from Seattle." It's a newspaper article. The headline reads -- okay, check this out -- "Asian Man Killed!!!" That's right. Three exclamation points. Three! Anyway, the Asian man (who was killed!!!) is the Mr. Lee guy that Truman met at the Packard house. He wants Cooper to look into it. Cooper will. He will!!!

By Djb

Marshlands. James is packing his bag (because he's been there three days) and Evelyn runs in. "Are you leaving? Are you leaving?" She hugs him all non-committal (you'd need a damn periodic chart of elements to discover what two objects in nature could have less chemistry than these two), and he throws her back suddenly with a shout of "I can't stay here! It's wrong!" He packs and packs (because he's been there three days), and she stands on her mark and launches in to what have embarrassed her terribly: "I love you, James. I've never said that to anybody before in my life. I love you." Oh, man. Because he's been there three days. And because…just, oh man. Sirens begin blazing then, and she looks out the window, whispering, "There's been an accident. Jeffrey's dead." James puts the pieces together: "My God! You set me up!" The police cars roll into the driveway. Evelyn cries and cries, swearing, "It was Malcolm's idea! He's not really my brother!" Way to mastermind in a hurry, Malcolm. Why? Right. Because he's been there three days. Evelyn tells James to hurry out, to make a run for it, to "go find that girl who loves you." Juuuust you. Aaaaaand I. Outside, Evelyn walks toward the police while James skulks in (no, really) silhouette. And there's Donna. Hiding behind a tree. Or a blade of grass. Or the particularly fat molecules that bond together and make up air. She's thin, y'all. They make a run for it. Togeeeether. Foreeeeever. La la lee loo lee.

It's raining in the woods, and a still-bathrobed Leo Johnson stumbles around, eyes all glassy. An owl-not-what-it-seems squawks toward him. He sees a house and makes his way toward it, but opening the door he sees a hand moving around guns and other various weapons of Cooper destruction, and he starts to reverse his path. The voice bids, "No, no. Come in. It's all right. I'm a friend. Come in." Leo does. The voice tells Leo, "I will help you." He asks Leo his name. Leo answers, "Leo," because, well, his name is Leo. And goofy-looking short guy with stubble moves out of silhouette (no comment) and sits at a table in front of a chess board. Get it? Get? It? He responds, "Well, Leo, you can call me Windom. Windom Earle." A nearby window bursts open and the wind blows leaves onto the chess board as this "Earle" character smiles all crazy, like. Hey! It's Poor Man's Dudley Moore!

Twin Peaks TV Show - James Marshall is a really bad actor - Twin Peaks Photos &amp; Videos, Twin Peaks Reviews &amp; Twin Peaks Recaps | TWoP

Twin Peaks TV Show - James Marshall is a really bad actor - Twin Peaks Photos & Videos, Twin Peaks Reviews & Twin Peaks Recaps | TWoP