A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 17
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
Now we enter what could best be described as the waste land of Twin Peaks. The driving mystery of the show has been well and truly solved, leaving no ambiguity or room for interpretation left about who killed Laura Palmer and why. However, there are still another thirteen episodes left to go in this season. How on earth are they going to be filled? What gear shift could the show make in the middle of the season to help keep us interested in what’s happening in the lives of the town’s residents?
Some unlikely possibilities are the the smaller stories that have been playing out in the background this season; poor Shelley Johnson who’s ended up with another boorishly ambitious local that’s wrapped up in his own small town schemes and is more preoccupied with some fantasy version of their life together where he’s provided her everything he thinks she needs than he is in spending time with her or listening to her actual needs, wants, or desires. The bland dramedy surrounding the paternity of Lucy’s baby, and the man children Andy Brennan and Dick Tremayne who are vying for the title. Or the eternally mawkish exercise of allowing late-30-something Nadine Hurley to enroll back in high school as some form of recovery.
As those old wheels spin in place, several others join in as Audrey Horne and Bobby Briggs get thrown together and the mayor of Twin Peaks and his brother pull a slightly aggro Statler and Waldorf routine at Laura’s wake.
The biggest wheel, though, is a sudden official inquiry into Special Agent Dale Cooper’s dubious actions across the border when he looked into One Eyed Jack’s and then the later rescue of Audrey Horne. These have come back to haunt him in the form of an internal affairs-style investigation that we know from the outset to be completely false. The scraps of evidence it’s predicated on are mostly sourced from the continuing resentment Jean Renault has for Agent Cooper regarding the deaths of his brothers. A pair of events which (again) the Special Agent was in no way directly responsible for. The slapdash nature of the whole ordeal feels comically on the nose coming as it does when Agent Cooper is right about to walk out the door of the show.
Just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in with some flimsy drama we’ll be killing time with as the show scrambles to shift its focus in a reshuffle that would normally happen at the end or beginning of a season. There is another brief mention made of Agent Cooper’s former partner at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Windom Earle, during some character-driven exposition, but it’s all still set up, and too little to hide the squeaking of the show’s wheels.
The conversation between Cooper and Major Briggs that closes out the show starts to give us a welcome hint of that sweet supernatural air which blows so sublimely through the douglas firs surrounding the town. A brief mention is made of something called the White Lodge as they roast marshmallows, but before the Major can reveal any more details about it, he seems to disappear into the opening scene of The X-Files pilot, pursued by both Cooper and our hunger for anything to help us forget the scene at Laura’s wake where a woman in her late-thirties acting like a midcentruy teeanger asked her husband if he thought people were using her shiny shoes to look up her dress.
It feels like we’ve fallen a long way already, but I suspect there’s still a way yet left to go.