Twin Peaks Decaps — Episode 2.02 — “Coma”

It’s…

I’m old enough that I saw A Fish Called Wanda* in a movie theater. Twice, technically, but I don’t count the first time because I arrived late and the only seat I could find was at the furthest left end of the very front row.

This taught me that you should never watch a movie in a large highly-irregular parallelogram format. It might nauseate you.

(For that matter, don’t watch a long program — for example, Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon — lying on the couch with your head at a 90° angle because the program was meant to be watched on a television turned on its side and you want to watch it “properly” like an earnest young art dude but your old television’s picture tube did weird things when you tried to rotate it. It might nauseate you.)

So when Fierce Creatures was announced I was excited even though the title didn’t seem very good. And I only watched it once, and I barely remember it. I probably enjoyed it, but I obviously didn’t enjoy it a lot. Doesn’t matter, everyone involved is great and if they got together and made a new movie next year I would go to a frickin’ theater for the first time in eight years and pay money to see it.

Point being, even when you’re dealing with an artist of high caliber with a solid history of quality work, sometimes you’re just not gonna love it.

David Lynch directed this episode. And the episode is okay, it’s fine.

A beginning is a delicate time, sure, and the beginning of a season of a television show is no exception. But just after the beginning you have to start building some momentum and some drama into your story, but you can’t have anything too significant happen yet, because you’ve just started and there’s still twenty more episodes to go after this one. So maybe more delicate?

Even if you’ve got a David Lynch and a Mark Frost and a Harley Peyton kicking around the office it doesn’t mean you’re immunized against the fundamental principles of storytelling. So this means you’ve got to spend some time getting your various elements nudged off into their initial trajectories.

Nobody’s getting shot today.

And that’s fine! It just means lighter structural walls have to hold up heavier narrative ceilings.

I’m an extremely talented writer.

A LITTLE HOUSEKEEPING

I’ve been picking on the credits a lot. So now, suddenly,

You can tell by Albert’s face that he just realized I’m going to talk about the credits again

the credits are great!

Do you think a name like GREGG FIENBERG is gonna line itself up? That GG alone is a major gap in the armor and if you’re on the lookout for telltale clues that a typography job was done half-assedly that’s where you’re gonna start.

But GREGG FIENBERG looks great and so does everybody and everything else, and I don’t know what happened but I’m just going to roll with it for now, and probably next episode they’ll stick an upside-down S in there just to fuck with me. Rest assured I will keep you up to date. Oh, I will.

So yes, Cooper and Albert are breaking fast together and it’s a charming scene. They talk about the case

I had to choose, do I fit in all of Cooper’s hand, or most of his inexplicably gigantic hair, and I made my choice

and Cooper talks about his dream

Albert, on the other hand (!), had relatively innocuous hair that day, so this’ll teach him

and Albert expresses a healthy skepticism about all that non-forensic jank and they bond a bit in a way you want your snarky non-boyfriend alternate sidekick to be, the guy you want to spend an hour or two with when you’re tired of being the most offputting person in the room.

I didn’t talk as much as I’d have liked about last episode’s methodical manipulation of Albert’s constituent parts to bring him into the core group in a palatable way without destroying what’s most interesting about the dynamic he adds. But if you watched Sherlock smartass his way through 7.99 episodes of Sherlock and then be suddenly (if ironically) humanized in the following 0.01 — and sincerely, not as a duplicitous ruse to jerk around the viewer — by walking away from the wedding party after being invisibly reminded by the joyous room full of people that he is not one of them, then you’ve benefitted from the same kind of narrative machinery that Albert puts through its paces over the next in-show week.

Now, I don’t know — and the information is probably out there somewhere but I haven’t encountered it — if Lynch and Frost were still planning at this stage in the production to not reveal the killer soon or ever and simply shift focus around to other stories (and if therefore the seed planted now for Cooper was intended to organically eclipse the Laura Palmer investigation as it receded), or if they had already been handed the edict to solve the murder (and they were looking ahead to fill the vacuum anyone could foresee approaching after that), but this is where Albert is given the dramatic privilege of the first mention of Windom Earle, whose reputation is established in this brief conversational segment as supremely menacing and mysterious, and whose name is established as the only known incantatory magic that can pause Dale Cooper when he’s eating.

