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Twin Peaks: The Missing Fan Fiction
Feb. 28th, 2018 12:34 pmThis article is full of spoilers that touch just about every season of Twin Peaks, including the most recent. Be forewarned.
Today I read a fantastic article on the 25 Years Later Twin Peaks articles site by Gisela Fleischer, "Do You Really Want To @#$% With This? The Alternative Timeline of Sarah Palmer." Engrossing and carefully considered, Ms. Fleischer's article stimulated my thought and memories about a zine story I wrote after the second season of Twin Peaks ended, but before the "FIRE WALK WITH ME" movie came out.
Here I feel I need to put in some disclaimers: I fully acknowledge Twin Peaks, its plots, characterizations, and storylines are copyright- and trademark-protected material, the intellectual property of their owner organizations. What I wrote was fan fiction for a fantastic media zine called "POWER STAR," compiled and edited by a close friend of mine at the time. I received no compensation for the story or any related material I wrote or drew, the zine did not run at a profit, and my operating assumption was that we were doing this for fun and that it constituted fair use. Such is the use I made and am making of that material and my experiences creating my own tribute of sorts to it then, and relating it here now. I am a happy and frequent consumer of the official and authorized products associated with the franchise. No infringement is intended.
I wrote "MEANWHILE..." as a short story whose developments launched primarily from the implications of a tiny scene in the final, David-Lynch-directed episode of the second season. In that last ABC network episode, Dr. Jacoby comes in to the RR Diner with Sarah Palmer and sits down in a booth with Major Garland Briggs and his wife Betty. He says Sarah has a message for the Major, and then Sarah says somewhat dully, in distorted tones, "I'm in the Black Lodge with Agent Cooper. We're waiting for you." I wanted to know what that meant, and I wondered when or if Briggs himself would come to the Black Lodge. I also wondered what the Sarah Palmer character might do if she finally dealt with the inner and outer demons in her life, and what might happen if and when she psychologically got her feet a little more firmly under her.
I do not have a physical or electronic copy of "MEANWHILE..." anymore. The lone copy I kept for years, I gave to a good friend. The other friend I had, who edited POWER STAR and with whom I shared a rabid love of Twin Peaks, has passed away somewhat tragically (in a fire, I should add). I will be relating therefore from memory the story I wrote, to my best ability.
My zine publisher friend had already written several fan fiction sequel stories to the events of Twin Peaks at this point, and I used her new events and, particularly, character development in my story. She had created the character Diane Cooper Wilkins as a twin sister to Dale Cooper, and his current partner. She had moved to Twin Peaks soon after the whole Windom Earle arc ended, and had been instrumental in getting her brother Dale out of the Black Lodge. Dale had gotten over his reservations about relative age and had fallen in love and intended to marry Audrey Horne after her recovery from the bank vault explosion injuries. They planned to live as a couple in the recently purchased (and hopefully spruced up) Dead Dog Farm property. Cooper's doppelganger was somehow neutralized, killed, and/or returned to the Black Lodge realm. In other words, my friend had wrapped up a lot of loose ends quite neatly. And when "Fire Walk With Me" came out, some time after I wrote the story I will relate here, my friend and I cosplayed the Cooper twins in matching black suits.
I did think her fiction had wrapped everything up a little too neatly. Many of her stories were much more like police procedural adventures than the wild, quirky ride Twin Peaks had been, under the various writers and directors of the first two seasons. Though her fan stories were very entertaining and exquisitely written, I wanted to get back to imagining events and scenes that were more, well, Lynchian. I also, as I said, did want to resolve that lingering cliffhanger of sorts with Sarah and the Major. But I wanted to do it more like what I saw as the Twin Peaks way. When I wrote "MEANWHILE..." in an excited burst of creativity and submitted it to my friend for approval, she was guarded in her enthusiasm. I had based my events on her newly-developed situations, after all, and I don't blame her for feeling a bit possessive or even creatively invaded by my change in tone. However, she said she would print it after making some edits, and the edits were not destructive to any of the ideas I had written. "Just wordsmithing a good Calvin-Smith story," she told me. Truly, that was what she had done. I was, and am, happy with the finished product.
