A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 12
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
There’s a helpful reminder in this episode that Agent Cooper has been in Twin Peaks for less than two weeks; twelve days as of this episode. Everything that we’ve witnessed so far across the first season and into this one has been at about the pace of an episode for each passing day in the town itself; all of the murders, the sawmill burning down, the different trips Jerry Horne has undertaken to secure investors for the Ghostwood Estates Project. Life comes at you fast as it tears you apart.
Unbidden by Jerry’s peregrinations, a new party has emerged out of the blue with an interest in this specific Pacific Northwest real estate opportunity. The mystery guest from the last episode, Mr. Tojamura represents a Japanese investment firm looking to make a five million dollar bid on the residential development that would replace the freshly burned down local industry in a move that will surely continue the consolidation of money and power into fewer hands, further removed from the town itself. Not that this sort of investment is bad on its own, but you wonder, with a town as small as Twin Peaks appears to be, how the hundred and fifty jobs lost from the mill would be replaced by upscale housing. Maybe some of the workers from the mill could be involved in the construction, but once the houses are up, what would happen afterwards? A fight among the desperate to be the lowest bidder for maintenance contracts, all while Benjamin counts his millions, Jerry does whatever the late-80’s equivalent of jetsetter and foodie lifestyles are, and Audrey recovers from a heroin addiction brought on by the drugs used to sedate her while she was kidnapped?
These are the same drugs that we have been led to understand the brothers Horne used to subjugate Blackie, their pawn madame at One-Eyed Jack’s, whose wayward bid for financial and professional independence is brought to an unceremonious end this episode by the almost-but-not-quite literal backstabbing ways of Jean Renault. The ironically efficient dramatic storytelling reinforces the cloistered nature of the small town and its corruption. It’s a reminder that while all these fish can blub a big game, their pond is still predominantly provincial and familial; the brothers Horne, the brothers Renault, and a drug trade that seems to mostly deal to the local disaffected youth, who probably see the reality of the life around them with a clarity the adults have talked themselves up and out of.
Even the ostensibly right side of the law seems to be continuing a fast-and-loose interpretation in this little corner of the world. Donna and Maddie’s plan to steal Laura’s secret diary hinges on exploiting the weakness of a person with disability, even after she’s hounded and humiliated him from the safety of his home by attempting to steal the diary and get him to come outside to read it to her. This is one of the few times it would be helpful to tell the damn cops that there’s a piece of evidence they should know about and retrieve so that they can determine if it’s relevant to the murder investigation they’re conducitng. Instead, the teenagers continue their vigilantism-lite and put themselves in apparently mortal danger by the end of the episode.
That still leaves us with the grown-ups engaging in their own adult version of the extra-legal application of the law, as Special Agent Cooper, FBI, and Sheriff Harry Truman plan and execute their raid on One-Eyed Jack’s, a private business in another country. Coop knew this was outside the purview of both his employer and Truman’s, which is why he engaged the latter to help him source assistance from a local vigilante group. Unfortunately for them both, Dale ends up with an off-duty cop who’s exhibiting increasingly compromised professional judgment in and out of the line of duty.
Somehow speaking for the defense of Leland Palmer during his bail hearing, Harry essentially lays out the reasons why his own judgment in this situation should be struck from the record because of his close relationship to the accused and the safety of generational power that the Palmer family enjoys within Twin Peaks. Instead, he allows an admitted murderer to get released on bail, despite this man already having exhibited extremely poor impulse control by engaging in an act of vigilante justice when he killed literally the first man that the police took into custody that had any possible connection to his daughter’s death. Truman seems to be tipping a hand that hides an unhealthy comfort with the elision of due process that no one else seems willing to check.
Hopefully someone is better at protecting the next suspect.