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I’m having a hard time distinguishing what Twin Peaks is capable of. What I mean by that is in “Episode 1,” I noticed flashes of a-ha moments – two, specifically -- that seem to suggest Lynch and Frost toying with the idea of pumping the show’s storylines with a little sci-fi.

So with that said, I’ll propose that Sarah Palmer’s mind enables her to see nightmarish “visions,” and that Agent Cooper, well, might be an alien.

Of course, I could be blowing small observations of mine totally out of proportion, and assuming Twin Peaks’ scope a whole lot bigger than it actually is (and will be). Is Twin Peaks mere drama or an animal more like Lost? It’s hard to tell.

The more practical of my two examples, I think, is in the nightmarish “visions” of Sarah Palmer. At the end of “Pilot,” she wakes with a bang and does her best Sidney Prescott in distress. Prior, we’d seen a gloved hand, somewhere across town, reach into the earth to excavate the half of the heart locket that Donna and James buried only hours before. It wasn’t until watching “Episode 1,” however, that I realized the two scenes were related to one another. That is, Sarah had “seen” it.

In “Episode 1,” Donna visits the Palmer house in support of Sarah and Leland, and ends up on the couch next to Sarah, who tells her, repeatedly, how much she misses her daughter. Soon enough, Sarah sees Laura’s face float on top of Donna’s body, and Sarah embraces her. Even stranger, mid hug, Sarah catches out of the corner of her eye a longhaired man crouching in the couch’s shadow. She, like at the end of “Pilot,” screams like a mad woman, which apparently is all you need to do to get unknown mystery men out of the home.

So, if Sarah sees/hallucinates/whatever her dead daughter’s face on Donna’s body, then spots some man we haven’t seen before with her naked eye, then I don’t think it too far a stretch to assume that what freaked Sarah the eff out in “Pilot” was, yep, that hand grasping the heart locket.

And if that is true, then what’s really at work here? Can Sarah control what she sees? My guess is she can’t as it would be pretty senseless to scare yourself stupid on your own accord. Instead, Sarah just has visions. But are they something she quietly developed after Laura died, or has she been grappling with them for a long time? And, how is it that the excavator knew the locket would be in the place he dug? Lucky guess, or did Sarah have something to do with that, too?

My other a-ha is related to Agent Cooper, who is so unlike everyone else in Twin Peaks. And I don’t know that we can totally blame it on the fact that he’s from the feds and not the town.

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