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 1, Episode 3
“Episode 2” aka “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the third episode, is officially designated “Episode 2.”]
Original Airdate: April 19, 1990
Writers: David Lynch & Mark Frost
Director: David Lynch
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, Ray Wise, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Eric Da Re, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee, Russ Tamblyn, Grace Zabriskie, David Patrick Kelly, Miguel Ferrer, Victoria Catlin, Wendy Robie, Kimmy Robertson, Jan D’Arcy, Mary Jo Deschanel, Gary Hershberger, Robert Bauer, Connie Woods, Michael J. Anderson, Al Strobel, Frank Silva
Okay. Now we’ve seen Twin Peaks.
The show’s third episode is, in effect, the final chapter of a big three-part premiere. This is literally true, to an extent: Coop’s dream recycles footage originally created for an extended cut of the pilot for European markets. More to the point, it introduces multiple load-bearing elements of Twin Peaks’ cultural iconography, things you’ve probably seen or heard of whether or not you have any idea whodunit or where all this is headed (no spoilers, in other words): Audrey’s dreamy dance, Leland’s hysterical grief, Coop’s unconventional police work, One-Eyed Jack’s, the Red Room, the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), the backwards speech, Laura Palmer whispering in Agent Cooper’s ear, the “Fire Walk With Me” poem, one-armed Mike, Killer Bob.
Episode three is where it becomes clear that something not just strange but supernatural is occurring in this quiet logging town. It’s where the show goes from weird to Weird. And in all its non sequitur, nonlinear surrealist menace, it’s where David Lynch as we’d know him for the rest of his career — the David Lynch of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and this show’s own unlikely comeback season — is born.
We may as well start with the main event. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper goes to sleep in the Great Northern Hotel and has a strange, potentially prophetic dream. Amid brief flashes of visions related to Laura Palmer’s murder, Coop is somehow contacted by the mysterious one-armed man who’s been lurking around the hospital.
And boy, does he have a story to tell, one that begins with a poem containing a familiar phrase:
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds:
Fire…walk with me.
This man, or creature in the semblance of a man, tells Coop that he once associated with the frightening long-haired lurker at the foot of Laura’s bed whom Sarah Palmer saw in her own vision. “We lived among the people. I think you say ‘convenience store’ — we lived above it,” says the one-armed man, indicating a non-human nature. He claims that when he “saw the face of God,” he repented of his association with “the devilish one” and cut off the arm bearing a tattoo that somehow symbolized his evil.
“My name is Mike,” the one-armed man says. “His name is Bob.”
And then there he is, BOB, in all his greasy, denim-clad, snarling glory. He seems startled, even scared, by Mike’s presence in the dream, but not so scared that he can’t deliver a rhyme of his own:
Catch you with my death bag —
You may think I’ve gone insane,
But I promise,
I will kill again!
For the purposes of this story, these lines are “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” They’re an invocation of power, an invitation to adventure and terror. They’re a magic spell. They peel back the red curtain on another place, which we enter with one last incantation:
“Let’s rock!”
That other place, known as the Red Room, is marked by its marble statuary, slim silver lamps, strange shadows, flashing lights, zig-zag flooring, and lush red curtains. We are welcomed to it by the aptly named Man from Another Place, a little person who twitches and dances groovily and talks in riddles. He’s presiding over a meeting of sorts between Agent Cooper, who appears to be much older than the man we know, and Laura Palmer herself.
Or is it? When Coop — who, unlike the MFAP and “Laura,” speaks normally, instead of in an unnatural reverse speech — asks her straight up, she says “I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back.” The Man from Another Place asserts that this woman is his cousin, but he’s also given to saying things like “That gum you like is going to come back in style” or “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air,” so who knows how seriously to take him.
As the Man dances, Laura, or whoever she is, approaches Coop and kisses him on the lips, to their apparent shared delight. Then his face grows serious as she whispers something we can’t hear into his ear.
Then he wakes up with a comical cowlick, calls Sheriff Truman on the phone, announces he knows who killed Laura Palmer…and insists “It can wait till morning.” Hey, I did mention his unconventional police work, didn’t I?
That’s another major scene in this pivotal episode. Coop heads out into the woods earlier in the episode with the best and the brightest of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department — Sheriff Truman, Deputy Hawk, Deputy Andy, and Lucy the receptionist. There, they drink coffee (“Damn good coffee! And hot!”), and Coop recounts a different dream, one he had three years ago. The dream taught him two things: First, that the people of Tibet deserve freedom from the Red Chinese yoke, and second, that through “mind-body coordination operating hand in hand with the deepest level of intuition, he now has deductive superpowers.
No, seriously, he demonstrates it and everything. Coop tosses a rock at a glass bottle set up some sixty feet away, one rock per person suspected of being the mysterious “J” whom Laura mentions meeting in her diary. Most are clear misses, but the peculiar Dr. Jacoby is a direct hit, and the sinister trucker Leo Johnson is a total smash.
Elsewhere in the episode, Leo puts the fear of god into his drug-dealing underlings, Mike and Bobby. (Interesting name choices there, huh?) Bobby knows Leo beats Shelly now, and he knows Leo suspects she’s two-timing him; he vows revenge if Leo ever lays another hand on her. Donna and James, too, hit new heights in their own relationship, which they realize was inevitable even if Laura were still alive; they make out passionately on Donna’s couch.
