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 7
“Episode 6” aka “Realization Time”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the seventh episode, is officially designated “Episode 6.”]
Original Airdate: May 17, 1990
Writer: Harley Peyton
Director: Caleb Deschanel
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, Walter Olkewicz, Kimmy Robertson, Wendy Robie, Don Amendolia, Victoria Catlin, Mark Lowenthal, Lisa Ann Cabasa, Erika Anderson, Lance Davis, Rick Giolito
“Harry, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair — or two cups of good, hot, black coffee, like this.”
It’s exceedingly rare to receive actionable advice on better living from a TV cop, but Dale Cooper is a rare cop indeed. I think this little speech, from the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks’ short first season, does more to endear Coop to us than half a dozen high-speed chases, collared perps, or climactic shootouts would have done.
Coop is not just interested in protecting and serving — though those aspects of his job as an FBI agent are ones he takes very seriously. Earlier in the episode he turns down Audrey’s desperate advances, as she sits naked and crying in his bed in her father’s hotel. Of course he’s attracted to her, but legal status notwithstanding, she’s a high school kid in pain. Finding her beautiful and abusing her trust and vulnerability while working a case about this very issue are two very different things. He is an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations; to paraphrase A Song of Ice and Fire, he swore an oath, and that matters to him.
Coop has the decency not only to understand all this, but to explain it to Audrey, so that she doesn’t take his rejection as more evidence that she’s out of place and unwanted. What she needs isn’t a roll in the hay with a knight in shining armor, she needs a friend who’ll listen to her problems over french fries. That’s a role Coop is happy to play for her.
In addition to forging deeper friendships with Harry and Audrey, Coop’s professional interests are advancing as well. On the advice of Doc Hayward, serving as an ersatz vet, Cooper and the rest of the do-gooders wait for Waldo, the talking myna bird owned by suspect Jacques Renault, to regain enough health to start playfully speaking once again. (Doc complaining about the fruit they’re trying to feed the bird because “these grapes are right on the edge” got an unexpectedly big laugh out of me.) Their hope is that Waldo might repeat something he heard the night of the killing, the last time the cabin was occupied.
(A couple of brief bird notes: Coop straight up says “I don’t like birds,” an unusual flash of fear on his part; a photo shows Waldo perched on Laura’s bare shoulder, an image rife with Hithcockian and mythic symbolism. Remember last episode, the Log Lady’s warnings about the owls, and the ominous crow?)
Meanwhile, the cops put together enough leads for Coop to suggest something bold. While he’s left his job bartending at the Roadhouse and fled to Canada, Jacques Renault is still gainfully employed up there, where he works as a dealer at, you guessed it, One Eyed Jack’s. Going way outside his jurisdiction — “international incident” levels of outside his jurisdiction, in fact — Cooper taps the local vigilante group, the Bookhouse Boys, for help with a cross-border investigation.
With Deputy Hawk in an observation van, Coop and Big Ed go undercover as “high rollers from the Tri-Cities — oral surgeons, Harry, big spenders vacationing among the firs.” This means Dale gets to look like a million bucks in black tie and glasses, while Big Ed puts on his best bolo tie and wears a wig and mustache as a disguise. Keep in mind Jacques would recognize Ed as a Roadhouse patron, so he has to go deeper undercover than Cooper, a stranger in town.
(I also get the sense that after the day he’s had, with his mentally ill wife Nadine preparing to give up on her dream of inventing silent drape runners after the first patent-attorney rejection letter, he’s eager to get away. He loves that woman, he wants the best for her, that is clear, but every moment he holds Nadine rather than Norma seems to visibly pain him.)
To pull off the ruse, both men sprinkle the truth in with their lies, hiding it in plain sight. When Blackie, the boss of the operation, confronts these suspicious strangers, they both wind up telling her what they really do for a living: Coop says he’s a cop, Big Ed says he owns a gas station, and both times Blackie thinks they’re flirting by being wiseasses.
It’s all fun and games until you come face to face with one of Laura Palmer’s attackers. Coop finally encounters the elusive Jacques Renault when he takes over at the blackjack table. The thing is, we’ve already watched Leo Johnson assassinate a bird to prevent it from talking about what happened that night with him, Jacques, Ronette Pulaski, and Laura Palmer at Jacques’s cabin. What we do hear, on a voice-activated tape, is Waldo the bird mimicking Ronette pleading for her life, refracted through the bird’s haunting sing-song voice. (“Laura? Laura?”) The nondescript face Jacques, the host of that particular party, suddenly seems menacing.
