TWIN PEAKS: SEASON TWO [1990-1991]

You're dead, Laura,
but your problems keep hanging around!
It's almost like they didn't bury you deep enough!

During it's 8-episode first season run, Mark Frost & David Lynch's bizarre prime-time soap opera murder mystery, Twin Peaks, became a tornado of a world-wide phenomenon, leaving it's second season with a lot to live up to.  

After the season one finale hilariously threw every possible clichéd cliff-hanger ending in the book at the viewer, the second year jumps right in the thick of things in true Peaks fashion that proves it wasn't just a flash in the pan.  The quality of the show is maintained for the next 7 episodes or so, until the television network forced Lynch & Frost, much to their dismay, to reveal who Laura Palmer's killer was fearing that audiences were growing impatient.  And with that a disgruntled Lynch more or less left the series and quite frankly, without him, it's astonishing to see the very apparent nosedive in quality within a single episode.  

From there the viewer is punished with 8 episodes of some embarrassingly bad writing that is not unlike the trashy soap operas the series set out to satirize.  A gaggle of new directors sloppily handled these episodes, all whom didn't seem to understand that Peaks used to be perfect blend of  quirky silliness, ominous darkness and the mind-boggling bizarre and instead brought them together like oil & water.  

Thankfully, after a brief hiatus, the writers got their shit together and the series became a faint reflection of what it once was.  Alas, the damage had been done and the task of picking up the shattered pieces isn't a completely successful one but it's light years better than the crap before it.  Sadly, the ratings plummeted something fierce and as quick as the series shot to popularity it was given the axe, leaving the viewer with an highly effective and disturbing cliff-hanger that still haunts me to this very day.

As a dedicated fan of the series, it's difficult to recommend due to a larger portion of the second season is just plain bad but it's also hard to properly criticize it because there's so many great things going on when it's firing on all cylinders.

3½ doppelgängers out of 5

TWIN PEAKS : SEASON ONE [1990]

"I'll see you in my dreams."
"Not if I see you first."

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” became one the most asked questions in the land of water cooler conversations for a very brief time in the early 1990's.  Created by Hill Street Blues' head-writer Mark Frost and film-director David Lynch, Twin Peaks' legacy grew into a pop culture phenomenon that would go on to influence many other hit cult-TV shows for several decades to follow. 

In simple, it's about a small Pacific Northwest town that is turned upside down when the homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, is found dead, wrapped in plastic.  Enter FBI Agent Dale Cooper who whisks in and innocently begins unravelling not only the mysterious murder but several of the community's seedy little secrets. 

Half quirky satirical soap-opera and half dark twisted mystery, Twin Peaks came at just the right time when television was becoming overly boring and predictable amongst it's hordes of stand-alone episodes. 
Right off the bat, the series proves itself to be a very unique addition to the primetime line-up with it's gloomy cinematic feature-length pilot episode.  Filmed near Seattle, Washington, Lynch made the best of the grey rainy skylines, the wind dancing through the haunted dense forests and the ever-present foghorn in the distance.  The moody atmosphere is instantly hypnotizing but lures the audience even further down the rabbit hole with it's humorously bizarre dialogue, oddball character quirks and now-iconic music that switches between cool-cat jazz to melodramatic soap opera themes with great ease.

Sadly, after the pilot episode, the series opted to film in California and, like The X-files after it, it loses quite a bit of it's mood amid it's bright and sunny woodlands, which look nothing like the Pacific Northwest.  Thankfully the quality of the writing upholds, with the exception of some red-herring storylines that seem like a lot of the characters were created to add to the strangeness of the town but could never find anything worthwhile beyond that.  Hints of the supernatural begin emerging, especially with the introduction of the unforgettable Red Room and the backwards talking dancing dwarf, which completely separated Twin Peaks from anything that had ever been seen on American network ever before.   

In just 2 months of airing the entirety of it's first season, Twin Peaks was that show everyone was talking about and most couldn't wait to what was next after it's cliff-hanging season finale.  The question was, could it keeps it's perfect balance of unpredictable weirdness and high quality writing?

4½ Douglas Fir Trees out of 5