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 8
“Episode 7” aka “The Last Evening”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the eighth episode, is officially designated “Episode 7.”]
Original Airdate: May 24, 1990
Writer/Director: Mark Frost
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, Walter Olkewicz, Victoria Catlin, Kimmy Robertson, Wendy Robie, Lance Davis, Rick Giolito
It’s Kyle MacLachlan’s finest moment to date as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, though you wouldn’t know he’s a Fed to look at him when it happens. He’s undercover as a high roller at One-Eyed Jack’s, the Canadian casino and brothel we (though not he) now know is owned by corrupt Twin Peaks business magnate Benjamin Horne. Wearing glasses and a tux, he’s fronting as the secret money man behind Leo Johnson’s cross-border cocaine smuggling operation.
Very quickly, he wins the trust of Leo’s partner in crime, bartender and blackjack dealer Jacques Renault. Convincing Jacques that Leo’s taking advantage of him, Cooper’s yuppie druglord offers Jacques ten thousand dollars cash to complete a job directly for him, “No Leo, no middleman.” Unsurprisingly given what we know of his work schedule, the French-Canadian dirtbag happily accepts the job.
There’s just one question Cooper has for Jacques before he sends him off on his errand, which of course is a trap designed to snare him within Sheriff Harry Truman’s jurisdiction in Twin Peaks itself. He’s already brandished the broken poker chip that matches the fragment found in Laura’s stomach. How did the chip get broken, that night with the girls, he wonders?
Cheerfully, with the relish of a schoolkid about to share his dad’s porn stash with a friend, Jacques explains that Laura liked to be tied up, which is what left her wide open when Waldo the bird was freed from his cage by Leo and landed on her shoulder. She and Waldo liked each other, and they were only “love pecks” according to Jacques, but with Leo “doing a number on her,” it was too much. She began to scream.
So Leo grabbed the chip, shoved it in her mouth, and said — Jacques delivers, chortling, in his thick accent — “Bite the bullet, baby. Bite the bullet!”
Throughout Jacques’s story, the view alternates between increasingly tight, subtly slow-motion closeups on Jacques’s grinning mouth as he talks, and Cooper’s rigid inexpressiveness as he listens. You can see, courtesy of MacLachlan’s best work on the show, that Cooper hates this man. He’s practically vibrating with it.
But he holds back all his loathing, all his disgust, and reacts as if he’s heard nothing out of the ordinary for men in their line of work. “Thanks for clearing that up,” he says in the end, with a snort of mirthless laughter. Coop’s pained non-reaction of a reaction reminds us this is not just a whodunit, but a tragedy. Jacques has given himself up as a suspect, but it won’t undo what was done.
With this exchange, Coop, Hawk, and Harry have enough to make their first real arrest for the murder of Laura Palmer. Harry nearly loses his life over it when Jacques grabs a gun, but fortunately, Deputy Andy is a crack shot under pressure. His heroism — he saves Harry without killing their suspect — is enough to earn him back into Lucy’s good graces…until she informs him she’s pregnant, at which point he wanders off without a word.
That’s three huge developments in the space of a single paragraph, if you’re keeping score, and that’s barely the start of it all. Written and directed by series co-creator Mark Frost, who delivers a bona fide TV masterpiece, it’s the most momentous episode of Twin Peaks yet.
Jacques’s night, for example, does not end with his shooting and arrest, more’s the pity for him. Interrogated by Harry and Coop in the hospital, he claims to have woken up from a blackout to discover Leo, Laura, and Ronette already gone from his orgy cabin, and to have no idea how any of them got to that abandoned train car.
But by now, word of the arrest has spread around town, and Jacques has made more enemies than just the Bookhouse Boys. Leland Palmer uses gloved hands to pull the hospital fire alarm, distracting the cops and nurses long enough to sneak in and smother Jacques to death himself. His face is a rictus of fury and pain — a far cry from his strange flat affect at the Sheriff’s Department when he first learns of Jacques’s location.
As for Jacques’s friend Leo, he’s already been taken care of by another party. Having fulfilled his job of setting fire to the mill — more on that in a second — he’s no longer of use to Ben Horne, who tells the ubiquitous Hank Jennings to take the firebug out. Hank shoots Leo through the window of his unfinished house, seemingly without realizing that he’s accidentally saved Bobby Briggs from getting ax-murdered at Leo’s hands when he does so. This gives Bobby a chance to plant cocaine in James’s gas tank and call in the tip to the cops.
Before fading out on his couch while watching Montana (Joe Giolito), his stand-in character on the show-within-the-show Invitation to Love, get shot in similar fashion, Leo tries to kill two birds with one stone. Not only does he set fire to one of the Packard Sawmill’s storage sheds, he attempts to burn his bound and gagged wife Shelly alive in the process for the crime of cheating on him with Bobby.
