Twin Peaks - Pilot Episode

Rating:
Summary: Twin Peaks -- scale them!
Review: David Lynch has gained a reputation for his weird and wonderful filmmaking style, like in "Mulholland Drive." And while the release of "Twin Peaks -- Pilot Episode" is not included with the first season release, this eerie and entrancing story will reel you in. It's cult TV at its absolute best.

The body of a beautiful young woman, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), washes up on a shore, wrapped in plastic. Apparently everyone in the town of Twin Peaks adored her, so her death is a blow. FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) takes a look at Laura's body -- and learns that she was murdered by someone he has tracked before.

He investigates Laura's diary, and finds that she may have been killed by someone she called "J." That hardly narrows it down, since the strange Twin Peaks is full of quirky people with that initial. And as Cooper investigates further, he finds himself in a town of dark secrets and strange occurrances -- and still the mystery of who killed Laura.

Due to some bizarre legal wrangles, the Twin Peaks pilot wasn't released with the first season of the show -- which is like releasing "Return of the Jedi" and "Empire Strikes Back" separately from "A New Hope." Despite this oddity, the pilot in itself is a magnificent piece of work, quirky and dark and twisted.

Drugs, murder, ghosts, precognition, dancing dwarves, supernatural possession and murder all crop up in the TV series, and this pilot set it all up -- it's not the best of the series, but it serves as a good set-up. And Lynch's handling of the solidly ordinary Northwest America is turned into a bizarre thing. Under the banality and the boringness is a dark undercurrent, making the town all the more eerie. But it's also so FUNNY at times -- Cooper and the quirky Twin-Peak-ites provide a sort of deadpan comedy to the proceedings.

It's also not just a murder mystery, but a study of the strange, layered characters. Kyle MacLachlan does an exceptional job as Cooper -- he's obviously a bit of a nutjob and neatnik, but a cheerful and likable one. He's backed by a cast of quirky, odd characters, including Lara Flynn Boyle, Ray Wise, Piper Laurie and Michael Ontkean.

Before the "X-Files" made the surreal a hit, before "Carnivale" took surrealism and ran with it, there was the magnificently weird "Twin Peaks." Time has been kind to "Twin Peaks," and long after it was first aired it's still a magnificent creation.

Rating:
Summary: Still a classic!
Review: While still as fascinating and absorbing as ever, Twin Peaks doesn't seem nearly as odd and loopy as it did fifteen years ago- and that's because its influence has been felt all over television, from Ally McBeal to The X-Files... to Desperate Housewives!

My old VHS tapes are starting to get a little long in the tooth, so I'm glad that the DVDs are coming out. I hope that whoever is marketing it will have the brains to sell the whole 26 episodes (If memory serves) as a boxed set, at a reasonable price.

When you watch the whole series from beginning to end, Twin Peaks takes the form of a supernatural tragedy. Laura Palmer's death brings agent Cooper to Twin Peaks, and he is seduced by the beauty of the place-- but after Laura's secrets have been explored, and the host of the mudering demon Bob is discovered, the mystery gradually becomes more and more about Cooper's secrets, and about his past. Nothing I have seen on TV since I was five years old has disturbed me as much as the final scene from the final episode. I slept about two hours that night.