It’s hard to go into a show like Twin Peaks knowing absolutely nothing about it. It’s iconic in so many ways and inescapable. Turning it on and watching things unfold even as a completely new viewer, felt like I was visiting an old friend. The music, the setting, and the characters feel familiar to me and that’s because they are. They’ve taken root in other places within media and directly influenced many things that followed.
Before film and comics, music was my first love and that’s the first thing that I noticed in the first moments of the episode. The music is very distinct and original. If anyone were to play any of this music out of context, it would immediately make you think of the show. There’s just no mistaking it for anything else out there. It was clearly written for the show to make the dark and quirky tone. As the episode goes forward, it doesn’t relent. Each scene is thoughtfully laid out and accompanied by music that perfectly suits it.
The pilot episode immediately puts forth the questions: what happened to Laura Palmer and who killed her? The basis for the rest of the show. It leads off from there and introduces us to the town and the quirky residents of it.
The personalities of each character are big and out of this world. It’s hard to pinpoint one of them that you could directly find in the real world and that’s part of the charm so far. Everything in Twin Peaks feels steeped in a world that’s so blatantly fictitious while it’s also very plainly meant to be the world we know and live in.
The whole aesthetic of the show is another huge thing. The costumes and what each individual character wears is precisely thought out. Each look feels like a very deliberate effort to tell a story about them without diving into a ton of backstory. For example, even in a simple moment such as Audrey changing her shoes when she gets to school to her red heels tells multitudes about her without saying anything at all.
I’m not sure how I feel about the story so far. There are definitely parts of it that intrigue me, like the mystery behind Laura Palmer’s death and just learning more about the other characters but there are other bits that leave me hesitant. It feels like something that was made without the story in mind, as if it wasn’t the primary focus of Twin Peaks.
On a technical level, the video is beautiful. They’ve done a great job of restoring the series for Blu-ray (even though this isn’t the first edition of it). The audio is mostly great but cut out in a couple spots. All in all though, it was excellent.
Tomorrow my thoughts for Episode 1 will be up. More then!
