Diane, 1 pm, July 12. I get the feeling this mystery, as much as this show is concerned with its mystery, is coming to its close. This pair of episodes closes off two of the season’s subplots with a moral quandary that implicates our faves and throws into question what we root for in characters. Twin Peaks always a show packed with contradictions, is pruning off its subplots while simultaneously zooming out to establish the boundaries of a cosmic struggle. Very normal for a murder-mystery series, right?
Here’s five thoughts on episodes 6 and 7 of season two, “The Orchid’s Curse” and “Demons.” Spoilers below.
1. A Day in Court
Two cases go before the court in “The Orchid’s Curse.” Leland Palmer is up first, for his bail hearing for his murder of Jacques Renault, a former suspect in his daughter’s killing. Although he openly admitted to the police that he committed the murder, and he waived his right to an attorney, he pleads not guilty to the crime and is released on his own recognizance without bail. The prosecutor points out that Leland has been witnessed behaving extremely erratically during the time leading up to the killing and in the aftermath, but that doesn’t sway the judge.
Judge Sternwood is just, fair, and too close to things. In my last review, I noted that he feels similar to Cooper, and the pair carry that same flaw, holding the town in such high esteem that he seems to be missing the details of the case in front of him. As Sternwood tells Cooper to pay attention to darkness lurking in the trees, both miss the darkness in the citizens. That bubble must pop eventually, and with this episode closing off other narrative avenues, it seems like it might happen sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile, a borderline comatose Leo Johnson is ruled unfit to stand trial. It’s a fair judgment, even if it’s brought on in part by Leo’s abused wife Shelly withholding her testimony to profit off the insurance payments. The whole scheme is hairbrained and doomed to fail, especially as Leo seems to be slowly regaining some of his motor skills.
2. All Girls Are Only After One Thing (A Diary)
There’s a sweetness to Donna and Harold’s interactions that are underlaid with a simmering malice that’s difficult to unpack – though saying that Twin Peaks is difficult to unpack is maybe understating things. In a traditional narrative, Harold would be a villain, at least in the way the interactions are framed, but in all their scenes Donna is the aggressor. Despite sometimes sinister music and lighting, Harold seems to genuinely be attempting to connect while Donna is only after Laura’s still unread secret diary. She plays with him like a cat playing with a toy, or a little girl putting on a show in her living room for her parents.
Donna has shifted roles this season, and picking up some of Laura’s worst traits along the way. She tells Harold a story about what she says is the first time she ever fell in love, when she met up with these two men with Laura and went skinny dipping. She delivers the story mostly in shadow, with darkness overtaking her face. It’s likely meant by Donna to tempt Harold sexually, but it exposes her own limitations and naivety. The story clearly makes her sad. She can’t be the kind of person that Laura is, despite her best efforts, because she feels the consequences of her actions in a way that Laura could not.
Donna enlists Maddy to help her steal the diary out from under Harold’s nose, but that game predictably explodes. He mutilates his own face, distraught over the betrayal. He manages to get Laura’s diary back from the pair before they’re rescued by James, but the act shakes Donna enough to help her come to her senses.
3. Hit the Road, Jacks
While Donna and Maddy’s raid goes haywire, Cooper and Truman’s goes off relatively smoothly with only a couple of deaths. Cooper has mostly played his part in the series with a relentless devotion to morality, but his off-the-books raid narratively puts him in more of a devil-may-care, rebel without a cause role. It doesn’t sit cleanly on the agent – just like Donna, he feels like someone playing a role he feels like he’s meant to play, rather than someone playing the game for a completely altruistic purpose.
Continued belowCooper agrees to deliver Audrey’s ransom payment, then quickly concludes that the ransom drop was meant to end in his own death. He and Sheriff Truman stage a raid of One Eyed Jacks that results in Audrey’s rescue, but Jean Renault uses the opportunity to murder the brothel’s madame, Blackie, and escape into the night.
That’s a wrap on the plot at One Eyed Jacks, with Audrey returned home and most of its principal players in hiding or dead. The detour through that hive of scum and villainy didn’t provide much that was of use in the investigation of Laura’s murder, but it did expose some of the evil that menaced the town. Time will tell if that exposure will help solve the problem, or if it will only lead to more evil surfacing over time.
4. Playing Games
“After Laura died, everything just went by kind of fast,” James says to comfort Donna after he saves her and Maddy from Harold’s house. “It’s hard to know exactly what to believe in.”
It’s a revealing statement, but not just about the actions of the three kids inserting themselves into a murder investigation. Donna, James, and Maddy have been playing at being detectives, but there’s a reasonable question of whether Cooper is doing the same thing. Between his undercover operation at Jacks and his rescue of Audrey, his own actions have led directly to several observable harms coming down upon the people of the town. He’s been behaving more like a cowboy than an officer of the law, and the game he’s playing isn’t all that different from the kids. Sure, he has more experience, but it’s hard to argue that he’s not also at least a little in over his head.
Yet, both Cooper’s actions and the actions of the kids have led to inarguable good outcomes, with Audrey’s rescue and the discovery of Laura’s diary. Later, Maddy sums things up nicely: “It wasn’t one thing or the other.” The core of Twin Peaks often lies in that contradiction, the nebulous space between two poles. It thrives on doubt and revels in the kind of discomfort that’s difficult to name.
Another, very different game unfolds in these two episodes at The Great Northern as Ben Horne and Josie Packard grapple for positioning in the aftermath of their schemes to sell the Great Northern. Ben a very tall, dangerous child wearing a man suit, the game is the only object – even as Josie outplays him in their blackmail sparring match, he’s clearly enjoying himself, borderline celebrating having a frenemy who can keep up with him. Josie, for her part, is shifting further away from her femme fatale classification, as the sincerity in her feelings towards certain characters becomes more and more transparent. Whatever game she’s playing isn’t over yet, even though she says she’s leaving town.
5. There is No Need For Medicine
Agent Gordon Cole (played by creator David Lynch) arrives to town, bringing warnings and new evidence that cracks open another aspect of the case. He warns Cooper that he fears the agent is veering too close to a previous incident in Pittsburgh that also ended with him injured. Earlier, as Cooper starts to doubt whether his commitment to the good fight is coming from the right place, he tells Sheriff Truman that there was another time his actions while attempting to do the right thing ended in the suffering of someone he cared about. Whether that incident is the Pittsburgh incident is left unconfirmed, but heavily suggested.
With Cole in attendance, Hawk and Sheriff Truman manage to wrangle in the one-armed man, who begs for his medication before succumbing to the influence of the “inhabiting spirit” MIKE. Just like the other spirits we’ve met so far, MIKE speaks mostly in obtuse riddles, but he manages to communicate a few specific, important details. He tells the men that he has made it his duty to stop BOB, the spirit responsible for Laura’s death. Like MIKE, BOB is a “parasite” that requires a human host, but he feeds on fear. MIKE tells them that the face of BOB that has been sketched is his “true” face, but few can see it: “The gifted… and the damned.” So far, it has seemingly only been seen in the Palmer house and by Agent Cooper in his dream.
Reading between the lines, MIKE’s prophecy confirms that BOB has a host with a different face – and likely a face we’ve already seen. He narrows down the suspect list even further, suggesting that BOB is nearby… at the Great Northern Hotel. A few of our regulars are seen at the hotel in the previous scene: Ben Horne, the oddball newcomer Mr. Tojamura, and the most likely suspect (in this writer’s opinion) Leland Palmer, who leads into the end of the episode with a rousing – and fitting – rendition of “Getting to Know You.”
