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Twin Peaks
Episode 1: "Traces
to Nowhere"
TV episode
Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch
Directed by Duwayne Dunham
Originally aired April 12, 1990
Page last updated 1/5/2022
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The results of Laura’s autopsy come
in; Leo is missing a shirt; Norma bumps into Nadine; James meets
Donna’s parents.
Read the episode transcription at Glastonberry.net
Didja Know?
For the titles of the Twin Peaks TV episodes, I have taken
the unique approach of using both the episode numbers, which were
the only titles given the scripts by series creators David Lynch and
Mark Frost, and the translated German titles of the episodes that
were assigned when the series aired in that country. Frequent
readers of PopApostle know I like the aesthetic of actual episode
titles, but I also wanted to honor the simple numbering used by
Lynch and Frost, hence the expanded titles presented in these
studies.
Notes from the Log Lady intros
When cable channel
Bravo
obtained the rights to air reruns of Twin Peaks
in 1993, David Lynch directed all-new introductions to each
episode featuring the Log Lady, portrayed by original
actress Catherine E. Coulson. These intros also appear as
options on the Blu-ray and Blu-ray collections of the series.
The Log Lady comments on the fact that she carries a log. Do
we find that funny? She does not. She goes on to say that
there are reasons for all things, even to explain the
absurd. Some may think her carrying the log, and speaking to
it absurd. But I believe the log actually holds the spirit
of her dead husband, or, at least, that his spirit
communicates to her through the log, which was a gift to her
on their wedding night (as revealed in the Twin Peaks
card set, 1991; however, The
Secret History of Twin Peaks states
that the log is from a Douglas fir and that she took the log
from a fallen tree after the forest fire that killed her
husband.).
The Log Lady asks if we have the time to learn the reasons
behind the human beings' varied behavior. It's interesting
that she speaks of "the human beings" instead of just "human
beings". Does she see herself as something more than human
at this point? Is she speaking the words of the "log",
obviously not human in and of itself?
I carry a log ... yes. Is it funny to you? It is not to
me.
Behind all things are reasons. Reasons can even explain
the absurd.
Do we have the time to learn the reasons behind the
human beings' varied behavior? I think not.
Some take the time. Are they called detectives?
Watch...and see what life teaches.
I carry a log.wav
the human beings' varied behavior.wav
Didja Notice?
This episode takes place on Saturday, February 25, 1989.
As the episode opens, at 3:06 on the Blu-ray, notice there are
two clocks on the nightstand next to the bed in Agent
Cooper's hotel room at the Great Northern. One is built into
the desk lamp. The other appears to be a travel alarm clock,
probably belonging to Cooper himself. The time is about 6:18
a.m. Could the two clocks symbolize multiple timelines?
A book is also resting on the nightstand. Presumably,
Cooper was reading it before retiring the night before; the
title is not legible on screen, but in
Episode 5:
"Cooper's Dreams", we see that it is
Great Expectations, an 1861 novel by Charles
Dickens.
Cooper's sidearm is also resting on the nightstand, a spare
clip next to it (the gun itself appears to still be loaded).
As the camera pans in the opening scene, notice that the bed
appears to be made up already. It's not likely that the
maid has already been by at this early hour...Cooper must
have made it himself after his night's rest!
Notice that a rifle is exhibited above Cooper's hotel room
bed, mounted on two deer feet. An odd, though rustic,
feature of the Great Northern! I wonder if it's an actual
working rifle?
On the opposite side of Cooper's hotel bed is another
nightstand, upon which rests a duck decoy and a stuffed
pheasant.
A painting with carved, three-dimensional turkeys on it
hangs on the wall next to Cooper's bed in the hotel room.
Some species of fish is also mounted on this wall.
Cooper's hotel room as seen here is slightly different from
that seen in the international version of the pilot (the
room is not seen at all in the aired U.S. pilot).
Agent Cooper's dictation into his recorder indicates his
hotel room is #315, a non-smoking room.
The lapel pin worn by Agent Cooper in this episode is
probably modeled on the FBI emblem (we never get a close
look at it).
Cooper reminds Diane of a nightmare hotel experience he once
had in El Paso. Presumably, he is referring to
El
Paso, Texas.
Notice that the waitress (name revealed as Trudy in later
episodes) at the Great Northern dining room
pours Agent Cooper a cup of coffee from an orange-handled
pot. Usually the orange handle indicates decaffeinated
coffee! Is this what Cooper drinks? It seems unlikely given
that we see him drink the same coffee as his cohorts in other
episodes.
At 5:27 on the Blu-ray, a man sitting in the Great Northern
dining room in the background is wearing a red-and-white ski
cap that has "Canada" embroidered on it. Canada, of course,
is the country directly north of the continental United
States, and just a few miles from Twin Peaks at the northern
border of Washington.
