Albert: “We sent the portrait of our long haired man to every agency from NASA to DEA and came up empty. This cat is in nobody’s data base.”

Thoughts on The Man Behind Glass:

• This one, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. I liked it fine – very much in fact -up until the three-quarter mark or so. But then things got…uneven. It felt a little like someone had plotted things out nice and entertainingly for the majority of the episode, then ran out of time and had to throw in a bunch of leaden exposition to pad things out. Even the stuff I enjoyed reveals some weird holes in the narrative (why does Cooper wait ‘til the halfway point if the episode to bring up the frantic call from Audrey the night before?). That said, this one was mostly-strong for me. Let’s talk about the majority of stuff that worked before we talk about what didn’t work, and who was unintentionally hilarious (James! My new favorite character!).

Cooper: “He’s been here.”
Truman: “We had a twenty-four hour guard.”

• The Man Behind Glass gets off to a crackerjack start with the revelation that someone has managed to sneak into Ronette’s hospital room to attempt to poison her IV feed. The idea that this man was able to get past Truman’s men may elicit no surprise from someone like Albert Rosenfeld, but it’s nonetheless unsettling. Then we discover that another letter has been wedged beneath Ronette’s finger, and the chill increases. Bob has been here.

• Cooper takes both Truman and Albert into his confidence and informs them that he was visited by a Giant. I enjoy that the characters around Cooper don’t ever seriously question him when he offers this kind of stuff up for straight-faced consumption. On any other show there’d be a de rigueur subplot with one of the characters constantly at odds over Cooper’s “unconventional methods.” For proof, look no further than The X-Files. Mulder’s clearly inspired, to whatever degree, by Cooper’s character. And who does Carter team him with? A dyed in the wool skeptic. There’s nothing wrong with this when done well (Mulder and Scully were done very well), but far more often than not it isn’t done well.

• We’re introduced to Harold Smith, the young recluse who was visited by Laura on her Meals on Wheels route. I found myself enormously distracted every time that Harold was on screen, due to the fact that he looks like the reincarnation of young Martin Short, if young Martin Short had hit the gym a lot. Harold can’t go outside for some reason, and so he joins the swelling ranks of townspeople in Twin Peaks who seem deeply damaged in highly-specific, quirky ways. It’s not even that he’s a recluse, he’s also gotta be a horticulturist who raises hybrid orchids.

Cooper: “The path is a psychic link that will lead us to this man.”

• See what I mean? Any other show and there’d be a whole bit between Cooper and his skeptical partner/antagonist about Cooper’s unorthodox ways. It’s easy to understand why that dynamic pops up so often, even if it has become a little lazy. I mean a psychic link? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. And yet, Truman has nothing but quiet faith in Cooper, and while Albert cracks jokes about all this he never questions Coop.

Great Albert Line: “While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchet man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and would gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

• And I love you, Albert Roserfelson. This is such a perfectly calibrated, perfectly strange, perfectly funny/sincere moment – whoever’s responsible for coming up with it deserves extra dessert. As one of Chud’s illustrious commenters noted after the first episode: it’s strange in this day and age to see a portrayal of authority that, for all the tics and foibles present, is so overwhelmingly positive. The FBI is portrayed here as a group of ostensible weirdoes, but they’re weirdoes who are damned good at what they do, and damned determined to do good in the world. Most entertainment gives us a much more ambiguous portrait of authority these days and while that’s overall a good thing there’s something to be said for the sort of mythmaking that Lynch engages in here. Just because the reality of the world means that authority will almost always be corrupt/compromised/human in ways that disappoint us does not mean that our fiction must reflect that reality. I like that Lynch spins an idealized vision of authority for the same reason I like Grant Morrison’s idealized vision of Superman – it inspires on a level that’s arguably culturally and individually important.

Okay, enough windy pontification. Onward!

