On Sunday night, “Twin Peaks” on Showtime presented what may one day be considered a classic 45 minutes of television– something for the ages, an amazing piece of work that may have explained the whole show for the first time and offered something that cinephiles will study.
The show’s ratings came out today. It ranked 90th of all shows seen on cable on Sunday night. A total of 264,000 people watched it. That’s fewer than the previous week by about 30,000. So even the lure of Laura Dern and an episode with familiar faces wasn’t enough to keep up the paltry ratings to this point.
Of course, the first 16 minutes of Episode 8 “Gotta light?” were much like the first seven episodes. Maybe viewers tuned out. A three minute performance by Nine Inch Nails may have done the trick. I just thought, this is the end. Who needs this?
And then, a just-shot dead Evil Agent Cooper (too hard to explain) opened his eyes, revived from death. And what commenced was surreal and beautiful. It required a lot of patience as it unfolded. But basically we saw David Lynch and company used the Trinity nuclear bomb test in New Mexico, in the summer of 1945, to explain all the evil in the world that followed.
Or certainly the evil that occurred at Twin Peaks. I do think they went back and said, what Bob (Bob being the evil presence on Twin Peaks) could be considered the inventor of evil? And the Lynch folks decided it was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Well, whatever. It was amazing. Few people saw it. When “Twin Peaks” continues, either the palate will have been cleansed and there’s a much better show, or things just get weirder. In any case, Episode 8 will go down in the record books.
The biggest problem–no promotion. No one from the show is doing publicity, and Showtime doesn’t offer press previews. No one knew Episode 8 was coming. It’s as if it appeared on a UHF channel by accident. But maybe David Lynch wants it that way.
I’ll bet Showtime can’t wait for “Billions” to return. I’m with them.
