LeftHandedGuitarist

Loved the last scene where Scotty and Worf growled at each other :)

[3.2/10] This one was pretty rough. A boatload of idiotic plot developments, worse dialogue, and every other character giving some wistful monologue about something that happened long ago. Let’s dive-in shall we?

First, the good stuff. It wasn’t nearly as effective as the end of the last episode, but I appreciated the low-grade Michael Meyers business with Leo and Shelly. Sure, it doesn’t make much sense -- for instance why were all the doors locked from both the inside and the outside? And it’s pretty cheesy that everybody escaped that encounter essentially unscathed, but there was at least some shlocky, horror-esque fun to be had.

Speaking of shlocky fun, that seems to be what the show is going for with the Windam Earl storyline as well. Again, it feels like a proto-Hannibal Lecter and/or Dexter Morgan kind of shtick. There’s at least some intrigue in the fact that he taught Cooper everything he knows, and he’s good enough not to leave fingerprints or fibers, making him a real challenge for Coop & Co. The catch is that 1. The whole chess symbolism thing is still super corny and 2. The fact that Cooper was romantically involved with Earl’s wife and that Earl maybe killed her feels like a bridge too far.

A lot of stuff in this episode feels like a bridge too far, twists for the sake of twists. We already knew that Mrs. Marsh was likely setting James up somehow, but why the show has devoted so much time to this tedious storyline, god only knows. Mrs. Marsh seems to have some remorse, having had her husband die in a car accident (which would conveniently point the finger at James) at her “brother’s” behest, but apparently falling for stone-faced James anyway. Of course, Donna has to be shoehorned in (with the return of their little ballad), and now we’ll get a dull Bonnie and Clyde deal with the cops after the two of them, swell.

At least in terms of bonkers, so-bad-it’s-good territory, Ben Horne and Dr. Jacoby waving confederate flags and singing songs about Dixie is...striking. Truth be told, I kind of like the idea behind this -- that Ben has been defeated in the real world and so the only way for him to get his mojo and his sanity back is for him to win a war for the historical losing side. Of course, this being Twin Peaks, it’s done in a terribly cartoonish fashion, but there’s something comic about the looniness of it all.

The same can’t be said for the Andy/Dick/Lucy storyline. It’s all so broad, with Lucy in particular feeling like a bad sitcom stereotype throughout all this while the two guys play standard male dumdums. Dr. Hayward setting them straight about Little Nicky’s life of misfortunes should, at least hopefully, put a merciful end to that portion of their storyline, but I doubt it.

I doubt it if for no other reason than Lana, the Mayor’s brother’s widow, appears to be a literal succubus and I have to imagine she’s related to Nicky somehow. (In fact, I bet the child she and the Mayor want to adopt turns out to be Nicky.) The fact that the Mayor holds her at gunpoint and the crew of the sheriff’s office just leaves him alone with her is straight up nutbar. I’m not really interested in seeing where this is going, but I’m sure it’ll be some supernatural mumbo jumbo, and not in a good way.

That’s also my feeling about the dip we take into Major Briggs’s storyline here. Again, I like that he’s shaken from his experience in the White/Black Lodge and questioning his loyalty to the airforce, but this is another “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory” plotline. The show should either just keep Briggs off screen until something meaningful happens in the story, or actually advance the plot in his appearances.

Catherine revealing the fact that her brother is alive to Pete is yet another tedious scene, where Andrew delivers loads and loads of exposition that I could just as well do without. (And all this crap with the Eckerts feels just sort of tossed off conveniently to boot.) There’s lots of that in this episode for whatever reason, whether it’s that or Coop talking about what happened with Earl or Dr. Hayward giving Nicky’s backstory. None of it is natural and much of it is full of plot holes.

Otherwise, Bobby and Audrey’s story continues to be a slow moving waste, Norma and Ed’s getting together is the same, and Leo running into Windam Earl in the forest is unbelievably serendipitous and convenient, though maybe you can chalk it up to the evil woods putting a thumb on the scale or something.

Overall, this is a real dog of an episode. I have to admit, my patience with the show is starting to wear thin, but there’s only eight more episodes so I’m going to strive to see it through.

HOLY SHIT. they actually cut ofglen's clitoris or am I wrong?

[3.2/10] Well, this was a real stinker. The one saving grace of the episode happens in the last five minutes where Major Briggs returns from his mysterious journey to embrace his wife and calm his son, in his own peculiar way. Bobby is still one of the worst actors/characters on the show, but for a split second there, when he’s comforting his worried mother and telling her that things will be okay, it felt real, like capturing the truth in this art, rather than just being a garish, cartoony bit of slop. It’s an odd place to find such a thing, in the midst of the family patriarch returning from being beamed to the white lodge or some such thing, but there’s real feeling there in a way most of this show can’t manage.

But boy, is there a lot of downright junk throughout the rest of the proceedings. Let’s start with the worst offender which is, as usual, James Hurley. Him stumbling into this weird Dallas-like world of wealth and spousal abuse and femme fatales has the benefit of keeping him away from the rest of the show, but it’s real overwrought crap. The monologuing brother of Mrs. Marsh, waxing rhapsodic about he vowed to stand up to the overbearing husband and didn’t, is painful in his awfulness, and Bobby still can’t emote to save his life.

That’s not a problem Nadine has, though again, her story still feels like something from an entirely different show. I again ask, where the hell is this storyline going? What is the point of it? Is it just supposed to be comic relief? Is it some commentary on how Ed infantilized her? Is it just to give the character something to do? I have no idea, but while the image of Nadine military-pressing Mike over her head is kind of kookily fun, it definitely feels like the show is spinning its wheels with Nadine.

But it’s barreling toward some strange, supernatural stuff with, of all people, Lucy, Dick, and Andy. While the dismal slapstick comedy of Andy and Dick mentoring Little Nicky was a big misfire for me, I’m even less enamored with the idea that Nicky might be literally cursed. Now maybe this is all extrapolation and Nicky’s caseworker (Molly Shannon!) saying that Nicky’s face a lot of misfortune isn’t meant to be some kind of repeat of The Omen. But this is a show that isn’t afraid to go that direction with things, and I have to admit it strikes me as a pretty dumb thing to wrap the comic relief portion of the show in. (Though I have to admit, I cracked up when the guys imagined Nicky in a little devil costume laughing maniacally. It’s ridiculous and dumb, but funny.)

I wouldn’t think much of it beyond giving the Lucy/Andy/Dick triumvirate something to do, but then you have the titular black widow, whose elderly husband dies seemingly in the throes of passion, but perhaps something more sinister is afoot. The scene closes with her having enraptured all the young men in the sheriff’s department, in a way that feels preternatural and not just a bunch of guys fawning over a pretty young woman. The fact that she too claims to be literally cursed, in the same episode we hear that about Nicky, suggests that there’s something mystical/magical happening here, with possible malevolent purposes if the dead hubby is any indication. I can’t say I’m enamored with all of this, but maybe it’ll give the now-listless show some direction.

Speaking of which, there’s some development in what I guess has become the main storyline of the show now, namely exonerating Cooper after the setup from Hank, Jean Renault, etc. His coin-flip decision to visit the “Dead Dog Ranch” with his realtor leads him to find the place where the show’s bad guys executed their plan to set him up. It’s another instance of some supernatural force guiding him to the answer. I’d call it convenient, and it is, but I guess we’re supposed to take something from his being preternaturally guided to these places.

I’d be lying if I said I was particularly engrossed by the storyline, but it does give us more Denise, who is, surprisingly, quickly becoming one of the best characters on the show. She’s kind of no-nonsense despite having an unusual lifestyle for 1991, and it makes for an interesting balance for the character. And it gives Audrey something more to do, stealing Bobby’s pictures of the deal going down to pass on to Coop, who can then exonerate himself. Audrey seeing Denise and realizing that there can be female agents (“more or less” according to Denise) seems to open up an entire new world for Audrey, and all of a sudden, her dreams of getting out of this town seem less married (figuratively or nigh-literally) to Dale Cooper.

Of course she’s also toying with Bobby in another storyline that does nothing for me, as the now suited-up dweeb is still the annoying little chump he always was. But now he’s paired up with a gone-off-the-deep end Ben Horne whose taken feng shui to ludicrous extremes and is tracking Hank so that he doesn’t lose One-Eyed Jacks. Screw-loose Ben Horne is, perhaps, slightly more interesting that generic 80s businessman Ben Horne, but neither of them is particularly compelling.

