This is challenging, layered material, written like profane poetry and glittering like Lestat’s eyeshadow. A show like that doesn’t come around often, not even during this very strong year for TV. There’s something special in this combination of glitter and gore.
Considering the strength of Jacob Anderson as a lead in what used to be Interview with the Vampire the TV show, shifting not only to Reid as an actor but to Lestat as a narrator — a nastier, more cynical, more comedic, less reliable narrator — is a massive risk that is paying off in spades. The Vampire Lestat visually and aurally bitchslaps you with entertainment like an unexpected shot of Eric Bogosian’s bare ass.
Nothing can prepare you for the finale of Twin Peaks Season 2. For over two decades it was, as far as anyone knew, the finale of Twin Peaks itself. On television, it is virtually without precedent. Before June 10, 1991, when it aired back-to-back with “Miss Twin Peaks,” only the surreal series finale of Patrick McGoohan’s proto-prestige masterpiece The Prisoner was even in the conversation.
In the oeuvre of David Lynch, who returns to the director’s chair, it is a turning point. The most avant-garde narrative work he’d done since Eraserhead, it marked his full-on entrée into the elliptical storytelling and supernaturally tinged surrealism that characterized not only the show’s prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but also Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks’ own triumphant return to television in 2017. Of Lynch’s major post-Peaks projects, only The Straight Story — a rare instance of Lynch directing from someone else’s screenplay — played it straight. Everything else is a zig-zag labyrinth of time and meaning.
As a series finale, it’s a series of controlled demolitions. Storyline after storyline is taken to its logical conclusion, then blown up, in one case literally.
Just to reiterate: We’re watching the queer glam rock incest vampire show. This one’s for the sickos, and brother, that’s me.
Lestat is for anyone who’s ever wanted to watch a show about gay draculas who sing “The Jean Genie” knockoffs into a camera dripping with human blood, then go bitch about it to Eric Bogosian. It’s for anyone who loves The Lost Boys and Velvet Goldmine and Cabaret and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and has ever thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if all those were the same thing at once?” It’s for people who know that even if that dark spot on Lestat’s pants at the end of one his performances isn’t his vampire blood-semen from ejaculating on stage, the fact that it’s even a question is a very good sign indeed.
We have it all now: the who, what, when, where, how, and why.
Who: Windom Earle — former FBI Special Agent, liaison to the Air Force’s paranormal investigation Project Blue Book, Dale Cooper’s former partner and mentor, the husband and murderer of the love of Cooper’s life, master of disguise, serial killer, seeker of secrets, would-be sorcerer.
What: The entrance to the Black Lodge — diametrically opposed to the benevolent White Lodge, home of the murderous entity called Bob, an immeasurably powerful place of evil for evil’s sake.
When: During the astrological conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn from January to June, whose opposing expansive and contractive forces augur times of great change, for good or evil.
Where: Somewhere in the woods outside of Twin Peaks, at a location indicated by the petroglyph from Owl Cave, which both Windom Earle and Deputy Andy Brennan have figured out is actually a map.
How: The doors to the Lodges require a key, and the Black Lodge is opened by fear (“my favorite emotional state!” whoops Windom), a feeling to which creatures like Bob are drawn as “their bread and butter.”
Why: Power. Is not the will to dominate the root of all evil?
“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.
Before his departure from Twin Peaks, Dale’s supervisor, Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, makes his move on Shelly, asking for a kiss before he leaves, perhaps for good. To him, she’s a goddess, not only due to her looks and personality but the fact that she’s magically cured his hearing loss, somehow for herself only. I mean, that is kind of hard to argue with.
But even as they’re locking lips, Bobby walks in, leading to a needle-scratch sound effect from the jukebox and a fantastic reaction shot from actors David Lynch (hooray!) and Mädchen Amick, who has never looked lovlier. (Let’s face it, the entire human race has never looked lovelier.)
“YOU ARE WITNESSING A FRONT THREE-QUARTER VIEW OF TWO ADULTS SHARING A TENDER MOMENT!” Cole informs him. “Acts like he’s never seen a kiss before,” he says to Shelly at a conversational volume, his face wearing the unmistakable look of a man who knows he’s successfully punching way above his weight class. “TAKE ANOTHER LOOK, SONNY!” he shouts back to Bobby. “IT’S GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN!” Then he leans in for his second kiss, fulfilling his, and one can only assume David Lynch’s, fondest wish. (Series mainstay Harley Peyton and co-creator Mark Frost wrote this episode, and Lynch’s fondness for his leading ladies, usually platonic but occasionally less so, is well-documented.)
The discovery of that hidden panel and that symbol is what prompts Coop to declare that they’re on a journey to “a place both wonderful and strange.” This is as apt a description for Twin Peaks, and Twin Peaks, as I’ve ever heard. With only four episodes left in the show’s second season, which for a quarter century meant only four episodes left in total, things are getting truly mystical. We have a white wizard in the form of Dale Cooper. Now we have Windom Earle as his opposite number, a dark sorcerer. A clash seems inevitable. What wonderful and strange place will it lead us to? Will it fill us with wonder, or leave us stranded where the stars are strange?
“She came to me,” Harry says, “and she made everything better.” He repeats himself, breaking down, in a way that’s hard to hear if you’ve ever worried about losing someone who’s done that for you. “Everything, so much better.” Dropping his gun, he collapses into Coop’s arms, and the two hold each other in the show’s most arresting portrait of their free and easy friendship yet. These guys love each other, man. How can you not love that? How can you not love them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It took a few episodes, but it’s safe to say it now: As of the twelfth episode of Twin Peaks Season 2, Twin Peaks Season 2 has officially begun.
