Twin Peaks: Watch With Me (Part 5)
The last installment of my Twin Peaks series: the Season 1 finale.
For the final installment of my Twin Peaks: Watch With Me series, I’m going to share my thoughts on the final episode as well as discuss some themes I noticed that I never felt the opportunity to share until the end of the season.
At this time I’m not planning to make a dedicated series about season 2, the movie or the follow-up third season from 2017 (all of which I have somehow watched already). I’ll write some thoughts on it eventually— like in the notes of a newsletter or my Twitter page— but I only wanted to take an in-depth, microscopic look of the first season. After all, it’s the one that was a 12-time Emmy nominee and widely regarded as one of television’s greatest single seasons.
Episode 8 - “Episode 7”, or “The Last Evening”
Holy cow. What a feeling it was to be a passenger on this intense ride of a final episode. An interesting note here is that the Season 1 finale (or, if you’re following it from the perspective of seasons one and two being one long season, the part one finale) was the only episode of the series directed solely by Mark Frost. I mentioned the symbiotic relationship between Lynch and Frost early on in my Twin Peaks series, but I’ll say it again: I think Lynch is responsible for the show’s atmospheric quirkiness, while Frost binds it together by its seams via sequential storytelling and a structured plot. Much like in his movies— and the show going forward at times—when Lynch is in charge, certain threads of the show drift into spiritual tangents. It makes sense that this episode was driven by Frost, as it was a straightforward episode template that brought every major subplot to a head. That’s not to say it isn’t classic Twin Peaks—it is—but there’s a fast-paced, direct element to the finale that shows me it’s not a David Lynch brainchild.
Let’s recap quickly. James Hurley and Donna Hayward, still playing the Rogue Good Guys™, are feeling guilty after their plot to lure Dr. Jacoby into their net ends with the doctor brutally assaulted at the hands of an unknown masked man. Agent Dale Cooper arrests Jacques Renault— with help from the pistol of a newly brave Officer Andy— under suspicion of murder after going undercover at One Eyed Jack’s Casino and getting the French-Canadian oaf to admit he was with Laura and Ronette Pulaski on the night of the attack… only for Renault to get smothered and killed in the hospital by Leland Palmer, who is now fully unhinged after his trip to the police station ends with the newfound knowledge that Renault was the killer. We learn just before his untimely end that Renault was not actually the killer, as he admitted passing out drunk on that fateful night before waking up to Leo Johnson, Ronette and Laura gone.
While this is happening, Leo Johnson gets tapped by Ben Horne to burn down the Packard Sawmill. He just has one detour to make before heading to the mill: his home, to assault his wife Shelley in retribution for her murder attempt, before taking her to the mill with him and tying her up inside the building attached to a timed explosive device. Hank Jennings calls Catherine Martell to lure her to the mill under false pretenses to fulfill Josie Packard’s wish. She wants Catherine to die in the fire. We learn in this episode that Josie is more diabolical than we thought— Hank Jennings is apparently her fall guy, taking money to serve 18 months in prison for Andrew Packard’s murder in addition to making the call that should end Catherine’s life. Except… does it? Catherine arrives to the mill to find Shelley tied up and screaming. The device detonates and the fire begins to rapidly engulf the mill while Catherine hesitantly unties Shelley. The last shot of the season that we see of Shelley and Catherine consists of the duo trying to escape the mill. Pete Martell, who is the true definition of a ride-or-die husband, runs into the mill to try and save the girls. Despite her disposition towards him, Pete is loyal to Catherine. In Mark Frost’s 2016 oral history book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Pete was heard to divulge his formula for a successful marriage: “As long as whatever both halves of a couple give to each other adds up to 100 percent? Don’t really matter how they divvy it up.”
The episode ends before we find out what happens. Leo, fresh off his rendezvous to the sawmill, heads home to kill Bobby Briggs, the final step of his endeavor to commit retributive justice. Before he can take the axe to Bobby’s cranium, he gets shot in the chest through the window by Hank Jennings. There’s no clear explanation to this occurrence, except the idea that Hank was likely contracted by Josie to ensure as little details as possible about the arson become public.
That’s pretty much it. Oh, except the last scene.