That’s the problem with a lot of Twin Peaks post-Palmer era. While I’ve never been much of a fan of this show, the very least it had going for it was a strong central mystery that the rest of the events of the series could be built around. While often it was pretty contrived, everyone in that town had a connection to Laura, and so it made sense to trace Twin Peaks’ reaction to the death of one of the town’s stars.

But without that throughline, we’re left with a mere collection of events that are only tied together for happening in and around the same place. That means they rise and fall on the quality of the individual stories and characters, and that has just never been Twin Peaks’s strong suit. When its few distinctive and complex figures -- Cooper, Audrey, maybe even Denise -- come out to play, the show can still be compelling. And on those rare occasions when its main personalities feel like real people experiencing real emotions and not overbroad soap opera nonsense, like in the quiet moment between Bobby and his mom, there’s something worthwhile there.

But for the most part, without that mystery to tie everything together, Twin Peaks is just a big mishmash of undifferentiated cheese, and that doesn’t do anyone, in the show’s universe or for those watching at home, any good.

[4.8/10] I’ll admit, despite my tepid review, there were parts of this one I enjoyed, particularly the opening act of the episode. While I found it kind of trying at first, David Lynch himself as Cooper’s hard-of-hearing boss, offering well-intentioned encouragement turns out to be a pretty funny bit in small doses. And Cooper facing down the investigation from internal affairs seems to have some legs. In a particularly amusing moment, Cooper offers one of this metaphysical-minded aphorisms about the town and his life, and the investigator offers a laugh-worthy “what the hell was that?” in response. We’re often wondering the same thing, fella.

The investigation ends up proving to be the strongest part of the episode. That dovetails, surprisingly, with the debut of Denise (David Duchovny!) as a DEA agent assigned to the investigation. Look, it’s 1991, so the attempts at tolerance are more than a little patronizing, and the show can’t resist having Harry having a laugh at her expense, but there’s a surprising amount of empathy for Denise as a trans woman for a show that aired twenty-five years ago. The best exemplar of this is Cooper, who is initially thrown upon seeing the woman he previously knew as Dennis, but then immediately adjusts and treats Denise with the same respect and kindness he treats everyone else. It gives the “this looks like a frame job to me, but you have to prove it” direction the episode goes something more than just another major plot to occupy the show post-Laura Palmer.

The other side of the coin is that the show seems to be introducing a lot of new crap to try to fill that vacuum, and most of it is godawful. The peak of this is the reveal that Catherine’s brother Andrew (a.k.a. Josie’s husband) is still alive and this is all a part of some plot the Martells have been cooking up. Let’s nevermind the fact that this would necessarily be so baroque a plan as to lose all credibility, but even so, it’s such a soap opera move (yeah yeah, I know Twin Peaks is riffing on soap operas) that I legitimately laughed out loud when he emerged from the other room.

The show bringing Josie back into the fold wasn’t my favorite thing in the first place, just because the actress isn’t terribly good and her romance with Harry is one of the least interesting things about a pretty strait-laced character. But this is a silly direction to take her, giving her a painfully cliché backstory and making her Catherine’s maid. (Though I neglected to mention in prior write-ups that as borderline offensive as it was at times, and as goofy as it is, I kind of liked the reveal that the Japanese investor was Catherine. It’s the kind of bonkers surprise that delights in its ridiculousness rather than makes you laugh at its stupidity. It’s a fine line, I’ll admit.

The runner-up award for worst new storyline goes to, who else, James Hurley, who conveniently finds some femme fatale with a derelict husband who wants James to fix her car and stay at her house while the hubby is away. (Presumably with sexy results.) Both James and his new likely paramour are bad actors (though it’s hard to tell given how painfully bad their dialogue is) to where the most one can hope for is that they’re quarantined to this bad part of the show so that it doesn’t infect everything else.

We also continue apace with Nadine’s adventures in high school, something that is, I am ashamed to admit, is kind of winning me over in its “so bad it’s good” qualities. To be frank, this feels like something from a different show, maybe a direct-to-video live action Disney Channel movie. But it’s unbelievably silly and totally unclear as to where it’s going that I can’t help but laugh at how insane the whole thing is.

I’m much less enamored with what’s supposed to be the comic relief here, namely the interactions between Deputy Andy, Dick Trelane, and the moppet who’s Dick’s “helping hands” buddy. The hijinx that they get into at the Double R Diner are sub-Little Rascals quality, and while there’s something kind of endearing about Andy trying to “kill ‘em with kindness” the charm wears off quickly.

We also get some of what appears to be foreshadowing for Cooper. Some of it comes from Hawk, who offers a hokey and again, borderline offensive dose of indigenous people’s wisdom about the “Black Lodge” and “White Lodge.” And we also get a cheesy Hannibal Lecter routine on audio tape from Cooper’s former partner who’s playing a literal chess match via the mail and underlining that fact with ponderous, overdone metaphors about how the game mirrors their real life tete-a-tete.

There’s a bit more legitimate entertainment at the wedding between the mayor’s brother and some young (probably) golddigger. Sometimes this show does best when it’s light on its feet and just gives you quick scenes of silly stuff around the town and its cast of oddballs without having to linger on any one of them long enough to deliver a monologue. But surprise kudos to Ben Horne, whose viewing of an old movie and reciting Shakespeare was actually mildly affecting. I didn’t think the guy had it in him.

Overall, more of the usual mixed fruit tray of mostly crud with a few ripe bites here and there. Let the “bad period” of Twin Peaks continue!

totally love this episode! great to see that there is still in individual inside the borg

I was prepared to be irritated after watching yet another episode about Riker finding a playmate, but this was a very good, very intense episode.

This took an interesting turn into parallels concerning homosexuality, transgenderism and conversion therapy. While I found the topic of the episode very interesting, the majority of the episode's pace was too slow for me and I didn't find Riker engaging. I think I would've preferred another character to have had this arc, although I understand why Riker was chosen. However, I found the last 15 min. very compelling starting from Riker trying to take the blame and Soren's subsequent speech.
It's been nice to see the friendship between Worf and Riker these last two episodes. I'm happy that they're able to be there for each other, even when they don't always see eye to eye. I feel really bad for how things turned out for Riker at the end. I can imagine how heartbroken he must feel at how things ended between Soren and him.

At the end of S2 I was very anxious about the direction the season finale set back then.
Most of the time I felt this Season was very weak overall and confirmed my reservations more often than not. The plot is getting way too fast, way too big to stay what made iZombie so great. Just like Ravi said in the last scenes, it all started in the morgue. Now it's too big to stay there. I like that iZombie is moving the plot forward and doesn't stay for years and years in one place, story-wise. But I'm still not onboard with how fast that is achieved. Mainly because it was this "small" group of people we followed and we, as the audience, were the "selected few" to follow along. It's the same feeling Friends gave and still gives me. This season, on the other hand, broke this off without the proper care, without a good transition by focusing too much on other things like the military corps.
Now I do have my doubts whether a fourth season is going to get me this feeling back. But it did get a lot of setup this season to become even greater than it ever was. Yet I remain cautious.

While the season was overall weak and I am not too happy with it as a whole, despite some really good episodes, this second part of the season finale was by far the best episode. We got a lot of answers, a few sideplots were concluded (more or less) quickly to make room for the next season (business as usual) and new stories. All my issues here and there do not make this season bad, though, but by direct comparison with S1 and S2, S3 simply lacks on many things. Things I hope S4 will make better.
But no matter how good S4 will be, Major, as a character, was simply destroyed this season. I loved that guy at the end of S1, in S2 he was still pretty darn cool, S3 on the other hand....ughh. I don't like him anymore, can't relate to his changes, even though S3 followed him closely in how people treat him and stuff. He's this muscled, good looking and now hollow character. That's probably the biggest bummer in S3. Besides the loss of the cure sideplot. I tink that was pushed too much into the background just to resurface for tension reasons at the end.

Clive getting his girl back in a tragic way was great.
Liv getting back to her new-old self, the pale zombie, was overdue and Ravi is just being the best, like always.
I would have been so pissed if that end scene would have been exactly that for iZombie.

S4 was announced in May despite somewhat low ratings, even for iZombie.
http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/izombie-season-four-renewal-cw-tv-show/
I like that iZombie started on The CW, other networks probably would have cancelled this ages ago.

