Doctor Who has actually undergone several significant shifts since its last Christmas special episode. David Tennant’s reign has come to an end, so a lot of “The Eleventh Hour” was about introducing the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and trying to cross the tricky transition from one protagonist into another. Doctor Who is such an odd, unique form of storytelling in this respect – every once in a while, a new actor shows up to take over the main character’s role, and the whole fiction has to continue in the same universe with this new player in its midst. Switching actors happens a fair amount on long-running film mediums, but it’s almost always on the James Bond model: exit Sean Connery, enter Roger Moore, with little comment and very little difference in the essential character. Instead, Doctor Who fictionalizes the new actor’s entrance, usually with great moment and aplomb, and takes each version of the Doctor as an opportunity to start all over again.

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan as the new Doctor Who and his companion, Amy Pond

Err… sort of. The incredible thing about the Doctor Who system of New Actor Playing the Protagonist is that somehow, each new Doctor brings something different and novel to the fiction while also retaining something essential about the character. The First Doctor, played by William Hartnell from 1963-1966, was quite old, occasionally snappish, forgetful, knowledgeable, and grandfatherly. When Hartnell left, he was replaced by Patrick Troughton, whose Second Doctor was younger, changeable, child-like and much less careful about his clothing. And as the Doctors changed, technology changed, and the landscape of television production changed, so too did the forms of storytelling, the enemies, the companions, and the visual style. It’s a show that seems most notable for its mutability, and yet, the things most crucial about the Doctor have always remained somewhere at the core of the show. He’s mysterious, lonely, he loves humanity, hates oppression, is nearly infinitely powerful and deeply frustrated when his capabilities fail to prevent injustice or tragedy.

The transition is always tricky, especially if the previous incarnation has been around for a while, and so I was ready to accept some rocky starts on the first introduction of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. He’s young – much younger than any of the previous iterations – and I was concerned that Smith would have trouble pulling off some of the more tortured aspects of the Doctor’s persona. And yes, the opening scenes were full of abounding silliness, culminating in the Doctor ravenously dipping fish sticks into a giant bowl of custard. The silliness somehow managed to be hilarious and just ever-so-slightly disturbing, though, and by the end of the episode, I was completely sold on Smith’s performance. By the time he got around to that iconic scene where the Doctor selects his new clothing, I was ready to find the bowtie completely charming rather than alarmingly twee. Even more impressive, he’s scary, or at least just scary enough to be believable when he chases off an entire Giant Eyeball Alien ship just by telling them his name.

Mmm, fish custard

As enormous and important as the new Doctor will be, “The Eleventh Hour” is as much about the show’s new producer as its new protagonist. Last years’ Christmas specials were the last hurrah of Russell T. Davies, who has been responsible for the new series of Doctor Who since it premiered five years ago. The reins are now in the hands of Stephen Moffat, who’s written several of the best episodes of Doctor Who over the last few years, and whose style of storytelling is distinctive. The beginning of “The Eleventh Hour” is a gorgeous set piece for Moffat’s aesthetic, and it establishes a solid, unmistakable foundation for his own Doctor Who.

Without question, the newly reborn Eleventh Doctor crash-lands in the middle of a fairytale. The bright blue box lands in front of a dilapidated house surrounded by thick green vegetation, out of which steps an adorable little girl with red hair, an apple-red cardigan, and a Scottish accent. Curiously, the Doctor sets down in a small village rather than the usual urban London setting. The elaborate offering and refusing of food follows a familiar fairytale ritual (“not to hot, not too cold”), the Doctor is mysterious and blunt, and he instantly treats orphaned Amelia Pond as an equal (and notes, quite rightly, that she has a fairytale name). All of the colors are intensely saturated, so that the TARDIS is blue and Amelia’s sweater is red in the manner of abstractions, flashcards, or children’s books.

