Welcome Guest | Login or Register

About a year ago, I acquired a bootleg copy of the pilot. It came at a time when my interest in Lynch wasn’t so big, so I kind of sidelined it until my next kick. When that kick came, I noticed that I had become too picky about quality, and a VHS-quality bootleg seemed about as attractive as watching Godard’s shitty political movies of the 70s.

But now we have the Twin Peaks Gold Box, the definitive document of the series. It includes both of the major versions of the pilot. I have only watched the US pilot, but I will consider giving the international pilot (which includes a patched on ending to the mystery, using new footage). Video quality of the Gold Box is pristine compared to the previous two DVD releases. It upscales to HD resolutions flawlessly, and the recoloring makes the show look recent, and not in a fakey way. The only thing the set is missing is the movie. And some commentaries from season two, but does anyone want those that much, anyway?

I think there is something of a Blade Runner original cut vs. director’s cut thing going on with Twin Peaks. Previously, I watched it without the pilot. I had to swim without witnessing the events that the whole rest of the story revolves around. Watching it with the pilot, finally, is both a revelation, and something of a disappointment. Give me two paragraphs to sell you on this one.

It’s a revelation in that I’m seeing this new (to me!) footage for the first time ever. I am finally getting the rest of the story. Finally I can see how some of these tertiary characters are linked to the mystery. And it’s not just a getting to see the rest of the story thing; the pilot is also potentially the best episode. Shot by Lynch himself, a good argument can probably be made that places the Twin Peaks pilot highly in his pantheon of masterpieces. It’s shot like a Lynch film. It’s got that great Lynchian detached acting going on. It’s got that Lynch signature blend of realism and surrealism, a decadent mix. It’s basically Blue Velvet without Dennis Hopper, focusing instead on the human side of the story rather than the lunacy. That comes later.

The pilot is also something of a disappointment. Similar to how the lack of window dressing exposition made the original cut of Blade Runner a bullet train to snoresville, conclusively knowing these key events definitively kind of makes me appreciate that I had to work to figure things out for myself on my original viewing. Call it a media take on Hemmingway’s iceberg theory, but not knowing the humungadunga important part of the story made me do a bit of detective work on my own, and personally, I think my journey of swimming to piece things together was much more rewarding than just watching the pilot. It’s kind of like watching a great TV show and predicting the big plot reveal in the last episode. Except backwards. People say vaguely similar things about the movie, Fire Walk With Me. Seeing the events that we’d speculated on, only seen described, vague visual flashes at most, seeing the preceding events definitively kind of waters down the Special Goodness we had previously built up around the show.

But hey, can’t really blame Lynch because I watched the show out of order, and my own personal TP sequence just happens to be better than the official. And any hatin’ I do feel in my heart is set to rest by the sheer quality of the episode. It’s good stuff! It’s good to have one last TP burst of goodness, and it’s interesting that the burst just happens to be the first episode.

If there’s one take away from this post, it’s that the Gold Box is something any discriminating media consumer needs to own. After like 15 years of not getting the treatment it deserves, the show’s finally getting an excellent release. As for Fire Walk With Me, it would certainly be nice if Lynch cleaned that up and gave it a new DVD release. It would be even nicer if he got the mythical “lost footage” and tried to cap off this portion of his career in the best way possible. Unfortunately, due to how that movie was originally received, I don’t think it is likely that David wishes to revisit it. Fingers crossed, though!

Addendum: Possibly something that may warrant investigation in a later post, but I am kind of surprised by some of the cinematography in the series; even in the episodes that Lynch didn’t direct. What’s spurring this current, immediate comment is the realization that there are several instances of shots (some of them consistent shots that recur in multiple episodes) that show a rather blatant influence from German expressionism. Unsurprisingly, these shots tend to be used in creepy moments, and shock shots. However, in some cases they are used for atmospheric merit. Maybe I will snap a screenshot later, but there is a recurring shot of the staircase in the Palmer home that is bleeding German expressionism, from the angle of the shot, to the use of shadow, and even to the shot being lit so that it is nearly in sepia tone. Nice, nice touches.

Also, the score still blows my mind. Even as a current classical music snob.

The second and third seasons are definitely the best, though there are great (and classic) episodes sprinkled throughout all six seasons. At some point during season four, it seems like the show started to rely on more weird and flat-out comedy or silly episodes than it did in the first three. The first three are pretty much all horror with the odd black comedy or blatant comedy thrown in, and the latter half of the show reverses that formula, I’d say. It’s a sort of subtle shift, as in you don’t notice it as it’s happening, but it’s pretty blatant when you compare, say, an average season two ep to an average season five ep.

