In a disappointing turn for the until-now self-determined character of Josie Packard, Jonathan and Josie have sex in what seems a very coerced event. We’re witnessing the negative side of Josie’s sexual wiles – after a while, her ability to use her body to manipulate men has become a prison of actions.

Jonathan presents her with a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, for this evening. Josie doesn’t want to leave until she’s received her insurance money and her payment from Ben. She’s waited five years for this. (Josie may have simply been a field agent who got too sucked up in small town life. Perhaps Eckhardt is getting sweaty palms if he knows an FBI agent is uncovering stones left and right in Twin Peaks these days…)

Jonathan counters that Mr. Eckhardt will make it worth her while. He also threatens Harry’s life if Josie doesn’t leave on time.

That afternoon, Josie pays Ben a visit. She tells him she has the contract with Pete’s signature, and she wants her money. Ben insists he doesn’t have the money on hand right now, but he will just as soon as the Icelander business is taken care of. She says she won’t leave the office until she has her money, and her obvious duress tips Ben off to the fact that she’s under pressure to make this thing happen now.

Ben produces a key to his personal hotel safe, which contains a dossier with dirt on Josie’s suspicious involvement with her husband’s death. He can blackmail her.

But! Josie has a cartoon-sized key to a safety deposit box that, if anything were to happen to her, would lead authorities to enough evidence to lock Ben away for three lifetimes. “They’ll bury us side by side.” She is almost giddy with excitement over her stalemate, but turns 180 degrees to reveal her frayed nerves to the audience.

This is a lovely moment, a return to the dangerous, scheming Josie that it seemed for a moment we’d lost. And it seems to work. Ben agrees to give Josie the $5 million from Mr. Tojamura. Josie, in turn, gives him Pete’s signature. “We are finished,” she announces. “Well played,” Ben returns.

Leland, seeming to recover from his daughter’s demise, gets on his feet and shows Ben he’s still got it by helping him come up with a scheme to buy some time from the Icelanders while Jerry’s in Tokyo vetting Mr. Tojamura’s bidding group, and as a bonus, pick up some pocket money in the laundering process.

Harry arrives at the Blue Pine Lodge to find Jonathan, whom Josie calls her assistant, packing her bags and taking them to the car. She’s fleeing, and Harry doesn’t understand why. Josie tells him she sold the mill. It’s over. She’s going home.

Harry calls after her, professing his love. Distraught, she can only run away, wordless.

Ben still hasn’t caught on to the fact that Tojamura is Catherine, although he’s sitting across the dinner table from her. Either that’s really good wine, or he needs to get his eye prescription checked.

“Tojamura” puts the heat on Ben, saying he has Tojamura’s cashier’s check for $5 million, but Tojamura still has nothing. (The fraudulent check has obvious implications for Josie, now that she’s the holder of said check.)

What I still don’t get, though, is what Catherine’s motivation is. How does getting Ben to accept a fake check in exchange for a fake man’s “investment” in Ghostwood help her at all in the long run? Geoffrey Johns’ exhaustive attempt to puzzle out the mill subplot (required reading for followers of this blog) suggests it’s because Catherine knows Ben will end up forking it over to Josie, which will screw her out of the estate, but I don’t buy that. Catherine would have had no way of knowing Josie would be so desperate to have the money immediately, and therefore, no way of knowing she’d end up taking a check from Ben to cover her.

Ben tries to make his case that he’s the leader of a small, local community, and that with the mill fire, he must take his time and be cautious. “I know a little about fire,” Tojamura counters. “My family was at Nagasaki.” Hooooollly shit, Twin Peaks. Putting Piper Laurie in yellowface drag for an extended plot line was ballsy enough, but this line? Ouch.

This painful interaction is mercifully interrupted by one of Leland’s musically-induced episodes of manic crackup, and we get the absolutely adorable moment where a grieving Pete unwittingly tries to make friends with his “deceased” wife. This is maybe one of my favorite scenes of the whole series–its one of those things that could only happen on this show.

Revelations:

- None

Answers this week:

- Did Eckhardt call for Andrew Packard’s murder? (Or did Ben?) A: Josie’s plan indeed stretches back a full five years. Meaning her entire marriage to Andrew Packard was a ploy by his rival, Eckhardt, to kill Andrew and profit from his downfall.

Ongoing questions:

- What will they do with the two ledgers?

- What is Catherine’s plan with the Tojamura identity?



- What happened to Catherine after the mill fire?