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 5
“Episode 4” aka “The One-Armed Man”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the fifth episode, is officially designated “Episode 4.”]
Original Airdate: May 3, 1990
Writer: Robert Engels
Director: Tim Hunter
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, Chris Mulkey, Jed Mills, Kimmy Robertson, Al Strobel, Erika Anderson, Lance Davis, David Lynch
Welcome to the new normal. Not every Twin Peaks will feature a hallucinatory dream sequence, or a depiction of grief so profound it’s deranging. Some won’t even include Coop saying fun things about the local cuisine like “This must be where pies go when they die!” (“Episode 3” aka “Rest in Pain.”) Some function much more like a traditional primetime soap, albeit an odd one. A cast of dozens, a surfeit of steamy love scenes, the ever-present threat of corrupt magnates and violent husbands? You got it. An FBI agent who comes face to face with a llama and fears he will influence witness questioning because, telepathically speaking, he’s “a strong sender”? You got that too.
Ben Horne fills the role of the local oligarch, a standard across daytime and nighttime soaps. The best known exemplar is Larry Hagman’s ten-gallon-hatted tycoon J.R. Ewing on Dallas, though my personal favorite is Eric Braedon’s teutonic tyrant Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless. As such, he’s at the center of much of the action.
In this episode, Ben falls for his daughter Audrey’s scheme to investigate Laura Palmer’s murder by giving her a job in the cosmetics section of his department store, the same job both Laura and her fellow victim Ronette Pulaski held.
He coaches his unseen brother Jerry through the making of a deal with Icelandic investors over the phone to the Horne family private jet. He canoodles and colludes with Catherine Martell as they plot to frame Josie Packard for arson. He meets Leo Johnson, the man selected for the firebug gig, in person (and mocks his flashy choice of vehicle for a clandestine meeting).
Ben also gets an eyeful of Leo’s latest handiwork: the corpse of French-Canadian drug dealer Bernard Renault, wrapped in burlap canvas. Leo is in league with Bernard’s elusive brother Jacques, who’s on the run in Canada, and together they’ve been trafficking cocaine across the border to sell to Twin Peaks’ schoolkids — Laura included, it seems. Bernard’s capture by the Bookhouse Boys last episode apparently presented a security risk Leo decided to take care of permanently, maybe even with Jacques’s approval. Ben may be mixed up with Leo, but not this side of his business; he’s aware of the drug trafficking but deems it beneath him.
You can thank the absent Albert Rosenfield for the lead that appears to crack the Palmer case, and Leo and Jacques’s link to it. Although he’s still pursuing charges against Sheriff Truman, which Coop intends to oppose, Albert identifies one of the brands of twine used to bind Laura the night of her death, as well as the animal that caused some of her wounds, a parrot or myna bird.
The rest of the investigation this time around stems from Coop’s unique brand of intuitive detective work. He matches Deputy Andy’s sketch of the home intruder from Sarah Palmer’s vision to the killer from his own. Leland, however, cruelly dismisses his wife’s supposed clairvoyance, including her nightmare of a gloved hand digging up half of a necklace.
But the necklace part is absolutely true, as we know. After hearing Sarah describe her dream, Donna and James discover that the necklace is missing. Donna explains to James that Laura always said her mom was spooky and prone to seeing strange things, much like Laura herself. If, as it seems, sinister forces are at work in Twin Peaks, the Palmer family seems to be in the thick of it.
As for the necklace, Dr. Jacoby stole it, as we know, because treating Laura changed his life. He says as much to Coop once again this episode, albeit far more glibly than he did at her grave; he also lets on that she was addressing both drug and sexual problems in therapy.
Audrey Horne, meanwhile, tells Donna that she overheard Jacoby saying he treated Laura on the down low. The two girls agree to help find Laura’s killer by pooling their information, which includes Audrey’s lead on Laura’s potential connection to the Canadian casino and brothel, One-Eyed Jack’s. (We’ll be returning the Jack with one eye in a moment.)
Meanwhile, Deputy Hawk calls in with the location of the mysterious one-armed man, spotted both in the hospital and in Coop’s dream. But when Hawk, Coop, and Harry burst in and interrogate the man, he’s fresh out the shower and meek as a lamb. He’s a traveling shoe salesman named Philip Gerard — Michael, or “Mike,” is his middle name — who lost his arm in a car accident. His best friend is named Bob, yes, but he’s just a normal veterinarian named Bob Lydecker who doesn’t match the sketch. And the one-armed man’s now-severed tattoo didn’t read “FIRE WALK WITH ME,” it read “MOM,” as he explains while sobbing like a baby.
