Pete's chilling discovery heralds one of television's most famous murder mysteries; a genuinely original and peculiar series that captured the imagination of audiences in the early-'90s. A twisted, melodramatic soap/drama about an apparently innocuous community hiding a strange, often horrifying underbelly. Twin Peaks burned brightly in pop-culture from 1990-91 before its flame was extinguished, but its short-lived influence heralded a rise in US shows willing to take risks and play with the conventions of hour-long drama.The pilot/TV Movie (sometimes referred to as "Northern Passage"), is a 90-minute introduction to the titular township and its inhabitants. It certainly has its moments of eeriness, but plays surprisingly straight for a series with a reputation for bizarre sequences and dreamy strangeness.
After the discover of Laura Palmer's pallid body, dependable Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) is called to the scene and the terrible news spreads across the logging community like wildfire. Laura's mother Sarah (Piper Laurie) is perturbed by her daughter's disappearance, first calling Laura's boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) who doesn't answer, then her lawyer husband Leland (Ray Wise) at the Great Northern Hotel -- just as the police arrive to give Leland the tragic news. Sarah herself left dangling on the phone he drops in pure shock, half-sensing the tragic news being delivered to him.
Indeed, there's a curious feeling that permeates this episode that Laura's death wasn't totally unexpected (in some odd, liminal way), particularly from her best friend Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), who shares questioning glances with her boyfriend James Hurley (James Marshall) when she notices Laura's empty desk, moments before the police arrive to inform the teachers of a student's passing. Principal Wolchek makes a sonorous announcement that echoes around the school's empty halls, as the kids huddle together for support in their classrooms. Laura Palmer was more than a 17-year-old student whose life has been tragically cut short, she was a potent symbol of beauty and innocence for this close-knit community, and her passing has stirred big emotions...First episode are tough to crack, and certainly Twin Peaks is a trickier than most to acclimatize to as a viewer. You almost need to learn to "tune in" to its skewed signal. The discovery of a dead body is a simple crime drama tradition that helps pull you along, but for the first third we're neck-deep in a sea of new faces and families. We're also kept on the outside because we weren't acquainted with Laura Palmer before her death, so have no investment in her beyond a natural curiosity as armchair sleuths. Not that it really matters, because Laura is more a symbol than a human being.
The performances are also a little anomalous, however intentional that might be, but it's particularly noticeable whenever Angelo Badalamenti's synthetic score rises up to tweak our responses to what the actors are doing. David Lynch's work often places an emphasis on music and droning tones to bewitch, manipulate and unsettle his audience, and that's certainly the case here. You could redub Twin Peaks with different music and almost get an entirely different show.
Things noticeably perk up once FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) arrives in town after the first half-hour, clutching a Dictaphone he uses to laboriously recount his activities, expenses and thoughts to the unseen "Diane". When Cooper turns up, we instantly have someone to latch onto as a fellow outsider, and Twin Peaks begins to find shape with Cooper as the audience proxy. Here's someone orderly, meticulous and also new in town. Cooper's early investigation actually reaps unexpected early reward, as his unusual demeanour hides a razor-sharp intellect, a boyish inquisitiveness (he's very keen to know what species of tree the town's surrounded by) and an aptitude for judging human behaviour.
He's just the man for the job, and it's not long before he's making progress interviewing prime suspects and finding clues: Laura's locked diary containing a final entry about meeting "J"; a key to a deposit box containing $10,000 and an issue of Flesh World magazine containing a photo of Ronette Pulanski (Phoebe Augustine), a teenage girl found walking across a railway bridge in dirty, tattered clothes (apparently a survivor of whomever killed Laura); a camcorder showing Laura and Donna together, with the mystery cameraman's motorbike reflected in Laura's pupil; the discovery of the murder scene in an old railcar containing a pile of soil, half a gold-heart necklace and a scrap of paper marked "FIRE WALK WITH ME"; and a letter "R" that Cooper tweezers out from under Laura's fingernail as evidence that they're dealing with a serial-killer who previous murdered an out-of-town girl called Theresa Banks. For a series often opaque with mystery, it's surprising that we get so many clues and progression in the second half of the very first episode!Twin Peaks is aptly named; not just for the locale's iconic mountains that adorn the town's welcome board, but for the duo that created the series. Mark Frost, a realistic responsible for Hill Street Blues, whose writing is imbued with pragmatism and expertise when it comes to devising police procedurals... and David Lynch, the cinematic auteur behind Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, blessed with a gift for painting nightmares through his strange collisions of image and sound.
These two creative peaks reached real highs back in 1990, which we'll ascend again here. I hope you'll join me. But, please remember, be careful when discussing these episodes in retrospect and don't post spoilers for episodes to come. Try and focus on the episode and preceding ones. Comments that don't stick to obvious common sense rules will be deleted...
Notes from the Black Lodge:
- This pilot was released in Europe as a television movie, marketed as a satirical spoof of American melodrama. Bizarrely, the European edit has a different ending where Agent Cooper solves the case! Scenes from that ending are used in episode 3 of the commissioned ABC series. Interestingly, this isn't the only time David Lynch has been asked to condense a serialized idea into a one-off movie, as the same fate befell Mulholland Dr. (planned as a return to TV drama, before the story was reduced into a feature and released cinematically to great acclaim.)
- It's fun to spot the famous faces in Twin Peaks (RoboCop's Ray Wise, Carrie's Piper Laurie), but it's just as fascinating 19 years later to spot actors who became famous as a consequence of this series: Kyle MacLachlan's now familiar to audiences of Sex & The City and Desperate Housewives, having finally escaped Twin Peaks' shadow; Mädchen Amick's career didn't skyrocket, but she's worked steadily since (recently appearing in the short-lived My Own Worst Enemy); Men In Black II's villain Lara Flynn Boyle is almost unrecognizable as fresh-faced waitress Donna; and I'm sure Stargate SG1 fans will spot the late Don Davis. It's also a little sad to be reminded how some actors failed to catapult themselves to stardom off the back of Twin Peaks, most notably Sherilyn Fenn.
Next: The series itself begins with "Traces To Nowhere", where waitress Shelly discovers some incriminating evidence...
written by: Mark Frost & David Lynch directed by: David Lynch starring: Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Dale Cooper), Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Harry S. Truman), Ray Wise (Leland Palmer), Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer), Mary Jo Deschanel (Eileen Hayward), Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer), Lara Flynn Boyle (Donna Hayward), Joan Chen (Josie Packard), Piper Laurie (Catherine Martell), Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs), James Marshall (James Hurley), Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick), Russ Tamblyn (Dr. Lawrence Jacoby), Pete Martell (Jack Nance), Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis), Everett McGill (Big Ed Hurley), Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley), Richard Beymer (Benjamin Horne), Eric Da Re (Leo Johnson) / original airdate: 8 April 1990
