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Twin Peaks Rewatch Episode 23: Slaves and Masters

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Twin Peaks Rewatch 23:

 

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Slaves and Masters

It's been a rough journey back through Twin Peaks recently, but we think we may have hit the roughest patch, with clearer skies to come. For now, we remain confounded—join us as we stumble through the highs and lows of "Slaves and Masters."

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Well here we are 23 episodes in. Last week was ... not good. How do we fare this week? Diane Keaton directed it!?

This is the 23rd episode, "Slaves and Masters." Known as episode 22 in the show's official numbering, DVDs, and Blu-Rays of course.

 

I remember this being my least favorite episode the last time through.  This time around I am skipping every single James scene so maybe that will improve it?

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When commenting on an episode a couple weeks back I mentioned that we had not yet reached what I thought was the show's lowest point.

This. This episode, for me, is Twin Peaks at it's absolute worst. Just...awful. What the hell is Diane Keaton (who, as an actress, I like quite a lot) doing with this episode? We've seen this on the show before. Directors trying, and failing, to out-Lynch Lynch, but it's never been taken to such ridiculous, self-indulgent extremes as it was here. Really amateurish, film student "look at me" stuff. Embarrassing to watch.

I would also argue that this episode, more than any other, ruins any potential that Windom Earle might have had. There's absolutely no way the viewer can ever find him threatening or scary after seeing him hop around in his underwear playing a flute like a demented imp.

There's one scene in an upcoming episode (maybe next week?) that's nearly as bad, but as a whole "Slaves And Masters" represents rock bottom for me. Things start looking up from here.

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Well here we are 23 episodes in. Last week was ... not good. How do we fare this week? Diane Keaton directed it!?

 

This'n ...also not good.  

 

Courage, gents: after the low point that is this and the previous episode, the series does start to course-correct.  Considering how dreadful these episodes are, it's astonishing how very fine some of the upcoming hours are.

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I enjoy Albert's Gordon Cole impression and his strong opinions about men's fashion. I also like the scene with Ed, Norma, and Nadine. (I actually enjoy Nadine's subplot in general, God help me.)

 

It's kinda funny that they're finally figuring out who shot Cooper. That feels like it happened a million years ago, show-wise.

 

I appreciated that Keaton was trying to bring her own feel to the show, but the attempts at visual style were executed so, so clumsily. When your actors are being blocked solely to get weird light patterns on their faces, even if that means standing in front of a projector for no reason, that's no good.

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I remember finding this episode surprisingly okay, although my expectations were of course so very low by this point. I'm interested to see how I find it the second time through.

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My favourite part was when they had a shot of the grieving widow walking up a stairs with an overlay shot of her own face from earlier in that scene. Powerful stuff.

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Hahahaha yeah seriously they loved those overlay shots with her wearing the veil. I think I counted four of them.

And man, way to utterly flop Wyndom Earle's introduction. They had built him up as this cold calculating genius, but instead we get a C-List batman villain hamming it up in his long johns and fake moustache. I suppose it was naive if me to expect another Bobland, calm and nonchalant but brimming with madness under the surface.

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Fun fact: the music playing during the Hideout Wallies scene with Donna and James is 'Dante Symphony - Inferno, the Gates of Hell' by Franz Liszt, and the singer is saying "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'intrate" ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.")

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I wish I had listened along week-by-week instead of jumping ahead. Perhaps I could've found some solace in this group watch. These are some shitty episodes. 

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I appreciated that Keaton was trying to bring her own feel to the show, but the attempts at visual style were executed so, so clumsily. When your actors are being blocked solely to get weird light patterns on their faces, even if that means standing in front of a projector for no reason, that's no good.

 

^This. I think the only times I haven't considered this the worst episode of the series is on rewatches when I was so exhausted by the sitcom-yness of the midseason that Keaton's empty bag of tricks at least felt like a welcome distraction. Other times, it just feels like doubling down on the nothing Twin Peaks has become.

