2x19 Variations on Relations

[4.9/10] Love is in the air in Twin Peaks, which is not a good thing, considering how hard this show has struggled with romantic dialogue in the past. Whether it’s Donna and James exchanging banalities or every third person in the town talking about how much they loved Laura Palmer, the show can’t create convincing lines about the affections of the heart to save itself.

The worst offender in that regard is the budding romance (or maybe forced molting is the better term) between Cooper and Annie. I’m a fan of Heather Graham’s after the pathos she brought to Boogie Nights, but she is clearly very green here, and for a show that already has rough dialogue and bad performance, her line readings are more wooden that the end products of The Saw Mill.

But that could be forgiven (after all, she’s like, the thirtieth rough performer on this show) if the romance didn’t seem so forced. The end game to this is pretty predictable. My suspicion is that Windom Earle ends up killing Annie to balance the scales with Cooper stealing his wife. The problem with that is that for a development along those lines to work, you have to care about the character and the relationship, and thus far Twin Peaks has given its audience little reason to do either.

It’s trying hard though. Cooper confides about his own sordid romantic past and Annie talks about the one boyfriend she had where things went wrong, and the show seems to be trying to draw a connection between them. But that just bears no relation to the actual chemistry, or lack thereof, between the two performers, and so the passion between them feels much more told than shown, let alone felt.

Thankfully, we get one more scene with Gordon Cole and Shelly Johnson to show us that love can be funny and kind of endearing. Yeah, there’s something creepy about a middle-aged man kissing a high schooler, but the tone of the thing is so light, and the Cole character so ridiculous, that it comes off less awkward than the Naomi-Mike material. Cole’s response to Bobby walking in (“a three-quarters view of the tender act of love”) is a funny line, and the incredulous bravado of Cole when delivering it is a hoot.

But pretty much everyone worth mentioning in the episode gets some kind of romance-related storyline, however brief. The aforementioned Mike and Naomi reaffirm that Naomi is statutorily raping Mike and Mike is taking advantage of a mentally disturbed woman, but Mike’s getting laid and getting high fives from Bobby so it’s supposed to be okay? I guess? And in similarly brief, seemingly pointless storylines, Lana the Sucubus is back, and wants to win the Miss Twin Peaks contest, trying to convince her Mayor husband to fix the competition for her. I still don’t know where they’re going with Lana, but lord knows where they’re going with anyone on this show.

Speaking of which, we see Donna digging deeper into the mystery of what her mom’s connection with Ben Horne is and why she was visiting him. Again, this feels like a random soap opera development to keep Donna busy and accusatory since she’s no longer a part of the main action. We also get some more of the world’s lamest comedy as Dick Tremayne hosts a wine tasting and Lucy gets predictably jealous of the attention Dick shows to Lana. Though, credit where credit is due, something about Dick yelling at Andy but then trying to be suave and genteel immediately after was pretty funny in a, if you will, Bert and Ernie sort of way.

The two loves of Audrey Horne (who is notably absent this episode) also share a moment together. The two of them share some of the usual purple prose above love in front of a fireplace in a painful overwritten scene that feels appropriate coming from Mark Frost, the writer of the 2000s Fantastic 4 movies. (A low blow, I’ll admit, but hey, I went there.) And to close things out, we have Sheriff Truman picking Catherine Martell’s brain about what Josey was really like and what she really wanted. (Every time Josey’s not on screen, the other characters should be asking, “where’s Josey?”) Naturally, since this is Twin Peaks, leads them to a puzzle box with mysterious symbols on it. I’m sure that won’t end up being a waste of time at all.

Speaking of mysterious symbols, we’re also moving on apace with the White Lodge/Black Lodge material. Andy recreates the pictogram from the cave, and it turns out that Major Briggs recognizes it from a dream or a vision or a vague memory or something. It leads to one of the show’s video collages with images of random fires and owls flying over a space background that makes you briefly assume you’re watching the video that plays behind the lyrics at a low-rent karaoke bar.

Last and maybe least, we get more of Windom Earle and his horrible monologues and jack-in-the-box tableaus as we wait for the show to get this seemingly interminable storyline over with. This time, he’s lured some “heavy metal youth” (Ted Raimi, who’s appeared in most of his brother’s work, including the Evil Dead trilogy and the Spider-Man trilogy), with the promise of beer, and ends up killing him in a giant paper mache chess piece, which is about as a subtle as...you know...it’s about the right degree of subtlety for this show.

So Earle leaves the now-dead guy in a big box for Cooper to find, and it’s meant to be this big reveal when the audience already knows exactly what’s in the box. (It’s not exactly the end to Se7en, if you know what I mean.) The show is intending to leave us horrified at the cravenness of Earle, but the whole thing is too damn goofy to produce any actual fear or really anything besides some mild chuckles.

That’s the best thing Twin Peaks offers as it nears the end of its original run - a few decent laughs. Some of them, like Gordon Cole’s bit or Andy and Dick’s interactions, are intentionally funny, while others, like the “passionate” dialogue between Cooper and John, are unintentionally so. Either way, there’s enough laughs to at least make this one mildly entertaining, even if the love stuff falls pretty flat all around.