Subject: Re: Second Season Failings From: jblum@umd5.umd.edu (Jon Blum) Date: 1991-07-24, 13:09 Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks Ramble on, Barb, there's some brilliant stuff in there. > >I think you may be right about the point of view problem. I thought > >the concept of Windom Earle was pretty good--a former mentor of > >Cooper's, a brilliant mind totally possessed by evil and a desire for > >a perverse revenge, inextricably tied up with a great tragedy of > >Cooper's personal life, never seen by Cooper directly but in periodic > >communication through such bizarre scenes as the vagrant at the > >chessboard. Rather like BOB in his ability to cause pain and > >suffering gratuitously, and in the difficulty of predicting what he > >would do next. Trouble was, since we saw Windom Earle plotting, we > >the audience knew what he was going to do next, so we lost that sense > >of vague dread. > > > >Had we not seen Windom Earle as an embodied character, week after > >week, and followed his plotting, would it have been so necessary for > >Cooper to appear so bumbling? I agree, it would have been much more interesting if (a) Windom had spent much less time on screen, and (b) Cooper had thought faster. What would have worked better would have been focusing only on the master-of-disguise element to bring Windom into the plot, while not revealing his plans. For example, his role as Will St. Gerard was effective (it fooled me...) and added to the sense of confusion, because we didn't know WHAT he was planning by giving Donna the chess piece. Of course, then we run into the ultimate problem with the whole Windom Earle plotline -- the WRITERS didn't know what they were planning either. The entire chess game metaphor petered out and had nothing to do with the finale. It seemed at first that Windom was assigning pieces to all the people in Twin Peaks (hence his gift of the knight to Donna), but then they never did anything with that. Consider the possibilities -- Leo was obviously a White Knight (!), and the knight is the piece which has the biggest advantage against a Queen. If Shelly had been picked as the Black Queen, Windom could have played the game so that Leo could "capture" his wife... as he tried to do earlier, with the axe. Reducing the soap-opera dynamics of a town to a chessboard was a great idea, which they completely forgot about. In short: if Windom had stayed as the Grandmaster, who knows where the plot could have gone? Another thought: black and white squares on the chessboard --> the black/white floor of the red room?...