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 18
“Episode 25” aka “On the Wings of Love”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the 26th episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 25.”]
Original Airdate: April 4, 1991
Writer: Harley Peyton & Robert Engels
Director: Duwayne Dunham
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, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Eric Da Re, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Kenneth Welsh, Billy Zane, Heather Graham, David Lynch, Wendy Robie, Gary Hershberger, Mary Jo Deschanel, Catherine E. Coulson, Brenda Strong, Robert Bauer, Ron Blair, Jack McGee
“Harry, I have no idea where this will lead us. But I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
That’s it. That’s the show.
When Dale Cooper — ahem, freshly reinstated FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, thank you very much — says these lines, Twin Peaks is getting more wonderful and more strange by the minute. Whether science-fictional or supernatural in origin, the strange forces in the woods around town are connecting more and more characters in more and more ways. Whatever they are, their roots are old, and deep, and etched into the stone below the town’s feet.
But it’s a circuitous route to Owl Cave, where the episode concludes. First, Harry Truman fends off an extremely sexy assassination attempt by Jones, the late Thomas Eckhardt’s gal Friday, Jones.
She doses him with a mild (sexy) hallucinogen that makes him see Josie in her place, then strangles him with garotte wire. The bigger, stronger Harry manages to knock the wind out of her, then knock her out. But he spends the rest of the episode with a nasty scar around his neck.
“Sexual jealousy,” Coop says when Harry asks him why Josie’s lethal ex Eckhardt would want him dead.
Harry’s response is a laconically thoughtful “Ahhh…yeah.”
I don’t know about jealousy, but sex is certainly in the air in Twin Peaks right now — or rather its more emotionally elegant variant, romance. At the Great Northern, the amnesiac Nadine and her 18-year-old boyfriend Mike check out of the honeymoon suite with looks of postcoital bliss on their faces that almost make you feel dirty to look at. (Complimentary.)
Meanwhile, Mike’s classmate Audrey (not that any of these people seem to go to school anymore) is falling for her father Ben’s dashing young colleague Jack Wheeler, and vice versa. The two flirt heavily with a hammer-and-nail metaphor the subtext of which is hard to miss, and Jack actually comes out and tells a delighted Ben, who’s crunching on a carrot like Bugs Bunny, that he’s falling in love with his daughter. You have to wonder if Horne would have sent Audrey away on her first business trip had he known she was being wooed by his sweater-clad savior.
In addition to winning Audrey’s heart, Jack’s in the process of helping to repair Ben’s. Apparently, the biggest asshole in Twin Peaks is genuinely sincere about no longer being (his words) “a sleazy, rapacious heel.” The pine weasel thing is legit. So are his efforts to fold Audrey into the business, and to be more present for both her and her disabled brother Johnny*. “I want to build a life in happiness for our whole family,” he says, and means it. Rather movingly, he indicates that Laura Palmer’s death, and his role in her dissolution prior to it, are the prime motivators of his repentance.
(*Johnny Horne and his war bonnet make their uncomfortable return here, shooting suction-cup arrows at primary-color targets in the shape of buffalo. Those big blobs of blue and yellow and red are an extremely disorienting sight at first, even in a show that’s full of such things.)
But Ben’s face turn and the romantic theme intertwine in an ominous way, as once again he’s spotted canoodling with Eileen Hayward by her daughter Donna, and his own daughter Audrey as well. When Donna asks her father how her mom might know Ben, the Doc denies, then rationalizes, then straight-up lies to her face, with an edge to his voice and a look in his eyes we’ve never heard or seen before. With Ben and Eileen’s fighting over a cache of ribbon-wrapped letters he wrote her 20 years ago, it’s not really even a matter of speculation what happened between them.
In addition to the hotel, the Double R is Twin Peaks’ other big romantic hotspot this episode. Coop’s boss Gordon Cole is in town to tell Dale to put his black suit back on, grab his new Smith & Wesson, and rejoin the Bureau to help stop Windom Earle, an all-hands-on-deck effort. (More on this in a bit.)
But fate, it seems, has conspired to bring Gordon to town in order to meet the beautiful diner waitress Shelly Johnson. He finds her to be an absolute knockout, which is a fair assessment. “THAT’S THE KINDA GIRL MAKES YOU WISH YOU SPOKE A LITTLE FRENCH!” he tells Coop.
Surprisingly, the agent makes his move. “THE NAME IS GORDON COLE, AND I COULDN’T HELP BUT NOTICE YOU FROM THE BOOTH!” he tells Shelly, sidling up to the counter. “AND, WELL, SEEING YOUR BEAUTY NOW, I FEEL AS THOUGH MY STOMACH IS FILLED WITH A TEAM OF BUMBLEBEES!” If you want to know why people still feel so warmly disposed towards David Lynch, look no further than endearing lines like this.
What’s more, Gordon discovers he can somehow hear Shelly clearly without his hearing aids. He declares this a miracle. The Log Lady, sitting nearby and somewhat put out by Gordon’s shouting, declares the cherry pie a miracle. On this last bit everyone seems to agree.
