Subject: Explain this: How did Laura get that diary page to Mrs. Tremond, huh? Impossible!
From: bskendig@bonnet.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig)
Date: 1990-12-06, 12:10
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

It's been established that Laura gave her diary to Harold Smith about
a week and a half before she died.  I believe Harold makes some
reference to this, and besides, the last entry I remember reading in
the diary (as found in bookstores across the country!) is that she
gave the diary to him to prevent BOB from being able to get at it any
more.

How, then, did Laura get to make two more entries in it?  We know
she's accounted for in the hours leading up to her death; at least we
know that she probably wouldn't have had a chance to run over to
Harold's home, steal the diary, write a cute entry in it, tear out the
page, and somehow get Harold to deliver it to Mrs. Tremond without
Harold being able to remember doing so later.

And that entry about her dream -- no.  No.  No, no, no!  All wrong.
The scriptwriters must have made a list of things to be sure not to
forget to mention sometime in the episode, and they just conveniently
dumped a whole load of it onto that diary page.  All there, delivered
in that one nice little packet; if Donna had happened to revisit Mrs.
Tremond again before that episode (what, the elderly only eat one meal
every few days?), she would have gotten the letter earlier, and the
mystery might have been solved earlier.

No, the diary page was hypodermically injected into the World of Twin
Peaks.  Laura didn't write it -- it's physically impossible and
completely nonsensical to think that she could have!  It was penned by
the hand of David Lynch himself: "Here are the clues!  Simple, huh?
Obvious enough for ya?  Betcha feel stupid for not catching on
sooner!"

The _only_ possible way out of this conundrum is by figuring that,
well, maybe Laura _did_ stop by and write that one diary entry, and
swore Harold not to tell anyone about it.  But that makes absolutely
no sense at all.  If you knew you were going to die, would you visit a
paranoid shut-in to write a page in your diary that was critically
important for a friend of yours to see, then have the paranoid shut-in
give that important letter to someone else and promise not to breathe
a word about it?  Not.

Can anyone else think of a way out of this?  This one little glitch
totally destroys the episode for me, because it's an example of the
scriptwriters giving up on their creation and deciding to magically
pull things out of the air, hoping that the audience won't catch on.

All semblance of plot is now shot to pieces.  I'm only watching it now
for the interesting characters, like Albert (oh, right, he's not
interesting since he turned nice), and Josie (oh, that's right, she
left), and the Log Lady (oh, they seem to have forgotten about her,
that's right)...

I think I'll go catch the next plane out of Seattle.

     << Brian >>

| Brian S. Kendig      \ Macintosh |   Engineering,   | bskendig             |
| Computer Engineering |\ Thought  |  USS Enterprise  | @phoenix.Princeton.EDU
| Princeton University |_\ Police  | -= NCC-1701-D =- | @PUCC.BITNET         |
"It's not that I don't have the work to *do* -- I don't do the work I *have*."