In PRESTIGE PREHISTORY, Pop Heist critic Sean T. Collins takes a look at classic TV shows that paved the way for the New Golden Age of Television — challenging, self-contained series from writers and filmmakers determined to push the medium forward by telling stories their own way.
Twin Peaks Season 1, Episode 6
“Episode 5” aka “Cooper’s Dreams”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the fifth episode, is officially designated “Episode 5.”]
Original Airdate: May 10, 1990
Writer: Mark Frost
Director: Lesli Linka Glatter
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Everett McGill, Jack Nance, Ray Wise, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Eric Da Re, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee, Russ Tamblyn, Chris Mulkey, David Patrick Kelly, Don Davis, Charlotte Stewart, Don Amendolia, Catherine E. Coulson, Lance Davis, Rick Giolito
Twin Peaks doesn’t have storylines, it has story clusters. That’s the simplest way to picture it, I think, and the easiest way to make sense of it. There are a handful of core concepts — the murder of Laura Palmer, the Ghostwood Estates/Packard Sawmill real estate swindle, the cross-border drug trade, the saga of Norma and Big Ed, the cops, the teens, the dreams — around which different sets of characters swirl. A few characters, like Dale Cooper, Audrey Horne, Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs, and Laura Palmer herself, are able to cross between clusters. By connecting them, they help create the sense that it’s all one big story after all.
Let’s look at Leo Johnson, for example — a very busy boy this episode, if not a terribly lucky one. While he’s away on one of his trucking routes, his wife Shelly continues canoodling with teen heartthrob Bobby Briggs. We learn Shelly dropped out of her junior year of high school to marry Leo, so she’s probably not much older than Bobby, if at all. It can be hard to tell on a show where all the teenagers are played by the best-looking twentysomethings you’ve ever seen. In a memorable scene, Bobby and Shelly, her hair still wet from the shower, flirt while Bobby waves her gun around, play-acting about threatening Leo for hurting her.
Following Bobby’s plan, Shelly tells Deputy Andy she heard Leo arguing with his drug-running partner Jacques Renault about Laura the night of her murder, further linking her husband to the crime. Jacques, Coop and Harry discover, paid for the P.O. box listed as the mailing address for personal ads taken out by both Laura and Ronette Pulaski in Flesh World magazine, where they also find a photo of Leo’s truck and another of Laura in a cabin with red drapes, like the ones in Cooper’s dream.
But the most persuasive evidence, from a viewer perspective anyway, comes from the Log Lady. This mysterious figure gets her first real scene this episode, as Coop, Harry, Hawk, and Doc Hayward search the woods for Jacques’s cabin and stumble across hers instead. Putting aside his initial skepticism — some things are too far out even for Dale Cooper, at least at first — Coop listens as the Log Lady speaks for her Log. (It is implied she believes it to be inhabited by the spirit of her lumberjack husband, who died in a fire the day after their wedding.) The Log’s tale — two men, two girls, screams, flashlights in the woods, a third man — tracks with Coop’s theory of the crime so far.
Could the third man be “Bob,” the menacing figure envisioned by both Cooper and Sarah Palmer? And what about the owls that figure so menacingly in the Log Lady’s dialogue? Because if I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a crow spying on our heroes this episode, while an owl appeared to observe Donna and James in the woods last time. Not to get all Hitchcock here, but it’s enough to make you nervous.
When our heroes make it to the cabin (after striking a dramatic hero pose in profile, one of two such striking shot compositions by director Lesli Linka Glatter), it’s practically an itemized list of things from Coop’s dream. The curtains are red. Waldo, Jacques’s myna bird and the cause of wounds on Laura’s body, is present — “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song” — and there’s a turntable playing a record on an endless loop — “and there’s always music in the air.” In addition, they find the broken poker chip that matches the fragment found in Laura’s stomach, hidden within a cuckoo clock — another bird, another pretty song.
Back to Leo, he gets his not once but twice this episode. First, he gets the stuffing knocked out of him, seemingly effortlessly, by Hank Jennings, Norma’s ex-con husband. The guy acts like he’s turned over a new leaf around Norma, but after eavesdropping on James, Donna, and Maddy as they agree to work together to find Laura’s killer, he assaults Leo for opening up his own drug business. Apparently, his job was simply to maintain Hank’s own until his return from prison.
The beating puts Leo in a sour mood when he returns home, and Shelly’s had enough of those. When he shoves her for the crime of trying to find out if he’s okay, she pulls out her gun and pulls the trigger. A horrible sound seems to indicate that the bullet found its target, but when the episode segues dramatically from their swinging overhead lamp to the roaring falls outside town, the fate of the Johnsons is left unclear.