And then there’s the crack in Amelia’s wall, which more than anything else telegraphs “fairytale.” It’s not the Disney-fied version, of course, but the original Grimm’s stories, where scary things are truly frightening, and horror lurks immediately underneath the everyday. The crack in the wall is such a classic, believable terror – it’s the house that threatens to become unheimlich, the completely mundane object that mysteriously attains power. Where previous Doctor Who stories reach toward cheesiness, as in the opening of the first episode of the new series, where Rose is attacked by plastic department store mannequins, the cheese factor here has been adapted into something deeper and more universal. Even when the show shifts several years in the future and we encounter Amy Pond as a much older Kiss-a-gram, the fairytale remains a strong, palpable undercurrent.

A very creepy disguise for Prisoner One, the villain of "The Eleventh Hour"

This type of storytelling has appeared in Stephen Moffat episodes of Doctor Who before, most notably, “Blink,” where weeping stone angels lurk in every corner, waiting to attack the moment you turn away. (To this day, that is one of the scariest episodes of television I have ever experienced. Oh my god.) I’m thrilled to see it playing such a big role in this new rebooted version of the show, because I think it taps into something that Doctor Who has always been uniquely suited to do, and that is almost entirely absent elsewhere on TV. Unlike any major American television show I can think of, Doctor Who is still made to be family television in Britain. You watch it with your dad, and you both enjoy it. American television for adults is constantly reaching for narrative complexity and mature subject matter as way of endlessly pointing at its own grown-up-ness, and the idea that you could make something more appealing to a wider audience by moving toward simplicity and universality rather than complexity and niche status has never taken hold here.

I wish it would, because the new Doctor Who is, as the Ninth Doctor would say, fantastic.

Today, one of my favorite shows of recent memory, and one that unlike all the previous shows I’ve done on List of Giant Things, I watched as it was originally airing. I did stumble on Battlestar Galactica after the fact of its first premiere and then inhaled the first season on DVD, but after that initial discovery, I was stuck with waiting months and years to find out the end of that story.

I think it’s appropriate and important to talk about endings when thinking about Battlestar Galactica, because its relationship with finality is quite different than a lot of other long shows. This isn’t the case for all genre fiction, but when a show is oriented around a plot that deals with mystery and discovery, the imagined end point forms a crucial and often difficult horizon line from the very beginning. Unlike fiction that uses multiple generations as its device for creating length, it would have been impossible for Battlestar Galactica to continue indefinitely. There are certain questions that the show built into its premise – What do all of the Cylon models look like? Is there such a thing as Earth, and if so, how do we find it? Will humanity survive? Will Cylons survive? – which required an ending in a markedly different sense than a romance plotline. Shows built on generations can continue forever by simply adding new characters, and in the sense of generations, I don’t just mean a family that has children, but any renewable cast of characters: a new senior class at high school, a new administration in the White House, a new bunch of interns in the hospital. Unlike those open, changeable settings, the world of Battlestar is a closed set. These are the humans who survived the apocalypse. These are the thirteen models of humanoid Cylons. Sure, you can discover another ship that managed to survive, or you can learn that there are more models of Cylon than you thought, and the show uses both of those strategies. But you can’t go on like that forever, and at some point, the show has to answer its central questions rather than continue the drama by forever stumbling across an implausible new set of characters. As soon as those questions are resolved, the show is over.

Oscar Moralde recently wrote a nice piece on the problem of television endings for Slant Magazine, in which he describes the difficulty of ending a long-running television show, especially when it’s not necessarily on the creator’s terms. As he points out, few writers have the opportunity to plan for how long the show will need to run, and the process of endlessly extending a show over an indefinite period of time is one Moralde describes as finding a path somewhere in between alienation and stagnation – on the one hand, you can’t change a show so dramatically that its audience no longer recognizes it (“jumping the shark”), on the other hand, you cannot endlessly repeat the same familiar pattern (or, you can do that, but we call those shows Law and Order, Two and a Half Men, or more simply: boring). On Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore and David Eick actually had an opportunity that doesn’t come around that often in television. They were able to set their own end point. The show was popular enough and was garnering enough high-culture respect that SciFi (now the dreaded SyFy) would probably have embraced another season of Battlestar, but its creators negotiated a renewal for a fourth season and then announced that season would be the show’s last. It’s an unusual move for a popular show, and one that was certainly the best thing that could have happened for Battlestar. Only by building in a defined ending point was the show able to move purposefully toward satisfying answers to its central questions.