At 5:30 on the Blu-ray, notice that Audrey's blouse has trees
printed on it. In my interpretation of the whole of Twin
Peaks, trees and wood are "good". However, it is
interesting to note that the 1953 Dictionary of
Mysticism describes a Japanese type of evil spirit
called a tengu that is an evil tree spirit, "human
in form but hatched from eggs", which may inform our
interpretation of events in the Season Three episode
Part
8:_"Gotta
Light?", in which a strange frog/insect creature hatches from an
egg and enters a teenage girl through her mouth while she
sleeps in New Mexico, 1956.
Audrey's hairstyle is different in the regular 1-hour
episodes of the first season than it was in the pilot.
Audrey tells Cooper that Laura Palmer used to tutor her
brother, Johnny, who was 27 and in the third grade, going on
to say he has emotional problems, which run in the family. Ben
Horne, father of Johnny and Audrey, later has a nervous
breakdown and imagines he is General Robert E. Lee in a
story arc during the second season of the series. Audrey
herself later seems to have some mental issues in the Season
Three episodes.
Audrey asks Cooper if he likes her ring, showing him her
hand. We never get a good look at the ring. Is there any
relationship...or intentional premonition...to the Owl Cave
symbol ring that appears in Fire Walk With Me? Or
with Cooper's own ring which becomes prominent in a couple
episodes during the second season?
After showing Cooper her ring, Audrey states that sometimes
she gets so flushed and asks him if his palms ever itch.
These both seem to be an indication of her interest and
attraction to Cooper. In addition, the symptom of itchy
palms are said in some myths to occur when someone else is
thinking about you, here possibly indicating that Audrey has
been thinking about Cooper and hoping that he has been
thinking about her.
At 7:15 on the Blu-ray, notice that the metal frame and glass
foyer of the Sheriff's office entryway is being dismantled.
In the 2-hour-pilot episode (Episode 0A: "Wrapped in Plastic"
and
Episode 0B: "Northwest
Passage") the sheriff's office was shot on
location at the regional office of the
Weyerhaeuser Corporation in Snoqualmie, which had the
glass foyer. The production rebuilt the interiors on a
soundstage for the ongoing series, omitting the glass foyer,
so they wisely chose to show the foyer being dismantled in
this first episode of the regular series!
The view outside through the doors of the sheriff's office
does not match what is seen from exterior shots; a short
stone wall is seen with trees growing up behind it. This
outside view through the doors changes again in the second
season, with the trees behind the stone wall suddenly gone!
Some other, unexplained, differences in the Sheriff's office
are that the walls have a different design; the entryway now
opens to a wall that has a coffee nook built into it instead
of just a small table set against the wall with a coffee pot
on it; the waiting room has different furniture and a
different tree picture is hanging on the wall.
At 6:25 on the Blu-ray, we see that there are boxes and boxes
of pink donut boxes stacked in the coffee nook of the
Sheriff's office!
At 6:28 on the Blu-ray, notice that a deputy in the
background is having a bit of a struggle pulling on the door
handle in front of him, what with already holding a folder and
cup of coffee in his hands while shifting a donut from his
hand to his mouth.
When Cooper enters the sheriff's office, he says good
morning to deputy Andy and Lucy, and they respond with
muffled greetings...because they have just stuffed their
mouths with morning donuts! In fact, when Cooper walks in on
Sheriff Truman in the conference room, he sees him also
stuffing his face with donut, and remarks, "Three for
three."
Lucy is wearing another sweater that has a design that
resembles Owl Cave glyphs, specifically the one Cooper will
later draw on a napkin in
Episode 25:
"On the Wings of Love".

In the pilot,
Bobby drives a 1969
Plymouth Barracuda.
But in the regular episodes,
he drives a 1981
Pontiac Firebird Trans Am (though
Fire
Walk With Me also has him driving the Barracuda
instead).
In this episode, Cooper, while going over the
available evidence with Truman, tells Truman they should
check out Bobby's vehicle top to bottom, so it may be that
the Barracuda was impounded for a while and Bobby had or
borrowed the Firebird as a backup vehicle.
Dr. Hayward tells Truman and Cooper that he couldn't bare
performing the autopsy on Laura, so he called in Joe
Fielding from Fairdale. Fairdale appears to be a fictional
town in Washington.
The autopsy of Laura Palmer estimates her death to have been
between midnight and 4:00 a.m. The autopsy also reveals that
she had sexual intercourse with at least three men the night
of her murder; these three men are revealed in later
episodes to have been Leo Johnson, Jacques Renault, and her
father (possessed by BOB), Leland Palmer.
At 10:06 on the Blu-ray, the side of Leo Johnson's big rig truck
says "Big Pussycat" and has the Twin Peaks telephone number
555-6315.
The 555 prefix of the phone number
is a long-time convention in Hollywood TV and film.
