Twin Peaks: Miss   Rewatch 
November 25, 2014 5:48 PM - Season 2, Episode 21 - Subscribe

The Major escapes Earle's clutches, possibly at the cost of his sanity. The final puzzle box is opened, revealing a key. Cooper and Andy manage to crack the secret of the cave painting. Ritual fertility dances are performed, and the queen is crowned.

Scheduling: There's just one more episode left! Since the finale would fall on Thanksgiving under our normal Tues/Thurs schedule, we're taking a well-deserved day off. The original series finale, "Beyond Life and Death" will be posted on BLACK LODGE FRIDAY, Nov. 28th. As always, 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, Slaves and Masters, The Condemned Woman, Wounds and Scars, On the Wings of Love, Variations on Relations, The Path to the Black Lodge

BONUS STUFF: Artist Emma Munger draws pin-up tattoo images inspired by the lovely ladies of Twin Peaks. Yes, that includes the Log Lady.
posted by Strange Interlude (6 comments total)
 
Uh oh, looks like the posting doohickey chopped off the "Twin Peaks" part of the "Miss Twin Peaks" episode title. Mods, if it isn't too much trouble, could you correct that from the back end? If not, no biggie. Thanks!
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:52 PM on November 25, 2014


Oh man, that Log Lady costume!
posted by codacorolla at 8:02 PM on November 25, 2014


I don't know what to say about this episode. I never cared about the contest, and half of the plot points seem to be based around it, including the protracted "steal it with sex" storyline.

That being said, Wyndam Earl briefly actually becomes scary in this episode, and I sort of wish his whole "master of disguise" gimmick had been as good as the horse and the Log Lady.

I do love the final episode, though.
posted by maxsparber at 12:27 PM on November 26, 2014


Agreed, the whole thing does come off as sort of a filler episode (or perhaps more charitably, a palate-cleansing sorbet) but it does put the pieces in place for the finale. I do wish it had been a somewhat more satisfying capper to the Lana Budding storyline, since she hadn't really shown a dark side up until this point. Other than that, nothing that happens here is any particular sort of revelation about the characters, other than that Kimmy Robertson/Lucy is a pretty good dancer (never mind whether a pregnant woman would willingly do those splits and kneeslides...) and Audrey could have had a fantastic career in public relations. I still don't comprehend how Annie won the thing, because 20-some years later her supposedly deep, impassioned speech still sounds like pretentious high-school forensics blather, which isn't helped by Heather Graham's monotone line readings. I'd kind of hoped that this rewatch might change my mind about Annie as a character, but I'm still mostly unmoved.

Earle's entrance at the beginning of the episode was actually rather unsettling in HD when I noticed his red eyes and black teeth, as though the influence of the Black Lodge was already working on him from a distance. Too bad the easily-escapable box-o'-spiders trap he set for Leo was kind of a ridiculous bust, tension-wise. I'd also remembered Earle's Log Lady disguise as being somewhat sillier-looking than what actually appeared in the episode. Coupled with the lighting effects, his kidnapping of Annie is actually a pretty effective nightmare image in a show that's started to run slightly short of them over the last few episodes. (That said, I wonder if the heavy strobes would even be showable on television, in our post-Pokemon-seizure present.)

Crackpot theory of the random time interval: The Miss Twin Peaks pageant can be seen as a partial recapitulation of the triple goddess archetype. Lucy is the Mother, Lana is the Maiden, and Earle's onstage appearance as the Log Lady is the Crone. Discuss!
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:26 PM on November 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


Too bad the easily-escapable box-o'-spiders trap he set for Leo was kind of a ridiculous bust, tension-wise

It pays off in the final episode.
posted by maxsparber at 5:29 PM on November 28, 2014


The strobing scene at the end is astoundingly scary, and a bucket of cold water to the face after all the silliness of the beauty pageant.
posted by trunk muffins at 7:33 PM on April 6, 2015


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