Dr Amp, Steve & Beckie, Lucky 7 Insurance, DoppelCoop’s light trick, the creepo at the Bang Bang Bar… we covered some distance here, folks. And yet it almost feels like we went nowhere at all.

Cooper’s still Dougie. Or… he’s still Cooper but he’s still practically comatose and everyone thinks he’s Dougie. He went to work this episode. Naomi Watts nagged him into the car and dumped him off (meanwhile his car was blown up as that hitman’s bomb caught out a few local hoodlums). Somehow Dougie got through the day, even stealing poor Frank’s coffee (although Frank seemed to like the green tea latte) and almost, if he’d had a little more wit about him, finding himself a pretty mistress. But Naomi forgot to pick him up so he just loitered with his ‘case files’ by a cowboy statue out front as the credits rolled.

If Cooper’s the main focus of Twin Peaks then that’s all that happened this episode. Every now and then he managed to catch and cling to a familiar word, a little tease of the man he once was, but nothing yet that’s been able to drag him back to sanity. Agent, case files, coffee… he’s close. But you get the feeling we’re waiting for Gordon Cole or New Sheriff Truman or someone else to find him and figure it out for him. Snap him back to reality, so to speak.

(Guts to Janey-E and Sonny Jim whose husband/father is dead, I’m only now realising, but they don’t know it. Perhaps Coops does, with that single tear as he looks at the kid in the car).

It’s so weird. Cooper was so much the heart of this story that they shoehorned him into the Fire Walk With Me film even when he didn’t really need to be there (and was clearly only barely there anyway). As long as the centrepiece of the tale is out there stumbling around like a newborn babe in an adult’s body then this show is unfolding on some creepy, unbalanced axis. Ungrounded and destabilised. To be honest, that’s probably the whole point.

In other news we finally found out what Jacoby’s golden shovels are for!

Yeah, Jacoby has himself a pirate radio show streaming online in which he seems to be the hippie Alex Jones of Twin Peaks now. So… the complete opposite. Ranting about corporations and all that. Toxins in the water. Disease being spread among the people. OUR AIR, OUR WATER, OUR EARTH! Among his loyal viewers are a certain Jerry Horne and Nadine Hurley. Jerry was lighting up something pungent while this was our first look at modern Nadine – in the episode that we were also first re-introduced to her high school nemesis Norma Jennings, who is still running the trusty Double-R Diner.

Amanda Seyfried shows up as Shelly’s daughter. You remember, the one who’s with the wrong guy? Well she asks for money, again, and then drives off with said fella. A quick bump for the road and now they’re going to dinner on that borrowed money. A squizz last week showed that Bobby Briggs didn’t have a ring on that finger – neither does Shelly. And her daughter is credited as Becky Burnett, though that’s presumably because she’s married to Steven Burnett. Peep the happy couple.

Curiously though, Shelly is only credited as Shelly. No last name. So we’re supposed to be wondering whatever happened to the young Bonnie and Clyde that Bobby and Shelly once were, the couple that were talking about getting hitched at the end of season two. A lot can happen in 25 years, apparently.

Especially when you consider the actors that have aged and moved on too. That thing about whether Sheriff Harry Truman would return has gotten stranger as the show has unfolded these five episodes. We knew he wasn’t gonna be back but for a character that isn’t coming back he’s sure been a busy focus. From Wally Brando’s respects to Lucy’s confusion in the pilot to this episode where the New Truman chats on the phone with him about ‘tests’. They’re killing him off-screen but in show, by the looks of it. Kinda cruel – I assumed they’d just do what the actor did and say he retired to Hawaii. Also New Truman has a very annoyed wife. He doesn’t seem like much of the domestic type.

Okay, now for a scarier credits discovery. That dude at the Roadhouse, the one smoking under the no smoking sign? Then a waiter comes over and tells him to put it out and he tells him to make him? Another bloke wanders over and says he’ll handle it, young buck gives him his ciggies and in the box is a wad of cash. Meanwhile a couple cuties at the next booth take notice and one asks for a light. Creepster then grabs her over and says some remarkably vulgar things as her friend yells at him to stop. This joker right here.

Well… he’s credited as ‘Richard Horne’.

Oh mate, if Billy Zane is responsible for this wanker then somebody’s gotta ho-ho-hold me back. Alternatively… what’s if Evil DoppelCoop is his daddy? And while we’re speculating about Audrey here, erm, where the hell is she?

Characters Yet to Return, Ranked by Impatience:

Audrey Horne
Phillip Jeffries (yeah, I know…)
Big Ed Hurley
Doc Hayward
Annie Blackburn
Any of the Packards/Martells
Leo Johnson
Mike Nelson
Johnny Horne
Donna Hayward

Ah no wait, it turns out that the dude who interviews Dropkick Burnett and tells him he’ll never ever get a job with a CV that pathetically written is actually Mike Nelson, the old sonofagun. Didn’t even realise that, didn’t even consider it. Jeez, these credits are the closest thing we have to a cheat code.

Some other stuff that happened, those bad-asses are still trying to kill Dougie but that charred body in his car might give them a false sense of completion there. Somehow they seem to have a connection to Buenos Aires, and you know that Phil Jeffries (otherwise ignored this series) had his South American connections too. A couple familiar TV faces also show up to fire the dude at the casino who allowed Dougie to win all that money. Seems like Doug might have been in some deep trouble going way back before he became Cooper.

Plus Garland Briggs’ fingerprints have popped off at the Pentagon. The sixteenth time in 25 years that it’s happened according to the exposition and we already know that Briggs is dead. Somehow DoppelCoop is involved in this and the fingerprints that tipped the military off seems to be that decapitated body from the premier… which we briefly come back to at the start. There was a ring in the bugger’s belly… Dougie’s wedding ring. Hmm now.

But Dougie’s been vaporised. So has that Black Box in Buenos Aires. DoppelCoop on the other hand, he’s locked up in prison and playing some disturbing games. He made his one phone call and, knowing that everyone was listening, he somehow pressed the right combination of buttons on the phone to set off every damn alarm in the place, after already saying a name which terrified one of the coppers. Clearly they’re swimming out of their depth there. DoppelCoop is too powerful, in ways that we don’t even know.

And just in case you were wondering, BOB is still with him. Not as blatantly as once but still there, hinted in the mirror. “You’re still with me. That’s good.” Hey, ah, Gordon… could ya hurry up please?

It won’t bring Coops back but it might help us keep writing about him if you hit an ad somewhere on the page. That’s a damn fine way to support the Cache.