Day Three Hundred and One - Twin Peaks: Season 2, Episodes 18 & 19, "Joxer! Joxer the Mighty, you old so and so!"

Well, I'll be damned... I don't think, when watching back in the day, that I ever noticed the bit role for Ted Raimi as an overly enthusiastic biker whom Windham Earle uses to create another human chess piece for him to kill. It's almost worth it, too, despite the melodramatic camera trickery used in the scene to amp up the death. To be honest, I couldn't stop laughing at Leo's shocked, stuttering gasp... it was so bad.

Elsewhere, Truman is almost killed by Eckhardt's girlfriend, Coop courts Annie (and Gordon courts Shelly), Audrey and Wheeler (Billy Zane) grow closer but the timing is wrong, the police go spelunking for pictoglyphs based on Major Briggs and The Log Lady's brands, and Pete tries to solve a puzzle box that Eckhardt left the Martell/Packard family.

I think that the soapy-est scenes of the episodes revolved around Donna snooping after her mother and finding breadcrumbs that seem to imply that her biological father is Ben Horne (making her Audrey's half-sister).

As with the rest of this portion of Season 2 (basically, everything from Leland's death on), it's boring tripe. To be fair, though, it has been getting better. These two episodes were not nearly as bad as last week's, and it feels like some of the groove is coming back, partially due to focusing more on the supernatural mysteries instead of all the annoying melodrama... and the writing has become a little crisper and entertaining once more. The jokes are funny again, too, like when Coop and Gordon excite Truman's epic hangover to expulsion levels twice!

At the very least, the time of rambling expository monologues seems to have passed. Sure, Windham gets a bit of a wind in his sails when he regales Ted Raimi's biker with a modicum of charm before the pointy end, but other than that we're free of the "tell" in "show, don't tell."

While I still can't believe or empathize with Cooper's whirlwind romance of Heather Graham's Annie, it's better than James' black widow storyline. Annie is an interesting character, but a bit too convenient. I'm sure it would've been much more natural to have the romance develop over the entire season, but I get the feeling that she and Zane were more a last minute stopgap to attempt saving the dying show and were just a case of too little, too late (as mentioned before).

I just wish that someone would explain to me why Andy was rappelling through the ceiling tiles. I mean, I get that he was training for the trip to Owl Cave, but why was he doing it directly in front of Lucy's window? Was there no better place to show off his flailing masculinity?

Ah well, just three short episodes to go... one a day through Halloween and we're done!

Quick shoutout to Mike and Nadine consummating their relationship at The Great Northern, and Bobby getting bent out of shape watching Gordon and Shelly share a few chaste kisses. He never treated her right, anyway. Just because he was better than Leo doesn't mean he was all that good for her. Oh god, I'm starting to talk like a soap watcher! Somebody help me!

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~