"Nice Jacket" is an episode of the series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the tenth episode of season 2.
Synopsis[]
Dirk fulfills the prophecy and restores order by courageously returning to Blackwing, where it all began. Todd and Amanda go toe-to-toe with the villainous Suzie Boreton.
Plot[]
Over a restored Wendimoor, a boy narrates "and so the prophecy was fulfilled, and everyone in Wendimoor lived happily ever–" only to be cut off by Suzie Boreton, who declares that "this is my story now," portraying it through a series of drawings. She describes herself as "a very special princess that no one appreciated" who had "a terrible accident that wasn't her fault" until The Mage came and "gave her another chance to live the perfect life she deserved." She becomes "a beautiful queen that everyone loved, and lived happily ever after." She adds on "or else" and giggles, blowing out the candle she is holding.
Farah Black, Sherlock Hobbs and Tina Tevetino awaken in the quarry after killing The Mage, all of them badly wounded. Farah instructs them on tending to their gunshot wounds and stands up to get the truck, only to take several paces and collapse.
Dirk Gently arrives in Blackwing through the Rowdy 3's room and is greeted by Rapunzel, which he chooses to ignore so as not to deal with yet another case thread. He runs through the halls, looking for Project Moloch until he runs into Lieutenant Assistent, who holds him at gunpoint until they are interrupted by a shootout between Blackwing guards and Kellum knights. Dirk attempts to talk sense into him, telling him they need to get to Moloch if they want to stop the knights. Ken Adams carefully monitors the situation on security cameras. On a whim, Dirk makes Assistent open a door leading to Mona Wilder, their presence distracting her guards long enough for her to turn into a cannon and fire.
The pain of attempting to keep the portal open forces Amanda Brotzman to take her and Todd's consciousnesses into a black void with a blue energy moving above them that Amanda refers to as "the backstage of reality," the transition changing their pupils into strange shapes. Todd hears the faint sound of screaming and jumps back into his body for a moment, realizing it is their screams of pain, until Amanda pulls him back in and warns him to keep his mind focused. He asks what will happen if Suzie arrives while they are out of their bodies, which Amanda says would "probably be bad."
Suzie freezes the Rowdy 3 in place when they try to stop her and uses her wand to drain their psychic energy, causing her wand to crack slightly and tattoos similar to The Mage's to start to form on her neck. She knocks them out with a spell and continues to advance on the throne room.
Mona's blast kills her guards and mildly injures Dirk and Assistent and she happily reunites with the former. She offers to get him across the facility quickly, but only if Dirk can turn into a bug, which he can "only emotionally" do. She decides that "we'll try something else."
Suzie blasts Todd and Amanda away from the pool, closing the portal and knocking the latter out. She fails to kill them because of her malfunctioning wand and Todd begins to rant at her, not understanding why she is involved in the case, deriding her as "this psycho crazy person who's screwing everything up for everyone." Suzie claims her wand has helped her "fix everything that's broken" and that's she is "taking control of my life," only for Todd to point out that "taking control of your life is about changing you, not everything else." Todd realizes that he should already be dead and that Suzie's wand is messed up, and he pulls the air gun and shoots her with it, knocking her out.
Dirk rides on Mona, now a motorcycle, to Moloch's room. They enter and find him alive, only for Hugo Friedkin, lying in wait, to put Dirk in a headlock and put a gun to his head. He warns Mona to stay a human or he will kill him, unwilling to let Dirk disappear again and "make me look like an idiot." Dirk explains that Moloch needs to go back to Wendimoor and all the bloodshed will end, causing Friedkin to realize that Ken was right and the stroke Moloch suffered from being moved brought on the dimensional gap. Friedkin laments that "I want to be right for once" and realizes that he is the villain in this scenario, Dirk explaining that Blackwing and "the attempts to build a cage around the utterly uncontainable" are the real problem, and that "this is your chance to make things right." Friedkin puts his gun back on Dirk, insisting that "you're the problem, not me," until Mona asks what is more important: "being in charge, or doing the right thing?" He asks if it is a trick question and begins to visibly hesitate. Friedkin and Mona emerge from Moloch's room, the latter in the form of a machine gun that Friedkin uses to mow down the nearby knights, Dirk following and pushing Moloch in his bed. They make it back to the Rowdy 3's room to find the portal gone.