• New character Richard Tremayne enters the scene as Lucy’s previously-never-spoken-of fling. I don’t remember this guy at all, and I kind of love him. He seems plucked from another point in the timestream – Carnaby Street circa 1958 perhaps – in a way that’s both fun and funny. He makes no sense in this environment, yet he’s hyper-specific enough to feel a part of the general weave of the show. Seems that Lucy’s baby is his, which is going to complicate things even further between her and Andy. I can see this plotline going wildly, painfully off the rails in the future, and I hope that’s not the case. In small doses, Tremayne could be a lot of fun to watch.

Leland: “He used to shoot matches at me. He’d say, “Do you want to play with fire, little boy?”

• In last week’s column I asked you to remember these words. We first heard them from James, who was recounting a night that he’d spent in the woods with Laura. She spoke those words to him then. Here, Leland recounts meeting a man who looks like Bob, and who recited the same exact words. We’re not sure what this means, or why two generations of the Palmer family have seen Bob in their lives, but the connection between father and daughter on this detail is (to me) inherently creepy.

• Cooper’s moment blowing out a match evokes the “match cut” in Lawrence of Arabia.
    
• Blackie has effectively kidnapped Audrey at this point, holding her against her will, tying her to a chair, videotaping her (kinky and unwise, as anyone in the internet age could tell them now) and shooting her up with what he can assume is heroin in an effort to get her hooked the same way, apparently, that Ben Horne hooked Blackie. Audrey’s story gets darker and darker as the show rolls on, and while I’m enjoying the overall sense of deepening shadows on this show I’m also reminded once again of the show’s predilection for putting young woman in disproportionate peril, and that makes me uncomfortable in a different sort of way. There’s something interesting here, however, in the way that the sins of the father are visited upon the daughter. That’s something we’ll return to here as we keep watching.

James: “You look great. Cool dress.”
Maddie: “It’s one of Laura’s. It was just hanging there in her room. Funny… I hardly remember putting it on.
James: “It looks good on you. It looks…I don’t know…right.”

• There’s a weird sense of psychological transubstantiation happening here over the course of these episodes, as Maddie sinks further into life in Twin Peaks (just how long is she planning on hanging around?) and simultaneously seems to subconsciously be assuming certain of Laura’s attributes and affectations. It’s nifty, and troubling, but the ways in which this sense have been built up over these installments will be undercut by this episode’s ham-handedness in the final stretch – not enough to destroy what’s been built, but enough to make me groan over it.

James: I don’t know, Maddie. I don’t know anything anymore. Sometimes I feel like I should just take off. Just get on my bike and ride.”

• This is the best idea that James has ever had. Get on your bike and ride, James. Ride into the sunset. Much as I dislike this character though, something interesting happened over the course of this episode – James became immensely amusing. The way that he delivers lines like “She acted like she wanted to do it with me through the bars. She didn’t care if anybody saw us. It was weird.” is laugh out loud funny. Funnier still will be his “tortured” cries as Donna roars away from him at the end of the episode. I’m okay with James hanging around if he’ll be the source of this much unintentional comedy from now on.

Mike: “Bob? I know you’re near….I’m after you now!”

• The mythology of the show gets a sharp, swift kick in the pants courtesy of one-armed Philip Michael Gerard, who apparently really did have an appointment with Truman to sell him shoes. But Gerard’s got a secret – he takes some form of medication that appears to repress the “other Mike,” whom Cooper saw in his first season vision. Here is the Giant’s third signpost revealed – without chemicals, Mike will point the way to Bob. Why would gerard want to repress the Mike personality/spirit/force that resides inside him? I honestly don’t know. But I can guess. I’d guess that having one’s body overwhelmed by a strange new mind would be a frightening, impotent feeling, and that Gerard would want to regain control of himself as quickly as possible. I’d also guess that Gerard has perhaps served as Mike’s vessel for a while – possibly from before Mike had his conversion experience and “saw the face of God.” Given that Mike was ostensibly “Evil” at that point one can understand why Gerard would want to restrain him.

