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 14
“Episode 21” aka “Double Play”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the 22nd episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 21.”]
Original Airdate: January 19, 1990
Writer: Scott Frost
Director: Uli Edel
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, Russ Tamblyn, David Patrick Kelly, Ian Buchanan, Robyn Lively, Don Davis, Annette McCarthy, David Warner, Dan O’Herlihy, Brenda Strong, John Apicella, John Boylan, Craig MacLachlan, Brenda E. Mathers
Finally, we find out Dale Cooper’s original sin. In this significant-feeling episode of post–Laura Palmer Twin Peaks, we come face to face at last not only with Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), Coop’s partner and mentor turned murderous nemesis, but with the crime of the heart Dale committed to earn Earle’s enmity, which has haunted him all series long.
It seems our white knight was more Lancelot than Gallahad. We’ve already heard the story of how Cooper fell in love and had an affair with a material witness he was protecting for a federal case. We’ve heard, vaguely, that this somehow caused him to lower his guard, which enabled the witness to be murdered. We’ve heard that for some reason, this event drove Earle insane and led to his lethal grudge against Coop, which he’s been pursuing via a cryptic chess game played through personal ads all season long. Now we learn why.
Cleared of the charges against him but still suspended from the FBI (you can tell because his hair isn’t immaculately Brylcreamed back), Coop acts as a Twin Peaks deputy and takes on the case. As he, Harry, and Doc examine the body of the dead man (played by Kyle MacLachlan’s real-life brother Craig) whom Earle planted in the Sheriff’s Department, Coop comes clean. The witness’s name was Caroline (played in a dreamy black-and-white overlay by Brenda E. Mathers), she was Windom Earle’s wife, and Earle himself killed her, injuring Cooper in the process.
Coop suspects that Earle both faked his insanity and actually committed the very crime to which Caroline was a witness, meaning Earle was already a cold-killer before the affair. Even so, Coop obviously blames himself for Caroline’s death, and for the “baggage” he’s brought to town as a result.
“Windom Earle’s mind is like a diamond, cold and hard and brilliant,” he says. “You don’t know what he’s capable of, Harry. You don’t know.” He sounds as frightened here as we’ve ever heard him, which does a lot to sell the man’s menace to an audience that’s already faced Bob.
As for Earle, after breaking and entering into the Sheriff’s Department to stage the body in Harry’s office, he has decamped to a cabin in the woods. This is where Leo Johnson, of all people, finds him — not the meeting of the minds you want to see if you value the lives of the good people of Twin Peaks.
After waking up from his coma, Leo stalks his unfaithful wife Shelley around the house, menacing her with his soap-in-a-sock weapon and with the axe he nearly killed Bobby with before he was shot by Hank Jennings, putting him in the coma to begin with. It’s fascinating to see writer Scott Frost and director Uli Edel inject such a mainline dose of 1980s slasher-film horror into the show’s Lynchian bloodstream; Eric Da Re is so convincing as a hulking, dead-eyed psycho, and Mädchen Amick is so good as an alternately brave and terrified Final Girl, that it works.
Possibly for the first time in his life, Bobby Briggs actually comes to the rescue. He stops Leo from chopping Shelley to bits long enough for her to recover the knife. Just before Leo can choke Bobby to death with the axe handle, Shelley stabs her abusive husband in the leg, sending him screaming and howling into the woods through the hole Shelley slashed in the plastic tarp covering their house. Only at this moment did it occur to me that Shelley Johnson has been wrapped in plastic all this time.
Leo is led to Windom Earle by the evil owls, and Shelley and Bobby are left holding each other in front of the Johnsons’ unpleasant decorative wall hanging of a clown. I’m detecting a little debt to the Joker iconography from Tim Burton’s first Batman movie, still a very recent and massive pop culture phenomenon, along with all the Jason Voorhees/Michael Myers stuff.
Bobby’s presence at the Johnson house may be surprising after the way he recently jilted her for his new life blackmailing Benjamin Horne. But Bobby has just spent the day at the Great Northern with his new friend/ crush/ boss/ whatever Audrey, her Uncle Jerry, Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, and (deep sigh) Confederate General Ben. Audrey has smartened Bobby up to a basic fact: If Ben continues in this direction, there’ll be no money for her to inherit or for Bobby to earn.
This is Jerry’s first time seeing his beloved big brother like this, and for once, he’s speechless. (Ben believes he’s General J.E.B. Stuart.) But Dr. Jacoby reassures everyone that by using his little Civil War miniatures to have the South march on Washington and win the war in an alternate version of history, he’s attempting to emerge victorious from his own shattered psyche after his great defeat.
“What he needs right now,” Jacoby says as if prescribing couples counseling, “is both your support and a Confederate victory.”
