3x04 Part 4

[6.8/10] When I made my list of favorite Twin Peaks characters for Twitter (because it’s 2017 and apparently that’s something we do now), I realized that, save for Audrey, they were all G-Men. I don’t know why, but the agents from afar were characters I was better able to connect with than the local color. Maybe it’s just the performers, maybe it’s the fact that they tended to be more adjacent to the soap opera nonsense that dominated much of the original show than a part of it, or maybe it’s that these figures had a sense of humor apart from the “hey isn’t that kind of goofy and weird” that tended to dominate the show.

Whatever the reason, they always stood out, and so an episode like this one, essentially dominated by Cooper (in various forms), Gordon Cole, Albert, and Denise(!) was, for the most part, right up my alley. I’ve read some grousing from various fans that the revived Twin Peaks hasn’t spent enough time in Twin Peaks, but from my perspective, this is the balance the show should always have had (if not even more slanted toward the agents).

Full disclosure: I cheered out loud when Denise made her entrance, though I have mixed feelings about the scene itself. There’s something a little too self-congratulatory about it, particularly with Lynch himself playing a character in the scene. Denise is a little too grateful to Cole and a bit caricatured, and Cole a bit too self-justifying. But “fix your hearts or die” is a great turn of phrase, Duchovny is still a superb performer, and Lynch’s heart is clearly in the right place, so it gets a pass from me.

What doesn’t get a pass, however, are the scenes we do get back in Twin Peaks, which seem interminable. Lucy and Andy’s shtick was pretty tired 25 years ago, and now it just feels like a trying clownshow. That said, I love the fact that their son is Michael Cera. I laughed out loud, because his awkwardness makes perfect sense for the offspring of those two characters. I didn’t care for his performance though. He seemed to have the wrong energy for the show, and his little monologue about “paying his respects” went on forever.

(Here’s where we go on an “Andrew’s Reaching With This One” detour. My pet theory is that Wally is Lynch and Frost parodying James Hurley. Wally has the leather jacket, the motorcycle, the criss-crossing the country, and the faux-poetic but mostly painful dialogue delivered in a faux-soulful but mostly painful way. Maybe I’m giving too much credit to what would otherwise be a pretty rough performance from Cera, but maybe it’s so bad because it’s replicating/poking fun at something that was so bad in the first place.)

Really, all the scenes with the original players at the Sheriff’s office went on forever. We get to see Bobby again, and learn that rather than going into business with Ben Horne, he himself became a cop. Oh yeah, and he’s still a terrible actor. I mean, holy cow, I thought that maybe in the previous quarter-century, Dana Ashbrook would have had some life experience to draw on to make his tearing up at the picture of Laura Palmer even the slightest bit convincing, but nope. Same ol’ Bobby. Same ol’ overwrought, unconvincing shtick.

But hey, at least there’s the great Robert Forster, of Jackie Brown fame, to play Harry Truman’s brother and substitute sheriff Frank Truman. He brings a certain world-weary gravitas to the role. As much as the return visits to the sheriff’s office to see the same reheated comic stylings I disdained in original recipe Twin Peaks doesn’t do much for me, but I like the sense, mostly delivered by Forster, that there is, to be too cute about it, a new sheriff in town, who seems to be suffering these fools gladly out of a sense of obligation while the other members of the department do the real work. I’m at least curious as to what the deal with Harry is, so that’s something. Otherwise, the portions of the episode actually set in Twin Peaks are a bust.

Even the parts with Gordon, Albert, and Tammy going to meet The Bad Dale are not all that great. For one thing, I sort of revile the Tammy character. Her performance isn’t very good, the cinematography male gazes the hell out of her, and she seems to only exist to ooze sexiness, which seems churlish at best. The scene where the G-Men talk to Bad Coop is strange, but more in a stilted way than in a cool Red Room sort of way. Maybe that’s intentional, to help convey that something is off and it’s palpable to Gordon and Albert, but the scene goes on a long time without much happening.

At least we get some interesting plot hints out of the deal. The notion that Albert gave Philip Jeffries some information to pass on to Bad Coop since he thought Coop was in trouble, that it led to the death of one of their agents, and that Bad Coop is trying to get out of this jam by pretending he’s been working undercover is an interesting one. Like most things involving Twin Peaks, I don’t know where they’re going with it, but it has promise.

I’ve said before that I wish there was an easier way to distinguish between a middling grade that means “mediocre throughout” from one that means “half brilliant” and “half terrible.” That’s this episode to a tee, because while much of the material here is questionable, everything focusing on The Good Dale as “Dougie” is just amazing.

Watching the stupefied Good Dale wander around the casino, his neighborhood, his home, and have no one recognize or acknowledge that he’s in real trouble is just an amazing choice. There is something genuinely Kafkaesque about it, and the idea that you have someone who has the mind of a child at the moment, who has clearly suffered something traumatic, and yet because everyone is just worried about the effect his actions will have on them, nobody helps them.

It’s an incredibly effective commentary on human nature. The casino owner, the limo driver, the old acquaintance (Ethan Suplee) and Dougie’s wife (Naomi Watts!) don’t make any effort to get him the help he clearly needs! Everyone’s just playing their role, making threats and demands and assurances to this guileless naif of an individual who is so clearly not all there.

It’s a brilliantly constructed set of scenes, ones where The Good Dale’s ability to repeat things drives just enough of the action to get him home and move the story forward. I’m going to run out of ways to compliment MacLachlan’s performance here, but the way he crafts this persona that is so vacant and lost, but with little peaks of the old Coop rising up here and there, is just incredible. And I love the callbacks and visual echoes that help bring those about, from Cooper’s awkward thumbs up with his son (a la Senor Droolcup), his look in the mirror (a la the final moments of the original series), and of course, his damn fine cup of coffee.

But what’s really striking, and what makes the inherent critique of how everyone treats Dougie so damning, is that the only person who seems to actually see Dougie, to realize that he needs help and respond to him in a non-self serving way is a child. Unlike everyone else in Dougie’s orbit, Sonny Jim has no agenda, which means he doesn’t project worries or imagined threats or his own crap on this man who is practically a blank slate. Instead, Sonny Jim just guides his dad, puts syrup on his plate, and actually responds to the man.

It’s half a comedy sketch from something like Animaniacs, and half an existentialist short story, and I love every minute of it. Unlike in the rest of the episode, the awkwardness of this diminished individual stumbling around, nigh-mindlessly repeating whatever’s said to him, and having the world plot and proceed like he isn’t behaving like some kind of stroke victim, only heightens the tragedy and absurdity of the situation. Separate and apart from Twin Peaks, it’s just this brilliant little vignette that could absolutely work on its own and which puts Dale Cooper in the company of Gregor Samsa.

But that tends to be what Twin Peaks is for me, even at its best. Some brilliant thing at the center, surrounded by tons of corny or dull crud that blunts its impact. It’s a thrill to see the G-Men back in action again, and the Cooper-focused portions of the story are, as usual, tops, but the further the show pulls away from that, the more it devolves into the same shlocky meh-ness that put me off the show originally.