(Note: This post has been edited as of Saturday, November 23, 2013, and now acts as the first of three posts dealing with the trio of Twin Peaks episodes about the end of the investigation into Laura Palmer’s murder, as well as the prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. This was a standalone titled simply “Twin Peaks, S2/E7, ‘Lonely Souls’” previously.)
A little over a year ago, I finished the first season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks over the course of a weekend on Netflix, and I recently began watching the second season with the intention of finishing it before I go to a midnight show of the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me this weekend. The show feels somewhat dated (it is so obviously a product of the early 1990s) and filled with melodramatic music and larger-than-life characters. At times it is a sincere soap opera; at other times, it is funny, self-aware and poking fun at the excesses and ridiculousness of the genre it resembles.
Twin Peaks aired for two seasons in 1990 to 1991, and though it was short-lived, it has achieved something of a cult status. Set in a fictitious Pacific Northwest town after which the show is named, Kyle MacLachlan plays eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper who arrives to investigate the murder of the popular, well-liked high school girl Laura Palmer due to suspicions of a serial killer at work. As he begins to uncover the mysteries surrounding the murder, he also discovers the town’s secrets, from shady businessmen, murder plots, prostitution rings and even malevolent supernatural forces at play.
As expected with Lynch’s works, the characters are quirky and have deep secrets, and the mood can be surreal, funny, mysterious, or disturbing. I wanted to write about an episode I watched last night, “Lonely Souls,” the seventh episode of the second season, because it was (or felt like) a turning point in the series and left me feeling exhausted and bewildered. I plan on writing about the subsequent episodes in which the case is solved before moving on to the prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
Episode 14, or “Lonely Souls” (S2/E7)
As expected with Lynch’s works, the characters are quirky and have deep secrets, and the mood can be surreal, funny, mysterious, or disturbing. I wanted to write about an episode I watched last night, “Lonely Souls,” the seventh episode of the second season, because it was (or felt like) a turning point in the series and left me feeling exhausted and bewildered.
The first season saw a number of plot threads come together in the season finale. Cooper and the local police had uncovered evidence in their investigations, and a suspect was in custody but hospitalized. A convoluted murder and arson plot to collect insurance money consisted of so many double-crossing and involved so many characters came to fruition, but not in the way some of the players expected. In a daring cliffhanger, the suspect in custody had been murdered; several characters’ fates were left hanging; and Cooper was shot by a mysterious assailant in his hotel room.
In the season 2 premiere, Cooper is visited by the apparition of a “giant,” who is really a very tall, lanky man that offers clues and riddles to help Cooper. Although initially unsure of the giant’s cryptic messages, by the time of “Lonely Souls,” he had come to believe that the visions of the giant were indeed there to help him in his investigations. I do not believe it was the first hint that something supernatural was afoot, but it was one of the big signs. I bring up the giant, because he reappears in the climax of this episode with a cryptic message, “It is happening again,” at the moment that Laura Palmer’s killer strikes once more.
Before getting to that, I just wanted to say a couple of things. First, I don’t know if the subtitles were from Netflix, or if they were carried over from another source, but when the Twin Peaks police find a suicide note that says, “J’ai une âme solitaire,” which Cooper then translates to “I have a lonely soul,” the subtitles read, “J’ai une homme solitaire.” Problem? The subtitle was saying, “I have a lonely man,” and with the gender wrong. “Une” is the feminine article in French for “a,” and “a man” in French would be “un homme.”
Second, season 2 hasn’t been holding my attention as much as the previous one. The previous season felt like it had more development and sense of urgency, whereas things have mostly remained the same for the first few episodes, with the exception of Audrey Horne’s (Sherilyn Fenn) amateur detective misadventures that landed her in trouble with the owner of a brothel in Canada she went undercover in to find out about Laura’s murder, prompting Dale and Truman to overstep their jurisdiction in an unofficial capacity in order to rescue her. But this episode was a bit of a major shakeup, so hopefully the show maintains the momentum (I am watching this show mostly spoiler-free, except for a major plot point in this episode and a few others, over twenty years after it has gone off the air).
In previous episodes, Laura’s friend Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and cousin Maddy (Sheryl Lee, who also plays Laura) had discovered Laura’s secret diary in the possession of Harold Smith, a shut-in whom Laura had befriended through delivering food to him as part of a community service project, and attempted to steal it. Though they failed, he felt betrayed and was found having committed suicide in this episode, and scraps of Laura’s diary were recovered for Cooper to analyze. Maybe I’m heartless, or he wasn’t that well written, or his “you’re just like all the rest” speech to Donna felt a bit too much like what Travis Bickle said in his outburst to Taxi Driver to Betsy after she rejected him, but I didn’t really care about this character. It wasn’t a very good subplot, I thought, so it was a good thing that came to an end in this episode and gave Cooper and Sheriff Truman evidence to act on.
