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 0
"Pilot" aka "Northwest Passage"
Original Airdate: April 8, 1990
Writers: David Lynch and Mark Frost
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Sheryl Lee, 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, Russ Tamblyn, Eric Da Re, Harry Goaz, Gary Hershberger, Michael Horse, Grace Zabriskie, Mary Jo Deschanel, Troy Evans, Jessica Wallenfels, Robert Davenport, Wendy Robie, Phoebe Augustine, Catherine E. Coulson, Al Strobel, Frank Silva
I am the hole in things…the enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning.
—Grant Morrison
There are two of you, don't you see? One that kills and one that loves.
—Francis Ford Coppola & John Milius
At the center of it all, your eyes.
—David Bowie
I think about the desk. The empty desk, the one that belongs to Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). It's where her friends Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James Hurley (James Marshall) look when they begin to realize someone is in trouble, something bad is happening. By now, the police have arrived and spoken with the trio's visibly shaken teacher. In the school courtyard, a girl runs screaming, face in her hands. The teacher says the principal will be making an announcement; she doesn't say what about, but James and Donna know without being told. The empty desk says everything.
Their grief hijacks their bodies. James snaps a pencil in his hand without thinking. Donna opens her mouth and wails in sobbing agony. In this they are hardly alone. Over and over, characters react to the murder of this beloved and popular 17-year-old with abject devastation. Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz), one of the first on the scene, breaks down in the middle of taking photographs, and again after the discovery of the location where Laura was killed. Her high school principal (Troy Evans) can barely make it through his announcement before breaking down himself.
Her father, Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), is in the middle of putting on a brave face for his frightened wife, Sarah, when Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) arrives with the news. We watch Harry pull up through the window behind Leland as he makes his call, forced to watch a time bomb tick down to zero. Leland sobs miserably, but puts himself back together enough to travel to the morgue and confirm that the girl found wrapped in plastic and washed ashore by the old Packard Sawmill is indeed his "little girl."
His wife, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), fares worse. That morning she's all harried kindness, using endearing pet names as she calls for a daughter we already know isn't there. She warns Laura she won't tell her again that it's time to get a move on, then quietly chides herself, knowing she absolutely will. There's a tenderness there behind the cigarette smoke and workday bustle, and it makes the crater blasted in her psyche by hearing Leland mutter "Sheriff Truman" over the phone all the harder for both her and us to endure.
As composer Angelo Badalamenti's melancholy music slowly climbs down the scale, David Lynch's camera follows the Palmers' coiled black phone cord down, down, down to where Sarah has dropped the receiver, now dangling like a hanged man. She herself stands, howling — there's no other word for it — in her grief. When she grabs her own mane of curly hair with both hands as she screams, it looks like she's trying to pull her exploded brain back into her shattered skull.
Laura Palmer is at the center of it all. She's who Donna and Sarah picture when their mouths become gaping voids of wailing pain. Hers is the face frozen in the picture frame in the high school trophy cabinet, on the Palmers' mantle, on the videotape of her and Donna goofing around discovered as evidence. She's the body wrapped in plastic at the center of an increasingly complicated investigation, involving multiple other victims. She was the center of the lives of so many people who knew and loved her: Leland and Sarah, Donna and James, her classmates and educators. and Johnny Horne, the disabled boy she worked with after school, who now bangs his head over and over, waiting for a friend who'll never arrive.
Even her hotshot football-team bad-boy boyfriend, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrooks), feels her absence — even though he's been cheating on her with Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick), a young diner waitress and the wife of an abusive trucker, Leo (Eric Da Re). He and his meathead best friend, Mike (Gary Hershberger), channel grief into tantrums and rage — against the cops who question him for the murder, against Mike's girlfriend Donna for failing to back him up, and against James, who, he now knows, was seeing Laura behind his back.
Secret relationships are the chief export of the town of Twin Peaks, it seems, putting their lumber output to shame. Laura was cheating on Bobby with James, who is now initiating a secret relationship with Donna, unbeknownst to her asshole boyfriend, Mike. Bobby was cheating on Laura with Shelly, who's cheating on her dangerous husband Leo with Bobby.
Shelly's boss at the diner, the angelic Norma (Peggy Lipton), is two-timing her off-screen jailbird husband with James' stern-faced but genial gas station–owner uncle, Big Ed (Everett McGill). Ed is hiding this relationship from his one-eyed wife, Nadine (Wendy Robie), whose true love appears to be their house's new drapes.
