Props to Adam Rich, without whom this recap would have turned out just the identical way as it turned out to be. Except, clearly, for the sentence you have just finished reading.
Fade up on a faux-eerie, faux-reedy, faux-spacey, real-cheesy soundtrack ditty representing the latest in Angelo Badalamenti's one-chord opuses, this one apparently entitled "Fourth-Grade Trip to the Local Planetarium." The non-mood setting music accompanies numerous extreme close-up shots of flowers from every angle and of every shape and color that collectively redefine the term "horticultural fetishism" (if, in fact, such as expression had ever been coined for the first time) and makes me wonder aloud if my mother didn't shirk her taping responsibility this week and accidentally set the VCR to record a PBS special on the contested art of a slightly less provocative Poor Man's Robert Mapplethorpe. But alas, the fates were none-too-kind, and we pick up where we left off last week, with Harold Smith vamping around the room angrily, continuing to do all he can to take all of the "glory" out of the too-familiar Twin Peaks concept "glorified extra." He holds a hand over the bloodied left side of his face as if Christine has just pulled off the mask and revealed The Phantom of the Garden Shears underneath, and as Maddy "Hands in the Air" Ferguson and Donna "Finger Down Her Throat" Hayward cower guiltily in a corner of the room, Harold speaks his delusional mind: "I trusted you. I invested my heart and soul in you." The girls try futilely to apologize, claiming they just wanted to read Laura's diary, but Harold is clearly taking the invasion of privacy personally, ranting on, "I thought you were different. You made me feel I could return to the world and find something decent." And just as I start to actually feel bad for the guy, he lapses suddenly into Scary Delusional Guy with the wha?-inducing sentiment, "You are unclean! You have contaminated me!" He lunges at Maddy, still holding the diary, but just at this moment, the door bursts open and in runs James "Down With RU-486" Hurley to save his damsels in distress. He knocks poor Harold against a wall with the full extent of his pre-natal might, grabs Maddy and Donna, and the three make for the door. In the melee, the diary hits the ground and Donna makes a half-hearted attempt to retrieve it, hears her brittle ribcage snapping like burnt underbrush, and decides once and for all that the strenuous calisthenic exercise of "bending" is best left to those whose idea of "healthy food consumption" doesn't automatically infer a breath mint and a laxative. Harold wails but does not follow.
And so the three make their escape diary-free, stopping inches from the front door. Inside, it's Harold's turn to cower shaking in the corner as he clutches the copy of the diary that is his last tangible connection to the outside world. Okay, last time, everyone just take a deep breath and repeat after me: supermarket magazine rack. Even as this scene takes place, in fact, literally tens of remaining Twin Peaks fans are on their way down to the Food Lion and discovering thousands of unsold copies of the book, right there between the Dentyne gum Donna treats herself to as a little dietary reward she likes to call "Christmas Dinner" and the tabloid magazines advertising heinous and blatant lies such as "Starving Man Eats Himself!" or "Eric DaRe Will One Day Work in Hollywood Again!" Lies, all of them lies. James holds Donna and asks, "Did he hurt you?" And then she begins to cry as the two hug and hug. Inside, Harold looks up at the ceiling and screams miserably.
And then the opening credits finally begin to roll, implying that the full dramatic heft of the sequence could not have been quite so poignantly rendered if marred by the garish introduction of the show's ever-expanding troupe of veteran talent. Wow. What self-indulgent directorial mind could possibly have deemed her (or, y'know, his. Whichever) opening sequence so earth-shatteringly important that she would forgo the series convention and move the credits (which are now so rife with pointless extras that they threaten to outlive the episode itself and end sometime in the middle of Nightline) to a time more convenient for her and her "artistic vision." Who directed this mess? WHO? Oh, hello, Linka. So we meet again, I see. And so the credits roll and roll and then they roll some more, barely diverting our attention from a shot of a running stream at night to a shot of the fantastically innovative moodily blowing trees to an owl-not-what-it-seems. Finally, we are inside of a log cabin I don't think I've ever seen before, where Cooper carries in a dazed Audrey and places her gently on the bed. Hawk stands behind them, with two other hovering presences the viewing audience is at a loss to make out (Who ARE those people? I'd love to see the original storyboard for that shot, Linka) as Cooper reports his findings, "Sluggish pulse. Pupils constricted. Breathing slow and shallow. Needle marks. Most likely heroin." Audrey stirs on the bed and calls Cooper "Daddy" (well, in a perfect world, maybe. And even then in a purely "who's your daddy" kind of way) before opening her eyes and seeing him. She relaxes: "I prayed. I prayed that you would come. And you did." Awwwww. That would have been so much more genuinely rendered if Cooper's look of subtle protectiveness hadn't been so obscured by the name "Fumio Yamaguchi" appearing in green letters right across Cooper's mouth just then. Linka? Enough. Seriously.
The credits stop once more, just in time to join our real heroes, Donna and Slater Fetus, in another indeterminate outdoor location, monotoning their lines with all the dramatic heft of just having been asked to record a book-on-tape of the back of a cereal box. "Yawn-ee-os," in all probability. James requests of Donna, "No more plans, okay? No more going off on our own?" Donna defends her actions on the basis that "he has Laura's secret diary. He could've killed her." Oh, puh-leeeeze. HE didn't kill her! If Donna really believed that, don't you think she would have avoided that lingering and completely unafraid "On a very special Twin Peaks" moment with James three feet from the front door of the house that Harold NEVER LEAVES a few minutes back? I mean, yeah, I'll go with Donna on the truism that Harold's mental washing machine got permanently lodged on "Unbalanced Load" some time ago, but I attribute that opinion of him to the fact that he NEVER leaves his house, rather than thinking he leaves only for light chores, church on Sunday, andto kill Laura in an abandoned train car? I'm sorry, but that theory possesses about the same narrative continuity as a Choose Your Own Adventure book read in linear page order. Either way, James tries to rationalize their recent behavior: "After Laura died, everything just went by kind of fast." Oh, yeah, this plot's been moving Mach 10. Jane, get me offa this crazy thing called Hurley Subplot! What? More? Oh, okay: "It's like, if we could put our hearts together and just keep them that way forever, we'd be safe, no matter what." Mixed metaphors ("put our hearts together"?) and biological impossibilities (um, "put our hearts together"?) notwithstanding, the two kiss and kiss as an instrumental version of "Just You" holds the soundtrack hostage yet again. God, I hate that song.