Just like in Orphan Black an episode where a character says s/he's gonna leave.

In like 9 out of 10 cases it raises either a death flag or is a red herring to fill an episode.
Either way, the character isn't going to leave. In this particular case I instantly thought Natalie taking Major to Italy raised a death flag for her. It'd be weird letting Major leave the show right now and she's the reason for him to potentially leave, so she needs to go to resolve it.
And then that totally unexpected end. Damn you, iZombie.
Finally Major is reunited with Natalie and then that. Although, I am not a fan that the character Major is degraded to a guy who sleeps with every woman who's not running away because he's the chaos killer kidnapper.
But I liked the irony of Liv claiming she's wearing a wig and a ton of paint while in fact it's usally the other way around.
Then again, I don't like Liv as a human as much as I like her as a zombie.
Overall a good episode, though, even if a bit tame in terms of brain-of-the-week than I expected upon reading the synopsis.

[7.3/10] I think I owe Ray Wise an apology. Leland Palmer grief-stricken jigs were one of my least favorite parts of the first season, and certainly one of the most laughable, and I had pretty well written the character, and by extension the actor who played him, off. Coffin-surfing and show tunes and more overwrought falling to pieces just struck me as too much, verging into, at best, “so bad it’s good” territory.

But now that he can fully play up Bob’s predatory instincts, his malevolent glee, his unhinged villainy, Wise is a revelation. In his first interaction with Donna in ages, he is so unbearably creepy. “Arbitrary Law” does well to tease and taunt the audience, putting Donna in the place Maddy was two episodes ago, in the same corner, while this shark of a man starts to pen her in. From his skin-crawling touching of Donna’s hair, to his awkward dancing that quickly turns into creepy dancing, to the same lewd gestures he performed before killing Maddy, Wise’s take on Leland goes all out in seeming to come this close to striking again.

He, of course, doesn’t, and a last minute reprieve for Donna thanks to Sheriff Truman leads him back to the Roadhouse for Cooper’s last seance, or whatever you’d like to call it. That sequence, like most of the show, is a bit hokey, with lightning crashing and showy camera angles. But at the same time, the episode does a nice job of not only attempting to tie all the psychic elements together, but setting a mood to make those reveals meaningful.

So we have all, or almost all the major players in one room -- Ben, Leland, Leo, the cops, and even, by serendipity or providence, Major Briggs escorting the senile bellhop. It’s then that Twin Peaks plays its hand. Leland’s dancing connects with The Man From Another Place’s little boogie. The “gold circle” that Gerard warns Cooper about in a severe and unnerving fashion comes back in the form of The Giant returning Cooper’s ring to him. The senile bellhop offers a stick of gum to Leland, serving as the cosmic force of the universe essentially fingering him as the killer in light of the “your gum is coming back in style” comment. In the shadow of all of this, Cooper thinks back on his dream, and for once he can hear Laura’s whispered words -- “my father killed me.”

What’s noteworthy about the scene is how much we already know. We know Ben’s a red herring. We know that Leland is Bob. We know who killed Laura Palmer and to a lesser extent why. And yet, this still feels like a reveal, a momentous occasion -- Cooper not only realizing who the culprit is but deciphering all of the cryptic images and clues he’s seen up until this point. I’m sure half of it is a retcon as I doubt how much of this Lynch & Frost had planned out in the beginning, but it works well enough to feel like a satisfying, if not fully clockwork, resolution of all the mystical symbolism Cooper has been chasing throughout the series.

There’s also some cleverness from Cooper here, realizing the dangerous animal he’s about to try to nab and making Ben the temporary patsy to lure Leland to the station as his lawyer. Again, the episode leans into the shorthand and trust that Cooper and Truman have developed, and the scene where they push Leland into the cell and he begins running around like a crazed beast is both a triumph and a fright.
It’s there that Ray Wise really shines, letting the beast out of his cage and creating a truly ominous and horrific presence. The way he hoots and hollers and toys with his captors as they interrogate him about what happened to Laura and the others gives him the character of an unchained spirit, unconcerned about his current circumstances and revelling in his taunts and his terror. It’s the scariest Bob has ever seemed, and that’s saying something.

But Wise isn’t finished. As usual, things get a bit melodramatic, but he also sells Leland’s remorse, his regret, his revulsion to all that he’s been a party to after Bob pulls the “ripcord” and Leland is forced to remember all of the deeds that Bob committed in his body. The sprinklers going off from Dick’s cigarette is too convenient, but it creates worthwhile imagery of Leland leaving this mortal coil and Cooper easing him into the next world, trying to help him let go of his unimaginable pain.

The only big problem is that Twin Peaks feels the need to sum up too much, both at the conclusion of Leland’s incident and in the aftermath. The scenes speak for themselves, so having Truman wax rhapsodic about what he can or can’t believe, and having the group give their “I sure learned a lot” speeches is an unsatisfying finish to some great work. It also doesn’t help that they’re wondering what’ll happen to Bob results in a cheesy sequence of an owl flying and a freeze frame that looks like the rejected cover of a prog rock album.

There’s also a good chunk of other pretty useless junk in the episode before we get to the meat of it with Leland. The Norma’s mom storyline continues to be entirely uncompelling. The same goes for the James-Donna romance, which never ceases to include the worst dialogue in the entire show on a regular basis as they torture one another (emotionally -- something I have to specify on this show) over Maddy’s death. And Lucy’s paternity situation wears on without end. There’s an awful lot of crap to wade through before the episode really kicks into gear with Leland, and by extension Bob, being exposed.

But once that happens, the show and the episode finds its way and delivers a satisfying wrap-up of the Laura Palmer saga, with enough imaginative verve and dot-connecting to make it feel like this jumble of nonsense was part of a plan after all. And you have my apologies Ray Wise -- you knocked it out of the park here, and for once, the outsized, supernatural world of Twin Peaks felt right at home for someone other than Agent Cooper. Godspeed, Leland. So long, Bob.

[7.7/10] I give Twin Peaks a lot of crap. I think it’s deserved and, frankly, that the show’s reputation is bolstered by the lack of competition when it aired. While it deserves credit for doing things that simply weren’t being done at the time, many shows have since followed that tack and far surpassed most if not all of its achievements, making them look downright quaint, if not outright bad, by comparison.

But by god, I have to give it this -- it answered the “whodunnit” in an unexpected, unnerving way, which felt at once unique, satisfying, and frightening. That is no small feat, and I have to confess that after all the hand-wringing and jumbled up nature of the clues, not to mention the show’s general propensity to make odd or ill-conceived story choices, I expected the reveal to be a letdown, if not an outright facepalm.

Instead, the twist and the answer to the big question -- Who killed Laura Palmer? -- turns out to be Leland, her father. And the episode’s closing sequence, interspersing the weird and ethereal vibe the show has tried to go for from the beginning, with a legitimately scary sequence where the truth is revealed, is without a doubt, the apotheosis of the show.

The virtuosity starts with a nice shot of the log lady, her log nudging its way into the frame, alerting Cooper and Truman that their destiny lies at the Roadhouse. David Lynch directed this one, and while some of his directorial choices have left me burying my face in my hands with this show, he does outstanding work here in shots like that which put the viewer off kilter and set the mood.

Once the trio arrives at the Roadhouse, Lynch goes full-on with his sense of a dreamworld. A singer warbles on the stage, finding the spaces between slow verve-y riffs and smooth, high pitched yawps that establish the otherworldly atmosphere. In a blink, the lighting changes, Cooper is singled out, and the singer is replaced with The Giant, there to tell Cooper that it’s happening again.

It’s then that the Leland reveal occurs. The episode communicates that well by making the reveal visual, with Leland seeing Bob’s reflection in the mirror and cutting back to the other side of the glass with Bob standing there. It’s a tack the episode puts to good use, with several moments in the ensuing incident that cut back and forth between Leland committing these horrid acts and Bob engaging in the same thing. For a show devoted to notions of duality, the grammar of the two parts of Leland Palmer come to life in these horrifying moments and do more to communicate that theme than all the overwritten dialogue the show has offered so far.

The ensuing sequence, where Leland-qua-Bob attacks and (presumably) kills Maddy, reaches peak horror in a way that even the show’s most frightening prior moments (one of the few areas in which the show has excelled) have not been able to match. The gleefulness on Leland/Bob’s face as he pursues Maddy around the room, the terrified screams from upstairs as Maddy screams, the way that Leland/Bob has her cornered and almost seems to be toying with her, are all truly chilling.

