Wounds and Scars

Annie Blackburn comes to Twin Peaks to work for her sister, Norma Jennings, at the Double R Diner. She has spent the preceding years in a convent and has recently left it. Her wrists are scarred. She is direct about the reason, without performance and without apology: she tried to kill herself, and the convent was where she went afterwards.

Cooper meets her at the diner. The scene is unhurried and slightly awkward on both sides — two people who have each spent a long time in an institution that gave their days a shape, both currently without one.

The archive records Annie's introduction plainly, including its mechanics. She arrives with five hours of the series remaining, carries no connection to Case 89, the Lodge material, or the Earle correspondence, and is placed immediately in Cooper's path. The Caroline Powell disclosure established the pattern the show intends to complete: Cooper loves a woman who has already survived something; the woman is placed in danger; Cooper is unable to reach her in time.

What redeems the construction is the writing of the character herself. Annie does not conceal the scars, does not present them as mystery, and does not require Cooper to react to them. In a series whose central subject is a girl who kept her suffering hidden until it killed her, a woman who states her damage out loud in her first conversation is not a small thing. Laura Palmer had two diaries. Annie has visible wrists.

Major Garland Briggs and Margaret Lanterman come to Cooper together. Each of them is carrying a mark.

Briggs's is the pattern of small triangles found behind his right ear after his abduction, first recorded in "Checkmate." Margaret's is on the back of her leg. She has had hers since she was a child — since the day she disappeared into the woods and was gone for a whole day, and came back with it.

Cooper takes both descriptions and draws them together into a single combined figure.

This is the most important scene in the post-hiatus stretch and the correct answer to the season's long-running problem. For eight episodes the Lodge material has arrived as isolated anomalies — a phrase from a Major, a legend from a deputy, a light in the trees. Here two of them are laid side by side and turn out to be the same anomaly, recorded on human tissue, forty years apart. The investigation stops collecting curiosities and starts holding a pattern. (See Margaret Lanterman file and Ledger Arc 05.)

Two findings on Josie Packard reach Cooper. The first is medical: at the time of death her body weighed sixty-five pounds, and no cause of death has been determined. The second is documentary: Josie has an Interpol dossier.

The pairing is the episode's quietest cruelty. On the same desk, in the same hour, the investigation receives proof that Josie Packard was a woman with an international criminal record and proof that something took two-thirds of her physical mass at the moment she died. One of these is a police matter. The other is not, and the sheriff's department has no drawer for it.

The archive holds the weight as an evidentiary fact and the mechanism as OPEN, exactly as the previous hour left it. What the number does is make the death measurable without making it explicable — the worst possible combination for an institution built on measurement. (See Ledger Arc 03 for the Packard record.)

Windom Earle puts on a disguise and calls on Donna Hayward at her home, presenting himself as Dr. Gerald Craig. He then sends Doc Hayward a black chess knight — the next move, delivered to the house he has just been inside.

At the cabin, he continues to instruct Leo Johnson on the terms of their alliance.

The archive notes the escalation and its precise character. Earle's earlier moves were mailed: a letter, a tape, a body left in a public office. This one is delivered in person, through a front door, in a house where a teenage girl lives — and the chess piece that follows tells her father exactly that. The message is not the knight. The message is that Earle was standing in the hall.

The disguise is also the first of several. Earle's method from here to the pageant is impersonation: he becomes a doctor, a professor, whatever profession will get him through a door in a town that does not lock them.

Ben Horne, restored to himself since Appomattox, has found a new cause: stopping the Ghostwood development in order to protect the habitat of the pine weasel. With the businessman John Justice Wheeler he stages a "Stop Ghostwood" fashion show. The weasel gets loose. The event collapses into chaos. Wheeler comforts a frightened Audrey in the middle of it.

Ghostwood was Ben Horne's project. He conceived it, financed it, burned a mill for it, and was arrested in the middle of pursuing it. He now campaigns against it, and the forest he is trying to preserve is the forest that contains the marks on Margaret Lanterman's leg.

The file records the convergence without granting Ben any knowledge of it. He is not defending the Lodge; he is defending a small mammal, loudly, because he needs a cause the way he previously needed a hotel. But the effect on the map is real: the man who intended to pave the ground the series is about to open has become, accidentally and for entirely personal reasons, its most vocal protector.

Nadine Hurley and Mike Nelson check into the Great Northern as Mr. and Mrs. Hinkman. Shelly and Bobby's arrangement continues; Leo Johnson remains missing in the woods as far as the town is concerned.

Nadine's plot has been the season's most-derided and the archive has already recorded its objection. The false name is worth logging because it belongs to the hour's actual subject. This is an episode about people carrying marks from events they cannot account for — Briggs's triangles, Margaret's leg, Annie's wrists, Josie's missing sixty-five pounds. Nadine is the one person walking around with no marks at all, having been relieved of two decades of her own history by a head injury, checking into a hotel under a name that belongs to nobody.

James Foley — whose features include At Close Range (1986) and After Dark, My Sweet (1990) — directs his only Twin Peaks hour, and the assignment he is handed is almost entirely conversational: people in rooms telling each other things. He shoots the station scene between Cooper, Briggs and Margaret with the stillness the material needs, letting two performers describe injuries to a third and holding on the listening rather than the telling.

Barry Pullman's third script for the series is his best. The episode has an unusually clean organising principle for late Season 2 — everything in it is a mark left by something that has already happened — and it distributes that principle across registers without announcing it: Annie's wrists, Briggs's ear, Margaret's leg, Josie's missing weight, and a chess knight left on a doctor's doorstep as a souvenir of a visit nobody knew was a visit.

The title is the hour's argument and the archive treats it as deliberate. A wound is an injury still open. A scar is what remains once the body has closed around it and carried on. The episode is populated by both, and it declines to rank them: Annie's scars are survival, Josie's absence is unresolved, Margaret has carried hers for forty years without being believed, and Briggs's are four days old and still classified.

It is also, unavoidably, a description of the show. Twin Peaks returns here from a six-week absence with half its audience gone and its cancellation a matter of scheduling. The series is wounded. What this hour demonstrates is that it is still capable of a scene like the one at the sheriff's station — which is to say that the damage did not reach the part that mattered.

Broadcast Thursday, March 28, 1991 to approximately 7.1 million viewers — the first hour after the six-week hiatus that ABC announced on February 15, and a modest rise on the pre-hiatus low, most plausibly attributable to the return itself rather than to any recovery. Written by Barry Pullman, who also wrote "The Orchid's Curse" and "Masked Ball"; directed by James Foley.

Heather Graham was cast as Annie Blackburn late in the production cycle, with the character written specifically for the endgame. Graham plays her with a stillness that reads as convent training rather than as blankness, and her early Double R scenes with Kyle MacLachlan are pitched several degrees quieter than the Cooper–Audrey material of Season 1.

Don S. Davis and Catherine E. Coulson share the station scene, and it is the only substantial two-hander the series ever gives them. Coulson's Margaret had been, until this point, an oracle delivering pronouncements; here she is a woman describing something that happened to her as a child, to a man who believes her because it happened to him last week.