(Warning: Mild SPOILERS follow for Twin Peaks and Lost, but really only in the form of lists of names and discussion of time frames that won’t really mean anything to you unless you’ve watched the shows and probably won’t ruin them for you if you haven’t. I certainly don’t say who killed Laura Palmer or anything like that.)
On the flight out to Colorado to visit my in-laws today I watched some of the special features on the Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD set, an early Christmas gift. Ironically, the feature-length making-of documentary “Secrets from Another Place” makes the best case I’ve ever heard for “Season 2 sucks,” and right from the mouths of the cast and crew! I’d of course known that when the network forced David Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer early in Season 2, their hearts and the hearts of many viewers were no longer into it, and I knew that the network started shuffling the show around in the schedule, causing it to bleed audience like crazy. And while I noticed both a slight dropoff of quality and the presence of new, superfluous storylines that didn’t tie into either Laura Palmer/Bob or the various schemes surrounding the Hornes and Packards–James Hurley’s road trip, the egregious Andy/Lucy/Dick Tremayne love triangle and Little Nicky business–I was so compelled by the later episodes and the deepening supernatural elements that I’ve always been a pretty staunch Season 2 defender. But “Secrets” lays out a point by point indictment of the post-“Who killed Laura Palmer?” Peaks, including a lot of stuff I either didn’t know or had never thought about in quite those terms.
* Both Lynch and Frost essentially abandoned the show to shoot movies after the first few episodes of Season 2 (Frost did Storyville and Lynch did my least favorite Lynch movie, Wild at Heart, and knowing this now makes me like it even less), leaving the creative reins in other hands. They both came back guns blazing for the final hours, but by then the show’s decline and fall with the network and audience was a fait accompli.
* The outbreak of the first Gulf War preempted the show something like six times. I always thought the time frame for the show’s collapse was portrayed as too rapid to make sense–a half a season was all it took to go from pop-culture phenomenon to the chopping block?–so the extra bumps in the schedule make that click for me a bit more now.
* The show unwisely expanded beyond its core cast to bring aboard guest star after guest star. Some of these were really just cameos, like the David Warner and David Duchovny characters, but others–Windom Earle, Annie, Evelyn Marsh, the aforementioned Dick Tremayne–ate up tons of screen time and added new elements to a show that pretty much had everything it needed in place already with its existing cast.
* It got jokey. The show was always very funny, but it wasn’t silly until you started having things like Nadine joining the wrestling team, the crusade to save the pine weasel or whatever that was, (say it with me) Dick Tremayne, and so on.
* It also started attracting performers (and presumably crew) who thought of it as a chance to “be weird,” which led to material that felt less like Twin Peaks and more like a parodic mischaracterization of it. Lynch, of course, never chooses to be weird–he simply can’t help it.
* The creative team waited too long after the revelation of Laura Palmer’s killer to introduce the second major antagonist, Earle, losing a lot of momentum. And when he did show up he was in the jokey/self-consciously scenery-chewing weird mold of late Peak, until perhaps his final episodes, where his old, erudite wild-man demeanor was finally harnessed as a frightening counterpoint to Cooper’s young, intuitive straight-shooter.
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this in the context of another Christmas gift, Lost: The Complete Third Season. It seems like at a few key points, Lost zigged where Peaks zagged. First and foremost there’s the brilliantly portrayed late-innings antagonist, Ben. I’ve said for a long time (and online, too, though I can’t find the post) that it’s hard to imagine how hard a hit the show would have taken had that character been written or played too broadly. In Kenneth Welsh’s Windom Earle we have just such a counterfactual example.
Also, after they were forced to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer, the creators of Twin Peaks basically gave up. As someone in the making-of doc put it, that was the spine of the show, and they had nothing to immediately replace it with; it was several crucial weeks before the magnitude of the Black Lodge issue became apparent, and by then it was too late. By contrast, Lost always has a whole new vista open up every time they pull the camera back to reveal the mystery at hand. You might find the new mysteries less interesting, but they’re at least there, and usually there’s a lot of them, and they tend to blow things wide open. Just think of how little we really knew about anything when the credits rolled at the end of Season One, and the explosion of information we received over the course of early Season Two. Hell, I think we’ve only just seen the show’s Bob figure for the first time. This is not to say Lost never falters with its reveals–relegating the origin of the Numbers to that stupid ARG is almost unforgivable–but it learned from the fate of Peaks (by the creators’ admission) to always have something else in store anytime a question is even close to answered. And to go to the mattresses with the network if need be, which was perhaps the most valuable lesson Twin Peaks ever taught anyone.
