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Twin Peaks Rewatch 7: Realization Time

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Twin Peaks Rewatch 7:

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Realization Time

This week on our weekly examination of Twin Peaks, it seems like half the cast is heading north of the border without telling each other, at least two people are wearing disguises, and everything has gone very noir. It's time for the penultimate episode of season one, as Twin Peaks' uncountable plot threads all line themselves up for the finale, and we sort through them with your help.

Catching up? Listen to the Rewatch archive.

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I forgot if these threads are not supposed to include spoilers for the episode coming up or not, so I will mark them, also my spoiler includes some of episode 8, because I couldn't stop watching after 7!

Maybe I need to watch this again, but Leo getting shot is kind of bizarre. Like it's not clear to me where he was shot or how bad he was hurt and he seems oddly fine in episode 8, enough to wreak more havok. It feels like there's some major scenes missing that I would have liked to see.

 

Also I think Madchen Amick's performance is my favorite on the show.

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I don't understand why Leo just rushes off from his house immediately to go assassinate Waldo when he hears Lucy mention the bird on the police scanner, since, apparently, he doesn't take his shot until that night. He had plenty of time to kill Bobby first.

That random guy who Audrey sends out to see the "accident that sounds like a bus"--you'd think he would come back and be like 'what the hell' after he sees there is no such accident.

If you pause and read Mr. Battis' day-timer when Audrey's holding it you can see on the last page "Ronette" gets a 4 heart rating and last worked One-Eyed Jacks on 2/3/90. Isn't it still supposed to be 1989 on this show, since Laura was killed February 23, 1989 right?


When Audrey slips the note under Cooper's door before she starts out for Jacks, she meets eyes with an Asian man checking in to a room right down the hall and the music plays an ominous tone for a moment.

At first, this would make him an early possible suspect for the audience in Cooper's subsequent shooting. This Asian man is *not* the "Cousin Jonathan/Mr. Lee" character who appears at Josie's side later either. But a bit later on, this same character appears at "Mr. Tojamura's" side when "he" is having a business meeting with Ben Horne. Knowing that Tojamura is actually Catherine Martell in disguise, this can only mean that she had this whole scheme involving a bank in Osaka planned out and was already setting it up before she even used the fire to stage her disappearance, which only happened because Ben told Josie where to steal the ledger from, which Catherine only discovered when the hardworking insurance agent Mr. Neff accidentally spilled the beans on the insurance scheme Josie and Ben were running against Cathy, which Hank then used to bait her to go to the mill for the fire. So she was planning to play a con yellowface drag the entire time? Why else would that same character already be checking into the hotel in town?


In this episode, there's a moment where Ben seems to get annoyed with Jerry for telling the Icelanders about One-Eyed Jacks, yet in the previous episode he himself had suggested to Jerry that maybe a trip to you know where, and he covers one eye, would help butter them up.


Isn't it weird that a prostitute needs a "prostitution resume" to work at a brothel? I thought all you needed was decent looks and being willing to sleep with random paying strangers. Also Blackie has her sign some kind of contract. Is that supposed to be enforceable in court?


Does Dr. Jacoby practice out of his own home? Or could James, Donna and Maddy have just waited until he left the office to go home instead of concocting a ridiculous;y complicated scheme that kind of crosses a line.


You have to wonder what Bobby is thinking when he sees James and Donna fooling around with a girl who looks exactly like his dead girlfriend Laura. But he doesn't seem to give it a second thought.

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Isn't it weird that a prostitute needs a "prostitution resume" to work at a brothel? I thought all you needed was decent looks and being willing to sleep with random paying strangers. Also Blackie has her sign some kind of contract. Is that supposed to be enforceable in court?

Prostitution is a super exclusive business, you've really gotta know somebody! Especially in a place like Twin Peaks.

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I think that was meant to be Blackie's way of catching out Audrey as a high school girl rather than an adult who'd been working for years.

