Slaves and Masters

Albert Rosenfield reports on the body left in the sheriff's office in "Checkmate" — the corpse with a chess piece in its mouth, the opening capture in Windom Earle's game. The dead man was a transient. His name was Erik Powell.

Cooper supplies what the name means. Powell was Caroline's maiden name.

This is the detail that converts Earle from an antagonist into a correspondent, and it is the most important forensic finding since the letters under the fingernails. Earle did not kill a stranger for position. He went and found a man who happened to carry his dead wife's surname, and killed that man, so that the body Cooper examined would say her name back to him.

The rhyme with Case 89 is exact. Laura Palmer's killer left letters under fingernails that accumulated across bodies into a name. Earle selects an entire human being for a name he already has. Both men use corpses as stationery; Earle's refinement is that he shops for the right paper.

Albert's briefing continues, and it is the hour's densest scene. Earle has been mailing articles of Caroline's bridal clothing to cities across the country. Plotted on a map, the destinations form a letter: a C.

The reading is offered and then immediately destabilised. C for Caroline — the obvious answer, given that the parcels contain her wedding clothes. Or C for Cooper. The episode does not decide, and neither does the file.

The ambiguity is the point and it is precisely engineered. Earle's whole method is to make Cooper unable to distinguish between the woman he failed to protect and himself — to collapse guilt and identity into a single initial drawn in bridal linen across a continent. If the letter is Caroline's, Earle is prosecuting a murder. If it is Cooper's, Earle is claiming him. Both readings require Cooper to accept that the correspondence is about him, which is the only concession Earle actually needs.

The scale of the gesture is the point. This is not a clue left at a scene; it is a message written across the map of the United States, legible only to someone assembling postal records into geography. Earle is composing at national scale for an audience of one.

Albert also closes an older file. Fibre analysis matches threads recovered from the scene of Cooper's shooting to Josie Packard's vicuña coat. Cooper and Truman go to Blue Pine Lodge and confront her.

Josie is found where the season has left her: in a maid's uniform, in the house she used to own, cleaning for Catherine Martell.

The composition of the scene is the episode's argument in a single frame. The federal investigation finally arrives with hard forensic proof that Josie Packard shot Dale Cooper — and it arrives to find her already imprisoned, already stripped, already Twin Peaks of two other people. The law is the last institution to reach her and the least consequential. Catherine got there first, and Thomas Eckhardt got there decades before that.

Truman's position in the scene is unbearable and the show does not soften it. He is the sheriff serving the confrontation, and he is the man who loved her, and the evidence in Albert's hand is proof that she shot his closest friend.

Thomas Eckhardt, installed at the Great Northern since "Double Play," presses his claim. He does not threaten Josie with violence. He does not need to. He holds her history, her debts, and the account of who she was before she was Mrs. Packard, and he has crossed the Pacific to collect on all three.

Josie is now answerable to Catherine inside the house and to Eckhardt outside it, and has no third position available.

The title names this arrangement without metaphor. Josie told Truman in "Masked Ball" that she was sold to Eckhardt in Hong Kong. The series has since compressed her from proprietor to servant across four episodes, and here places the buyer in the same valley as the merchandise.

What holds is the distribution of screen weight. This storyline — a woman held by purchase, in domestic service, in a country not her own — is given roughly the same running time as a comic set piece about a man who thinks he is Robert E. Lee. That is either the show's failure of proportion or its bleakest joke about how such arrangements actually sit inside a community: adjacent to the entertainment, unremarked.

Ben Horne's Civil War delusion — running since "Checkmate", complete with a stuffed mule named Traveller — is ended by theatre rather than medicine.

The household stages the surrender at Appomattox. Dr. Jacoby plays General Grant. Jerry Horne plays Wilmer McLean, in whose parlour the historical surrender was signed. Audrey plays Scarlett McLean. Bobby Briggs plays the bugle. Ben, as Lee, accepts the terms — and comes back.

The method is the scene's entire meaning and it is more sophisticated than its silliness suggests. Nobody tells Ben he is unwell. Nobody contradicts the delusion or tries to break it from outside. They enter it, honour its internal logic, and walk him to the one event in that history where the general is permitted to stop fighting. The delusion is not defeated. It is completed.