One year later

All the way through its run, Battlestar is nothing if not completely ballsy in its endings. There are several moments of outright cliffhangers, but it’s even more astonishing in how often the last ten or twenty minutes of an episode will completely shift everything you thought you knew. The best of these is the end of season two, where several plotlines converge around the discovery of a habitable planet and the decision to settle there, abandoning the search for Earth. The last fifteen minutes of that season take place a full year later, which means that the show skips over a gap greater than the entire previous period of time covered in the first two seasons. In the last fifteen minutes, we learn that characters have gotten married, entire political systems and labor unions have been established, a city exists where none was before… Lee Adama got fat! It’s a remarkable shift that telegraphs the writers’ supreme confidence in the long term plan for the show (because how could you do something like that if you didn’t know where you were going?), and jolts the audience outside its comfortable patterns. A faster, if no less impressive shift happens in the middle of season four, at the end of an episode that wasn’t a season finale, but constituted the last episode before a very long hiatus. The easy assumption is that the show will end with finding Earth. Instead, in the final moments of episode twelve (of twenty-two), Cylons and humans land on Earth together and find an irradiated, post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s a blow-your-mind level of awesomeness, and a playful, bravura gesture of surprise and control that’s much more complex and fictionally risky than the typical soap opera cliffhanger (“She’s pregnant! Who’s the father?!”).

You can always tell post-apolcalyptic landscapes by their insistence on grayscale

Nevertheless, the end of Battlestar Galactica was subject to some intense skepticism from the audience, and it was more to do with the thematic and allegorical concerns of the show than from a standpoint of narrative structure. Lost is an important text to bring in here, because it too is a genre show that has been given a set end point far in advance, and seems to be loaded with concrete questions which require answers but whose answers will necessarily conclude the show. My problems with Lost now have little do with the actual answers to those questions (“it’s a genie!”), and are mostly about the way we’re getting around to them (“why should we care about the flash-sideways?”). In contrast, Battlestar’s last season was a pretty masterful sequence of events that doled out information in meaningful, careful, but not unfairly suspenseful ways, while the conclusion it actually reached was considered by some of its audience to be incongruously utopian, or disappointingly spiritual.

After living with it for a while now, I’ve decided that I like the ending. There’s only so much bleakness one can take before turning in relief toward an optimistic ending, even if that ending looks inconsistently cheerful. Its final lines speak to the problem of ending something so complicated, when Caprica Six tells Chip Baltar that she has hope for this incarnation of earth: “let a complicated system repeat itself long enough, eventually something surprising will occur.” But even if the end of Battlestar was unsatisfying for some viewers on a thematic level, it’s hard to deny that its conclusion was thoughtful, well-balanced, and most importantly – planned. We can only hope that we’ll feel the same way about Lost when we look at it a year from now.

It’s hard to even know where to start with Deadwood. This could easily be a 1,000-word blog post on any number of things about the show: its fascinating adaptation of a specific time and place in American history, its immense network of characters and plotlines, its distinctive and completely idiosyncratic dialogue, the detailed attention to set design and costume… it overwhelms. Ian McShane’s performance alone deserves 1,000 words.

And in truth, that’s the takeaway experience of Deadwood, a sense of an immense amount of stuff crammed into a relatively small container. The show is set in an American frontier town in what will eventually become Kansas, right at the beginning of Deadwood’s gold boom. Every shot of someone walking down the street overflows with people, mud, horses, signs for new businesses, price lists for food and hardware, laundry drying on a line, broken liquor bottles, piles of newspapers, dogs, sacks full of mail, wagons, stands selling food, two guys in a bar fight that’s expanded outside, women emptying chamber pots from balconies, prostitutes leaning up against porch railings soliciting tricks. Even in the camp’s many indoor spaces, rooms are crammed full of things hanging from the ceilings, things littering the floors, lanterns and glasses and pistols piled up on every flat surface. It’s an aesthetic mirrored in the show’s narrative structure, where a single episode can follow twenty-three characters and five plotlines, and even mirrored in the dialogue, which comes spilling out in arcane obscenities and multiple subordinate clauses.

