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 2, Episode 8
“Episode 15” aka “Drive with a Dead Girl”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the sixteenth episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 15.”]
Original Airdate: November 17, 1990
Writer: Scott Frost
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, Kimmy Robertson, Ray Wise, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee, Grace Zabriskie, Chris Mulkey, David Patrick Kelly, James Booth, Kathleen Wilhoite, Jane Greer, Al Strobel, Emily Fincher, Frank Silva
“His name is Bob, eager for fun. He wears a smile. Everybody run.” With its audience collectively traumatized by the revelation that Laura Palmer was murdered by her demonically possessed father Leland — who then proceeded to murder Laura’s doppelgänger cousin, Maddy Ferguson — Twin Peaks dumps us right into the life and times of the man-monster we now know to be the killer. I don’t think I was prepared for how goddamn cheerful it is, or how unsettling that would be.
I can’t say we weren’t warned. “Where we’re from,” warned the red-suited Man from Another Place way back when, “the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.” Hasn’t there always been music in the air when Leland Palmer is around?
During his early stages of grieving (and I don’t want to discount that some of that grief, or maybe even all of it, is genuine, since it’s unclear how often Bob is in control), he was constantly dancing around. After he killed Jacques Renault and his hair turned white, he began adding lyrics to his little performances: singing “Mairzy Doats” with the Horne Brothers, performing “Get Happy” with Gersten Hayward on the piano, and now swerving his car back and forth across the road while singing “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
Eager for fun? He spends the morning putting hundreds of golf balls across the very room where he killed Maddy, with her body stuffed into the golf bag in the closet even then. Later, he gets pulled over by Harry and Coop for swerving all over the world on his way (he says) to the nearby links.
He wears a smile? Boy, does he. He’s eerily friendly to everyone he meets today, from Donna and James (he tells them Maddy is already on the bus back home) to his wife Sarah (“Bye, hon!” he says brightly, carrying her niece’s corpse out to his car) to Harry and Cooper when they pull him over for reckless driving (he appears ready to brain Coop with a golf club until Harry calls him away).
The flipside of that good cheer is his demented grimace in the hallway of the Great Northern as he pretends to cry over his friend Ben Horne’s arrest for Laura’s murder, or Bob’s grin in the rearview mirror of Leland’s car after he gets away from the cops scot free. When no one’s looking — that’s when you can see who’s really smiling, and what he’s really smiling about.
All the while, Leland’s best friend and biggest client remains behind bars for a crime — perhaps the one crime — he didn’t commit. Ben Horne’s prospects look pretty dim, from a strictly legal perspective. His lawyer is his semi-competent brother Jerry, whose best legal advice to Ben is to get a better lawyer. At least they get to sit on the cell’s bunk beds and sweetly reminisce about watching a pretty babysitter dance in the dark for them as kids — the kind of aside only Twin Peaks would even attempt, let alone pull off.
Ben’s alibi is no better for him than his attorney. The night Laura was murdered, Ben was with Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie, who’s hilariously now credited as playing both Catherine and Tojamura in the opening titles). She’s now back from the dead, fully aware of all his double-crosses, and she’s demanding he sign over the whole Packard Sawmill/Ghostwood Estates project over to her in exchange for her help getting him off the hook. Her husband Pete is so delighted to deliver the bad news to Ben via a tape recording that he cackles like he’s possessed himself.
And while he doesn’t yet know it, he’s about to get blackmailed a second time. The cassette tape Bobby found in Leo’s boot is a recording of him and Ben Horne plotting the sawmill arson together. Bobby sends a copy to Ben with a note saying they need to talk, and tells Shelley (looking resplendent in a blue silk robe and nightgown, only slightly besmirched by the food Leo splattered all over it) he’s going into big business.
Ben has two things going for him. First, he really didn’t do it, and these are the kind of lawmen who care about that sort of thing. Second, they’re also the kind of lawmen who consult possessed one-armed men the way your average TV cops use polygraph machines. Mike, who at one point escapes police custody to continue his hunt for Bob — he can sense the demon is in the hotel when Leland’s there doing his Fred Astaire routine — says Ben is not their man.
The result is the closest to a real schism Coop and Harry have come. “In another time, another culture, he may have been a seer, a shaman priest,” Coop tells Diane via tape recorder. “In our world, he’s a shoe salesman and lives among the shadows.” It’s funny because it’s true.
