The TWIN PEAKS Character Series surveys one hundred ten characters from the series Twin Peaks (1990-91 on ABC and 2017 on Showtime as The Return), the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and The Missing Pieces (2014), a collection of deleted scenes from that film. A new character study will appear every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday although patrons will have immediate access to each entry a month before it goes public. There will be spoilers.
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Brought to Twin Peaks by a spiritual intervention, the unlikely Freddie and his green glove are destined to play a key role in a battle between worlds.
Two men arrive at the Roadhouse after work; with the older local James Hurley guiding an impressed young British man around. "This place is the dog's bollocks, innit?" Freddie marvels. No one comments on the odd green gardening glove on his right hand.
Saturday, October 1, 2016
A week later, Freddie and "Jimmy" (as he calls James) are working late as security guards at the Great Northern Hotel, awaiting one more shipment before they go to the Roadhouse again. Freddie teases James, who reveals it's his birthday, about Renee - a woman he hopes to see at the bar despite the fact that she's married. James presses Freddie, who is crushing walnuts into dust with his gloved hand, to reveal the backstory of this mysterious quasi-appendage (a doctor once tried to remove it but stopped when the hand began to bleed). The story Freddie reveals is extraordinary: six months ago, back in London, he found himself regretting his layabout life and wishing he could help people. Leaping onto a pile of trash he was propelled into a spiral in the sky; floating in air, he met a mysterious individual named the Fireman who told him where to find a single green glove that would have the power of a pile driver, and to travel to this small town in Washington to pursue his destiny. Without knowing what this would mean, Freddie dutifully followed this advice (after gravely injuring a stubborn store clerk who didn't want to sell him the "damaged" item). James is suitably amazed. That night he gets to see the glove in action - beyond its questionable utility as a nutcracker - when he gets into trouble with Renee's husband Chuck. The angry, jealous man and his friend beat James brutally until Freddie intervenes; a single blow to each - a tap really, given how slightly he moves his gloved fist - sends them flying to the floor. Chuck in particular appears to have a seizure despite Freddie's best efforts to keep his power in check. As Deputy Hawk places Freddie and James in jail cells at the sheriff's station later that night, he sternly informs them that the victims are in intensive care. The two prisoners are soon distracted from their own woes by a fellow jailbird warbling a curious tune: an eyeless woman stretching her arms out and calling into the night.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Come morning, she's still at it (despite moments of sleep during the night) and Freddie and James remain riveted. They fail to notice that another prisoner, the nasty Deputy Chad, has slipped out of his cell until he returns wielding a gun against another deputy entering the room. Freddie knows what to do: as Chad approaches his hated colleague, the prisoner punches the cell door so hard that the bars swing out and slam into the bad deputy's face, knocking him out. A gunshot is heard upstairs, and James, Freddie, and the female prisoner - for reasons apparently unknown to any of them - are hustled upstairs. There a black-clad man lies dead on the floor; another man who looks just like him races into the room (accompanied by other men and women in black suits and pink dresses), and a group of beings clad like hobos materialize to massage the corpse. A spinning globe - rough and dark like an asteroid but with the impression of a man's face inside of it - emerges from that body, hovers in the air, and gravitates toward the lookalike visitor. Freddie calls out a challenge to the demon ball, which turns angrily towards him as the visitor shouts, "Are you Freddie?" "That's right," Freddie answers, "And this here's me destiny." The next several minutes devolve into a frantic, bloody fight. The ball scrapes Freddie's face in several ferocious bursts, scratching him till he bleeds all over, but Freddie punches back several times, causing a retreat, a descent into a hole in the floor (where the enemy emerges from flames and smoke for one last attack), and finally, an explosion as the ball shatters and the shards vanish into the ceiling. The lights, dimmed for this entire battle, come back on as Freddie asks, "Did I do it?" The visitor (his doppelganger now disappeared along with the demon ball) grins and affirms. Still slashed and weary, Freddie sticks around to guide the eyeless woman to this visitor where she transforms into, seemingly, another woman entirely. After kissing her, the visitor proclaims, "I hope I see all of you again - every one of you." Then the lights dim again as one of the other men in the room calls out, a bit panicked, "Cooper!"