I’ve ragged on Twin Peaks for its extended sequences that drag on and on (and if fairness, there’s still plenty of that in this episode, just not in this scene) but Lynch extracts a sense of terrifying realness to making Leland/Bob’s attack of Maddy into essentially one big scene, only broken by the cuts back and forth between the visages of both halves of the persona. There is no time for the viewer to catch their breath, no time to process what they’re seeing, just this skin-crawling parade of moments where a demon possesses a man to, in turn, caress and destroy his daughter. “Lonely Souls” does not shy away from or cushion the blow of that horror, and it gives the reveal a force that much of the show, even in its investigation of the main mystery, has lacked.

The episode then cuts back to Cooper in the bar, as the Giant fades and the scene returns to normal. It’s then that “Lonely Souls” becomes a tone poem, one where Donna seems to feel the weight of all that’s happened, where even execrable Bobby seems affected by what’s going on, where the bellhop who left Cooper lying on the floor bleeding has enough sense of apologize, and the location where so many of Twin Peaks intersected feels like some supernatural weigh station, one where these lonely souls congregate and know harsh truths and strange things meld together into one, grief-fueled dreamscape. It’s the best thing the show’s ever done, and that may not be particularly high praise coming from me, but by god, it’s still something.

As I often say about these things, the episode wasn’t perfect. Maybe it’s my years of having seen one too many thrillers and mysteries, but there was no tension in how the early parts of the episode seemed to point to Ben as the killer. He seemed like an obvious red herring, just because it was too perfect, and he was already too evil, for the show to go that direction. That said, it was nice to see Audrey get to be a part of this in a meaningful way once more, and I can appreciate the show wanting to include some misdirection before the big reveal, even if the feint wasn’t especially effective for me.

In the same vein, we also wasted some time with sidestories that are hitting the same beats again. While we were mercifully spared any more Andy/Lucy drama for one installment, we’re back to Bobby and Shelly having money troubles over the insurance not covering all of Leo’s expenses plus their own. Leo mumbling about “new shows." The mystery of what that means or when he’ll recover more function doesn’t do much for me either.

And Nadine’s scenes have become formulaic now -- she blathers on about something related to high school, Ed goes along with the lie to reassure her, and then she uses her super strength in some way. Like Leo, she’s a ticking time bomb, but I wish the show would either let her tick to something interesting or just leave her in the background until it’s time for her to go off.

But hey, that doesn’t keep “Lonely Souls” or Twin Peaks from getting plenty of credit for paying off the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murderer in an eminently satisfying fashion. Leland really is the last person I would suspect, but the way his disturbed state and connections to everyone were laid out makes him fit the bill nicely (with an admission that the supernatural elements make that a little easier on Lynch and Frost than it might otherwise have been). The reveal that Laura’s killer and abuser was her own father, who was a tool of some sort for an ancient evil, has layers of disturbing qualities that make this far better than “the butler did it.” I haven’t loved every minute of Twin Peaks journey to uncovering who killed Laura Palmer, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t really appreciate and stand back impressed at the way they paid it off.

I... I am not able to rate this episode.

Let me just say that, while there have been some moments of brilliance in the early episodes of this return to the Twin Peaks universe, there have been some things and episodes that have had me a bit concerned. That being said, if everything beyond this episode was crap, it could not diminish the absolute brilliance I witnessed tonight. Started out good, but the sequence that kicks off with the a-bomb explosion has to be the most artful piece of television ever produced to date. Those first few minutes are what Kubrick might have done in 2001 if he'd had the technology. I suspect I'll be rewatching this episode several more times in the week to come. So, if you, like me, have been a bit disappointed at moments with the return, I hope that this episode has restored your hope and or faith in the genius that is David Lynch. I know it has for me. Mind. Freaking. Blown.

The single greatest hour of television I've ever witnessed.

[4.2/10] Look, Twin Peaks just needs to stop trying to write romantic dialogue of any sort, but especially dialogue involving the teenagers. Maybe it’s that the younger actors on the show are not nearly as adept as the adults. Maybe it’s that Lynch & Co.’s conception of what teenagers sound like, or ought to sound like, is just so painfully off that no actor could salvage it, but my god, it is consistently one of the most painful parts of the show and that is no small feat.

Unsurprisingly, two of the worst offenders on that front are scenes involving James Hurley. His colloquy with Donna on the sidewalk after rescuing her and Maddy from an insane, vengeful Harold is the stuff that facepalms are made of. It’s not at all clear what motivated them to reconcile or feel differently than they had been (I guess Donna realizes Harold is a nut which breaks her attraction, and James realizes he cares about Donna enough to rescue her, even though he rescues Maddy first?). But regardless, the lines about how if they just put their two hearts together nothing can stop of them is the worst kind of purple prose and neither of the young actors can deliver it in anything approaching a solid fashion.

The whole sequence involving Bobby’s last minute defense of the two girls is pretty weak too. Maybe I should forgive the show it’s corny swerve, but it’s a very convenient way to get Maddy and Donna out of harm’s way just in the nick of time. There’s something that feels really cheap about that, particularly with the way the prior episode ended on a threatening cliffhanger. I’m not saying I wanted to see the girls hurt by Harold in any way, but anytime you let your characters evade the seemingly mortal peril you set them up for in a cliffhanger without a single real consequence or hardship from it, it’s hard for the conflict as a whole not to feel like a waste.

The other terrible scene involving James is his farewell to Maddy down by the water. It’s another overwritten set of lines, with Maddy talking about how it was nice to get to try Laura’s life on for size and James admitting he was trying to relive his time with her. Those sentiments aren’t bad, but the way they’re put down in the script is overly florid and unbelievable. Sure, teenager can be melodramatic and embellish their speech, but the conversation between Maddy and James never feels sincere, just overblown.

There’s also some horrid stuff with Shelley, Bobby, and Leo. Again, these are all characters who have pretty well outlived their usefulness on the show, to the extent they were useful in the first place. (Though again, it’s worth noting that nigh-lifeless vegetable is the part Eric DaRae was born to play.) Presumably, at some point , Leo is going to wake up and try to take his revenge on Bobby and Shelly, and the two of them bitching about their insurance scam going awry and making out in front of him will come back to bite them. But for now it just seems like a lot of wheel-spinning and table-setting for that seemingly inevitable conclusion.

We also get David Lynch casting himself in his own show, which is always a dicey proposition. (Though technically he was already cast in vocal form as the same character, so maybe there’s a reprieve there.) Him playing Cooper’s boss as someone hard of hearing has some odd comic value to it, so there’s that, and him delivering an avuncular attaboy to Cooper while also expressing some concern that he’s in too deep with this case has some merit in it too.

But hey, we also get some of the biggest and most meaningful progress in the Laura Palmer case we’ve had in a while. Hawk tracks down the one-armed man, and when the folks down at the police station corner him and force him to undergo his seizure without his medicine, the truth comes spilling out. The one-armed man has been possessed by Mike, some sort of supernatural creature who used to be partners with Bob. He basically reiterates the story we got from Cooper’s dream, with a few details here and there.

I’ll admit, I kind of like it. The supernatural elements to this show have often been hit or miss, but this feels well-established, or at least established well enough. The performance from the one-armed-man is a little outsized, but the actor does a good job of distinguishing the somewhat timid shoe salesman from the more self-assured, ethereal being that borrows his form. There’s some hokey parts involved, but it works about as well as it needs to, and it’s one of the few parts of this episode that can say that. I can only hope that, as the show seems to be circling ‘round the endgame for the Laura Palmer storyline, more scenes from the episode follow that tack.

Warning, Spoilers below for some predictions on who killed Laura Palmer

Mrs. Bloom’s guess is that it’s Leland, with her reasoning being that everyone who saw Bob was connected to him in some way, that he himself saw Bob when he was a kid, and that he’s in the hotel all the time, making him a good candidate to be possessed by the evil spirit.

My guess is that it’s Audrey’s brother, the one who wears the Indian headdress all the time. I’ll admit, I don’t quite have the good reasons that Mrs. Bloom does, but she and I were discussing characters we hadn’t seen in a while (what the hell happened to Donna’s original boyfriend, Mike?) and I realized that he’d been MIA for some time. Other than him obviously being at the hotel a lot, I don’t have a great rationale for why he’s the one that Bob possessed, but there’s something about the disturbed manchild who no one would suspect because what motive would he have in this town full of backstabbing and treachery that feels like the kind of faux-profound irony and out of left field answer this show would go for.

