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I suspect that over the course of the season, David Lynch and company soon realized that the world they’d created in Twin Peaks had grown very large. I mean, the number of faces and their relationships with one another are a lot to handle on their own. And then on top of that are the many conversations and storylines that, well, make the show – and, hopefully, have it all “make sense.” (Make sense is in quotations here, of course, because not everything is as it seems in our fictional Washington state community).

As “Episode 6” led me to believe, cliffhangers lingering from the week before would be mostly answered, and a few new ones would get introduced for TP devotees to chew on over summer break. Not so. “Episode 7” was a snappy, quickly cut finale that I think tried to do too much in the 45 or so minutes afforded by ABC.

Therein lies one of the problems, then, of a large, ensemble cast. Beefed up character trees can create rich stories and complicated webs of mystery, yes. Yet, in the case of Twins Peaks (or better said, its season one closer), it might’ve forced the writers to feel that they had to pack more stuff in the episode than they should have – at the expense of penning a satisfying finale.

“Episode 7” begins inside Jacoby’s lair, with Donna and James making strange observations about Laura’s ex-therapist. For one, he’s a collector of those tiny umbrellas used to dress exotic cocktails. Apparently, he keeps them to remind himself of the times and places that he meets young women. And, inside a coconut is the missing tape from a few episodes ago, and half of Laura’s heart-shaped necklace Jacoby was clutching at the end of “Episode 1.”

For Donna and James, the necklace links Jacoby to Laura on personal, tangible grounds – much like the audio tapes – but they don’t come to conclusions on what that might look like. We wouldn’t expect much from James, though, because as we learn later on from a recording of Laura’s voice on missing tape, Laura thought him to be a big doofus.

Meanwhile, having taken the bait on a Laura look-alike in town (Laura’s brunette cousin, Maddy, in a blonde wig), Jacoby arrives at the gazebo she’s standing in front of and gets a good enough look at Not Laura to be convinced that it might actually be Laura. An unknown assailant, donned in black, attacks him from behind, though, and leaves him for dead in the grass.

In a moment that may have been lifted 15 or so years later on Lost, we begin on a close up of Jacoby’s face before zooming slowly towards one of his eyes, which saturates our view entirely. An extreme eye up was used earlier in the season to link James to a video of Laura and Donna prancing around like idiots, yet this one wasn’t as revelatory. This time, the camera lingered on Jacoby’s eye for an uncomfortably long time, and then that’s the last we see of him.

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