Note who does the work. Audrey — the daughter who infiltrated her father's brothel to gather evidence against him, and was nearly killed doing it — puts on a costume and plays a role in his fantasy so that he can come home. She has now entered two of Ben Horne's closed worlds. The first one almost killed her; this one restores him.

There is also the structural function honestly. The Civil War material exists because the season had a character it no longer had a plan for: Ben was built as a suspect for a murder that has been solved, and the writers filled the vacancy with a breakdown. That the exit from it is genuinely moving does not change what it was there to solve.

In the woods, Earle keeps Leo Johnson. The regime is not confinement so much as apprenticeship: Leo copies poetry in a hand that is not his own, fetches, serves, and receives instruction — including a lecture on the flutes Earle carves and plays.

The flutes are the clearest emblem for what Earle is. He is a man who whittles instruments by hand in a cabin in the forest, plays them well, teaches their history to a captive, and kills strangers because their surnames are useful. Cultivation and atrocity occupy the same afternoon and are performed by the same hands, without friction between them.

Leo's position completes the title's inventory. He beat Shelly with soap wrapped in a sock in the second hour of the series; he now lives in a chair he was invited to sit in, doing clerical work for a man who calls him friend. The archive does not offer this as justice. It offers it as symmetry, which is a colder thing.

Norma Jennings and Ed Hurley talk about the twenty years they have spent married to other people. Nadine's wrestling ambitions have collapsed into disappointment. James Hurley's position in the Marsh killing continues to deteriorate in another county.

Norma and Ed are the episode's one relationship not organised by ownership, and as deliberate placement. In an hour catalogued around purchase, captivity, service and command, the show sets aside four minutes for two people who have been unable to belong to each other for two decades because of obligations they took on voluntarily. Nobody bought Norma. Nobody owns Ed. They are separated by nothing but their own promises, and they are as stuck as Josie is.

Diane Keaton directs her only episode of Twin Peaks, and it is one of the odder credits in American television. Keaton — an Academy Award winner as a performer, and by 1991 an emerging director — takes an hour built almost entirely from two-handers in rooms and shoots it as such: close, actor-forward, unhurried, with the Appomattox sequence given the wide comic staging of a filmed play. The result is less atmospheric than the Lynch-derived house style and more attentive to faces, which suits a script whose subject is what people do to each other in private.

Peyton and Engels's script is the most explicitly thematic of the season. The title is a list and every storyline appears on it. Eckhardt and Josie: purchase. Catherine and Josie: service. Earle and Leo: apprenticeship as captivity. Ben and his delusion: a master who became the servant of a story. Even the forensic material joins the inventory — Erik Powell was killed to be used as a word, the most complete reduction of a person to an instrument the series has staged.

This is one of the mid-season's more coherent hours, and the reason is discipline rather than inspiration. The episode knows what it is about and organises around it. Where surrounding hours assemble concurrent plotlines with no shared logic, "Slaves and Masters" runs a single question through every room: who is the instrument, and whose hand is on it. The answer it arrives at is that nearly everyone is the instrument, including the man with the chess set, who is himself being operated by a grievance eight years old.

Broadcast Saturday, February 9, 1991 to approximately 7.3 million viewers, continuing the season's decline. Six days later, on February 15, 1991, ABC announced that Twin Peaks was going on indefinite hiatus.

Diane Keaton's assignment remains a curiosity in her filmography and is among the more frequently cited pieces of Twin Peaks trivia. She had directed a documentary and television work before this, and would direct her first narrative feature, Unstrung Heroes, four years later.

Kenneth Welsh's Earle and Eric Da Re's Leo establish, in the cabin scenes, the dynamic that carries to the finale: the intellectual and the labourer, the instrument-maker and the hand. Richard Beymer's Ben Horne is written out of the Civil War material here after roughly three episodes inside it, and the exit — a family performing a surrender so that a man can stop fighting — is the most-praised sequence in an otherwise widely criticised subplot.