Maddy's Murder
When You're Not Going Home
Last night’s viewing:
Lonely Souls (Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 7). Dir. David Lynch, 1990. 47 min.
I’m laid up with cedar fever, an extreme allergic reaction to the mountain cedar trees that are native to central Texas. It’s the height of the season and I wake up each morning feeling like I’ve been beaten up in the night. So I’ve taken to my couch, jacked up on Zyrtec, and am now semi-hallucinating my way through a queasy selection of what passes for “lighter viewing”. Capsule reviews to follow, I really can’t manage much more of anything else…
As announced by the Log Lady in her introduction, Lonely Souls is a “dark dream of suffering and pain”. With Lynch at the helm (and indeed, appearing as aurally-challenged Bureau Chief Gordon Cole), this is an especially disturbing episode, with the director conjuring some of the most striking scenes to be shown on US network television; and climaxing in the unrelenting grimness of Maddy Ferguson’s murder.
Pretty much every comic tic, romantic gesture, and grand guignol excess that typifies Twin Peaks is at play in this episode, but pushed and intensified to their absolute limit by Lynch’s bravura direction. If you only ever watched one installment of this 48-episode death-driven drama, then this would be the entry that captures everything. In a neat subversion, even though the identity Laura Palmer’s killer is finally revealed, this is merely the herald of still greater apocalypses to come.
But still I'm afraid to tell you of my fantasies and nightmares. Sometimes you’re good at understanding. Sometimes you just giggle and I don't have the nerve to ask why things like that are funny to you. So I feel badly again and shut up about it for a long time. I love you very much. But sometimes I worry that you would not be around me at all if you knew what my insides were like. Black and dark and soaked with dreams of big, big men and different ways that they might hold me and take me into their control.
The world spins. And Lonely Souls is bookended by death. The first is the suicide of Harold Smith, the shut-in horticulturalist and author of the “living novel” of other people’s lives. He collects diaries, and fragments, and confessions. Hides them away. He has Laura Palmer’s secret diary. We see him hanging from the neck in the hothouse, a note pinned to his chest: J'ai une âme solitaire. I am a lonely soul. Angelo Badalamenti’s score is perfect for this scene, a spectral Messiaen-like organ piece that segues into Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, and Maddy Ferguson waking up to the splendours of a new day. Her final turn around the sun.
Maddy has made the decision to leave Twin Peaks and return home to Missoula, Montana (birthplace of one David Lynch). But you can never go home. You must know that. “I’ll come galloping back often,” Maddy reassures her aunt and uncle.
The episode proceeds with the requisite funny business … Leo and the mystery of the “new shoes”, Catherine (a wonderful Piper Laurie) masquerading as Mr Tojamura, the ‘light-hearted’ touches amongst the growing evidence of sexual abuse and molestation. The encroaching stain of darkness.
The world spins, and then at the 30 minute mark, it begins.
A shot of a tree rustling in the wind cuts to an empty living room (always an ominous sign with Lynch), a low synth drone from Badalamenti (the shovel-maker) and the dead click of Louis Armstrong repeating on the phonograph. An empty chair (the master of the house is absent, a neat foreshadowing as Leland Palmer is about to be possessed by the murderous BOB). Unusually, the camera backs away from the vacated chair at ankle height, turns, and who is this crawling down the stairs, misshapen and whimpering, groaning under the turning overhead fan?
We cut to a new scene at the Sheriff’s office but the death drone continues unabated. Something is happening. The moon passes behind the clouds. The trees again. The stuck record repeating itself. Sarah Palmer crawling the floor, beholding the pale horse. Terrible and magnificent, the vision pushes her into unconsciousness.
The camera trails along Sarah’s prone form and rises up to meet her husband, Leland, his hair a shocking white, stood tall and straightening his tie in the mirror, seemingly oblivious to the incapacitated figure at his feet. The drone fades and we’re at the Roadhouse (the neon sign reflected in a grimy puddle, another magnificent Lynch shot) and Julee Cruise is on stage singing to the patrons. Seems that we’re going to get the full works tonight.
Shadow in my house, Cruise sings as Agent Cooper, Sheriff Truman, and the Log Lady enter the double doors for an unprecedented night out in each other’s company. Donna and James are sharing a booth, she’s upset about Harold’s suicide, James tells her that Maddy is going home. The bookends of the day.
There’s the sound of thunder and the band are now playing “The World Spins”. The sun comes up and down each day. Cooper has a vision of the Giant on the stage intoning “It … is … happening … again”.
Cut to Leland admiring himself in the living room mirror. The demon BOB looks back at him. Leland doesn’t flinch, just smiles. Turns to the camera, the drone resumes. Leland stares at the open doorway and calmly puts on surgical gloves. Maddy is now in the doorway and wants to know what’s burning. She has been summoned downstairs by an ignis fatuus.
Maddy’s murder is in three acts. Extended, and awful. Almost unbearable. She’s chased down and dragged back into the living room. Brightly lit and unsparing, unlike the strobe-lit killing of her cousin Laura in the darkened railroad car, this is murder upfront and clear to see, broadcast in the front room of the Americans. Strangulation and screaming. Terrible screaming. A hard punch in the face. BOB is grinning as he tortures Maddy, deaf to her pleas. He’s revelling in it. The soundtrack is slowed down to the pitch of desperate animal groans. BOB slow-motion waltzing with Maddy in her final moments. He throws her to the couch, she’s sat upright, and we zoom in (noting the perfect cut of her skirt) on the scream (the scream that joins every other scream; you sometimes feel that cinema was solely invented to capture scream after scream, the defining image of tormented humanity); a very hard cut to Leland punching down hard into that scream. Once. Twice (pause for breath).
Leland stops completely, as if he has come to his senses. Maddy is coughing and spluttering a little but still very much alive. Leland gathers her up. He’s holding her. Slow-dancing Maddy around the room. And then he’s BOB, licking and kissing her neck. Crushing her. The soundtrack drone now incorporates the Messiaen theme from earlier, but this time reduced to a funereal dirge. BOB looks like he’s fucking Maddy where she stands, her eyes roll back, and she’s back with Leland again. An unflinching close-up of her bloody teeth, cut lips, and a single bloodstain running from her eye like a stylised tear.
Leland runs Maddy across the room and smashes that face into a glass picture frame. The glasses shatters and we’re invited to admire Maddy’s ruined form on the living room carpet. Snuffed out just like that. In the middle of packing for the long drive home to Missoula.
And at the Roadhouse, Cooper’s vision of the giant fades away, Julee Cruise returns, and the world spins on and on.
I’m so sorry.
Coming next: Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
©Amphetamine Sulphate
©Philip Best 2026
Truly exhilarating writing. I've seen this episode many times but this will definitely make me view it in a different light (or darkness).