Review of Twin Peaks: The Return 1.13

Twin Peaks may not always be comprehensible or comprehendible (well, almost never), but it's always good for a laugh, with a variety of visual, acoustic, and linguistic punchlines, and just some good old-fashioned gags (and I don't just mean scenes that make you feel like gagging).

For example, in last night's episode 1.13, we get the following: Anthony Sinclair (played by Tom Sizemore, who looks like Michael Madsen, you get a lot of that in Twin Peaks, too) can't bring himself to kill good Cooper (still mostly in a stupor) via poisoning his beloved coffee. So Sinclair takes the tainted coffee to the men's room, pours it in down a urinal, and the guy standing in front of the next urinal comments, "that bad, huh?" To me, that's really funny. (Marshall McLuhan always liked to say that behind every joke is a grievance. The grievance in Twin Peaks is that it makes no sense—i.e., is not a linear narrative.)

This episode had other good news for good Cooper last night. In the same scene as above, he gets a piece of cherry pie along with his coffee! It may not be the diner's patented cherry pie and coffee, but hey.

And bad Cooper has a good night by his standards, too. He not only bests mean Mr. Clean in an arm wrestle, but kills him with just one punch. He also (unknowingly) sends that green ring back to the other dimension where it surely belongs.

And the song—well, last night we did get a complete song. James Hurley is back with the worst singing of the season, including two women who can barely (I almost spelled this bearly) hit a note in the background. But this is a definite improvement over last week, when we got no song at all—and it was nice to see that woman in the venue so moved by the performance.

And in another departure, we got a little action after the end of the song—barely, but it was a new scene. But here's a question: who owned the hand in the other dimension that received that little green ring? Just asking.