"MEANWHILE..." tells a story that goes like this: Major and Betty Briggs see Sarah at church. She's coming over for Sunday Dinner with them later. She is sad and distressed because she keeps having visions of Leland and Laura, and frankly, by now, she wants to stop seeing them. She feels somehow they are not at peace, and likewise she cannot be so. On their ride home, Major Briggs tells Betty he wishes there was more he could do for Sarah. At dinner, later, Sarah also says she feels there is something someone can do, and she feels she should ask the Major to try to help. She is desperate and insistent. The Major, without revealing the nature of his work, assures her he intends to do what he can. Later, in his office at the military research facility (Listening Post Alpha did not exist as a plot point at this time), Major Briggs ponders. He looks at printouts from the deep space probes. He draws diagrams on his chalkboard. He calls Agent (Dale) Cooper at home and updates him on the situation. Cooper and Audrey discuss the call and Sarah's continued distress, and Cooper says "Someone really needs to help her." Time freezes then, the Giant appears, and he tells Cooper "This time, someone does not have to be you." Major Briggs looks back over at his desk, some distance away from the blackboard where he stands, and in the numbers and letters of the page of printout he clearly sees the face of Leland Palmer. He now knows what to do, and makes a few more strategic phone calls.
The scene now shifts to The Red Room, where the Man from Another Place (not yet identified as The Arm) gets ready for an imminent arrival, saying to a plastic-wrapped Leland Palmer, "It won't be Cooper." Red curtains wave over black-and-white tiles.
Briggs goes to Glastonbury Grove in the middle of the day, in bright sunlight, and begins walking counter-clockwise around the oily puddle there. Meanwhile, Dr. Will Hayward and Dr. Jacoby arrive at the Palmer house, where Sarah had been told by Cooper to expect them. Sarah has obtained the jar of oil Cooper had kept after getting from The Log Lady. Jacoby is alarmed at how it smells. Sarah puts the jar on the mantelpiece.
Briggs is feeling physical resistance, as he expected to feel, to his walking the "wrong way" around the circle. He looks up at the fiery rays of the sun shining through Douglas Fir limbs, gets an idea, and firmly says, "FIRE, WALK WITH ME." Surely enough, flames seem to rise from the oily pool. The Major jumps into their midst and seems to fall into a deep pit or well, "faster and faster." Agents Cooper and Wilkins, in their Spokane offices, start at the perception of something powerful happening, but Cooper remembers the Giant's reassurance and he and his sister get another cup of coffee. He relates that it was he who brought the Log Lady's jar of oil to Sarah earlier, before driving to Spokane. A bolt of unexpected lightning near the Palmer house freezes everyone in its illumination except Sarah, who hears sounds upstairs. She runs up there, past the ceiling fan, and sees Leland in Laura's still-untouched room, holding her secret diary and exclaiming to Sarah about the shocking things he sees have been written there.
Black curtains wave over red-and-white tiles. Major Briggs sits in this "wrong" room with The Man From Another Place. The little man tells him he's in the wrong place, but Briggs has heard others' stories and notices his diminutive companion does not sound like he is talking backwards. Briggs asserts he is in the right room. Leo Johnson, covered in spiders, appears on an adjoining chair and tells him to go back. Briggs says he's not going back until he finishes what he came for: Leland and Laura are being held in some sort of limbo, and Major Briggs wants them set free. The Man From Another Place sarcastically salutes Briggs, who then gets up, with some difficulty, and lifts him out of his chair, telling him not to play games with human souls. The Man says, "This is not the place for games. The place for games is the Palmer house." Major Briggs almost drops the little man in shock.
