Thoughts on The Orchid’s Curse:

Cooper: “I’m going to begin today with a headstand.”

• Lord, how I love Cooper. His oddball habits save the day again as an impromptu headstand leads to the discovery of a note from Audrey, which confirms that she was headed to One Eyed Jack’s.

• Hawk has a turquoise earring? Have I just not noticed this before, or did the two retired schoolteachers he interviewed in connection with Leland’s story about Bob being his neighbor at the lake give it to him?

Lucy: “Sometimes the “Can-Do” girls…can’t.”

• That’s a cute line. Less cute is the implication that Lucy’s taking the day off to have an abortion – something that was rare to see on television when this episode first aired, and that might be even rarer nowadays. Even rarer: Can you remember the last time you saw a fictional character decide to go through with a decision as difficult as this one, and not suddenly decide to keep it?

Mr. Pinkle: “Sometimes you’ve got to be tough with these things. You gotta hit it hard. A machine is like a woman – that’s what we always say at the machine shop.”

• That’s a particularly ugly line. The fact that Shelly’s a battered wife may indicate a desired irony here, or it might not. After all, Twin Peaks likes to menace its ladies. I’ve brought up violence against women as a notable aspect of this show before. It’s moments like this one that make me think its something worth bringing up. I know that some of the readers of this column are female – am I being overly-sensitive in noticing this pattern? Is it something that you’ve noticed as well? Do you care, one way or the other?

• Did you notice that Mr. Pinkle, the salesman in this scene, is Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley?

• Bobby refers to Leo as his cousin – is this just subterfuge for the salesman, or are they actually family?

Truman: “Your Honor. Leland Palmer is a well-known, well-liked, well-respected member of this community.”

• Leland’s pre-trial arraignment takes place in the Roadhouse, illustrating that Twin Peaks isn’t large enough to have its own courthouse. On an interesting-and-obvious note, red curtains make their reappearance in this scene as the backdrop to the stage where the Judge presides.

Donna: “Maybe our dreams are real.”

• That’s an interesting line, especially on a show where dreams have a kind of queer reality to them, where the town itself feels dreamlike and suspended above “reality.”

• Jimmy Glick Harold continues to be weird and generally creepy, leading up to a moment in which Donna taunts him with the Diary in an effort to get him to come out of his serial-killer-house – I mean, “Orchid hothouse.” Harold makes it to the doorway, looks up at the sky, and falls down shaking. What’s his deal (I honestly don’t remember)? Major Briggs has brought in the notion of aliens being involved on this show – is Harold afraid of being abducted?

• Thanks to Shelly’s ill-considered insurance scheme, her subsequent unwillingness to testify against Leo, and the Defense’s contention that Leo is a garden-fresh Vegetable, it becomes impossible to try him for his crimes. Thanks to Coop’s conversation with Judge Sternwood we get an accounting of where we are in the storyline: Cooper’s been here 12 days. Not coincidentally, we’re now 12 episodes in.

• I don’t know what a Black Yukon Sucker Punch is, but I think I’d like to try one. And yes, there’s a band with that name. I suspect that for every fictional reference on Television, there’s a band with that name (“Monster Eats The Pilot” being another example). Is there a post-punk trio named “These Pretzels Are Makin’ Me Thirsty”? There should be.

Judge Sternwood: “I’ll advise you to keep your eyes on the woods. The woods are wondrous here, but strange.”

• So, Sternwood apparently knows a little something about the town’s woods. That’s interesting, and I’ll be interested to see if they ever follow up on this. As it is, Sternwood’s comment again underlines for us the metaphysical aspect of the woods. “Wondrous…but strange” doesn’t line up with my own view of the woods, interestingly. So far, without exception, the woods have been a place of unease for me as a viewer and for the characters in general.

Nadine: “It just came right off.”

• Uhhh….Ooookay….

We re-join Big Ed and Nadine, post-hospital, and learn that Nadine firmly believes she’s in High School. We also see more of the extent of her mysterious super-strength when she rips the door off the fridge – an unbelievably odd story choice. I’m being honest when I say that I have no idea if this goes anywhere relevant to the larger mythology or if its just bone-deep strange for the heck of it.