• Nadine and Ed are revisited, and we learn that Nadine’s arms have been heavily cuffed because, in a comatose state, she managed to rip through more traditional restraints. This is the second hint we’ve had so far of Nadine possessing superhuman strength (the first, if you remember, occurred on her rowing machine, where she bent the arm of it back (“Sometimes my arms bend back”?) despite it being made of metal. Here, the second hint is followed up by a display of that strength, as Ed’s Mad Pirate (Mutant) wife rips her heavier, chain-augmented cuffs free and reawakens, acting and sounding like a regressed teenager. Weiiiiird. Something potentially interesting: We’ve seen Cooper receive a “gift” of sorts from the Giant – a ball of light that entered Cooper’s body and vanished at the throat – the location of a chakra. Nadine is pumping out wild amounts of adrenaline, according to Dr. Hayward, and the adrenal glands correspond with another chakra.

• Jacoby reappears as Cooper and Truman hypnotize him in order to question him, discovering from him the identity of Jacques Renault’s killer – which equals bad news for Leland Palmer.

• And it’s at this point, more or less, that the whole enterprise proceeds slowly downhill. Donna’s graveside soliloquy is overwrought and undercooked, affected and affectless. It’s kind of agonizing in a smack-you-over-the-head-with-the-already-obvious sort of way, a classic case of telling, not showing. I get the purpose behind this scene, but the writing and execution just feels way off to me. Everything Donna says here we already know, and the stuff that could work (“I can’t help you anymore. I love you but I can’t.”) is essentially overwhelmed by all the stuff that doesn’t work (“It’s like they didn’t bury you deep enough!!”). I’d like to be more entertainingly unkind and lash this moment with a bunch of witty criticism, but its not really worth the effort. This sums things up pretty nicely for me.

• Apparently, one speech to a dead girl per episode just isn’t cutting it anymore. Maddie launches into her own short rant, seemingly directed at Laura’s picture, and gets all upset over the idea that people can’t distinguish her from Laura. Except, that’s not really fair/true. I mean, no one forced Maddie to pretend to BE Laura, she did that all by herself. And, best as I can recall, only Sarah Palmer ever confuses the two. Here’s my real issue: We’ve been talking about how, subtextually, Maddie serves as a “twin” to Laura, and how this reinforces certain thematic aspects of the show, and allows Lynch and Co. to indulge in a Vertigo-style homage. The problem with forcing subtext to suddenly become text is that, at least for me, doing that saps the subtext of its power. Having a character just state everything that the show has been suggesting is (a) boring, (b) intelligence-insulting, (c) silly. It’s this last part that bothers me most. Donna and Maddie’s words feel, ultimately, kinda silly – and silly (as opposed to surreal, or baffling) is the last thing that a drama as finely-balanced as Twin Peaks needs to be in what are, one assumes, straightforward emotional moments. All that said: I really like the way that Ray Wise plays this scene as Leland. There’s something both comforting and unsettling about his interaction with Maddie in this scene. We all wish we could return to the idyllic summers of our youth when we age, and yet we’ve just learned that it was during those Pearl Lake summers that Leland first met Bob – and Bob is anything but simple and sweet.

• The episode ends with a return to Harold’s house, still looking like he’s auditioning for a biography of Martin Short: The Early Years, as Donna goes to a total stranger (one who never leaves his own house) for comfort in the wake of James and Maddie’s betrayal. Sure. Why the hell not. And it’s there that Donna spots something truly unexpected just before the credits roll – a small red book with the words “This is the diary of Laura Palmer” written inside.  And with that, we’re done ‘til next week.  

This week’s Twin Peaks Ephemera

Each week I’ll link to a bit of pop culture ephemera that was created around the time of Twin Peaks’ airing, or that was created due to the show’s influence/inspiration, or is otherwise related to the show. This week’s offering is The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, another companion book published while the show was on the air. Written by Lynch’s daughter (she of “Boxing Helena” fame), the Diary chronicles Laura’s life growing up in Twin Peaks and explores Laura’s evolving and darkening psychology as she gets older. I’ll be honest: I don’t think much of this book. For one, it feels creepy and exploitative in a way that the show itself has not, yet. If you want to read about a twelve year-old girl’s sex thoughts, this book is for you. Roman Polanski’s probably got multiple copies. Another reason for my dislike of the book is that, stylistically-speaking, its poor. No twelve year old girl writes the way that Laura writes in this book. Granted, you could make the same essential statement about the early sections of Cooper’s “autobiography,” but Cooper’s been established as such a distinctly peculiar character that, overall, a more “adult” voice befits him in a way. A third reason for my dislike: It is kinda unintentionally goofy. There are sections in which Bob and Laura alternate “speaking,” and it just serves (for me) to take away some of Bob’s mystique and overall fright. You may feel otherwise, which is why I’m linking to it here.

