THE
ADVENTURES OF BOOPER COOPLEGANGER IN SOUTH DAKOTA
Dale
Cooper is the primary focus of these first two hours, and so it makes sense to
begin with his doppleganger, introduced after a wonderfully Lynchian POV-shot
of a nighttime drive set to a twisted version of “American Woman,” Cooper’s
doppleganger is a stoically chilly SOB who evidently takes his fashion cues
from Jamie Sheridan’s portrayal of Randall Flagg in 1991’s The Stand.
I’ve
written at length before about Twin Peaks’s preoccupation with twins and
mirrors, and the Coopleganger serves as a dark mirror of Cooper himself – right
down to the preference for handheld recording devices. He’s also a twinned
reflection of BOB, that greasy, longhaired embodiment of primal Evil.
Exactly
what Booper Coopleganger has been up to for 24 years is unclear, but it ain’t
good (and from now on let’s call him “Mister C,” as he’s dubbed in the show
itself, so that I don’t run a goofy joke straight into the ground). There’s
every indication that Mister C’s spent that time wallowing in sin and darkness.
We watch as he recruits two associates, Ray and Daria (whose name, uttered by
Mister C, sounds remarkably like “Diane”), for some sort of nefarious purpose
involving the secretary of one Mr. Bill Hastings, whom we meet in this episode,
and some numbers. Whatever that purpose is, it has to do with what he WANTS,
and not what he NEEDS.
Mister
C: "WANT. Not NEED. I don't need anything,
Ray. If there's one thing you should know about me it's that I don't NEED
anything. I WANT."
That
is one very interesting philosophy, and it ties back directly into the original
series and one of its primary themes. First, recall Dale Cooper’s words to
Audrey in Season One, Episode 6, “Realization Time”:
Agent Cooper: “What I want and what I need are two
different things Audrey.”
The
two Coopers both draw a clear distinction between “want” and “need,” and
operate on opposite sides of that distinction. For Agent Dale Cooper, “wants”
are to be shunned in favor of “need’ – with the implication being that mere
want is a lesser thing, the call of the body at the expense of the soul. For
Mister C, “needs” are to be shunned in favor of “wants” – with the implication
being that “needs” are weaknesses and that “wants” are strengths.
All
of this evokes and buttresses the original series' fascination with animal
appetite and with evil for the sake of evil; evil consciously chosen. Mister
C appears to be asserting that he is not controlled by his appetites, he
chooses them. This aligns perfectly with Lynch's unnerving philosophy of evil
as a force - a free-floating malign energy that has frightening agency and
takes uneasy pleasure in acts of darkness - not compelled to do them but freely
choosing them, descending into a primal animal state to revel in its own
malevolence.
Twin Peaks has always been deeply interested in
Appetites. The original series and its characters were obsessed with food
(recall Ben Horne tearing into a brie and butter sandwich like a man starving
in the desert).On a larger scale, the kind of raw hunger and deep appreciation
for food shown throughout Twin Peaks is echoed on a lot of levels within
the narrative; hunger for sex, for drugs, for violence, for sin, for abandon,
basically – an abandonment of what one “needs” in favor of what one “wants,”
consequences be damned. That current of want over need – of consuming animal
appetites – is re-embodied in Cooper’s transformation from one who needs to one
who wants.
How could Lynch and Frost make this thematic point even
clearer? Well, they might include a seemingly throwaway scene in which Laura’s
mother is shown watching horribly gory footage of lions feeding at night, of
literal animals literally indulging their appetites. And how might they tie the
scene and that footage back to Mister C and to Bob and to the sort of
corrupting, primal, animal “wants” that Bob (and now Mister C) embody? They
might choose to end that throwaway scene by focusing in on the mirror behind Mrs. Palmer’s
head, where we can glimpse the animals as they continue to feed and Mrs. Palmer
adopts a look of horror. That shot is a direct callback to the image
in the original TP pilot in which we were oh-so-subtly introduced to Bob for
the first time. Not coincidentally, Mrs. Palmer is seated on her couch and
looking terrified. Now look in the mirror:
Right there, reflected in the
mirror, is the show's primary personification of animal appetites. It’s no
accident that Lynch shot Mrs. Palmer’s brief scene as a seemingly intentional
reflection of that earlier scene, given the show’s preoccupation with twins/doubles/mirror
images.