Leland, or his image, shouts at Sarah in Laura's bedroom, exclaiming at all the bad things Laura had been doing. Sarah says Laura had done these things in an effort to resist evil. Leland asks "What was she trying to do, fight fire with fire?" When she answers that Laura was trying to fight him, he acts stricken and asks why Laura would resist her father. An image of Laura appears in a corner of the room, asking her Mother if she and Dad were fighting. Sarah ignores the apparition and tells the Leland image that Laura was not fighting Leland. "He was fighting YOU." As if recognizing what Sarah meant, Leland turns into BOB and grabs Sarah's arm angrily. Sarah, ready for this, turns, wrests free of his grasp, and runs out of the room and down the stairs, BOB in hot pursuit. He almost catches her when she reaches the living room and fireplace, but at the last moment she takes the jar of oil and smashes it in the unlit fireplace, which briefly bursts into flame, as does BOB before screaming and disappearing. The light from the lightning bolt fades, and Docs Hayward and Jacoby are no longer still figures, but are sitting there wondering what happened to Sarah and why is she standing in front of the fireplace all of a sudden. She has a look of peace on her face, and says she thinks things will be better now, somehow. In the Wrong Room, the Little Man disappears in brief flames and everything goes dark around Major Briggs. He still feels solidity under his feet and sees a distant light. He starts walking and finds that the light leads him to the interior of a palatial estate, immaculately maintained: the very place he had seen in a vision and described to his son Bobby at the diner. In fact, as he walks further, Bobby comes in, having been instructed by his Mom to meet his Dad at Glastonbury Grove. They embrace as in the vision, and go home.
Some time a little later, at the RR, the Cooper twins, Audrey, and Major Briggs, along with Sheriff Truman, gather to discuss what happened. They don't think BOB or the Black Lodge were destroyed, but they also know Sarah feels a peace she has not felt for such a long time. Feeling a curious sense of resolution, but unsure exactly what happened, they relax and enjoy coffee and dessert. Diane sensuously takes a bite of her cherry pie and exclaims, "Hot DAMN this pie is good!" and everyone laughs.
It goes without saying that the original writers and director of Twin Peaks produced a much more creatively sound continuation of the story when they returned us all to the town last year. (It also had the advantage of being authorized fiction!) But "MEANWHILE..." was fun to write. I ended up taking as my second wife the friend who wordsmithed my story, but a lot has happened between then and now. I wonder how she would have reacted to the actual authorized decisions that were put into The Return. She wrote fan fiction obsessively and felt a personal connection to the characters she continued and, in some cases, created. I know Audrey's fate and who Diane actually turned out to be in Season 3 might well have distressed her. I'm happy to have written what I wrote, those years ago, to contribute to her extension of the Peaks universe, but I am also thrilled beyond belief at what Lynch, Frost, and all those wonderful performers and producers did to continue the authorized world of the show.
Thank you for reading.
Today I read a fantastic article on the 25 Years Later Twin Peaks articles site by Gisela Fleischer, "Do You Really Want To @#$% With This? The Alternative Timeline of Sarah Palmer." Engrossing and carefully considered, Ms. Fleischer's article stimulated my thought and memories about a zine story I wrote after the second season of Twin Peaks ended, but before the "FIRE WALK WITH ME" movie came out.
Here I feel I need to put in some disclaimers: I fully acknowledge Twin Peaks, its plots, characterizations, and storylines are copyright- and trademark-protected material, the intellectual property of their owner organizations. What I wrote was fan fiction for a fantastic media zine called "POWER STAR," compiled and edited by a close friend of mine at the time. I received no compensation for the story or any related material I wrote or drew, the zine did not run at a profit, and my operating assumption was that we were doing this for fun and that it constituted fair use. Such is the use I made and am making of that material and my experiences creating my own tribute of sorts to it then, and relating it here now. I am a happy and frequent consumer of the official and authorized products associated with the franchise. No infringement is intended.
I wrote "MEANWHILE..." as a short story whose developments launched primarily from the implications of a tiny scene in the final, David-Lynch-directed episode of the second season. In that last ABC network episode, Dr. Jacoby comes in to the RR Diner with Sarah Palmer and sits down in a booth with Major Garland Briggs and his wife Betty. He says Sarah has a message for the Major, and then Sarah says somewhat dully, in distorted tones, "I'm in the Black Lodge with Agent Cooper. We're waiting for you." I wanted to know what that meant, and I wondered when or if Briggs himself would come to the Black Lodge. I also wondered what the Sarah Palmer character might do if she finally dealt with the inner and outer demons in her life, and what might happen if and when she psychologically got her feet a little more firmly under her.
I do not have a physical or electronic copy of "MEANWHILE..." anymore. The lone copy I kept for years, I gave to a good friend. The other friend I had, who edited POWER STAR and with whom I shared a rabid love of Twin Peaks, has passed away somewhat tragically (in a fire, I should add). I will be relating therefore from memory the story I wrote, to my best ability.