There are problems with the show, when you look at it all. The show has a tendency to reuse plotlines, changing up the formula, of course, but still variations on themes. For example, there are at least four episodes among the six seasons (which is about 70 episodes) that use an evil twin formula of some variety or another. There are at least two episodes that use a genderbending plot. And I’m not saying these are ELEMENTS of an episode’s plot, I am saying they are the ENTIRETY of the episodes’ big plot twists. That’s six episodes, without putting much thought into it, that have the exact same twist. Almost a tenth of all the episodes, excluding season seven. There are also at least three episodes that have OMG HE/SHE/THEY WERE SECRETLY VAMPIRES plots where the ending twist is, indeed, that someone was secretly a vampire the entire episode. They do it with werewolves. . .once or twice, depending on if you count one particular episode. It’s close enough for me.

There are also a handful of terrible episodes, or episodes that try to portray a plot that is either totally lame or with elements that are just a bit too much. You can’t blame a show that was on for seven seasons for having some terrible episodes. For what it’s worth, there are only two or three episodes that I would cast with the ultimate insult of being too boring. At least the show was always explicit, even when it wasn’t great.

For all the mentioned shortcomings, it’s probabl hard to not like a good portion, probably even the majority, of the series. All the episodes are based off legitimate EC comics from back in the day, so they had a limited pool of ideas to work off of. To make it worse, they were modernizing and reheating ideas from approximately 30-40 years before the series was made, in a time when there were no back issues, trade paperbacks, or DVD collections. Of course a monthly anthology from then could reuse ideas as much as it would like, and since they were building their fan bases on being transgressive and extreme to teenagers, there were probably a limited pool of ideas to work with to begin with. And once this TV series became a sort of banner show for HBO, they had to keep the ball rolling with more seasons, as long as it stayed successful. So they too were stuck with reusing ideas. Yes, I know, quality over quantity. It’s no real excuse for HBO, and the channel of today would no doubt have had the series quit while it was still totally ahead, but this was the early 90s, when regular televised content was still a new game to them. It took them some time to find their footing, and they really could have made worse mistakes than the ones they made with Tales.

It’s funny seeing the guest stars in their 10-15 year younger forms. Jeffrey Tambor. Demi Moore. The guy that plays Johnny Drama. Arnold. Kelly Preston. Bobcait Goldwait. Miguel Ferrer (twice! Correction, THRICE). His Twin Peaks alumni bud Kyle Mchlachlan. Lance Henriksen. Steven Weber. The list goes on. That’s only like the first two seasons, and since there are only 12/13 eps in a season (aside from the short first season), you can generally count on seeing a recognizable star pretty frequently. Unfortunately, when you weren’t seeing someone you recognized, the acting could be, well, terrible, but again, it’s campy material anyway, so it still works most of the time.

It was a fun walk through memory lane, and it was neat to see what episodes were from which seasons (I had never seen the show in order). It’s nice to see the “trajectory” of the show’s quality, and even when an episode wasn’t that hot, it was neat remembering an episode I first saw a dozen (in some cases more) years ago. Also, all organic special effects rocks. This show was probably one of the last hurrahs of great gory makeup and plastic monsters. It was probably masturbation material for Fangoria readers.

It was also doing the intentionally/ironically cheesy thing a full 15+ years before Grindhouse and Snakes on a Plane were even glints in their individual directors’ eyes. I guess this was one of the first examples of that sort of thing, though I can think of a few potential 70s and 80s precursors, maybe.

This past weekend, in the coveted Saturday at 10PM time slot, ABC aired the first of four Masters of Science Fiction episodes.  Astute cable television viewers will recognize that the title bears a striking resemblance to a certain mediocre Showtime series, Masters of Horror (aka Some People That May Have Been Involved With a Horror Movie at One Time or Another), and unsuprisingly, they share the same brains.  And, so far at least, the same, uh, mediocrity.  And since Masters of Science Fiction is on network television, it lacks all things awesome like cussing, nudity, and graphic violence.  This is clearly not the sort of pony show that ranks higher than two stars on my scale.

The series has had something of a troubled production.  There were originally supposed to be six episodes, but the order got cut to four.  And then the episodes were moved from the fall to the summer, which means the people in charge of schedules didn’t deem it worthy to run alongside the major new season offerings, whether due to quality or content.  In another vote of no confidence, the show has been hidden away, deep in Saturday night, far away  from time slots when people might actually be watching television.  Some people would say (and are saying) that ABC has killed this show by not giving it a real chance to hook in potential viewers.  After viewing an episode, if the rest of these are of similar quality, I think ABC knew this hokum would dig its own hole, and decided to let it die unnoticed rather than in the prime time bright lights, where mean TV Guide columnists would laugh at the size of its puny Nielsens.  Either that or they figured that science fiction nerds don’t have anything better to do on Saturday nights.

