Part 1 of  Twin Peaks Second Season

With Season 3 of Twin Peaks quickly approaching, I’ve decided to reflect back on seasons 1 & 2 along with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the feature length deleted scenes compilation: Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces.  Twin Peaks is my FAVORITE show of all time and I want to share with all of you my take on the show, my feelings then and now, and my theories as Season 3 plays out this year.  These articles will be SPOILER heavy so if you’ve never seen the show, stop reading and watch it now.

Season 1 ended on May 23, 1990 and it was a long summer until the Season 2 premiere on September 30. I couldn’t wait for the show to come back. All summer long I speculated and theorized. I was pretty sure that Leo (Eric DaRe) had killed Laura (Sheryl Lee.) But the bigger question for me was “Who shot Cooper?” I was in shock when it happened at the end of Season 1. I couldn’t stop worrying about it all summer.

To help me get through the long summer I watched Blue Velvet for the first time.  And I LOVED it. There was no question, as I wrote on my backpack, David Lynch is God! Also just before the new season began The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer was released to bookstores. I bought it and devoured it quickly. After reading the book my suspicions swung from Leo to Ben (Richard Beymer.) I couldn’t wait for the season to begin.

The first two episodes of the season were directed by Lynch and it shows right from the start. As Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) lies on the ground mortally wounded, the waiter brings him his warm milk but doesn’t seem to notice Cooper’s situation. He even gives Dale a smile and thumbs up as he leaves him bleeding to death in the room. The season certainly has a darker and more horror like feel to it especially in these first two episodes.

The second episode of Season 2 is probably my favorite of the series.  It feels like a Lynch film especially the sound design.  The noises that buzz on the soundtrack add to feelings of uneasiness that accompany scenes like Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) delivering Meals-on-Wheels to Mrs. Tremond (Frances Bay) and her grandson. Speaking of her grandson, he is played by Lynch’s son Austin Jack Lynch. He looks so much like a young version of his father. The scene is so fantastic.

Another quintessential Lynch-ian scene in this second episode is when Cooper and Sherriff Truman Michael Ontkean go to talk to Ronette (Phoebe Augustine) at the hospital. Ronette has just come out of her coma at the end of the previous episode. She woke up screaming as she was having a vision of BOB (Frank Silva) brutally attacking Laura. When Cooper and Truman enter her hospital room we get a long, somewhat comical scene of them trying figure out how to lower the stools they’re going to sit on. The scene is amazing in the way it allows a sense of real life “problems” interrupt the drama.

If there’s one thing in the episode I didn’t like it’s the scene of Donna, Maddy (Sheryl Lee,) and James (James Marshall) sitting on the floor recording a song together.  I can’t tell you how much I HATED this scene and the song when I first watched the show. I hated it so much that I totally missed what was happening in the scene. Watching it again, I’m still not a fan but I can at least acknowledge there is much more to it than I originally realized. Side note, I guess Maddy just no longer needed glasses after the first season.

I LOVE ALBERT. Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) is one of my favorite characters on the show.  He has some of the best lines. The title of this week’s article is part of an Albert line. I like that for all of his issues with Twin Peaks and its small town-ness, he is still all about love. While he seems like someone who should be dismissive of Cooper strange techniques he instead has great respect for their obvious results.

I don’t remember it taking very long for me to figure out the Japanese business man was actually Catherine (Piper Laurie.)  Because we didn’t see her get killed in the fire, I never bought that she was dead .

The first time I watch the show I had no idea the judge was played by the same actor (Royal Dano) who voice Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland. This time it’s all I could think about.

The seventh episode of the season also directed by Lynch still makes me feel tense. The end of the episode in which the giant (Carel Struycken) tells Cooper “It is happening again,” and we see BOB as Leland’s reflection freaked me out so much when I first saw it.  I still feel so terrible for Leland (Ray Wise) overall as he had no idea what BOB had been done through him. 

Join me next week for the back half of Season 2.