Adrian Pasdar vs. Kyle MacLachlan
Battle of the Fortress-Chinned Weirdmeisters

Kyle MacLachlan looks weird. It's not a bad-looking weird, as any number of supermodels will testify. But you don't become the peg on which David Lynch hangs his hat if you don't look a little bit weird. That chin. Those eyes. That smile. Weird.

Adrian Pasdar, on the other hand, doesn't look that weird, unless you consider looking like the love child of Rob Lowe and Kyle MacLachlan to be "weird." (Digression: it is somehow very easy to imagine a movie directed by David Lynch in which Rob Lowe and Kyle MacLachlan retreat, without a word, to a densely wooded, harshly lit forest, couple in the leaves, then return moments later with a squalling baby in Lowe's arms. That baby grows up to be Adrian Pasdar. He is fascinated with ants. A dwarf dances in a red room with a disproportionately large door. Someone eats pie. Roll credits.)

Pasdar has the chin of his father (MacLachlan) and the eyes of his mother (Lowe). This package worked for some people (like my old high-school girlfriend who was obsessed with Pasdar and Depeche Mode, in that order) but apparently not enough people to launch him to real stardom, despite his fine turn in the underappreciated vampire-grunge movie Near Dark.

His father, meanwhile, bobbed along nicely as Lynch's Burt Ward before retiring to a life as professional paparazzi fodder on the arm of Linda Evangelista. Before long, he'd earned his own permanent folding chair at the side of every runway. Father happy; son happy. Even mother happy, having landed on that peppy little show about the White House.

But then Little Adrian decided that he wanted to do weird too. That weird didn't belong to daddy alone. But rather than do weird right -- à la David Lynch -- he decided to do weird-lite, and signed on to star in Mysterious Ways, a bizarre intermingling of Zeitgeist undercurrents -- part X-Files, part Roma Downey -- that comes across like it should be titled Touched By A Mulder.

To make matters more confusing, about that time Daddy Kyle decides to eschew weird and do, well, the binary opposite of weird, which is to say, Sex & the City, i.e. exactly the kind of entertainment programming that David Lynch was sent here to destroy. So now it's getting all confusing. The not-weird pretty one is doing weird shows, and the weird-but-pretty one is doing pretty shows, and so one's all weird and pretty and the other's all pretty and weird and it's all pretty weird (and weirdly pretty) and what the heck is even going on here?

So we say it's time for Adrian Pasdar to kill Kyle MacLachlan and marry Rob Lowe. Then they can couple and have a baby of their own, who will look like a human infant but have David Lynch's hairstyle. Then the camera will zoom in on the baby's face, as the baby laughs a throaty, human laugh, and a burning barn is reflected in his eyes, and he says, in the voice of Robert Blake, "Linda, it was you, you, always you, fire, walk with me." Roll credits.

Advantage: Pasdar, but only if he marries Rob Lowe.