We’ll see who’s right! Or if there’s even an answer at all!

[2.8/10] Woof. After having such a rough time with the first season of the show, I blanched a bit at the suggestion that the second season was a step down. “How much further could it go off the rails?” I wondered. How could it conceivably recede from the already paltry levels it had already hit. Well, there’s my answer -- ninety minutes of television that is 90% shlock.

But, as I always try to do when talking about something I don’t particularly care for, let’s start out talking about what’s good about this one. Full disclosure, the opening scene with the senile old room service guy doddering around while Cooper lays bleeding on the floor initially annoyed the hell out of me. The scene drags and drags and is almost excruciating in its duration. But I take that to be the point, and somewhere around the second time the guy returned just to give a thumbs up, it elicited a chuckle for the sheer rake gag-esque audacity of the scene, so that’s something.

We also get the who, if not necessarily the why, of the central mystery of the show. Cooper lays out the details of what he’s pieced together, and the episode reveals, or at least seems to reveal, that Bob, the guy from Cooper’s dream and Mrs. Palmer’s vision, beat up Ronette and seemingly killed Laura. Some of the scene veers into cheese, as nearly everything here does, but the quick, spliced together clips of that grisly final scene are legitimately chilling, and add a level of fright and severity that the show has had trouble establishing outside of myna bird mimics thus far.

There’s also some nice material involving Ed and Nadine. I’ll admit, I’ve come around on this portion of Twin Peaks, which I initially found bothersome. Ed offers a sad and exaggerated but believable tale. He and Norma were longtime sweethearts; he thought Norma ran off with Hank (where presumably there’s more to the story), and Nadine was there for him in a time of need. Ed was impulsive and distraught and married her, but she was so happy and so gracious and so devoted to him (never even blaming him for accidentally shooting out her eye) that he didn’t have the heart to leave her. It’s a little melodramatic, but it’s a good performance from Ed, and the look of wistfulness in Norma’s mind when she sees the husband and wife together adds another layer of pathos to the whole thing.

That said, the theme for this episode seems to be two-fold: 1. Baffling transformation and 2. Doing a collection of really stupid stuff.

The latter assessment may sound harsh, but I don’t know how else to explain some of what seems to be trying to pass for comedy or texture throughout this episode. While the senile room service guy has a certain anti-humor charm to it, the similar attempts at weird or wooly humor are painfully bad. The numerous, extended shots of Deputy Andy’s odd little walk and wobble were dumb as all get out. Leland breaking into a little jig and Ben and Jerry following him was a baffling effort at charm. And the “hospital food is terrible” recurring gags are the hackiest kind of easy crap. I think the show means to be funny here, but it never quite makes it above moronic.

And that’s not the only place where “Giant” be with you makes no sense (in a bad, rather than merely surreal, way). When Ben chases Audrey around the bed, why in the world doesn’t he recognize his daughter’s voice, or the other features besides her face? The whole bit is creepy (which is, in fairness, what I think Lynch & Frost were going for) but it feels like a cheap way to avoid the reckoning the show set up in the prior episode.

That’s not the only nonsensical parent-child scene in the episode. Major Briggs tells his son Bobby about a dream he had where they embraced as family in a wonderful house some time in the future. It’s meant to play as some kind of reconciliation or corner-turning moment for the pair, but it plays as ridiculous as all get out. Much of that can be pinned on the horrible acting from Bobby Briggs, who seems be trying to communicate being sincerely touched, but mugs and renders the reaction implausible.

Then there’s the strange transformations in the episode. Leland Palmer’s hair turns white after he returns from strangling Jacques Renault. So...there’s that. But he’s also happy now, singing songs and passing out during them. I’ll admit, there’s something funny about Ray Wise playing so chipper (and it’s a nice change from his awful cry-dancing routine), but it’s so exaggerated and over the top that it’s hard to take anything from it beyond mild bemusement.

The same cannot be said for Donna’s transformation here, as she seems to be attempting to step into Laura’s persona. Between taking Laura’s glasses, her meals on wheels route, and toying with Bobby, we get an entire change in her personality without the slightest hint as to why or how. Maybe the glasses are cursed or the ghost of Laura is possessing her or some crap like that? It’s weak sauce from Lara Flynn Boyle, and a direction for the character that feels entirely unmotivated.

Oh yeah, and then there’s a soothsaying giant. While this struck me as odd, it’s of a piece with the “people who seem like they’re from an old circus’s freak show give Cooper vaguely-worded prophecy” shtick from the first season. It didn’t do much for me (and certainly didn’t feel as formally audacious as Cooper’s first dream), but it didn’t really bother me either.

In total though, “May the Giant Be With You” may be a new low for Twin Peaks, which had already been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a while by this point. Plodding pacing, more awful dialogue and acting (with Pete joining Bobby as a particularly bad offender on that score), dumb attempts at comedy, and nonsensical character choices. This was a slog, but hey, at least we have Alfred back to voice my thoughts on the ridiculous of this all in-universe. Yeesh.

I consider this to be one of the 10 best ever TNG episodes.

[6.8/10] Hey! What do you know! A decent episode of Twin Peaks! I’m as shocked as you are. What helps this one out is that it divides fairly neatly into a few separate “investigations” going on with respect to Laura’s murder. Not all of them are great, but it gives the episode a coherence and direction that’s been missing in some other parts of the show.

The most interesting of these is Audrey’s. I don’t mean to keep harping on this point, but the scene with her and Cooper is well-done, showing the FBI agent to be a decent guy looking out for the Audrey and wanting the best for her, not just trying to take advantage of her like so many other folks in Twin Peaks do to one another.

But more than that, Audrey is one of the few people beyond Cooper who actually seems clever here. While her effort to infiltrate whatever ring Laura was involved in through her Dad is dangerous and suggests she’d be in over her head, the way she goes about it is pretty smart. Distracting the Dept. store employee, overhearing her coworker offered a job as a “hospitality girl” at One-Eyed Jacks, and then conning that co-worker into giving her the number for “Black Rose” is, as Mrs. Bloom noted, very Veronica Mars-esque in its guile.

One she gets to One-Eyed Jacks, things flag a bit. It feels like more of an excuse for her to slink around, and the scene where she proves to Blackie that she should be working at One-Eyed Jack’s despite her phony resume by seductively tying a cherry stem into a knot is pretty corny and even gratuitous. But thus far Audrey is one of the few people in this show advancing the mystery without resorting to magic, psychic dreams, or super-convenient look-a-likes, so she (and the writers) get credit for it.

Speaking of which, the episode also has James, Donna, and Maddy tricking Dr. Jacoby in order to get a lost tape that Laura sent him. I’m not as big a fan of this part of the episode, because the fact that Maddy is Laura’s identical twin cousin is already a pretty ridiculous element in the show, and so leaning on that fact to drive a major plot point feels like too much.

Still, the notion of using Maddy as a distraction to get Jacoby out of his office so that Donna and James can snoop around is a sound one. There’s some interesting layers of people stalking others (Mysterious POV dude who’s watching Jacoby who’s watching Maddy-as-Laura), but more than anything, it just functions as a straightforward enough way for the young Scooby Doo-esque investigators to find the macguffin and get another piece of the mystery going.

The same’s true for Cooper and the rest of the sheriff’s office. Credit where credit’s due, this show mostly elicits laughter and/or derision from me, but for the first time there was actually something unnerving. Something about Waldo, the myna bird, parroting back Laura’s name and pleas not to be hurt was rightly chilling, and while Leo shooting it at a convenient moment feels like an unnecessary tease, (though the imagery of blood on the donut buffet was striking, if nothing else) it’s another facet of the mystery that helps clear up the picture of what happened that fateful night.

Speaking of which, I appreciate that Cooper and the rest of the team are piecing things together and things are converging at One-Eyed Jacks. There’s a lot of disguises in this episode, between Maddy putting on a blonde wig to play Laura, and Cooper and Ed teeing things up themselves to blend in at One-Eyed Jack’s. (Side note: Ed’s mustache and curly wig make him look like Norm MacDonald playing Burt Reynolds.) I’m sure that’s some vaguely commentary on people being duplicitous or two-faced or hiding things in this town (lord knows we’ve belabored the matter of seeecrets over and over again here), but it’s something.

