For some reason, I enjoyed this one a lot more than I have on prior viewings. Even the goofy M. T. Wentz stuff struck me as fun, and even the Andy “sperms” material gave me a couple of chuckles (mostly due to Kyle’s terrific straight man reactions...when Andy asks if he can go and Dale very seriously deadpans, “If you must”
). That storm really adds a great mood and elevates even the more mundane scenes. Sternwood is one of my favorite of the S2 pop-in characters.
It occurs to me that Cooper never meets either Leland or Sarah onscreen throughout the entire series until the end of E10, when he and Harry arrest Leland. It’s surprising that we never see him interact with the murder victim’s family at all until he’s arresting one of them. This also causes his interactions with Leland in this episode to be much more detached and impersonal than Harry’s, as they have no on-screen history. (EDIT: I somehow forgot the Episode 3 “dream souls” scene with Hawk, where Cooper of course walks Leland home.)
It cracks me up when Harold says it “seems appropriate” to read aloud from Laura’s diary. In what world, Harold, is callous invasion of a dead girl’s most intimate thoughts “appropriate”?! He’s a weird one, that Harold.
If Hawk is correct, Leland presumably hides the secret diary pages in the restroom stall door somewhere between the end of the prior episode and the beginning of this one.
This episode in Dale’s diet:
— Coffee in his FBI mug in the sheriff’s station waiting area while talking to Harry; he also has some donuts on the chair next to him which he is not seen eating (two jelly donuts, and two others which are mostly out of frame; one seems to have chocolate frosting and blue sprinkles, the other might be chocolate frosting with green sprinkles)
— Coffee in his FBI mug in the conference room (possibly laced with Irish whiskey; in the prior scene, Sternwood tells Harry to “break the seal on that Irish you stashed for me”)
— He has a glass of water while waiting at the Roadhouse (the bartender brings him a second one), and he plays with his food, making a design out of many peanuts and shells
— At the Roadhouse: “Harry, let me buy ya a beer”
If nothing else, the cringey masturbation material gives us some insight into the preferred coffee brand of the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station: Lucy is carrying a box full of Royal Kona Blend! Not what I would have guessed, but Dr. Jacoby would certainly approve!
For the curious: I finally got my hands on Jerry Stahl’s autobiography and glanced at the brief Peaks-related section to get his side of the story (as an aside, I found his writing style in the book pretty nauseating, just from the brief section I read). He talks about shooting up twice during the drive to the story meeting. He describes Mark as “one of those crisp, competent Anglo-Saxon fellows you had the feeling popped from the womb with a perfectly parted Princeton and white teeth.” He says the meeting was a “dictation session” and that Mark had laid the story out in such prodigious detail that writing the script would essentially amount to a game of connect-the-dots (it’s hard to tell if he’s complaining or not, since he was by his own admission unable to do even that). He admits to excusing himself to take a hit in the restroom, and describes himself as uncomfortably over-enthusiastic when he returned. Apparently when Mark started talking about Sternwood, Stahl started babbling about how his father was a federal appellate judge and the little details he could add to the script, like how the robes are dry-cleaned. He claims that Mark sarcastically said, “Hey everybody, Jerry’s sharing a little something personal with us! Isn’t that nice! You think we can keep going now, or do you have a few more little stories for us?” (This is presumably the passage that so upset Mark when he talks about it in Brad Duke’s book.) He talks about blowing the deadline while he shot nonstop speedballs and thought only two days had gone by when it was actually a week, and recalls trying to clean blood off pages without smearing the few thoughts he’d jotted down (material which he admits “was incoherent even before it was illegible”). And he recounts L/F’s courier showing up, and Stahl keeping him waiting at the door while frantically typing just to get something on a page to give him. Finally, he says he never heard from the TP crew after that, and says Tony Krantz reamed Stahl’s CAA agent for recommending him.
I’m still really curious how he came to be in INLAND EMPIRE!