Hank has a very busy evening. In addition to shooting Leo, he blackmails Josie over his involvement in the murder of her husband, the mill’s original owner Andrew Packard. (Someone’s seeming less and less like a damsel in distress by the day!) Hank also calls Catherine to lure her to the fire in hopes of killing her off, too.
Once inside, Catherine frees Shelly — not without deliberating about it first, mind you — in one of the show’s most straightforward suspense sequences yet. Pete, with whom she’s partially patched things up, rushes in to the inferno in an attempt to rescue her, which is the last we see of any of them.
All the while, Hank keeps acting like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth while around his estranged wife Norma back at the diner. He says and does all the right things, but you can tell from the queasy look that comes over her face when Hank kisses her that some part of her knows there’s less to him than meets the eye.
Across town, Norma’s lover, Big Ed, returns from the mission to One-Eyed Jack’s only to discover that his wife Norma has taken a lethal dose of pills in his absence, while wearing her prom dress. He calls for an ambulance and cradles her in his arms, begging her not to leave him, stroking her hair with obvious and sincere tenderness. It’s all such a standard soap-opera story, but actors Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, and Peggy Lipton make it feel real and sad.
Back at One-Eyed Jack’s, Ben Horne, the owner, is celebrating finally signing on the dotted line with the Icelanders for his Ghostwood Estates development. He’s now ready to claim his droigt du seigneur over the place’s new girl…without realizing it’s his own snooping daughter, Audrey, who’s shown being prepped by the place’s in-house Igor-like seamstress. The Hornes’ storylines end with him walking in her chamber door, leaving her with very little room or time to maneuver.
Mystery assailants still abound. We don’t know who beats Dr. Jacoby into cardiac arrest as he tries to figure out why the false Laura Palmer has lured him out of his office. We don’t know who the third man with whom Laura had sexual contact the night of her death is, whether it’s Bob the long-haired mystery man from Coop and Sarah Palmer’s visions or someone else. We don’t know how much of the show’s surrealism is supernatural and how much is just style.
And most crucially for the moment, we don’t know who ends the episode — and the season — by shooting Agent Cooper multiple times at point-blank range.
Put it all together and it’s a hell of a way to hang a cliff, huh? No wonder pop culture went briefly berserk for the show. The most poignant and pointed mystery this season finale explores, however, is that of the human heart.
In a scene that serves as an echo of Jacques’s monologue, James, Donna, and Maddy play the tape they retrieved from Jacoby’s office earlier in the episode. In the process, they dismiss Jacoby as a suspect, realizing he was trying to help her, not hurt her. Indeed, if you look back on things now, Laura’s sexual aggressiveness with him appears to have been one-sided; he may have cared about her more than a normal patient, but I buy his explanation that it’s because she renewed his faith in humanity, despite her own lack of it.
The teen sleuths learn that Laura found James sweet but dumb — and he’s strangely glad to hear her say it, like it lets him off the hook for his own complicated feelings about her in turn. They also learn that she was seeing Leo Johnson via her description of a “mystery man” with a red Corvette. “Seeing” is altogether too neutral a word for their relationship, however, which revolved around rough sex that teetered on the edge of assault, if it didn’t go over outright.
“I think a couple of times he’s tried to kill me,” she tells Jacoby on the tape. “But guess what? As you know, I sure got off on it. Isn’t sex weird? This guy can really light my F-I-R-E.”
Sex is weird is a fundamental truth about life that people much older than Laura fail to grasp, leading to lifelong misery, whether for themselves or for everyone else in the country, as they try to flatten it into something normal.
We don’t yet know what terrible secret Laura was hiding, even as she was confessing things like this to Dr. Jacoby. It seems likely to have driven her to the reckless pursuit of sexual and chemical self-medication that led her to Leo Johnson’s truck and Jacques Renault’s cabin in the first place.
No matter the case, “Isn’t sex weird?” does so much to humanize the girl Leo and Jacques abused that night, the person Pete Martell — saints preserve him — found wrapped in plastic on the beach that gray February morning. Laura Palmer was a complicated person, and she saw herself as such. She displayed a self-awareness you could never pry out of the Bens and Leos and Hanks and Jacques Renaults of the world.
Maybe this helps explain why Laura dedicated the parts of her life not tied up in self-destruction by helping others — running the Meals on Wheels, tutoring Josie, caring for Johnny Horne, accidentally changing Jacoby’s life. She had empathy, real empathy, for other people. How can you tell? Because despite all her self-hatred, she couldn’t help but extend some of that empathy to Laura Palmer.
Prestige Prehistory returns on Jan. 12 with Twin Peaks Season 2.
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