Characters Freddie interacts with onscreen…
James Hurley
Deputy Chad (punches out)
Diane Evans ("Naido") (guides her)
Agent Cooper
Musicians whose performance he is present for…
Chromatics
Spirits who appear with/to him
Woodsmen
BOB (his...victim?)
Characters whose corpse he encounters
Agent Cooper ("Mr. C")
*retroactively added in March 2024
How many people can call *the* BOB their victim?! That alone gives Freddie a unique place in the Twin Peaks we thought we knew for twenty-five years. Even Laura, who memorably defied BOB's wishes, had to die to do so. That's another thing; the nature of Laura's tragic, drawn-out, and deeply moving struggle with the mystical spirit is a million miles from Freddie's absurd, jagged comic-book clash with the growling video game avatar. Through Freddie, the impression we get of this series and the world it depicts leans more toward DC and Marvel Comics than Salvador Dali and Maya Deren (although Lynch certainly lends surreal flourishes to the fight scene). The town of Twin Peaks that Freddie experiences is a continuation of his visionary experience back in London, both a spiritual and geographical nexus, pulling in astonished onlookers including local law enforcement, Las Vegas mobsters, and FBI agents. In the course of this character series, from the most minor bit parts to these more substantive supporting characters, we've never stumbled across this climactic sequence before. As the participant with the least screentime overall (despite his central role in this particular crescendo), Freddie serves as our introduction to one of the linchpin passages in The Return - and ultimately all of Twin Peaks.
Freddie’s journey
We meet Freddie as a peripheral oddball, his green glove and British accent setting him apart from the largely familiar Roadhouse crowd, while his companionship with James lets us know he has at least some connection to that world (however new he is to it). His character does not change throughout the course of the narrative; rather he brings the audience - and himself - to a discovery of the fate that awaited him since before his first appearance. The trajectory is uncomplicated (well, aside from the fact that a seemingly justified assault and imprisonment helps him to his destination), and this plus the larger-than-life, cartoonish quality of his showdown does more to transform our understanding of Twin Peaks than of Freddie. That said, once his own role in the action is complete and he stands back to witness the rest of the sequence, the bloody champion's final moments turn the dial away from narrative coherence and straightforward good vs. evil action. Clearly, the mythology has more uncanny places to take us once the simple lad has served his plot utility. He can only join the rest of the motley ensemble, staring in incomprehension as the lights dim. In the sheriff's station, post-destiny, Freddie is greeted by shattered reflections of what he himself has become, including even Cooper (the least baffled of all these onlookers). He's a traveler serving a larger purpose only to end where he began: a stranger in a strange land.
Actor: Jake Wardle
Wardle's unusual path to Twin Peaks led directly through David Lynch himself. Prior to Peaks, Wardle studied acting and filmmaking, going viral as a teenager for a video in which he mimics a variety of different English-language accents. Stacking up tens of millions of views, he was contacted by the director and invited to participate in a future project; meanwhile, they kept in touch via Skype. During this time, Jake also began appearing in short films and doing voice work (which has remained his main career path post-Peaks) as well as pursuing an impressive array of interests and skill sets listed on his website: motion capture, firearms, cycling, swimming, and military re-enactment, particularly of the Napoleonic era. In the half-decade since The Return he's popped up in relation to some Twin Peaks fan films (both shorts and promotions for features) and as a voice actor in video games but his biggest breakthrough since then is forthcoming - as Sgt. James Gibson in the 2023 miniseries Masters of the Air he's directed by Cori Joji Fukunaga in a work produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. (YouTube video pictured: The English Language In 24 Accents, 2010)
Episodes
Part 2 (Showtime title: "The stars turn and a time presents itself.")