 

At least this is the lowpoint. I am not a fan of the next episode - its attempt at "hey, remember..." comeback fall flat to me - but at least it begins to dig us out of the hole. I do like the one after that, despite something that rhymes with "mine diesel" and something else that rhymes with "silly pain".

 

I'm not rewatching the episodes at present (though I did rewatch many of these recently) but it's interesting to follow the reactions of those slogging through for the first time. Last year, when I got back into Twin Peaks in a big way and started to research and write/make videos about the show, I became more and more fascinated with the train wreck of the mid-second season. These episodes didn't seem much better to me than they did the first time but as I get used to them, the questions of "how did this happen?" and "how can this be part of the same show as ____?" and "where do things start to go wrong and start to improve again" came to the forefront. Somehow the mess began to make sense as part of the bigger picture, the flaws necessary in some cosmic way to balance out the strengths. Maybe it was just Stockholm Syndrome.

 

However, the very first time I watched the show I didn't even have that morbid curiosity. All I knew was that the Twin Peaks I had loved watching had been magically replaced with its evil doppelganger halfway through and I didn't know if or when it was going to end. The second time I watched the series, to write up an episode guide for my blog, I skipped everything between Leland's death and the finale!

 

So reading this despair brings back memories. I feel your pain. Ah, nostalgia...

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Let me repeat what has already been said multiple times in this thread: What an awful episode! It wasn't dull like some of the recent episodes have been, it was just actively bad to the point where it started to become fascinating. Who knew that James' faux-noir plot could get worse! Even though I've seen these episodes before, I was sure that last week was the end to that plot was really shocked when it returned in this episode, and somehow managed to have even less closer or meaning.

 

I was actually with the Wyndam Earle stuff before, but then this episode couldn't figure out what kind of villain they wanted him to be. Is he a calm, super detective? A raging wacko? A master of wearing the goofiest Luigi mustache disguise? Why would sending Caroline's wedding clothes to various police departments mean anything to Cooper? He and Caroline were not married and I find it really hard to believe that he would even recognize that clothing (imagine the woman you're having an affair with taking the time to show you all of her wedding stuff). It's something that I assume seemed cool and like what a deranged murderer would do, but it immediately falls apart when you start to think about it for longer than a few seconds.

 

What a massive train wreck of an episode. At least we got an Albert and Truman hug out of it.

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The thing about Windhom Earle is that as botched a job as they do setting up the character, I nonetheless like that he ends up being a mirror image of Dale Cooper, thus bringing to light that despite appearing to be a charming, eccentric FBI agent he is in fact also a psychopath.

 

So I actually like Ben Horne's pretending to be a civil war general sub-plot (which I'm sure is not the general consensus), but this episode handles his coming to his senses moment in the most clumsy manner possible, which is deeply unfortunate. But watching all these people around him poorly acting out this civil war fantasy is pretty satisfying, and I'd like to think the whole sequence is some metaphor dreamed up by one of the writers as meta-commentary on how off the rails the show had become by this point (but that's surely wishful thinking).

 

And on the topic of wishful thinking, I'm realizing now that the last time I watched the series I had all these kind of big ideas for what the show meant, but in my re-re-watching I think maybe a lot of the ideas aren't backed up by the evidence because I'm seeing a lot of stuff that contradicts the ideas I had. It reminds me of the first time I saw Battle Royale before it had any sort of official U.S. release and the bootleg translation was horrible, but that meant I was sort of free to imagine what was going on in the movie, but then when I saw it later with a better translation the actual movie was less exciting than the imagined version in my head. And I think something similar is happening to me now with the (3rd? 4th?) rewatch for Twin Peaks, and I am just starting to reach the conclusion that the show is worse than I thought it was. I mean obviously we're in the worst part of the show, but actually I think there are a lot of things that just don't hold up all that well. Bummer...

