A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 15

The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.

This is the kind of episode that shouldn’t really exist on its own. It’s a bridge between two important events in the show where nothing much happens beyond a little more dramatic building in the main storyline and a couple others that are connected to it. It’s the kind of episode that has to be made to fill an order that’s come down from the network at a time when full seasons of television averaged a length of twenty two episodes. That’s great for making a lot of television, but it comes at a cost to quality and any sense of dramatic urgency. 

It was a very differently paced culture back when Twin Peaks first aired, long before the idea of being able to have an entire season of a show at your fingertips was possible, much less the standard. It would be seven years before HBO produced its first hour-long dramatic series, OZ, then another two years after that before The Sopranos came out and nearly another decade until even the thirteen-episode season started to become the norm. That’s a lot of Hurley playing golf. 

Ideally, this episode and the one following it would be combined into a single, tighter sixty-minute one. It’s fun to think about a world in which the original run of Twin Peaks was just twenty hour long episodes, if for no other reason than it would make the prospect of working my way up the back half of season two less physically and mentally daunting. 

We’ve had intimations of what drama could replace the central mystery of Laura Palmer’s death, but very little that’s concrete has been seeded beyond an ominous letter from Special Agent Dale Cooper’s former partner at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is… dangerous? We don’t really know much and we’re getting even less because the show is so busy tying up its biggest mystery before it can swap out the entire mainline plot in the middle of a season, something that I don’t think has happened before or since Twin Peaks. 

And for good reason - imagine if Mulder and Scully fully exposed the government’s dealings with extraterrestrials in the middle of season four of The X-Files, and then the show pivoted to become a standard police procedural. Or if Daenerys just went nuclear with her dragons in the middle of Game of Thrones’ sixth season, and then the show became a fantasy version of The West Wing for the rest of its run. TV shows can change a lot over their entire runs, certainly between seasons, but there’s a consistency that’s necessary to keep people attached and interested in whatever premise the show is presenting. 

So, while Leland danced and sang and generally exhibited some behaviors that are associated with serial killers, and a lot of people independently conspired to put Ben Horne up against a wall, nothing important happened today in Twin Peaks.