TV Rewind: Twin Peaks
By Eric Hughes
June 30, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I say “supposed,” though, because honest to god I’ve never seen the thing - save for its “Pilot,” which I’ll get to in a moment.
You see, I’d been meaning to over the past month or two decide on a show that would entertain me through the summer. There are so many programs -- The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, etc. etc. - that I shamefully have never started, but intend to in time.
Yet the problem with those three, and many others that come to mind, is that they’re freakin’ long. The West Wing? Um, 156 episodes. The Sopranos? “Just” 86. They may be acclaimed critically, but come on!
Enter Twin Peaks, a show that hit a nice and round 30 episodes before saying goodbye. As well, it’s available in its entirety on Netflix Instant, a convenience of accessibility that I felt should be taken advantage of immediately.
This column is like inviting a novice to the dinner table - I know little to nothing about Twin Peaks - but isn’t that the same attribute you’d hope for in new reviews of a show like, say, Lost? Though I’m bound to say many silly things in my analyses, perhaps they’ll be some of the same things you thought, too, when you watched Twin Peaks on first-run.
And now, a review of “Pilot.”
What’s great about Twin Peaks is it wastes no time in digging into story. No more than a few minutes go by - and even half of those were devoted to an opening credit sequence - before a logger named Pete discovers what appears to be a dead body washed ashore. It’s all so right away, like if the Cloverfield monster had revealed itself when the 20-somethings were still partying inside that swanky apartment. Anyway, Pete calls in the town’s sheriff, Harry S. Truman, who determines the body to be that of Laura Palmer, a 17-year-old high school student.
We cut to Laura’s house, more specifically her mother, who’s yelling for Laura from the kitchen to get her to wake up for morning classes. Realizing she isn’t home - in the morning! on a school day! what is
the world coming to?! - her mum makes frantic calls to her circle of friends, including the mother of Laura’s boyfriend, Bobby Briggs. Mrs. Briggs, too, isn’t sure herself where Laura could be.
Not happy with that answer, Sarah Palmer dials Bobby’s coach, who says Bobby’s been showing up late for practice all week, and maybe the week or two prior, too. Leland, Sarah’s husband and local bigwig who’s about to close a land development deal with foreign investors, says he hasn’t heard from Sarah either. He does, though, go all guy with it by telling his wife that Laura and Bobby must be out somewhere together. No big deal!
Then Harry drives up to where Leland is to deliver the news about his daughter. A pity for Sarah, really, who infers the worst by Harry’s presence next to Leland and a dropped phone from her husband’s hand.
And that, more or less, is Twin Peaks’ first beat, a briskly paced sequence that functions as a working backbone for what’s to come in terms of characters and scope in the extended episode’s 90 minutes. And there’s much to discuss before this debut review runs up, so let’s hop to it, shall we?
The most mysterious thing about those first 10 or so minutes is an Asian woman who we later find out is Josie Packard, the wife of a man six years dead who, Harry says, “built the town.” But we don’t learn her name, her standing, even that she owns the town’s sawmill until well into the episode.
Josie, actually, is the character we first see after the end of the opening credits. She, as Lynch and Frost intended, is the first person we meet. And she simply sits by a mirror, dressing her face with makeup.
I’ll admit when I first saw Josie I found her appearance to be rather ambiguous. As we see more of her - standing idly as Harry turned Laura’s body over, certainly at the sawmill making announcements - the idea of me mistaking her as possibly male seemed rather silly. But what, if anything, could that mean? And why, over any other character, does Twin Peaks begin with her applying makeup alone? Throughout “Pilot,” I got a sense that she’d be pivotal as the series moved along.
Soon enough, a guy from the FBI, Agent Cooper, enters the fray. He and his department are called in to investigate the death of Laura Palmer after another young girl, Ronnette Pulaski, who went missing around the same time as Laura Palmer, treks over state lines. She’s ushered into the hospital, and, as Agent Cooper suspects, she’s got a surprise under her ring finger. Removed by tweezers, it’s the letter R printed real tiny on, I guess, paper. He’d discovered something similar under the fingers belonging to a girl who died over a year ago.
Meanwhile, we meet a few of Laura’s friends and classmates. Her best friend is Donna, played by Lara Flynn Boyle, her secret lover is James Hurley, and Audrey is the most suspicious of the three. She seems to inflict random acts of madness, and doesn’t have much of a reaction, save for a smirk, when she finds out with the school that Laura Palmer died. Part of me thinks she’s little more than a red herring, though. Her part as innocent psychopath - emptying the contents of a Styrofoam cup on a desk, ruining the deal with the investors with a “slip” of the tongue” - seemed too over the top to mean she had anything to do with Laura’s death.
Once all feels built and also settled, the real investigation begins. Cooper uncovers a hidden key and eventually a lockbox, a video of Laura and Donna playing around is watched and Laura’s closest buds - including Bobby, who we might find out was cheating on Laura - are questioned about what they may know.
Twin Peaks’ “Pilot” is some good fun, but it doesn’t go by without fault. One of the things that stuck out for me - but, all the same, I was charmed by - was how heavy handed some of it was. In particular, the steady reveal of James Hurley as Laura’s secret boyfriend, and biker J in her diary. It came to a point where no one else we met could be the mystery person, so the reveal of it all was like: “Well, yeah!”
Next week: “Episode 1”