1x05 The One-Armed Man

[3.5/10] Part of the reason I write these reviews is to help myself pinpoint precisely why I like or dislike something. It’s easy to let a show or a movie wash over you, and just coast on the good (or bad) feelings it leaves you with. There’s nothing wrong with that! Television and films should be an experience, and if it can provoke something from the viewer, whether it’s laughter or sympathy or excitement, that’s a good in and of itself that requires no examination.

But for me at least, figuring out why I enjoy or abhor something helps me to figure out what makes a show or movie work for me and, thus, what other shows I might like. And over time, I’ve found that I enjoy subtlety and naturalism. I really appreciate when shows can find ways to convey stories, character development, and themes in nuanced ways, and I appreciate when they play the characters as real and having genuine reactions to whatever happens, even if they’re in extraordinary situations.

That’s not a hard and fast rule -- I enjoy plenty of works that go over the top and hammer the point home if they’re done well in other ways, but it tends to be my baseline for how much I enjoy and connect with something. And that may be the big problem for me with Twin Peaks -- it doesn’t check those boxes, and if anything, it’s a diametrically opposed to them.

“One-Armed Man” is a great example of that. The episode seems to be getting at ideas about the relationships between men and women, and how the different genders approach them differently. We see it with Andy and Lucy, we see it with Norma and Hank, we see it with Shelly and Bobby (and by extension, Leo).

But there’s zero subtlety to any of it. The episode features Lucy giving Andy the cold shoulder in a hackneyed sitcom fashion, but the result is a facepalm-worthy discussion with the male members of the shooting gallery down in the police office’s basement. Even Cooper spits out uninspired banalities about women being “cut from a different blueprint” and his own lost love that reek of the old “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” nonsense. It’s churlish to critique the gender politics of a show made a quarter of a century ago, but having a whole scene where the guys discuss “chicks, man” speaks to the heavy-handed approach the show takes.

At the same time, the episode seems to want to draw a parallel between Shelly and Norma with respect to their beaus. We get a little backstory on Leo, that he once seemed cool and flashy but then was a bad guy once we got to know him, with the implication that it may be the same kind of situation with Hank. The problem is that rather than playing with the ambiguity of that, suggesting that Norma is helping Hank because she’s being suckered in by the same old tricks but leaving the possibility and complexity out there, Twin Peaks immediately reveals that Hank is a scary enough dude to send Josey Packard spooky photos and threaten her over the phone.

When the show isn’t being blatantly obvious or overblown with its characters and dialogue, it’s being needlessly cryptic. Obviously it’s a mystery and you can’t reveal everything at once, but the show throws out a bunch of nigh-random stuff here that doesn’t make the picture much clearer. I remember from my first watch through of the series that it has an “everyone is conspiring with everyone” problem.

That’s particularly true for Ben Horne, who is playing Catherine one the one hand, and working with Leo on the other, while the bad accent man from the last episode is wrapped up in a body bag. Cooper is chasing leads from his dream, finding a one-armed man and trying to find the owner of a bird that may have bitten Larua.

To be frank, it’s all just kind of dull. Letting a mystery stay mysterious for a while isn’t a bad tack necessarily, but the progression has to mean something, and so do the character populating the world. Giving lots of screen time over to bad-acting Bobby, or purple prose from Dr. Jacobi, or other snippets of nothing in particular leave the episode feeling particular lumpy.

That’s another of Twin Peaks big problems. There’s no real structure, no momentum to anything that happens. It falls squarely into the “here’s a bunch of stuff” category. Now I’m willing to give Twin Peaks some leeway here, to let the story crystalize, but other than that vague “me and women have trouble communicating theme” there’s nothing that really unites “One-Armed Man” as a cohesive whole, either as a standalone story in and of itself or as a chapter in a larger narrative or even as a series of moments that amount to something more.

You can get away with that if each scene is individually interesting or well-acted or making some kind of subtle point, but that’s not what “One-Armed Man” or Twin Peaks offers. Instead, it offers overwritten dialogue about walls put up in front of secrets or fears about visions or a hodgepodge of other crud and just hopes it sticks together well enough for the episode to make it to the end credits.

There’s no throughline here. The closest thing is the murder investigation, but even that lurches forward and spirals out in no direction in particular. The Renaults and Leo and Ben and Bobby all have some ill-defined connection that the show will no doubt spin out even further, but it’s mostly a bout of detective work and breadcrumbs that raise more questions without answering much of anything. You can only do that so long before the whole show gets wobbly.

Wobbles are okay if you’re enjoying the ride, but when the dialogue vacillates between characters outright announcing how they’re feeling and spouting faux-poetic nonsense, all you feel are the bumps, and sadly, they’re not subtle bumps.