Not the best episode so far. The dangerous-Agent-Cooper-in-jail story line has moved along an inch or two, when Cooper uses his one phone call to somehow (with touch tones alone) hack into the jail's alarm system. We see the incapacitated-Agent-Cooper-as-Dougie at work (he's in Life Insurance), but it all seems for comic effect; story line barely moved at all.
Most of the rest of the episode is devoted to short vignettes introducing new characters with new threads, which we know from Lynch' Twin Peaks work in general (especially season 2), might be relevant, or might be false leads. For some reason Lynch likes producing that kind of fatigue in his audience.
Specifically: we meet a young couple who is sponging off of Shelly, who still works at the Double R Diner ("NOW, Shelly"...that Shelly), a misogynist/drug dealer who hangs out at the Bang! Bang! bar, and a military career gal who's going to get the "Area 52" branch of the military involved in the ongoing murder investigation in South Dakota.
There is one bright spot in the Dougie story. Although he has a long way to go to recovery, the incapacitated-Agent-Cooper-as-Dougie shows momentary sparks of recognition. Every now and then someone says a word or phrase that strikes a chord in Dougie's FBI self, such as "case file": he stops, repeats the word, and seems to think about it. The best one is the effect the word "coffee" has on him, that really gets a rise! He actually gets his hands on a cup of Starbucks and suckles it likes it's a baby bottle containing life itself.
The brightest spot in the episode is our learning of what Dr. Lawrence Jacoby has been doing with himself. We've seen him receiving a shipment of standard hardware store shovels via UPS. Later, he painstakingly spraypainted them gold. And now we see that he hosts, under the name "Dr. Amp", a periodic video/podcast show about conspiracy theories, the evils of government, and the poisoning of our environment by multinational corporations. He's got a great audience: Nadine, the eye-patched wife of Big Ed Hurley watches. And Jerry Horne, the ne'er-do-well younger brother of Northern Lodge owner Benjamin Horne, tokes up while listening.
And how does Dr. Amp fund his show? He offers his audience a solution: they have to "dig themselves out of the shit." He even shows himself shoveling himself out of a waist-deep pit of brown muck, with what else but his $29.99 Gold Shit-Digging Shovel, available by mail, Order Now! By God, Lynch still has the comedy touch.
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