And speaking of menacing…

Across the room an operative of an unknown power observes Agent Cooper, which is actually odd since Cooper is at best tangentially related to the operative’s purpose, and certainly not to the extent where surveilling him would seem like a good use of the operative’s skulking time and talents.

But for now that’s of little matter, since the operative immediately finds a story in the newspaper which is so compelling that not only does he immediately give it his undivided attention, but he even slightly furrows his operative brow in a manner too subtle to have been subterfuge.

And it looks like the classifieds so it’s probably not even a story, maybe just an insane deal on a stylish car, or, since this is the Pacific Northwest, a rugged station wagon.

“For what the equivalent of this V6 Celebrity wagon would cost me in Hong Kong,” he is without doubt thinking, “I could buy this here and have it shipped back and basically not pay for gas for a year. Plus the alternate-side drive would give me an uncanny air of intrigue.”**

Then he’d retire from the high-stress racket of being a shady operative and start a small business, using his imported Chevy Celebrity to deliver and install professional-quality audio-visual equipment for home-use enthusiasts, like Willem Dafoe’s character in the movie about Bob Crane. A peaceful life.

You know what’s also a peaceful life? American federal politics in 2017!

Just kidding, there’s a lot of talk on social media this week about Meals On Wheels, Corden-dot-gif.

Laura Palmer even became a twitter meme on the topic, though if you could ask her I’d imagine she’d rather be alive instead. [audience laughter, maybe a bass fill or something, I don’t know what they do on that show, I don’t really watch a lot of television]

Anyway, all joking aside, if this is what the job is like,

I say shut it down,

for the volunteers’ own safety and sanity.

But the good news, brought to you by the vegetable Creamed Corn and the number 2, is that there’s a “Mr Smith”

who does not leave his house

and who was Laura’s friend, and Donna just delivered her first and last meal to an old person because from here on out she’s ridin’ the Harold train.

Aside from the physical impossibility of Mini-Lynch’s magic trick and how the entire Tremond sequence reinforces the idea that Donna is paralleling Cooper’s investigation into the mysterious interdimensional aspects of the case while Audrey pursues the more down-to-earth line — as rewards for their service, Donna will have dinner and wine and romantic intrigue, while Audrey will be tied up and injected with heroin — it’s interesting to me that Mrs Tremond says to Donna, whose question about knowing Laura sounded like small talk more than an interrogation yet somehow elicited the most suspicious “no” in cinematic history, and who is now leaving quickly because the vibe in that house is just hitting too many simultaneous layers of weird, you might ask Mr Smith next door, he was Laura’s friend.

That’s an odd thing to say to someone who hasn’t explicitly told you that she’s investigating Laura Palmer’s death unless you already somehow know that anyway, wouldn’t you agree?

ANYWAY, TIME TO SAMPLE SOME STOOL HUMOR

There are tense and significant moments emerging at the hospital, where Cooper and Truman are about to receive a clue that will actually forward the case somewhat. I mean, not exactly a clue, but some evidence. And it’s actually testimony rather than evidence-evidence. And it’s less testimony and more extreme involuntary reaction.

Again, comedy right before the horror, which is why this scene was Nirvana’s #1 songwriting influence; Pixies were #2

Ronette is ready now to talk, but it’s maybe less talking than it is flailing with noises and the ability to remotely disrupt nearby electrical systems via emotional force.

So it’s police sketch time, and honestly Andy is not bad at this part of his job.

Great! It’s Leo, or at least it’s pretty Leo-esque, and she shakes her head No!

Successful so far! Moving on!

THIS SHOULD BE FINE

CAN’T SEE THIS GOING POORLY

oh

I suppose lights go out, sound gets weird, recently-awakened coma patient has violent fit was not actually the worst way this could have gone and since it did essentially point at the Dream-Ghost-oriented course of investigation Cooper was pursuing anyway we can count it as a marginal Win.

This isn’t that interesting, but here’s Ben and Jerry Horne and two ledgers.

So the deal is, and explaining it is the primary purpose of this scene, Jerry still likes food, keeping the real ledger showing the Catherine-engineered bankruptcy of the sawmill and burning the fake one would be a safer plan, while burning the real ledger and keeping the fake one that makes the sawmill look profitable would somehow be a more lucrative plan even though didn’t they just have it burned down? or is it maybe only partly burned? but either way Catherine is getting the blame and she’s probably dead and Josie will get the insurance money from that little detail and then she can sell the mill and the land to Ben as long as Pete agrees to the deal.

