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 23” aka “The Condemned Woman”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the 24th episode overall, is officially designated “Episode 23.”]
Original Airdate: February 16, 1991
Writer: Harley Peyton
Director: Lesli Linka Glatter
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, Michael Horse, Kenneth Welsh, Billy Zane, Miguel Ferrer, David Patrick Kelly, Chris Mulkey, Wendy Robie, David Warner, Dan O’Herlihy, Michael J. Anderson, Frank Silva, Ron Blair
There’s a terrible energy to Joan Chen’s performance as Josie Packard in this, her final episode of Twin Peaks. At least, it seems final; I suppose there’s always a way one’s immortal soul could be extracted from the wooden knob handle on a night table drawer and restored to the land of the living. This is Twin Peaks we’re talking about, after all — a woman’s dead husband talks to her through her log. Strange things have absolutely happened. Just not many of them.
But until that final, fatal confrontation, Josie spends this entire episode falling apart. She holds her hands to the sides of her head in a this-can’t-be-happening reminiscent of how Laura Harring’s character Rita seems to cling to her own head to keep her identity from flying apart in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive nine years later. She tells her arch-nemesis Catherine she fears she’s going mad, and she looks it. By the time she draws a gun not just on Dale Cooper, but on Harry Truman, the man she loves, you genuinely don’t know which of the three she’ll shoot — Dale, Harry, or herself.
It’s all finally too much for her, beginning with the revelation that her “late” husband Andrew Packard, whom she thought she’d killed, is still alive. She literally faints from the shock of it. It’s not just that she believed him dead. It’s that now that he’s not, the man who ordered the execution — the sinister Thomas Eckhardt — will blame Josie.
Catherine and Andrew know this full well. Andrew seems like kind of a fun guy, honestly, and he and Pete jackass around like the old buddies they are. (Pete makes him his breakfast in the shape of a dog’s face, sending them into hysterics.) But Andrew and his sister cruelly taunt Josie, telling her that her only way out is to go to Thomas and plead her case directly. Catherine, though, makes sure Josie has her hidden gun — the same one she used to shoot Agent Cooper at the end of Season 1 and kill Eckhardt’s henchman Jonathan in Seattle — when she makes the visit.
Andrew, meanwhile, infiltrates the Great Northern Hotel to confront Eckhardt himself, claiming (falsely) that Josie saved him from the assassination attempt, and (correctly) that she’s on her way to Thomas and should be considered dangerous. The Packard siblings clearly hope their two enemies will do them the courtesy of bumping each other off; whoever loses, they win.
The Packards also know that the law isn’t far behind Josie now. Agent Albert Rosenfield has put together a mountain of forensic evidence tying Josie to the shootings, and while he’s sympathetic to his pal Sheriff Truman’s plight as Josie’s lover — and Coop’s as Harry’s friend — he can’t hold off on an arrest forever. Cooper begs for the chance to convince Josie to turn herself in; Catherine overhears, and later tips off Coop about Josie and Thomas’s rendez-vous. Maybe she’s using him as a failsafe, to ensure that whoever survives the encounter gets immediately arrested. Maybe she’s just hoping to add more loaded guns to the showdown. Either way, Piper Laurie has never been more gleefully wicked or imperious in the role.
By the time Cooper, who’s sitting in his bed practicing fly fishing when he gets the call, makes it to Eckhardt’s room, a shot has been fired. The ruthless businessman stands and smiles, a bullet hole in his chest from Josie’s gun. He drops dead. A standoff ensues, with Harry himself, also tipped off to the meeting by Catherine, arrives with his own gun drawn. But in the end, no more shots are fired. Josie writhes as if having some kind of seizure and collapses, dead, like a character from a Poe story.
But Harry, Coop, and Josie are not the only beings in that room. Suddenly Harry and Josie fade away as the familiar harsh white spotlight that signals the supernatural washes over room. Then a denim-clad arm appears from behind the bed, and there he is: Bob, last “seen” forcing Leland Palmer to kill himself before escaping in the form of an owl.
“COOPER!” Bob yells, grinning and shaking and roaring. “WHAT HAPPENED TO JOSIE???”
He then vanishes himself…and the Man from Another Place appears instead, in his red suit, dancing his backwards dance.
And Josie’s face is seen within the knob on the drawer, first superimposed, then (via early CGI) seemingly a part of the wood itself, screaming and fighting for escape as the wood groans and creaks against her face.
Even if this move had its origin in Joan Chen’s desire to leave the show, a decision she’d come to regret, Josie is literally the first character we see in the first episode of this series. Killing her at all, let alone in this truly bizarre fashion, is going to send shockwaves not just through the audience, but through the dramatic balance of the show. Besides being the love interest of the character billed second only to Coop himself and a compelling screen presence in her own right, Josie was attached to many of the characters involved in Twin Peaks’s underworld: Catherine and Andrew Packard, Ben Horne, Hank Jennings. In this episode alone she brings out a desperate, agonized side of the normally placid Harry we’ve never seen before. That ingredient’s now gone.
