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~

Day Two Hundred and Ninety-six - Twin Peaks: Season 2, Episode 14, "Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!"

Hoo-boy, and I thought yesterday was a bad night for Twin Peaks and its second season doldrums. In comparison, it almost feels like a pleasant dream. We are quite figuratively reaching critical soap opera mass here in terms of terrible writing and loss of atmosphere.

Where the Agent Cooper of old would rely on obscure practices and folksy wisdom, he now pontificates on times past, reeling off exposition at the drop of a hat but never going anywhere with it. And it's not just him doing so. I've heard more cheesy soap monologues in the last forty minutes than I've heard in the entirety of the rest of the episodes previous combined... and they're bad ones at that.

What... is... happening?

It's like everything that made the series wonderful, mysterious, and stylish has been sucked out of the production like so much marrow from a bone (please forgive the horrendous simile). While the show only occasionally bordered on genius, at least you could always count on it to make you think or scratch your head in confusion at the wacky symbolism and visions. Or you used to be able to, anyway.

Guh.

Coop, newly deputized while he remains on suspension (despite being cleared of all charges), begins investigating the corpse that Windham Earle has left as his move in their chess game. Instead of throwing rocks at a bottle or something else equally ridiculous (but effective) all Cooper does is say he's at a loss... then confesses (in a monologue) to plot and backstory.

Then there's Doc Hayward who does pretty much the same thing about Andy and Dick's orphan problem child, Little Nicky, giving a long, rambling sob story that brings both men to tears. Add to that James and his stupid side story coming to fruition (with a monologue from his black widow lover) and I can't help but wonder if Lynch had literally run out of ideas and was just winging it with cliches and hack writing. Oh, and Leo is up and ambulatory... but more a Frankenstein's Monster than a Jack Torrence, lumbering about as he is with that axe.

Seriously... this is the worst prime time television writing that I have ever witnessed. I could almost forgive it for a meta sort of self-awareness, but they're betraying so much character development that had been building these past twenty or so episodes that I can't even blame the network for canceling. I think that I blacked out all memory of just how bad it got since the last time I watched the series (marathoning my sister's VHS tapes well over a decade ago).

I mean... wow... just, wow.

Thinking back, there's not a single moment of this episode that I enjoyed. The only thing that looked vaguely interesting was when Lucy swatted the fly and left a huge, bloody smear... but not even The Owls were able to pull me up tonight.

We're in troubled times, my friends. Troubled times, indeed, and I'm starting to feel desperate. The only thing keeping me sane is the light at the end of the tunnel that is November, but that will only bring upon me a new, even worse madness (NaNoWriMo). We'll see if I survive.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~