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 10
“Episode 17” aka “Dispute Between Brothers”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the eighteenth episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 17.”]
Original Airdate: December 8, 1990
Writer: Tricia Brock
Director: Tina Rathbone
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, Russ Tamblyn, Grace Zabriskie, Chris Mulkey, Ian Buchanan, James Booth, Jane Greer, Clarence Williams III, Gavan O’Herlihy, Wendy Robie, Tony Jay, Don Davis, Mary Jo Deschanel, Don Calfa, Michael Parks, John Boylan, Lisa Cloud
Rumors of Twin Peaks’ demise have been greatly exaggerated.
We’re up to the tenth episode of the show’s second season, which tends to be described in monolithic terms as wholly unsatisfactory, a betrayal of Season 1’s potential. But everything from that cliffhanger season finale through Leland Palmer’s capture and death has been every bit as good as Season 1, and in several cases significantly better; the episode in which Leland is revealed as Laura’s killer is the most powerful episode of the show to date.
In a way, Season 2 hasn’t even really started until now. Given the truncated length of Season 1, it makes more sense from the perspective of today’s viewer to view everything from the pilot until Leland’s death at the hands of his demonic inhabitant Bob as the first chapter of the story. The remaining 13 episodes of Season 2, starting here, are effectively Chapter Two.
And what a start Chapter Two gets off to. The first episode of the show to be both written and directed by women, Tricia Brock and Tina Rathborne respectively, it’s a thoughtful farewell to the side of Leland that prevailed in the end, a heartwarming series of bon voyages between a departing Agent Cooper and the good people of Twin Peaks, and an introduction to several new storylines that, for now at least, feel both urgent and intriguing.
The episode establishes its ruminative tone with its opening shot, a view of a lonely forest road, echoed later by a close-up of cold water running out of a drain spout and low dark clouds overhanging the town. Its first order of business, set three days after Leland Palmer’s death, is suitably somber. After refusing Doc Hayward’s offer of a sedative so that she can be completely present at her husband’s funeral, Sarah Palmer sits in rapt attention, eyes closed, lips pressed together, as Agent Cooper describes her husband’s last minutes.
As a closeup on Sarah grows tighter and tighter, an off-camera Cooper explains that Leland was as much a victim of the man she saw in her visions just as Laura was, having fallen prey to the entity called Bob when he was a child himself. He tells her the Leland she loved was not responsible for the crimes his body committed, but she knew this already. It was the man with “long, dirty, disgusting hair” from her visions.
“He’s gone forever,” Coop says, overconfidently.
“So is everything I loved,” Sarah says, before Coop’s words about Leland seeing a forgiving Laura within the light of the afterlife soothes her.
The wake that follows is a comparatively lighthearted affair, involving a motley crew of townsfolk, including Coop, Sarah, Sheriff Truman, Mayor Dougie Milford and his arch-rival newspaper publisher brother Dwayne (Tony Jay), Donna Hayward and her parents, Audrey Horne, Ed and Nadine Hurley, Hank and Norma Jennings, Pete Martell, Major Garland Briggs, and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby. Donna’s mother Eileen explains to Audrey that people naturally come together in times like these, even randos like Hank Jennings, whom I’m not sure the Palmers know from Adam.
But while Hank maintains his unflappable nice-guy image in public, he remains up to no good. Taking his new father-in-law Ernie up to One-Eyed Jack’s, he gets the old book-cooker involved with the place’s new owner, Jean Renault, whom he met at gunpoint in the woods the night of Cooper’s raid on the place.
Ernie, also known as “The Professor,” exaggerates his CV a bit, claiming he’s done work for major drug cartels. But he apparently really is the kind of numbers man who can turn the casino/brothel solvent with a few simple tricks, which Jean badly needs. Ernie feels bad about betraying the trust of his straight wife, Norma’s mother Vivian, but some opportunities are too good to pass up.
Shrouded in his own cigarette smoke, Jean has other interests besides keeping One-Eyed Jack’s in the black. He’s still out for revenge against Agent Cooper, whom he blames for his brother Jacques’s death: Leland was the killer, but Cooper’s the reason he got dragged to the States and put in danger to begin with.
Unfortunately for Coop, Jean has friends in high places. RCMP Officer Preston King (Gavan O’Herlihy) has teamed up with FBI Agent Roger Hardy (Clarence Williams III, an old Mod Squad castmate of Peggy “Norma Jennings” Lipton) in an international, multi-agency investigation into Coop’s excursions across the border to investigate One-Eyed Jack’s and rescue Audrey Horne from her kidnappers. In the course of all this, three people wound up dead and a whole lot of coke went missing.
With the help of Mountie King, his inside man on the RCMP and in the investigation into Cooper, Jean hopes to pin all of it on our hero. It’s unclear right now if Roger, an internal affairs agent who shows up dramatically with King at the Sheriff’s Department and demands Coop’s badge and gun while suspending him without pay, is also in on the dirty deal. Cooper seems to think Roger should know better than to suspect him, of all people, of running drugs. I mean, when Sheriff Truman calls Coop “the finest lawman I’ve ever known,” he’s not just blowing smoke.
Coop’s record, however, is not spotless. When Audrey comes to his room to say goodbye, since he’ll be leaving Twin Peaks soon, he explains that they could never have gotten together, not just because of her age but because of her involvement in an investigation he was working. He says he once became involved with a witness who got killed because his love for her blinded him to the threat. His partner, Windom Earle, was driven insane in the process.