The supplementary purpose of this scene is to test out the theory that if you give David Patrick Kelly some silly lines to end scenes with and let him give them weirdly artificial dramatic readings that it will be fun to watch. And since science generally demands that you run your tests more than once before declaring any results, chances are good that it will happen again even as the discomfiting echoes of “hickory sticks” still find purchase upon the glassy walls of our reflexive aural memories.

In any case, nothing gets settled but at least we’re up to speed on their deal.

ACHIEVEMENT IS ITS OWN REWARD

Babs and Babs lay dreaming, in a four-poster bed

Now here’s a little gem of a scene, one of my favorite moments of the show for the way it brings together two characters with unusual gifts that are less similar than complimentary, and gives them a satisfying encounter that raises each above their surface quirks and shows their deep and significant qualities, while also providing the most important forward jolt of the episode story-wise.

Margaret challenges the Major with a character-surveying question lightly tinged with rudeness.

Major Briggs, who is a man not easily rattled so long as you aren’t smoking at the dinner table which seems to be the one thing that really sets him the fuck off, takes the unusual questioning in stride and his response shows respect for the questioner, the question, and the underlying moral principle.

This is satisfactory, and probably unusual, so Margaret proceeds to deliver the “deliver the message” message** she has brought to him. Probably even more unusual is that he seems to understand her immediately and says so. So we get to see Margaret smile for a moment like a person who is not out of sync with the world around her.

Margaret’s special status has been recognized and acknowledged by someone who before this meeting was, judging by their initial conversation, a relative stranger. Major Briggs, the stranger, has had his status as a man of depth and philosophical sophistication raised even further, both by his openness to the unusual and by the evident fact that the unusual apparently respects him back, at least enough to use stealth channels to communicate with him.

And now Briggs has a mission of his own that will bring him into a fruitful and likeminded acquaintanceship with Special Agent Dale Cooper as their respective investigations into the esoteric merge over the course of the season.

NOW THE ANTLER BECOMES THE ANTLEE

Sheriff’s Department, minor things are afoot.

Andy is sad because I didn’t mention that he was putting up that BOB poster in the RR window at the start of the Major Briggs/Log Lady scene.

More than you bargained for

Lucy’s gestation of her chitinous spawn has had drastic effects on her physical and chemical makeup, one result being that she can now levitiate a pencil using the power of her mind, but only this one pencil, and I guess it gets used up over time for normal pencil-related activities because we never see it happen again.

But wait, what’s this?

Undeniably Normal Angles and Dead Animals: the Hank Jennings Story — Chapter Four: An Unstoppable Bucksion

It’s Hank! And does he have some kind of telekinetic power as well now?

No. It’s just another dumb domino thing that will never be interesting and please stop it.

Anyway, Hank’s gotta sign in because he’s on parole, and it’s clear that Harry and Hank are not on good terms, which Cooper expertly deduces both by their speaking tones but also presumably by the way Harry gets so thoroughly outraged to discover that Hank has done the thing that he literally just watched Hank do, five seconds ago, two or maybe three feet in front of him.

Let’s see what he left us. It’s an H

“How long were you and Hank friends?” And you immediately know that Harry’s going to say that back in the day Hank was “one of the best of us”, and of course he does, because the clock is ticking and you’re not gonna re-invent every single dramatic device ever used, plus it’s Hank and I don’t feel like anyone was losing any sleep trying to find new ways to make him seem interesting, comedically-repeated domino pic.

To be honest half the reason I brought up this scene at all was because Cooper delivers his lines in front of a gun case

and it reminds me of the gun case my grandparents had in their living room every time I see this scene, and now I’m feeling a little sad.

I used to just take the unloaded rifles out and play with them all the time, and there was ammo in there, in boxes but also just loose and laying around, all over the house really, and I would just play with all that shit and literally nobody ever tried to stop me.

(But what freaked me out even more was Peggy’s wall decoration in later seasons of Mad Men, because she had these pebble paintings hung up in two different apartments,

and they are exactly the same as what was in my grandparents’ house, which was in a small town that in my mind is forever intermingled with Twin Peaks.)