Sheriff Truman is seeing Josie Packard (Joan Chen), the glamorous widow who inherited the all-important Packard Sawmill from her husband, Andrew, when he died in a boating accident, on the sly. Not so sly, however, as to avoid detection by Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie), Andrew's sister and Josie's bitter rival. Catherine herself appears to be having an affair with Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), the slick and ambitious owner of the luxurious Great Northern hotel, who wants to get his hands on Packard land. Even Laura's relationship with her eccentric psychiatrist, Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), was a secret from her parents.
At least Deputy Andy and Lucy (Kimmy Robertson), the slightly daft receptionist at the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department, seem to be an open and supportive item. Ditto Donna's father, Doc Hayward (Warren Frost), and his wheelchair-using wife, Eileen (Mary Jo Deschanel), who care about their daughters Donna and Harriet (Jessica Wallenfels), a budding poet who helps her older sister break curfew while coining the phrase "the full blossom of the evening." And, I suppose, Leland and Sarah have each other to lean on now.
Twin Peaks itself has Dale Cooper.
Writers and co-creators Mark Frost and David Lynch haul back and let loose an absolute haymaker of a character introduction when they bring FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper on board. For a couple of unbroken minutes he talks into a handheld tape recorder, addressing an unseen woman named Diane — seemingly an assistant at his FBI home office — about the details of his trip. As he preps to take on the case, he makes congenial small talk with Diane about the quality of the cherry pie at a diner he stopped at and waxes rhapsodic about the area's trees. "Entering the town of Twin Peaks," he says, crisply enunciating the name of the place. He's our guide in this world, our psychopomp, our Virgil.
The trees Coop loves are Douglas firs, he is later told by Sheriff Truman, who, unlike most small-town cops you see on television, actually welcomes a fed takeover of the case. Coop kindly but firmly says he's in charge, and Harry graciously accepts, and that's that. It says a lot about their working relationship, which already begins paying dividends before the first 24 hours after the murder are up.
Coop is on the scene for two reasons. First, the mystery killer's other victim, high schooler Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine), is found wandering across a bridge, suffering from shock and unable to recount what happened. In the process, she crosses the state line, automatically making it a federal case.
Ronette's father works at the mill for Josie, Catherine, and Catherine's nice-guy brother Pete (Jack Nance), the slow-spoken fisherman who discovered Laura's body on the beach. Over Catherine's wishes, Josie shuts down the mill in honor of the victims; we watch the blades slow and then stop, another absence created by Laura's. Josie will later cuddle with Harry and gaze at the spot where Laura's body was found, now barren and empty again. She’s gone away.
Second, nearly one year ago to the day, a young woman named Teresa Banks was murdered elsewhere in the state under similar circumstances. A clue left by the killer — a tiny typewritten letter R, inserted under Laura's fingernail — appears to connect the cases. In other words, there's a serial killer on the loose, and he (and it is a he; both girls were raped) may be your neighbor, your coworker, your father, your son, your best friend, your boyfriend.
It's a grim and paranoid message, which is why Coop must be the one to deliver it. Cooper is a cop's cop. He's a skillful interrogator of suspects and witnesses, as we see when he gets everything he wants out of Bobby and Donna despite their reluctance to speak. He's a keen investigator, noticing clues — like James's motorcycle reflected in Laura's eye in the videotape — that others miss, and knowing exactly how to stake out and catch their quarry.
But he's so much more than that. Dale Cooper is a mensch. I mean, he's a hell of a guy. He brings a wide-eyed enthusiasm to the world that belies his all-black, all-business Bureau suit. I attended an all-boys Catholic high school where the Marianist brothers who taught us dressed exactly the same as Coop does, and indeed there is something monastic about the simple severity of his style.
But once you get a sample of his personality, you realize loud clothes would make his presence laughable. There are a lot of things that are funny about Coop, but there's nothing laughable about him — nothing laughable about joy, friendship, camaraderie, curiosity, love of nature (Douglas firs! Snowshoe rabbits!), love of good food (that cherry pie! those donuts!), and simple living in companionable peace with one's fellow man. These are the values this smiling, square-jawed young knight errant brings with him when he arrives at Twin Peaks.
Yes, Coop is a man and an FBI agent, and so it's more complex than all that, but it remains the case regardless: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid," wrote Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon. "He is the hero, he is everything." That's Coop. His positive energy is exactly what the shocked community needs. It's as if the loss of Laura, apparently a pure but tortured soul, caused the town to reach out and pull someone equally good-hearted into its orbit, for purposes yet unknown.
