Fade up on a shot of Maddy "Bad Die Job" Feguson, emulating her far cooler Cousin Laura in the copycat ensemble of a clear plastic bodysuit and accessorizing with those black splotches of dirt dotting her pasty face. Poor Maddy. Someone forgot to tell her that that look is, like, so last April's dead teenage demon attack rape victim chic. Cut to a shot of Albert "Mr. Brown" Rosenfield, Dale "Mr. Blue" Cooper, Harry "Mr. Pink" Truman and Hawk "Mr. Orange" White-man-stole-my-last-name, ambling toward the camera in exaggerated High Drama for Dummies slo-mo through the woods by day. The trees blow moodily. The minor chord holds forebodingly. The opening credits are just filthy with James Marshall's name. The good news? There is no good news.
Albert, who a certain FBI honcho (not to mention Twin Peaks executive producer) named COLE promised would not be coming back to town, holds in his hand a tiny plastic evidence bag with the paper letter "O" in it and reports, "The short answer is this is the work of the same ghoul who killed Laura. More fan mail." The "O" was again extracted from under the ring fingernail of the victim. Further evidence reports that "there were strands of fur clutched in her right hand" from a stuffed white fox. Truman leaps into action, telling Cooper he's going to contact Leland to find out how to get in touch with Maddy's family. Gee, seems to me the route of least resistance would be crossing the border to Montana and talking to, oh, I don't know, the only people who live there? Cooper asks Truman not to make any calls just yet, asking for twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours for what? Cooper is one ripped tank top and a line of bodily-worn machine gun ammunition away from Sly Stallone-ing the place up when he fixes his gaze on Truman and takes himself a mite too seriously: "To finish this." Yay, RamboCop! Between that kind of bad-ass, renegade crime fighting and a comparison of Kyle and Sly's career trajectories for the better part of the 90s, I'm hard-pressed to tell them apart right now at all. Oh, that's right. Cooper wasn't in Get Carter. Thank God. Well, there's always the third remake.
Albert beckons Cooper over to his patch of sinister woods to offer the following uncharacteristically unhilarious piece of advice: "I don't know where this is headed. But the only one of us with the coordinates for this destination, this hardware, is you. Go on whatever vision quest you require, stand on the rim of the volcano, stand alone and do your dance. Just find this beast before he takes another bite." Actually, that was a little funny, in an accidental, purely "Word Up" kind of way, though Albert left out the rallying cry of "When you hear the call you've got to get it underway" which, in all honesty, is what always inspires me to do my best work. Albert walks away and Cooper observes in reply, "Now all you sucker DJ's who think you're fly, there's got to be a reason and we know the reason why." Actually, he doesn't say that at all. What he really says is, "God help me, I don't know where to start." Hawk, as per usual, is burdened with the latest contrived foray into faux me-like-pretty-cloud-of-white "Native" spirituality, offering, "You're on the path. You don't need to know where it leads. Just follow." But the words of the good and great Chief He Speaks With Banality seem not to comfort Cooper during this stressful time. No romance. No romance. No romance for me. Coop.
Arbitrary Law
Donna "Thin Lizzy" Hayward sits alone at a table in a gauzier, far snazzier update of the Double R Diner (the "Triple R," 'haps?) until she is approached by James "L'il Bow Wow" Hurley a few moments later. He sits down and takes her hands in his, telling her, "I went for a ride this morning. God, the engine was like a thousand people singing." Singing what? "Requiem for This Script," one can only hope. The "Cameo" version. She asks what they were singing about, then continues that she herself could sing "about last night." Last night? Continuity being what it was on this show around this point (that being "non-continuous"), I'm going blame my ignorance for not knowing exactly what went on "last night" and just be glad that the cameras sent to record this amorous event smashed into a billion pieces at the slightest suggestion of James Hurley, er, "riding her bike." James extracts a jewelry box from his pocket and slides a diamond ring onto Donna's finger, worrying, "I didn't know what size to get." But the fact that it fits her finger perfectly proves that his decision to test the width of the ring out on a conveniently-appearing chopstick was, in fact, an informed one. Because she's real skinny, people. He continues on that he wants to be with her all the time, and they kiss passionately. I think that was a marriage proposal. And here's me, left without so much as one "isn't he a little young to" jokes from the once overflowing coffers.
Mama Legs sits at the counter of the Double R eating an omelet. She takes a bite and, in horror, spits it back onto the plate with a protracted gagging sound (okay, that is SO much more yucky than lingering shots of a grisly murder site. Who's with me?) and snarks, "Whatever fowl did you take these eggs from?" Norma asks if that means her mother doesn't like them, and Mama Legs adds, "I'm afraid I'm going to run into a thumb tack." Norma sighs all angrily and tells her mother that she's tried "so hard," but that Mama Legs doesn't have a positive word for anything she's ever done. Domineering mom, put-upon nothing-is-good-enough daughter, we get it. Poor Norma. Without her soapy alienation from true love Ed keeping her character afloat, her plot arc has devolved into her acting out the title role in a live-action teleplay of a Cathy comic strip. Mama Legs retorts that she supports Norma wholeheartedly, adding, "the menus are very presentable." Norma doesn't think that's so funny. She'll have to wait in line to register that grievance with the board, I'm afraid. And so Mama Legs tries to be of actual assistance around the place: "If you want to serve a truly memorable omelet, try white veal sausage and morel mushrooms." Norma snarks that she'll "go pick the mushrooms." Oh, Cathy. Will you never win?