• Josie’s Mysterious Japanese Business Man Named Tojomura reveals his purpose in the town at last, at least in part – he’s there to offer a competing bid for the Ghostwood project. I’m starting to remember where I think this plot line goes. If so, it’s pretty safe to say that it’s weirder than you’re expecting.

• Duck call!

Jean Renault: “Are you ready to play?”

• So, here we are – Horne’s set Cooper up to be tortured/killed, Cooper and Truman are preparing to infiltrate One Eyed Jack’s, and Audrey’s trussed up and pumped to the gills with good ol’ Heroin. This feels like a set-up episode for most of its running time, and while it’s well-done as a whole you’ll notice that I don’t have much to say about it. As an hour of television its fine, but only fine. Serviceable seems like a good word to describe it. But then we get to the point – eventually – and the episode picks back up.

• Andy gets the result of his “semens analysis” and while I’m not loving the continued idiot-ification of the character, the line “I’m a whole damn town” cracked me right up.

Donna: “I was about thirteen years old, fourteen maybe. Me and Laura put on our tightest, shortest skirts – too tight. Laura talked me into it. We were going to the Roadhouse to meet boys. Their names are Josh, Rick and Tim. They’re about twenty years old and they’re nice to us.”

• Uhhh….Oooookay….

Remember me talking about the weirdly exploitative quality of “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer”? Yeah, this is pretty much what I’m referring to. Donna’s version here is actually the much-sanitized version.

• Cooper and Truman storm One Eyed Jack’s, but not before Cooper catches sight of a large owl looking down on him from the trees. Can we assume that Bob is watching him, using the owl as intermediary? Not necessarily. It’s not spoiling anything for me to point out that Cooper’s search through One Eyed Jack’s mirrors another search he’ll undertake by the end of the season, nor that the Red Curtains present here and in the Roadhouse mirror the Red Curtains we saw in that strange room during Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer.

Potentially Important Harold Line with Lost-related-ironic-significance: “Its all basically a matter of water and light, isn’t it?”

• There’s nothing at all sexual or suggestive about Harold’s Orchid talk in this episode, nor in the way that Donna fingers the “labellum” of the flower. Just sayin’.

• Voyeurism continues to burble along as one of the show’s major preoccupations with this episode, as Truman watches Jean and Blackie’s fatal kiss.

• Remember all my crazy talk about Cooper functioning, in essence, as a kind of Knight? Yeah, this is the kind of stuff I’m talking about. I think we can all agree that Coop’s flattening of Jean’s female partner is awesome, yes?

• Hawk cements his bad-assness with a well timed knife throw.

• And the episode ends with a bit of weird, inexplicable violence – the sight of Harold dragging a garden tool across his face as Donna and Maddie huddle in fear. That’s Twin Peaks for ya. One minute it’s all labellums and living novels, the next it’s all self-mutilation and screams.

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.

This week’s item is special. Fro Design Store is an internet site featuring the work of Fernando Reza, a graphic designer with an eye for the sort of clean, stark imagery I find really compelling. Here’s the poster he recently created in appreciation of Inception:

He’s also done a bunch of prints on Lost. Here’s one of them:

Neat, no? If you head over to his site you can check out some of the prints he’s designed. Turns out he’s also a Twin Peaks fan, and he’s agreed to produce a Twin Peaks print in conjunction with this column. He’s at work on it now, and I should have a link up for you to view it soon. I’ve already agreed to purchase a print, and to answer your question: No, I don’t see a dime from this. Given the relative dearth of Twin Peaks items out there, and my appreciation for a good piece of pop art, I just thought it seemed like a fun idea. My sincere thanks to Fro for agreeing to design the print, and for being a very nice guy. I hope it’s enjoyed!

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)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S2, Ep. 2 & 3)

Laura’s Secret Diary & The Orchid’s Curse (S2, eps. 4 & 5)

Leland: “Have you ever experienced absolute loss?”
Cooper: “I doubt that any one of us is a stranger to grief.”
Leland: “More than grief. It’s deep down – inside. Every cell screams. You can hear…nothing else.”

