Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Season 2 Episode 3
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is always a joy to watch, but every good series has moments where it needs to pause to set up its mysteries and to establish burgeoning conflicts. Such is the case with “Two Broken Fingers,” which continues the joy of the team investigating with Tina and Hobbs but with more focus on placing other puzzle pieces on the board than getting the full picture. Things were a little bit more jumbled, but there were plenty of dramatic moments to keep viewers wanting more. Meanwhile, our suspicions about Suzanne were confirmed even as she played on our sympathies. Her situation with her husband, her son, and her late boss are still terrible, but clearly we didn’t have the full picture with which to judge her. A fallen prom queen injured while driving a carpool of kids while on Xanax puts a new spin on her magical makeover, and the mild amusement of the Mage as he tries to take back his wand shows that something else is at play between the two of them. And since Panto Trost said that when the Mage finds his apprentice, no one can defeat him or his Army, we can only conclude that the apprentice must be Suzanne. But who are the “fierce foes” who must be united? What is the “great weapon” that must be retrieved? And who is “she who sees all” who will open a “door into a dream”? There’s still a lot more to this prophecy that must unfold in the actions of Dirk and his friends, thus the set-up episode idea. Because it’s true: he normally would have been interested in Hector’s corpse in the tree — so cool! It did feel a bit clumsy the way Farah dropped hints about the importance of the two holes in his skull and how they might relate to Marina’s two broken fingers that give the episode its title, almost as though the dialogue’s subtext were, “Hey audience, pay attention to these seemingly unimportant details!” Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is usually more subtle than that. That being said, Tina’s adventures with Farah were a delightful romp. The weed gummies, the Army Rangers/Power Rangers mixup, her being an empathic bisexual… Tina is wonderful. Her frankness is almost as brash as Bart’s, and for the second time, we get some wonderfully matter-of-fact dialogue about killing people from the holistic assassin. She reminds us of her naivety about the world as she asks Tina, who knows a different Ken in Bergsberg, “There are two Kens?” It would be great if Bart were out and about, and we certainly hope for a reunion with Ken, but in the meantime, it’s great to have her character provide such hilarious reactions, especially at the end when Panto Trost impressively articulates the prophecy only to have her kill the moment by asking once again, “Do you know Ken?” So the enjoyment of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is in no way diminished by an episode that eddies and swirls like a spell about to be cast. It’s exciting in its own way. The jumping around from story to story in this episode didn’t feel quite as tight as usual, and certain threads had more oomph than others, but the overall effect is still incredibly entertaining. Hopefully next week, Dirk, like the show, will be back on his game.
