Who Killed Laura Podcast - Pilot
Hi, Chris here. As I write this, it’s actually almost a year since we recorded this pilot episode. I bought The Complete Mystery blu-ray set and in early October it was announced that the series would return, this time on Showtime. So it just seemed like good timing to revisit it and hopefully cover everything before the new episodes aired. Life intruded and we were sporadic in recording these, and for better or worse, David Lynch recently announced that the series wouldn’t air until 2017, so with several of these “in the can,” a little more efficiency in how we do them, and a renewed commitment, hopefully we will be on track to discuss the entire old ABC series, the film, the deleted scenes and “missing pieces,” and perhaps ephemera like the Agent Cooper Tapes and The Diary of Laura Palmer as well. And who knows, maybe somewhere we’ll talk about the fan edit James Hurley spinoff or the fan edit Fire Walk With Me.
We’ll number these like the series did, so this is the Pilot, and next episode is Episode 1, and so on. We have at least one Bonus Episode outside the normal numbering as well, and that may be where we discuss the non-series material.
I think we’ll leave our feelings about the series for the podcast itself, especially since they’re still evolving with this decades-later analysis, so let’s just discuss some of the errata of this episode. And yes, I realize its breadth resembles the corrections crawl of SNL’s “Fox & Friends” sketch. As you can probably here a couple times, as much as we were enjoying ourselves and having a good conversation, our lack of research was embarrassing. We get better. Now for the corrections, additional background and observations.
First, the show aired on ABC. It is now owned by CBS, who put their logo at the end of every episode on the blu-ray set. We got confused.
We’re not very concerned in this and the next episode or two about when the episode in question aired, who wrote it, and who directed it. We make it a habit later. This pilot episode, entitled “Northwest Passage,” though the titles were never revealed in the credits, aired April 8, 1990, was written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, who also created the series, and Lynch directed it. It’s a longer episode than normal and was seen by 34.6 million viewers.
As a bit of background we don’t discuss in this episode, Lynch and Frost met in 1987 and started work on a couple film ideas that didn’t get the ground–a biopic of Marilyn Monroe and a comedy called One Saliva Bubble–before coming up with an idea for a crime film called Northwest Passage. This became Twin Peaks. Interesting that that series mixes both comedy and a tragic blonde with secrets, so both creative itches apparently got scratched.
Dumb mistake: I repeatedly call Doctor Hayward “Doc Martin.” I think it’s because his daughter is named Donna, and somehow I was conflating her with Donna Martin, Tori Spelling’s character from another ‘90s show I watched at the time, 90210. As another great friend and Lynchian pointed out, Hayward is very close to “wayward,” though Laura fits that bill more than Donna. The good doctor is played by Warren Frost, father of series co-creator Mark Frost. He and his show wife, Grace Zabriskie, would also play a married couple in five episodes of Seinfeld spanning 1992-1998.
Not as dumb a mistake: Scott says “Bunkhouse Boys” rather than Bookhouse Boys.
It’s implied here, due to faulty memory, that the Log Lady (RIP Catherine Coulson) didn’t play an important part in the series, but she was on the periphery of every episode. Neither is true. She isn’t in every episode, but does play an important part, particularly in Episode 5.
The Lynchboro storyline of the crime series Wiseguy aired just weeks before Twin Peaks premiered and was oddly prescience, with lead character Vinnie becoming sheriff of a small Washington town and trying to stop a serial killer.
The 1993 mini-series Wild Palms was mentioned as possibly being influenced by Twin Peaks, or maybe it’s just a similar-sounding name. Other shows said to containing some Twin Peaks influence include Picket Fences, Northern Exposure (as it aired just a few months after, it’s unlikely, at least not as an initial inspiration), and who knows if there would have been an X-Files if Agent Cooper hadn’t opened the door for other quirky, charismatic and obsessive FBI agents investigating the bizarre. And basically, any series set in a small town where the characters have old secrets might get labelled a Twin Peaks knockoff, rightly or wrongly.
You’ll note we talk about what we perceive is one of the larger if not main themes of the series, Man vs. Nature. The aforementioned friend, Alan, a great fan of author James Howard Kunstler, pointed out that Kunstler has said that suburban housing is often named after the natural elements destroyed in its creation. So what to make of Ghostwood Estates, eh? Also along those lines, note our main despoiler of nature, Ghostwood developer Ben Horne, has an autistic son he ignores and perhaps doesn’t love, the Native American headdress-wearing Johnny.
Finally, you’ll notice the episode cuts off fairly abruptly. In this same session, we went on to discuss the “International Version” of the Pilot, but the podcast was long enough as it was, so we cut that section and will present it as a bonus episode a few weeks from now. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know why we’re waiting. If not, just sit tight.
Thanks for listening and reading. We’d love to hear from you what you liked, didn’t like, what we screwed up that we don’t discuss here, and what Twin Peaks and Lynch and Frost have meant to you.
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