Swearengen and Mr. Wu discuss business in Mr. Wu's very full meat locker

The dominant impression is perpetual movement. Deals constantly develop which shift balances of power and new characters arrive to con and be conned. The camp itself is always being pushed into a new status, reaching for new technologies and struggling to come part of American statehood. Al Swearengen, played by Ian McShane, may be the closest the show comes to a main character, the owner of the Gem Saloon who has a finger in every pie and oversees nearly every piece of business that enters the camp. And yet even Al can’t keep up with everything: there’s an amazing line at the end of the first season when Al stands looking out of his balcony into the window of Mrs. Alma Garrett, whose hotel room looks straight into his office across the street. The first season begins with Swearengen trying to swindle Mrs. Garrett’s husband by convincing him to purchase a gold claim thought to be worthless. When Mr. Garrett decides he’s bought a bad claim, and Swearengen’s henchman Dan Doherty simultaneously realizes the claim is actually immensely profitable, Swearengen orders Dan to kill Mr. Garrett. Swearengen causes the death of Mrs. Garrett’s husband, the camp sheriff is now in love with her, she’s taking care of a child Swearengen considered murdering to protect the camp from bad rumors, and yet, Swearengen looks at her across the street and says, “Do you know, I’ve never spoken to her once since she come to camp?”

Alma Garrett, seen from Al Swearengen's balcony

It’s astonishing. How is it possible that two characters with such entangled plotlines have never even met each other? A similar moment happens later in season two, when Jane Cannery (better known as Calamity Jane) stumbles into a whorehouse and meets Joanie Stubbs, who has had a great deal of contact with Jane’s best friend in the camp, Charlie Utter. They formally introduce themselves to each other, and it seems remarkable that these women have never met before. It’s an indicator of just how crowded Deadwood really is – the show follows so many different characters and plots that these relatively significant characters haven’t even met, even though they all live practically next door to one another. At one point, as several people all vie for a table at a local restaurant, Mr. Merick actually start to talk about how absurdly full the place is. “It is terribly crowded today. We were just remarking just yesterday that it couldn’t possible get more crowded. And yet today, it is!” Charlie Utter, waiting in a line to get a seat, puts it more directly: “Is it fucking crowded in here, or do you just got some big fucking feet?” he asks the man in front of him. “Maybe it’s a lethal combination of them both.”

There are a lot of crowded shows around these days – it’s become an important mark of complexity, or difficulty, or quality, or something. There probably aren’t that many more characters on Deadwood than The West Wing, The Sopranos, or Lost, and certainly not any more than The Wire. But there are a few things that differentiate Deadwood’s crush of people. For one, many of those shows build their multiple plotlines around something like a thematic unity, or at least make space for self-reflection. The West Wing often does this well: a Thanksgiving episode will unpack that holiday’s significance in American mythology through several interlocking plotlines that allow characters to muse about family, pilgrimage, heritage, history, and turkeys. For many of its earlier seasons, The Sopranos used Jennifer Melfi as a space to allow Tony to reflect on his life and livelihood, which gave viewers the same opportunity to engage in thinking about the show above the level of plot. When there’s a thematic unity or an internal system of self-consideration, the crowds seem much less crowded. Character systems and individual strands of the plot sort themselves into networks and hierarchies, and the inner organizing system is felt, if not seen.

