1x04 Rest In Pain

[5.6/10] I unabashedly love The Room. It has this bizarre, unreplicable combination of incompetence and raw earnestness, of someone putting their soul on a platter for all the world to see with no understanding of how to actually convey that. The end result is one of the funniest and yet purest films you are ever likely to watch.

But it is not a standard that any professionally produced or written show should aspire to, and the funeral scene in “Rest Pain” feels legitimately of a piece with scenes from The Room. I want to be clear here. Sometimes I exaggerate for comic effect when talking about this show and its foibles, but that’s not what I’m doing here. My first thought when seeing the ridiculous outbursts of that graveside scene was legitimately the work of Tommy Wiseau.

Maybe it’s just the would be all-American kid (in this instance, Bobby), overacting and screaming his head off about everyone being hypocrites and to blame for Laura Palmer’s death. Bobby is one of the show’s worst actors (no mean feat) and seeing him contort himself and rant and rave in such a cartoonish fashion calls to mind Johnny’s “Fed up with this world” speech in The Room.

The silly eulogy delivered by the preacher, while the camera darts around to reaction shots of the assembled does the sequence no favors, nor does the slow-motion confrontation between Bobby and James. And by the same token, Leland Palmer leaping onto the coffin and crying out in outlandish, over the top grief, while his wife screams at him for ruining a solemn occasion feels like the loudly-broadcast mishmash of emotions that only come in movies directed by Tommy Wiseau or, failing that, Harold Zoid.

But what’s strange is that the show seems at least vaguely aware of the absurdity of this. Shelley makes fun of the sequence in the very next scene. In the same way, Laura’s identical twin cousin Madeline shows up, “Rest in Pain” seems to acknowledge how silly this is by having the show within a show, a melodramatic soap opera, include a woman playing two different parts in its opening credits. Simply owning up to one’s own ridiculous doesn’t excuse it, but it at least makes you wonder what the show was getting at, why it didn’t do better, what it hoped to achieve, in depicted such goofy scenes and story choices.

Thankfully, there’s a few things that save “Rest in Pain” from succumbing to the worst of Twin Peaks’s tendency toward ridiculum. One of them is the choice to, however briefly, pair up Agent Cooper and Audrey again. As I’ve mentioned before, the two of them are uniquely compelling in a show full of caricatures, and so matching their energies, having Audrey be clearly infatuated by Cooper and Cooper aware of what’s going on with Audrey while being smart enough to hold his place, makes for a moment that’s charged in a way that few others on this show can muster.

I’m also rather entertained by Alfred. Sure, he’s an exaggerated character as well, but he has a proto-Dr. House quality, as he drips with insults about Twin Peaks and its denizens in an amusing fashion, that at least makes his routine funny even if he feels like something out of a sitcom at times. His tension with Sherriff Truman and Cooper, and his steady stream of digs at this town and its people, make for entertaining texture as he drops more clues about what happened to Laura.

We also get clues about how Ed and Nadine got together, and how he and Norma found one another. Credit where credit is due -- I complained about how the last episode took what could be a pathos-ridden character in Nadine and turned her into an object of scorn or fun. But here, it offers a little more sympathy for her, casting her as the “brown mouse” who harbored affections for high school hero Ed, and is grateful that he “came back to her.” It’s not much, but the episode treats her more kindly than before, and suggests why Ed and Norma fell back into their old high school sweetheart habits, as the conveniently-timed threat of Norma’s husband’s parole looms on the horizon.

I even appreciated the supernatural elements hinted at here. While the notion of a secret society, “The Bookhouse Boys,” strikes me as a little hokey, I can appreciate what the show is going for with the broader material it’s aiming at with them. There’s a great deal of talk, from Cooper especially, about how Twin Peaks is an idyllic town, with slices of pie and ducks on a lake and a certain old school simplicity and sweetness that so compels Cooper that he contemplates buying land out here.

But Truman suggests that seeming tranquility comes at a price. Maybe that price is the notion that for all its shiny exterior, there is a darkside to Twin Peaks that, as Bobby butchers in a poorly-written and delivered monologue, nobody in town is willing to acknowledge. But “Rest in Pain” also suggests that there’s something more spiritually wrong with the place as well, that the protection of that paradise comes at the cost of an evil that lurks around the place. The nice down with a dark secret is an old trope, but it’s also a compelling one.

The problem is that it has to be executed correctly, and generic teen bad boys who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag, bog-standard jerk husbands who have all the nuance of anthropomorphized plaque in a toothpaste commercials, good-for-nothing hoodlums who offer accents about as convincing a fratboy on St. Patrick’s Day, and manic cry-dancing dads who only achieves farce when they’re going for feeling, leave “Rest in Pain” as a kitschy mess despite the promise and mild improvement it shows.

The Room is unintentionally hilarious, and Twin Peaks often is too, but nobody wants to make you laugh by accident, especially when they want to make you think or worry or empathize. “Rest in Pain” isn’t that bad most of the time, but it comes too close to the Wiseau line than anyone, viewer or creator alike, should be comfortable with.