Diane, 1 pm, August 2nd. “As is the case here in Twin Peaks, even this bucolic hideaway is filled with secrets.” Agent Cooper says this into his recorder in the second of our two episodes today (much like I am saying this currently in my own recorder to send to you later, Diane), and it’s as clean of a summary of Twin Peaks as I could come up with. Early in the first episode, Nadine Hurley is asked why she’s interested in high school boy Mike when she’s going steady with (*cough* married to *cough*) Big Ed. Nadine hems and haws a bit, but she doesn’t deny what she’s doing; she simply shrugs it off as what must be done to make herself happy.
That’s an attitude a lot of this town shares, and the course of the show has largely been about the consequences of each person’s different forms of hedonism. With the Laura Palmer mystery put to bed, Twin Peaks has kept following its path forward; that path seems to lead to some good ol’ juicy drama.
Here’s five thoughts on this week’s pair of episodes, “Masked Ball” and “The Black Widow.” Spoiler below.
1. (Another) Milford Wedding
Both of the episode titles this week refer to a big event happening in Twin Peaks: the wedding of Dougie Milford and Lana Budding. The elder newspaperman and his young bride are set to tie the knot, and the town’s attitude towards the nuptials is of both celebration and resignation. This isn’t Dougie’s first wedding; as Sheriff Truman puts it, Dougie’s weddings are “a seasonal affair.”
Framing the episodes with the wedding (and its aftermath) does something interesting to its higher stakes plotlines. The event itself is comical, bringing out the small town antics that can make this show such a delight. But it also mirrors the show’s interweaving narratives. Dougie’s brother Dwayne objects to the wedding, claiming Lana is only after his money and would bring Dougie ruin. That is proven at least partially correct when, at the beginning of “A Black Widow,” Dougie dies from a heart attack after having sex with Lana.
Lana seems very distraught at her husband’s death, confiding in Hawk that all her romantic relationships have been doomed since her senior prom. But she gets over that sadness quickly enough – by the end of the episode she’s holding court at the Sheriff’s Department, drawing in all the men in the building with her sweet pea storytelling and her little black dress. There’s a statement in there about power, the way it gets undermined, and the things that draw us to our doom; but it’s masked by a sweetness and an earnestness that misdirects you from the truth. That’s Twin Peaks for you.
2. Ghosts from the Past
Josie Packard has returned to town, and it’s time for her to pay the piper. First on her list is Sheriff Truman, to whom she finally confesses the truth – or at least part of it. She tells Truman about her involvement with a man named Thomas Eckhardt, a dangerous man with lots of power and influence who also had it in for Andrew Packard. She conveniently leaves out the bit about her own role in Andrew’s death, but there’s enough elements of truth to her story that it draws into question how complicit Josie actually was (or still is).
Next up, unfortunately for Josie, is Catherine Martell, who seized the opportunity of her resurrection to consolidate her assets. She already won control of the mill from Ben Horne (more on him later), and now it’s her chance to knock her former rival down a peg. Catherine uses her leverage to force Josie into a new position as Catherine’s maid. Catherine wants more than revenge, though, which is confirmed when Andrew Packard steps into the room after Josie leaves, revealing that he is alive. The two of them are setting up some sort of scheme to draw Eckhard out, and Josie is the bait.
While the ghosts of Josie and Catherine’s pasts resurface, James runs away from his own, hoping to find himself some vague concept of freedom. He can’t define it, though, and that’s to be his undoing; his lack of purpose and disconnection from reality leads him straight into the arms of the first beautiful woman who comes to him with a sob story. James, having learned nothing about his past catastrophic white knight impulses, jumps to her aid.
Continued belowJames meets Evelyn Marsh, who convinces him to stay with her while he fixes her car.
She has a femme fatale air to her that’s more archetypal than the ones we’ve met before. Evelyn shows up dressed in red, immediately flirtatious and dangerously gorgeous; though she claims to want companionship, Twin Peaks has long established you shouldn’t take people at face value. When she reveals her husband is beating her, James seems poised to intervene, regardless of the consequences.
3. Ben Horne’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Week
Ben Horne is having a bad time. The trauma of the past few weeks has left him puttering around his office, watching old reels of his childhood. Hank Jennings pops in to spoil his fun (if you can call it that) and reveal another addition to Ben’s thousand cuts – he’s lost One Eyed Jacks to a “friendly” takeover from Jean Renault. Ben doesn’t take the news well, but when Hank leaves doesn’t start scheming – he makes shadow puppets in the light of his projector. The man is not well, and he’s losing his assets one by one on his way down to the bottom.