William Bullock and Tom Nuttall examining Mr. Nuttall's new bicycle

Deadwood rarely uses those kinds of self-sorting techniques, and so the jumble of people remains a jumble, often frustrating, but also frequently astonishing. The other characteristic that distinguishes Deadwood’s mob from the hordes in other shows is the total emptiness that surrounds it. The Wire is set in Baltimore, and while the show seems to touch on characters from nearly every segment of the city, the city itself isn’t an isolated space. Characters in The Wire may feel trapped in Baltimore, but the show acknowledges the existence of New York, Annapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, all within an easy day’s drive. There is nothing within a day’s drive to Deadwood. People crush together, filling every corner and driving up the price of real estate, but the camp is surrounded by complete wilderness. The crowd is there because it chooses to be, because it’s a camp full of potential on the very edge of political legitimacy. Deadwood is full of people building new streets and hanging signs from every new building, because the throng is self-defining, and because the act of hanging a sign means that there’s something there to be named. On most shows, the mass of characters is a means to an end, allowing the show to incorporate more content and further expand its fictional world. On Deadwood, the crowd is the point.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had one of the strongest presences in academic writing about television, or at least, it did until The Wire was crowned “the best show in television history,” and it became popular to fret over urban violence and the inevitable failures of modern institutions. Do not mistake me – I am all in favor of jumping on the “best show in television history” bandwagon, because The Wire just blows everything else out of the water.

Still, Buffy holds a special place in the development of academic television criticism, because while The Wire was catapulted quite quickly into canonical status (is now the subject of classes at Ivy League universities, has become a benchmark against which all other television is compared, is constantly perceived in relation to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, etc. as way of solidifying its high-culture position), Buffy grew into its position slowly, and the whole process was accompanied by persistent navel-gazing. There are dozens of books, but take for example Buffy Meets the Academy, a collection of essays broken into sections: Power and the Buffy Canon, Buffy Meets the Classics, Buffy and the Classroom. My favorite essay titles in the book include “Buffy Never Goes It Alone: The Rhetorical Construction of Sisterhood in the Final Season” and “Buffy’s Insight into Wollstonecraft and Mill” – the text is constantly reaching toward the language and references of a standard critical discussion, but is ever self-conscious about making a popular network television show with an audience of teenage girls its subject.

Buffy became an academic hit largely because it turns several favorite gendered tropes on their heads, and dramatizes the reclamation of the Gothic as an empowering female genre. Where the vampire story traditionally narrates the travails of lovely, victimized women, dangerously attractive vampires, and chaste, heroic male saviors, Buffy re-cast the role of Awesome Vampire Destroyer as a far-from-helpless heroine, known for her roundhouse kicks and her attraction to Bad Dudes. It’s not hard to read all sorts of gender politics, role reversals, high school metaphors and sexual commentary into Buffy. But it needs to defined against not just Gothic genres, but also earlier high school-focused television.

One place to see this clearly is in the dialogue, which is crucial on Buffy. Where shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 has a dialogue pacing that forces you to wait entire geological eras before the next line comes lumbering along, Buffy is fast and funny. Joss Whedon-eque dialogue became as important a defining characteristic for the show as Sorkin-esque language on The West Wing or Sherman-Palladino for Gilmore Girls. The common denominator for all of them is speed, but where Sorkin utilizes uncannily complete dialogic paragraphs and Sherman-Palladino was queen of the pop-culture reference, the language on Buffy can be undervalued as merely relentlessly quippy. It is brimming over with ironic one-liners, frequently voiced by Xander, (“Yesterday my life was like, ‘uh oh, pop quiz.’ Today, it’s ‘rain of toads”), but Buffy and even the villains get their fair share of humor. As Buffy nervously enters the dank, dripping sewer that houses the Big Bad of Season One, an ancient vampire called The Master, she comments that it looks like he has some water damage. “Oh good, the feeble banter portion of the fight,” he responds. When Willow worries about asking out Oz, who is a few years older than she, Buffy (who is dating a vampire) replies, “You think he’s too old ‘cause he’s a senior? Please. My boyfriend had a bicentennial.” (Many more examples here.)