Still, the boys’ trip to One-Eyed Jack’s has a nice caper-y feel to it, between the disguises, the fake names and the patter with Blackie. It promises interesting things as a wired up Cooper and the rest of the Bookhouse Boys (which is basically the sheriff’s office...plus Ed) close in on Jacques.

That just leaves the continuing machinations around the Mill. The arrival of a life insurance policy for Catherine that leaves the proceeds to Josie reveals that Ben Horne is double crossing her whilst claiming to be double crossing Josie and so forth and so on, because, as Jerry seems to indicate, he wants to buy the land the mill is on for Ghostwood estates. It’s another wrinkle to this endlessly complicated scheme, and doesn’t add that much, but at least it’s a development in the story, a change in the status quo, rather than just tacking on more alliances and backstabbing.

To the same end, Sheriff Truman seems like an idiot for not sniffing out the fact that Josie is playing him (something that Cooper, at least, seems to acknowledge), but there’s the fig leaf that he’s blinded by love or infatuation or who knows what else and can’t see it. Still makes him seem like a dope. And on top of that, Leo figures out what Bobby’s up to with Shelly; Hank figures out what Ed’s up to with Norma, and Lucy finds out that she’s pregnant.

That’s a lot for one episode, but it feels more focused and propulsive than a lot of Twin Peaks ep that just sort of meander from one plot point to another without any real direction or purpose. It’s no great shakes, and there’s not much in the way of meaningful character development (beyond Cooper’s kind of charming “give yourself a gift every day” routine), but it’s the show feeling like it’s going somewhere, not just spinning its wheels, with minimal amounts of overdone dialogue or faux-philosophical meditations on whatever’s knocking around Lynch & Frost’s heads this week. That gives us the most watchable Twin Peaks episode yet.

[5.6/10] I unabashedly love The Room. It has this bizarre, unreplicable combination of incompetence and raw earnestness, of someone putting their soul on a platter for all the world to see with no understanding of how to actually convey that. The end result is one of the funniest and yet purest films you are ever likely to watch.

But it is not a standard that any professionally produced or written show should aspire to, and the funeral scene in “Rest Pain” feels legitimately of a piece with scenes from The Room. I want to be clear here. Sometimes I exaggerate for comic effect when talking about this show and its foibles, but that’s not what I’m doing here. My first thought when seeing the ridiculous outbursts of that graveside scene was legitimately the work of Tommy Wiseau.

Maybe it’s just the would be all-American kid (in this instance, Bobby), overacting and screaming his head off about everyone being hypocrites and to blame for Laura Palmer’s death. Bobby is one of the show’s worst actors (no mean feat) and seeing him contort himself and rant and rave in such a cartoonish fashion calls to mind Johnny’s “Fed up with this world” speech in The Room.

The silly eulogy delivered by the preacher, while the camera darts around to reaction shots of the assembled does the sequence no favors, nor does the slow-motion confrontation between Bobby and James. And by the same token, Leland Palmer leaping onto the coffin and crying out in outlandish, over the top grief, while his wife screams at him for ruining a solemn occasion feels like the loudly-broadcast mishmash of emotions that only come in movies directed by Tommy Wiseau or, failing that, Harold Zoid.

But what’s strange is that the show seems at least vaguely aware of the absurdity of this. Shelley makes fun of the sequence in the very next scene. In the same way, Laura’s identical twin cousin Madeline shows up, “Rest in Pain” seems to acknowledge how silly this is by having the show within a show, a melodramatic soap opera, include a woman playing two different parts in its opening credits. Simply owning up to one’s own ridiculous doesn’t excuse it, but it at least makes you wonder what the show was getting at, why it didn’t do better, what it hoped to achieve, in depicted such goofy scenes and story choices.

Thankfully, there’s a few things that save “Rest in Pain” from succumbing to the worst of Twin Peaks’s tendency toward ridiculum. One of them is the choice to, however briefly, pair up Agent Cooper and Audrey again. As I’ve mentioned before, the two of them are uniquely compelling in a show full of caricatures, and so matching their energies, having Audrey be clearly infatuated by Cooper and Cooper aware of what’s going on with Audrey while being smart enough to hold his place, makes for a moment that’s charged in a way that few others on this show can muster.

I’m also rather entertained by Alfred. Sure, he’s an exaggerated character as well, but he has a proto-Dr. House quality, as he drips with insults about Twin Peaks and its denizens in an amusing fashion, that at least makes his routine funny even if he feels like something out of a sitcom at times. His tension with Sherriff Truman and Cooper, and his steady stream of digs at this town and its people, make for entertaining texture as he drops more clues about what happened to Laura.

We also get clues about how Ed and Nadine got together, and how he and Norma found one another. Credit where credit is due -- I complained about how the last episode took what could be a pathos-ridden character in Nadine and turned her into an object of scorn or fun. But here, it offers a little more sympathy for her, casting her as the “brown mouse” who harbored affections for high school hero Ed, and is grateful that he “came back to her.” It’s not much, but the episode treats her more kindly than before, and suggests why Ed and Norma fell back into their old high school sweetheart habits, as the conveniently-timed threat of Norma’s husband’s parole looms on the horizon.

I even appreciated the supernatural elements hinted at here. While the notion of a secret society, “The Bookhouse Boys,” strikes me as a little hokey, I can appreciate what the show is going for with the broader material it’s aiming at with them. There’s a great deal of talk, from Cooper especially, about how Twin Peaks is an idyllic town, with slices of pie and ducks on a lake and a certain old school simplicity and sweetness that so compels Cooper that he contemplates buying land out here.

But Truman suggests that seeming tranquility comes at a price. Maybe that price is the notion that for all its shiny exterior, there is a darkside to Twin Peaks that, as Bobby butchers in a poorly-written and delivered monologue, nobody in town is willing to acknowledge. But “Rest in Pain” also suggests that there’s something more spiritually wrong with the place as well, that the protection of that paradise comes at the cost of an evil that lurks around the place. The nice down with a dark secret is an old trope, but it’s also a compelling one.

The problem is that it has to be executed correctly, and generic teen bad boys who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag, bog-standard jerk husbands who have all the nuance of anthropomorphized plaque in a toothpaste commercials, good-for-nothing hoodlums who offer accents about as convincing a fratboy on St. Patrick’s Day, and manic cry-dancing dads who only achieves farce when they’re going for feeling, leave “Rest in Pain” as a kitschy mess despite the promise and mild improvement it shows.

The Room is unintentionally hilarious, and Twin Peaks often is too, but nobody wants to make you laugh by accident, especially when they want to make you think or worry or empathize. “Rest in Pain” isn’t that bad most of the time, but it comes too close to the Wiseau line than anyone, viewer or creator alike, should be comfortable with.

[8.2/10] There is no show on television that threads the needle between symbolism and literalism better than Better Call Saul. Part of the show’s success, and that of its predecessor, stem from the fact that it works equally well as an exciting story as it does a commentary on human nature and what relationships with bad or shady people do to us. No character represents that idea better in “Fall” than Kim Wexler.

The scene with her out on the Texas-New Mexico border to interface with her new client works well as foreshadowing, and as a sign that Kim is trying to take on too much by herself and coming close to suffering for it. When her car gets stuck in the dirt, she has so much going on, another tight deadline to meet to try to make up for Jimmy’s possible shortfall, that she tries to take care of it all herself. She find a nearby board, heaves and pushes on the car until it budges, and panics when it starts heading toward a nearby oil derrick. Only by racing into the driver’s seat and slamming on the breaks at the last minute does she avoid a grisly wreck.

It functions as a sign that Kim is juggling too many balls, that she’s letting small but important details slip, with her car as a particular conduit for this idea, in a way that could come back to bite her.

But it also functions as a larger metaphor for what Kim’s going through with Jimmy. She has a problem of being stuck in the muck herself -- with the threat of Chuck’s machinations to get his brother disbarred and Jimmy’s ensuing suspension putting pressure on her to carry the firm. So Kim does what she always does -- she pushes and pushes and pushes until she can get things moving again. Little does she realize that in all that pushing, she may be headed for disaster, and it’s only her frantic heroics that allow her narrowly avoid it. Sooner or later, those heroics will come up short, sooner or later, trying to expend all of her efforts to keep Jimmy out of that muck will backfire on her. It’s only so long that she can go to such lengths and avoid that crash.

