10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 14
2. A Frog In The Throat (?)
The greatest scene in an all-time great Peaks episode saw Sarah Palmer attempt to drown her sorrows in Elk's Point #9 Bar.
She drew unwanted attention from a truck driver to her left, after pulling up a solitary stool. She warded off his advances with a forthright refusal ("It wasn't meant to be polite"). The trucker was unperturbed. "It's a free country," he reasoned. "A free..c*nt..ry." Sarah knows all about sexual predators. About how they are completely resistant to the concepts of consent and accountability. Her words are nothing to him - so, like her dead daughter Laura, she removed her face. Within the blackened husk behind it, smoke coalesced. Lightning spat out like a reptile's tongue. The ring finger - the "spiritual mound" - of a hand appeared, more resembling a blackened phallus.
She then ripped half his neck out. After a moment of satisfied calm, she let out a curdling scream, almost phonetically identical to the one heard as she spotted BOB by the foot of her bed 25 years ago. Was this a ruse? After protesting her innocence to the bartender, she surveyed his corpse with a focused stare. "Sure is a mystery, huh?"
This was an awesome performance from Grace Zabriskie. She conveyed the mystery of possession in Twin Peaks (by what? The mother? The manifested frog bug?) with a mystifying number of layers. She was at once haunted, haunting, accountable, unwitting. The colour scheme of her demonic guise suggested an evil - but the retaliation was rendered almost justifiable by the ludicrous tragedy that is her life.
This was both gut punch and fist pump - a scene set to be discussed for its moral complexity for as long as the character of Leland Palmer itself.