But it does feel like some deck-clearing is going on in general this episode. Take the saga of Big Ed Hurley and Norma Jennings. Ed is dumbfounded when his amnesiac wife Nadine breaks up with him — apparently she had a night of passion with Bobby Briggs’s idiot friend Mike Nelson on a wrestling trip — and marches right over to the Double R, where he takes Norma in his arms and proposes on the spot. Shelly Johnson pulls a series of adorable faces as she skedaddles away so her boss can play tonsil hockey in peace (though not before sneaking as many looks over her shoulder as she can).
Norma then heads to the Sheriff’s Department holding cells and tells Hank she’s divorcing him, finally refusing to listen to any of his butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth “I can change” bullshit. (When he brings up going to therapy like a sad-eyed puppy dog I cracked up.) The moment Hank realizes the jig is up and that Norma won’t give him an alibi for the night he shot Leo Johnson, his demeanor totally changes. Confronting her about her affair with Ed, Hank sneers, “You’re his whore, Norma.”
“I’d rather be his whore than your wife,” she spits in response, eliciting cheers from the audience (me). For actor Peggy Lipton, who once helped define TV cool as part of The Mod Squad, it’s her coolest moment on the show to date.
Like Ed and Norma, James Hurley is moving on too. After wrapping things up with the cops in Evelyn’s murder case, he meets up with Donna Hayward for a sunlit picnic in the woods, filmed with real natural beauty by director Lesli Linka Glatter. The two love and miss each other, but James tells her to keep moving, and Donna understands. Donna tells her she can’t come with him, and James understands too. As she lowers him to the picnic blanket, kissing him, the scene tastefully fades away. One last time, for old time’s sake.
Is Audrey Horne getting in on the act and moving on from her Special Agent? She seems equal parts entranced and repulsed by newcomer Jack Wheeler (Billy Zane), a handsome young business magnate whose education was funded by her father Ben years ago. Apparently Ben saw something in the kid then, like Gus Fring saw something in Gale Boetticher in Breaking Bad years later. Having built an empire by turning around and selling failing businesses while adding environmentally friendly upgrades, Jack’s now the perfect person for Ben to consult to save his crumbling empire. For his part, Jack may be the only person in Twin Peaks who likes Ben without being related to him.
In short, the sleep-eyed, bedroom-voiced Jack looks like the Pokémon evolution of Bobby Briggs, he remembers Audrey doing a performance as the character Heidi in a dirndl when she was 10 as if it were yesterday, he adores her awful father, and he’s his successful passion project while she herself has often felt barely welcome at the table. You can see why Audrey would have mixed feelings about him…but some of those feelings are positive enough that she tells him “I’m only eighteen” as a non sequitur, that’s how strong the vibe is.
To Ben’s credit, meanwhile, he’s put the Civil War behind him. Looking fit as a fiddle in his Fila tracksuit, a stick of celery in his hand, he tells his braintrust of Audrey, Jerry, Jack, and “my executive assistant, Bob Briggs” (lol) about his plan to stop Catherine’s Ghostwood project. By driving up awareness of a local endangered species, the pine weasel, he hopes to put the kibosh on construction. Well, at least until he can regroup and figure out another way to seize the land himself, as Jerry, who has an unexplained band-aid on the bridge of his nose this episode, points out admiringly. Ben Horne, greenwashing pioneer!
He’s also planning a run for Senate. Honestly, we’ve done worse.
However, there are much more dangerous criminals in town than Ben, or anyone else we’ve mentioned so far. Windom Earle may be temporarily stalemated in his lethal chess match against Cooper by Pete Martell’s mastery of the game, but he’s not been idle. He tears a handwritten copy of the poem “Love’s Philosophy” in thirds and leaves one scrap apiece for Shelly, Audrey, and Donna, along with a note telling them to meet at the Roadhouse to “save the one you love” by attending “a gathering of angels.” The three young women assemble the puzzle, but are no closer to understanding what it’s all about.
Meanwhile, Windom Earle lurks just down the bar, disguised as a trucker, hiding in plain sight as he’s done all episode long. You can see how much he’s enjoying this, how self-satisfied he is at being the smartest one in the room. If he had a disguise he felt could fool Cooper, he’s the kind of person who’d probably try it, just for the thrill of seeing if he could get away with it. But it’s the arrows he has Leo Johnson making for him that have me the most concerned at the moment. Someone will die if this man ever plays Cupid.
Like most of the episodes in this critically disfavored stretch of the series — be careful which Twin Peaks fans you say the words “pine weasel” around — this feels, well, extremely Twin Peaks to me. It makes room for everything from Andrew Packard gleefully proclaiming “I’m aliiiiiiive” to Josie like he’s his own Dr. Frankenstein, to huge moments in the romances between the Hurley boys and their beloveds, to goddamn Bob and the Man from Another Place reappearing. It all fits.
The show reminds me of a well-recorded rock song in this way, where if you sit and single out any given instrument, you hear something almost totally new. Want to focus on how Mädchen Amick is the best-looking human being ever to be filmed for the small screen as she sits at the bar in the Roadhouse in a brown leather jacket smoking a cigarette? Want to marvel at Thomas Eckhardt’s garish robe as he breathes his last, ending legendary bad-guy actor David Warner’s brief stint on the show? Want to contemplate the cosmic injustice of a woman forced into moral dissolution by powerful men, punished by demons, and trapped in a wooden limbo forever? Twin Peaks makes all of it possible, even the things you wish weren’t.
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.
