I know I'm a little bit late with this, since it aired back in the early 90's, but last week I finally finished watching Twin Peaks. I was too young to watch it when it first aired and on reruns I never managed to catch it all. I've had the Complete Series boxset in my shelf for a year or two now and when my wife and I were looking for something to watch, we decided on Twin Peaks.
This isn't going to be a full review of the show, rather just some thoughts I have about the show, likes and dislikes and so on.
Likes:
The best thing the show has going for it is the town of Twin Peaks. Possibly the best realised small town on TV next to Northern Exposure, it has a definite feeling of community and a place where people actually know each other.
Dale Cooper. One of the best characters in the history of TV. Quirky, but not overly weird and his relationship with the town sheriff Harry S. Truman actually works very well. I was always amused at how easily Cooper would get the cops behind his ideas, no matter how unearthly they sounded. And some of them were really out there.
The mystery of Laura Palmer's murder is an intriguing one, and it's very well done. The show actually manages to make it feel like a mystery and the killer isn't obvious from the start.
Which brings us to Bob. Bob is scary. Nightmare-inducingly scary. Had I seen this when I was a kid, I don't think I would've been sleeping a lot. The scene in which Bob is after Laura's cousin in the living room is one of the scariest scenes I've ever seen.
The first season in general is a masterpiece of 90's TV.
Dislikes:
Laura Palmer's murder is the thing that was used to launch the series and from what I gathered, it was the show creators' David Lynch's and Mark Frost's original plan to build the show around the murder and then take the show on from there, possibly never revealing the killer of Laura Palmer. But the show needs better writers for that.
Lynch does love the world of Twin Peaks and probably would've done something better with Season 3, as the things being set up for the next season in what ended up being the series finale, are much more interesting than what happens in the show after the initial murder has been solved. The show has no idea on what to do with itself and goes for the soap opera cliches that it had cleverly avoided or played with before. Yes, I'm looking at you, James and your "adventures" outside of Twin Peaks.
Also, where season 2 eventually lets me down is the new antagonist, Windom Earle. I like the name, and he seems like a worthy opponent for Cooper from all his messages and the backstory they share. And then we meet Windom and he's basically the evil version of Roger Moore's The Saint. With disguises and playing games with Cooper, he just doesn't seem threating at all. Considering how powerful of a villain Bob was, having Windom Earle be so lackluster just makes the whole thing so much more sad.
Spoiler area:
I do like the reveal of the killer of Laura Palmer and I thought it was well done all around to finish up that storyline. Losing Leland Palmer at the same time was, I suppose, inevitable, but I really missed his character.
Afterwards, the show really loses its footing, like I've mentioned before. There are so many characters that were introduced as red herrings for the Laura Palmer murder that the writers didn't know what to do with them all after Leland/Bob was revealed as the killer. James's run-in with the femme fatale wife is definitely the low point of the show, and things like Ben Horne's Civil War re-enactment are probably what drove people away from the show. Also, the plotline with Nadine and her "superpowers" just went on and on without really going anywhere.
Added to this, they bring in more and more characters, only couple of which actually work, main ones being David Lynch's half-deaf FBI agent Gordon Cole and David Duchovny's agent who is a bit different from his later Fox Mulder character. But I'm sorry to say, the characters of Billy Zane and Heather Graham just didn't work for me at all, and that part of the finale did fall flat for me.
Which is sad, because there was definitely potential here. It seemed like we were getting rid of some characters in the finale, including my favorite Twin Peaksian, Pete (played by Lynch regular Jack Nance). I can't say Season 3 would've brought Twin Peaks back to basics, but it certainly seems like it would've taken some chances that it really should've taken during its second season.
I don't know how much Lynch/Frost were pulling the strings after the first season, I have a feeling the writer Harley Peyton was planning a lot of the second season, which could explain the missteps. Then again, could be that Lynch just doesn't know how to run a TV show. He almost got a second chance with Mulholland Drive, whose pilot was later re-edited into a brilliant movie.
Twin Peaks is definitely worth watching, even with the problems during its second season. And with only around 30 episodes to watch, it doesn't really take that long to go through either.
