3x05 Part 5

[5.2/10] Ahhh, there’s the old Twin Peaks I remember, the one where Cooper commands the screen and moves the story along in interesting ways for 15-20% of the episode, and the rest is spent rolling around in heaps of pointless, unfunny bullshit. That sound harsher than I mean it to, but “Part Five” is a let down, if only because despite some dull spots here and there, “The Return” has felt so singular, connected to what came before but unquestionably distinct and innovative. The fifth installment of the revival, on the other hand, felt more like the version of this show that tried my patience considerably.

But let’s focus on the good stuff. While it’s starting to feel like a shaggy dog story in the making, I’m still enjoying the tale of “Dougie” and the inadvertent chaos the stupefied version of The Good Dale has sewn. It’s a slow burn, but Cooper is slowly but surely recovering who he used to be. He’s rediscovered his love for coffee; words like “agent” and “case file” stand out when he’s being dressed down by his boss at the insurance agency, and he lingers around a statue of a cowboy, gun drawn, arm akimbo, lured in by the familiarity of the pose. Even his ability to sniff out whether someone’s spinning lies hasn’t left him. The old Coop is buried there somewhere in this walking blank, and the hints we get of his presence are tantalizing.

It causes trouble for a number of other people though. I never thought Jim Belushi could be scary, but his admonition to the pit boss to leave town, after accusations that he was in on Dougie’s big win, were unexpectedly intense. There’s nothing too engrossing about the ecosystem around the insurance company, but it’s another place where Cooper adds a few flies in the ointment, from stealing coffee to reflexively calling out coworkers. And nowhere is his presence (and absence) felt more than in the car bomb that takes out a couple of thieves and nearly claims the life of the junkie across the street’s son too. As I said about “Part Four,” there’s a sense of existential tragicomedy in the way that this brain-addled man, wholly incapable of any guile or deception or plotting, is the fulcrum for so many other people’s trials and tribulations.

There’s intrigue with The Bad Dale too. His bits move the plot along a bit more, or at least tease it a bit more, with the confirmation that he still has Bob in his head, and his ability to predict when his food is coming. In addition, Lynch & Frost return to their virtuosity at crafting these terrorscapes as a few choice numbers dialed into a rotary phone send the whole prison system haywire, giving Bad Coop just enough time to send on a coded message. Who’s receiving it though? The episode is cryptic about it, but the Argentinian locale where those device-transforming beeps emerge hints that it’s Phillip Jeffries, another point which raises intrigue.

And there’s even something worthwhile to come from the murder case that opened the season and seemed to be practically forgotten. Constance (who seems to be our Cooper analogue for this revival) finds a ring in the stomach of the corpse from the scene of the crime, and it appears to be a gift from Dougie’s wife. The plot thickens, and Constance’s gallows humor about “headlines” and such make her amusing and jejune like Coop used to be.

But then we get back to Twin Peaks, and a few other places where nothing much interesting happens, and it not-happens for a while, and the episode becomes a slog.

I’m sure this is heresy for the faithful, but if we didn’t return to the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office for a few episode, I would cry no tears. Hawk and Andy looking through more boxes of Coop’s old case files brings forth meager comedy or story advancement. Frank Truman getting the third degree from his wife is supposed to add more local color but just wears on. And while the hints that Harry’s had a rough diagnosis piqued my interested, there’s just not enough there to hold onto.

We also don’t really need a long Alex Jones-esque pitch from Dr. Jacoby (now named Dr. Amp) talking about freedom and conspiracy theories and selling his golden shovels. (Though hey, at least that led somewhere!) While it’s nice to see that Nadine’s still around (and completely the sort of rube who’d buy into that sort of nonsense) or that Jerry Horne would tune in, it’s another bit that’s supposed to give us some enjoyable color and just feels like an indulgence.

Last but not least, we return to the hallowed Double R diner to revisit Norma and Shelly and the new kid in town. I like the idea of this part of the episode. Revivals almost always carry an air of tragedy about them, because to revisit the show and have it feasible to get the gang back together, you have to leave tons of characters in stasis. But Shelly (and to a lesser extent Norma) had dreams and hopes to do more with their lives, so to see them still busing tables and serving pies has a twinge of sadness to it.

That’s supposed to be magnified to the mistakes of the past repeating themselves when Becky (Shelly’s daughter, presumably?) asks for money so she can go do drugs and and hang out with her deadbeat boyfriend. (As an aside, there’s something appropriate and a bit amusing about The cycle is repeating, something about Amanda Seyfried’s participation in this revival, since in many ways Veronica Mars felt like an updated version of Twin Peaks.) Shelly and Norma both know the dangers of getting hooked to an intoxicating but ultimately bad young man in your adolescence, and that’s a nice gloss to put over the whole thing.

But as usual with this crew, the performances in the scene are middling at best, and aside from the captivating “the way you love me” interlude, it doesn’t really do anything to make me care about the characters or the scene. The same goes for the grisly bad boy threatening to rape the seat neighbor who asks for a light. It’s an uncomfortable scene, which could maybe be excused as Lynch & Frost deconstructing the old bad boy cliché they themselves have employed multiple times, pointing out that these dark-eyed hunks are not all smiles and puppydogs behind their leather jackets, but that’s probably giving them too much credit.

Overall, it’s a disappointing episode, one that ends the streak of success the revival has had thus far, unsurprisingly, by giving it over to the side characters and new characters who follow them, who were never nearly as interesting as Coop himself.