What
Mister C “wants” is underlined a final time over the course of these two hours
during his tense dialogue/confrontation with Daria, who along with Ray has
apparently been hired by someone to double-cross and kill Mister C (as for who
that might be? Scroll down to the Vegas section):
Coopleganger:
“Anybody ever show this to you before? Do you know what this is? This is what I
want.”
Before
Mister C murders Daria with a shot to the head – the third woman to be shown as
having died in this particular manner over the course of two hours – he shows
her a playing card. It’s an ace of spades, which immediately brings to mind
One-Eyed Jack’s, the gambling establishment and den of all-around iniquity from
the original series. The central spade on the card has been inked over by hand,
in favor of a different shape – what might be a distorted version of the owl
cave symbol.
That
symbol is branded onto the mysterious green ring that plays such a prominent and
totally-unexplained part in the narrative of Twin Peaks,
linking the ring to the cave and both things, ultimately, to the Red Room/Black
Lodge. In Fire Walk With Me
it's heavily indicated that the ring has the ability to bring people into the Red Room/Black
Lodge.
So
what are we to make of this? Well, we know that Mister C is “supposed to get
pulled back to this thing called the black lodge.” We know that the owl cave
ring has some kind of seemingly mystical properties involving
transportation/teleportation, and that it has transported people to the Red
Room. Is it possible that possessing it might keep a doppleganger from being
transported against its will? We’ll see!
There’s
a little more plot here, involving Cooper downloading plans for a Yankton South
Dakota prison from the FBI database (and can we take a moment here to pause and
appreciate the ways in which Lynch and his collaborators have melded modern
technology and filmmaking with comparatively archaic effects-work? I genuinely
ADORE that Cooper’s Microsoft Surface has a display screen that looks like it
was programmed in the 90s), and we’ll see what that amounts to soon enough.
Before I move on to other things, let’s take a look at the conversation that Mister
C has with “Philip Jeffries.”
Phillip
Jeffries was the FBI Agent played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me –
another agent of law and order targeted by the Black Lodge for unknown reasons. However, David Bowie is deceased, and the
voice on the other end of Mister C’s call doesn’t sound a thing like The Thin White Duke.
Is it possible that Jeffries has a doppleganger as well, currently running
around the “real” world like Mister C? I’d say that’s a distinct possibility. As I’ve previously noted the Black Lodge seems to have a real mad-on for FBI agents; Bowie, the agent played by Chris Isaak at the start of FWWM, and Dale Cooper have all been seized by the Lodge. Perhaps the reason for the targeting of FBI agents is a conscious
effort to replace agents of righteous order with double-agents of chaos and
darkness (Twin Peaks
loves its doubles/twins!).
Doubly
intriguing is “Jeffries’” mention of Major Garland Briggs – one of my very
favorite characters from the original series. Briggs has intimate ties to the
Black and White Lodges, and more knowledge about the mythology of Twin Peaks than anyone
else. The actor who played him, Don S. Davis, passed away several years ago.
Unless “Jeffries” was referring to Bobby Briggs during his call with Mister C
I’m not sure how Lynch and Frost intend to involve this character – but I can’t
wait to find out. As for Jeffries, he seems to know a lot about Mister C,
telling him that “you’re going back in tomorrow (to the Lodge), and I’ll be
with Bob again.” Whoever this Jeffries is, he seems to be acquainted with Bob
and has perhaps been possessed by him before. A strong thread throughout the
show is the way in which being possessed by Bob is both something filthy and
something ecstasy-inducing for those who experience it – a thread that confirms
David Foster Wallace’s notion of evil being something that “transports” the
characters in Lynch’s works.
Mister
C’s narrative section finishes with him ending his call, leaving the room
containing Daria’s dead body, and proceeding to go next door where another
version of “Dark Diane” (a double, if you will) is waiting for him – played by
a very welcome Jennifer Jason Leigh – and just before Booper Coopleganger
initiates sex with her she’s ordered to clean up the murder in the next door.
Multiple
women are murdered throughout these two hours – three of them gaining gruesome,
gaping holes in their faces. It’s revolting stuff, and this particular thematic
constant is the place where Twin Peaks makes me most uncomfortable. Twin
Peaks has always featured acts of horrific violence against women, and The
Return continues that pattern to genuinely disturbing effect. Speaking for
myself I have always viewed that violence as commentary about the ways in which
women are victimized, as opposed to Lynch taking pleasure in staging that
violence, but I confess to curiosity over how the new wave of socially
conscious criticism will react. Criticism has evolved a great deal since the
original series aired, and in particular has focused over the past few years on
whether television shows and films are properly socially conscious. Whether you
very much like or vehemently dislike this trend, it’s a trend, and I’m
genuinely curious as to what those critics will make of all this violence
against women.