That said, there are interesting/spooky sections to the text, and I think it’s interesting to note here that Laura’s cat was named Jupiter – a detail that may remind you of the quote I posted in last week’s column about that planet.

Catch up on Lost & Found!

• Lost & Found: An Introduction, A Proposition, A Preponderance of Purpled Prose
• Lost & Found: And The Winner Is…
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S1, Pilot)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (Eps. 1 & 2)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (Eps. 3 & 4)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (Eps. 5 & 6)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S1, Ep. 7 & S2, Ep. 1)

Coma & The Man Behind Glass (S2, eps. 2 & 3)

“Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.” – Blaise Pascal
Grandson Tremond: “J’ai une ame solitaire.”

I’m well aware that there’s a stretch of this season that’s infamous for being terrible, but between the two hour premiere (covered last week right here) and the episode Coma, the season is off to one hell of a good start. It helps that Lynch unleashes his dark side here in a major way. The imagery presented over the course of May the Giant Be With You and Coma is impressionistic, striking and frankly, nightmare-inducing. I’ve never been one to feel frightened by gore. Slasher films don’t scare me except in the most rudimentary, cat-jumping-out-at-you way. But this? This unfixed, free-floating mélange of id-imagery freaks me the f*ck out.

Here’s a completely unsubstantiated theory: the initial demand (real or perceived) to know the identity of Laura’s killer was fueled, in part, by the endings of the first two episodes of the second season. If the general audience’s reaction to those endings was anything like mine, David Lynch freaked them right the f*ck out too. There is, I think, a discernable difference between the sort of surrealism Lynch offered in Zen, and the sort he’s offered up over the past two weeks. I’ll argue that where Zen‘s imagery largely evoked dread, Giant and Coma’s imagery largely evokes fear. These words are sometimes used interchangeably, but they aren’t interchangeable. Dread is the feeling of something waiting to pounce on you. Fear is seeing it pounce.

Dread is something a majority of people enjoy experiencing on TV and in film. It’s what makes thrillers so popular. People want to be afraid of the dark on that level – spooked by shadows. What’s less popular, overall, is when something truly frightening comes out of those shadows. Twice in a row, David Lynch leaves us in a place of nightmares, and I can’t help suspecting that some folks were turned off by that – and by the seemingly-nonsensical imagery – wanting to get away from the “arty” stuff (read: the stuff that made me poop myself/that I didn’t understand) and back to the other stuff. Namely, Laura Palmer.

Thoughts on Coma:

“[O]ne day Lha Thothori Nyantsen was in the tower praying and his castle was then totally covered with lights, rainbows and clouds, and a miraculous thing happened. In the midst of this mysterious display he ended up with a box in his hands. He was on top of the castle praying, and suddenly a box appeared in his hands, just like that, out of thin air. When the box was opened, inside there was a sutra known as Samatok Köpa, Samatok Köpeto (Sutra Designed like a Jewel Chest), and one called Pangon Chag-gyapa (Sutra of a Hundred Invocations and Prostrations), and then Cittamani (wish fulfilling jewel), that is the mantra OM MANI PEME HUNG, and a little golden stupa. So these were all found in the box in his hands. So Lha Thothori Nyantsen, on top of Yumpu Lhakar, found these. That is considered, historically, the first time Buddhism came to Tibet, miraculously. Then in a dream he saw that in the future, five generations from him, they would know the meaning of the content of these objects: the stupa, the texts and the mantra. – Tibetan Buddhist History: An Introduction

Cooper: “Amazing isn’t it? The Happy Generations.”

