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 13
“Episode 20” aka “Checkmate”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the 21st episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 20.”]
Original Airdate: January 19, 1990
Writer: Harley Peyton
Director: Todd Holland
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, Chris Mulkey, Ian Buchanan, James Booth, David Duchovny, Gavan O’Herlihy, Wendy Robie, Don Davis, Gary Hershberger, Annette McCarthy, Nicholas Love, Michael Parks
It’s been a while since we’ve seen or heard from Twin Peaks’ show within the show. Invitation to Love, the cheesy soap opera many of the townsfolk followed during Season 1, has been completely absent from Season 2, and with it one of the filmmakers’ chief methods of having a little fun at their own expense. They’re fully aware that the only thing that really separates the melodramatic potboiling of the fake show from the real one is execution, so they hung a lampshade on it. It’s all in good fun.
In audio form, anyway, the show makes its triumphant return this episode. We hear it playing in Shelley Johnson’s still half-finished house as Bobby Briggs jilts her in favor of his big opportunity with Ben Horne. (And, presumably, his equally hot prospects with Ben’s daughter Audrey.) The soap has always been an escape for Shelley; now it plays as her prospects narrow and the walls close in.
Sure enough, the inevitable finally occurs, and the monstrous Leo Johnson emerges from his coma. He’s got a party hat on his head, cake smeared all over his face, and if his sinister smile is any indication – murder on his mind. Shelley can only scream like a girl in a horror movie, which is more or less what she is.
Shelley’s survival notwithstanding, Invitation to Love feels like an appropriate accompaniment to this episode, one of the horniest and most violent in the show’s brief history. Couple after couple, including some surprising ones, get it on, while heroes and villains alike employ brute force either to save the day or darken it.
James Hurley’s road trip, for example, reaches the destination you always knew it would. After finishing his miraculous repair of her husband Jeffrey’s fancy car — he leads her there with a blindfold and two glasses of champagne, showing he does have some game — James finally sleeps with Evelyn, who begs him to stay even though his work is done. Little does he know that she’s also having an affair with Malcolm, her…brother? Question mark? Twin Peaks is not above House Lannister–style on-camera brother-sister incest, I don’t think, but it’s just as possible the whole brother story was bullshit. Let’s just hope it all gets sorted out before the arrival of Donna Hayward, who’s been tipped off to James’s last reported location by his uncle Big Ed.
Back in Twin Peaks, Ben Horne’s devolution continues apace. He’s adopted a fake Southern accent and the persona of Robert E. Lee, the traitorous dipshit whose disastrous generalship at Gettysburg marked the beginning of the end of the Confederacy, more or less. (We’re all taught to believe he was some kind of gentleman genius for reasons I leave up to you, the reader, to deduce.) By the end of the episode Ben has apparently reversed the course of history and defeated the Union’s General George Meade.
Will this help him recover from the defeat he suffered at the hands of Catherine Martell? Or with those very hands themselves do the trick? Catherine shows up in a splendidly loud coat patterned with very 1990s Native American motifs and straight-up puts the moves on her arch-rival. “You make my body hum,” she says, helpless before the power of her own lust. Hell yeah, sister! If only you were horny for someone less loathsome than Ben Horne!
Catherine, you’ll recall, has reduced her hated sister-in-law and other arch-rival, Josie, to indentured servant status. That doesn’t stop Sheriff Harry S. Truman from getting hot to trot when he comes to see her and find out why she didn’t move in with him as they’d planned. She tells him she has no choice, that they’re both in danger; maybe it’s the risk, maybe it’s the maid’s uniform, but Harry is all over Josie in seconds. These two are always pretty passionate when they’re alone together, of course.
That’s more than can be said for Norma Jennings and Big Ed Hurley. In love for decades, the two have stayed apart ever since Norma’s husband Hank was paroled from prison; Ed, meanwhile, has had his hands full with his wife’s suicide attempt, amnesia, belief she is a high school student, and incredible super-strength. (She’s an X-Man, basically.) But Norma sneaks off and the two make love in Ed’s house while his wife is at school. (Man, that sounds weird.)
Unfortunately, Hank is on to them. The moment Norma leaves, he pops out of the woodwork and starts beating Ed down — until Nadine gets home from Twin Peaks High, sees what’s going on, and beats the living shit out of big tough Hank Jennings. She may be hot for young Mike Nelson (who kinda seems into it after she plants one on him at the Double R), but Nadine is not about to stand by and let anyone mess with her Eddie.
