A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 21
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
Bobby does a good thing after all!
It kinda seems like he did it accidentally, but you take what you can get. Coming home after a long day of indulging in the continued revisionist HBO pitches of Benjamin Horne (who really deserves better medical treatment than what the Raleigh St. Clairs of the world can provide), he finds Shelly once again at the mercy of a homicidal Leo Johnson. He steps in to save her, winding up against a wall with the handle of an axe against his larynx until Shelly stabs Leo in the shoulder. One loud, piggish bellow later and Leo lights out through the torn plastic sheet in the direction of the end of the episode faster than you can say flight from prosecution or death by exposure.
It would be a heroic gesture if Bobby hadn’t set this whole situation in motion by talking Shelly into an insurance fraud scheme that kept Leo from being put behind bars for the rest of his life after tying her up and leaving her to die in fire. Now he’s just doing the minimum amount of damage control and clean up that one would expect from someone who’d made such a mess. Time will tell if this is the wakeup call that Bobby needs to become the man visions have foretold, but we’ve also got nine more episodes left in this season so unfortunately he’s got plenty of time to backslide.
This is another weak point of this type of episodic television. You have characters making the same mistakes over and over and over again when it seems like the end result and consequences are blindingly obvious. Yes, it’s something that happens to people in so-called real life, but television isn’t real life! It’s stories; stories we tell each other, and a failure to tell stories where characters are capable of growth from the decisions they make is a failure of imagination. Continuing to put characters through the same plots over and over and over again while merely changing the window dressing and thinking that no one will notice or ask or want for something better eventually is a kind of laziness that borders on cynicism.
I don’t really have the heart to continue to dive into the increasingly gross use in this show of what eventually became a recognized hate symbol beyond saying that the treatment the medical professionals seem to be prescribing for the personality disorders resulting from physical and mental traumas popping up in Twin Peaks is suspicious at best and tiring all around.
Luckily, Sheriff’s Deputy Dale Cooper finally starts to expound a little on the formative past pains that played a part in forging the personality we’ve grown so fond of since his arrival in Twin Peaks about a month ago. It turns out that the woman he told Audrey that he’d fallen for was Caroline Powell, the wife of Windom Earle who was his first partner at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We know how much he cared about her because we see her black and white smiling face superimposed over his as he talks about her, an effect that is :chefkiss:. Anywho, she was under his and Windom’s care as a federal witness and her death drove his partner insane, but Coop thinks that was feigned to allay the blame that Windom had committed both crimes (killing Caroline and whatever she was a witness for) until Windom actually lost his grip on reality. The end result of which is a Dale Cooper who is the fastidious and professional temporarily suspended Federal Agent who first drove into our hearts through a dark forest of douglas firs.
And he must have run faster than the writers could type death by exposure (or death by blood loss), because Leo Johnson manages to survive twenty four hours outside in a Pacific Northwest forest in early March while wearing only pajamas and a bathrobe before he stumbles upon a lit up cabin. Lucky! There he meets Windom Earle, which is definitely the best thing that could happen to him at this point in the show. Or maybe the best thing that could happen to him for us at this point in the show. Good luck, LJ!