3. Mikhail Gorbachev Demanded To Know The Ending...
It can be hard to overstate quite what a phenomenon Twin Peaks was at the time, but audiences had really never seen anything like it. Still there has never been anything quite as odd that's appeared on a major network except maybe that live Peter Pan they did last year with Christopher Walken and her out of Girls but it did help pave the way for genre hits that struck a chord with mainstream audiences like The X-Files, Lost and Heroes (for better or worse). Everybody was tuning into the show at the time, even if interest eventually dropped off and it became more of a cult thing to be into. But whilst it was airing Twin Peaks had no shortage of fans, and no shortage of fans in high places, either. High places the fans in question thought they could use as leverage to uncover the answer to the show's core mystery. It may be apocryphal, and it almost certainly didn't do much for the then-recently cemented new relationship between the East and the West at the tail end of the Cold War, but it's alleged that in 1991 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to get US President George HW Bush to find out who killed Laura Palmer for him. Somebody down the chain of command rang Lynch, and he refused to give up the goods. And rightfully so.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