After one day in town, Agent Cooper helps Sheriff Truman arrest James, a natural suspect, even though Coop thinks it's unlikely he's the killer, just as he'd ruled out Bobby earlier. Even so, James was secretly Laura's boyfriend, his name matches the initial 'J' found in Laura's diary for that night, he has no alibi, and — unbeknownst even to Coop — he has the other half of the heart necklace found at the crime scene. He winds up in a cell across from Bobby and Mike, who get arrested after initiating a barroom melee with James's biker pals at the nearby Roadhouse, the town's hottest night spot.
James and Donna, who seem to have fallen in love almost instantly through their shared love of Laura, bury the necklace in the dirt, though an unseen person digs it back up at the end of the episode. In doing so, they unwittingly echo the crime scene itself, a blood-soaked abandoned train car in which the cops find a pile of dirt, the other half of the necklace, and a note. It's just a nonsense phrase, it seems, left behind by a madman. But when you see the words FIRE WALK WITH ME written in blood, you remember them.
Through all this I haven't even mentioned one of the episode's standout characters and chief chaos agents, Audrey Horne (Sherilynn Fenn). A striking pale brunette in saddle shoes that she replaces with red high heels the moment she gets to school, she's the spoiled-brat daughter of Benjamin Horne, whose business deal with a troupe of comical Norwegian investors she ruins by describing the discovery of Laura's naked corpse. At one point she pokes a hole in a coffee cup and spills it all over the hotel concierge desk, just for fun.
And there's one last missing piece that needs pointing out. Look closely at the final sequence, when Sarah Palmer's restless, sedated sleep is crosscut with the mystery figure using a gloved hand to retrieve James's hidden heart necklace. She awakens, sitting bolt upright and screaming, a mirror mounted on the wall behind her. Now look in the mirror.
Who could that be?
But the chief chaos agents in this feature-length episode, the best series premiere in television history, are Mark Frost and David Lynch themselves. The world they create in these 94 minutes is singular and inimitable, not that that stopped many people from trying to imitate it over the years. Twin Peaks is a liminal place, a porous border between worlds.
Here, Lynch and Frost lovingly recreate the rhythm and melodrama of the primetime soap opera. Twin Peaks is a rich and gooey lava cake of sex, lies, and star-crossed love affairs to rival everything from Dallas and Dynasty to Gossip Girl and Grey's Anatomy to The White Lotus and The Hunting Wives.
At the same time, the show can't help but be a send-up of that vibe. Lynch and Frost's writing and Badalamenti's omnipresent score cranking the pathos to a level that would be campy if it weren't so obviously heartfelt. The two men's simultaneously goofy and wry senses of humor constantly erupt in unexpected places: the deer's head they find lying on the conference room table in the bank where they retrieve Laura's safe deposit box using a cocaine-dusted key, or the presence of anomalous figures like the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) or the One-Armed Man (Al Strobel). But the romance, the longing, the sadness all feel real! The show functions beautifully as the exact thing it was created, in part, to comment on.
But it's more that the soap format is a perfect fit for Lynch and Frost's preexisting preoccupations. "Weird crime in idyllic small town," after all, is how Lynch made his bones: Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks' immediate predecessor in Lynch's filmography, explored that topic and cemented his reputation as a cinematic visionary. Frost, meanwhile, was coming off a run as one of the chief creative forces of Hill Street Blues, a genre-redefining cop show with a flawless instrumental theme song.
In this light, "Who killed Laura Palmer?" is a vehicle for getting where both creators want to go anyway, and they plan to have as much fun joyriding around as possible. Their plan, in fact, was never to resolve the mystery, keeping the sudsy goings-on going on forever. "A sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go perpetually" is the oft-quoted Frost description of what they wanted to achieve. In the process, they could bring all their artistic enthusiasms and obsessions to the donut-covered table.
But "Who killed Laura Palmer?" is a question that drips with a pain that Lynch and Frost admirably refuse to clean up and wipe away. Whatever their original intent regarding the resolution of her murder, Laura Palmer is no MacGuffin, no glowing briefcase or unobtainium or Maltese Falcon. She is, or rather was, a real person. She was complicated, obviously, and led multiple secret lives, lives even Donna and James, her best friend, knew nothing about. She was likely an addict. She may have been trafficked. She was a child — Leland and Sarah Palmer's child. She was Laura Palmer.
Now she's gone. Through all the surreality and silliness, as suspect after suspect is introduced and dismissed, Lynch and Frost never lose sight of Laura. They never silence the cries of those who loved her, to the point where I found it impossible not to cry along with them all. They never take their eyes off that empty desk. They never let you forget what it means.
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