Amanda and Suzie wake up at the same time, Todd telling Amanda to get the portal back open while he defends her. He begins to fire the air gun as Suzie stalks towards him, but she blocks each blast with her wand.
Friedkin is stabbed in the chest from behind by Lord Triangle Badevil, who prepares to kill Dirk and stop the prophecy until Ken enters the room and shoots him in the head. He gasses Mona and orders the room locked down, identifying himself as "Supervisor Adams."
The Beast attacks Suzie and makes her drop her wand, which Todd grabs and gives Amanda the clear to reopen the portal. Suzie begins to pull Todd, grabbing tight to the wand, towards her using her power. She gets the wand back and starts to slowly torture Todd to death.
Dirk tries to reason with Ken, (who is addressing him as both "Svlad" and "the debug function of reality") who refuses to let him leave as the portal re-opens on Dirk's side. Dirk realizes Ken will not kill him and begins to push Moloch towards the portal, only for Ken to shoot him in the leg to deter him. A dying Friedkin points his gun at Ken, telling him "you can't control it" and giving Dirk the time he needs to jump with Moloch and Mona into the portal. Ken pushes Friedkin in after him just as it closes.
Just before Suzie can kill Amanda, the portal explodes with light and Dirk emerges wearing his yellow jacket, (implying it to be Mona) as well as Moloch, now a child again and wearing a crown, who easily summons the wand to him and says "rise and shine!" He dispels the rings killing Todd as Suzie tries to pass herself off as a "good guy" to Moloch, who immediately doubts her and makes her vanish. The Rowdy 3 awaken outside as Moloch introduces himself as "Francis" and thanks Dirk for saving him. Amanda apologizes for the destruction of his world, but Francis insists he can reverse all of it. Dirk and Todd suddenly remember The Mage, but Francis informs him that he is already dead thanks to their friends, but now they need their help, sending Todd away with a "gift" to help save them. He recreates the Rowdy 3's van and drops it back in Bergsberg for Amanda, insisting she has "big things to do" back in her dimension when she asks if she needs to learn more things from Wendimoor, sending her away as well.
His gift to Todd is revealed to be a red and white car with "amboolents" written on the side, which he drives down to the quarry and finds Farah and their friends barely alive. Farah murmurs that "I'm so sorry about all this," and he retorts "are you apologizing to me for me saving your life? That is so you."
Mona transforms back into a human and puts her arm around Dirk to keep him steady under his leg wound, sitting him down before Francis. He thanks Mona for her help, and Dirk asks him a question: "do you know why I am?" Francis describes the people like them as "tools to fix the broken universe" and that Dirk is specifically there to "help people be where they should be," which seems to comfort him. He asks what Francis is, and he says he was supposed to "make things, but my dreams caused a problem that you had to fix." He laments not having a better life in his old world, but concludes that "some things you have to let go. You have to create your own world. Create your own family. But I suppose you already know that, don't you, Dirk?" He sends Dirk and Mona away, turns to the Beast, and muses "now, what should I do with you?"
Having killed every Kellum knight in Wendimoor, Bart Curlish sits atop a pile of corpses, drenched in blood. Francis approaches her and thanks her for getting rid of them, noting that there were only supposed to be ten. Bart berates herself for not killing Suzie when she had the chance, sighing that she "can't beat it." Francis offers to let her stay after he fixes things, but Bart states that she would "ruin your perfect world. I thought I was a leaf in the stream of creation, but I'm not. I'm on a wire. I'm a puppet. I'm not even a person. I'm just a weapon." Francis responds that "in time, I hope you'll find that that's not true." She asks Francis to remove her from Wendimoor, and he asks where she wants to go.
Friedkin's consciousness awakens in the backstage of reality, his pupils a blood red. He stares at the blue energy in awe, murmuring "now I get it."