Everyone’s hustling hard to avoid a crash in “Fall,” though most of the plots of the episode involve financial decisions rather than ones involving dirt and chrome. That includes Mike who, in a brief scene, does his due diligence with Lydia to make sure he’s putting his name down with the right people, but it also includes Jimmy, who is pushing hard to speed up the timing of his payment from the Sandpiper case.

To that end, he finds roundabout ways of putting pressure on Irene, the named plaintiff, in settling the case so that he gets his percentage of the common fund. That means, plying her with cookies to take a look at the latest letters advising her as to the status of the case. It means giving her a free pair of walking shoes to make her look like a big spender. And it means going so far as to rig a bingo game to make it look like fortune keeps smiling upon her at the expense of all her friends and erstwhile well-wishers.

Many of these sequences are funny. It’s amusing to see Jimmy decked out in full mall-walker gear as he puts in plan into motion. There’s something undeniably entertaining about Jimmy being ensconsced in a spirited session of chair yoga when turning Irene’s friends against her. And it’s enjoyably silly hearing him play “let’s you and him fight” while playing innocent in the Sandpiper lobby. There is a prosaic quality to Jimmy’s treachery here, and his million dollar payday requiring him to hobnob with a pack of old ladies creates a certain amount of inherent farce.

But it also brings a cruelty, a cavalier and callous quality to the story. Jimmy is not entirely without scruples – there is a moment of hesitation, a momentary wince, when he sets the rigged bingo balls into the chamber – but in the end he’s willing to turn poor, innocent Irene into an outcast, to leave her crying in a back room from the ostracism, to get what he wants. That’s who Jimmy is. When he’s in a tight spot, it doesn’t matter that this is someone who is kind to him, who trusts him, who was his key to getting the Sandpiper case in the first place – he wants what he wants and he’ll do what he needs to do to get it, regardless of how dishonest, crafty, or cruel he has to be to do it.

The same, appropriately enough, is true for Chuck in “Fall.” When the malpractice insurance providers show up and declare that they’ll double the premiums on every lawyer in the firm so long as Chuck is in practice there. Chuck vows to see them in court, and Howard, initially kindly and then more forcefully, suggests that Chuck ought to retire. Howard tells his partner that there’s a place for him at the local law school, and less gently, that he no longer trusts Chuck’s judgment.

It’s easy to see Howard as just as mercenary as anyone here (including Jimmy, whom Howard accuses of being like Golem as he tries to move a settlement along), but he’s not wrong. Chuck seems to legitimately be a great legal mind, and he genuinely appears to be getting better, but he has his vendettas, his blindspots, his irregularities that, understandable or not, have made him a liability to the firm he helped create. It’s hard to accuse Howard of any sort of altruism in this, but he’s been supportive of Chuck, stood by him, and it’s not unreasonable for him to reflect and say that Chuck is doing more harm than good to the company that bears his name.

But Chuck doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about outrageous premiums or putting his firm’s good name on the line as part of a byzantine plan to catch his brother in the act, or even about destroying his firm by trying to cash out his share. He puts on a show for Howard, one that sees him having turned the lights on and used an electric mixer to try to puff himself up in front of a friend-turned-adversary, to show Howard that he is not the crazy man who ranted and raved on the stand but a sharp thinker making great strides who can either be a vital asset or a one-man poison pill depending on which side Howard chooses.

That’s the thing about Chuck, and his brother for that matter. They are willing to destroy, or threaten to destroy, the lives and livelihoods of the people around them to achieve their own goals, and damn the consequences. (Those consequences may, providently enough, make Howard more likely to want to settle the Sandpiper case in order to have some liquidity and cash on hand.) Even the people close to them, who have helped them and looked out for them, are not immune from suffering in their wake.

That catches up with Kim in the end. She can’t celebrate with a miffed Jimmy when he brings in a fancy bottle of booze in honor of his scheme to prompt a settlement working, because she has to do much to do to try to cover his behind. There’s been hints that her efforts to do it all herself rather than deal with her lingering concerns about Jimmy were going to hurt. There’s the five-minute naps in the car before meetings at Mesa Verde. There’s the near-miss out at the oil derrick. There’s other instances where simply being proximate to all this mess has put Kim in harm’s way.

As always, the show shoots it beautifully. There’s something quietly ominous about the silence in the car after Kim rehearses her speech. The scenery outside the window starts to fade away. Suddenly, in a blink, the accident hits. She moans in pain as she pulls herself from the wreckage. Her carefully-crafted binders blow away in the wind. Smoke billows into the austere New Mexico landscape as she surveys the tumble of metal and legal documents before her. This is, despite all her efforts, despite all her attempts to carry everything on her own back, something unavoidable.

That’s the rub of “Fall” and of Better Call Saul. Except when facing one another, the McGill brothers almost always get what they want. They know how to work the system, to tilt things in their favor, to intimidate or challenge or call the bluff of whomever is standing in their way. And because of that, they rarely suffer.

But the people around them do. The people who care about them, who try to help them, who do anything to tarnish their pride or their patience end up worse for being in the unfortunate orbit of these two men, just as Nacho’s father is worse for his son’s association with the Salamancas. It’s never Jimmy or Chuck who has to face the consequences, has to stomach the hardships of their failings or difficulties -- it’s the poor old lady made a pariah so that Jimmy can have a payday, it’s the man who stood by Chuck until it threatened to destroy his firm, and it’s the smart, decent woman who became Jimmy’s confidante, accomplice, and caretaker, straining to keep the two of them from ruin, and finding herself asleep at the wheel, surrounded by crushed chrome and the detritus of her meticulous work.

There is no escaping the McGill brothers. There is no fixing them or correcting them or saving them. There is only the doomed efforts that emerge in their wake, that inevitably end in a crash.

Terrific episode!

Picarde is at this best here, defending the rights of not just one crew member, but, the whole Federation.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again.

[4.4/10] Thank goodness for Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Cooper. That’s about all I can say for the second episode of Twin Peaks. There is such a joie de vivre, a wide-eyed, confident heap of quirk to the character and the performance, that his presence instantly elevates every scene he’s in. From the Batman-like introduction in this episode, to his meticulous evaluation of coffee, pie, and various other breakfast foods, to his ability to sniff out that the Sherriff is seeing Ms. Packard, there’s the sense that Cooper is certainly eccentric, but also scrupulous and good at what he does because of it. It doesn’t hurt that MacLachlan can make Lynch and Frost’s dialogue sound believable in a way that no one else in the cast can.

The only other character in the episode who offers anything of note is Audrey. There’s parts of that I find unpleasant, because her role seems to be to titillate as much as she’s meant to be a legitimate character. But the other side of the coin is that there is an intrigue and an unassuming pathos that cuts through the way she’s uncomfortably cast as a teenager oozing sexuality.

That comes through in her apple cart-upsetting ways. Like everything in Twin Peaks, it’s absurdly over the top, but the scene in which she pulls her pencils out of the cup she just bored into, just to see what happens when the coffee spills everywhere, represents the way in which she is something of a wildcard, willing to stir the pot for the sake of stirring the pot.

But as much as it seems like adolescent nihilism, or causing trouble for trouble’s sake, there’s also the sense that it’s a cry for attention. It’s trite to have the wealthy parents with kids who make problems because they feel neglected, but it’s at least an interesting tack to take in the scene where her dad confronts her for scaring off the Swedish investors with the news of Laura’s death. It’s all a little silly, but unlike most of the characters in Twin Peaks (Dale Cooper excepted) she at least has a presence about her that makes her stand out in a show full of thinly-drawn, stereotypical characters. (It may help that she typically doesn’t have to spit out too much of the series’s abysmal dialogue.)

And no one in the show is more of a flat, stereotypical character than Leo, the abusive husband of Shelley. But before we get into that, let’s tease out the ridiculous, lumpy, love-dodecahedron that the show has going with its teen cast members at the moment. It starts with Leo, who’s married to Shelley, who’s seeing Bobby on the side, who was also dating Laura, who was having a dalliance with James (and possibly two other guys), who is not romantically involved with Donna, who is officially dating Mike. If that weren’t enough, there is Naomi (the eye patch-wearing nut obsessed with drapes), who’s married to Ed, who’s secretly seeing Norma, who’s married to a man in jail. And just to make sure there’s enough tangled romantic webs to really make things convoluted, the Sherriff is seeing Mrs. Packard, who is flirting with Pete, who is married to Catherine, who is schtuping Audrey’s dad. Phwew. Suffice it to say, this is a show where you need a diagram to keep up with all the romantic connections, and it’s utterly, utterly ridiculous.