My zine publisher friend had already written several fan fiction sequel stories to the events of Twin Peaks at this point, and I used her new events and, particularly, character development in my story. She had created the character Diane Cooper Wilkins as a twin sister to Dale Cooper, and his current partner. She had moved to Twin Peaks soon after the whole Windom Earle arc ended, and had been instrumental in getting her brother Dale out of the Black Lodge. Dale had gotten over his reservations about relative age and had fallen in love and intended to marry Audrey Horne after her recovery from the bank vault explosion injuries. They planned to live as a couple in the recently purchased (and hopefully spruced up) Dead Dog Farm property. Cooper's doppelganger was somehow neutralized, killed, and/or returned to the Black Lodge realm. In other words, my friend had wrapped up a lot of loose ends quite neatly. And when "Fire Walk With Me" came out, some time after I wrote the story I will relate here, my friend and I cosplayed the Cooper twins in matching black suits.
I did think her fiction had wrapped everything up a little too neatly. Many of her stories were much more like police procedural adventures than the wild, quirky ride Twin Peaks had been, under the various writers and directors of the first two seasons. Though her fan stories were very entertaining and exquisitely written, I wanted to get back to imagining events and scenes that were more, well, Lynchian. I also, as I said, did want to resolve that lingering cliffhanger of sorts with Sarah and the Major. But I wanted to do it more like what I saw as the Twin Peaks way. When I wrote "MEANWHILE..." in an excited burst of creativity and submitted it to my friend for approval, she was guarded in her enthusiasm. I had based my events on her newly-developed situations, after all, and I don't blame her for feeling a bit possessive or even creatively invaded by my change in tone. However, she said she would print it after making some edits, and the edits were not destructive to any of the ideas I had written. "Just wordsmithing a good Calvin-Smith story," she told me. Truly, that was what she had done. I was, and am, happy with the finished product.
"MEANWHILE..." tells a story that goes like this: Major and Betty Briggs see Sarah at church. She's coming over for Sunday Dinner with them later. She is sad and distressed because she keeps having visions of Leland and Laura, and frankly, by now, she wants to stop seeing them. She feels somehow they are not at peace, and likewise she cannot be so. On their ride home, Major Briggs tells Betty he wishes there was more he could do for Sarah. At dinner, later, Sarah also says she feels there is something someone can do, and she feels she should ask the Major to try to help. She is desperate and insistent. The Major, without revealing the nature of his work, assures her he intends to do what he can. Later, in his office at the military research facility (Listening Post Alpha did not exist as a plot point at this time), Major Briggs ponders. He looks at printouts from the deep space probes. He draws diagrams on his chalkboard. He calls Agent (Dale) Cooper at home and updates him on the situation. Cooper and Audrey discuss the call and Sarah's continued distress, and Cooper says "Someone really needs to help her." Time freezes then, the Giant appears, and he tells Cooper "This time, someone does not have to be you." Major Briggs looks back over at his desk, some distance away from the blackboard where he stands, and in the numbers and letters of the page of printout he clearly sees the face of Leland Palmer. He now knows what to do, and makes a few more strategic phone calls.
The scene now shifts to The Red Room, where the Man from Another Place (not yet identified as The Arm) gets ready for an imminent arrival, saying to a plastic-wrapped Leland Palmer, "It won't be Cooper." Red curtains wave over black-and-white tiles.
Briggs goes to Glastonbury Grove in the middle of the day, in bright sunlight, and begins walking counter-clockwise around the oily puddle there. Meanwhile, Dr. Will Hayward and Dr. Jacoby arrive at the Palmer house, where Sarah had been told by Cooper to expect them. Sarah has obtained the jar of oil Cooper had kept after getting from The Log Lady. Jacoby is alarmed at how it smells. Sarah puts the jar on the mantelpiece.
