“Can you not comprehend how freaking weird this is?”
More accurate words have hardly been spoken throughout this first season of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Leave it to Todd (Elijah Wood) to squeak this rhetorical question into the air to really stop an audience in its tracks. Because let’s be real, here. This is weird.
In fact, it’s freaking weird.
“Watkin” feels like the most coherent episode of this first season because we finally get an hour of television that doesn’t bounce around like the barrage of rubber balls we’ve received in previous episodes. Bart (Fiona Dourif) and Ken (Mpho Koaho) literally never show up. The comedy isn’t nearly as prominent, thus bringing its occasional level of obnoxiousness down to a reasonable decibel. The Lost Trailer Park Boy gets mean (and he gets mean quick). Farah (Jade Eshete) and Amanda (Hannah Marks) are split into one story. Dirk (Samuel Barnett) and Todd are split into the other, and that’s really it. It’s what we’re given, and it’s what we need.
The focus this week is on a journey into which Dirk and Todd (inevitably) stumble. There’s a single brick building that appears to be the Center of All Clues and, naturally, Dirk finds a lever that plunges both him and Todd through a trap door into an underground lair. Magically, Dirk also has a single lightbulb that can only work via the touch and/or energy of a human, so, well, there’s how your lighting problem is solved.
What unfolds, though, is a relatively neat series of traps through which the pair must navigate in order to survive. It begins with the use for that curiously, ok-I-guess-we-should-just-go-with-it lightbulb that proves to be more handy than it appears at first glance. Long story short, Dirk and Todd find themselves in a wild room filled with lightbulbs that begins to close in on them, and unless they can figure it out, the room will crush them to death. Fortunately, there’s a place for their lightbulb, and that lightbulb acts as a doorknob. The day is saved.
Thank goodness for that, because, darn it, wouldn’t it be sort of weird to kill off the title character by the middle of the first season’s fourth episode? I mean, sheesh.
Yeah. Anyway, things get stranger when they make it to the next room; it has a rhino statue on the wall that releases an electric energy whenever it decides to activate itself and metaphysically charge at the two (non) friends. Todd, thinking far too quickly again, realizes that the rhino statue is missing its horn and if the two just deal with the electric shocks they receive, hold hands, and connect the current between said statue and said horn (which, of course, is halfway across the room), then perhaps the door will open. Somehow, this leads to both leading men being stripped down to their underpinnings, but hell, it works.
What it reveals, however, is far more interesting. After surviving the death traps, Todd and Dirk stumble upon a series of television sets that work as puzzles, and boom goes the dynamite. Why? Because these television sets appear to be the missing piece to the case all along. Not only do they look colorful and intriguing but, after Amanda figures out how to reboot them, they depict a map that our strapping young group of detectives will need in order to solve the mystery. Or, well at least so this series would have you think. We’ll have to see how next week plays out to understand how accurate (or inaccurate) that assumption might be.
In the meantime, the lone surviving FBI agent is recruited by the Lost Trailer Park Boy, and heads to Todd’s place to probably kill him. OK. Probably not “probably”, but you get it. Instead, he finds Amanda there, who then tells Farah about her predicament. So, while Dirk and Todd go frolicking underground, Farah returns to Todd’s apartment to ostensibly protect Amanda from the possessed FBI agent. This doesn’t really lead to anything, but it does produce some memorable dialogue between Amanda and Farah about what it’s like to be a weird person.
The merry-go-round culminates within the final four minutes of the episode — and, by the way, this is a television series that really likes to culminate with some weird stuff in its episodes’ final four minutes — when we find out that the Lost Trailer Park Boy is doing all he can to lure in his ex-girlfriend … or, well, his girlfriend from the days when he was the rock star we saw last week. He meets her in a bar. She seems distraught. He brings her a fur coat. She doesn’t understand why this odd-looking man won’t leave her alone. He promises her more memories from the rock star if she just follows him one last time.
So she does, and boy, that wasn’t the right move.
That’s because he gathers his cronies to watch him murder her with a guitar. In the process of doing this, he loses that nerdy, stuffed-nose voice of his and … holy cow, man, shit just got real. Turns out, Lost Trailer Park Boy can be super intimidating and super scary. I mean super scary. Here’s hoping he stays like that because … yikes, the dynamic of that character just went up about 60,000 notches on the Intensity Meter.
But I digress. He mumbles some stuff about how he’s going to track down all our heroes and how he’s going to Win the Day, his boys gaze on with dead eyes and empty hearts, and it looks like the life of the rock star is now put to rest for good. All this while Team Detective is presumably on its way to wherever a map connected by televisions leads them.
Oh, and that dog is still living at the police station. Yeah, I don’t get it, either.
Suffice to say … Todd had it right: All this is pretty freaking weird.
A Clue, An Accomplice, or An Assistant
Not to really get on a soapbox (because this is television and I think it’s silly to do that when we’re talking about television), but for a series that tries to so consistently be so good humored, this thing sure doesn’t treat its women well. Between watching a woman crawl around as though she’s a dog, an entire episode-and-a-half of Farah’s abduction, and now the murder of what appears to be a fairly irrelevant female character to this narrative, I’m beginning to wonder a bit about a bit. Just saying.
“I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” says Todd. “No,” responds Dirk. “I don’t even like coffee.”
I still don’t understand the Rowdy Three, but that doesn’t prevent my growing affection for them. Their ability to save the day, for reasons impossible to articulate, is endearing to me. The fact that Farah slipped it in at the end that she knew who those guys were only makes their mystique that much more intriguing.
It’s with regret that I report there was actually no installment of “what odd thing will a part of Amanda’s body turn into” this week. I’ll expect two next week, now, especially since they’re traveling.
Honestly, I really liked the whole death trap/puzzle/games portion of this week’s episode. It felt like a Nickelodeon version of a Saw movie.
Honestly (part 2): I loved the transition from weirdo bumbling geek to ominous cold-blooded killer that we saw the Lost Trailer Park Boy transform into this week. For the first time, it feels like that character actually matters.
Also worth noting: the character’s actual name is Gordon, and the actor who plays him is Aaron Douglas. If you’re looking for an honest connection between him and that whole Trailer Park Boy thing … well, Aaron Douglas was born in Canada, and that’s pretty much all I got. If this evil transformation sticks, though, there’ll be no reason to refer to him as the Lost Trailer Park Boy.
When Zimmerfield (Richard Schiff) said, “There is something wrong. There is something seriously wrong,” I laughed very loudly in my head. There’s something about that team’s comedic timing that I just can’t get enough of.
Anyone taking bets on what color Dirk’s next jacket might be? I’m going purple.
This Week’s MVP: Let’s go with the Rowdy Three, if only because they keep saving people and I still have no idea what the hell their deal is. Let’s be honest, though: without them, how would Todd and Dirk have ever escaped that potential TV fire situation? They bust down walls and save lives. Seems like a good way to make a living.