• Cooper gives Albert an impromptu history lesson on Tibet as we join them in The Great Northern for a brisk breakfast, and in case you were wondering – yes, what Cooper says here is firmly rooted in the real-world beliefs of the Buddhist people. The man Cooper refers to as King Hathatha Rignamputsan can be linked to Lha Thothori Nyantsen, the 28th King of Tibet. I’m a fan of the way that Tibet’s history is tangentially woven into the show, and the ways in which Buddhist/Eastern thought and legend seep into the narrative.

• Oh, and incidentally? Take a look at the quoted passage just above. Note that among the items the King found in his mysterious box was “a little golden stupa.” By-and-large, a stupa refers to structures like these – places of prayer that contain holy relics, comparable to Catholic Churches in a sense. Now considered to be places of veneration, stupas were originally much, much smaller and served as funerary monuments. In form and appearance, they resembled mounds of earth. Seen any mounds of earth hanging around Twin Peaks? I know I have. And what’s interesting to me – if we make an irrational, intuitive, Cooper-esque leap in logic to consider the mounds of earth in Twin Peaks to be rudimentary stupas – is that these typically-holy creations have been subverted and corrupted in the context of the show. By appearing in places where death has been present (the train car) they fulfill their essential, original function as funerary monuments, but they operate to mark out places and moments of extreme violence and, dare I say (dare! dare!) the presence of Evil.

• Speaking of Evil: Bob is discussed, and while Albert is clearly bemused by the fact of Cooper’s dreams and anti-logical deductive techniques, it’s interesting to me that Cooper never receives the kind of tongue-lashing that Albert so clearly enjoys handing out to the “hayseeds” in Twin Peaks. There’s a professional respect between these men that creates an interesting dynamic.  I truly enjoy the rapport between Miguel Ferrer and Kyle McLachlan on this show. Watching their worldviews clash and compliment one another makes for surprisingly-rich exchanges between them, both in the words themselves and in the underlying battle between positivism (one might say “naïve idealism”) and cynicism (one might say “realism”).

• Also touched on during their morning coffee-n’-conversation: Ronette Pulaski has awoken from her coma, as we saw in the final minutes of the previous episode (were all of you as terrified as I was during the final minutes of May the Giant be With You?), Jacques Renault is dead courtesy of an inconvenient pillow, the mill has been burnt and Leo Johnson identified as the primary suspect. Whew.

• On top of all of this, Albert’s also conducting an investigation into who shot Cooper. We learn that he’s interviewed the bizarre old man who brought a shot-and-bleeding Coop some warm milk, and that the old man (“Senor Droolcup,” as Albert calls him) is deeply senile – something we’d pretty much figured out for ourselves by looking at him.

• And, on top of that, Cooper’s ring is still missing, remember? The Giant removed it from his finger during their interactions, and promised to return it once the Giant’s “clues” became clear. In the last column I recommended that you read The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life. My Tapes. I’ll do that again now. There’s some intriguingly vague stuff in there to do with Cooper’s ring. And there’s some VERY intriguing stuff about the final bit of information that Albert drops in Cooper’s lap during this alarmingly-overstuffed casual debriefing – namely, regarding Cooper’s “former partner,” Windom Earle.

Who is Windom Earle? Why does Cooper look so troubled at the mention of his name? Read the Autobiography.

• The Mysterious Japanese Businessman appears again, apparently keeping an eye on Cooper.

Mrs. Tremond: “Creamed corn!? Do you see creamed corn on that plate?”
Donna: “Yes..”
Mrs. Tremond: “I requested no creamed corn. Do you see creamed corn on that plate?”
Donna: “No.”

• It seems entirely appropriate, now that we as an audience have travelled this far into Twin Peaks’ figurative and literal woods, for us to come across what amounts to a strange recreation of Little Red Riding Hood. Donna, as you may or may not recall, has taken over Laura’s Meals on Wheels route (I’d forgotten this entirely, because Donna is hella-boring), and her route apparently includes the Tremond household. Inside, Donna delivers a meal to an elderly Mrs. Tremond in bed and meets the woman’s tux-wearing grandson (again with the tuxedos – what’s up with that?). It’s immediately apparent that Donna’s wandered into something bigger and stranger than she or we were expecting. Because of the creamed corn, you see.

