2x17 Wounds and Scars

[3.4/10] Here’s the weird thing about Twin Peaks for me. I feel like, after twenty-five episodes, I pretty fully understand why it’s bad. (What is still a mystery, granted, is why people not only thought it was good, but so good.) It’s easy to point to the terrible dialogue, the convoluted plotting, the awful performances, and oh man that ridiculous music that sucks the ability to take the show even slightly seriously.

But then, the show will do something different, show a performer in a different light, and I start to question my diagnosis of the pathology. Sometimes, that’s good. Take Shelly for instance. Shelly has basically been a human prop on the show. She’s there for Leo to abuse, Bobby to fawn over then ignore, and occasionally do something sexy. The show’s never really developed the character beyond that, and so she pretty squarely falls into the unfortunate “sexy lamp” category.

But for literally 15-20 seconds, Mädchen Amick shows that she has at least a modicum of talent and personality. Her little routine pretending to do a Q&A session for a beauty pageant has her doing amusing character voices, creative facial impressions, and overall just seeming like she’s a person and not a prop. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s more than Shelly usually gets to do and it makes me wonder if someone I’d written off as a mediocre actress on the show just wasn’t getting material commensurate with or at least well-suited to what she can do.

The flipside of that is Michael Ontkean as Sheriff Truman. For the most part, I’ve found Truman to serviceable at worst. He spits out his fair share of the show’s bad lines, but he’s one of the more normal seeming people in Twin Peaks (not much of an achievement) and he’s one of the few performers on the show who generally delivers a believable, not overly exaggerated performance. It’s not exactly naturalism, and sometimes it tends toward the bland, but Truman seems like a regular enough guy which is what you’d expect for the sheriff of a small northwestern town.

But then you hit an episode like “Wounds and Scars” where, rather than playing the strait-laced lawman, Ontkean has to yell and weep and be an emotional wreck and god help him, he’s just not up to it. Again, the script doesn’t do him any favors, making him a generic mourner spouting the usual clichés. But when he’s supposed to be angry or suicidal or just despondent, the emotions feel insincere.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I was never invested in Josey as a character, so maybe it would mean more if the loss of her was something I really cared about, but still. It’s a sign that every performer has their strengths and weaknesses, and maybe there’s a version of Twin Peaks that asks different things of its actors: allows Shelly to have more personality, lets Truman remain the even-keeled normal dude, doesn’t try to hang so much on the emotional turmoil of James “I’ve never felt an actual feeling” Hurley.

One of the show’s strongest performers has always been Audrey, and Billy Zane isn’t bad either, which is why what should be another bog standard banality of a story -- young rich guy swoops in to save a local business and falls in love with the daughter of the business owner -- feels more vibrant than most of what “Wounds and Scars” churns out. Audrey and Zane’s character have chemistry, and it plays on Audrey’s sense of feeling lost and not understood in a nice way. There’s still as much cheese in their plot as anyone’s (and there’s an Attack of the Clones vibe to their picnic, of all things), but the talents of the performers make it work better than it has any right to.

What doesn’t work is the entire rigamarol around the charity fashion show. My lord, that scene just stretches on and on into eternity, jumping from dull story to dull story. Ben Horn and Catherine Martell taunting and being lusty with one another hasn’t been interesting for a long time, and it’s just interminable here. By the same token, I was naive enough to think the show had actually minimized Andy, Lucy, and Dick. But here they are doing a sub-Full House level comedy routine about a lumberjack fashion show and Dick getting bit on the nose with a weasel. It’s the broadest of broad shlock and just a bear of a scene to get through.

Windom Earle is also back to playing master of disguise. He’s such a bond villain type that I can’t really be invested in his story. I’ll admit, there was some juice to him pretending to be one of Donna’s dad’s old friends from medical school, and a bit from him seeming to sense Cooper’s presence, but for the most part it’s just cornball monologues and groaners.

Speaking of Cooper’s presence, we see him lock eyes with Heather Graham! She had to be super young here, right? Mrs. Bloom tells me that people hate her character, but thus far she’s unobjectionable, if a bit wooden in her delivery. Though again, like I’ve been saying, that’s not unusual for this show, and the lines the script feeds are no great shakes.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual on Twin Peaks. We get some hint at the supernatural stuff with Major Briggs and the Log Lady revealing that they have similar scars from similar white light encounters. Ed gets Dr. Jacoby to try to get him help explain divorce to Nadine but she’s still deluded. (Her “I think I’ve gone blind in my left eye” line is a big laugh, I’ll admit.) And Pete is freaking out trying to figure out the right stalemate moves for a game of chess in the world’s most belabored ongoing metaphor.

None of it’s terribly compelling, and none of it is especially well done, but as scenes like Shelly’s and Truman’s show us, there’s an alternate world where this show could have been much better, or, god help us, much much worse.