Yes, it’s quippy. But the dialogue maintains Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s careful two-tone balancing act, allowing it to walk the tightrope between Gothic plotlines and an average teenager coming-of-age story. At any moment where horror threatens to overrun an episode, a quick dose of snark yanks the atmosphere back into a more grounded framework. Simultaneously, as Buffy’s painful character development forces her to cope with all the usual, awful realities of adulthood – traumatic first sexual experience, death of a parent, assuming the role of caretaker – the dialogue often shifts into a sincere mode, allowing characters to express hesitance or blunt sadness without the benefit of mitigating humor. Dialogue knits together all the light high school comedy with dark monstrous destiny, and as the series moves into later seasons, performs an impressive reversal, where monsters are the light action sequences that punctuate bleak real-world problems. Particularly in seasons six and seven, the quips that were previously used to pepper scenes of apocalyptic danger begin to appear more frequently as Buffy tries to apply for a loan, or get a job that actually has a salary. “Are you in the wrong line? That’s for deposits, that’s for withdrawals, and this one…is for getting kicked in the face.”

The Gentlemen

Of course, I can’t talk about Buffy and dialogue without at least mentioning the episode “Hush,” which appears in the show’s fourth season. A seriously scary group of fairy tale demons called The Gentlemen arrive in Sunnydale and steal everyone’s voices, Little Mermaid-style, so that no one can scream when they start cutting out peoples’ hearts. For the entire body of the episode, there is no dialogue at all, and Buffy and the Scooby Gang resort to writing on dry erase boards, using overhead projectors, and miming (often lewd) gestures. It’s an amazing sequence, and it establishes that Buffy can work without a steady stream of wry, underhand comments. Still, it’s clear that “Hush” is an exception-proves-the-rule example, where the absence of dialogue only heightens our awareness of how crippled the show would be without it.

Willow and Buffy realize they can't speak

As a subject for academic attention, though, I feel sure the show’s incessant punning hinders its foothold as a serious cultural object. It’s not always easy to think about Mary Wollstonecraft in the context of a show where the villain cries out “You were destined to die! It is written!” and the heroine answers, “What can I say? I flunked the written.” But the cheesy, goofy dialogue is really the forum where all those gender politics and David Lynchian dream sequences are built, and where Buffy’s role as a believable sixteen-year-old is defined again and again. Whatever the case, shows like The Wire begin to take their place in a television canon, and Buffy gets stuck underneath the deeply serious enterprises like The Sopranos or Mad Men. But I really believe Buffy has been an important catalyst for television criticism, and hope that it won’t get slowly relegated to the teenage girl-friendly genre project it superficially resembles.

As a part of all this, I’ve decided to take Fridays and write about a show on that List of Giant Things. I spend a little time every day sitting down with a word processing document. Might as well use some of that time for the LoGT instead of The Real Housewives of New York City, ya know what I mean? (Note the second: this does not necessarily mean that I haven’t watched The Real Housewives of New York City. I find Bethenny’s cheekbones mesmerizing.)

So, up first on the LoGT project – Twin Peaks, 1990-1991. Largely produced and created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, although some disputes during season two caused David Lynch to leave until returning to work on the final episode.

I first saw the pilot of Twin Peaks in my college dorm room a few years ago, and I remember watching the synthesized strains of the hypnotic opening credits and rocking back in my chair. “What on earth is this?” I wondered, as a machine slowly rotated around the points of a giant buzz saw, blowing sparks everywhere. The pilot introduces the community, the main characters, and what seems like the central focus of the show. Local high school student Laura Palmer has been murdered, and Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman are going to find out who did it. That first, extended-length episode does essentially what you’d expect, outlining the relationships between Laura’s friend Donna, her boyfriend Bobby, her lover James, and all the other minor characters at the diner, the Great Northern Hotel, the gas station, the sheriff’s department. It’s also intensely melodramatic and returns constantly to the overwrought main theme, which never slips quietly into the background noise, but rather slaps you upside the head with its straining, electronic violin and keyboard anguish.