In a sequence that is genuinely surreal Donna watches as the creamed corn on Mrs. Tremond’s plate appears to vanish, then reappears in the hands of Tremond’s grandson, and then vanishes again completely. It’s clear that there’s something going on here – but what that something is isn’t clear at all. Again, there’s the feeling of having been dropped into a dream, of not quite having our footing. That feeling is underlined, not just by the fact of the food’s inexplicable migration, but also by the indefinable discomfort that creamed corn seems to cause Mrs. Tremond. I can’t say as I blame her. Creamed corn is disgusting. And, if I can venture into vaguely-spoilery territory for a moment, I think that’s highly appropriate. If cherry pie sums up all that’s Good and Right about this town, creamed corn arguably sums up all that’s Evil and Wrong with it.

• Oh, and that last thing the grandson says before Donna leaves? It’s French: “J’ai une ame solitaire,” or “I am a lonely/solitary soul.” I’ll stop there but leave you with this: Notice again the ambiguity of these characters. It won’t be the last time we see them.

• For the most part I genuinely adore David Lynch’s skewed view of the world. I like the ways in which Twin Peaks juxtaposes comedy and tragedy, satire and sincerity, all in the same scene or even in the same moment. And yet, there’s something about the business with the stools in Ronette’s hospital room that feels tone deaf to me. The two halves of this scene don’t match up at all, and the attempt to juxtapose the humor of Coop and Truman’s prolonged chair-adjustments with the stark brutality of Ronette’s condition doesn’t work at all for me. It’s the first time that Lynch-being-Lynch feels “off,” feels misguided and even distasteful. Your mileage may vary, as it should, but I’d be dishonest if I said that the goofiness of the behavior here doesn’t overshadow what is, and should be, a serious moment.

That said, I like the business with the chairs. It’s just unfortunate that Lynch chose to combine it with this scene.

Jerry: “Brother Ben, we’ve got two ledgers and one smoked cheese pig. Which one do we burn? And it ain’t gonna be my pig.”

• God, I love the Horne brothers. The more I watch of his performance, the more I realize what an eminently-watchable character actor Richard Beymer is. His portrayal of Ben Horne is a wonder, and the way in which he and David Patrick Kelly play off one another makes for some of the best chemistry on the show. In the wake of the Mill’s burning and Catherine’s disappearance the brothers must decide which ledger to destroy. Thanks to that Mill fire, the decks have been cleared in a major way on this show, and all of the characters I found patience-testing in Season 1 have been changed for the better by this development – Catherine’s missing, and prior to disappearing she became much more interesting as a woman conspired against, as opposed to a woman conspiring; Josie Packard is similarly missing, which I’m thrilled about, since she was pretty boring; Hank Jennings has developed into an intriguingly-connected sideplayer who’s involved in shady doings on levels I hadn’t remembered/contemplated, Leo Johnson’s in a coma…..that Mill fire was a blessing.

• Leaving the Brothers Horne we catch up with Deputy Andy, who is plastering “Have you seen this man” posters around town with Bob’s sketched face on it (have other people in the town dreamed of Bob? Would they recognize him?). And this is the second moment of the episode that feels slightly “off” to me. Andy’s a bit of a simpleton, for sure, but he’s always been a fairly realistic simpleton, despite the surrealistic circumstances and surroundings in this town. I can buy that he’d be messy with his tape. I can’t buy that he’d manage to wrap half a roll around his own fingers, with stray strips on his face. This isn’t the behavior of a sweet, well-meaning simple/stupid guy. This is Lenny from Of Mice and Men territory, and it doesn’t work (for me).

Major Briggs: “Achievement is its own reward. Pride obscures it.”

