Like most of the episodes in this critically disfavored stretch of the series — be careful which Twin Peaks fans you say the words “pine weasel” around — this feels, well, extremely Twin Peaks to me. It makes room for everything from Andrew Packard gleefully proclaiming “I’m aliiiiiiive” to Josie like he’s his own Dr. Frankenstein, to huge moments in the romances between the Hurley boys and their beloveds, to goddamn Bob and the Man from Another Place reappearing. It all fits. 

The show reminds me of a well-recorded rock song in this way, where if you sit and single out any given instrument, you hear something almost totally new. Want to focus on how Mädchen Amick is the best-looking human being ever to be filmed for the small screen as she sits at the bar in the Roadhouse in a brown leather jacket smoking a cigarette? Want to marvel at Thomas Eckhardt’s garish robe as he breathes his last, ending legendary bad-guy actor David Warner’s brief stint on the show? Want to contemplate the cosmic injustice of a woman forced into moral dissolution by powerful men, punished by demons, and trapped in a wooden limbo forever? Twin Peaks makes all of it possible, even the things you wish weren’t.

I reviewed episode 16 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!

David Lynch is not the only notable name to direct an episode of Twin Peaks. Lesli Linka Glatter, famous for her later work on Mad Men and Homeland, directed four episodes. Duwayne Dunham, whose résumé as an editor includes Return of the Jedi and Blue Velvet, directed three, as did Caleb Deschanel, cinematographer of The Natural and The Right Stuff.

But it’s fair to say that Diane Keaton — yes, that Diane Keaton — is the biggest star to sit in the director’s chair this side of Lynch himself. While she’s most famous as an actor, Keaton brings more than just her Oscar and her star on the Walk of Fame to the proceedings. While clearly working with the stylistic palette established by Lynch himself, Keaton takes the opportunity to flex.

I reviewed episode 15 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Finally, there’s Twin Peaks’ answer to The Omen, Little Nicky. Andy informs Lucy of his and Dick’s theory that their young mentee is a murderer who offed his own parents. “We think he was six at the time of the crime,” Andy says gravely. Royally peeved, Lucy recruits Doc Hayward to tell these two dopes the real story, and boy, is it a tearjerker. 

The Doc himself delivered Nicky, whose mother, a poor immigrant chambermaid at the Great Northern who was the victim of sexual assault but carried Nicky to term anyway, died in childbirth. “We buried her in potter’s field and sent the infant to the orphanage,” Doc says, like he’s an Edwardian vicar. Nicky’s tragic life took a turn for the even worse when the loving parents who adopted him died in a car accident. By the time Doc says “Six-year-old Nicky managed to pull his parents from the blazing car,” Dick and Andy are sobbing and I was howling with laughter. Between this storyline and that Jacoby line, this episode features some of the show’s funniest dialogue ever. But right at the end of this deliberately over-the-top moment of sensitivity, Lucy swats a mosquito, and the thing is full of blood. It’s such an odd, unnecessary, uncomfortable, funny, weirdly shocking thing to do. In other words, it’s Twin Peaks.

I reviewed episode 14 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link! I continue to find the allegedly terrible Season 2 storylines good.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen or heard from Twin Peaks’ show within the show. Invitation to Love, the cheesy soap opera many of the townsfolk followed during Season 1, has been completely absent from Season 2, and with it one of the filmmakers’ chief methods of having a little fun at their own expense. They’re fully aware that the only thing that really separates the melodramatic potboiling of the fake show from the real one is execution, so they hung a lampshade on it. It’s all in good fun.

In audio form, anyway, the show makes its triumphant return this episode. We hear it playing in Shelley Johnson’s still half-finished house as Bobby Briggs jilts her in favor of his big opportunity with Ben Horne. (And, presumably, his equally hot prospects with Ben’s daughter Audrey.) The soap has always been an escape for Shelley; now it plays as her prospects narrow and the walls close in.

Sure enough, the inevitable finally occurs, and the monstrous Leo Johnson emerges from his coma. He’s got a party hat on his head, cake smeared all over his face, and  if his sinister smile is any indication – murder on his mind. Shelley can only scream like a girl in a horror movie, which is more or less what she is.

Shelley’s survival notwithstanding, Invitation to Love feels like an appropriate accompaniment to this episode, one of the horniest and most violent in the show’s brief history. Couple after couple, including some surprising ones, get it on, while heroes and villains alike employ brute force either to save the day or darken it.

I reviewed episode 13 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)