Not every relationship on the show is quite so passionate. Big Ed Hurley finds himself in the doghouse with his whack-job, super-strong wife Nadine when he tracks grease onto her experimental cotton-ball drape runners. However, he’s spared her wrath because the grease turns out to be the missing ingredient in her quest for totally silent drape runners. (“We are gonna be so rich!”)
Catherine and Pete Martell, we learn, sleep in separate bedrooms. (How did these two ever get together in the first place?) Mercilessly browbeaten, Pete gets his revenge by passing his sister-in-law Josie the key to the sawmill’s safe, where she finds that Catherine has been cooking the books.
Catherine’s partner in crime, Ben Horne, is sleazier than we suspected. In addition to cheating on his wife, Sheila (Jan D’Arcy), with Catherine, he’s a regular customer at One-Eyed Jack’s, a casino slash brothel on the Canadian side of the border. The place is operated by Blackie (Victoria Catlin), a glamorous madam with whom Ben seems to have a longstanding, uh, acquaintance.
Ben and his brother, a globe-trotting life-of-the-party type named Jerry (David Patrick Kelly, whom you may remember asking the Warriors to come out to play), travel to One-Eyed Jack’s by boat, where they’re greeted by a dockhand in lingerie. Once inside the place, they flip a coin for first dibs on the brothel’s visibly uncomfortable “new girl” (Connie Woods). Ben says she comes “freshly scented from the perfume counter; note that the perfume counter at Horne’s Department Store is where Laura’s fellow victim Ronette Pulaski worked. The two disappear through the establishment's (somewhat less vivid) red curtains. It’s all very Epstein Island, with Ben Horne a clear Trump type even back then.
In addition to Jerry, the episode’s other big character introduction is FBI Special Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer, an instant scene-stealer). Take everything you remember about Coop’s attitude toward arriving in Twin Peaks, then imagine the opposite — that’s Albert. A forensics expert, Albert’s there to examine Laura’s body before her burial the next day, and he’ll have no truck with country bumpkins like Sheriff Truman while he’s there. Harry takes Coop at his word that Albert is the best in the business but “lacking in some of the social niceties”; otherwise, the two lawmen would have come to blows.
In the Palmer home, Leland is losing it. Though he’d previously seemed to be the more together of Laura’s two parents, he seems deranged by grief here, manically dancing with Laura’s portrait while sobbing. When his wife, Sarah, intervenes, they shatter the picture frame’s glass, and Leland’s blood is smeared all over his daughter’s face.
Even Audrey Horne is grieving in her own weird way. In our first glimpse of this cool customer’s human side, we learn that despite her personal dislike of some things about Laura, she loved her for the care she showed Audrey’s developmentally disabled older brother, Johnny. Then she begins swaying moodily to the discordant jazz she puts on the diner jukebox — “God, I love this music. Isn’t it too dreamy?” — and the moment passes. Perhaps this is the only way a girl who grows up in the unhappy Horne household can process the unhappiness of others.
This episode is everything Twin Peaks can be. It’s sexy, sleazy, and soapy, unabashedly so, yet there’s also a scene of Shelly turning off a soap opera called Invitation to Love, rejecting it as unrealistic. Soaps aren’t generally willing to get as ugly and raw as this episode gets, from the blood-soaked rag Deputy Hawk retrieves near the crime scene to the blood-soaked photo in Leland’s hands. The show is both a celebration and a send-up of the genre.
It’s also very funny, thanks in large part to the new characters. When Jerry arrives on the scene, Ben becomes a little kid, chowing down on a baguette and brie sandwich straight from Paris like a 12-year-old scarfing a hot dog. He interrupts a static, cringe-comedy shot of the four miserable Hornes eating a compulsory family meal that shows Lynch’s unlikely influence on comedy to this day. Elsewhere, Albert fires off rapid-fire insults in an unmistakable lawman’s cadence like an outraged Jack Webb in Dragnet chewing out a production assistant. Both men instantly feel like a natural part of this world, despite both very literally coming into town from outside.
And it’s terrifying. I mean it’s scary as shit. Its impact can be diluted if you’ve seen it a million times, but Coop’s dream is, well, the stuff of nightmares. Actor Al Strobel’s haunting voice as he chants out between two worlds sounds like a dragon waking from slumber. Frank Silva, who plays Bob, was a member of the crew whose reflection was accidentally caught in the mirror behind Sarah Palmer when she wakes up screaming in the pilot, and whom Lynch spotted crouching behind Laura’s bed to be out of the way. His look was so menacing, and his appearance in the mirror such a fortuitous coincidence, that Lynch and Mark Frost created the character of Bob for him while already shooting the pilot. Watching Silva growl his menacing words at the camera here, you understand why.
There’s one final thing this episode is, and it’s a hard one to convey: It’s sublime. The Red Room scene, specifically, feels so luminous to me, so alive with the magic of creation, that I burst out crying the moment I heard the words “Let’s rock!”
That can happen for me when I’m overwhelmed by the magnificence of a cinematic image: the Vertigo dolly-zoom on Chief Brody in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, say, or “The power of Christ compels you” in The Exorcist, or Shelley Duvall seeing the bloody elevator doors in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or Liza Minnelli’s performance of the title song in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, or Rebekah Del Rio’s performance of “Llorando” in Lynch’s own Mulholland Drive.
These moments aren’t sad in the way of a traditional tearjerker, but nor do they move you to tears of joy. It’s the sheer emotional charge of these moments, however you’d care to name the emotion in question, that gets me. They seem to draw some truth about the soul of the world from out of that abyss and cast it onto the screen, beautiful and terrible. Where they’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.
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