This season's been bloated, bland, incoherent, and (most egregiously) absolutely boring.
While most of this episode (and the rest of this season's arc) has been off-key in the worst way, I want to make a point about the particularly galling introduction to the episode. The aping of Lynch's aesthetic - chiaroscuro supernatural mood singers in a public bar draped in a primary color to add a bit of surreal flair - completely misapprehends why the conceit is so unsettling to begin with. Lynchian horror juxtaposes almost eerie normality with the ghoulishly uncanny, which has never been this show's modus operandi. In fact, Pizzaman's been beating us over the head with how abject misery and untold horrors are suffuse and inescapable in his banal depiction of L.A.
When Lynch in Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet inserts a vignette featuring a quasi noir / vaudevillian musical performance, the uneasy je ne sais quoi that punches the guts of the audience is earned because so much else in the art is quotidian. Twin Peaks is introduced as a town of polite, law-abiding all-Americans who go about their days quietly until occult tragedy strikes and the entire weave starts unraveling. With two episodes of jumbled exposition that's gone out of its way to demonstrate that every corner and crevice and alcove in L.A. is fraught with sleaze, boozing, deviant sex, fraud, and violence, throwing a Lynchian "homage" (if you can even call it that, knowing Pizzaman's well-documented penchant for plagiarism) is so utterly tone deaf that it almost boggles the mind that this man managed to teach poor unsuspecting students literature in a past life, let alone helm a flagship HBO series. He's throwing shit at a wall and hoping it sticks while paying no heed to the narrative or tonal dissonance of his gambits. Elvis doing Bette Middler in a dream sequence to open an episode isn't artistically daring, but rather an inveterate plagiarist's misreading of the actual artistic texts he's copying from!
This season is failed "art", but it's been quite the spectacle to watch unfold when viewed as a self-imposed public humiliation for the bloviating auteur who made it.