Thanks to actor Russ Tamblyn’s utter earnestness, this one of the funniest lines of the season so far, but you can see why Bobby would find it less than reassuring. You can also see how Ben Horne — a Yankee, yes, but primarily a world-class piece of shit who got high off his own supply and paid for it — might become a Confederate sympathizer during a psychotic break. There are a lot of rich hubristic white assholes who like ‘em young in America these days, and they don’t even need the excuse of mental illness to root for a slave state.
Windom Earle and Leo Johnson aren’t the only menaces to society loose in Twin Peaks tonight. Catherine Martell reveals to her husband Pete that her brother, Andrew, has been alive all along, having faked his death in the boat accident that his trophy wife Josie was involved with. Josie was working for Andrew’s ex-partner turned nemesis (there’s a lot of that going around!), Thomas Eckhart. (Catherine, meanwhile, is weirdly handsy with her brother.)
Played by the outstanding bad-guy actor David Warner, Eckhart’s in town too, wearing his sunglasses indoors at night. Since “Jonathan/Mr. Lee,” his previous henchman, was apparently murdered by Josie in her escape — “Asian Man Killed!!” reads a cringeworthy fake newspaper headline — he’s brought along a new right-hand woman, played by Seinfeld villain Brenda “Sue Ellen Mischke” Strong. (Seriously, man, casting director Johanna Ray does not miss.)
And the crimes just keep on coming. A couple hours away, the inevitable happens: Evelyn’s abusive husband Jeffrey is killed when the car James repaired for him crashes, setting him up for murder. It wasn’t her idea, she says, it was Malcolm’s; “He’s not my brother,” she says simply, and James finally catches on. But Evelyn really has fallen in love with James, even though he thinks what they’ve done is wrong. (“Love isn’t wrong,” she tells him desperately.)
Renouncing her role in the scheme, Evelyn warns James to make his escape before the police can catch him. Outside the house he runs right into Donna Hawyard, who was tipped off to his location by Big Ed and tracked him down despite being thrown off course by Evelyn. Together, the pair disappear into the night.
You can cross a few potential killers off your list, however. First up: Hank Jennings, who’s been hospitalized following his run-in with Nadine. (He variously claims he got hit by a truck or that a tree fell on him.) He may have missed the big drug bust at Dead Dog Farm because of the beat-down he received, but that won’t stop Harry from busting him for parole violations and sending him back to prison. Finally, Big Ed Hurley and Norma Jennings may be free to pursue their star-crossed love.
“People will find out,” she says, smiling.
“Let ’em,” Ed says, smiling back. Hell yeah, brother.
Then there’s Lana Milford and her brother-in-law, Mayor Dwayne Milford. The widow Milford has just received a…clean bill of health, I guess you’d call it, from Dr. Jacoby. He assures the assembled lawmen that Lana is neither cursed nor a killer. “What she does in fact possess,” he says, “is a heightened sexual drive and a working knowledge of technique, anatomy, and touch that few men have ever had the pleasure of experiencing or the skill to match.” It’s another incredible Jacoby line, and by the time he finishes saying it Harry and Coop and Hawk have gotten so horned up from watching Lana wiggle her feet that they’re just a steam whistle shy of being Tex Avery wolves.
Then along comes Dwayne, shotgun in hand, to get justice of his own. With the gun drawn on Lana and Jacoby, things look real touch-and-go for a moment. Acting on the kind of instinct that Harry and company have learned to trust implicitly (earlier in the episode he accurately predicted Earle’s every move), Coop persuades Dwayne to lower his gun and go into the conference room to talk it out with Lana herself.
Then, he and the boys wait. Then there’s a commercial break. Then they wait some more.
When they finally burst in, guns drawn, they find Lana planting big red kisses all over Dwayne’s face. “We’ve decided to adopt a child,” he announces. I guess that settles that!
Finally, there’s Twin Peaks’ answer to The Omen, Little Nicky. Andy informs Lucy of his and Dick’s theory that their young mentee is a murderer who offed his own parents. “We think he was six at the time of the crime,” Andy says gravely. Royally peeved, Lucy recruits Doc Hayward to tell these two dopes the real story, and boy, is it a tearjerker.
The Doc himself delivered Nicky, whose mother, a poor immigrant chambermaid at the Great Northern who was the victim of sexual assault but carried Nicky to term anyway, died in childbirth. “We buried her in potter’s field and sent the infant to the orphanage,” Doc says, like he’s an Edwardian vicar. Nicky’s tragic life took a turn for the even worse when the loving parents who adopted him died in a car accident. By the time Doc says “Six-year-old Nicky managed to pull his parents from the blazing car,” Dick and Andy are sobbing and I was howling with laughter. Between this storyline and that Jacoby line, this episode features some of the show’s funniest dialogue ever. But right at the end of this deliberately over-the-top moment of sensitivity, Lucy swats a mosquito, and the thing is full of blood. It’s such an odd, unnecessary, uncomfortable, funny, weirdly shocking thing to do. In other words, it’s Twin Peaks.
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
