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 16
“Episode 24” aka “Wounds and Scars”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the 25th episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 24.”]
Original Airdate: March 28, 1991
Writer: Barry Pullman
Director: James Foley
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, Billy Zane, Ian Buchanan, Heather Graham, David L. Lander, Wendy Robie, Don Davis, Gary Hershberger, Catherine E. Coulson, Mary Jo Deschanel, Brenda Strong, Ron Blair
We’ve never seen Sheriff Harry S. Truman like this. I don’t think anyone has seen Sheriff Harry S. Truman like this. He’s holed up in the Book House with a bottle, more likely several bottles, of Jack Daniels, along with his service revolver and a whole lot of breakable furniture. He dismisses Deputy Hawk’s concerns about policing Twin Peaks without him: “You and Cooper can handle it. It’s a pretty simple town ... Used to be. I guess the world’s just caught up to us.” He even turns down a home-cooked breakfast from Norma Jennings, that’s how blue the guy is.
His mood does not improve when Cooper shows up with intel from Josie’s Interpol dossier. She had the proverbial rap sheet as long as your arm, including not just her two murders here and her attempted murder of Cooper but a raft of crimes back in Hong Kong, including prostitution. “Harry,” Coop says, “eventually it’s gonna help you to know she was a hardened criminal. A killer.” In response, Harry screams at Cooper to go at the absolute top of his lungs.
Finally, Harry loses it entirely. Drunk as a lord, he trashes the private club of Twin Peaks’ secret society of do-gooders, sitting on a table like a mad king as he swings around his gun and his bottle of Jack. Cooper asks him to give up his gun, something Harry says he’s never done — like visiting China, Josie’s home.
“She came to me,” Harry says, “and she made everything better.” He repeats himself, breaking down, in a way that’s hard to hear if you’ve ever worried about losing someone who’s done that for you. “Everything, so much better.” Dropping his gun, he collapses into Coop’s arms, and the two hold each other in the show’s most arresting portrait of their free and easy friendship yet. These guys love each other, man. How can you not love that? How can you not love them?
His voice choked with tears, Harry laments all the things he doesn’t understand. Perhaps he means the fact that Josie’s body only weighed 65 pounds at the autopsy. I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about, and nothing to do with the things Cooper saw after she died.
Speaking of which, an impromptu Council of the White Wizards convenes after the Log Lady returns, approaching Major Briggs at the Double R and escorting him to the Sheriff’s Department to talk to Cooper.
Like the Major, the Log Lady disappeared inexplicably, back when she was a child. Like the Major, she returned with a mysterious scar. While Briggs’s came in the form of three upward-pointing triangles, the Log Lady’s looks a lot like a stylized representation of the town’s eponymous Twin Peaks themselves. None of the three, all of whom have been touched by whatever forces govern these goings-on, can unravel the mystery.
Nor is the more immediately pressing issue of Windom Earle getting any easier to comprehend or counteract. With Pete Martell’s help, Coop is grinding their deadly chess game to a stalemate, though a regretful Pete reports that in all his research he has yet to come up with a stalemate that doesn’t involve losing up to six pieces. In Earle’s sick rulebook, that means six murders. Pete believes he can improve on this, and Coop believes it too, but the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Especially not once you see what Windom Earle’s been up to. He’s furious when he deduces that Coop has outside help in crafting his stalemate game — “Cooper doesn’t know the meaning of stalemate!” — and he’s out for revenge. So he begins using his prowess with disguises to visit with each of the three “angels” he singled out in the last episode personally. He poses as an old medical-school buddy of Doc Hayward’s to gain access to Donna’s house, dropping off his number and a present.
The present is his next chess move. The number goes to a cemetery. The medical-school pal he’s pretending to be drowned in front of Doc Hayward decades earlier. It’s creepy as hell to think this guy can just come and go as he pleases. Later, in fact, he dresses as a biker to encourage Shelly Johnson, who (preposterously) says “I don’t think of myself as pretty,” to enter the upcoming Miss Twin Peaks pageant. This man only has two kinds of motives, sinister and ulterior, so if I were Donna I’d do the opposite of anything he suggests.
Earle also gets a good long look at his nemesis Cooper, who’s sitting at the counter across from him. Coop doesn’t really notice this other customer until he notices he’s gone, but you can read on his face that he’s aware something dark is at work.
Honestly, I’m surprised he’d notice anything short of an earthquake, if that, after he meets Annie Blackburn (baby Heather Graham).
The beautiful blonde younger sister of the beautiful blonde diner owner Norma Jennings, Annie has recently run away from a convent, and somewhat less recently attempted suicide, if the scar on her wrist is any indication. (Real suicidally depressed people know she did it all wrong, but Hollywood only knew “slit wrists” as side-to-side, not up-and-down. But hey, that’s show biz for ya!)