Sorry about the lack of column last week, folks. You know how it is – some weeks you’re lucky to have enough time for a little decompression, much less the time to churn out windy missives on old TV shows. I’m glad to be back, and I hope you’re all still enjoying the show. We’re getting close to something of epic importance in the narrative, and I’m afraid my impatience to get there may have colored my opinion of these two episodes – both fine, but neither particularly special. You’ll have to forgive the relative lack of screencaps – my computer isn’t being very cooperative.

I don’t typically point this out at the top of the column, but if you’re a fan of Twin Peaks I’d like you to check out this week’s Twin Peaks Ephemera, located at the very end of the column. There’s something special awaiting you there this week. I hope some of you will enjoy it.

Thoughts on Laura’s Secret Diary:

• Todd Holland takes over directorial duties in this episode, and he’s a good fit for this show. The opening shot, which sends us sliding through a darkened tunnel as screams and eerie calls (“Daddy?…Daddy?…) fill the soundtrack, is nicely impressionistic and evocative; the camera pulling out further and further, emerging from one of the circular perforations in the soundproof room of the Sheriff’s Department where Leland has been taken for questioning in the wake of his arrest for the murder of Jacques Renault.

Leland confesses to the crime and Ray Wise yet again makes his work on this show riveting. Wise and Richard Beymer (Ben Horne) are this show’s Secret MVPs – character actors who consistently inhabit their performances in ways specific and intelligent.

• Leland’s confession evokes sympathy from Doc Hayward but not so much from Cooper, who stares Hayward down and coolly inquires if the Doctor approves of murder. Coop seems a little…off in this episode – like he’s perpetually on a short fuse. That’d be expected of most people given the crazed tenor of people and events in this town, but Cooper’s always seemed above the fray so to speak.

• Andy’s character portrayal continues to spiral distressingly closer and closer to Full Retard/Simple Jack territory. This episode’s buffoonery: Sperm testing hijinx!

• Beymer’s face is fascinating to watch as he works – the gregariousness of his public face barely hanging there in his interactions with a young hotel employee before it slips to reveal a grim pragmatism that’s profoundly amoral (notice the partially-obscured banner behind them announcing “…Queen Semi-Finals.” This half-hinted-at event will end up playing a major part in the final portion of the show).

• How on earth did Bellina Logan, the Desk Clerk in this episode, get past the casting stage of things? I think we can all agree that she’s….lacklustre at best. I suppose she’s gotten better in the intervening years since I see she’s worked steadily since this episode aired (four times with Lynch, and she’s currently haunting Sons of Anarchy – a show that more than a few Chud folks seem to really dig), but you’d never think that watching her performance here. Sheer awful, with a side of dearsweetJeebusmakeitstop. No offense intended to the actress, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that she sticks out like a sore thumb at a foot convention.

• I’m finding the character of Jean Renault fairly interesting so far. His whole Urbane Cowboy schtick is a nice about-face from Jacques and Bernard and I’ve always enjoyed villains that undersell their own patter. Here, Renault offers to exchange Audrey for a stake in One Eyed Jack’s, a fair amount of cash, and the delivery of Agent Cooper across the border for some brotherly vengeance. That’s a lot to ask, but Horne agrees and we get a brief glimpse of his vulnerability in the process. Peaks took us close to real darkness, showing Ben Horne’s oblivious eagerness in deflowering his masked daughter; Horne is clearly a monster (a curiously entertaining one), but he seems to genuinely care for Audrey.

• Hank and Norma get more interesting with every episode, I’m happy to say. It’s interesting to watch Norma clearly swayed by Hank’s apparently-good-natured impulse to spruce the Double R Diner up for apparently-eminent food critic M.T. Wentz. It’s even more interesting to watch Hank flip from ingratiating to scheming, back and forth, all the while remembering what Truman said of his former friend – that he used to be a Bookhouse Boy. One of the best. Does anything ever actually happen with this M.T. Wentz plotline, though? Wentz never shows up (that we know of! Oooooooh!), and all the fuss seems like it’s for naught. Did I miss something? It wouldn’t be the first time.

