A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 27
The distant clouds that we’ve seen gathering on the horizon are almost on us. Pressure’s dropping, the air is charged and a tense calm suffueses the streets and people of Twin Peaks that no one can pin down the origins of but which no one feels quite right about. After taking the last episode off, things are back in full force, with one of the best combinations of filmmaking and supernatural we’ve had in a dozen episodes. As the winds of plot that have been idling for an unbearably long time start rushing in to circle each other and come together we get what feels like a stifling number of closeups throughout the episode.
Bobby is back! Again! He seems to have snapped out of his latest self-interested fugue to apologize to Shelly as she rehearses her Miss Twin Peaks speech in a conversation that brings us closer and closer until all that exists onscreen are their two faces and a smidge of bokeh’d background only to be summoned away by a call to talk with Special Agent Dale Cooper of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who is finally able to brief the unlucky trio of girls who’ve been targeted by Windom Earle’s poetry. This scene actually starts and ends with a pair of shots that push the minute mark without a cut. The opener goes from a wider shot of the room into closeups of everyone else as the conversation increases in thematic intensity, while the closing shot is just a continuous move from closeup to closeup to closeup as the weight of the danger being laid out washes settles in on everyone’s face.
These longer takes are peppered throughout the episode, with the second one running well over a minute as the pawn containing Windom Earle’s latest victim is moved from the gazebo by the lake into a waiting ambulance. Earle’s gloating over his lead on the law enforcement following him is another minute long that ends with Leo Johnson surreptitiously getting possession of his shock collar’s controller. The longest by far, though, is a slow two-minute plus zoom out of a conversation between Annie and Agent Cooper at the counter of the Double R that feels increasingly tense and voyeuristic the longer it goes on, situated, as it is, slightly behind Agent Cooper’s back and coming from an angle in diner we’ve never seen before.
These two filmmaking choices, separate and combined, provide us with a chance to see these characters together in a way that we rarely, if ever, have been able to before, pinioned as we have been by the twin yokes of standard coverage and seemingly inconsequential storylines. The former still exists because of the formal exigencies of the medium in which it’s broadcast, but the rapid dwindling of the latter in concert with deliberate filmmaking choices give a cracklingly novel intensity to these scenes and interactions that has been wanting from the show for so long. Seeing these faces in this way makes it feel as though we’re being reintroduced to them.
Annie and Agent Cooper continue their courtship at a dance later in the episode, where he receives the most deliberate and unambiguous message yet from Another Place after she says she’ll enter the Miss Twin Peaks contest. Coming after a flood of telegraphing double entendre language that calls back to the, “hear the other side, see the other side,” Saint Augustine quote Agent Cooper made earlier in the episode and and him calling her the queen in a reference to Windom Earle’s playing card-themed hit list, the Federal Agent is slapped with a spotlight on the dancefloor and looks up on the stage to see the giant waving emphatically waving his arms and head as he mouths the word, “No.” It’s strikingly ominous when a supernatural force known primarily for speaking in riddles just gets up and waves the biggest red flag we’ve ever seen in a series full of them. Worse, we don’t know how much of that message landed in Agent Cooper’s conscious mind because once he’s out of the spotlight he goes back to mackin’ on Annie.
Maybe his sixth sense has been dulled by the rest of the bad vibes that have been going around town this episode. The most explicit of which is a curiously clawlike, hand twitch that’s been hopping from a pie aficionado at the Double R, to Agent Cooper as he talks up Annie to Sheriff Truman, and finally Pete Martell as he sheds a tear for Audrey Horne. We also see Windom Earle giving a creepy TED talk about the Black Lodge in a poorly framed tape from the mysterious Project Blue Book. The restrained performance and low-fi aesthetics lend his words an uncanny weight that we don’t get from his present-day unhinged self, whose giddiness about… everything from taunting law enforcement to using the Owl Cave glyph as a map, is starting to feel like a dramatic liability. If your performance lives at 11, it starts to turn cartoonish pretty fast.
All these bad vibes sweep through the empty halls of the high school, past stop lights working for no one, and on out through the trees surrounding Twin Peaks until they wind up in a small clearing where a ring of spindly trees encircles a shallow, rock-ringed pool. Suddenly, a spotlight appears, followed by a hand, grasping in a jerky echo of the motion experienced earlier by several citizens throughout this episode. The spotlight disappears and BOB is back. He snatches his arm back from where the light was as we realize this is filmed in reverse and we move down to see the pool reflecting long red curtains as a lonely Saxophone blows a tune somewhere out there in the darkness.