“There’s something wrong. This isn’t right. There’s something wrong here.”
These are the last words of this episode, spoken by Dwayne Milford, mayor of the town of Twin Peaks. He hasn’t suddenly developed concerns beyond his usual ones: badly presiding over local events, talking slowly, flirting with his much younger girlfriend Lana. He is in fact simply struggling with the microphone at a Miss Twin Peaks event. There’s a sight gag where he adjusts the mic only for it to sink away from him when he lets go that’s one of the funniest moments of the episode, even.
But we’re privy to information and observations to which Mayor Milford is not. We’ve spent a full episode listening to some of composer Angelo Badalamenti’s most unsettling work, much of it a series of ambient, ominous whooshing and humming. We hear it over the roar of the falls, in the wooden interiors of the Great Northern, in the formica paradise of the Double R diner. There’s something wrong here.
The camera of Stephen Gyllenhaal (Jake and Maggie’s dad) follows suit, its slow movements drawn out to at times genuinely striking lengths. There’s a seemingly endless shot of Coop and Annie mooning at each other over the counter, talking Augustine and Heisenberg as if this is how everyone flirts, where our viewpoint drifts further and further from them, as Badalamenti’s horror-movie synth slowly overwhelms the jaunty country-western music on the diner jukebox.
There’s no immediate explanation for any of this, no source of the visual or sonic disturbance that we can identify, no real reason for the shot, which ends with a breathless match cut on Annie and Coop leaning in for a kiss, at all. And there’s no reason for the slow-motion shot of syrup dripping from shattered dishware on a noisily dropped tray, oozing like blood, that follows the kiss. There’s something wrong here.
I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!
Tags: horror, pop heist, TV, TV reviews, Twin Peaks