Twin Peaks: Slaves and Masters Rewatch

November 4, 2014 6:35 PM - Season 2, Episode 15

Cooper stumbles upon a clue to the identity of his shooter, and Jacoby and the Hornes find a cure for Ben's Confederate neurosis. Norma and Ed finally get back together after 20 years apart, and Leo finds himself the unwitting prisoner of Windom Earle. Meanwhile, the James/Evelyn Marsh subplot finally concludes, this time for real.

Scheduling: new episodes posted every Tuesday and Thursday. Both re-watchers and new viewers are welcome.

Watching: available for streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and for free on Hulu and CBS's site.

Previous Episode Threads:
Season One: Pilot, Traces to Nowhere, Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer, Rest in Pain, The One-armed Man, Cooper's Dreams, Realization Time, The Last Evening

Season Two: May the Giant Be With You, Coma, The Man Behind Glass, Laura's Secret Diary, The Orchid's Curse, Demons, Lonely Souls, Drive With a Dead Girl, Arbitrary Law, Dispute Between Brothers, Masked Ball, The Black Widow, Checkmate, Double Play

BONUS STUFF: 25 years later, Dale Cooper teams up with a who's who of present-day TV detectives to solve the mysteries of Twin Peaks once and for all.

posted by Strange Interlude (2 comments total)

Directed by Diane Keaton, and very strangely directed too. She takes something from earlier episodes -- that there always seem to be conventions going on in the background -- and turns them into groups of nearly identical dopplegangers all doing exactly the same thing at the same moment.

I think Keaton could have added a lot to the show, at least in terms of visual motifs, had she continued to direct. I'm not sure she was completely simpatico with the show's sensibilities, but I don't know that it mattered either at this point. After Laura Palmer's reveal, it might have been interesting to turn the show over to directors who would provide their own version of Twin Peaks, the way multiple writers have offered their versions of the Cthulhu mythos. It's definately the episode where the direction is the most interesting, but for the ones directed by Lynch himself.
posted by maxsparber at 9:07 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Good thoughts on Keaton's direction here; I was struck by the way she kept framing things inside of windows or door frames, and then partially obstructing them, e.g. the swinging door at the Martell house, and the half-muffled conversation behind the Sheriff's station door. You could tell that Keaton was trying to make the most of a limited budget by reusing set elements in different ways, like Norma cleaning the diner's giant plastic ice cream cone during her scene with Shelly. It all felt of a piece with the Lynch episodes without necessarily aping his style directly; the only elements that I thought were pure Lynch were the abstract close-ups of the chess board at the beginning, and then the eerie slo-mo during the Evelyn and Malcolm scene. I think if the show had lasted into a third season, the Keaton episode might have become a touchstone for other guest directors, in the same way that Rian Johnson and Michelle McLaren's episodes of Breaking Bad always helped set a tone for the ones following.

The revelation of the "Who Shot Agent Cooper" mystery feels like it came about eight episodes late, since it would have lit an actual fire under the Josie storyline instead of all this dithering around prior to Eckhardt's appearance. The offscreen murder (Headline: ASIAN MAN KILLED) of Josie's "cousin"/lover/whatever basically underscores how inessential he was to her storyline, and how much tighter it would have been to just have Eckhardt making his presence known earlier in the season.

I'd forgotten about the "master-of-disguise" quirk they gave to Windom Earle. I guess they must have gotten some great network notes back following Catherine's Tojimura ruse, and sunk the budget into even more unconvincing crepe-hair mustaches and wigs.

I'd also forgotten that the James/Evelyn plotline dragged on for a whole other episode before its conclusion. I can actually sense James Marshall's impatience with the whole thing in this episode; watch how he doesn't even get all the way through Evelyn's front door before spitting out his lines ("Why'dyadoit?!?"), almost as though he's trying to get the scene out of the way as quickly as humanly possible. For what it's worth, Marshall's on record as not being a fan of this plotline, either.
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:52 PM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]