Harold: “But sometimes I worry that she wouldn’t be around me at all if she knew what my insides were like. Black and dark and soaked with dreams of big, big men in different ways they might hold me and take me into their control.”

• Donna returns to Ed Grimley’s Harold’s house after having dropped by in the middle of the night during the last episode. There’s clearly an attraction between these two, but who cares? Not me, that’s for sure. Little Neddy Harold reads long, totally inappropriate passages from Laura’s diary out loud, appearing to only realize after the fact that maybe, possibly, it might be a smidgen creepy to have a shut-in reading your best friend’s darkest thoughts. In what universe is this guy not supercreepy?

• And speaking of supercreepy, Laura’s private confessions certainly qualify for that appellation. There’s something indefinably sad about her words here – the feeling of being trapped in a more “adult” mindset and existence, of being old beyond your years and your friends’ experiences, far deeper within the woods than Donna had ever gone – that mixes in with the unease that her words stir. It’s potent to me as a viewer. As a character, Laura is Shakespearean in her tragedy; that probably sounds pretentious to some of you, but I stand by it. Lynch and Frost have created a full, fascinating character from a dead girl’s diary, the image of her body, and the remembrances of the people around her. That character is arguably more complex and fractured (believably so) than some of the still-living people in this fictional town. Heck of a job, sirs.

• Harold’s description of the “living novel” that’s created from the stories that people tell him could just as well apply to television as a whole.

• Josie Packard makes her frankly-unwelcome reentrance on the show in this episode. While it’s nice to see Pete again, the trade off isn’t really worth it.

• Audrey is drugged outta her damn mind and witnesses the killing of Emory Battis by Jean Renault, which drives her further over the ledge of sanity. I’m a little uncomfortable with this whole Audrey-in-peril plot – mostly because the show seems to take a certain queasy delight in putting her through the wringer but also for larger reasons that I’ll get into again on the next page – but I can’t deny that its largely effective for what it is.

• We finally get the fully-explicated story behind Lucy and Andy’s mysteriously antagonistic relationship from Lucy herself but we’d already figured all of this out for ourselves. Lucy’s reasons for leaving Andy are relatable, which is nice, and we get the sense that her weirdo anger toward Andy is as much about being angry with herself as anything else.

• Donna’s back to smoking her cigarettes again and acting like the Lara Flynn Boyle of Men in Black II. She ropes Maddie into helping her steal Laura’s diary from Jack Putter’s Harold’s house which pleases me, since I’m already pretty much over his character. I don’t need to see Harold’s Storytime every week, with this glassy-eyed psycho botanist breathlessly reading snippets of Laura’s secrets to Donna.

• We go back to animal behavior and sudsy Soap Opera as Josie orders the typically-buttoned-down Truman to tear her camisole and “take her.” It gets weird when we see that Mysterious Japanese Man is watching them go at it from the window.

Cooper: “Well, heaven is a large and interesting place sir.”

• Judge Sternwood rolls into town for the arraignment of Leland Palmer and makes the acquaintance of Agent Cooper. Cooper’s comment will come up again later, when we delve a little deeper into Season 2.

• Dick Tremayne pops in again for just the right amount of time, cementing his status as a jackass by quietly slipping Lucy the money to “take care of the little problem” that they have; i.e. their secret baby.

Judge Sternwood: “When these frail shadows we inhabit now have quit the stage, we’ll meet and raise a class again together in Valhalla.

• For those of you who aren’t familiar with the details of this mythical place (all four of you), here’s the short version: Valhalla is the Hall in which the chosen dead are said to spend eternity in preparation for Ragnarok, as told (and here we are again, curiously enough) in Nordic myth and legend. Recall that Norwegians and Icelanders alike have spent time lately at The Great Northern (which is, interestingly, a Hall of sorts), and that their respective belief systems have been vocally mentioned.

• We learn that Mysterious Japanese Man is Josie’s cousin, which makes the whole watching-through-the-window-while-Truman-tears-her-camisole thing even creepier, frankly.

• Cooper and Truman prepare to meet Renault’s man together, which makes me a happy camper. Holmes and Watson, readied for battle.

CURSE THE ORCHID, AND HAROLD, AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!