Agent Cooper arrives back at the Great Northern Hotel after a long day to find a note that Audrey Horne had slipped him before working her first shift at One Eyed Jack’s, a job she earned courtesy of an impromptu knotting of a cherry stem in her entry interview. We don’t know what the note says, though, because before Cooper gets to open it, the phone rings. It’s Andy, frantically relaying the news that Leo Johnson has been shot. But Cooper doesn’t hear it; before he can physically pick up the phone, there’s a knock at the door. He opens it without looking through the peephole, and another unidentified person shoots him three times in the chest. Is it the masked man? We don’t know. In any case, Cooper hits the floor, and the season’s over. I can’t imagine how it felt watching this live in 1990.
Other Notes on the Finale
The Season 1 closer saw the crux of all the show’s major plots and subplots but didn’t close any of them out either. Leo, Catherine, Shelley and Cooper might all be dead. We don’t even know. There’s also a chance that none of them are dead. The fallout to begin Season 2 will be tremendous.
The biggest question in the show is “Who killed Laura Palmer?”, a mystery whose answer is somehow further away by the episode’s conclusion. For a few episodes now, it’s felt like Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault were responsible for Laura’s death. Now, they’ve both been shot and it’s becoming increasingly clear that while they might be bad apples, they didn’t kill Laura. There’s a high chance of the killer being a someone we’re already quite familiar with, but who?
Based on the show’s arc thus far, I’m starting to realize that none of these answers are essential to getting the most out of Twin Peaks. The phantasmagoria of life’s journeys can be more fruitful than the destinations themselves. As a wandering Mennonite roaming in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian foretold, “There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
For the first time in the show’s run, we see Audrey out of her depth. Up until the season finale, Sherilyn Fenn’s character commanded the room in every scene she was in, even the interview for One Eyed Jack’s. But now, she’s being forced into situations she wasn’t expecting; it’s becoming clear that she viewed the note she left for Agent Cooper as her ticket out of the position she got herself in, and now that he’s definitely not going to see it any time soon, she has to ride the wave.
Speaking of Audrey wading in deeper waters, it feels like the penultimate scene is what the chaos has been leading up to: the owner of One Eyed Jack’s wants to be the first to “see” her at the new job. As viewers, we know for a fact that her father, Ben Horne, is the owner, but to be honest, Audrey is already pretty sure of that herself. The power of suggestive cinema is at work here when Ben enters the room, dancing with his eyes closed. We don’t actually see him open his eyes to behold his daughter dipping her toes in a prostitution ring of his own making, but we can imagine it. It’s almost more terrifying than the idea of what will happen when he inevitably opens his eyes— which we won’t see until the next episode, at least. This begs the question, would Ben do it? We know Ben is a depraved individual, but likely not irredeemable enough to have sex with his own daughter. I mean… who would do that? Who would be depraved enough to have sex with their own daughter, especially while she’s high-school aged and struggling with her identity? Hmmm……….
Side note: We need to talk about one of my favorite David Lynch moments, which takes place in this scene. While Audrey is nervously awaiting Ben’s entrance, she’s having her dress altered by a hunchback seamstress. What the hell is a biblically ugly, renaissance-era seamstress doing in a steamy brothel-slash-casino? So jarring.
Nadine Jennings’ most romantic, moving and beautiful moment in the show arrives when she attempts suicide. I don’t believe in romanticizing suicide, but there’s something poetic about her demise being so much more Shakespearean than her everyday life that drives the tragedy of her character home. She’s no longer obsessing over greased drape runners, shrieking at big Ed or lamenting her inability to get a patent. She’s cross-legged and cathartic. It’s somber. It’s almost predetermined. And it’s definitely not going to kill her.
Themes in Twin Peaks
I couldn’t find a place for this in the context of the episode recaps and thoughts, but I really wanted to use the end of Season 1 to touch on some tropes— both evident and hidden— from Twin Peaks. This is mostly because David Lynch has been coy about the meaning of these recurring motifs. Once, when he was asked about why he included the moment when Pete Martell accidentally finds a fish in the coffee machine’s percolator, he mentioned a real-life experience of finding lava soap in a percolator and wouldn’t elaborate any further. There’s not much to work with in this department, so here’s my best shot.
