*Link to Evelyn Marsh (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #46)

Visit the TWIN PEAKS Character Series directory for all entries as they are published or re-introduced.

In many ways, Evelyn is a character at odds with the direction of The Return (which she does not appear in; hence the link below to the unrevised, original character study published in 2017). Her storyline is one of soapiest of the old series whereas the third season largely dispenses with that degree of melodramatic storytelling. Plus her name is often used as shorthand for the series straying far from its Lynchian roots, which doesn't leave her much quarter in a season directed entirely by David Lynch. On the other hand, one of the qualities that set Evelyn apart in the second season has now become much more common: she's the first character we meet outside the immediate vicinity of Twin Peaks, setting a precedent for The Return's sprawling geography. Although her screentime ends in episode 22, she is mentioned in Mark Frost's novel The Final Dossier (which came out after I wrote the entry) - reciting the outline of the series events, the book's narrator adds the Evelyn was eventually found guilty of murder. Another addendum to the old entry is worth mentioning: Annette McCarthy sadly passed away just a few months ago, yet another open-ended performer bio since closed off by an early death.

Evelyn Marsh (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #46)

(There may be a long pause at this point in the series, with the entry for #45 appearing later in the spring or early summer. If so, I’ll offer an update with more information in a week.)

When I was composing the character series five years ago, one of the biggest, most bemusing surprises came when Evelyn placed slightly higher than another character far more deeply associated with the world of Twin Peaks. Now, thanks to additional screentime in the third season, that's no longer the case. So get ready for one of the show's most iconic characters next...

Richard Horne (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #47)

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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A stain upon Twin Peaks drawn from its greatest admirer and one of its most prominent citizens, Richard embodies the darkness that has settled over his town after twenty-five years.

*Links to John Justice Wheeler // Harold Smith (#49 // #48)

Visit the TWIN PEAKS Character Series directory for all entries as they are published or re-introduced.

Although in many respects the characters couldn't be any more different, the back-to-back entries on John Justice Wheeler and Harold Smith do reveal some similarities. Both young men are dashing, highly intelligent, and smitten with high school seniors - their flirtation conducted largely in isolated side plots separated from the other characters. Both are introduced in season two and exit the story abruptly after five episodes thanks to a violent death: a friend in JJW's case; in Harold's case, his own suicide). Both are even accompanied by their own distinctive theme music. That said, I tend to find the secluded Harold's enigmatic encounters with Donna (and certainly poignant strains of "Harold's Theme") richer and more connected to the core of the story than the worldly JJW's gallant dalliance with Audrey (or his distinctive cowboy twang soundtrack). Neither character reappears in The Return so these studies do not need to be updated. However, it is worth mentioning the sad fact that Lenny Von Dohlen, like all too many Twin Peaks contributors, passed away last year (not long after Julee Cruise, who was also in her mid-sixties).

John Justice Wheeler (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #49)

Harold Smith (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #48)

Wednesday's entry will focus on one of the most unambiguously vile characters in the whole series. And like Mr. Wheeler, he's closely linked to Audrey...

March 2023 Patreon round-up including Podcast Episode 100 Archive + 6 TWIN PEAKS Character Series advances & Twin Peaks Conversations podcast

In March, I doubled up my TWIN PEAKS Character Series advances, offering six new or revised entries (they're still patron-only as of today). I also shared pieces of larger podcasts with patrons, not only the usual back half of a Twin Peaks Conversations episode but also an archive bonus for the sprawling Episode 100 (which isn't attached to a particular month and will be released at some other point, maybe piecemeal in the spring).

Anthony Sinclair (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #50)

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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A dishonest insurance agent who inspires contempt in almost everyone he encounters, Anthony is nearly driven to murder before he breaks down.

The Power of Nightmares (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #52)

Both highly relevant and very much a time capsule, Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares depicts the War on Terror as a clash between two delusional, unpopular ideologies attempting to replace unfashionable hope with paranoid fear. Curtis' polemical approach involves not just interviews and illustrative b-roll but also propulsive editing of heavily manipulated found footage with immersive electronic pop soundtracks; this is my podcast's third stylistically unconventional, thematically retrospective 2010s documentary in a row (after Heart of a Dog and Blue Velvet Revisited). Coming back to the movie now, I can actually relate to it much more than when I initially watched a few years after its release. Its portrait of an American empire willfully blinded by hubris resonates with how I see the world at present. But Nightmares is also a portrait of a neoconservative right wing that differs from the more cynical, less ambitious national "populism" of the current moment. Even the film's one dip into domestic culture war (a curiously outdated view of the Clinton impeachment) emphasizes the idiosyncrasy. I found the film fascinating to dig into given the passage of time; while the emphasis is more on 9/11, Afghanistan, and domestic prosecutions (as well as the Islamic fundamentalism and Cold War context that birthed the neocons and al Qaeda), the recent twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War makes this episode feels even more apropos.

Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts

You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

(and most places podcasts are found)

Bill Hastings (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #51)

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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Hastings is a high school principal swallowed up by a strange (to him) yet all-too-familiar (to us) nexus of a criminal investigation, love affair, and supernatural encounter.