Briggs is feeling physical resistance, as he expected to feel, to his walking the "wrong way" around the circle. He looks up at the fiery rays of the sun shining through Douglas Fir limbs, gets an idea, and firmly says, "FIRE, WALK WITH ME." Surely enough, flames seem to rise from the oily pool. The Major jumps into their midst and seems to fall into a deep pit or well, "faster and faster." Agents Cooper and Wilkins, in their Spokane offices, start at the perception of something powerful happening, but Cooper remembers the Giant's reassurance and he and his sister get another cup of coffee. He relates that it was he who brought the Log Lady's jar of oil to Sarah earlier, before driving to Spokane. A bolt of unexpected lightning near the Palmer house freezes everyone in its illumination except Sarah, who hears sounds upstairs. She runs up there, past the ceiling fan, and sees Leland in Laura's still-untouched room, holding her secret diary and exclaiming to Sarah about the shocking things he sees have been written there.
Black curtains wave over red-and-white tiles. Major Briggs sits in this "wrong" room with The Man From Another Place. The little man tells him he's in the wrong place, but Briggs has heard others' stories and notices his diminutive companion does not sound like he is talking backwards. Briggs asserts he is in the right room. Leo Johnson, covered in spiders, appears on an adjoining chair and tells him to go back. Briggs says he's not going back until he finishes what he came for: Leland and Laura are being held in some sort of limbo, and Major Briggs wants them set free. The Man From Another Place sarcastically salutes Briggs, who then gets up, with some difficulty, and lifts him out of his chair, telling him not to play games with human souls. The Man says, "This is not the place for games. The place for games is the Palmer house." Major Briggs almost drops the little man in shock.
Leland, or his image, shouts at Sarah in Laura's bedroom, exclaiming at all the bad things Laura had been doing. Sarah says Laura had done these things in an effort to resist evil. Leland asks "What was she trying to do, fight fire with fire?" When she answers that Laura was trying to fight him, he acts stricken and asks why Laura would resist her father. An image of Laura appears in a corner of the room, asking her Mother if she and Dad were fighting. Sarah ignores the apparition and tells the Leland image that Laura was not fighting Leland. "He was fighting YOU." As if recognizing what Sarah meant, Leland turns into BOB and grabs Sarah's arm angrily. Sarah, ready for this, turns, wrests free of his grasp, and runs out of the room and down the stairs, BOB in hot pursuit. He almost catches her when she reaches the living room and fireplace, but at the last moment she takes the jar of oil and smashes it in the unlit fireplace, which briefly bursts into flame, as does BOB before screaming and disappearing. The light from the lightning bolt fades, and Docs Hayward and Jacoby are no longer still figures, but are sitting there wondering what happened to Sarah and why is she standing in front of the fireplace all of a sudden. She has a look of peace on her face, and says she thinks things will be better now, somehow. In the Wrong Room, the Little Man disappears in brief flames and everything goes dark around Major Briggs. He still feels solidity under his feet and sees a distant light. He starts walking and finds that the light leads him to the interior of a palatial estate, immaculately maintained: the very place he had seen in a vision and described to his son Bobby at the diner. In fact, as he walks further, Bobby comes in, having been instructed by his Mom to meet his Dad at Glastonbury Grove. They embrace as in the vision, and go home.
Some time a little later, at the RR, the Cooper twins, Audrey, and Major Briggs, along with Sheriff Truman, gather to discuss what happened. They don't think BOB or the Black Lodge were destroyed, but they also know Sarah feels a peace she has not felt for such a long time. Feeling a curious sense of resolution, but unsure exactly what happened, they relax and enjoy coffee and dessert. Diane sensuously takes a bite of her cherry pie and exclaims, "Hot DAMN this pie is good!" and everyone laughs.
It goes without saying that the original writers and director of Twin Peaks produced a much more creatively sound continuation of the story when they returned us all to the town last year. (It also had the advantage of being authorized fiction!) But "MEANWHILE..." was fun to write. I ended up taking as my second wife the friend who wordsmithed my story, but a lot has happened between then and now. I wonder how she would have reacted to the actual authorized decisions that were put into The Return. She wrote fan fiction obsessively and felt a personal connection to the characters she continued and, in some cases, created. I know Audrey's fate and who Diane actually turned out to be in Season 3 might well have distressed her. I'm happy to have written what I wrote, those years ago, to contribute to her extension of the Peaks universe, but I am also thrilled beyond belief at what Lynch, Frost, and all those wonderful performers and producers did to continue the authorized world of the show.
Thank you for reading.