Much of the humor in the past couple of episodes comes from Leo Johnson and Cooper’s superior from the FBI. While Cooper is always dictating something into a cassette recorder to a certain “Diane,” his superior Gordon has a hearing problem and forces others around him to always repeat themselves and shout. On the darker side, but still somewhat slapstick-like, Leo Johnson, who had been a part of the murder and arson plot from season 1 and then shot by another conspirator under instructions to eliminate him, remains in a vegetative state, while his wife Shelly and her lover Bobby, both of whom he had tried to kill in the previous season’s finale, throw an ironic “homecoming party” for him.
Then there’s the awkward humor that I just don’t really get. Among the townspeople, Norma runs a diner, and she and Ed had dated and are still in love with each other. She is married to an ex-con named Hank who is still engaged in criminal activities, and Ed is married to the eccentric Nadine whom he dated to rebound from his breakup with Norma. Nadine came out of a coma after a suicide attempt (from the end of season 1), and she has regressed back to thinking she is in high school while gaining superhuman strength. It’s quirky in that David Lynch kind of way, but the whole thing just felt kind of awkward and not very funny to me, and I can’t pinpoint why.
So there’s some effective humor, and there are some quirks that don’t quite work. Luckily the former outweighs the latter, and the episode itself is quite eventful and full of revelations. There’s kind of an awkward moment when a newly introduced character turns out to be an old character, and it’s awkward because it’s a white person in Asian makeup disguised as a Japanese businessman. The character is in disguise for a reason, and it’s not a case of a white actor playing an Asian character as a mockery, but it’s still kind of awkward. On the other hand, the reveal is somewhat funny in the way it seemingly pokes fun at ridiculous soap opera twists; some of the characters’ previous moments are deliberately over-the-top as to be a joke about American perceptions of Japan; and the reunion that this character has with another is so heartfelt that I am mostly okay with it.
After the incident with Harold Smith, Maddy reveals that she is planning on leaving Twin Peaks. Donna, James Hurley, and Laura had been good friends, and James and Laura were secretly in a relationship, because Laura was officially dating high school athlete Bobby, who was himself cheating on his girlfriend with Shelly, the battered, dissatisfied wife of the abusive, criminal Leo Johnson. So yeah. Anyway. When Maddy arrived, it was as if they had a trio back together and began to play amateur detective. While Donna and James had fallen for each other, eventually an attraction formed between James and Maddy, and that became awkward for all involved. It initially looked as if everything would work out for this trio, and at the climax of the episode, James and Donna were seen reconciling and chatting at a bar just as the Lady with the log walks in Cooper with the sheriff.
Prior to that, though, Audrey’s father Ben Horne was taken into custody in connection with the murder of Laura Palmer. Parts Laura Palmer’s secret diary found at Harold’s was pieced together. Clues have led to Ben Horne’s arrest in this episode, on suspicions of having murdered Laura Palmer, because she had been working at the brothel that he owned and threatened to expose him in her diaries. But as this is a David Lynch mystery, that would be too easy of a solution, and like previous leads, this doesn’t directly take us to the real murderer, but it does reveal more of the corruption and the dark side lurking underneath the seemingly idyllic town.
The main thing about this episode is that we finally find out who really killed Laura Palmer. Various characters have had visions of a long-haired man with a frenzied look. The name Bob has come up a lot. It has been hinted at in the past, but now, we finally see that Bob has taken possession of someone in the town. I know the show has been out for over 20 years now, but I won’t reveal such a major plot point here. I will say that I’ve been spoiled long ago over the internet about who it was and who is killed in this episode, but the last 10 minutes or so of this episode gave me a lot of anxiety. The image of someone’s reflection change suddenly in the mirror was chilling and creepy, and as he chases his would-be victim around the house, the lighting, music, slow motion, distorted sounds all come together, and the end result was surreal, nightmarish, and genuinely terrifying. After the deed was done, we return to the bar. The vision of the giant disappears, and the musicians play on. The shocking brutality of what we have just witnessed, the death of a character we have gotten to know, the sad ballad, and the sight of an old man walking up to Cooper to say, “I’m so sorry,” of Donna breaking down and crying, and of Bobby with a concerned look, as if deep down they knew something terrible had happened again, gave the episode a heartbreaking conclusion.