Harry, however, can’t go by the word of a shaman shoe salesman. “Cooper, I’ve backed you every step of the way,” he says. “I’ve had enough of the mumbo jumbo. I’ve had enough of the dreams, the visions, the dwarfs, the giants, Tibet, and the rest of the hocus-pocus.” Instead of arguing, Coop concedes that Harry needs to go where the hard evidence leads, and apologizes for overstepping. It goes so well that it leaves Harry dumbstruck.
But Harry knows how to be magnanimous himself when it’s called for. Earlier that day, he’s very gentle with Pete when the older man confesses that he, too, was in love with Josie. Alas, she’s left town along with her assistant — or was that her cousin? The discrepancy in her story leaves both men with a bad feeling.
Out-of-town visitors are causing trouble for a lot of our characters right about now. Lucy receives a visit from her loudmouth lookalike sister Gwen (Road House’s Kathleen Wilhoite). The mother of a newborn, she’s so proto-woke it tilts back around to being offensive: She clumsily asks Hawk if he hates white people and refers to her own son as a future “sperm gun.”
When Andy shows up at the station, the sight of Lucy holding the baby makes him pass out, and honestly she’s such a vision of Madonna-and-child that I can hardly blame him. When he and Lucy are finally able to shut Gwen up and get a word in edgewise, Lucy learns Andy might be the father of her baby after all, and Andy learns he might not be.
Norma, meanwhile, receives a visit from her snooty — and suspiciously food-critical — mother, Vivian (Jane Greer). To Norma’s surprise, her wealthy mother has remarried since they last spoke. Her new husband’s name is Ernie (James Booth), and he’s the worst-dressed “financial analyst” I’ve ever seen. (The couple’s whole vibe is very Dorothy and Stan Zbornak from The Golden Girls.)
Hank, who has a surprisingly warm relationship with Vivian despite his time in the can, has an even warmer one with Ernie. Nicknamed “The Professor,” Ernie is an ex-con with a rap sheet that includes gambling, loan sharking, and involvement in the S&L crisis. He’s poised to take on Vivian’s entire investment portfolio, but she has no idea he’s got a record. That’s a secret I have a feeling Hank is willing to exploit.
The way “Henry,” as Vivian calls him, can get almost anyone to believe his bullshit is really remarkable, and I think that’s largely down to actor Chris Mulkey. He plays the character’s good-natured lies entirely straight, to the point where sometimes I wonder if he really is on the up and up after all.
The episode is bookended by the previous night’s tragedy and its discovery. The opening shot shows us the exterior of the Palmer house that night, its windows bright against the darkness as Maddy’s screams are heard from within. At the end, Coop is called away from a heart-to-heart with Audrey about her father and her time at One-Eyed Jack’s to investigate a grim discovery. Another body has been found, wrapped in plastic and fished out of the water: Maddy Ferguson, Laura’s cousin. The Giant was right. It has happened again.
How will Cooper and Harry take this awful news? They’ll have to release Ben Horne, leaving them back at square one. They’ll have a terrified community and a devastated family (as far as they know) on their hands. They’ll likely blame themselves for not having caught the killer before he could strike again.
We know who that killer is now, and that makes Twin Peaks a fundamentally different show than it was an episode ago. With the show’s central mystery solved from the viewer’s perspective, you can already feel the force of storytelling gravity tugging the case towards its resolution. There’s only so long you can leave Leland on the loose without making Agent Cooper and company look incompetent, which cuts against the core appeal of the character.
In-story, there are moreover signs that Leland is slipping, even relative to his usual song-and-dance man persona. I suppose drowning the living room in golf balls is one way of covering up a crime scene, but it’s hardly inconspicuous. He is barely able to keep himself from laughing at Ben Horne’s arrest for his own crime long enough to keep Harry and Cooper from seeing and hearing him do so. (He takes one last look around before he leaves and does a little more dancing before he departs the hotel.)
Later he runs their cop car off the road, and when he gets pulled over he actually opens the trunk and unzips the golf bag containing Maddy’s body. The scene is white-knuckle tense: the killer, his victim, and the distinct chance that Leland might kill Cooper in broad daylight in front of an armed sheriff already on the line to headquarters. It’s reckless, and Leland/Bob has been so fastidious with his crimes up until now. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that this is a man, or a monster, who wants to get caught.
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