Unfortunately for Coop, a lot of roads are leading to One Eyed Jack’s tonight. Ben Horne and his party-boy brother Jerry are on their way up there as we speak, preparing to close the Ghostwood deal by treating their Icelandic partners to a walk on the wild side. This will significantly complicate Dale and Ed’s efforts to stay undercover.
It’ll be even harder for the joint’s other surprise guest tonight: Audrey Horne. Though talked off the ledge by Coop the night before, Audrey has simply redoubled her efforts to further his investigation on her own. After spending her shift at the perfume counter insulting customers, she does glamorous noir-ish spying on department store manager Emory Battis (Don Amendolia) through the slats of his closet door. Pro tip: Only Audrey Horne can smoke cigarettes while spying on someone in his closet and get away with it. Don’t try that at home.
Audrey watches and listens as Battis sleazily propositions her fellow perfume-counter employee, a beautiful young woman named Jenny (Lisa Ann Cabasa), about moonlighting at One Eyed Jack’s. “The variety of work is completely up to you,” he oozes. “Hostess, cocktail waitress…or if you are chosen, ‘hospitality girl.’” (You can practically hear the air quotes.)
Jenny, who’s no dummy, quickly figures out the kind of hospitality such girls are expected to provide their wealthy clients and decides it’s a job for her. “That sounds cool,” she says, “as long as they’re wealthy.”
(Side note here: Assuming Laura was also trafficked from the perfume counter to Jack’s, do you think she got into it for the money? Because based on how Bobby and Dr. Jacoby described her last week, it seems more likely she chose this occupation because it made her feel dirty, which is what she believed herself to be.)
Using the info she gleaned while eavesdropping, Audrey bullshits her way into Jack’s and into Blackie’s inner sanctum, giving the name “Hester Prynne.” “I read The Scarlet Letter in high school just like you did,” Blackie says. Coop and Ed may have snowed her, but not this rookie.
Audrey, however, has something going for her that the FBI agent and the Bookhouse Boy don’t: She can tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. This is a scene so sexy that you heard about it in middle-school lunchrooms at the time, barely comprehending what, exactly, was being established by this act of lingual dexterity.
But even if I didn’t get it back then, Blackie sure did: She hires “Hester” on the spot. That should make for a fun father-daughter reunion when Ben Horne, apparently a long-standing fan of Jack’s “new girls” fresh from the perfume counter, comes visiting later tonight, huh?
You know, Laura and Ronette worked that perfume counter. Ben, what have you been up to?
Laura herself makes a surprise return, in a way. When James, Donna, and Maddy listen to Laura’s secret tape, they discover her secret flirtations with her therapist, Dr. Jacoby. They also realize Jacoby’s still in possession of a missing tape from the night of Laura’s death. James, showing more cunning than I thought him capable of, comes up with the idea of Maddy wearing a blonde wig, putting on a breathier voice, dressing up in Laura’s clothes, and pretending to be her own murdered cousin. (To do so, she must sneak past an her unseen Uncle Leland, who watches her leave, looking equal parts haggard and strangely sinister in a room with all the lights out.)
The result of the teen sleuths’ ruse is one of those eerie doublings pioneered by Hitchcock in Vertigo and perpetuated by Lynch across his work from this point forward. Maddy emerges into view like Laura returning from the dead, stopping James in his tracks. (Does Donna seem disturbed by this, do you think?)
Maddy-as-Laura is even shot on video camera and shown in closeup on a CRT screen, just as Laura was in the video we saw of her and Donna goofing around earlier in the season. Add in a fake phone call, and the evidence is persuasive enough to send Jacoby running to the meeting spot where “Laura” sets up a rendezvous with him over the phone. (Recall that Dr. Jacoby didn’t attend Laura’s funeral, so he doesn’t know she has a practically identical cousin in town.) James and Donna sneak into his now-vacant office the moment he leaves.
Unfortunately for James, this leaves his motorcycle unguarded, and Bobby Briggs is on a mission of vengeance. Believing he’s successfully taken Leo off the game board by stashing his bloody shirt in Jacques’s apartment, Bobby reassures a frantic Shelly, who knows she shot Leo but has no idea how badly now that he’s disappeared, that he’ll take down everyone who’s crossed him. Of course, he says this even as Leo has him within his rifle sights; only intercepted police chatter about Jacques’s talking bird, which has to take priority, stops Leo from pulling the trigger.
