A Pilgrim's Peaks - The Missing Pieces
The last stop in the original run of things is, fittingly, the most recent. Not everything that was filmed for Fire Walk With Me was include in the final film, as often happens in movies, but when it came time to collect everything together for the blu-ray boxed set in 2013, David Lynch took all of that unused footage and cut it together into Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a 90-minute extension of that now exists alongside the main work. It’s plain to see why everything here was removed from the two hour and fourteen minute original because this contains everything that is about the rest of the town and not about Laura Palmer being physically or psychically tortured. There are hints of what Laura’s going through that you can kinda piece together and an extended version of the scene where BOB tries to possess her, saying he wants to taste through her mouth, but that and a scene of BOB-possessed Leland coming home at night are about as scary as things get for Laura.
Things definitely aren’t easy for Laura, but an extended scene with the Hayward family underlines the serious blinders it seems like the whole rest of the town had for what she was going through. It’s said that Laura comes over to Donna’s house every day, which is a lot even for best friends. Donna’s dad lets Laura smoke in the house, even though he’s a doctor and otherwise has a strict no-smoking rule (presumably that means the ashtray that’s left out on the living room table was bought just for Laura). The pall that comes over everyone when Leland calls and Laura has to leave. Everyone knows something is wrong, but no one is saying anything about it.
A normally insecure narcissist, Bobby Briggs lets Laura off the hook when she comes over just to get drugs and doesn’t want to have sex with him because even that meathead he can clearly see that she is in a bad place. Again, no call is made to any kind of social welfare service. No flags are raised. No help for Laura beyond the numbing of hard drugs. He’s right, in the series, to call out everyone assembled at her funeral for looking the other way and ignoring her pain, but he’s just as culpable.
The Missing Pieces also includes scenes with just about everyone else who was alive in Twin Peaks at the time; Big Ed and Nadine stop by the Double R to remind us of their love triangle. Josie and Pete haggle about 2x4s at a pre-fire sawmill with Dell Mibbler from the Twin Peaks Savings and Loan bank. Sheriff Truman, Deputy Hawk and Lucy & Andy also pop up in humorous, unresolved scenes, and there’s even a family dinner where happy-go-lucky Leland teaches Sarah and Laura how to introduce themselves that ends in uncontrollable laughter. Again, easy to see why this was cut - it is all tonally worlds apart of the mental and phsyical torture Laura endures throughout the proper movie because it gives her hope and relief, which she sadly doesn’t get in this life but does by the time she ends up in the Black Lodge.
It also contains extensions and additions of the part of Fire Walk With Me that’s about the investigation of the death of Teresa Banks that precedes the events of the series. There’s some well done supernatural stuff, and Chris Isaak makes for a decent if less lively stand-in for wary of typecasting Special Agent Dale Cooper, FBI, it mostly feels like this stuff was a part of the movie to ease audiences into a false sense of security about what they were going to watch. Even sticking with what made it into FWWM, they are much closer in tone and style to what someone familiar with even just the first season would expect from a Twin Peaks movie. It makes for a hell of a sucker punch given the rest of the film, but holistically it also builds out the world while tying together the before and after better.
The extension offered by The Missing Pieces also gives us a little more information about what happened to Annie after the end of season two; she made it to a hospital and is apparently safe from everything except thieving nurses. In the end, we’re left in almost exactly the same place as the series. Special Agent Dale Cooper is possessed by BOB, who’s once again loose in our world, reminding us of the persistence and capacity for evil in us all.