2x21 Miss Twin Peaks

[4.5/10] Oh Twin Peaks. If you can’t make me care, the least you can do is make me laugh, and “Miss Twin Peaks” at least gave me that. Almost nothing about the Windom Earle storyline has worked, but god help me if seeing him not only dress up like the Log Lady, but bonk Bobby Briggs on the head with his log, cracked me the hell up. (Why couldn’t you have done that sooner, Wind-y?) I’m not made of stone. Putting your uber-evil, scenery-chewing villain in the getup of your town’s oddest oddball (which is saying something) and having him cavort around and give the ol’ el kabong to nudniks tickles my fancy.

So did Donna’s story here, where by god Donna is uncovering secrets and she has feelings about that! Her overdramatic confrontation with her parents in her bow-heavy prom dress lookalike is the kind of overwrought nonsense this show delivers on a regular basis. She also confronts Ben Horne about it, and her mouth-covering gasp is the kind of reaction you look for on a telenovela. I guess they needed something to do with Donna now that the Laura stuff is finished and Bobby’s been either off the show or embroiled in his own terrible storyline, but it’s cheesy to begin with and Lara Flynn Boyle isn’t up to it.

The same goes for poor Heather Graham who, it’s increasingly clear, must have been to five acting boot camps between now and when her movie career kicked into gear, because she displays all the acting talent of teleprompter come to life in this series. That would be fine if she were one of Twin Peaks’s many picked-up-and-forgotten side characters with little to do, but she has to make a heartfelt expression of love to Cooper and an impassioned plea for the environment at the pageant, and neither land. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that (a.) the love part is supposed to seal the tragedy and threat vis-a-vis Cooper and (b.) the speech is supposed to be what wins her the Miss Twin Peaks pageant, so when two major events happen as a consequence of these things, the reaction is a great big “huh?”

That’s right! True to the title’s promise, we’ve made it to the Miss Twin Peaks competition, and Annie’s game-winning oratory seems even sillier when Audrey gives a much more convincing and compelling speech about two minutes earlier. Lana, the probable succubus, fails in her attempt to rig the contest by sleeping with Dick Tremayne in a closet (something The Mayor is oddly okay with), and by doing a contrived bit of “jazz exotica.” And we round out the talent show portion by revealing that, what do you know, Lucy is a pretty great dancer! (She also picks Andy as her baby-daddy, hopefully ending that terrible plotline forever.) Nobody else involved has much to do, which is kind of a shame since Shelly, of all people, seemed to be the most hopeful about this gig.

But mostly, it’s all a contrived setup for Annie to win and for Windom Earle to attack. I’ll admit, there’s something cool, albeit cheesy, about the strobe light effect, and Earle mugging his way through the crowd while Cooper looks on in shock, but it’s a predictable, all too neat end for everything involving Earle, this contest, and the old love triangle involving Cooper and his former partner. (The episode also has Earle clumsily deliver the information that he did, in fact, kill his wife Caroline.)

Which leads to what is probably my biggest beef with this episode -- the literalizing of Twin Peaks’s mythology. I’ll admit, it’s a very tough line for any supernatural-themed show to walk, because you want the magical elements of your story to feel like they make sense, but you also want to ensure there’s a certain degree of mystery or unknowableness to them as well, or it feels like every problem is solved by just following the recipe and baking your mundane-but-technically-magical cake.

Spelling out so many details about Bob and The Black Lodge and the cave pictogram make the whole “evil in these woods” -- one of the few elements that I liked about this show early in its run -- into run of the mill B-movie supernatural thriller material. The Black Lodge is now a literal place, and Bob comes from there, and you can only get there from a certain place and certain time. We may as well have Link assemble the seven magical amulets to open the gate. The unexplained origins and abilities of Bob and his evil and the possession that came with gave the whole thing a certain power. Making it so rote and ordinary takes a lot of that away.

It doesn’t help that the key to opening this portal (which, I imagine, will work out about as well for Windom Earle as it did for the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark), is the combination of love and fear. What do you know! Annie has both! Love for Cooper! Fear of Earle! It’s all too simplistic and convenient and contrived, and turns one of the few cool things about Twin Peaks -- its mythos -- into a bargain basement fetch quest. (One deciphered, appropriately enough, by a dolt like Deputy Andy.)

As usual, there’s other minor, mostly pointless developments along the way too. Nadine suddenly seems jealous at the news that Ed and Norma plan to get married (and crushes Mike’s arm for his troubles). Andrew Packard plus Pete and Catherine Martell continue to play The Da Vinci Code with Eckert’s box to my continuing disinterest. Leo frees Major Briggs from Earle’s cabin, apparently wanting to save Shelly despite the fact that he himself was trying to kill her pretty recently. For the effort, Leo gets put in a ridiculous contraption that threatens to drop spiders on his head and Major Briggs is too brain-scrambled to be much help to anyone.

And so, Twin Peaks approaches its endgame determined to try to ruin one of the few half-decent things about the show. With any luck, there’ll still be a predictable but welcome “more than you bargained for” twist to unlocking The Black Lodge, but regardless, it reduces one of the distinctive factors of the show to a magical flowchart. At least the end is nigh.