Other things happen in the sixth episode of Twin Peaks’s return — funny things, fascinating things, frightening things, things we’ve waited to see for 25 years. Most of them fade in the glare of white-hot agony generated by that one scene. It is one of the most viscerally upsetting moments in both David Lynch’s oeuvre and, frankly, the history of television drama.
Back in Twin Peaks, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Shelly and Norma (a re-debuting Peggy Lipton) watch concerned as Shelly’s daughter Becky (a radiant Amanda Seyfried) “borrows” money to compensate for the shiftlessness of her husband, Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones). This guy is such a no-account that Mike freaking Nelson (Gary Hershberger, also making his return) boots him from a job interview because he couldn’t even fill out the application properly. Norma and Shelly, who have no shortage of experience with winding up with the wrong guy too young, can only watch and cling to each other.
But even the dumbest young love is still young love. Becky is clearly enamored with Steven’s flattery of her and promises of a brighter future…and with his cocaine, which he hoovers up like a vacuum apparently. He still has enough left over for her to take an absolutely blissed-out, coked-up ride in his convertible, staring up into the sky with luminous eyes while the Paris Sisters’ oldie “I Love How You Love Me” plays on the car radio.
Honestly, someone probably should show the fun parts of dating a dirtbag and doing a lot of blow. These can be fun activities! They just come with some side effects, usually. But Lynch and Frost convert this moment into a kind of ecstatic tribute to the joy of being young, being beautiful, being in love, being alive, the sun, fast cars, fun drugs, good music, grinning from ear to ear just because you feel good. It’s incredible how many moments like this, in how many different moods and tones and genres, the TP braintrust has created already this season. They can shoot threes from the logo or shatter the backboard with a dunk seemingly at will.
Airing back to back with “Part 3,” this episode rounds out the Vegas storyline somewhat, showing us exactly who Dougie is and what the hell Cooper is going to do in his shoes. What it really does is establish that apparently nobody is going to much notice that the Dougie Jones they know has been replaced with a doddering simpleton who can only repeat snippets of things people say to him and has forgotten how to do all basic tasks, from getting out of a car to urinating.
Maybe that will change, and more people like Bill Shaker’s wife will come along. Maybe Lynch and Frost are making a point about how for certain guys, things kind of just always align in their favor. Maybe it’s just funnier that way.
Regardless, it’s one of the most audacious things this show has ever done — as big a departure from the original in its way as purple oceans and cannibalistic entities mutilating nude people. If you don’t want Twin Peaks at its Dougie Jones, you don’t deserve it at its Dale Cooper or its doppelganger. To paraphrase another great TV show, they’re building something here, and all the pieces matter.
This journey beyond the infinite deserves, frankly, a round of applause. Coop’s journey is not without precedent: Without straying far from mainstream nerd culture, it’s reminiscent of David Bowman’s travels past Jupiter in 2001, the concept of the Source Wall from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, or the ritual of Chüd in Stephen King’s novel It. Even so, it looks and feels wholly unique. Mark Frost and David Lynch are combining horror, fantasy, science fiction, surrealism, and experimental filmmaking with gobsmacking results — the kind of episode that leaves you either knocked back on your couch or excitedly pacing around the room, recalling favorite moments and spinning elaborate theories. My notes read “THERE’S SIMPLY NEVER BEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS ON TELEVISION.”
Rolin Jones’s Interview with the Vampire was always good, but during Season 2 something extraordinary happened. It just got better and better from episode to episode until the finale, which was the best episode the show had ever aired. And they say lightning doesn’t strike twice! Moving, disturbing, disgusting, hilarious, and harrowing, this final episode of The Vampire Lestat’s first season is the best episode in the whole show’s history.
This is true even though it succumbs to that otherwise woeful trend of shows building and building to an explosively violent climax that never arrives. Shōgun Season 1, House of the Dragon Season 2, and Fallout Season 2 were all good-to-great, yet they all dry-dicked us when it came to bloodshed, if you’ll pardon the Daniel Molloy–level vulgarity.
This episode overcomes that deficit through its sheer richness. “Silver threads,” Lestat says dreamily as he (apparently) looks directly into Heaven at one point. “Silver threads stretched out over other threads.” That’s how the writing on this show feels. Hannah Moscovitch’s script is a tapestry of different tones, styles, genres, emotions, sensations, all of it so wittily worded, so diamond sharp that Oscar Wilde could use it to file his nails. Director Alan Taylor, the major Sopranos and Game of Thrones director, returns to the chair for the first time since IWTV’s phenomenal series premiere, and lays out a real feast for the eyes as well as the ears.
I reviewed the season finale of The Vampire Lestat for Pop Heist. I just wanna be clear that as a horror person, a glam rock person, a musical theater person, a goth, and a TV critic, this show had a very high bar to clear with me, and it soared over that thing straight into the
I’ll say right here that Kyle MacLachlan is simply magnificent in this role, terrifying and wholly unique in his malevolence. The doppelganger looks as if all the light inside a normal human has been completely emptied out and replaced with tar. He sounds unbearable when he’s pretending to be happy and uncanny when he actually is. He’s pure darkness. I’m a big fan of Jamey Sheridan’s work in Mick Garris’s 1994 adaptation of The Stand, but if you said that MacLachlan’s Nega-Cooper is the best portrayal of Stephen King’s infernal archvillain Randall Flagg, I wouldn’t argue with you. He is the Dark Man, the Walkin Dude, the Hardcase, the Man with No Face.
The differences are established right away. The opening title sequence, with its familiar sight of a chirping bird and whirring saws, is gone. After woozy shots of the black-and-white floor and the red curtains, there’s a cold-open flashback set in the Black Lodge, with Laura Palmer telling Dale Cooper she’d see him again in 25 years. We fade to mist over the pines, then to the walls of Twin Peak High School, where the screaming girl runs through the courtyard as she did in the pilot, in slow motion. The camera pushes in to the trophy case, zeroing in on Laura’s homecoming photo. When the title of the show appears and Angelo Badalamenti’s theme finally hits, it’s over Laura’s face.
This opening alone establishes three things. First, the Black Lodge is no longer a side dish, it’s the main attraction, with the Red Room’s zig-zag flooring and billowing crimson drapery the first things you see. Second, we will be diving deep into memory here, into what happened 25 years ago and what happened in between. Third, Laura Palmer is at the center of it all.
The Vampire Lestat is now at the point that Interview with the Vampire reached in its second season. It is escalating in quality at a rate that is frankly psychotic. Each episode is better than the last; in IWTV’s case, this culminated in the Season 2 finale, which was the best episode in the history of the show. There are two episodes left in this season. Pump them directly into my veins.
Here’s where we address the white horse in the room: the performance of top-billed stars Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise as Laura and Leland. They are, without qualification, the two best film performances I’ve ever seen in my life. Even in a series stuffed with gifted actors tasked with doing difficult work and succeeding, there’s nothing like these two. There’s nothing like them anywhere. They touch the sun.
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.