The next time we see him he’s put up a Confederate flag and started building a miniature version of the Battle of Gettysburg (a great sign of someone’s mental health). He’s visited by Bobby Briggs, the young man with a thinly considered blackmail plan. Bobby somehow strikes gold when it turns out that Ben does have some use for him: he enlists Bobby to tail Hank and take some photographs of whatever Hank is doing for Renault. Bobby, desperate for cash to support the fallout of his last get rich quick scheme, agrees.
4. Friends Old and New
Agent Cooper, meanwhile, is having a bit of trouble. The investigation into Cooper’s actions at One Eyed Jack’s is gaining steam, but Cooper is unperturbed. He tells the investigators that he’s got his eye on a bigger board game: “what we fear in the dark and what lies beyond the darkness.” To put it another way, Cooper, after his experience with the Palmers, is leveling up. His path may be getting complicated, but he’s more than game to follow it wherever it may lead, be that his firing and prosecution or his vindication and exoneration.
Cooper gets a bit of help – and a bit of danger – from some old allies. First up is DEA Agent Denise Bryson (David Duchovny), a friend of Cooper’s who is brought in to investigate the drug trafficking charges against him. But Cooper knew her by a different name; Bryson, it turns out, is trans, and has transitioned since the last time Cooper saw her. Introducing a trans character is a fascinating choice in a show that’s so concerned with duality and the different aspects of the self. The decision to have her be played by a man is typical for the time, and is deeply irritating in retrospect. That said, Duchovny plays her with an air of assuredness and goodness that feels more honest than many other male-actor-as-trans-woman performances, and feels ahead of its time for 1991. Bryson is received frostily by some of the less enlightened (*cough* transphobic *cough* geez, I should get some water) members of the town, but not by Cooper. Once he gets over his initial shock, he’s back to trusting Bryson to help him find the truth.
With an assist from Audrey Horne (who gives Cooper the photos Bobby took for her father) and a bit of luck in stumbling on the house where his framers have been shuffling their drugs, Cooper and Bryson manage to flip Ernie Niles, Hank Jennings’s new father-in-law and former cellmate who’s been brought in to help with distribution. The stage is set for a sting that might bring Cooper some justice and deal a blow to the bad guys lurking in the shadows of the woods.
Meanwhile, Cooper has been getting into a long distance battle of wits with his old partner, Windom Earle. Earle apparently went mad after their last assignment together went wrong, and now Earle has taken to taunting Cooper with chess moves. Cooper posts his response to Earle’s move in the paper, but Earle’s response to Cooper’s response comes in before Cooper’s move is even printed; Earle can predict how his former partner thinks. The show is setting up a new boogeyman lurking at the edges of the frame.
Continued below5. White/Black
For the last section of this write-up, we have to circle back to the beginning of “Masked Ball.” The episode opens on Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman speaking with Betty Briggs about Major Briggs, who had gone missing in the woods on his fishing trip with Agent Cooper. Betty looks very nonplussed by the disappearance of her husband. It’s partly a result of his past disappearances, but also an element of this town’s bizarre attitude towards the arcane. Sometimes an owl caws, lightning flashes, and someone goes missing. What can you do?
After she leaves, Cooper asks Hawk and Sheriff Truman about something Major Briggs mentioned in the woods just before his disappearance: the White Lodge. Both of them look concerned, and Hawk relates a bit of folklore from his people. He tells of a place where the spirits reside, a place of perfection called the White Lodge, and the dark shadow of it called the Black Lodge. Every spirit must pass through the Black Lodge on their way to perfection and meet their shadow self there. If you enter the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will annihilate your soul. It seems likely that something about Major Briggs’s work for the military has to do with the White and Black Lodges, and that those places have to do with the dark inhabiting spirits (BOB and MIKE) that Cooper and friends tangled with during the Palmer investigation. Later, Cooper and Truman learn that the message Briggs intercepted pertaining to Agent Cooper did not actually come from deep space – it came from somewhere nearby in the woods.
At the close of “The Black Widow,” Bobby Briggs comes home to find his mother upset, now worrying that this disappearance might be different from the others and that something terrible has come of her husband. As lightning crashes, Major Briggs reappears, soothing his family that he is alright. The fight with darkness seems to not be over, however, and though the supernatural horrors that Twin Peaks has contended with are taking a backseat for now, they’re lurking at the edge of the frame just like Windom Earle.