Part 14 (Showtime title: "We are like the dreamer.")
Part 15 (Showtime title: "There's some fear in letting go.")
*Part 17 (Showtime title: "The past dictates the future." - best episode)
Statistics
Freddie is onscreen for roughly eighteen minutes. He is in eight scenes in four episodes, taking place over eight days (but mostly within a twenty-four hour period). He's featured the most in part 14, when he explains his mission to James. His primary location is the Great Northern, just barely edging out the sheriff's station. He shares the most screentime - all of it in fact - with James. He is one of the top ten characters in parts 14 and 17.
Best Scene
Part 14: Explaining the strange path that brought him to Twin Peaks, Freddie - who will prove himself a man of action - may be most memorable when he's all talk.
Best Line
“I pop Jobsworth one in the loaf with me green glove. I hear a crack and by the way his head's tiltin' and him trying to talk, I fear I've snapped his Gregory.”
Additional Observations
• An intriguing detail about Freddie's encounter with the Fireman is that the vortex appeared when he jumped onto a "high stack of boxes." This makeshift tower calls to mind the Purple World rock and castle where we see the Fireman in Part 8 as well as the Jack Rabbit's Palace tree stump which Andy comes across on his way to his own Fireman meeting earlier in Part 14. (Indeed, Andy's and Freddie's visits make interesting counterpoints in the same episode - exposition through dialogue vs. images, although there is some brief dialogue in the Andy sequence as well. This lets us know that the Fireman we'll hear about a few scenes later is in fact the familiar Giant figure from the original series; otherwise we might not connect the dots.)
• During his recounting of the glove discovery, Freddie tells James, "I'm back in my room, waking up the next morning. Got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across me head, went downstairs and had a cup of..." before he and James both laugh, recognizing the lyrics from "A Day in the Life". Is this the only Beatles reference in Twin Peaks?
• Although the character connections only list the individuals included in the main series, Freddie does of course also have very significant encounters with the minor characters of Chuck and, less directly, Renee. (His interaction with the Fireman is offscreen and not applicable here, though it's probably his most significant relationship of all outside of BOB.)
• How much of the final sequence does Freddie really see? We could ask this of everyone present in the sheriff's station but Freddie is particularly hands-on (literally in the case of his BOB battle but also helping Naido before she turns into Diane). He stands in the background of the shot where Naido's face disappears into an image of the Red Room but is that vision for Cooper's eyes only? The abrupt curtain call which ends the scene only serves to reinforce that we're moving away from almost any non-Cooper character's subjectivity at this point. Wherever we're going from here, they can't follow. And it's quite likely - certainly reinforced by Mark Frost's work in The Final Dossier - that to the extent their existence even continues beyond this point, these characters won't remember what just happened.
• Given his own work in genre fiction - including screenplays for a standalone Fantastic Four franchise on the eve of the Marvel Cinematic Universe - it's easy to peg Mark Frost as Freddie's primary author. Quite possibly, he sketched out Freddie's arc which not only resembles a superhero origin story and video game final boss scenario but also - in its absurd coming-together of seemingly random occurrences and quirky details - the late twentieth-century fiction of authors like John Irving (especially A Prayer for Owen Meany). Frost's conception of Twin Peaks has always been novelistic. And yet the core of the Freddie story - the green glove with superhuman power that cannot be removed - is apparently a very old David Lynch idea. In interviews as well as his own biography/memoir Room to Dream, Lynch reports, "I had the green glove idea from long ago and originally Jack Nance was going to wear it and that would've been a whole different thing. The power of the green glove and the way it's found in the hardware store were perfect for Freddie Sykes, though."
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Next (active on Wednesday, March 15 at 8am): The Singer
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Previous: Jacques Renault
To immediately read a month of upcoming entries, updated weekly to stay a month ahead...
(at the time of publication, this includes full entries on new or revised characters among #62 - 42)
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