Sloooooooow pan down

For the most part, those early episodes don’t do much to subvert your expectations of what Twin Peaks is doing. There are some weird, unnerving slow shots, particularly one where Sarah Palmer calls her husband Leland to ask if he’s seen Laura, and hears a police officer tell Leland that Laura’s been killed. The phone drops, and the camera slowly pans down the spiral cord until it pushes close up to the receiver, through which we can hear Sarah Palmer making horrific grieving animal noises. It’s deeply creepy, but not unreal. Agent Cooper’s idiosyncrasies make up a good portion of the show’s mystery, especially his penchant for talking into his tape-recorder to an unknown woman named Diane, and there are some particularly odd minor characters. In the second episode, while Sarah Palmer sits on the couch, grief-stricken, she has a vision of a scary long-haired man crouching on the floor. The show is weird, and the pieces to the puzzle increasingly create a sense that the puzzle might not look like you think it does, but at first it’s all just signs and portents.

Bob visits Sarah Palmer in a vision

By the third episode, though, Twin Peaks’ relationship with reality begins to slip. At the end of the episode, Agent Cooper falls asleep and slips into a seriously surreal dream, where he sees flashes of two mysterious men named Mike and Bob, he sits in a red-curtained room while a dancing midget who speaks backwards tells him about his cousin who looks exactly like Laura Palmer and is filled with secrets, and the actress who plays Laura Palmer leans over and whispers the name of the killer into Cooper’s ear. From this point on, Twin Peaks is an unpredictable barrel of the uncanny, where any normal moment could take a swerve toward the bizarre and strange meta-fictional playfulness becomes the dominant mode. Very soon thereafter, the actress who plays Laura Palmer reappears in the main body of the show, now playing Laura’s cousin Maddy. This point also acts as the introduction for Invitation to Love, a show-within-the-show where one of the actresses plays two characters, Emerald and Jade. Throughout the remaining twenty-six episodes, Twin Peaks repeatedly frustrates any attempt to follow a straightforward narrative thread. The surreal red-curtained room reappears, a giant comes to visit Agent Cooper and give him clues, Eye Patch Lady wakes up from a coma and believes that she’s a high schooler, Log Lady’s log delivers mysterious hints, and the owls that live in the woods outside Twin Peaks become evil spirits trying to turn Agent Cooper into his own evil doppelganger. (I think. At the end, it gets…confusing).

Dancing midgets in the red room, Sarah Palmer flips out

Twin Peaks isn’t the first television show to tell a story over the period of several episodes, or to have an immense number of characters, or multiple, interwoven plotlines – soap operas had been doing it for decades, and Invitation to Love is a nice little riff on how indebted Twin Peaks is to that type of television. Nevertheless, Twin Peaks became one of the first shows to actively frustrate viewers’ attempts to keep everything straight week-to-week, and took ample advantage of the television medium in a time before technology made it easy to record, re-watch, and analyze what you were seeing. The show is impossible to follow if you sit down and watch it all at once, pausing to think about what’s happening as you go along. I can only imagine how completely strange and compelling it must have been to watch the whole story spread over many months, or to be unable to rewind and watch Cooper’s crazy dancing midget dream again. You would be in a perpetual state of “WHAT ON EARTH WAS THAT?!?,” and the slow, dreamy, meditative quality of the visual style only makes the lightning quick flashes of a one-armed man getting into an elevator more unnerving.

Who killed Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, who killed Lilly Kane in Veronica Mars

The show has also had a long, influential arm in the television that has come since then. The first season of Veronica Mars is heavily reliant on the “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” plot structure, and although it avoids the surrealist bent that Twin Peaks uses so effectively, the resolution of that story bears some familiar resonances with what happens to Laura as well as connects both shows back to an older Gothic archetype of disordered familial relationships. The beginning of Lost is also strongly reminiscent of the opening episodes of Twin Peaks, where a horrible but understandable event quickly shifts into something supernatural. Even The Sopranos, which would seem like a completely different sort of show, plays with unnerving dream sequences and psychological horror in a way that comes straight out of the David Lynch playbook.

And even though Twin Peaks has become such a ubiquitous, influential, cult-classic television show, re-watching over the past week, it is still unlike anything else I’ve seen. It’s too weird and unlikely to be repeated or copied, and it’s far too neglectful of the audience’s needs for closure, explanation, and sympathetic characters to have any success in the mainstream market. If you’ve never seen it, it’s definitely worth a look. But… brace yourself.