1x07 Realization Time

[6.8/10] Hey! What do you know! A decent episode of Twin Peaks! I’m as shocked as you are. What helps this one out is that it divides fairly neatly into a few separate “investigations” going on with respect to Laura’s murder. Not all of them are great, but it gives the episode a coherence and direction that’s been missing in some other parts of the show.

The most interesting of these is Audrey’s. I don’t mean to keep harping on this point, but the scene with her and Cooper is well-done, showing the FBI agent to be a decent guy looking out for the Audrey and wanting the best for her, not just trying to take advantage of her like so many other folks in Twin Peaks do to one another.

But more than that, Audrey is one of the few people beyond Cooper who actually seems clever here. While her effort to infiltrate whatever ring Laura was involved in through her Dad is dangerous and suggests she’d be in over her head, the way she goes about it is pretty smart. Distracting the Dept. store employee, overhearing her coworker offered a job as a “hospitality girl” at One-Eyed Jacks, and then conning that co-worker into giving her the number for “Black Rose” is, as Mrs. Bloom noted, very Veronica Mars-esque in its guile.

One she gets to One-Eyed Jacks, things flag a bit. It feels like more of an excuse for her to slink around, and the scene where she proves to Blackie that she should be working at One-Eyed Jack’s despite her phony resume by seductively tying a cherry stem into a knot is pretty corny and even gratuitous. But thus far Audrey is one of the few people in this show advancing the mystery without resorting to magic, psychic dreams, or super-convenient look-a-likes, so she (and the writers) get credit for it.

Speaking of which, the episode also has James, Donna, and Maddy tricking Dr. Jacoby in order to get a lost tape that Laura sent him. I’m not as big a fan of this part of the episode, because the fact that Maddy is Laura’s identical twin cousin is already a pretty ridiculous element in the show, and so leaning on that fact to drive a major plot point feels like too much.

Still, the notion of using Maddy as a distraction to get Jacoby out of his office so that Donna and James can snoop around is a sound one. There’s some interesting layers of people stalking others (Mysterious POV dude who’s watching Jacoby who’s watching Maddy-as-Laura), but more than anything, it just functions as a straightforward enough way for the young Scooby Doo-esque investigators to find the macguffin and get another piece of the mystery going.

The same’s true for Cooper and the rest of the sheriff’s office. Credit where credit’s due, this show mostly elicits laughter and/or derision from me, but for the first time there was actually something unnerving. Something about Waldo, the myna bird, parroting back Laura’s name and pleas not to be hurt was rightly chilling, and while Leo shooting it at a convenient moment feels like an unnecessary tease, (though the imagery of blood on the donut buffet was striking, if nothing else) it’s another facet of the mystery that helps clear up the picture of what happened that fateful night.

Speaking of which, I appreciate that Cooper and the rest of the team are piecing things together and things are converging at One-Eyed Jacks. There’s a lot of disguises in this episode, between Maddy putting on a blonde wig to play Laura, and Cooper and Ed teeing things up themselves to blend in at One-Eyed Jack’s. (Side note: Ed’s mustache and curly wig make him look like Norm MacDonald playing Burt Reynolds.) I’m sure that’s some vaguely commentary on people being duplicitous or two-faced or hiding things in this town (lord knows we’ve belabored the matter of seeecrets over and over again here), but it’s something.

Still, the boys’ trip to One-Eyed Jack’s has a nice caper-y feel to it, between the disguises, the fake names and the patter with Blackie. It promises interesting things as a wired up Cooper and the rest of the Bookhouse Boys (which is basically the sheriff’s office...plus Ed) close in on Jacques.

That just leaves the continuing machinations around the Mill. The arrival of a life insurance policy for Catherine that leaves the proceeds to Josie reveals that Ben Horne is double crossing her whilst claiming to be double crossing Josie and so forth and so on, because, as Jerry seems to indicate, he wants to buy the land the mill is on for Ghostwood estates. It’s another wrinkle to this endlessly complicated scheme, and doesn’t add that much, but at least it’s a development in the story, a change in the status quo, rather than just tacking on more alliances and backstabbing.

To the same end, Sheriff Truman seems like an idiot for not sniffing out the fact that Josie is playing him (something that Cooper, at least, seems to acknowledge), but there’s the fig leaf that he’s blinded by love or infatuation or who knows what else and can’t see it. Still makes him seem like a dope. And on top of that, Leo figures out what Bobby’s up to with Shelly; Hank figures out what Ed’s up to with Norma, and Lucy finds out that she’s pregnant.

That’s a lot for one episode, but it feels more focused and propulsive than a lot of Twin Peaks ep that just sort of meander from one plot point to another without any real direction or purpose. It’s no great shakes, and there’s not much in the way of meaningful character development (beyond Cooper’s kind of charming “give yourself a gift every day” routine), but it’s the show feeling like it’s going somewhere, not just spinning its wheels, with minimal amounts of overdone dialogue or faux-philosophical meditations on whatever’s knocking around Lynch & Frost’s heads this week. That gives us the most watchable Twin Peaks episode yet.