A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 14
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
[cw: brief discussion of suicide]
Twin Peaks, when it works, is capable of truly incredible sucker punches. There is a side of it that is hard to watch, and it’s an easy one to forget about because it’s not really what you expect the first time through, which has the effect of making it easy to forget about over time when you’re coming back to rewatch it. The entire storyline with Nadine reverting to a super strong version of her high school self after recovering from her suicide and Big Ed convincing the rest of the town to play along is excruciating. It feels like the worst impulses of a soap opera are benign fed into and it takes something that should be serious - recovering after an attempted suicide - and turns it into a running gag about how silly it is that Nadine loves Ed, but too much, and how he’s afraid he’s become of her now that she is both actively interested in sex with him and that he can be hurt by her. Maybe it’s advisable to play along with her delusion, but even if he needs to treat her in this way, he can still tell her that she’s physically powerful to prevent her from hurting himself and others.
It feels like enforced levity, something thrown in to try and balance out the other parts of the show that are falling away to reveal the pitch black nature of what happened to Laura Palmer. The storyline with Shelley Johnson and Bobby Briggs caring for a now disabled Leo Johnson to commit insurance fraud started out on a similar note. The pair quickly got out of their depth when forced to actually provide care for a person with disabilities, but that arc at least seems inclined to come into orbit around the greater drama that’s happening in Twin Peaks. Nadine and Big Ed just seem to be stuck on their own Farrelly Brothers comet, occasionally passing close enough to other townsfolk to make them uncomfortable on arrival and relieved upon passing.
We see the very real consequences of actions that characters have taken this episode, as Donna Hayward's teenage impulsiveness now has a body count. Harold Smith has committed suicide after Donna and Maddie broke into his home in an attempt to steal Larua’s secret diary and were rescued by James Hurley. Yes, Harold was threatening the two young women with a gardening tool after his distress caused him to engage in self-mutilation. Yes, he definitely distributed alcohol to a minor when he gave Laura a glass of wine over lunch. And yes, he was obstructing a police investigation by withholding evidence while appearing willing to trade parts of it to a teenage girl in exchange for details about her private life. But he was mostly responsible when he was around her, and didn’t deserve to have his illness manipulated in such a thoughtless manner. As soon as she learned about the diary, she should have gone to the police. Sheriff Harry S Truman may be exhibiting the judgment of western lawman, Special Agent Dale Cooper of the Federal Bureau of Investigation typically has a more compassionate touch and would likely have been able to meet Harold in some safe middleground.
Instead, a lonely man was driven further into his own dark places and he never came back.
Donna is right to question her actions as she begins to comprehend the scope of their consequences. It’s a terrible thing to realize that you may have played such a part in someone’s life, but recognizing your failures is the best way to make sure that you don’t repeat them and that maybe next time you can be the help someone needs.
For all the pain on display, Twin Peaks never sensationalizes the suffering its characters endure. It can indulge in soap operatic tropes to the point where you can barely tolerate what’s happening on screen, but there is remarkable grace in how it handles actual pain. Harold dies quietly and alone, but we don’t see the act itself, just the result - there’s no dramatic score, no tearful note writing, no chair tumbling over. Of course, he’s not the only death this episode.
As Donna’s enlightenment is dawning, the curtains are coming down on Maddie Ferguson. The cracks in the supports have been spreading for a while, with her vision of blood on the Palmer’s living room floor and of BOB stalking through the house for her in what we recently learned from MIKE was the likely presage of one damned. And there he is again in the mirror, where he’s been for nearly forty years, looking back at the glowing face of Leland Palmer.
There is a visceral terror throughout Maddie’s murder because she is never quiet until she is dead. When she’s not pleading for her life, she’s screaming, then hyperventilating, then gasping for breath, then nothing. The violence is abrupt, and mixed with glimpses of the grief from whatever part of Leland still exists and disquieting feral sensation from BOB. There are just three punches thrown, and one final head injury. The impact from every blow still lands harder than the entirety of most blockbuster fight scenes. All of it is harder to watch.
The unnatural element of murder is underlined by filmmaking and storytelling elements that make it a little more bearable. Everything that happens within the realm of the supernatural - with BOB - is spotlit, echoing previous encroachments of worlds beyond ours into this one. The giant is back to memorialize that, “It is happening again,” when no one else beyond perpetrator and victim are there to bear witness. After it is done, the light goes out, and some psychic wave of grief passes through both those who we would expect to be sensitive and those we wouldn’t. Donna’s fresh mourning is compounded, prompting James to embrace her. Bobby looks up, almost in the direction of where the spotlight would have come from, a look of bewilderment giving way to something more akin to loss, the likes of which we’ve seen from him only once before. As Cooper stares at where the spotlight was shining, he receives a sincere apology from the waiter who delivered his room service about a week ago.
And then, a gradual fade to black.