I’ll be honest with you here: I’m not sure how I feel about the resolution of the loooooooong-simmering Ed-Norma-Hank situation arriving in the form of a mutant middle-aged woman in an eye-patch and a cheerleader outfit tossing one of the scariest creeps on the show around like a pro wrestler. I swear, you can see actually see the light go out of actor Chris Mulkey’s eyes as he goes through with this stuff.
Elsewhere in town, Dick Tremayne puts on his best private dick trenchcoat and fedora and leads Deputy Andy on a quest to learn about the past of their seemingly sinister ward Little Nicky by stealing his files from the orphanage he came from. It’s good clean fun, buoyed by the winningly stupid performances of Ian Buchanan and Harry Goaz as Dick and Andy.
On a more serious note, the Jean Renault story is brought to a close at last. Cooper, Harry, and Denise set up a drug bust using Hank’s father-in-law Ernie Niles wearing a wire to set the trap. Denise even goes undercover as “Dennis,” a more-or-less convincing cis male version of herself, to play the out-of-town high-roller making the buy.
But when Ernie’s sweat shorts out the wire and blows his and Denise’s cover, Cooper hands himself over to Renault in exchange for the hostages’ release. He reasons that he’s the one Jean has wanted all along, and he’s right — he’s just not sure why. Why blame him of all people for the deaths of his brothers Bernard and Jacques, when Leo Johnson and Leland Palmer were the killers?
Jean is happy to explain. Actor Michael Parks deploys same reserved intensity he brought to his scenes in Kill Bill a decade or so later as Jean blames Cooper for all the ills that have befallen the town of Twin Peaks since his arrival after Laura Palmer’s death. I think he may be right that things have gone badly wrong in Twin Peaks, but he doesn’t even notice conceding that “a pretty girl die” before Coop ever got there. Perhaps that was the turning point.
Regardless, our heroes prevail. Denise returns to the scene dressed as a waitress, and by the time Jean recognizes her, Coop grabs the gun from her stocking — bad guys simply cannot resist a dame! — and shoots Jean dead. Denise, meanwhile, subdues Sgt. King, the Mountie who was in on the whole thing. That’s a wrap on the Renault brothers, unless there are more out there somewhere.
But there are still enemies on the move. The episode begins with the debriefing of Major Garland Briggs, who remembers little of what occurred to him during his two-day disappearance from the woods outside of town, beyond fire and a giant owl. He’s depicted in a stone throne covered with vegetation, and his appearance follows a view of a field of stars as a voice whispers “Cooper” and a strange three-triangle symbol made of flame flies directly at the viewer. The same symbol is now scarred into the Major’s skin behind his ear.
Before he’s whisked away by Air Force goons, the Major reveals he’s working on an unofficial continuation of Project Blue Book, the military’s old investigation into UFOs. His work, he says, is aimed not just at the skies, but at the ground below.
Finally, Cooper’s insane ex-partner Windom Earle makes his first big move. After destroying generators at the power station and the Sheriff’s Department, Earle deposits a mutilated corpse in Harry’s office chair, along with the head of a stag. The dead man’s hand is arranged to point directly at a chess board, indicating Earle’s next play in his game with Cooper.
This is massive escalation in tactics, of course, and a sign that another killer is loose in Twin Peaks. (It’s also the gnarliest dead body we’ve seen on the show so far, which feels worth noting.)
With no one plotline in a place of primacy — you could say whatever Coop’s involved with is the main storyline by default, but he’s involved in a lot right now — Twin Peaks at this stage is a choose your own adventure, in which you can choose which characters to invest in. I’ve always been a big fan of Bobby Briggs, so I’m fascinated by the way he picks up stakes when the going gets tough with Shelley. Risking your life to avoid her psychotic husband who sells you drugs? That’s romantic, that’s sexy. Sitting around a house feeding jello to a vegetable? See you later, sister.
But does the Horne family strike you as being any more likely to provide Bobby with the kind of peace and satisfaction he knew in Major Briggs’s unforgettable dream? One look at General Ben Horne should answer that question. I know Bobby’s plight is minor — well, it was until Leo got loose — but it’s memorable to me.
The same goes for James, whom I find interesting for the same reason Laura found him both adorable and exasperating in equal measure: He’s so sweet, but he’s so dumb. The kid wouldn’t hurt a fly, but at the same time he can’t see the obvious play being made by Evelyn and Malcolm. Where can a guy like that fit in, in a world like the one he lives in, or like the one we live in? Where’s his invitation to love?
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