(So, you know, there’s a little bit more information about me if you wanted it, I guess.)

I’M BACK, BACK AND AS SANE AS I’LL EVER BE FROM NOW ON

Jerry comes into Ben’s office. Catherine didn’t sign the insurance policy.

Maybe just as well, they decide.

Then Leland comes into Ben’s office.

He has smart and strategic business ideas. Like talking to the Icelanders about the devastating mill fire that just happened.

But maybe he got a little ahead of himself. By talking to the Icelanders about the devastating mill fire that just happened.

Moot point, though, because,

what’s that over there?

It’s the trigger for the other major dramatic development of the episode! You see, back when Andy was sketching out Sarah’s vision-monster at the Palmer house last week, Leland was slouching around in disheveled sleepwear casting aspersions and being kind of a dick, and apparently not only managed not to hear his wife’s description of the man she apparently hallucinated at the foot of his daughter’s bed the morning after she was murdered, but also had zero interest in looking at the police sketch her description of this suspect produced — until he spies it on an end table way over on the other side of his boss’s office, at which point it immediately becomes the most interesting goddamned thing he’s ever seen in his life, and the trigger for a rush of childhood memories that seemingly implicate a temporally-unlikely vacation neighbor in said murder!

Incidentally, do you remember this from the first minute of the program?

You can’t deny that my screenshot quality has improved, if nothing else

Well, it occurred to me that when they were shooting this current scene in Ben’s office, Lynch and Frost knew that BOB, the “man” on the poster, would eventually be revealed as not a corporeal criminal, but an inhabiting spirit, meaning he would narratively serve as a symbolic stand-in for the real flesh-and-blood murderer who had not yet been revealed and who therefore could quite easily be Benjamin Horne, who is, as Leland holds the poster aloft,

directly behind it, obscured by it as they share the same space, visually connected to it, you understand what I’m getting at here.

Anyway, Leland runs off to talk to Sheriff Truman and Ben says “Jerry, please kill Leland” and it’s funny but then Jerry gets a line too and it’s weird and artificial again like hickory sticks and you can’t help but wonder what it’s doing there and then you remember, science.

(I mean, at least it’s artificial and weird, so there’s something to hang your hat on. Watch any episode of Daredevil and wait for any scene with Foggy Nelson in it if you wanna know how much less engaging artificial and normal can be.)

DOCTORS OF THE REVOLUTION GAVE US THE MEDICINE

Leo’s in a “Coma” [light audience applause] and Shelly and Doc Hayward get a nice little scene together to set us up for Bobby’s insurance scheme later — if there’s one message this show drives home it’s that you should never trust a representative of the insurance industry because they will Fuck [clap emoji] You [another clap emoji] Over — and Leo shows us a modest amount of skin.

And Audrey questions Battis about Laura and the brothel, and a lady with a red wig and a cowboy hat shows us a modest amount of skin.

Emory Battis is blindfolded and tied up on a settee or whatever so he’s gonna answer whatever you ask him. Thing is, he also has painted toenails which is probably an offside “freak-signifier” foul in 2017 but was fine in 1990; nowadays Standards and Practices would make them lose the toenail polish because they really don’t want to have to deal with the emails and the tweets but Emory would definitely have been fucking a goat and/or eating the heart of a human child and that would have been okay, and I’m not moralizing here in either direction, I just find life and the passage of time to be pretty darned interesting.

Speaking of time passing, we’re pretty used to the idea that even with a show that gets parcelled out to us like Better Call Saul — never mind the ones that get dropped in a binge-ready bundle like BoJack Horseman — we’re gonna get through those episodes as fast as we can and then watch them again and then wait until next freaking year for the next beautiful batch.

Well, back in 1990, between the time Cooper got shot at the end of season one, and the time we got to watch him bleeding on the floor of room 315 at the beginning of season two, it was four months. And people were freaking out about the wait. And still they had the nerve to complain about Cooper lying there on the floor for a half-hour or whatever.