As for Shelly’s tough-guy boyfriend Bobby, who spends family therapy playing too-cool-for-school, there’s more to him than you can see on the surface. The Briggs’s therapist, Dr. Jacoby (“That guy’s a psychiatrist?”), asks to speak with Bobby alone, then confronts him with intimate details confided to him by Laura in their own sessions. Laura laughed at Bobby when he cried after they had sex for the first time. She hated life and thought everyone was rotten and corrupt, herself most of all, which drove her to corrupt others in turn.
In fact, it was Laura who got Bobby into selling cocaine so she’d have steady access to it herself, not the bad-boy football captain turning the homecoming queen into a cokehead. That’s why he’s in business with the husband of the woman he’s having an affair with, who already has ample reason to kill him. Maybe it’s why he’s claimed to have killed someone himself, as he briefly implies before shifting the spotlight to his father’s military career. (“That’s different.” “Different from what?”)
“She wanted so much,” Bobby sobs, upset by what her need turned him into. But it’s clear he’s talking about more than cocaine. Laura wanted more than a boy like Bobby could give her, or than cocaine and sex with older men could give her for that matter. As Jacoby says, she had some terrible secret that no one seems to know about — not Jacoby, not Bobby, not Donna, not James.
But maybe the latter two can figure it out, with the help of Laura’s cousin, their new partner in crime-solving. Going off Donna’s tip that Laura had a hiding place in her house no one knew about, Madeleine — Maddy to her friends — finds a cassette tape hidden in a hollow bedpost. The quest seems like a welcome diversion from life at the Palmers’, where Maddy says the mood is grim.
We learn just how grim it must be by the end of the episode. Leland Palmer has already been spotted at the Great Northern Hotel, looking ragged and disheveled, insisting to Ben and Jerry Horne that he’s ready to help them close their new prospective deal with Scandinavian investors. (This week’s batch is from Iceland, here caricatured as the home of boisterous and beautiful blonde Vikings, whereas we know it to be the enchanted realm from which Björk sprang.)
Jerry’s in the middle of giving a big speech at a welcoming reception when music kicks in (I’m still not sure why) and Leland, who’s shown up against doctor’s orders, begins sobbing and dancing uncontrollably once again. Ben manages to convince Catherine Martell, his partner in crime, to dance with Leland in order to cover up the outburst in front of the investors. Soon the whole reception is dancing, waving their hands in front of their faces in mimicry of Leland’s uncontrollable grief.
The scene is what finally cracks Audrey Horne’s emotional armor. Following up on her end of the bargain she made with Donna, Audrey pursues her own leads in Laura’s case by forcing her way into a job at the perfume counter at her dad’s department store, where both Laura and Ronette worked. She’s not just in this out of the goodness of her own heart, of course, as she also hopes to impress Coop with her investigative know-how.
But watching all those people unwittingly mock Leland’s devastation reduces Audrey to tears. Maybe it’s seeing her father and his friends ignore a man’s suffering. Maybe it’s the way Laura’s death is being swept under the rug in the name of commerce. Maybe it’s seeing a father who misses his daughter, in a way Audrey suspects Ben would not miss her under similar circumstances.
Whatever the case, Audrey ends the night, or at least the episode, in Dale Cooper’s room. While her scheming father Ben conspires with his real partner in the Ghostwood scam, Sheriff Truman’s girlfriend Josie Packard (!), Coop finds Audrey naked in his bed, still visibly upset. “Don’t make me leave,” she begs. “Please, don’t make me leave.”
The sight of Audrey sitting up in that bed is a memorable image in a show that’s still manufacturing such things left and right. Ben Horne covering one eye to refer to his favorite Canadian casino-brothel, Bobby slouched next to his parents on Dr. Jacoby’s couch, Shelly lighting her cigarette using the burner on her gas stove, Norma and Shelly trying out “refugee beauty queen” hairstyles for no real reason, Leland crying and dancing, the glory shots of the lawmen and the Doc — it’s all classic Peaks.
As for Audrey, anything can happen in a town like Twin Peaks. But it’s tough to imagine that a square-jawed sort like Cooper would take advantage of an emotionally distraught high schooler, especially working on a case like Laura’s — even if the high schooler in question is eighteen, as both Audrey and the script (a corker, by co-creator Mark Frost himself) take pains to remind Coop and us. But whether or not it’s ever consummated doesn’t make Audrey’s pain and need for love and companionship in this moment any less tender or sad.
The same is true of James and Donna’s fledgling love, which has James spilling the secret of his mother’s alcoholism and sex addiction and his father’s abandonment of the family; you can see how not just Donna but the stable home she comes from would stir his heart. The same is true, too, of James’s uncle Ed and his girlfriend Norma, two people so determined to do right by others that they never do right by themselves.
“Maybe that’s our trouble, Ed,” Norma says. “We never wanna hurt anyone. We never just take what we want.” But on a soap opera, the only people who take what they want no matter the consequences are the bad guys. People like Norma and Ed — and on a different and graver subject, Bobby and Audrey — are all too aware that when you take something, someone else has to lose it.
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