…Which
brings us to the other half of the South Dakota narrative – the murder of
librarian Ruth Davenport, apparently at the hands of local businessman Bill
Hastings, played by a shockingly effective Matthew Lillard. The lead up to the
discovery of Davenport’s severed head is the only portion of The Return that doesn’t
really work for me – Mrs. Green, her verbal tics, and Max Perlich’s rando
neighbor character just aren’t all that interesting or amusing or even oddball,
they’re just sort of there – but everything else about this part of the
narrative works like gangbusters because so much of it encapsulates the show’s
strengths, from the overwrought-but-effective soapy elements (“Life in prison,
Bill!”) to the investigative elements (the scene between Lillard and the cop
he’s known since school is wonderfully done), to the dashes of quirk (“But the
Morgans are coming to dinner!”) to the ominous intrusions of the supernatural.
The Mister C/Bill Hastings threads are clearly intertwined on a number of
levels: (1) Mister C mentions getting “information from Hastings’s secretary,”
(2) Mister C appears in the Hastings’s home and shoots Hastings’s wife in a
manner identical to how Davenport was killed – via a gunshot to the face, and
(3) Bill Hastings may be possessed by Bob, or by another Lodge spirit.
The
spirits of the Lodge make themselves known throughout this part of the
narrative – first, when detectives search Bill Hastings’s car. As they do so
one of their flashlights flickers on and off, on and off. Electrical
abnormalities have popped up in multiple places throughout the life of Twin
Peaks – first during the Season One pilot, during the examination of Laura
Palmer’s body, when the morgue lights flicker on and off like a strobe.
Electricity also features heavily in Fire Walk With Me.
As I
wrote in my overview of that film: “Whether electricity
is a means of transportation/manifestation for Lodge spirits, or whether
electrical abnormalities simply signal their presence is not clear. But it is
clear that the two things are connected.”
Longtime viewers will also be reminded of Bob when
Matthew Lillard claims, with seeming sincerity, that he “had a dream that
night…that I was in [Ruth Davenport’s] apartment.” In the world of Twin Peaks the
un/subconscious is a place of grave danger and great grace, and Hastings’s
“dream” could very well be evidence that he is responsible for Davenport’s
death, either because he has been/is possessed by Bob, or is being ridden by
another Lodge “parasite” similar to Bob. And what do we see directly after the
camera pans away from Lillard, disconsolate in his jail cell? Why, it’s a
damnfreaky spirit!
Finally,
there is the question of whether Hastings’s wife was similarly possessed by a
Lodge spirit. There’s certainly evidence to that effect. For one, she clearly
knows Mister C and he clearly knows her (and George). Recall what Lillard says
to her from behind bars: “I know about you and George! ..And maybe somebody
else, too!” That “somebody else” is almost certainly Mister C. Now recall what
Mister C says to Hastings’s wife just before he shoots her: “You did good. You
follow human nature perfectly.”
That’s
a verrrrry intriguing line of dialogue. It could mean simply that she has acted
in the sort of way Mister C expects human beings to act, and that he approves
of that. It could
also mean that she’s a Lodge spirit inhabiting a human body, impressing
Mister C by how well that spirit knows human nature. I’m fascinated by
that idea since it suggests that there are multiple Lodge apparitions operating
out in the real world, sometimes in concert and sometimes in opposition to each
other.
***
TWIN
PEAKS, WASHINGTON
Lynch
and Frost stop by their titular town only intermittently, but it’s a welcome
pit stop along a darkened highway. We’re reintroduced to the Horne brothers,
Ben and Jerry (named, as longtime fans of the show are aware, after the ice
cream makers), and through them to a new character played by Ashley Judd. What
any of them have to do with the larger being told is totally unclear, but it’s
great to see the Hornes once more. David Patrick Kelly’s Jerry, introduced
crooning “Saltyyyyyy…crunchyyyy” like the frequent
Richard Foreman collaborator that he is, remains
freakishly food-obsessed, and that fetish can only have gotten more acute now
that he’s involved in the legal weed industry. For longtime fans their cockeyed
banter is like sativa-laced manna from heaven.
