In the pilot episode of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s television series, otherwise known as Twin Peaks: Northwest Passage, just about everyone in the small logging town of the title is guilty of something. Guiltiest of all is the unknown murderer of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), but there also are the various affairs, shady business deals, and illicit secrets we learn about in what amounts to a more TV-friendly (yet still perverse) variation on the underbelly of Americana that Lynch offered in Blue Velvet. Kyle MacLachlan, who played a naive teen in Blue Velvet, appears here as FBI Agent Dale Cooper. Called in to investigate, Cooper seems equally invigorated by the topography (“Man, smell those trees! Smell those Douglas Firs!”) as he is by any clues he uncovers. MacLachlan’s Cooper is a delight: goofy but clearly competent, often turning expressions on a dime. He would seem out of place for such a grim story except that every performance is heightened in some way. Emotions are often either too loud or too quiet for the situation at hand, as if there’s something evil in the air, clouding everyone’s brains. Also keeping you off kilter is Angelo Badalamenti’s score, which recalls inspirational, movie-of-the-week pabulum except for an oddly insinuating bassline lurking underneath. Add Lynch’s penchant for the comically macabre moment—“It fell down,” a bank employee shrugs to Cooper about a mounted elk’s head laying on a conference table—and Northwest Passage strangely, seductively sets the table for the twisted series to come.
