“The Black Widow” is a prime example of the second-season tendency to embroil secondary characters in storylines with decidedly mixed results. “The Black Widow,” Season 2, Episode 12Įven amid the dullest of doldrums, there are flashes of brilliance in every episode, mostly owing to the show’s uniformly excellent ensemble cast. So, throughout this list, I’ve often selected a particular episode in which to discuss a story arc that spills over into other episodes.ģ0. Given the serial nature of the storytelling, it stands to reason that, in the course of ranking the episodes from the show’s first two seasons, aggregates or clusters of episodes tend to stick together. Indeed, if we simply break season two up, as one recent article suggests, into three “sub-seasons” of seven or eight episodes each, we can get a fairer notion of where its relative strengths and weaknesses reside. There are as many moments of unfettered surrealism and sheer horror, if not more, spread across those 22 episodes as there are in the first eight. That said, season two has gotten a bad rap. As other writers and directors moved to the forefront, they introduced some distractingly tangential subplots (and a couple of narrative cul-de-sacs), setting the season on ungainly footing that was only exacerbated by ABC’s continuing shifts in broadcast night and timeslot. Owing to these battles, and other reasons (Lynch went off to direct Wild at Heart, for one), both men stepped back from their involvement with the series over the course of its second, full-length season. Stories abound about Lynch and Frost endlessly wrangling with ABC over when and how to resolve Twin Peaks’s central mystery: Who killed Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the town’s troubled homecoming queen? Lynch, it’s said, hoped to postpone the revelation indefinitely. But audiences tuning in to the show expecting another sudsy, essentially anodyne primetime soap along the lines of Dallas or Dynasty were treated in the episode’s opening moments to images of a beautiful young woman, washed ashore on the banks of an idyllic Pacific Northwest river, her corpse “wrapped in plastic,” as memorably described by passerby Pete Martell (Lynch regular Jack Nance). Lynch tapped co-creator Mark Frost, who had made his bones writing teleplays for edgy yet realistic fare like Hill Street Blues, to ensure a sturdy dramatic backbone was securely in place for a series Lynch was wont to describe as “ Peyton Place on acid.” Fans of Lynch’s recent Blue Velvet, another nightmarish descent into the sordid underbelly of a postcard-pretty small town, were, if nothing else, already attuned to the proper wavelength.
On April 8, 1990, ABC broadcast the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, cult filmmaker David Lynch’s initial foray into network television.