A Pilgrim's Peaks - Part 12
A weirdly calming episode. Everyone’s talking to each other, usually in groups of two or three, and unlike a lot of recent episodes, they’re almost always taking the time to listen to one another during these conversations. It happens so often, from front to back throughout that it has an almost meditative effect, even when the conversations are shouted or laced with expletives. If we’re lucky, we get one, maybe two, such interactions between characters in a given episode, with violence that’s some combination of physical or psychological in nature sandwiched between glimpses of the Lynchian supernatural and that particularly distinctive slice of his old-fashioned Americana.
It’s a real multi-flavor soft-serve mixed metaphor situation most of the time, which makes the placid homogeneity of this episode stand out for its steadiness. FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole and Special Agent Rosenfeld give Special Agent Preston a precis of the Blue Rose task force before inducting her into this alternate universe X-Files/Fringe investigative group. Between her, Dana Scully, and Olivia Dunham (and Daphne Blake and Willow Rosenberg and and and), there’s a longread to be written about the ratio of redheaded women who investigate the paranormal to the ratio of redheaded women in the general population. Cole and Rosenfeld have another two-and-half-hander later on in the episode as the latter comes to inform the former about suspicious text messages sent and received by Diane.
The extra half there goes to the silently scene-chewing, unnamed French woman in Cole’s room when Rosenfeld arrives, who makes a multi-course meal out of her departure. Like a lot of this episode, we just stay with this action as it happens; a not infrequent occurrence in Twin Peaks, where the way people interact with each other over time can be as much, or more important, as any Lodge-adjacent fancy. If you’re not on board for this, then watching people stare at each other while they wait for someone to get up, or listen to someone else reminisce as Ben does to Beverly about his childhood bicycle, or hesitatingly answer increasingly alarming questions about a checkout-line jerky display, this show must be incredibly enervating at times. There’s almost no action, but you don’t always need that with your friends, and after more than forty episodes with these characters there can be as much drama in Sarah Palmer still choosing to live alone in the same house for twenty five years, with that ceiling fan still spinning, as there is in entire seasons of special-effects laden prestige television. Hawk should be concerned when he checks in on her. Everyone in that town should be, but it’s only after whatever’s been lurking in there interacts with the public outside of our civilly prescribed manners that a signal flare goes up and the only support system America wants to fund meaningfully is called in to check up.
Those law men also seem to have finally gotten wind of the trail of destruction left behind by the youngest Horne and we also finally (FINALLY!) catch up with the former youngest Horne, Audrey, who like so many women in Twin Peaks appears to be stuck in a loveless relationship with a man she despises but cannot separate herself from. Even the shouting she does at her husband has a staid air, thanks to the matter-of-fact, shot-reverse-shot way it was filmed. We learn so much about these two and the resentment that’s built up between them, but the filmmaking never adds heat to the flames, suggesting that this has happened before and could go on happening for the rest of their lives. Pretty dark, David!
There are a few brief interstitials throughout the episode to remind us of the wider stakes at play. Miriam the teacher is checked in and recovering from her run-in with the live-wire loose-end Richard Horne at the hospital. Dougie Jones is brought out into the backyard of his home by Sonny Jim in a failed attempt to play catch. And in a slightly longer scene, Chantal and Hutch wait outside the Warden Murhpy’s home talking over next steps from the Doppelgänger before assassinating Murphy on his front steps and Hutch unhurriedly delivers one of the most iconic lines in a series already full of them; “next stop, Wendy’s,” indeed.