Eileen Hayward (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #52)

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.

• indicates passages added or revised since 2017, if you want to skip directly to fresh material; this is a revision of an earlier piece written before the third season.

Eileen is a bedrock of attentive comfort in Twin Peaks, until even she is revealed to be hiding something.

TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #20 w/ 25 Years Later publisher Andrew Grevas (YouTube & extended PATREON)

Andrew Grevas and his prolific fan analysis website 25 Years Later burst onto the scene in 2017, months before the launch of season three, as if fully formed overnight. In fact, Andrew's passion for Twin Peaks and his desire to write - and publish writing - about media more generally had been developing over several decades. To call his exposure to Peaks "precocious" would be an understatement; until I spoke to him this month, I'd never met anyone younger than me who had watched the series when it originally aired, but now I have. At five (!) years old, Andrew was exposed to the dark, spooky, enticing world created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. He remained haunted by the barely-remembered iconography of the show into adulthood, when he re-discovered the episodes after watching the film for the first time. No wonder one of the themes that fascinates him is the passage of time, a subject we discuss more extensively in the back part of this podcast. First we survey his own history with Peaks and then the formation of his website after years of writing about Lost and other subjects. Recently he's spun the core site off into several other loosely-affiliated components with different topics: TV Obsessive, Film Obsessive, and Horror Obsessive. He describes that process here as well.

PART 1 on YouTube

For the $5/month tier on my Patreon, we explore the following questions among many others... What does the fan community (as well as the world onscreen) tell us about the years gone by? What role do boomers, Gen X, and millennials play as both viewers and contributors to Peaks? How do Parts 8 and 17 play with history and nostalgia? For over an hour, we continue the discussion in this exclusive venue, situating Twin Peaks and particularly The Return in a larger context.

Listen to...

PART 2 on Patreon

Visit 25 Years Later

Read Andrew's thread of favorite interviews

Follow on Twitter

(personal, 25 Years Later, TV Obsessive, Horror Obsessive & Film Obsessive)

*Link to Phillip Gerard (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #53)

Visit the TWIN PEAKS Character Series directory for all entries as they are published or re-introduced.

For reasons explained in greater detail beneath this link, I'm keeping this original entry limited to seasons one and two plus Fire Walk With Me/The Missing Pieces - nothing from The Return. (That will be reserved for an upcoming entry on all of the spirits, which includes a component for MIKE independently of Phillip Gerard). Even within those limits, this is one of the longest entries so far with extensive "additional notes" on the unusual development of the character(s). There is of course one other unfortunate update I would make to this entry written six years ago, in this case to the actor bio: Al Strobel, the actor who so memorably plays Gerard, was one of 2022's many Twin Peaks casualties. Onscreen and off, he greatly enriched this community.

Phillip Gerard (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #53)

+ A note on Gerard vs. MIKE

This entry provides a dilemma. In the original character series of 2017, prior to the third season, I separated the one-armed man into two different studies. In the "Phillip Gerard" entry I discussed all of his scenes from the perspective of an ordinary person who was at times independent of, and at other times consumed by, a spiritual presence named MIKE. In the "Spirits of Twin Peaks" omnibus I specifically focused on the question of who MIKE was, counting for screentime only those at least partly incorporeal moments in Cooper's dream or in the Red Room at the end of Fire Walk With Me - even though these are factored into the Gerard entry too. The overlap honestly feels like a bit of an oversight in retrospect; that said, since I'm not revising Phillip Gerard to include season three material, I'm leaving that aspect intact too.

The decision of where to place the new material was a difficult one. On one hand, the character is credited in season three - just as he was in the original series and Fire Walk With Me - as "Phillip Gerard." On the other hand, this time (unlike in the original) we only ever see the one-armed man in the spirit world - the Red Room and convenience store-adjacent locations - from which he occasionally broadcasts messages into the human world that only Cooper can see or hear. There is no longer any sense that he has a presence in physical reality. I've heard interesting arguments that this character is not the grand spirit MIKE but actually ordinary Gerard himself, who has died and gone to Twin Peaks heaven (or hell?) to play a spirit guide role much like Laura. Nonetheless, since my previous rule was that Gerard refers to the real world presence and MIKE to the one we see removed from that body (even if he looks the same), I'm sticking with that definition and will reserve all of this new material for the updated "Spirits" entry.

At any rate, Monday's character will be much more clear-cut although her revised entry is almost as completely rooted in the old material as Gerard's. In this case, the only update will be not for The Return, but for The Final Dossier. See you after the weekend for that one.

Candie (as well as Sandie and Mandie) (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #54)

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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Candie, the most called-upon member of a trio including Sandie and Mandie, is dazzled by the world around her if rather disengaged from the immediate needs of her bosses.

Carrie Page (TWIN PEAKS Character Series #55)

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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Things aren't going well for Carrie in Odessa and they don't get much better when she takes a ride with an FBI man to Twin Peaks.