Even so, Audrey won’t let go of her idealized Special Agent. “There’s only one problem with you,” she tells Cooper. “You’re perfect.”
It’s a testament to the quality of the episode that all these little goodbyes still hit home even though we know Cooper won’t actually be going anywhere, not until the season finale at least. The show is still called Twin Peaks, right? Even so, his Wizard of Oz–like goodbyes to Hawk, Andy, and Lucy, and his receipt of a fishing lure as a parting gift from Harry, are all genuinely touching. With Harry in particular, the moment is almost romantic, with the full Twin Peaks theme playing in the background — and an unexpected aside about how the trout Coop will be fishing are only interested in sex. My goodness, Sheriff!
Of course, we’ve seen the Sheriff in action, and he’s ready to go at a moment’s notice if need be. That’s the case late that night, when he hears someone scrabbling outside his house and opens the door to find a dirtied, bloodied, exhausted Josie Packard. She falls into his arms, he falls on top of her, and within seconds he’s desperately kissing her. Harry is a pretty peaceful guy, but not where Josie is concerned.
It’s not even his first big surprise of the day. Catherine Martell, Josie’s nemesis, pops up in his office after two weeks of being presumed dead. With surprising sincerity, she describes getting lured into the mill fire, rescuing Shelley Johnson, and fleeing into the woods to escape. A “guardian angel,” she says, must have led her to her family’s old summer cabin on Pearl Lakes. (You may recall this as young Leland Palmer’s vacation destination, where he first met “Mr. Robertson.”) There she sat, she says, eating cans of tuna fish and waiting for her would-be assassin to show up and finish the job.
“What made you come back?” Harry asks.
“I ran out of tuna fish,” she says. She has come here to kick ass and eat Bumble Bee, and she’s all out of Bumble Bee.
While Catherine and Josie are moving back home, Bobby Briggs is moving on up. Wearing one of Leo’s old suits, he leaves Shelley with her vegetative husband Leo to seek employment with Ben Horne, whom he’s threatening to blackmail with a recording of him ordering the arson at the mill. Ben, who looks like death warmed up, promptly has Bobby ejected from the premises — but not before Bobby strikes up an unexpected alliance with Audrey, who gets him in to see her dad, saves him from his security guards, and asks him out for ice cream afterwards.
“Cup or cone?” he asks.
“Cone,” she says. “I like to lick.” My goodness, Audrey!
We don’t see what happens after that, but it’s past nightfall when Bobby finally calls to check in with Shelley, who’s busy brushing her awful husband’s teeth.
But even as she chews Bobby out for “the longest meeting in history” and considers whether they should finally cut their losses and put Leo in a home so she can have some semblance of a life, Leo moves his wheelchair. I’ve thought from the beginning that the possibility of being present when Leo comes out of his coma and sees what’s been going on is more than enough reason to give up on the home care scheme. The last thing Leo did before getting shot was raise up an axe to chop Bobby’s head in half, after all.
In other news around town, Dick Tremayne announces his intention to be a good father, should Lucy’s baby turn out to be his. Andy, who plans to win Lucy over with “morals and manly behavior” as opposed to Dick’s suave continental playboy routine, suggests all three of them act as friends to create a more peaceful environment for both Lucy and her “bun in the oven.” Hawk considers this a full-scale retreat from the field of romantic battle.
Nadine learns her awful mother Vivian is the incognito food critic who has buried the Double R in the press and cuts her out of her life. “Some standards have to prevail,” Vivian protests.
Twin Peaks High School re-enrolls the hallucinating Nadine Hurley — whose current worries include whether boys can see up her dress in the reflection on her patent leather shoes — at the request of her husband Ed and psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby. At cheerleading tryouts, she throws a kid twenty feet in the air for like the length of the whole football field.
The episode’s biggest question arrives right at the end, and Major Briggs is the man who asks it. Out on a night fishing trip with Cooper, planned before his suspension from the Bureau, he discusses the strange force called Bob, whom the FBI agent worries is out there hunting for his next “victim to inhabit.”
The Major, who not for the first time appears to have more intimate knowledge of…whatever the hell is going on in Twin Peaks than maybe anyone other than Laura Palmer herself, says that Cooper is “blessed with certain gifts” that make him uniquely capable of facing evil like Bob without fear, which is what makes us “vulnerable to darkness.”
“In this respect, you’re not alone,” Briggs says. “Have you ever heard of the White Lodge?”
Cooper hasn’t. But based on how this episode ends, it seems likely both he and we in the audience are gonna hear plenty. When Dale excuses himself for a pee break — under the watchful eye of an owl — before learning what Garland has to say, a white light erupts from the trees, and a shadow-shrouded figure appears. By the time Coop can respond to Briggs’s cries, the mystery man and the Major are both gone.
This may be the first episode of the post–Who Killed Laura Palmer era, but Laura is still very much its heart and soul, even putting aside the continued presence of the supernatural forces that claimed her life. Leland’s wake, at which even Sarah smiles, feels like an attempt at targeted grieving: They are mourning not the self-destructive addict and the monster who abused her, but the smiling light of half a dozen lives and the good man she forgave for being used as a weapon against her.
The successful resolution of the Palmer storyline is what buoys those farewell scenes with Harry and the rest. These people achieved something important together on behalf of Laura and her whole community. That’s a bond our heroes carry with them forever. That fundamental decency, that honoring of Laura and the people she loved, is why I carry our heroes with me.
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