Also
popping up, even more briefly, is Doctor Lawrence Jacoby – formerly Laura
Palmer’s skeevy psychiatrist and now, apparently, resident of the Ghostwood
forest that borders the town of Twin Peaks. We’re treated to an extended scene
of Jacoby receiving a shipment of shovels, which for now amounts to an
amusingly Lynchian non sequitur. Is Jacoby digging something up? Burying something?
Recall that in the original series he was the one who unearthed Laura’s half of
the locket.
The
show also takes us back to the Roadhouse’s “Bang Bang Bar,” where we’re reintroduced to Shelly and James (and a Renault
brother tending bar!) and it’s here, oddly, where nostalgia packed
the biggest punch for me as a viewer. Shelly may be dead wrong about James
(James was never cool, Shelly – and initially that lack of coolness was a real
asset to the character…at least until Evelyn Marsh showed up), but it’s great
to see them both. I remain firmly on the fence about Balthazar Getty.
Finally,
we have the portion of the show devoted to Twin Peaks’ Sherriff’s Department.
It’s in these sections that co-writers Lynch and Mark Frost tether their town
to the larger unfolding narrative. These segments are also where we learn that
there are two Trumans. “One is sick, and one is fishing.” We can assume, since
Michael Ontkean did not return for Season three, that Harry Truman is “sick,”
and that Robert Forster, who auditioned for the role of Harry Truman back in
the day and is cast in Season Three, is the Truman who is “fishing.” And,
incidentally, Lucy and Andy have a kid! His name is Wally! Looking forward to
meeting you, Wally!
In
reintroducing well-loved characters Andy, Lucy, Hawk, and Margaret (aka The Log
Lady, played by Catherine Coulson, who died in 2015) the show also conveys for us the basic information we need to
connect the dots between the ending of Season Two and the beginning of Season
Three. It’s in this section that we learn Cooper “disappeared” 24 years ago,
and has not been seen since. It’s here that The Log Lady communicates urgently
with Deputy Chief Hawk about Cooper, telling him that “Something is missing,
and you have to find it.” She informs him that “The way you will find it has
something to do with your heritage” – a comment that fits perfectly with what
we know of the show’s mythology so far (recall the “Owl Cave,” a remnant of the
area’s Native American tribes). It also fits with what Cooper told Hawk in Season Two of the original series: “Hawk, if I ever get lost, I hope you’re the man they send to find me.” Cooper’s instincts were right on, because Hawk immediately returns to
Glastonbury Grove, the gateway between our “real” world and the Black
Lodge/Red Room. There he catches a glimpse of the show’s iconic curtains,
before we’re suddenly whisked away from Twin Peaks and back to the Red Room.
***
THE
RED ROOM
From
cryptic black and white conversation between Cooper and The Giant to a
sentient, malevolent statue, this Red Room has it all: Arms. Curtains.
NONEXISTENCE.
It’s
also a reflection of itself, with an older Cooper and an older Laura occupying
the same positions and space that they occupied 25 years ago – in footage that
we see at the very start of the episode. We were first introduced to the idea
of an aged Cooper inhabiting the Red Room way back in Season 1 episode 3, which
aired on April 19, 1990. Twin Peaks is radically obsessed with Twins and
twinning, right up to and including its titular mountains. People and events
mirror one another. In the Red Room/Black Lodge this is made literal, with
older and younger versions of the characters occupying the same space/time and
recreating scenes from the original run (with Laura repeating the famously
bizarro line “I feel like I know her…but sometimes my arms bend back”). Past
scenes from the show are replayed, blending the narrative’s past and present.
Then there are, of course, the evil/crazy/savage “dopplegangers” that inhabit
this strange space; just as the Black Lodge exists as the “shadow” of the White
Lodge, so these dopplegangers exist as the “shadow-selves” of these characters,
reflecting the primal subconscious.
Finally, there’s the way in which the first portion of
Cooper’s Red Room experience appears to loop back on itself – to double up, if
you will – ending where it began: with Cooper and the man that longtime viewers
know as Mike, seated together in the Red Room. That sense of the narrative
doubling back on itself lends further credence to the notion that in the Red
Room, and in the universe of Twin Peaks generally, time is capable of doubling
back on itself. “Is it future? Or is it past?” asks Mike, and that’s not a
rhetorical question. In Twin
Peaks it’s well established that the past repeats itself, that
cycles run in circles like literal and figurative rings.