Anyway, we get Leo’s homecoming with Shelley, where he is viciously jealous (over unfamiliar branded cigarettes in his ashtray) and willing to beat her with soap in a sock over a missing, blood-stained shirt. I’m willing to cut some slack to a show made in 1990, but I can’t help but wince at something as serious as spousal abuse being depicted in such a cartoonish, Halmark Channel-esque fashion.
Rest-assured, there’s plenty more crap where that came from, as we dig deep into a budding relationship between expressionless James and Donna. There’s the grain of something solid there, with the idea that grief provokes strong emotional states in people that sometimes forges unexpected connections, but there’s next to no chemistry between the pair.

It doesn’t help that James has all the ability to emote of a particularly dull Rock, or that Donna is saddled with the cringiest of bad dialogue. Her little monologue about this all seeming like a wonderful dream, but also a nightmare, is a noble attempt to capture the confused feelings that emerge around grief and comfort, but it’s written with all the nuance and eloquence of an episode of G.I. Joe.

That level of depth and subtlety carries on in the scene that Donna shares with Laura’s mom. As if the over-the-top acting the mom had already shown weren’t enough, we get some poorly-done special effects to superimpose Laura’s face on Donna’s to signify that the mom is delirious or out of it in her grief and grasping in vain for her daughter. The frantic screaming when she sees a random dude peeking from behind the couch is too much too, and it’s hard not to laugh when the show at least seems to be going for sincere, grief-stricken emotion.

The thrust of the episode seems to be a dichotomy of Laura as someone who was an upstanding young student on the one hand – dating the captain of the football team, volunteering at meals on wheels, and tutoring Audrey’s mentally-challenged older brother, and a doomed ingénue on the other, two-timing her boyfriend, doing cocaine, and getting lost in dark forests with mysterious people. But it’s a rote sense of duality, the usual Madonna/whore complex without any wrinkles in the early going beyond mystery thrown on top of mystery in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it’ll all be going somewhere.

That’s the best I can hope for this rewatch of Twin Peaks, that eventually all this over-exaggerated camp and baroque plotting turns into something decent beyond its status as an intermittent showcase for Kyle MacLachlan. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The bio-scan and Transporter filters aren't 100% then!? Pathogens do get through

I'm surprised why they didn't just shut off the program, when they went into the holodeck to locate Geordie, instead of searching through the simulated landscape. Seemed a bit inefficient.

Man, when I first saw that Dixon Hill sign, I groaned. I'm very much over that simulation. But then Guinan showed up and that made me excited! Haha.
Those Paxans though. Calm your shit. I wonder what that feeling was that Picard felt at the end. Some sort of intuition? Instinct? Very good though. Now although Data has no emotions, I can't help but feel a little sad for him, having to carry this secret with him, all alone, until he stops functioning. Oh well. Interesting episode.

Colm Meaney and John C Reilly are not the same person. Yeah, I just learned that. Mind blown.

Holy shit! Did they perform a clitoridectomy on Ofglen?

I have to say that while I'm enjoying the story, it's also getting me antsy. I can't shake the idea that not everyone that deserves some sort of punishment will get it, and even then I don't know in what way can these people, specially these women, be rewarded in a way that I can count as a 'win' and it worries me.

[3.4/10] Star Trek, as a franchise, is awfully fond of alternative timelines and parallel Earths and other What If-style imaginations. Well, maybe there’s some alternate universe where The Adventures of Gary Seven became a major hit for CBS, and we all look back on the fact that Gary met Kirk and Spock with the same fondness that people think of the Adam West Batman meeting the Green Hornet flanked by Bruce Lee’s Kato.

But this is not that universe. Instead, it’s one where a viewer like me is left wondering why The Original Series finished its second season by turning over the proceedings to a reasonably dull character the audience has never met before, while sidelining its two main characters from most of the action. A backdoor pilot is nothing new, but it’s odd, to say the least, as a modern viewer watching a show turn its season finale into one big advertisement for another series.

(Don’t get me started on the cheese of Kirk telling Gary and Roberta that they’ll have lots of adventures together in a line that feels proto-ripped off from The Simpsons.)

But hey, it’s not the first time Star Trek has turned significant portions of an episode over to a new character. The problem was that “Assignment: Earth” didn’t feel like an episode of Star Trek. That could just be the result of Kirk and Spock and the rest of the Enterprise crew being put on the bench for most of the episode, but I think there’s more to it. The tone is a bit different, slightly more I Dream of Jeannie than TOS.

It’s also an exceedingly dull episode of the show. Star Trek is not above having uneventful, seemingly interminable middle sections that just sag and sag. But “Assignment: Earth” spends so much time at the McKinley Base where a nuclear bomb orbiter is being launched where next to nothing happens, and it happens slowly. There were times when I seriously wondered if the episode had been running short and so the powers that be just threw in random scenes of characters restating the problem or added in more establishing shots or other wheel-spinning to pad out the time.

That’s really the biggest problem with “Assignment: Earth.” No doubt, the audience would inevitably bristle at seeing their usual heroes put on the backburner in favor of some random half-serious Get Smart ripoff. But even taking the episode as we find it, and accepting that it’s an episode-length pitch for another show, “Assignment” does nothing to make me want to watch that show.

Gary Seven is a pretty uninspired presence. While there’s some intrigue to the character when he uses his little servo pen to best Kirk and company (something done, no doubt, to sell a Trek-loving audience that this guy is awesome don’t you know) and manages to beam down and pursue his mission anyway, Robert Lansing doesn’t offer much of a presence beyond that opening act. There’s a few semi-amusing moments when he banters with his cat (though TOS had already played the “cat that turns into scantily-clad lady” card by this point) but for the most part, he’s a big block of wood proceeding through a pretty perfunctory plot without many good story beats.

The same goes for the annoying Roberta, his young would-be sidekick. I couldn’t believe it was the great Terri Garr playing the role, because Roberta is the cheesiest sort of ditzy sixties foil. The fact that she’s so flighty and throws in weird, character-establishing lines like “that’s why my generation are rebels” kind of stuff just makes her an unpleasant presence in the episode. And there’s little comic or dramatic chemistry with her erstwhile future co-star.

That’s not helped by the fact that the episode repeats a number of things Star Trek has already done. It’s contrived and laughable how blase Kirk is about going back in time to 1968. If time travel were such a casual thing, it would have solved a lot of the crew’s problems from earlier episodes and probably brought a few people back from the dead. Nevermind the fact that it’s silly as hell that they just so happened to go back in time to the year when the episode aired. That alone could be forgivable, but combined with the episode’s other problems it’s just another dent in the fender.

It’s also a pretty ham-fisted anti-nuclear weapons story. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to look askance on a show at the dawn of the nuclear age expressing its anxieties about the threat of global annihilation from fifty years later, but the show lays the whole “terrible risk” thing on pretty thick. To add insult to injury, the mission to mess with the telemetry of the orbiter rocket is a perfectly fine goal in the episode, but there’s not enough around it, with everything basically being reduced to the usual “oh no, we got captured!” stalling for time.

The best the episode can do for Kirk and Spock (beyond having them held at gunpoint by a random security guard) is try to give Kirk some grand dilemma about whether or not to trust Gary Seven and believe him when he says what he’s doing is for the greater good. But the episode drops that for most of its run time, only picking it up at the very end after the duo have basically been background characters for 90% of the episode.

In brief, “Assignment: Episode” fails as an episode of Star Trek, which is understandable, if not exactly desirable, for what is essentially an undercover pilot for another series. But what’s not okay is that it also fails as an episode of The Adventures of Gary Seven, or at least, as any kind of enticement for people to watch this shoehorned-in spinoff. While the premise of a man raised on another planet sent to Earth to help mankind survive the nuclear age has potential, the stone-faced hero with the space-case (no pun intended) sidekick and his feline assistant make for a weak mix when stretched across forty-five uneventful minutes.

The fact that we’re not talking about this as the start of a Gary Seven series suggests that the Paramount executives were not convinced of the potential for a show based around this idea, and after watching this disappointing season finale, I don’t blame them.

Just give Alexis Bledel the Emmy already