A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 20
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
Or perhaps Bobby will just abandon Shelly Johnson to take care of her murderous, semi-vegetative husband and the insurance fraud scheme he talked her into so that he can pursue what he sees as the opportunity of a lifetime to work for Ben Horne doing something unspecified for an as yet unnegotiated amount of money. Unfortunately for Bobby, the disgraced former magnate who’s his mentor-to-be has fully adopted the persona of the disgraced former colonel of the United States Army turned seditious insurrectionist Robert E. Lee. Ben Horne is fully adorned in grays and flying no fewer than three flags of the Confederate proto-state around his office as he goes about rewriting American history in his head. Disillusioned, Bobby bails on this latest pipe dream for now to flirt with Audrey while trying to figure out how to pop Ben’s revisionist bubble instead of going back to school and making good choices. Teenagers!
The big theme of this episode seems to be people getting some action. Sheriff Truman kisses Josie into submission to continue their totally healthy sexual relationship. Caterine Martell hunts down Ben Horne to reignite their totally healthy relationship that had been on hold since he tried to have her burned alive in the fire they planned to use to destroy her sawmill. Norma Jennings and Bid Ed consummate their will-they-or-won’t-they relationship that’s toootally greaaat for Big Ed’s health because of course dumb Hank Jennings suspected something, followed them, and was in the middle of beating up Big Ed until Nadine came home from kissing Mike Nelson into submission and used her super strength to beat Hank into submission. James Hurley continues to be the world’s most easily duped boy as he and Evelyn start a totally normal healthy sexual relationship with him wrapped around her finger and, wait, is she kissing her brother? That seems tooootally – well, you get it. Deputy Dale Cooper of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department even gets to shoot Jean Renault at the end of the sting operation thanks to the help of Denise Bryson of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
That last bit closes off the dead-end four episode plot that’s been spinning its wheels and doing donuts in mall parking lots while waiting for a more meaningful plot to come along as Windom Earle finally leaves a physical mark in Twin Peaks when he disables power for the town, breaks into the Sheriff’s Department and leaves a decorated corpse that could open an anthology crime drama on HBO. I can’t say I’ll miss much of what just ended and will likely be wrapped up for good next episode, but at least it was over fairly quick by the standards of early-90’s televised drama. If more work had been done planting the new plot earlier in the season, this switch from Who Killed Laura Palmer to Who Is Windom Earle And Why Should I Care? could probably have been done in one or two episodes, tops.
Speaking of early-90’s televised drama, this is easily the most X-Files episode of Twin Peaks yet. There’s the obvious inclusion of David Duchovny as a federal agent in the proximity of supernatural events, but we’ve also got Dana Scully’s dad in the role of Major Garland Briggs, a man who has just returned from some kind of abduction and searches for extraterrestrial signals for the government as part of his day job. He also mentions Project Blue Book, the code name for the US Air Force’s investigation into the UFO phenomenon. The starfield with voiceover at the beginning of this episode also bears a strong resemblance to the opening of the first episode in the second season of The X-Files. Major Briggs only gets far enough in his recollection of what happened to him to once again mention the White Lodge before military personnel show up to escort him away, but that supernatural susurrus disturbing the trees around town has taken a more cosmic air than usual.