TV Rewind: Twin Peaks

Episode 24

By Eric Hughes

December 21, 2011

Listen to your friend Billy Zane. He's a cool dude.

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The cliffhanger from “Episode 23” confuses me.

At that episode’s endpoint, Shelly, Audrey and Donna realize they’ve all been personally requested to meet at the Roadhouse for… their best guess. They get there, and Windham is - as anticipated - waiting in their wings to snap at their warm bodies at a moment’s opportunity. They separately approach the bar at about the same time - again, without cell phones, amazingly - as Windham watches from the side.

Now, for sure we’d get some follow up on this whole thing, right? I mean, Twin Peaks has up to this point been pretty good about this…

Well, we know the girls are all alive, at least, but we don’t know much more than that. You see, “Episode 24” began like none of this happened, and it’s profoundly confusing to me. The Roadhouse night isn’t discussed, the girls don’t appear to shaken by it and Windham is already playing dress up for other parts of his mad chess game.

Huh?

Meanwhile, Josie is dead - as we also knew from “Episode 23” - and that thing picks up right away, as if “Episode 23” simply bled into “Episode 24.” Harry is deeply disturbed by her death, and a montage of him caressing and romancing memories of her are all we get for the first few minutes. It isn’t until Harry (and us) find out Josie’s body weighed only 65 pounds at her death that Harry awakes from his Josie coma and remembers he’s, yes, a human being living on the Earth.

The rest of “Episode 24” - for Harry, at least - plays like his true-life actor’s audition tapes. Seriously, the dude makes a bad brokenhearted soul and an even worse drunk. I can’t say I’ve been particularly taken by his performances as Twin Peaks’ sheriff so far anyway, but this episode in particular just wasn’t good for him. The hope is he’s back to his old self by “Episode 25” and, consequently, the final five Twin Peaks episodes that ever made it to air.




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Harry’s pity party, though, presents us with a return visit to the Bookhouse. That is, a return to the society’s physical location and little more than that. The Bookhouse, introduced in season one, hasn’t been much of anything since that introduction. And yet when it first graced our screen, Lynch had me believing it would be something important. So Harry gets shwasted and spends the night at the Bookhouse. Felt more like a nod to fans than anything else.

So Windham… he’s a kook, right? After collecting his ladies at the bar, he’s now paying personal visits to them in disguise. For Donna, it’s as her father’s former college roommate, Gerald, who died years ago - well, when he and Will were roommates - in a tragic drowning accident that Donna’s father even witnessed. Donna issues to her dad the gift Windham - as Gerald - gave her, and it’s a chess piece. Will knows exactly what this all means because he’s a bad ass coroner and makes his way to the station to fill the guys in on Windham’s next move.

Meanwhile, at J.J.’s Diner, Norma encourages Shelly to enter the Miss Twin Peaks pageant from a flyer laying on the bar. It’s been placed there by, again, Windham, who’s seated at the bar as some bike dude who otherwise might be a regular at my dad’s dive bar in Ephrata, PA. Like Norma, Windham - as biker dude - encourages Shelly to apply. She giggles and thinks it over.

I’m oddly intrigued at what this pageant might be - and look like - if it actually formulizes.

In stunt casting news, Heather Graham joins the cast playing Norma’s sister, Annie, who was recently released from the convent. In a matter of minutes, she’s already tending the bar at J.J.’s, and seems to be a natural at it. We don’t see much more of her than that.

Of course, her and Billy Zane - who also appears here in his second episode as Ben’s protégé - were hardly the Heather Grahams and Billy Zanes that they are today. (A case may be made for Billy, since by this point he’d been in two Back to the Future movies). At any case, it’s been nice to see some celeb blood in the mix at Twin Peaks. It’s been some time since Denise (David Duchovny) graced us with her presence.

With all this going on, it was still nice to see Briggs (and Log Lady!) back in the fold, discussing their random tattoos after going missing for days at a time. Briggs did so not too long ago, and then got a toxic-like icon affixed to the back of his neck. Log Lady notices it, and finds it odd that he had to go missing a few days to get it. When she was a girl, Log Lady disappeared for a day and ended up with a sketch of two small mountains adorning her thigh.

They share all this with Cooper, and he doesn’t do much with it, save for drawing their respective tats on a big board and looking at them like he has an inkling at what they could mean. This is odd for him: Usually he knows what something might be rather quick. Like, before any other character on the show and those of us watching at home combined.

We know it’s Bob-related. We just don’t know how yet.


     


 
 

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