And then…well…a bunch of stuff happens. Much of that
stuff is so loaded with symbolism and surrealism that it’s impossible to say
with certainty what it “means,” which is part of the point of the show,
frankly, and always has been. Like, say, Cooper informing Laura that she’s
dead. She tells him that “I’m dead…and yet I live” and then proceeds to TAKE
HER FACE OFF. What’s behind that face is pure light, and that light could
“mean” a bunch of things.
The ambiguity of the show’s symbolism is a strength,
allowing us to project meaning onto those symbols in a way that’s more powerful
than having concrete meaning assigned. To
give one more example: during the Red Room sequences we are shown a white horse
– a horse that we have seen once before on the original series, and have read
about in The Secret Diary
of Laura Palmer – a tie-in novel which covers the same ground
as Fire Walk With Me (and
does so, in no small part, as effectively as FWWM). That novel spends no small
amount of time describing the horse that Laura’s father pretended to have
bought her for her birthday (but which was actually purchased by Ben Horne,
letting us know that Horne’s creepy fixation on Laura was in place at age 13). There are cultures that view
the white horse as symbolic of spiritual
purity/power/honor/redemption/resurrection/the Sun/victory over darkness. In
other words, it’s generally and widely considered as a symbol with positive
associations. So what’s it doing in the Red Room? Well, it’s very possible that
Lynch means it to symbolize Laura’s lost innocence, but the answer is that
there’s simply no way to know. Lynch traffics in symbolism without concrete
“meaning,” and I’ve argued pretty forcefully in the past that to reduce the
horse to any one interpretation is very much beside the point.
If you were a reader of my Twin Peaks columns, back
in the day, then you know already that I have very specific ideas about that
space and the things within it, and I’ll reiterate those ideas as we go along.
However, they’re my ideas, not some key to unlocking the “true” meaning of Twin Peaks, and that’s a
distinction well worth reiterating. Trying to parse the show that way is, I think, mostly a fruitless
exercise. It’s not WHOLLY fruitless, because Twin Peaks is a collaborative effort
between a man who has little use for narrative coherency and a man who takes
great pleasure in constructing mythology. It is possible, to give one example,
that when a talking tree informs Cooper to remember “253,” it is perhaps
referring to a Washington state area code to pick one possible meaning – after
all, Twin Peaks is located in Washington. It is much, much more likely that the tree is
referring to something else entirely, which
will only become clear once the meaning of that number is fully revealed to us
(recall, as example, the clue of a “smiling bag” in the original series and
you’ll remember just how amusingly unhelpful most of the show’s “clues” really
are).
All
that said, here are a few more thoughts on what we see in the Red Room:
“The
Arm,” formerly played by Michael J. Anderson and previously known as “the
little man from another place”, is now, apparently, a tree with something
fleshy and faceless pulsing atop it. Twin
Peaks set up this bizarre transformation over TWENTY YEARS AGO,
when the Little Man made his final appearance in the original series:
WHOA.
The
Arm’s purpose within the overarching mythology of Twin Peaks remains
incredibly unclear. The Little Man projected a kind of quirky malevolence, and
in FWWM
Lynch appeared to suggest that the Little Man, Mike, and Bob were all united in
the goal of collecting and feeding on “garmonbozia” (otherwise known as “fear,
and the pleasures”). We know that at some point, Mike cut off his arm (or his
Arm) in order to repent and escape the influence of Evil. Given the way that
time and space circle and loop back on themselves in this universe, is it possible that both Mike and The Arm have now repented, and that both are
attempting to help Cooper?
The episode kicks it up another notch when it
introduces an evil tree-doppleganger (Lord I love this weirdo show) which seemingly boots Cooper out of the Lodge
entirely through the floor, where he lands on top of a giant glass box that’s
sticking out of the side of a building.
In
order for Dale to truly leave the Red Room/Black Lodge we are told that his
doppleganger must return. Since we know that Mister C has a plan to prevent
himself from being drawn back to the Lodge, and since we know that time runs
very differently within the Red Room, can we presume that when Mike says
“something’s wrong,” he’s referring to the failure of the doppleganger to
return? That when Cooper is ejected from the Red Room in
apparent spiritual form it is so that he can, like a reverse-Bob, possess
someone with the goal of finding Booper Coopleganger and forcing him to return? That the glass box that Dale Cooper enters, and in which he is
seemingly “processed,” is designed to help transport Cooper into a new body?
