A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 8
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
A new season and the show already feels weird. Darker and not as tightly made as anything in the last season, even the pilot which shares a feature length with this one. We spend the first five minutes in a floor-bound purgatory with Special Agent Dale Cooper as he goes through a hallucinatory interaction with a member of The Great Northern’s waitstaff who is myopically dedicated to delivering the warm milk room service ordered last season. In some ways, it’s as fine an example of the unique tone-balancing act that flows naturally from the wellspring of Twin Peaks, but it also goes on for the entirety of five full minutes. Big Ed delivers the award clip version of his and Nadine’s relationship that largely rehashes everything we were told about them in the first season without adding much new except the obvious, conflicted guilt we know he would be feeling for having so recently been on the verge of divorcing her. The emotional impact of the scene is diminished by our prior knowledge of it. Similarly, when Deputy Brennan gets faced by a floorboard, he spends the subsequent several minutes in the scene stumbling around and almost but not quite falling over. In addition to dragging, it also defeats the purpose of the universal slapstick gag where someone gets hit and falls down backwards. Instead, Andy just kinda awkwardly goes nowhere.
There’s also been some overnight changes to characters that have been made unexpectedly between seasons. Blackie, the once-confident and powerful operator of the casino and brothel One-Eyed Jacks has suddenly developed a debilitating heroin habit at the hands of the brothers Horne. Admittedly, we knew little about her beforehand, but it’s an out of the blue and arbitrary change that signals A Turn. Donna Hayward’s hair has doubled in length since she helped break into Doctor Jacobi’s office last night. A pair of Laura’s sunglasses and the need to keep that a secret has also turned her into a femme fatale, adopting an increasingly hardboiled edge over the course of the episode as she exhibits what the series has quietly laid out as one of the scariest things a female can do; express a desire for consensual sexual intercourse with a male partner. James Hurley is suitably intimidated and possibly aroused, but able to maintain his chastity by virtue of false imprisonment. Andy has also reverted back to a perhaps truer version of himself, crying over details of Laura Palmer’s last night as Cooper metaphorically lays a literal montage out on the table for everyone watching at home. The deputy doesn’t notice, but this emotional outburst wins him a sympathetic reaction from Lucy, underscoring again the need for more than a trigger finger to fully form into an adult.
Leland’s hair has also turned white - as a sheet! It’s the sort of obvious visual cue that the consequences of him committing murder late last night that helps divide the uncomfortably grieving emotional hot potato into the outwardly well-adjusted[-ish] member of society people are more comfortable being around. He sings, he dances, he causes other people to dance with his singing as Jerry and Ben continue to be the reliable trenchcoat-clad stack of man children playing at crooks running their small town! We have yet to see the full consequence of the destruction they engineered on the sawmill and the roughly one hundred and fifty jobs it provided to the local economy, but it seems unlikely that a housing estate will be an adequate replacement for that smoking, blackend hole.
What we do see, after Cooper’s second interaction with a giant phantom, is the actual murder of Laura Palmer in all it’s screaming, bloody, nightmarish horror. It’s a genuinely terrifying and abrupt close to an episode that felt unwieldy even in its best moments like the one right before it and a necessary reminder that the reason we’re all here was the untimely death of a troubled and neglected girl who suffered in plain sight and then, one last time, in private.