Each episode is based on a story by a master of science fiction.  Sounds good, right? Well, hold your horses! I’ll get into episode 1 in a bit, but let’s take a sneak peak at the lineup that will be cockslapping us for the next three Saturdays.  The next episode is titled “The Awakening” by Howard Fast.  Looking at all of the things Mr. Fast has written, it is fairly clear that science fiction wasn’t his primary focus.  He’s probably most well known for writing Spartacus, which inspired the classic quasi-Kubrick movie of the same name.  After that episode, we get something by Heinlein, which I am going to assume is either heavy-handed and dated, or heavy-handed and trying to be relevant about politics (no doubt neatly warmed over to appear relevant to today’s politics).  That last phrase brings us to the final episode, written (screenplay and short story) by Harlan Ellison, who is, indeed, just trying to be relevant at all.

Note:  From a cursory reading of synopses of the available episodes, it seems that attempting to be politically relevant to the United States of today is a common theme amongst all four episodes (Apparently the Heinlein story is about <sigh> civil liberties).  Masters of Horror sometimes does this, most notably in Joe Dante’s “Homecoming,” in which dead soldiers rise from the grave so they can vote against a war-mongering executive administration, but it is important to note that Horror doesn’t go back to the political chest that often; certainly not four times in a row.

This first episode, “A Clean Escape,” was written by John Kessel in the mid 80s, at the height of Reagen-era wackiness, an influence that makes itself known in the episode’s standard issue genre anthology series twist.  While watching the episode, I couldn’t shake the feel that it felt like a play, and it turns out that’s what the story was originally published as.  Most of the story takes place on the same set, with a few scenes taking place in brief flashbacks and elsewhere in the complex that contains the main set.  There are also only two primary characters; everything else is a bit part.  So what we have here is mainly a 42 minute dialogue between two characters, portrayed by Sam Waterston of Law and Order fame, and Judy Davis of, well, she’ll always be of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to me.  These two players are both capable of giving reliable, often great performances, but here it seems like they are just scraping by, reading and reacting to a script that they haven’t properly digested. 

Maybe because of this, or maybe because of the story’s origin as a play, a lot of the dialogue feels stiff and rather dry, as if Kessel was trying to strike a careful balance between realism and the wonky lines that frequently show up in science fiction.  Each of the performers has a histrionic episode during the course of the episode; in both cases a belabored but generic feeling outburst, something you’d expect from a high school student asked to interpret the material rather than two name actors.  But enough about the performances. Lukewarm as they were,  if the material were worth the paper it was originally published on, the performances displayed in this episode really wouldn’t have brought it down–they are at worst functional performances.  I mean, actors can’t be expected to turn it on for every single performance, especially when it’s a one-shot episode in an anthology series.  Davis and Waterston weren’t doing this for an Emmy, they were here to get paid.  Yikes, I must remember to be nicer about Waterston; he’s probably going to be our next Secretary of Homeland Security, depending on how the political cookie crumbles.

I’m guessing that what I alluded to earlier is in fact the truth: stories for this series were picked for their political veins, not quality of science fiction.  This story, as it stands, is barely even science fiction.  The setting sounds scifi–a post-apocalyptic world, the year 2031–but the story is just a little human drama that happens to take place in the future.  I don’t want to give away too much of the plot (I think I have a tendency to give too much away during my synopses), but Davis plays a psychiatrist, Waterston her anterograde amnesia-suffering patient, and she is treating him in order to help him remember anything that happened after 2007, which is where his memories end.  As far as politics goes, the Relevant Message delivered by this episode would be something about the refusal of certain public figures to accept accountability for their actions. Relevant!

For those that have seen the episode (and again, I won’t post any explicit spoilers, just in case), it is easy to see that the science fiction elements could have easily been stripped from this episode.  Altering the post-apocalyptic setting, a similar story could have easily been told about a Hitler or Pol Pot figure, or if you want to go with good guys, Oppenheimer or Nobel.  Recently, I have seen a number of articles mentioning genre writing’s worth in comparison to “literature,” and I think this story is a good example to show that genre lit can sometimes be considered regular lit if cast in a slightly different light.  Well, maybe it’s not a good example since the story is kind of bad, hackneyed, and the third act has totally dialed itself in by the end of the second.  And the ending cap doesn’t particularly make sense.  But still, there’s a point in there somewhere.

