TV Rewind: Twin Peaks
By Eric Hughes
January 31, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
You see, the final half or so of the episode takes place within the Black Lodge. Lo and behold, the Black Lodge happens to be the space with the red curtains, the venue with the dancin’ small person, the strange room where Cooper’s memorable season one dream was set. We’ve had flashes of the lodge since that dream, but it wasn’t until “Episode 29” - Twin Peaks’ de facto series finale - that we actually get to spend significant time inside.
No matter if I write about the scenes in the Black Lodge or the scenes everywhere else in “Episode 29,” the link they all share that can’t be ignored is that it all happens - all of it: the situations, the actions, the outcomes - rather quickly.
Put another way: Lynch’s baby got canceled, and he worked in earnest to give that same baby an ending. A good ending, a bad ending, whatever. Twin Peaks got an ending.
You clearly can see it in how many of the show’s small B-stories are given a scene, sometimes two, to wrap it on up:
Donna confronts the man she thought was her father, and also her supposed real dad - Ben Horn, Audrey’s papa - and after dramatic deliberation decides the “father” she knows and loves with forever be her true dad.
Nadine is alive and well again by waking from her walking coma without a memory at all of her season-long fling with her young boy toy. She cries out to her former husband, Ed, and he simply looks on.
Audrey chains herself to the vault of the town’s bank just as Andrew arrives inside to open the lock box his key belongs to. Inside the box is a bomb, which detonates. Instant death to everyone inside the vault, including dear Audrey.
Now, would it have been okay by me to cut, say, Donna’s daddy drama if it meant more time inside the Black Lodge? Oh heck yes. Really any of these stories could’ve been deleted, if not trimmed a bit, if it meant more fleshing out of all that was bombarding poor Cooper. Although he chose to go in there alone, so…
I mean, even the clerk at the bank vault. What was his deal in walking around in slow circles, tending to Audrey, shuffling off to his desk, returning to Audrey with a glass of water and the rest of it. As if the show somehow forgot that its 50 minutes of episode is, well, a precious and sacred 50 episodes.
Hello, this is the last 50 minutes that ABC would ever broadcast.
Moments like this didn’t frustrate me. If anything it humored me some. I mean, here we are near the end of the end and Lynch is just training his camera on a geezer we’ve never met before as he’s dragging his sluggish old body around and around tending to the needs of Ms. Audrey Horn.
Looked at one way, it’s as if the old man is an exaggerated attempt at personifying - in Lynch’s mind, anyway - everything else airing on television at the time: the slowness, the dullness, the lack of, you know, life. With Twin Peaks axed after “Episode 29,” it’s “old man goes back to his desk,” “old man fetches Audrey some refreshment” for the rest of us.
But unlike Lynch with his series finale, I don’t want to spend too of much of my valued time on the B-stories. Let’s get to that frickin’ Black Lodge.
Cooper and Harry end up at the spot where Bob appeared only a few episodes ago, and it’s here that Cooper warns Harry that he must proceed the rest of the way without Harry. Cooper steps over the pool of water, the familiar red curtains appear, and the dude is in.
Inside we see our little friend in the red coat, and then another person: The Black Lodge Singer, I guess we’ll call her, who soulfully croons about going under the sycamore trees. She then disappears.
You see, there was a lot of disappearing and then sometimes reappearing in this episode.
The episode, in a way, functioned as a way to reintroduce us to characters we hadn’t seen in awhile, perhaps a whole season. Before Cooper even ends up inside the Black Lodge, he has a run-in with Ronette, Laura Palmer’s gal pal who managed to escape death the night it took Laura. We easily hadn’t seen her since Harry and Cooper were still chasing after their red herring, Leo Johnson.
Anyway, inside the Black Lodge we see again guys like Leland and the elderly bellhop, the giant, Windham’s former wife Carolyn, Laura’s cousin Maddy. Sort of like a who’s who of Twin Peaks celebrity.
I think these cameos played more like nods to the audience than anything else: Maddy warns Cooper to not trust her cousin, Leland tells Cooper that he didn’t kill anyone, Laura says to Cooper that she’ll see him again in 25 years. And blah blah blah blah blah.
All of it, really, was like a hodgepodge of crazy for me. It probably didn’t help that anything said inside the Black Lodge - save for whatever came out of Cooper’s mouth, oddly - would be projected as if said in reverse, or something. Rarely did voices bind with their mouths. I won’t even consider what it would have been like to watch it all unfold without subtitles.
So Laura screams a lot and cowers behind a chair, Cooper twins himself a doppleganger and chases himself about the lodge, the bellhop hands Cooper coffee that is both a solid, a liquid and a molasses-like substance all at once. Oh, and Windham gets murdered by Bob because he supposes he can take Cooper’s soul in exchange for Annie’s freedom.
And then Annie, as you know, we discover on the floor, and when she arises she resembles Carolyn, and then she transforms back to Annie, and then she transforms back to Carolyn, and yeah, you get it.
But I think the big picture stuff to come out of the lodge is this: Windham is dead, Annie is alive - we’re told this; we don’t ever see her again in reality -- and Cooper is in bed recovering. But then he’s moved to go and brush his teeth, and as soon as he’s in the bathroom with toothpaste tube in hand, he squeezes gobs of it into the sink, smashes his head against the mirror and then reveals himself to be part Bob. He cackles: “Where’s Annie? Where’s Annie? Where’s Annie?”
Yes, Bob even grabbed hold of our hero, too. And all Cooper wanted in the lodge was a measly cup of coffee and, well, to save Annie’s life.
And you know, it’s a fitting conclusion to a show that appears to operate in ritual. At the top of “Pilot,” Laura Palmer is murdered, perhaps by Leland. Then midway through this season, Maddy is offed, again by Leland grappling with a Bob inside. And then Annie’s a target, bound to be destroyed by the man who once loved her.
Always women. Always men against women. And as we learned a bit ago - or, as I suppose we learned - women are keys to the Black Lodge. Could it be that the women that came before the Windham/Annie thing were taken so that their captors could get inside the Black Lodge? Perhaps they were killed, then, because their purpose had been exhausted.
So, Twin Peaks: anything like what I’d expected? No, not really, even though I probably can’t remember what it is I expected. I did have an itch to see something different, though, and this show fit that bill. Bits of it, whole scenes even, won’t be lost on me quite yet.
But for a series that really hit a stride, oh, about halfway through season two - right around the time Leland murdered Maddy - it’s a shame indeed that its audience wasn’t large enough to warrant another season or two. As I’ve already alluded, Lynch had to bring everything back around quickly - sort of - or risk a non-ending.
Between what we got and what could have been, I’m actually glad we got this. But I still have so many questions.