***
NEW
YORK CITY
And
speaking of that large, weird, glass box, the New York City portion of The Return is somehow
its most obtuse. A mysterious, for-now-anonymous billionaire benefactor has
sponsored a bizarre art project/science experiment (I would imagine that
“Audrey Horne” is a good possible answer to the question of that billionaire’s
identity, but given the ways in which time and space are already being played
with it’s possible that Mister C or Cooper himself are responsible for the box
– possibly via a connection in Las Vegas (and more on that directly below). The
giant glass box that they’ve paid to construct and surround with cameras
underlines another of Twin Peaks’s consistent themes: voyeurism. From Blue
Velvet to Lost Highway to, of course, Twin Peaks, glimpsing
things we shouldn’t, of peering in on things uninvited; of being made aware as
a viewer of your own gaze and how you, as a viewer, are a voyeur yourself. One
of my favorite instances of this theme comes in Season One, when James and
Donna dress Maddie her cousin Laura in order to investigate Dr. Jacoby.
Unbeknownst to them, Bobby watches them from the bushes. Unbeknownst to any of
them, someone else is watching all of them. And unbeknownst to any of the
characters, we’re watching them.
Here, in the first two hours of The Return, Lynch
returns to his obsession with the voyeuristic impulse, capturing the cameras
that surround the mysterious box with the same dispassionately fetishistic eye
with which he captures the naked body of Tracey, the unfortunate young woman
who is doomed to die simply because she couldn’t wait for the object of her
obsession to finish his shift.
Both Tracey and Sam are charming blanks who speak in the
soap clichés of vintage Peaks
(“You’re a bad girl, Tracey.” “Try me.”), and their blankness feels intentional,
as though these New York City scenes are intended to be dreamlike in a
different but no less purposeful sense than the surrealist scenes in the Red
Room. Both characters speak as if in a dream, and the essential set-up of this
NYC world is dreamlike; a young girl bearing coffee cups marked with “Zs”
(Zzzzzz) nevertheless gets granted access to a waiting area with a posted guard
(who suddenly, inexplicably disappears) and high tech door, the giant glass
box, the strangely formal arrangement of couch, side table, bonsai, and the
ring of cameras.
And
then things get really strange.
What
is the negative image that appears in the box? How’s it connected to Cooper, if
at all? Is it possible that the image is Laura, erupting out of the Red Room in a fit of rage?
Sure. That's possible. It’s also possible that it’s a Garmonbozia-ghost from Planet Zerp. Your
guess is as good as mine! Either way, SOMETHING erupts from that glass box and
tears those two charming blanks apart. Was that entity drawn to Sam and
Tracey’s primal animal passions? That seems possible, given Peaks’ themes. It
also seems possible that it’s there as a direct result of what Sam and Tracey
didn’t see: the arrival of Dale Cooper’s spirit. I’d conjecture that the spirit
who erupts from the box and kills the unlucky couple may just be pursuing
Cooper, but at this point it’s impossible to tell.
Either
way, the way in which the New York City narrative and the Red Room narrative
overlap and encircle one another reinforce again the notion of time as
something cyclical and circular, folding over onto itself in a ring.
Which
brings us, finally, to…
***
LAS
VEGAS, NEVADA
Just
a single scene, starring Patrick “DON’T LOOK BEHIND THE DINER” Fischler as
Mister Todd, a frightened-eyed business type ordering some kind of payment to
somebody or other. "Why do you let him make you do these things?"
asks Mister Todd’s associate, Roger. "Roger... you better hope that you
never get involved with someone like him. Never have someone like him...in your
life."
And
that’s it. It’s a wisp of a scene, but in the context of these two hours it
leaves me wondering: Is Todd responsible for hiring Ray and Daria to kill
Mister C? He seems to have the motive, assuming that the “him” Todd refers to
is Mister C. Is Mister Todd connected to the mysterious billionaire funding techno-occult research in New York City? I have no idea. You have no idea. And yet here we are, puzzling it out and savoring the act.
***
...Whew.
That's all I've got for now. I'm a little out of practice at this, but boy did
I enjoy assembling these thoughts. I can feel the ol' muscles limbering up, and I hope you'll come on back and geek out
along with me as The
Return continues. Next week I'll take a look at Season 3, eps 3 and 4.
