A Pilgrim's Peaks - Part 10
As nice as it is to be back, it’s unfortunate to be reminded that in some ways the town of Twin Peaks hasn’t really changed that much in the last twenty five years. Yes, Bobby has gotten better. Shelly appears to be living a happier life without Leo in it, and the Double R seems to still be doing steady business. But the same issues that plagued the town back then still thrive in a way that’s easy to forget since our most frequent window into the town lately has been from the crepuscular view afforded by the town’s Sheriff’s Department. Law enforcement in this country has never really had a decent grasp on the ground-level problems its citizenry faces, and so the cerberus of violent men, idiot boys, corrupted authority figures and the same old mistakes continues to prey amongst the more vulnerable fringes of the town. If that ain’t America, then I’m not a successful singer-songwriter with 22 Top 40 hits.
That same Sheriff’s department is failing to protect the people supposedly under its care because there’s corruption in its ranks. The lump of congealed TV dinner grease that is Deputy Chad has been intercepting any and all complaints related to the twerp Richard Horne to the extent that it’s not so much a blind eye that’s being turned to his actions as it is a face with the eyes gouged out of it because Horne is a violently roiling ocean of misogynistically toxic masculine sludge poured into a discarded mold of Rust Cohle from True Detective. The most recent examples of this behavior are Deputy Chad ignoring the call made by the teacher who saw Horne run over the child in the crosswalk and intercepting the letter she sent to the Sheriff’s Department. Lucy has an inkling of his suspicious behavior, but there’s no telling when she’ll put two and two together since she doesn’t seem as perceptive as she used to be.
Richard Horne stays busy throughout the episode, cutting a wide, red swath through the town as he beats and leaves for dead the woman who witnessed his hit-and-run before paying a visit to his grandmother. While there, he proceeds to violently attack her, steal all the money and jewelry she has in the house and then leave her with a string of verbal abuse. Horrible stuff, but it shows that he’s not hiding behind his family’s name - which makes at least some sense, as Benjamin on the whole seems to have fulfilled his quest to become a Good Person from back in Season 2 (although that starts to dip as when asks his secretary Beverly out to dinner). Instead, Richard hides behind whatever money and property his family have that isn’t nailed down along with the money he makes from selling drugs for people like Red. After this episode I’m really starting to wonder if he’ll ever get around to making good on his threat to cut open the twerp’s head and eat his brains.
He probably wouldn’t get much of a meal from Horne or any of this generation’s crop of idiot boys as we see in the all-too-familiar scene in the Fat Trout Trailer Park where Steve Burnett is pulling a classic Leo Johnson on his wife Becky. Already painted as a serial underachiever, Steve only had to stoop to abuse to rise to the level of Leo and he does so with the unsurprising grace afforded to every tool husband in this town who married up to a downtrodden wife. When the drugs wear off, the mental and physical bruises from him are all she’ll have left. How long will it be until she reaches out or gets help from the two women in town who know her situation the best?
Nearly closing out our tour of the town today is the recently crowned conspiracy nut Dr. Lawrence Jacoby. He’s still spewing out his misguided diatribes against the guv’mint (most of what he says is really the fault of corporations, but hey, let a boomer boom) into the ears and eyes of his unquestioning audience who are very metaphorically drinking up every word. It’s a bit that has aged well, right down to making money off of them by shilling polished up versions of stuff most people don’t need or already own.
We end with Margaret Lanterman’s most recent phone call with Deputy Chief Hill, where she talks about the glow and dance of electricity that’s lit up the world, but seems to be dying these days and asks, “what will be in the darkness that remains?” The answer from this episode seems pretty clear; people like Richard Horne and Deputy Chad doing all the ills we’ve witnessed, rampant and unchecked. The doppelgänger continuing to kill his way through everyone who stands between him and his goal to stay in our world. To use traps like the room at the top of that building in New York City against the, “good ones,” Margaret mentions; the ones who’ve been with him in the past. She says the circle is almost complete - hopefully it’ll close before the lights go out for good.