Double Play

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 oneyou 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 DownOn 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 deathby 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.

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 Clich 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?