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 11
“Episode 18” aka “Masked Ball”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the nineteenth episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 18.”]
Original Airdate: December 15, 1990
Writer: Barry Pullman
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, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Chris Mulkey, Ian Buchanan, Clarence Williams III, James Booth, David Duchovny, Wendy Robie, Charlotte Stewart, Gary Hershberger, Tony Jay, Robyn Lively, Annette McCarthy, Royce D. Applegate, Ron Taylor, Dan O’Herlihy, John Boylan, Catherine E. Coulson, Joshua Harris, David Lynch, Kenneth Welsh
Wherever you go, there you are. Buckaroo Banzai’s maxim feels broadly applicable to the people of Twin Peaks. Transplants bring their pasts with them, and expats remain trapped in a perpetual Twin Peaks of the mind.
Take James Hurley, for instance. Having fled town following Maddy Ferguson’s murder — which means he has no idea Laura’s killer was definitively caught — we catch up with him as he rides his motorcycle down a tree-lined highway. He ends up at exactly the kind of juke joint he frequented in Twin Peaks, although at this one they apparently don’t card.
But if James is looking to get away from troubled blondes, I’ve got a feeling he should get back on his bike and keep riding. He winds up in a conversation with the beautiful barfly sitting next to him, a woman in red named Evelyn Marsh (Annette McCarthy, yet another knockout brought to you by the Twin Peaks casting department). After some banter it sounds like she’s been rehearsing in her head since she first saw Double Indemnity, she invites James back to her place to check out the vintage car she swerved into a ditch.
Evelyn is awfully anxious for James to fix the car before her husband, who is away on quote-unquote “business,” returns. So anxious, in fact, that she offers him the room above the garage rent-free while he works on the car. You don’t need to have watched every movie in the Criterion Channel’s erotic thriller collection to formulate a pretty good guess as to where this is all headed. Is it all that different, really, from the sordid stuff he’d hoped to outrun?
Back in town, Josie Packard continues to straddle the line between femme fatale and damsel in distress. She tells Harry she was taken off the streets at 16 by a man named Thomas Eckhard; “He was my father, my master…my lover.” Eventually she escaped his clutches, and the power of her late husband Andrew Packard kept him at bay. With Andrew dead at Eckhard’s command, Eckhard and his minions are free to target her once more. She escaped one such thug, “Mr. Lee/Cousin Jonathan,” in Seattle before making her way back to town.
She gives a different version of the spiel to Catherine, on whose mercy she now throws herself. Oh, Catherine believes that Eckhard was responsible for the hit on her brother, sure — but she knows Josie was involved as well. Then there’s the mill swindle and arson for Josie to answer for, acts she claims Eckhard forced her to commit. In exchange for not handing Josie directly back to Eckhard, Catherine tells her she’s now her own personal maidservant.
The moment Josie leaves, Catherine produces none other than her brother Andrew (Dan O’Herlihy), back from the dead — it’s not clear how long Catherine has known he’s still alive, or vice versa — and out for vengeance. If Josie thought she could hide safely from her past in Twin Peaks, she was badly mistaken.
Not even Agent Cooper can escape the sins of his past. Windom Earle (Kenneth Walsh), the former partner whose insanity Coop feels is the result of his own affair with a slain witness, continues to send taunting chess moves and cassette tapes to Cooper at the Great Northern Hotel. The implied threat is barely even implied.
Roger, the agent in charge of investigating the allegations of drug-running and homicide against Cooper, is only slightly more friendly than Earle. Coop refuses to play the usual internal-affairs game, explaining that he’s “started to focus out beyond the edge of the board.” To Roger, Cooper’s failure to defend himself, beyond a categorical denial of acting with bad intent and some of what Harry might call Cooper’s “mumbo jumbo,” indicates that he is not only guilty, but possibly mentally ill.
Granted, Cooper did just tell Roger that his enlarged focus now encompasses “the sound the wind makes through the pines, the sentience of animals, what we fear in the dark and what lies beyond the darkness.” Roger’s response of “What the hell are you talking about?” feels entirely appropriate.
Fortunately, not all of Cooper’s old colleagues are so skeptical of his innocence. He receives words (or shouts) of encouragement from his boss, Gordon Cole, over the speakerphone. “LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA!” Cole advises.
Cole also tips Cooper off that an old friend, one of the DEA’s best agents, has been called in to investigate the drug aspect of the allegations. But things have changed since Coop and his pal last saw each other. DEA Agent Denise Bryson is now out as a trans woman, which — after a brief period of adjustment — Cooper and the rest of the team accept with relative ease. (Hawk doesn’t shake her hand, but that’s seemingly more out of surprise than bigotry; he does misgender her, but in the process of complimenting her outfit, so maybe it evens out.)
During a wedding reception for local publishing magnate Dougie Milford and his latest young bride (Robyn Lively), Denise explains how (in the parlance of our times) her egg cracked when she had to wear women’s clothing for an undercover assignment. Unfortunately, she also informs Coop that his car has tested positive for cocaine residue that will almost certainly match the coke that Mountie King alleges was stolen from his sting operation.
Denise agrees with Cooper — who initially uses her old name, but apologizes and corrects himself when she points this out, which is about as well as such an interaction can possibly go — that it bears all the hallmarks of a frame-up. Unfortunately, she can only go where the evidence leads her. (For the time being it leads her into the arms of Deputy Andy, who appears completely transported by his dance with Denise. Lucy better watch herself.)
The same man at the root of Coop’s misery, Jean Renault, is also making life difficult for Cooper’s frequent foe Ben Horne. An increasingly cocky Hank Jennings shows up in Ben’s office, where Horne’s been holed up watching old home movies and not showering, to tell him Jean Renault has taken over ownership of One-Eyed Jack’s. Already stripped of the Packard Sawmill and Ghostwood Estates by Catherine, he’s lost the last of his major holdings outside the hotel itself. That his response is to make shadow puppets does not speak well to his current level of business acumen.
Elsewhere around town, Deputy Andy and his romantic rival, Dick Tremayne, begin taking care of their youthful ward “Little Nicky” Needleman (Joshua Harris), who pulls pranks on them and then does the “I’m sowwy, I’m just a widdle birthday boy” routine. Nadine develops a crush on Donna Hayward’s jock ex-boyfriend Mike, whom she easily outdoes in the weight room. The Log Lady apparently loves both weddings and cake. (I’m sorry to be a downer about an adorable bit, but maybe it’s because her own wedding was the last happy memory she has before her newlywed husband’s death.)
Most importantly, there’s a new lead, and new lore, in the supernatural storyline that is now the show’s primary link to the Laura Palmer case. Cooper learns from Major Briggs’s wife, Betty, that her husband has long been fixated on the woods where he disappeared. He learns from Hawk that the Major’s mysterious mention of the White Lodge refers to a local indigenous belief — the place where the benevolent spirits that guide humanity and nature live.
Hawk explains that there also exists the White Lodge’s “shadow self,” the Black Lodge. It’s a kind of purgatory through which souls must pass and encounter their own shadow selves, “the Dweller on the Threshold.”
“But it is said,” Hawk concludes, “if you you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul.”
Seems like a good time to start focusing on what we fear in the dark and what lies beyond the darkness, doesn’t it?
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