Regardless, he’s still determined to punish James for…what, exactly? Bobby feared Laura as much as or more than he loved her, especially when you see how sincerely into Shelly he seems — with whom he was cheating on Laura, by the way! Is it just about his hurt pride? Male hypocrisy? Or is it something else? Is he trying to take the heat off his own role in Leo’s criminal operation? Is he just venting the pain he feels about Laura, which he appears congenitally incapable of expressing in a healthy way?
Whatever the case, Bobby stashes a shit-ton of coke in the gas tank of James’s hog. He’ll presumably call it in to Lucy, who seems to have had a pregnancy scare resulting in her cold shoulder toward Deputy Andy; she’ll call it in to Harry, who (Bobby hopes) will put James away, and then Bobby and Shelly will be free and clear.
But Harry has problems of his own. He’s been convinced by Josie that Ben Horne and Catherine Martell are out to burn down the mill, with Josie in it. The sheriff overcomes Coop’s initial skepticism — “How much do you know about her? Where she’s from? Who she was before?” — to convince the agent that his girlfriend’s in danger.
But then she appears to be a lot of people’s girlfriend. We already know that she and Ben Horne are planning a doublecross that will end in Catherine’s death instead; Catherine herself learns this when an insurance agent shows up asking her to sign a missing copy of her new policy, leaving everything to Josie. And boom, just like that, one of the show’s villains is suddenly sympathetic.
It’s not just Ben whom Josie is connected with behind the good sheriff’s back. There’s also Hank Jennings, the newest employee of his wife Norma’s diner. The man is an accomplished bullshitter, winning Shelly over with what really does read as sincere warmth and contrition the morning after telling Leo he’d gladly kill her the next time the trucker screws up. How connected is he to the Ghostwood scheme, and whose side, if anyone’s, is he on?
There’s one more thing to mention. Director Caleb Deschanel’s clever camerawork during the episode’s final moments conceals this at first, but while James and Donna watch Jacoby, and while Bobby watches James and Donna, someone else is watching them all — someone breathing heavily within the nearby trees.
Whether or not this mysterious figure is meant to be Laura’s killer, we know a lot of people it can’t be. Coop, Ed, Hawk, and Jacques Renault are up in Canada. Ben and Jerry Horne are on their way up there themselves. James is inside Jacoby’s office, Jacoby is inside Jacoby’s car, and Bobby is inside James’s gas tank. Hank is with Josie (and was in prison at the time of the killing at any rate).
But Leo is still out there somewhere after shooting Waldo. Leland is last seen sitting silently in the shadows. Hank’s whereabouts are unaccounted for at the moment, if you’re feeling particularly paranoid. There’s Deputy Andy, Pete Martell, and Doc Hayward, none of whom have been anywhere close to the circle of suspects. Bob, mysterious gray-haired man from Coop and Sarah Palmer’s visions, has yet to show up in the waking world at all, while his one-armed confederate, Mike, turns out to be a shoe salesman named Philip. All this is assuming that the killer is someone we’ve seen at all.
“I feel like I’m gonna dream tonight,” Laura coos on the tape she recorded for Jacoby. “Big bad ones, you know? The kind you like. It’s easier talking into the recorder. I guess I feel I can say anything. All my secrets. The naked ones. I know you like those, Doc. I know you like me too.” In Harley Peyton’s script, Laura’s words from beyond the grave are a warped reflection of Cooper’s marvelous treat yo’self doctrine.
From everything we’ve heard, Laura didn’t think highly enough of herself to want to give herself a present. She seems to have thought of herself as a present, a living gift to be awarded to men: Bobby, James, Leo, Jacques, Jacoby, the readers of Flesh World, you name it. Please note that I am not slut-shaming Laura Palmer here. Her behavior isn’t the problem, not really, not until she got mixed up with a stone-cold psycho like Leo anyway. Her despair of herself is. She’s not doing these things because she enjoys them, she’s doing them because other people enjoy her in a way she can’t. It’s the same trade-off Audrey tried to pull with Coop. She, at least, was lucky enough to have someone tell her this is a temporary balm for pain at best.
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