Buncha spoiled babies, if you ask me.****

(Incidentally, I wonder more about the backstory of the cowboy-hat woman than I have any reason to. I wonder if that was work hair or if that’s just her style. The hat I assume was just a part of the outfit, but it would be pretty cool if it wasn’t and that’s just her hat that she wears. I wonder if the awkward way she walks out of the room in this David Lynch-directed Twin Peaks episode should be considered within the same conceptual framework as the awkward way the two separate secretaries walk out of Gordon Cole’s office at the start of the David Lynch-directed Twin Peaks movie. At any rate, she’s very nineties, and I probably have a little bit of a crush on her. Shut up, like you don’t ever get weird crushes on minor characters in television shows and then publicly confess to them in writing a couple of decades later under the guise of cultural criticism.)

HERE’S THE THING

I can write, or I can take care of myself, but I haven’t quite mastered doing both simultaneously yet.

Phase One of this Twin Peaks Decaps series was the first season’s worth of essays slammed out at a pace of one per day. I felt good for the first few days and while I was pleased to keep up the pace for a while longer as a semi-arbitrary personal challenge it was clear that I would have to slow down soon or I would blow some kind of gasket brain-wise.

My issue now, during Phase Two, is that I am allowing myself a bit too much rest between installments. There are two months to go before season three starts up, which if my math is correct means I have to put out new decaps every three days on average to be ready for that madness.

Which would be easy enough if I was writing the way I was when I started. But the last essay was over eight thousand words, which is many. And this one is over six thousand, and somehow I gathered more screenshots for this one than for the last one, and both of these sins despite this episode being a regular episode and the last episode being a double-length episode!

Point is, I have no discipline for this shit. I’m an artist, man. I do my own thing. I go where the muse takes me. I wear V-necks and cut my own hair. I may know better than to mansplain jazz to a woman but don’t doubt for a moment that I have loads of material on the topic lined up and ready to go if anyone ever asks, even though I don’t really know much about jazz at all.

Okay so SPEAKING OF JAZZ here’s some moody jazz we’ve already heard a dozen times because it’s standard incidental Twin Peaks music but OH WAIT

it seems like it’s not just Twin Peaks music, it’s also Twin Peaks music, because Bobby tells Shelly to change the station and she does and the music changes so that’s maybe the third time that’s happened so far in the series?

So you’ll be maybe happy to know that I double-checked and the music she switches to is in fact not the same music on the radio when Leo beats the crap out of her with soap in a sock, and thank goodness for that because it would have been pretty weird, especially in a scene where Bobby’s basically going to boss her into doing something she doesn’t want to do but it’s still sexy, and that’s not the best wording for it but it’s well after three in the morning and you know what I meant.

Now, I do believe Bobby is sincere in his claim that Leo owes her and that this is a way to settle that debt. Still, it’s obviously creepy behavior! (Though at least, unlike some of the eighties-nineties-era creepiness that sometimes pops up on this show, this time the show definitely knows it. I’m not saying Bobby needs to be nice all the time.)

Anyway, here’s a little Wild at Heart connection for you:

nobody has ever actually been this pleased with a car radio. The ranking is Sailor and Lula in first place, Shelly and Bobby in second, and literally any real human who has ever lived somewhere below that.

(For me it’s the second Wild at Heart connection, the first being that it’s also down there with my less-favorite Lynch work. Take that, Mister high quality entertainment that doesn’t happen to please me quite as much and was made in exactly the same time period, such that each influenced, and not always positively, the other, Wrench.)

So Leo is worth five thousand dollars a month, which, if I got paid a dollar a word I would make more for whatever length this meandering essay about a minor episode of television is going to end up being. But to collect they have to keep him at home. So Bobby thinks they should do that.

It’s a really good idea, Bobby, and you’ve clearly thought it through from every angle and done your research, so when Shelly says she doesn’t want to do it you should convince her otherwise, dickweed.

I guess Dickweed does a good job of it though, since Shelly wants to make out with him almost immediately.

BUT SO ANYWAY, WHAT ABOUT ROOM 237?

I dunno, man, wrong franchise. But So Anyway, in room 315, Cooper has a lot on his mind, like his former partner Windom Earle, and I might just start bolding his name every time from now on, such portent with which it is laden, and also Audrey being missing less than two full weeks after a vicious and local teen-girl-murdering and whatnot.

Speaking of portent,

you think this framing was accidental? Or is it maybe supposed to make us think about the Giant a little bit, the way it includes that lighting fixture?