As Ken studies Wendimoor items pulled from the bodies of knights, Wilson enters berating him for the incident and declaring it "a disaster." Ken dismisses it as "a matter of perspective," explaining that the knights' weapons and armor were made of a metal that does not exist on Earth and that they still have a research team in Bergsberg studying the pocket dimension in the Cardenas house. He declares it "conclusive proof of the supernatural" and "the greatest discovery in human history." Impressed, Wilson asks him what is next and addresses him as "supervisor."
Recovering in the hospital and temporarily wheelchair-bound, Farah, Hobbs and Tina play cards together, where Hobbs praises Tina for her performance under pressure and informs Farah that she is no longer wanted by the FBI, as well as the fact that Blackwing agents visited their hospital rooms and made them sign secrecy contracts. Farah tries to return her deputy badge as required by law, but Hobbs orders her to keep it.
Dirk, (on crutches) Todd, (still driving the amboolents) and the Rowdy 3 meet up so Todd and Amanda can say their goodbyes before splitting up again. Todd notes that they seem to be doing a color-coordinated group outfit, Amanda confirming that she is trying to get them to all wear grey. They joke about "going back to normal life" before Amanda warns him that she saw "something big" in her visions and that "reality is falling apart at the seams." She states that she is going out to find more people like Dirk so Blackwing cannot get to them, describing herself as "a leaf on the stream of creation." She offers to take Dirk and Todd with them, but quickly concludes that they have "got your own thing to do." She reveals that Francis sent the Beast to Earth, now part of the Rowdy 3, who offers Dirk a traffic cone as a form of goodbye. Amanda gives Todd the Everbulb, the Rowdy 3 having found it back at the Ridgely. He bids her good luck and they hug before she leaves. Todd wonders if the Beast's presence in their world will be something significant, but Dirk cuts him off and continues that it will "eventually connect to something in some way that eventually becomes a simply enormous problem" to which Todd agrees. Todd reveals he kept the air gun and they high-five before he takes his pills. Dirk asks if he is okay, and Todd smiles and responds "you know what? I really am." He points out that "you solved the case" and Dirk shrugs it off as an "easy one." Todd wonders what happened to Suzie.
Suzie awakens in a train car back in her old Bergsberg attire, limping again. She looks out the window and realizes she is trapped in Wendimoor's sky train.
Panto Trost and Silas Dengdamor share a kiss on a bridge overlooking Wendimoor while their families make peace, Farson relaxes in the woods with the Bofuki Nepoo, finally at rest now that the feud is over, Wakti Wapnasi and Francis greet each other, Bob and Scott Boreton play with their new puppy, and Amanda pulls out Suzie's wand in the back of the van, Francis' gift to her, while the Beast hangs her head out the window. Todd puts up a plaque in an office he now shares with Dirk and Farah: "DIRK GENTLY'S HOLSITIC DETECTIVE AGENCY: Cases Solved With Arguable Efficiency". Dirk puts his arms around them as his stress toy falls off a nearby desk, revealing it to be Mona, who smiles and shushes the camera.
Ken and Osmund Priest, the latter's face bandaged, visit Bart, who has voluntarily sent herself back to Blackwing. Ken promises that her experience will be "much more rewarding" under his new direction, but he is "just so extremely happy to see you" on a "personal level," despite his flat tone of voice. Bart states she is sick of the "confusing and irritating" world, which Ken muses that he can relate to, promising "we're going to figure it all out together." He moves to leave and tells her he will see her soon, Bart admitting that she feels as though she should kill him. Ken calmly states "but you won't, will you? We're going to bring order to the universe. I'm going to bring everything under control," and leaves with Priest in tow. Priest asks if in Ken's world, he sees himself as "one of the good guys" and Ken replies "in my world, there are no 'good guys.'" The lights turn off in Bart's room.
Behind the scenes[]
- The episode title presumably refers to one or multiple of the jackets worn in the episode: Dirk's temporary yellow jacket, his black jacket in the end montage, Amanda's new grey jacket, etc.
Cast[]
Crew[]
Notes[]
Deaths[]
- Four Blackwing guards
- Blackwing guard
- Four Kellum knights
- Lord Triangle Badevil
- Ten Kellum knights
- Seven Blackwing guards
- Around 10,984 Kellum knights
References[]
External links[]
- "Nice Jacket" at BBC America
- "Nice Jacket" on IMDb