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For me, Twin Peaks lost its touch after Arbitrary Law, and never recovered until The Path to the Black Lodge. A lot of people I know consider this episode to be the worst out of "gap" episodes. I would have to agree. Diane Keaton overuses the - well, I'm not sure what you would call it - slow-mo-ish image fade crap. And she uses the same image of Evelyn if I'm not mistaken twice in this episode. She couldn't even manage to provide a different shot of Evelyn, which I'm sure would have completely driven the budget into the ground. It reminded me of Manos: The Hands of Fate, when the police officer pulls over the family, and the officer and father are both voiced by the same actor. Just... No.

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Whoops, I forgot to update the thread with the podcast episode information. Now it's updated!

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Me and my brother laughed for about half an hour when James bursted in and said "WHYDYOUDOIT!"

classic James

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A couple of highlights, I hope they're not too big

 

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I don't think Bobby hitting Audrey was intentional, she looks startled, haha

 

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What keeps me going through these episodes is imagining the writer who really loves James. The writer who felt the character was smothered by the setting of Twin Peaks and that he needed to go on the road to really flourish. And everybody else on the staff is so checked out by this point that they just let him write his dumb James stories. So he sits and he writes about an honest kid on the road just looking for his place in the world, with nothing to his name but his bike and a past he can't seem to leave behind.

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What keeps me going through these episodes is imagining the writer who really loves James. The writer who felt the character was smothered by the setting of Twin Peaks and that he needed to go on the road to really flourish. And everybody else on the staff is so checked out by this point that they just let him write his dumb James stories. So he sits and he writes about an honest kid on the road just looking for his place in the world, with nothing to his name but his bike and a past he can't seem to leave behind.

 

Nothing to his name? The guy's got 12$ in his bank account!

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Nothing to his name? The guy's got 12$ in his bank account!

 

Not anymore, someone took a van to deliver him his money to a roadside diner. The gas probably cost more than that.

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I wonder if there's some writer or director who really wanted to have do it with James through the bars so much that he was kept on the show long past his due date to gain favor with the guy.

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I'm a little behind but felt I had to sign up (yep, first post - hi all) to comment on this particular episode. I was really surprised to hear/read how everyone was so universally down on Diane Keaton's direction. Given the level of direction in the second season as a whole (read, mostly BAD), and the general quality of the script (read, treading water like its life depended on it) I thought that Slaves And Masters was one of the better episodes since the end of the main Laura Palmer arc.

For me there has always been two distinct sides to the Twin Peaks coin. On the one hand you have the weird Lynchian thriller that is season 1 and the main Laura Palmer murder mystery. Then you have the whole meta narrative on American TV that is more to do with the substance of the production than its actual content. It's this side that - for me - mostly fails because it never goes quite far enough (with only Lynch himself hitting the high points), and it is here that Keaton succeeds where others take a much more conservative approach. And yes, she does this by doing the things that everyone here is pointing and laughing at - packing every scene with overly self concious scene setting and over exaggerated character moments that constantly call your attention back to the production and the whole ridiculous artifice that the show has become.

I'm sure that the decision to take this approach was aided by seeing that the script was so damn weak (at this point in the show the plot is essentially a vacuum), but I think it's worth saying that given what she had to work with Keaton manages to generate interest where there was none and create content where there essentially wasn't any. It helps that to my eyes she is having a lot of fun! The show at this point is almost a parody of itself and taking itself far to seriously. In these terms Keaton's episode made me think of the brilliant Acorn Antiques - it's OTT-ness being its real joy. Although nowhere near the full blooded parody that Acorn Antiques is, Slaves And Masters does play as fast and loose with the cliché that Twin Peaks has become by this point in season 2 and is all the more refreshing as a result.

In a show that has increasingly become bereft of any real content Keaton does just what is needed - fills the episode with a multitude of visual gags, over-amped character beats, and direction that is more about highlighting the contradictions in the shows format rather than slavishly serving what there is(n't) of the plot. Granted, this is nowhere near up at the level of Lynch himself (Keaton doesn't do subtle) but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this episode overall, and given that much of that enjoyment was down to its direction how confused I was to then find out that no one else shared my delight in it!

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