Maybe I’ll follow up and watch the other episodes (I am curious to see how thick they lay on the politics in each episode), but ABC knew what they were doing when they sent this thing to the gallows.  At best, the production values felt similar to the 90s revival of The Outer Limits.  And Stephen Hawking?  Did he need the money?  I am fairly certain the producers cashed him a check to use his name, and then modulated his voice with a Mac for use in the actual episode.  He’s kind of the Rod Serling of the series, I guess.  Not to be too mean, but his voice doesn’t really fit the role that well.  I will go so far as to say that this is the worst thing Hawking has done since he proved that god doesn’t exist. 

Well, drop those things that “Pilot” told you down the Honey Pot, because “Co-Pilot” is here to rewrite history! “Co-Pilot” tells us that the beginning of the series roughly coincides with the formation of The Barn and Mackey’s Strike Team. So we are lead to believe that Mackey’s web of drug-dealing corruption, and the camaraderie and trust that has formed amongst his Strike Team, has formed extremely quickly over the few weeks between “Co-Pilot” and “Pilot”? How is that possible? How could Mackey get his drug and corruption game going strong, make friends with his new Strike Team members, trustworthy partners in the corruption (two of the four members on the team are new to Mackey), and earn his Barn rep in the space of (at most) few weeks? In “Pilot”, it is implied that Strike Team is something that has been around for quite some time; a gang of bullies that is allowed to run rough because they’ve been around for a while, or grandfathered into the then-seemingly-new Aceveda era . . . but no, Strike Team wasn’t even formed until Aceveda took over, er, started, the Barn.

But questions of which came first, Aceveda or Strike Team, seem inconsequential in light of an even bigger issue that “Co-Pilot” invents. In “Pilot,” Aceveda is extremely suspicious of Mackey and Strike Team, again, as if they were a program that is from an administration previous to his, a known problem that he has inherited. “Co-Pilot” demonstrates as fact that not only was Strike Team formed just as Aceveda took over, but he probably could have prevented Mackey from ever being on the team. Aceveda, in effect, gave the job to the cop who he’s trying to take down just a few weeks later when the pilot hits. None of this makes sense! Why would Aceveda let someone get hired for a prestigious position (indeed, a position that seems to have been a major selling point when convincing the higher-ups on the merit of the Barn project) when he is apparently really, really suspicious of the candidate? Why would he do this when he has political ambitions and wants to look good? Heck, he hires his old buddy to infiltrate Strike Team in the VERY SAME EPISODE! (It is also important to note that Terry, the buddy mentioned above and the infiltrator that takes a bullet to the face, is seemingly not on very close terms with Aceveda in “Pilot.” In “Co-Pilot” they make it seem like the seeds for the infiltration deal have already been planted, yet Aceveda has to convince him a second time in “Pilot.” And not only that, but Terry questions his motives in the “Pilot,” which implies that they really aren’t buddies. Inconsistent writing everywhere!)

Moving past that enormous and troubling story hole that pretty much makes season 1 incomprehensible, there’s the Julien issue. In the pilot, it basically seems like it’s his first day on the job, but again, he’s right there in “Co-Pilot” joining the team at the same time as everyone else. Why a total rookie would be picked for an experimental police unit I have no idea, but the important thing to take away here is that Julien is treated like a total rookie in both “Pilot” and “Co-Pilot.” This situation 100% guarantees that the first episode of the series happens very shortly after the events of “Co-Pilot.” If “Co-Pilot” took place months before “Pilot,” Julien wouldn’t be referred to or treated as a rookie in the first episode. So “Co-Pilot,” at most, takes place a handful of weeks before the pilot, which proves that all the Aceveda/Strike Team/Mackey stuff mentioned above is legitimately a serious plot problem.

It can be argued that my argument that 1 season equals approximately 1 year is flawed, but even if it is, the episode itself gives its own confirmation that the timeline I have pointed out is at least roughly accurate. If I were incorrect, and this episode occurred some considerable period, longer than weeks, before the pilot, why did it feel the need to wrap up the episode with an event that happens in the very first episode–the meeting of Terry with Strike Team?

Basically, “Co-Pilot” is a major, major black eye on the series, and it took me a few episodes to forgive it. I can’t believe this got past the showrunner and producers. Not only does it introduce unignorable plot issues, but it’s also a totally unnecessary filler episode. It’s trying to be fancy, explaining the pre-history of a scenario that appears to begin in medias res, and in doing so, it casts shadow on the storytelling of the show on whole. Any Shield watchers just starting with the show and still behind me, skip this bomb. It adds nothing, and it might just put you off the show a bit. Disasterton.