Jessa and I recently finished watching Twin Peaks, as well as the follow-on movie, Fire Walk with Me. As with almost all of our TV watching, we watched this on DVD, especially as this came out in… …1991. At a high level, I enjoyed the series, it was quirky, had a cool mystery with supernatural elements, and did some really interesting things with a large cast. However, this is one of the cases where I feel that the series was lacking something in the later episodes (and, to a larger extent, the movie) that made it so much less awe-inspiring than what we got in the pilot.

In the pilot of Twin Peaks, we got the most amazing living small town. From the moment we walk into the town, we see that the it is a town in motion, with quarrels, schemes, and so many people cheating on their significant others it’s crazy. And then in walks Dale Cooper, who is both playing the straight man and the craziest of them all. There are so many moments in this pilot that were pure oddity-awesome, such as when Dale Cooper and Harry Truman are walking through the police station discussing the body of Laura Palmer, and, mid-sentence, Dale stops Harry and says, “Harry, there’s something I have to ask you. What are those trees along the side of the highway on the way into town?” This break in the momentum of the scene was just too amazing for words, and Jessa and I both bust-out laughing. Throughout the first season, these sorts of absurd moments were littered everywhere, somehow making everyone a bit more human to me. Everyone wasn’t laser focused on the murder of Laura Palmer or any other one-thing of importance – they had trivialities that concerned them, and those little things got screen time and made this little town come together.

Towards the end of season 2, however, the town seemed to lose all of these little quirks, and it felt very 2-dimensional. All the characters were only concerned about their one thing to the exclusion everything else – there were no quirks to separate the people from the plot. I distinctly remember this hitting home when Dale Cooper sees the giant near the end of season 2, and neither acknowledges nor even speaks about it at all.

Overall, watching Twin Peaks was fun, and also provided some context about Lost (a more recent ensemble cast mystery show). There are things that I liked better about Twin Peaks (that the characters were more distinctly quirky and that the events somewhat more absurd), but Lost also provided something to the genre – the ability to keep the mystery going a lot longer and showing us just how deep the rabbit hole can go.