Depending on how new to the show you are, you may or may not know that its second season has a historically poor reputation. By now the whole Twin Peaks saga — the original run, the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Season 3, aka Twin Peaks: The Return — is so beloved, as is its co-creator and primary director David Lynch, that you may hear Season 2 badmouthed less often than it used to be.
Speaking personally, I think people lump together the entire Laura Palmer saga in their heads as “Season 1,” then lump everything after that (plus the “Mr. Tojamura” thing, perhaps) together as “Season 2.” Even then, a lot of the things people love about Twin Peaks happen after Laura’s murder is resolved. You’re never going to hear anyone complain about post-Laura Season 2 because it introduced Denise Bryson or the concept of the Black Lodge, that’s for sure.
Other than that, though? When people use “Season 2” pejoratively, this episode is rooted almost entirely in the storylines they’re talking about. James’s film-noir road trip. Nadine’s high school wrestling career. Andy, Lucy, Dick Tremayne, and the devilish Little Nicky (Joshua Harris). The widow Milford and her siren-like power over every man who lives in a town already inhabited by, well, the female cast of Twin Peaks. Ben Horne becoming a Confederate sympathizer during a psychotic break.
Well, everyone knows these Twin Peaks Season 2 storylines suck. What this review presupposes is…maybe they don’t. Written and directed by one of the series’ A-teams — Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, and Caleb Deschanel — it makes a strong opening case for some of the show’s most maligned material.
Wherever you go, there you are. Buckaroo Banzai’s maxim feels broadly applicable to the people of Twin Peaks. Transplants bring their pasts with them, and expats remain trapped in a perpetual Twin Peaks of the mind.
Rumors of Twin Peaks’ demise have been greatly exaggerated.
We’re up to the tenth episode of the show’s second season, which tends to be described in monolithic terms as wholly unsatisfactory, a betrayal of Season 1’s potential. But everything from that cliffhanger season finale through Leland Palmer’s capture and death has been every bit as good as Season 1, and in several cases significantly better; the episode in which Leland is revealed as Laura’s killer is the most powerful episode of the show to date.
In a way, Season 2 hasn’t even really started until now. Given the truncated length of Season 1, it makes more sense from the perspective of today’s viewer to view everything from the pilot until Leland’s death at the hands of his demonic inhabitant Bob as the first chapter of the story. The remaining 13 episodes of Season 2, starting here, are effectively Chapter Two.
And what a start Chapter Two gets off to. The first episode of the show to be both written and directed by women, Tricia Brock and Tina Rathborne respectively, it’s a thoughtful farewell to the side of Leland that prevailed in the end, a heartwarming series of bon voyages between a departing Agent Cooper and the good people of Twin Peaks, and an introduction to several new storylines that, for now at least, feel both urgent and intriguing.
“In pursuit of Laura’s killer, I have employed Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck. But now I find myself in need of something new, which, for lack of a better word, we shall call magic.”
We know who that killer is now, and that makes Twin Peaks a fundamentally different show than it was an episode ago. With the show’s central mystery solved from the viewer’s perspective, you can already feel the force of storytelling gravity tugging the case towards its resolution. There’s only so long you can leave the killer on the loose without making Agent Cooper and company look incompetent, which cuts against the core appeal of the character.
I’ve given some thought to the sublime in cinema — moments when it feels what I’m watching has somehow transcended earthly limitations, visually expressing a feeling so huge that it’s impossible for words to articulate. I realize now that for me, this happens in horror more often than anywhere else. In fact, it may only happen in horror.
It happens when characters are made to confront some symbolic representation of…not death, though that’s part of it, and not evil, though that’s part of it too. They confront the darkness we fear exists at the world’s heart, the terrible void that acts as a megapredator for our tiny souls. They confront the true black.
I think of moments like Chief Brody on the beach, the camera dolly-zooming on him Vertigo style as he sees that the shark he hoped had been killed but knew in his heart had not claim another victim. Father Karras and Father Merrin, chanting “The power of Christ compels you!” at a hovering Regan MacNeil. Wendy Torrance turning a corner and watching an elevator unleash a river of blood. The cops gazing down the hall of Barton Fink’s hotel and seeing a demon in human form amidst a blazing inferno. The end of Mulholland Drive. The end of The Zone of Interest.
And this episode of Twin Peaks. Maddy and Leland and Bob and Sarah in the living room. Coop and Harry and the Log Lady and the Giant and the waiter and Bobby and Donna and James in the Roadhouse. Evil incarnate, drawing out grief from people who don’t even yet know why they’re grieving — only that there’s been some tear in the fabric in the world, one that they can sense but never repair.
When Mark Frost and David Lynch’s credit appeared against the red curtains, I couldn’t hold back anymore. The tears I’d withheld came pouring out. This is one of the most deeply awful and awesome things ever aired on television. I have not forgotten it since I first watched it nearly three decades ago. I will never forget it for as long as I live.
There’s room for silly business like this in Twin Peaks for sure. It’s part of the charm. But we’re now getting ever closer to the pulsating black heart of the story — the force of sheer malevolence that claimed Laura Palmer’s life. As such, even the simplest lines that touch on this mystery take on an awesome power. When Mike describes Bob as “the parasite,” attaching himself to human hosts and feeding on their fears and carnal pleasures, it’s like hearing Max Von Sydow talk about the thing inside Regan in The Exorcist.
“He is Bob, eager for fun,” Mike says. “He wears a smile. Everybody run.”
This dialogue moves me to the point of tears, not of sorrow or joy, but awe. A great and terrible thing is at hand.
