A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 4
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
Everyone’s making plans in this episode. The kids all make plans; Audrey plans to help Agent Cooper and enlists Donna, who has her own set of plans with James, and Bobby plots with Shelly to deal with Leo. The adults get in on the action, as well; Catherine and Ben continue their plan to burn down the saw mill and frame Josie (who’s spying on them as part of her plan to gather evidence of their misdeeds to give to Sheriff Truman), which leads to Ben making a plan with Leo over a cooling corpse to arrange the details of the arson. Norma’s plans to leave her husband Hank for Big Ed are foiled after she helps the former get paroled from prison, which puts big Ed’s plans to leave his wife Nadine on the backburner, further complicated by her renewed affection toward him because of his unintentional assistance with inventing her silent drape runners. All of the law enforcement officers are still making plans to find and catch Laura’s killer, and as part of that they make plans to practice regularly at the gun range.
It’s the sort of work that has to exist in a story with this many characters, all of whom are about two degrees of separation from each other and are also active participants in the story being spun. It takes up a lot of air and doesn't leave a whole lot of room for art or payoffs beyond further pointing fingers towards Leo Johnson after Bobby plants his bloody shirt at the home of another suspect before it’s raided by Special Agent Cooper and the police in a bit of law enforcement that feels a little too fast and free of paperwork to my lay eyes.
The raid itself is the endpoint of a weird thread of suspicion that started to be cast in the first episode, where a one-armed man was portrayed as a person of interest simply by virtue of being asymmetrical in the proximity to where Ronette Pulaski is being kept in the hospital. He’s pursued to the point of a raid on his hotel room (the first of two in the episode), whereupon he has several guns pointed at him when he is half naked, apparently having just gotten out of the shower. It’s an uncomfortable thread of ableism whose only real excuse is that a similar man also appeared in Special Agent Cooper’s dream.
There’s also a small mixed bag of faux Native American mysticism, a resurfacing of vague orientalism associated with Tibet, and bland talk from the group of grown male law enforcement officers about how different and incomprehensible women are which pinions a series that can feel transcentally timeless down to a very specific era. None of these are things people really associate with Twin Peaks, but it’s never a bad thing to remember that the art we appreciate and hold highest is not perfect. Being human after all isn’t the end of the world - it’s what most of us are - and that makes the times we break free of those limitations into something beyond the liminal all the more satisfying.