On that, is this the original example of the tying a cherry stem in a knot with your tongue as a sexy maneuver? I feel like it's come up in TV from this era a few times but I wasn't present in that time to know it very well.

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The fact that Leo actually goes out of his way to kill the myna bird via rifle is one of the most absurd points in the show...and I love it so much. I mean *snort* no bird would be able to stand up to the stresses of cross-examination. An even better plot line would have been Leo threatening the myna's wife if her husband didn't keep his mouth shut.

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Also I love when Jacqueas Renault is finally revealed on screen we get a schlubby american looking guy instead of a suave French criminal to match the exotic name. 

 

Actually according to wikipedia he was also back in episode 4, did I just miss him then or was that a not full appearance?

 

EDIT: See below for an explanation on why this post is entirely wrong.

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Wasn't Jacques in the pilot episode as well? When Hank tries to defend Donna from Bobby and Mike, but immediately collapses, he blames Jacques Renault for slipping something into his beer.

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As far as I remember he was often referenced but I just don't remember seeing him on screen and knowing in my brain that it was him. IMDB doesn't list him as being in the pilot, (unless there's a weird separate pilot page I can't find) so I think he was just meant to be existing off camera for that episode at least.

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We see him getting freaked out by the red light at the outside of the bar and then calling Leo before seeing him in the casino. Or was that his brother?

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I really like Josie's (Joan Chen's) performance with Harry. It's very convincing, with an added layer of uncertainty about whether she is also 'acting' within the story. The meta-soap opera melodramatics are great.

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We see him getting freaked out by the red light at the outside of the bar and then calling Leo before seeing him in the casino. Or was that his brother?

 

This is 100% accurate, I think my brain just skimmed that appearance and assumed he was some minor character because he's on screen Super Briefly and (despite having seen it before) I was half expecting a french caricature.

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Minor point: the store manager's notebook stood out to me. The last page (with Ronette's name) has a slightly different handwriting style, and a very different heart style to the previous pages. The writing also strikes me as being in a more feminine style. I wonder if that was deliberate or just a quirk of the production. I can't imagine the notebook is delegated to a secretary or passed back and forth with Black Rose herself, or why the style would change.

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Minor point: the store manager's notebook stood out to me. The last page (with Ronette's name) has a slightly different handwriting style, and a very different heart style to the previous pages. The writing also strikes me as being in a more feminine style. I wonder if that was deliberate or just a quirk of the production. I can't imagine the notebook is delegated to a secretary or passed back and forth with Black Rose herself, or why the style would change.

Oh man I forgot to mention the notebook in the episode! Oops. The handwriting didnt stick out to me but I really liked the presence of the notebook at all, as a Clue Object.

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Just one note, David Fincher directed the first two episodes of House of Cards. I am not sure if it was ever pitched as a series created by him even though he is well known and because of him most of the actors who are on the show made it. But from all of my reading about it, Fincher was more employed to set a style guide and show pacing for the show rather than the show being his baby. However because the style pretty much is supposed to follow his work on the first two episodes, maybe that's why the show is continually being attributed to him despite him not having much to do with the rest of season 1 and all of season 2. I also pretty much doubt Fincher is going to return to direct any other episodes.

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Just one note, David Fincher directed the first two episodes of House of Cards. I am not sure if it was ever pitched as a series created by him even though he is well known and because of him most of the actors who are on the show made it. But from all of my reading about it, Fincher was more employed to set a style guide and show pacing for the show rather than the show being his baby. However because the style pretty much is supposed to follow his work on the first two episodes, maybe that's why the show is continually being attributed to him despite him not having much to do with the rest of season 1 and all of season 2. I also pretty much doubt Fincher is going to return to direct any other episodes.

 

House of Cards is awesome. I didn't know that about David Fincher. It's an interesting analog.