• On the plus-side, Major Briggs is emerging as one of my favorite characters on the show. Prior to this revisiting of the show I’d never really thought about him twice. I admire and appreciate his calm positivity, and am intrigued by the way in which that quality exists side by side with a detached, almost mechanical way of expressing himself. There’s a quality of “enlightenment” around Major Briggs – a quality highlighted for us in the vision he recounted to Bobby in the previous episode, and again here, when approached by the Log Lady. I mean, how centered and kind of amazing is that line above? It’s the sort of throwaway inspirational line that tends to grab me as a viewer (think also of Lost’s “Jesus Christ is not a weapon”). The Lady o’ the Log delivers Briggs a message from her log which is, appropriately enough, “Deliver the message.” Intriguingly, Briggs seems to understand what she’s talking about. I, on the other hand, do not.

• The roots of Andy and Lucy’s weird animosity are exposed here – she’s pregnant, but Andy’s sterile. So how exactly does that add up? This in no way explains why Lucy’s been cold toward Andy, but it certainly justifies Andy’s frustration in the moment. The scotch tape stuff is no less aggravating the second time around.

Truman: “Hank used to be a Bookhouse Boy. Back then, Hank was one of the best of us.”

• And Hank’s story just got more interesting yet again. We learn that Hank and Truman were friends once, and that he was a Bookhouse Boy like Truman, Hawk, James, and now Cooper. This means, one assumes, that he’s privy to the secret about the dark side of Twin Peaks, and of the Evil that lurks there. It also means, so I assume, that Hank was once dedicated to stopping the flow of drugs into Twin Peaks before reversing course and becoming a supplier of them. I want to know more. How did Hank and Truman fall out? What happened to turn Hank from “one of the best” to one of the worst?

Leland: “I know him…My grandfather’s summer house on Pearl Lakes. He lived right next door. I was just a little boy. But I know him. I have to tell the sheriff about this right away.”

• Creeeeeeeeeeepy. As of this moment, something important and troubling stirs and floats to the surface: Bob was known to two generations of the Palmer family – both Laura and Leland have seen his face. But what does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that Bob may not be entirely human. For Leland to recognize him from his own boyhood means that Bob has stayed the same in his appearance for at least 30 years or so. We’d suspected this, but the timing involved here confirms it for us in a nicely subtle way.

• Leo’s in a coma, which means he’ll be coming out of it at some point. Damn.

Emory: “Why is the vacuum cleaner off?!”

• Emory Battis, the manager of Horne’s department store and the “talent scout” for One Eyed Jack’s, is also, apparently, a customer of the joint – one who enjoys being tied up and having his toes painted while someone runs a vacuum cleaner. Somehow, ice cubes and Frosty the Snowman also play into his weirdo-jumble of fetishes. Yikes.

• Little Red Riding Hood is brought to the forefront as metaphor during this scene, with Audrey describing herself as Red, and Emory as the Wolf. In a show as steeped in animalistic, savage imagery as Twin Peaks, this is no coincidence. Nor is the image of a man (or men, really) as wolves although its not just the men in this town who have Appetites (notice that in the next scene between Bobby and Shelly, Shelly tells him that she’s “Going to eat you up,” which is what the wolf tells Red Riding Hood). Through Audrey’s interrogation we learn that Laura only came to One Eyed Jack’s once – that she was using drugs and was kicked out. We also have it confirmed that Ben Horne owns the place, and that he’s fully aware of how things work.

Major Briggs: “I’m not at liberty to reveal the nature of my work. This secrecy pains me from time to time. Any bureaucracy that functions in secret inevitably lends itself to corruption. But these rules I have pledged to uphold. I believe a pledge is sacred.”
Cooper: “Speaking as a man and a fellow employee of the Federal Government, so do I.”
Major Briggs: “Well, I may reveal this much: among my many tasks is the maintenance of deep space monitors aimed at galaxies beyond our own. We routinely receive various communications, space garbage, to decode and examine. They look something like this … radio waves and gibberish, Agent Cooper. Till Thursday night, Friday morning to be exact.”
Cooper: “Around the time I was shot.”