Solving this murder primarily through tangible facts and evidence is a concept that was abandoned shortly after the opening credits of the Pilot, so why not devise a character who speaks in fortune cookies cracked open at Syntactical Szechwan, the same restaurant at which Yoda culls his advice. Enter Mike. Cooper leans by his bedside at the Great Northern, and he is writhing and sweaty and twitching that shirtless little nub of his as Doc Hayward stands aside and warns that Gerard needs his medication pretty darn soon if he doesn't want to become the victim of the Excess Character Fire Sale the ABC Accounting Department seems to have set in motion recently. And more power to them. Cooper tells a barely coherent Gerard that "BOB has killed again," informing him of the dream he and Laura shared. Again. Mike pants and huffs, "BOB and I, when we were killing together, there was this perfect relationship, appetite, satisfaction, a golden circle." He makes an "A-OK" sign with his hands and Cooper somehow deduces from this round of The Charades of the Criminally Freaking Insane that his lost ring has something to do with all this. Cooper reports that he gave his ring to My Giant, and Mike huffs and pants, "He is known to us here" because the passive voice always makes an already sinister situation just that much more creeeeeeepy. Mike adds, "You have all the clues you need" before pointing at Cooper's head and alerting, "The answer is not here. The answer is here." He points at Cooper's heart. Dude, that's pretty weak right there. Thirty TV minutes away from the culmination of a murder investigation and the only advice Captain Clairvoyant can toss out is "Follow your heart"? To equate him with Yoda is now officially an insult to Yoda. That's less Yoda and more Nell Carter telling Joey Lawrence that he can make the football team even though all the other kids tell him he's too small on a particularly special episode of Gimme a Break. This sequence, of course, also lacks the incomparable cabaret singing flair of said Nell Carter. Shut up, One-Armed Man. Gimme a break, indeed.
Cooper stands at the end of a long hallway inside the Great Northern and watches as The Elderly Room Service Waiter from the second season premiere ambles into his view at the other end. Drool Cup speaks: "I know about you. That milk will cool down on you, but it's getting warmer now." Cooper looks curious and repeats "getting warmer now." Drool Cup gives Cooper a thumbs up and leaves to curl up somewhere and quietly die.
Finally in Ben's office, Truman shows Cooper Ben's recovered telephone records from the night of Laura's murder. Truman confirms that the phone call Leland described to them was made from Ben's office. Also, Ben gestures toward a stuffed white fox sitting on a table behind the couch, corroborating the strands of fur they found on Maddy when they pulled her out of the waterfall. And though I had completely forgotten about this and thought it so insignificant when I last watched it that I didn't even bother to recap it, when Leland returns "good as new" to Ben's office, he visibly turned around and grabbed a clump of hair off of that fox and shoved it in his pocket. Oh, cool. I didn't remember that Ben-as-killer was so explicitly set up as an intentional frame. I love that detail. But this episode is still kind of putrid. Back to the action, Albert saunters up to let them know that Maddy was killed between 10 P.M. and midnight, which also stands to implicate Ben. Noooooooooooo! Albert then hands Cooper an envelope that contains "Ben Horne's blood test." Cooper takes a peak and reveals nothing to us before handing it off to Truman. If the furrowing of eyebrows constitutes "deep thought" as much as the director of this episode (check out these accoladessnerk) would very much like us to believe, these guys are about to squint their way to a Nobel Prize, the trifling matter of Laura's murder be damned.
Police station. Another Useless Extra is toiling on a ladder fixing the sprinkler system because wacky comic hilarity is much more wacky, comic, and hilarious when there's a straight man present to watch it unfold. And with all the upcoming chatter about Dick Tremaine, I was beginning to doubt the presence of any such "straight man" on this show in the first place. Ha ha. Whatever. Andy accosts Lucy outside of her office and insists, "I want to talk about our child. Our baby." Lucy whines (why oh why do I even bother to qualify?), "Maybe it is our baby and maybe it isn't." Wacky Comic Foil stares down from the ladder with some confused brow-furrowing of his own (which, considering that gesture's direct correlation to above-average intelligence, I'm surprise Wacky Comic Foil doesn't suddenly glean the knowledge of how to bond hydrogen and oxygen molecules without the help of a sprinkler system and just get the hell out of this frame and go water the damned lawn himself) as Lucy bellows, "I thought you were the father, but then you said you didn't have any sperms!" But then she found out the sperms were back, "So as far as I can tell, it's a fifty-fifty proposition." Andy marches angrily over to a nearby phone and picks it up. Pause. Then: "I want to speak to Richard Tremaine, men's fashions." Lucy whines out some "please Andy don't hurt 'em" rhetoric while he waits, and moments later Andy speaks again, "Tremaine? Brennan. Andy Brennan. We need to talk. That is, if you're not too busy." Awwww. Darn lovable goofball. Watching Wacky Comic Foil looking at him so admonishingly, how on Earth could I believe otherwise?