A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 28
We’re so close to the end now, but somehow this episode feels more like we’ve stopped and are waiting for something to happen instead of picking up where the last episode ended and running from there. The biggest highlight is the return of Special Agent Dale Cooper’s tape recorder-based conversations with Diane. It’s nice to see Agent Cooper being outwardly introspective again. Everything else that happens in this episode feels like it’s happening at half speed because we spend so much of it watching every one of the protagonists playing catch up with an antagonist whose every plot-relevant thought and action we have been witness to. It’s a lot of treading water while we wait for everyone to catch up with each other so the chase can be as fair as possible.
It’s an inelegant solution that’s not helped by a return of the placeholder filmmaking we’ve seen through most of this season. The shots have moved back a few steps to make the closeups less so. They’re also put together into a more traditional form and of a more typical length and rhythm than what we saw last episode. The occasional grace notes like Audrey wearing a bright red dress while she’s seated in front of a fire, thinking about John Justice Wheeler and the subsequent framing of her barefoot and boxed in by her father’s office and his will to stop the Ghostwood development mostly highlight the lack of excitement going on in the rest of the episode.
None of this would be a bad thing itself, if the story were able to pick up the slack and pull this all together in an interesting or engaging way, but it, too, feels stuck between being rushed and stilted as though it’s waiting for other parts of itself to get in place before it can move forward. There’s a destination, and someone knows where it is, but they won’t let us get there yet. Annie and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s relationship goes from talking about her speech about saving the forest and tree metaphors to sex with startling abruptness. Mayor Milford isn’t entirely wrong that it feels like she’s only been in this town for fifteen minutes, but right now it seems like stakes only exist to be raised and so this is what we get; Supernatural Soap Opera Barbie and Special Agent Ken being mashed together to remind us how important they’ve become to each other.
The supernatural is another casualty of the side of the story we’re on. It’s backgrounded almost entirely as the perspective this episode is mostly from those in law enforcement who are so far behind that they just need to be told everything or have flashes of knowledge even they don’t understand in order to catch up to Windom Earle because all of the sudden we’re at the second to last episode of the series and oh crap, there’s only one episode left?