Cooper answers the knock at the door and a Great Meeting occurs for what I believe to the best of my recollection to be the first time. Special Agent Dale Cooper and Major Garland Briggs, crackpot geniuses in uniform! It’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

(I wish they could pal around a bit in season three, but with Don Davis lost to us we’ll have to hope that lucid-moments Coop strikes up something metaphysical with one of the other sixteen hundred characters they cast.)

So Cooper invites the Major in to talk and immediately grows an authority horn.

Cooper being Cooper, it’s a much more receptive and less antagonistic pipe-like authority horn than the angry saw-like authority horn we’ll see in the movie, attached to the head of a surly sheriff.

FWWM pic yoinked from one Brad D, because the dvd drive is one of the broken parts of my half-broken lappy

Anyway, if Coop was still in any way on the fence about how real all this Giant business is, Briggsy is here to set his mind at ease with some exceptionally articulate space gibberish.

I see some weird stuff at my weird job // Yah, me too, shit’s crazy out there

So anyway, the forest spit out this National Poetry Day glop // Okay but I’m in my PJs so skip to the end

Yeah well that Wood Woman kinda made me come here, I got my own stuff going on too, my son smokes for starters

So now Cooper knows that there is at least some kind of external objective reality to his visitations and communications, which, I don’t quite get why he’s skeptical, he’s already Agent Rocksen Bottles and all, I guess maybe it’s a writerly way to convince the more straitlaced of us out here in viewerland to buy into it? I guess you gotta find reasons for people to meet. No matter.

Because what awaits us next, in the living room of the Hayward residence,

Imagine the music sting from the beginning of episode 2.08 here

has no concern for such human frailty.

PREPARE TO REVISIT THE SCENE THAT HAS SCARRED COUNTLESS MINDS OVER MULTIPLE GENERATIONS WITH THE HORROR IT CONTAINED AND PRESENTED UNFLINCHINGLY TO AN AMERICA THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN PREPARED FOR IT

no not that

i mean that happens too, in a bit

but i meant this

JUST YOU, AND I, JUST YOU, AND I, TOGETHER, FOREVER, IN LOVE

I’m sorry to make you relive it. But you had to know it was coming.

Word on the street is that’s actually James Marshall’s voice but they messed around with it a bit in post and what they ended up with, I have to admit, is as good a caricature of David Lynch’s Inner Teenage Boy as anything else they could have possibly summoned from this world or the next.

The scene is clearly structured to contrast absurd and/or hokey and/or cringey humor against intense terror in that special way that is so often called “Lynchian”, and mission accomplished because everyone sure remembers

BOB

crawling over that couch

and right into the camera. And it was smart to do this, because we just saw a BOB horror show at the end of the last episode, so adding another chapter of it to the end of this one does a lot to solidify and strengthen his unique menace, and to suggest that he is not limited to coma visions and detective dreams. He starts to feel less like a metaphorical ghost and more like a literal threat.

As far as the Scoobies go, the scene shakes up their little triangle a bit. Maddy is well into her Blooming Young Woman arc, as she begins to fall into an attraction with James, having recently shed her apparently-unnecessary eyewear and most of her initially-adorkable awkwardness.

So James is really noticing Maddy again, and Maddy is noticing James noticing her again, and Donna is noticing James and Maddy noticing each other’s pants off again,

and this was all building up at the diner, and the gazebo, and the diner again, et fucking cetera, but it finally blows up here when Donna jumps up and runs away and the entire invisible mystery band that showed up to accompany James stops playing as soon as he drops the guitar to run after her.

No hay banda

Donna subjects James to a weird intense fumbling kissy moment but then she has to grab the phone because Mr Smith is calling for her, oops, timing,

and now James gets to wear that “oh, yeah, you get mad at me for eye-banging our new friend who looks like the brunette twin of our old friend in the middle of your living room, but you got a phonecall from a Mister, so now who’s the asshole?” face for a second before providence interrupts their brief sexy-angry foreplay session.

Maddy Ferguson.

When she decides a few episodes from now that it’s time for her to leave town and she has to break the news to Aunt Sarah and Uncle Leland, she mentions missing her job and her friends and her own apartment. And just one episode ago Sarah asked her if she missed her mom, which it’s easy to forget about because BLOOD CARPET.

Now maybe she does miss her job, and her apartment, and even her mom, but I don’t actually think Maddy has a whole lot of friends back in Missoula.