 

I love how the new House of Cards (US) twists the old one (UK). Even going so far as to:

 

Kill off the character of Zoe Barnes in the first episode of season 2. She was killed off in the last episode of season 01 in the UK version. So, you think that she made it for another season. She is even in the credits prominently for season 2. I think this was done intentionally. It was in that episode that Frank Underwood puts down his cufflinks and they read F U. As in, Fuck You she didn't make it.

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Wait, did Bobby sabotage James's bike, or did he just plant cocaine on it? I wasn't paying close attention, but I thought that's what happened.

 

Spoiler content discussion:

 

Personally it doesn't really matter to me how far out the writers had figured out the plot of Twin Peaks or whether or not it was intentional when they wrote the opening scene for this episode. Taking the show as a self-contained aesthetic object, and knowing how the show concludes, this is a pretty damn significant moment. People that get deep into Twin Peaks lore can go on and on about psychic and otherworldly worlds and connections in pointing to Agent Cooper succumbing to the forces of evil, but this points to a much more material, non-fantastical explanation as well.

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Yeah, I think you're right about the cocaine.

 

Also on the spoiler content for this episode:

 

During the fire range scene a few episodes back, Truman asks Cooper if he's ever been married. Cooper then refers to a woman he loved once who is now dead. That reads as further seeding for the later Wyndam Earl plot, or at least seeding for Cooper to have some kind of past that comes out in Twin Peaks.

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Tune in next time for The Bookhouse Boys and the Mystery of the Whittled Whistle!

 

Wait, did Bobby sabotage James's bike, or did he just plant cocaine on it? I wasn't paying close attention, but I thought that's what happened.

 

I think it's kept deliberately vague, but you'll know for certain next episode.

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Listening to the episode and the discussion about Audrey and the cherry stem was really interesting to me because I think the scene works in two ways - it obviously (as Jake and Chris postulated) seems like a trick she practised but it had a deeper and more sad implication to me given the circumstances surrounding where One Eyed Jack's hires from. It is a trick that gets brought up quite a bit as a colloquial trick that women, if they can do it, are obviously not only experienced but valuable. It feels like Audrey would learn something like that without realizing what that skill might actually deeply imply and has a lot of the air of her being a real high school girl - constantly and dangerously sexualized but not quite grasping what that entails. Her experience with OEJ in general is her realizing that. 

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Twin peaks is full of reflections, most of them twisted. The one I just picked up on this one while listening to the podcast is between the book house and one eyed jacks. They are the respective club houses for our good characters and our bad. They even have face related gestures and logos associated with them. 

 

Side note, I wonder if there is significance in the fact that our negative side of the coin is a half blind man, which could be a statement about evil or desire depending on your flavor of dogma. While the other is pointing to what looks like a teardrop, it could be commenting on those that are open to their emotional self or maybe the ability to feel pity. 
 
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one-eyed-jacks.jpg
 

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Re: moonchat in the podcast. Both the full moon in the previous episode and the waxing half moon in this episode are wrong. The correct phase of the moon for the night of March 1st 1989 would have been a waning half moon. Furthermore, the moon didn't rise that night until 4 am, but cooper says that "the night is young."

 

Clearly this flagrant disregard for continuity has forever tainted the show, and what was once brilliant has now become unwatchable.

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Isn't it weird that a prostitute needs a "prostitution resume" to work at a brothel? I thought all you needed was decent looks and being willing to sleep with random paying strangers. Also Blackie has her sign some kind of contract. Is that supposed to be enforceable in court?

 

The way I imagined that scene going down is that Audrey shows up at One Eyed Jack's and Blackie is about to give the standard "OK, here's how this works" speech she gives to all the wide-eyed innocent perfume-counter newbies when Audrey, not knowing what's up, hands her that crazy resume.  Which gets her hackles up (not least because of the condescending Hester Prynne bit) and so she gives Audrey the run-around.

 

She's not really impressed by the silly cherry stem trick, that's just where she decides, OK, whatever, send her on back there with the other girls.

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