Twin Peaks: Episode 1 - Traces to Nowhere   First Watch 
April 5, 2017 2:41 PM - Season 1, Episode 2 - Subscribe

Special Agent Dale Cooper has a damn fine cup of a coffee and not so fine cup of coffee.

James gets interrogated. Dr. Jacoby has something hidden in his coconut and Sarah Palmer has a frightening vision.


(We're watching MWF and the weekend.)
posted by Ruki (5 comments total)
 
Kid was way more into this episode than the Pilot because it was shorter. The fish in the percolator scene got big laughs. Kid no longer thinks James killed Laura Palmer, but is still convinced Audrey did it. I told Kid I'd be asking them "Who killed Laura Palmer" after each episode until the reveal.

Bobby continues to make me deeply uncomfortable, even more so than Leo Johnson. Leo is an evil I know with his abuse of Shelly, but Bobby makes me skin crawl.

(Two weeks ago, I found out that Peggy Lipton and my late MIL are second cousins. Peggy Lipton, Rashida Jones, my MIL, and my kid all have the same chin. It's kinda trippy.)
posted by Ruki at 2:52 PM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


Bobby makes you uncomfortable, for me it's Dr. Jacoby. Professional boundaries at all, Doc?
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:02 PM on April 5, 2017


Professional boundaries are not something that any of the characters on this show are especially good at.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 4:08 PM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


C'mon, not even Sheriff Truman?
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:13 PM on April 6, 2017


This episode abandons the straightforward progression of time (didn't take long, huh?) by allowing the audience to experience Laura as James did during his flashback, at her most innocent and angelic.

My notes say "lots of jewelry in this episode," but the only two pieces I can recall off the top of my head are Agent Cooper's ring and Laura's locket. Maybe Audrey had something? I don't know. I've never been a jewelry dude, so I don't know if it's actually important or if everyone wearing jewelry is an adult-in-the-early-90s thing.

Ruki, Bobby to me is not nearly as scary as Leo so far. Bobby is so clearly a child trying on bad-boy clothes (witness his father literally slapping a cigarette out of his mouth), while Leo is missing something that everyone else we've seen so far has. This missing-ness makes him stand out from the rest of the suspicious townspeople and is related to the first type of violence I noted in the pilot, the wasteful, puzzling kind. Television shies away from this violence, for the most part, and this is probably why there aren't too many characters like Leo played seriously in modern programming; compelling villains in the twenty-odd-years since Twin Peaks have been charming, amoral, artistic, ambitious, and interesting. Leo so far is a garden-variety blue-collar sociopath of the kind that everyone knows and wishes they didn't.

Leo Johnson's actor, Eric Da Re, plays the role with such a shallow affect that he sometimes comes off as poorly skilled, but the material he's given in this episode is so meaty it's hard to screw up. That caress before Shelley leaves for work, the bestial anger at the missing shirt, and the unfocused, practiced, casual turning up of the radio before he beats his wife with a bar of soap in a sock... ugh ugh ugh. Shelley protecting her face is the image from this episode that stays with me.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:15 PM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


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