Food is a massive plot driver in the show. Right off the bat, Cooper mentions the tuna sandwich and coffee he ate while driving into town for the first time. Upon meeting Pete and Josie, he even mentions that he takes his coffee “black as midnight on a moonless night”, foreshadowing the vague darkness that holds the whole town hostage. Agent Cooper also loves after-dinner sweets— just before learning about the aforementioned all-consuming darkness, he even celebrates the pie selection at the RR Diner (named after railroads, and also the location in the show where most characters cross paths): “This must be where pies go when they die.” It’s an interesting dichotomy between the wholesome joy of a good meal and the show using its inherent innocence as a tool to predict tragedy ahead. Even the corresponding colors of the food— like the dark coffee— seem to mean something. The cherry pie is a vibrant red, the same shade as the curtains in Cooper’s dreams. Or Josie Packard’s lipstick. Or the blood spurting from Waldo the myna. This is no accident.
Maybe the best theme in the show’s first season is the Log Lady. The Log Lady, who is named Margaret, acts certifiably insane. Community outsiders treat her as such, despite the townspeople’s lack of interest or shock in her cryptic parables. Even Cooper, who seems ready to lend an ear to anyone who will try and give him information, is hesitant to listen to her ramblings without Sheriff Truman’s coercion. Throughout the show, though, she drifts from the craziest person in town, to maybe the most sane and grounded. She sees and synthesizes clearly the spiritual darkness emanating from the woods better than anyone else, since, according to the backstory in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, she lived in town since childhood: “It would not surprise me to learn that [the Log Lady] got lost in the woods overnight as an impressionable kid and later developed an entire menu of debilitating mental or emotional symptoms related to logs.”
The Log Lady is almost entirely a vehicle for the show’s spiritual motifs. She speaks unimpeachable yet supernatural truths through her log that she always keeps snugly curled to her chest, but it’s always in fragmented vignettes regarding elemental entities— or animals. Generally, it takes time for the detectives to unravel what the Log Lady means, but it always circles back to pertinent details of their investigations. Spirituality through elements and animals are two of the show’s main threads, and she harnesses knowledge of both in spades. She literally speaks through a log. It’s canon that her husband was a lumberman killed in a fire, which explains both her further obsession with wood and her fear of fire (“[My husband] met the devil. The devil took the form of fire.”) She’s in tune with the animals— her first advice she gives to the investigators about her knowledge of the Laura Palmer murder is, “We don’t know what will happen or when, but there are owls in the Roadhouse.”
Elemental themes are not unique to the Log Lady. Fire, wood and water are all characters in the show. Fire rears its ugly head in dreams, the murderer’s calling card (“Fire, walk with me!”) and even in the last episode with the sawmill arson. Water backdrops the entire show, as well. Twin Peaks takes place in a waterfall-laden, rainy town in the rural Washington backcountry. And, of course, wood. Cooper was itching a wood tick when he was shot. The development between Ben Horne and the Icelandic investors is called Ghostwood. Plus, beyond the Log Lady’s log, all of the evil in the show takes place in the woods.
The elemental leads right into the spiritual. The importance of these basic natural elements hearkens back to the idea that life falls before a thread of predetermined fate, and the only way this path can be altered is divine intervention. The dreams that Agent Cooper has— and subsequently follows— are abstract, but they describe things that have happened or will happen. The belief that life will work itself out plays into the psyche of Cooper’s character each time he blindly trusts his subconscious. The predetermination of life and death also falls in line with the “show within the show”, Invitation to Love. It’s always playing on television sets throughout Twin Peaks, and it’s a soap opera about love and betrayal giving way to death. If there’s a scene with a television set powered on, Invitation to Love will be playing. It almost exactly mirrors the Twin Peaks storyline.
On a deeper and slightly more theoretical level, there’s been a lot of discourse around the social commentary surrounding this show, and whether it exists at all. While I think David Lynch would hate these conversations, I’ll throw in my two cents. I jokingly called the show “copaganda” to a friend after seeing an article claiming it was too pro-police; that’s a ridiculous take, especially when you contextualize the era in which the show aired. More so than an institution’s power struggle over its citizens, this show, if anything, speaks to the plight of the late 20th century: ruralism vs. industrialism. Take away the cop badges from the Twin Peaks police department, and they’re a small-town force of good that just want to rid their home of a lingering wickedness. The department is the embodiment of a true man (Truman), if you will. It’s the only altruistic entity in the show when you compare it to both the bureaucracy of the FBI and the evil actions of Ben Horne, Catherine Martell and Josie Packard, which were brought on exclusively by capitalistic greed. You could make an argument that when sawmills, housing developments, large hotels and department stores drew the Packard, Martell and Horne families into Twin Peaks, they brought the darkness with them. I’m sure David Lynch would disagree with me about all of this.
What a ride.