• Don S. Davis, who plays Major Garland Briggs, is probably recognizable to some of you for his role in The X-Files. It’s somewhat ironic then, that the character of Major Briggs should be revealed here to be involved in what appears to be research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This episode continues to underline Briggs’ growing importance to the show in terms of “the nature of his work,” and the readouts that he presents to Cooper here pull us all deeper still into the woods, making it clear to us that Dale Cooper is intimately involved in what’s happening here, on levels that he and we don’t understand at all. If these readouts are generated by deep space monitors, it stands to reason that the communications received by those monitors would originate from somewhere in deep space. This implies some seriously wonky stuff. It implies that what we may be dealing with here are aliens (!), that the visions Cooper has experienced of The Giant and the Little Man may be visions of literally unearthly creatures. There’s that famous (now arguably-overused) quote from Arthur C. Clarke about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and the inexplicable, quasi-mystical events we’ve witnessed in this town are suddenly, however tenuously, capable of being considered “rational” in that they consist of phenomena that is not metaphysical, but rather, literally alien. That said, were I you, first-time viewer of the show, I’d be very careful not to conclude that you understand what’s happening here on the macro-narrative level based on this exchange.

• The song sequence between James, Donna and Maddie is surprisingly well done. I like the sense of a triangle slowly forming, and the sense that like Laura before her, Maddie finds something exciting and forbidden about the clearly-present attraction between her and James. Donna’s jealousy is nicely played, and it motivates her to leave the room so that James can follow her, leaving Maddie all alone in the Palmers’ living room.

….which is where the nightmares begin.

• It’s been 20 years since I first watched this scene, and its lost none of its strange, horrible power in all that time. There is no explaining the way in which the sight of a man crawling over a couch feels like a violation – but it does. Once again, Lynch has hacked somehow into a free-floating existential dread that frightens me in a way that no amount of grue and splatter can. The image of Bob in the Palmer house is the image of cancer made sentient and malevolent. When you folks picked Twin Peaks as the first show we’d revisit here on Lost & Found, I wrote the following:  

“For me (especially having revisited some of it as an “adult”) much of Twin Peaks’ cumulative power lies in its unblinking look at Evil. In it’s best moments this show offers a startlingly-clear view through grimy, warping glass at what feels and sounds and seems to be pretty much Evil Incarnate. Mark my words – It won’t happen for all of you, but for some of you Twin Peaks is going to burrow under your skin and slither there. It’s going to creep you out, man…

“Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed….they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person….Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are – at least potentially – everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time – not ‘lurking below’ or ‘lying in wait’ or ‘hovering on the horizon’: evil is here, right now.” – excerpted from ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head,” by David Foster Wallace

Wallace submits in his (great, great) essay that all of Lynch’s films focus on Evil, and that this focus comes without the comforting narrative fiction that is clear “moral victory.” As in Lynch’s films overall, so also in Twin Peaks. When people do terrible things on this show there are sometimes consequences. But there are sometimes no consequences at all. Lynch doesn’t introduce Evil into Twin Peaks so that Good can vanquish it. Lynch introduces Evil as fact, as uncaring force of nature – a storm to (maybe) survive but not vanquish; not really, not ever.

When I wrote that, and quoted Wallace, I was thinking specifically of this scene. There’s a malign joy in Bob’s eyes as he creeps his way toward Maddie/the viewer. It’s the sight of someone “ecstatic, transported.” In Maddie’s vision, “evil is here, right now.”

The Giant/Major Briggs: “The owls are not what they seem.”

• We return to Cooper’s dreams, and to another of The Giant’s “signposts,” and the mythology of Twin Peaks expands further.  Now we understand, however irrationally, what is meant by those words. As we watch, Bob’s face becomes the face of an owl. The owls are not what they seem in this town because, somehow and in some way, the owls ARE Bob.

• We end with Audrey still trapped in One Eyed Jack’s, now exposed as the boss’ daughter, and apparently in real danger. Will Cooper rescue her?… Well, as I keep telling you all he IS a kind of knight. What do you think?

GO BEHIND GLASS….AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!