Meanwhile, Coop is just smitten with Annie, one of the Double R’s other fabulously good-looking employees, as Gordon is with Shelly. Fresh out of the convent, Annie is finding adjusting difficult. Much of the world is unfamiliar to her, like dealing with men on a regular basis. At the same time, though, much of the world is familiar to her — it was a convent, not the maximum-security prison they keep Magneto in — but people act like it couldn’t possibly be. “Every time I tell people where I’ve been, they act like I’m out on parole,” she tells Shelly.
With her odd affect, complicated backstory, interest in spirituality, outsider status, and (of course) spectacular looks, Annie is a natural fit for the equally odd, complicated, spiritual, good-looking outsider, Dale Cooper. By the time he tries telling her a joke — it’s terrible, but they laugh together like it’s the funniest thing either of them ever heard — the soft-hearted Harry knows his friend is falling in love.
Even Lucy seems to be leaning towards someone in the great contest for her heart (and baby). After Dick Tremayne ignited “the Weasel Riot” last episode, Deputy Andy’s courage during the melée has impressed the receptionist deeply. About the only romance in this episode that isn’t blossoming is Donna and James’: Donna gets a postcard from San Francisco in which James details his plans to move on to Mexico and return with stories to tell.
In the end, Dale runs into Annie in (where else?) the Great Northern, and truly makes his play, rejecting all her reasons why things might not work out between them. This includes the scar on her wrist; “I’ve failed before,” she says cryptically, “and I’m just afraid it might happen again.” That’s the thing about Coop, though, who smiles at her so disarmingly it has to be seen to be believed: You’ve got nothing to fear from him unless you’re a criminal, a supernatural entity, or an enemy of the people of Tibet.
Which of the three is Windom Earle? He’s certainly a criminal, that much is clear. But he also worked on Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s UFO research project that Major Briggs recently divulged has evolved into a study of the forces surrounding Twin Peaks. Recall that this included the transmission picked up by their deep space telescope mentioning Cooper and the owls, but originating from deep below the ground instead, because that’s about to be important.
Earle now has ears inside the Sheriff’s Department. He sends Harry a bonsai tree purportedly from Josie (she’s Chinese, bonsai trees are Japanese, this is some real “Asian Man Killed!!” shit) with a microphone hidden in a rock, and learns that Gordon Cole is in town — another example of Cooper cheating at their chess game, to his mind. He’s determined to make someone pay; the question is who.
This comes down to a demented card game of sorts.
Donna, Audrey, and Shelly have each been assigned a queen card in a deck Windom’s playing with. Cooper is the King of Spades; the Queen of Hearts has not yet been selected. Earle’s idea is to murder one of the queens at the upcoming Miss Twin Peaks beauty pageant, which offers a scholarship to the college of the winner’s choice. Suddenly we understand why characters like Audrey, Shelly, and Donna — all of them incredibly beautiful, none of them seemingly all that interested in this fact — might actually enter the contest, and thus put themselves in Windom’s crosshairs.
Earle also dons another disguise, that of a professor, for a creepy run-in with Audrey at the local library. She’s doing research on civil disobedience, presumably for the pine weasel campaign. He purports to be a professor of poetry.
Sensing an opportunity, she asks him to ID the verse that was sent to her and the other two girls. “Shelley,” he says, confusing Audrey for a moment before he explains this is the last name of the poet. Still, that selection seems telling — as does the way Leo Johnson’s gaze lingers on his estranged wife’s card. Could she be the factor that finally snaps Leo out of Windom’s servitude?
Meanwhile, a chance comment from Annie alerts Coop to the existence of a place called Owl Cave. This subterranean chamber, a favorite hangout of local kids, contains a glyph etched on the wall that’s much like the combination of symbols Cooper has been doodling at the diner, combining the burn-like “tattoos” found on Major Briggs and the Log Lady following their respective disappearances.
Venturing into the cave with Harry, Hawk, and Andy (whose spelunking practice at the station doesn’t seem to have paid off), Cooper sees the symbols — at which point the group is all but attacked by a shrieking owl. Andy swings a pickaxe at the bird, which may not be a bird at all. He misses, and the head is embedded within the symbols. This opens a hidden panel in the cave wall, containing a rod inscribed with yet another symbol: a diamond, with two wing-like angled lines protruding from it. It is very clearly IMPORTANT.
Windom Earle thinks so too. Entering the cave long after the others have gone, he finds the rod with the inscribed symbol, then notices it drawn inverted on the cave ceiling. He rotates the rod until its symbol is upside-down as well, and the cave begins to collapse. Another real cliffhanger of a cliffhanger.
The discovery of that hidden panel and that symbol is what prompts Coop to declare that they’re on a journey to “a place both wonderful and strange.” This is as apt a description for Twin Peaks, and Twin Peaks, as I’ve ever heard. With only four episodes left in the show’s second season, which for a quarter century meant only four episodes left in total, things are getting truly mystical. We have a white wizard in the form of Dale Cooper. Now we have Windom Earle as his opposite number, a dark sorcerer. A clash seems inevitable. What wonderful and strange place will it lead us to? Will it fill us with wonder, or leave us stranded where the stars are strange?
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