A tarnished do-gooder with a traumatic past looking to make a fresh start in Twin Peaks? Now where have I heard that song before? Coop certainly recognizes it, and seems half in love by the time his coffee arrives.
He’s not alone in that department. Audrey is literally swept off her feet by Jack Wheeler, Ben Horne’s cowboy-aficionado protégé turned financial savior. After a romantic picnic, something the kids of Twin Peaks simply can’t get enough of apparently, she leaps into his arms during the panic that breaks out when a live pine weasel attacks Dick Tremayne and then runs loose during a garish fashion-show fundraiser.
The weasel’s handler is a returning David L. Lander, aka Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley, which is shirley — excuse me, surely — the strangest bit of stunt casting yet on a show that’s no slouch in that department. They brought David Warner in just to wear sunglasses and die in an ugly robe, for crying out loud! Anyway, Lander once again plays Tim Pinkle, last seen hawking a mechanical chair to the Johnson household. Now he’s an expert on the pine weasel. Sure, why not.
But more surprising still is Ben Horne’s rationale for the event. He tells party-crasher Catherine Martell that it’s not about trying to weasel his way (no pun intended) back into control of the Ghostwood lands, it’s not about vengeance against her, and it’s certainly not about showing off Dick Tremayne’s nightmarish plaid-based fashion sense. Ben says he genuinely does want to save this endangered species and leave the world a better place in this one small way, calling it “a first scrubbing on one of the dirtiest consciences in the entire Northwest.”
Does that dirty conscience include whatever clandestine relationship he has going on with Eileen Hayward, Donna’s wheelchair-using mother? Donna spies from the stairs as Ben arrives at the door, kneels by her side, takes her hand, makes a shhhh finger gesture, and talk softly back and forth with her. Even if you didn’t know Ben was fucking half the town (I count Catherine, Josie, Laura, every perfume-counter girl at One Eyed Jack’s, and I guess his own wife at some point), there’s really only one conclusion you could draw from this.
As for Catherine, she’s approached by Jones, Thomas Eckhardt’s imposingly sexy assistant. The woman drops off a box, a gift from her late employer, one which Catherine, wisely I think, does not open. At the end of the episode, she knocks out a biker stationed at the Book House as a guard, disrobes, lets down her hair, and slips into bed with Harry Truman, who’s sleeping it off. “I have a few things to tidy up,” Jones told Catherine (who held a gun on her during their conversation) before leaving. Looks like Harry, whom Josie loved instead of Thomas Eckhardt, is on the to-do list.
Also, Big Ed is consulting Dr. Jacoby to figure out how to divorce Nadine, who doesn’t understand that she’s married. At any rate, she’s busy: She wears a disguise to rent a room at the Great Northern so she can bang her high-school boyfriend Mike. What else can you say but “Ah, Twin Peaks!”
I think it’s fair to say that about a lot of this episode. I’ll admit that “a rodent or other small animal bites a man on the nose or junk and then he runs around screaming for a while” is my least favorite form of physical comedy, and Squiggy is an odd fit even for a town as odd as Twin Peaks. But there are distinctly Peaks-ian aspects even of the disastrous fashion show — the juxtaposition of Jack and Audrey’s ultra-romantic pose against the chaos all around them, the disorienting hard cut after a closeup of an extra screaming at the top of her lungs.
Jones and Annie, meanwhile, can join Twin Peaks’ roster of S-tier babes, while the Log Lady’s return augurs deeper developments in the lore of the Lodges; the show wouldn’t be what it is without both of these aspects in play.
Elsewhere, characters behave in surprising ways. Shelly displays a winning cynicism about beauty pageants of a sort we have’t really seen before out of her, hilariously mocking the contestants’ air-headed speeches about world peace. Harry’s meltdown, too, is a side of him we’ve never witnessed: As Hawk puts it, “It was like taking a hike to your favorite spot and finding a hole where the lake used to be.”
Ben Horne’s apparent Damascene conversion and his apparent dalliance with Doc Hayward’s wife both got me good. Windom Earle might as well be a Batman villain with all his tricks, but he says something to Donna about the paradox of high school that sounds both insightful and sincere: “You have no idea what you want to do with your life, so it feels like absolutely none of it applies to your life.” He kind of nailed it, didn’t he? Here, perhaps, we see what makes Earle so dangerous. He’s not a gibbering psychopath. He maintains enough connection to and understanding of humanity to manipulate people even more effectively than if he were merely a calculating brainiac.
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.
