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“All I did was come to a funeral. And it’s like I fell into a dream.”

I never intended on beginning these things with a quote each time, but for the second week in a row, a Twin Peaksian said something poignant enough to make me wanna begin the column with a quote.

This one’s from Maddy, Laura’s “twin.” And I singled it out because there’s a word she uses that bunches together season two very nicely: Dream.

This sophomore string of episodes plays like fantasy. A giant visits Cooper, Leland’s a silver fox, like seven people are in comas, a one-armed man is selling shoes, satellites are feeding back messages from outer space, and so on. It’s been a lot to stomach, especially compared to what amounted to a fairly tame first season.

What does Maddy’s line mean, then, if anything at all? I’d like to think it’s more a commentary of how far the show’s come. You know, the zany’s been upped so much that even the characters are like, “Um… hello?”

Twin Peaks’ world has stretched some, and I’m just now getting comfortable to the new digs. In fact, I like that it isn’t so ambiguous with its goings-on. No longer are we doing battle with just nightmares and visions and ugly trapped in the mind. That supernatural stuff is showing its face in the “real world.”

And that’s just it - the fantastic is, within the context of the show, becoming real. So much so that it’s tough for poor Maddy to distinguish what she thought the world was to what she’s running into in Twin Peaks.

Though the line was spoken rather fleetingly, I think it speaks to the good, good place Twin Peaks is in right now, in that it’s intentionally toeing the line between real and imaginary. Science and supernatural. And the best part is the characters are just about as confused as we are!

“Episode 10” happens to introduce us to the show’s latest oddball. He’s Harold Smith, a once prominent stop on Laura’s Meals on Wheels route. He’s in the picture because Donna took it upon herself to pick up her ex-friend’s shift.

From Harold, we get that he’s known Laura since she started working in the program. And his little oddity is he’s an avid grower of rare orchids. His request is for Donna to place one at the foot of Laura’s grave, which Donna accepts and then does a bit later on.

And at “Episode 10”s end, it’s revealed that Harold is the keeper of a Laura Palmer diary that Donna merely scans her eyes over. For now.

Yet again, Laura gets more life through the bookkeeping of other acquaintances. We’ve listened to Jacoby’s secret tapes and heard passages from Laura’s personal journal. Now we’ve got another diary of sorts from a dude who apparently was close to Laura - even though, as Donna points out, Laura never talked about him.

“Episode 10,” actually, was a Donna-heavy affair. Along with the Harold storyline, Donna’s doing battle with her former beau, James, who apparently has lynched his affections on Maddy.

Donna started noticing something was up a week or two ago when she caught Maddy and James gazing into each others’ eyes in the living room. This week it’s the holding of hands at the diner when they think they’re alone. The image hits Donna terribly, as if we’re to believe she’s really got it that bad for James in the maybe week since Laura died.

I’d have a little more sympathy for Donna if her and James as a thing weren’t so stiff. Truth is, Twin Peaks is plot driven, and its
characters are stock. These minglings are all rather silly because they’re not the least bit believable. Well, Cooper and Audrey intrigue me in a strange way, but the rest of ‘em - Bobby and Shelly, Donna and James, even James and Maddy - no.

As promised an episode ago, Leland catches up with Cooper and Truman to tell them that he knows the guy leading their manhunt. Bob, or Robertson, as Leland remembers his last name being, used to reside a few lots over from his gradfather’s. A probable match to the guy who terrorized Ronette, appeared in Cooper’s dream and showed up in visions by Sarah and Maddy, Robertson used to flick matches at a small Leland and say: “You want to play with fire, little boy?”

Of course, “fire” connects us to our guy. At the scene of the crime was a slip of paper that read: “Fire, walk with me.”

So far, evidence points to Bob. No longer is it a question of “who” killed Laura (and nearly Ronette), but “why”? And, why fire? Is it symbolic, or a pithy thing that bonds Bob to clues from “Pilot”?