A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 22
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
It’s usually good when bad things happen to villains in stories - it means they’re getting just desserts, rightful comeuppance, or what have you. Likely, it’s also an indication that their place in the tale is coming to an end, either as part of the greater story, or just their place in it as a lesser evil. You wouldn’t be wrong to expect that when Leo Johnson wandered into Windom Earle’s cabin he would quickly be dispatched as part of the human-life chess game playing out between the former Special Agent and the currently suspended one. But then you remember that we’re in an era of television that asked for nearly twice the number of episodes you’d get from your average prestige drama nowadays and there are seven more episodes left after this one and that the sweet release you crave from a character as craven as Leo Johnson will almost certainly be drawn out ad nauseum.
In this case, he becomes a prisoner (yay!) who is tortured (nope.) by his warden Windom. Yes, that old future chestnut of the post-9/11 world was still a dramatic device deployed in the more prelapsarian times of the early nineties. Ethically disappointing, it also makes for a dramatically dissatisfying denouement for LJ because he’s been such a domestically and holistically violent dirtbag that the method of suffering the writers chose for him is one that elicits sympathy in the viewer. I’d say I hope the end will be quick, but as the past half dozen or so episodes have evinced, nothing this season happens quickly.
Thankfully, Benjamin Horne’s caretakers have finally decided to snap him out of his reveries as one of history’s most gloriously failed military leaders. The Wizard of Oz gag at the end was nice, but not worth four episodes of confederate flags that also make light of one of the worst periods of American history through revisionism. Losing the war but winning the peace truly makes for an uncomfortable perpetuation of zombie ideas through the generations to a point where slave-owning separatists somehow seem noble. Thanks for nothing, Clark Gable.
This extended mid-season mini-season finale of Twin Peaks also closes out James Hurley’s apparently entirely vestigial cautionary tale of auto repair gone awry. Luckily, he’s come through it in such a manner that probably won’t produce any lasting changes to his moody candy shelled rebel exterior with a gooey chocolate heart of gold at his center. His fling and frame-up with the femme fatale Evelyn ended fatally for her lover Malcolm, who thankfully ended up being just that, and not the brother he’d first been introduced as. Stop helping people, James, and take the time to do some work on yourself!
That whole thing felt like a more sordid restaging of last season’s in-universe soap opera, Invitation to Love, only with higher production value and not taking place at the Ennis House. It makes me wonder if incest is a common plot point in soap operas, because the misdirect with Evelyn and Malcom’s relationship is at least the third time that this show has played some version of that card. Fourth, if you count the lie that Josie told someone about Jonathan being her brother in the same episode we saw them sleep together. It’s a weird, dark theme to keep returning to, but we’ve quickly gotten to the period where it’s easiest to forget how dark Twin Peaks is for all the weird going on in it. Even if it’s not part of the genre’s conventions, the convolutions that the show goes around to tie the various Packards and Martells together as the mysterious businessman Thomas Eckhardt comes into their orbit are so intertwined as to appear… well, you get it.