Tag Yourself, I’m Maddy’s spacey, distant stillness while the more socially confident people argue in the next room

Maddy arrives in Twin Peaks as an awkward person. She’s not quite sure how to react to James’ direct (and admittedly stupefied) attention. She sometimes stumbles a bit over her words in the way Tara Maclay did in later seasons of Buffy when she wasn’t stuttering anymore but we were meant to remember that she used to. She’s grateful when Donna and James ask her out to the diner, which, understandable, sure, but she had only been away from home for a couple of days, and even now it’s barely over a week.

She starts socializing with these fairly normal young people and immediately she begins to change. And I don’t think it was just Laura’s sunglasses.

Anyone who grew up in a small town knows the freedom that comes with moving away and suddenly being able to reinvent yourself as you found friends among new people who hadn’t already made up their minds years ago who you are. They may also remember how easy it was to be more impressionable than you realized when spending time with a newer and cooler group.

I feel like Maddy’s unstated character arc is that of a young woman who grew up in Missoula, who never really blossomed there because she was never challenged to and never had the space to, who starts living in another town where she makes friends with some strangers, and who then for the first time allows parts of her personality to surface that had never had the chance before.

By her final day in Twin Peaks, Maddy is a different, stronger person.

And now that I’ve made myself even a little sadder I’ll point out that when James and Donna interrupt their foreplay to rush back into the living room and see why Maddy is Palmer-shrieking,

James is fully focused on Maddy, while Donna keeps looking to try and see what Maddy has seen. Donna knows on some level that weird shit is thoroughly afoot, and she continues to be the Cooper-Scooby.

The Cooby.

I REALLY TRIED TO DO A GOOD ROOM 315 / ROOM 237 THING

but I just couldn’t find one. This strategic and self-conscious glibness isn’t always the easiest way to write, you know. For example, I had a bunch more Spaced and Frisky Dingo stuff I wanted to work in somehow and I couldn’t get them to fit either. A Black Dynamite reference, I was gonna do that.

Look, this is free content. I don’t even have a Patreon yet.

Anyway,

Cooper’s in bed and his brain chews on recent events to see how they might blend together and to offer the opportunity for some prime nineties-style special effects like that rough-cut shutter-flash end-of-the-film-roll thing every music video used for a couple of years, and also some of this stuff:

Putting the pieces together

RING

Dang it, he might have dreamed that Laura told him who killed her again and maybe he’d remember this time. BOB was even coming into focus as

RING

Sigh.

Okay, fine, time to answer the bedside phone like a pre-internet-era person with a phone that rings because of the physical bell it contains and also it has no call display so you just answer it and talk to whoever is calling you like you’re some sort of barbarian, who doesn’t have an anxiety attack every time the phone rings since that would obviously blow a huge functional hole in your day-to-day life, yet somehow looking back upon this day from twenty-five-plus years in the future you realize you used to be able to do it without thinking because that’s just how things were done then, so you have to ask yourself how much is the contemporary rise in mental illness attributable to simple improvements in diagnosis, versus wondering at what point we acknowledge that rapid advances in technology itself are having a profound effect on human psychology and even physiology that we don’t understand and barely know to even look at, and I’m inclined to agree with that Harari guy that Homo sapiens is coming to an end much faster than we think

oh, yes, Audrey, hello, you should come home now, lot on my plate already.

…aaand click.

The Wicked Witch and her Horny Monkey will have none of that.

See what I mean? Just means more shit Coop’s gotta do now.

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* John Cleese and I have the following things in common (list is not necessarily exhaustive): our initials are JC; we are above average in height; we’re funniest in groups because by ourselves insecurity sets in and we overthink compensatorily and only semi-successfully; we were born on 27 October; we are extremely talented writers

** I actually don’t know if it’s common in Hong Kong or not. I’ve never been to Hong Kong. Where I live, it’s actually not that uncommon to see a vehicle with the steering wheel on the “wrong” side, and it always seems kind of cool.

*** I just picked up on the deliver the “deliver the message” message thing today, and I will immediately add it to the list alongside second Second Cup cup, new New Jersey jersey, taking the “taking the joke too far” joke too far, and at least two more I can’t recall offhand.

**** Now Millennials on the other hand, there’s a demographic that knows how to suffer.