However, the coincidences keep piling up. Veterinarian Bob’s office is right next to a convenience store — perhaps the one above which “Mike” said he and the greasy-haired Bob used to live. Coop correctly predicts that this convenience store sells the brand of twine that Albert ID’d, and that the offending bird is a patient of this particular vet. The owner of the bird — a myna named Waldo, according to the veterinary records they go through — just so happens to be Jacques Renault.
Meanwhile, the plastic fragment lodged in Laura’s stomach just so happens to be part of a poker chip from One-Eyed Jack’s. When an intact poker chip slips out of one of Ben’s pockets in the no-tell motel room he and Catherine Martell are liaising in, she discovers that her boyfriend is a customer too. I can’t imagine that going over well.
Coop gets this intel over the speaker phone from his unseen boss at the Bureau, Gordon Cole (the voice of David Lynch himself), virtually the moment that Andy uncovers Jacques Renault’s bird. “Gentlemen,” Dale says, “when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.” It’s all the evidence he needs to order a raid on Jacques’s home.
The man himself is long gone, but what they find should jam him up plenty: Leo Johnson’s bloody shirt, planted there by Bobby Briggs after he learns that Leo and Jacques, whom he knows as the bartender at the Roadhouse, were secretly in cahoots. It’s a shrewd move by the moody football captain, who slips out the window just in time to avoid the law.
Which brings me to this episode’s real selling point. Throughout, as befits a soap opera, love — good and bad — is in the air. Lucy is giving Andy the cold shoulder. “In the grand design, women were drawn from a different set of blueprints,” Cooper declares down in the firing range beneath the station (he’s a crack shot, while Andy can barely hold a gun), before alluding to a heartbreak in his own past.
Pete Martell asks his sister-in-law Josie to enter a mixed-doubles fishing competition with him. (Platonically, perhaps, but it’s hard to be sure.) Ben and Catherine are doing their seedy thing. Donna and James keep generating chaste heat with their sad, grief-laden kisses. James also meets Laura’s identical cousin Madeline, and it’s hard not to notice a stray spark or two flying.
Norma Jennings’s sleazy husband Hank, in prison for vehicular manslaughter, gets parole with her help and promises he’ll change, but we know better: He’s mixed up with Leo, with Ben Horne (to whom he recommended Leo for the Packard sawmill arson job), and, somehow, with Josie too. (His true love seems to be the white domino he sucks on.) Hawk, we learn, is dating a professor at Brandeis for whom he writes original poetry.
And then there’s Bobby and Shelly. Boy oh boy, is there ever Bobby and Shelly. Director Tim Hunter films the two of them making out in her unfinished house, Shelly straddling Bobby’s lap in her waitress uniform as they kiss and clutch at each other. When Bobby gets the idea to use Leo’s shirt to get rid of him, Shelly rewards him by opening her uniform to reveal a black lace teddy, against which she clutches a gun suggestively. And just like that, Bobby decides he has a few minutes to spare before he leaves after all.
I don’t blame him. Mädchen Amick is the most beautiful woman in a cast that includes Lara Flynn Boyle, Joan Chen, Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, and Peggy Lipton, which to paraphrase The Big Lebowski puts her in the running for the most beautiful woman worldwide. Dana Ashbrook is a megababe too, whose mercurial nature — beneath the tough-guy act he’s clearly an emotional and easily hurt kid — makes his obvious hunger for Shelly feel wild and insatiable.
But that’s just it: He’s complicated, and so is their whole situation. Bobby is a red-hot lover, but he really did care about Laura, and Shelly says she wished she could have comforted him at her funeral. Shelly, meanwhile, is perfectly capable of playing the seductive desperate housewife, all bullets and black lace, but she also spends her shift commiserating with Norma about their similarly shit taste in husbands.
So yes, they’re gorgeous, but it’s the stickiness of their situation, the sharp angles and rough edges, that makes Bobby and Shelly’s romance work so well. Passion is the means by which they process their pain. Isn’t that the purpose of soaps — like Invitation to Love, the show within the show that the characters keep on watching even as their real lives exceed it — in the first place?
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.