At 10:09 on the Blu-ray, it appears the Johnson residence has a
gas pump on the property! It seems unlikely that the
residential location would be permitted to have a live gas
pump; it may be just an antique decoration in their yard.
At 10:19 on the Blu-ray, the door of Leo's truck says
Freightliner on the inside.
Freightliner is an American manufacturer of diesel
trucks.
At 12:08 on the Blu-ray, the TV set on which Agent Cooper shows
the video footage of Laura and Donna to James at the
Sheriff's office is not the same one we saw in the previous
episode,
Episode 0B:
"Northwest
Passage",
even though they seem to be sitting in the same room. This
is probably because this episode was shot months after the
pilot and some of the more generic props were not saved.
In the flashback sequence at 15:28 on the Blu-ray, we see that
the two halves of Laura's heart locket actually form the
phrase "Best Friends".
In the jail cell they're held in, Mike once calls Bobby
"Bopper". Bobby again calls Mike "Snake", as he did in
Episode 0A: "Wrapped in Plastic"
and
Episode 0B:
"Northwest Passage".
At 18:23 on the Blu-ray, we get a sudden, out-of-scene clip of
the video of Laura and Donna on their picnic. At the end of
the clip, the video zooms into Laura's face and a woman's
voice (presumably Laura, but it's hard to tell) half-speaks,
half-whispers, "Help me." Is this just a symbolic
representation of Laura's troubles in the past? Is it her
spirit calling out?
At 18:30 on the Blu-ray, Donna is seen to be wearing a hockey-jersey-style shirt made by
CCM.
Lucy refers to Agent Rosenfield as "Rosenfeld".
When Lucy hands the phone to Cooper to take Agent
Rosenfield's call, she says "it has that open-air sound
where it sounds like wind blowing, you know like wind
through the trees..." Images and sounds of wind blowing
through trees are a frequent motif throughout the
series. Is there any significance to Rosenfield's call
sounding like wind in the trees?
Over the phone, Cooper tells Albert to come up through Lewis
Fork and stop at the Lamplighter Inn for lunch. He commented
on the Lamplighter in his dictation to Diane in
Episode 0A: "Wrapped in Plastic".
As Norma and Nadine bump into each other at the Twin Peaks
General Store, a
Duracell
battery stand is seen in the background.
Nadine tells Norma that Ed bought her new drapes at
Gentleman Jim's. This appears to be a fictitious
establishment.
At 24:47 on the Blu-ray, we see that Agent Cooper is putting the
finishes touches on the whistle he was whittling in
Episode 0B:
"Northwest Passage".
Sheriff Truman remarks to Cooper that he feels like he
better start studying medicine because he's beginning to
feel a bit like Dr. Watson. He is referring to the assistant
of the legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Dr.
John Watson, characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930).
I love the look on Cooper's face after he takes a sip of the
fish-contaminated coffee at the Packard Lodge!

At 29:24 on the Blu-ray, notice there is an owl statuette in
Catherine and Ben's motel room. Are the bedposts in the room
also topped with the shape of owls? It's hard to tell (see
screenshot below).

As Catherine and Ben discuss torching the Packard Mill, she
recommends "some night when Pete's off
on a toot with Smokey the Bear." I'm not sure exactly what
this means. At first, it sounded to me like Pete going off
to get high by smoking marijuana! But we see no evidence
throughout the series that he was into that. "Smokey the
Bear" is also a slang term for "police", so maybe it's a
reference to Pete and Sheriff Truman having gone fishing
together? Pete is an obvious angler, and Truman is later
depicted as knowing how to tie a fly in the second season,
so maybe he and Pete did go fishing together when Truman's
duties allowed the time.
At 32:19 on the Blu-ray, Donna's sweater has a pattern oddly
similar to the Owl Cave/ring symbol, not seen until the
latter half of the second season. |
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As Donna visits Mrs. Palmer, notice that, at 32:35 on the
Blu-ray, Donna's face is reflected over the face of Laura in the
glass of the framed photo of Laura. A minute later, Mrs.
Palmer sees Laura's face superimposed over Donna's!
When Mrs. Palmer sees Laura's face over Donna's, is it
Laura's spirit trying to appear through Donna? Mrs. Palmer
then has a vision of BOB at the foot of Laura's bed, peering
up at her. Is Laura trying to communicate the identity of
her killer?
At 34:36 on the Blu-ray, Hawk sees the One-Armed Man at Calhoun
Memorial Hospital. He was glimpsed briefly in
Episode 0A: "Wrapped in Plastic"
and is next seen in Cooper's dream in
Episode 2:
"Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer".
After Hawk loses the One-Armed Man in the hospital near the
morgue, notice that a faint sound of electrical crackle is
heard just before Hawk walks away. Was the electric crackle
BOB or MIKE entering the building for a meeting with the
One-Armed Man? The spirits from the Black Lodge seem to
travel via electricity and cause similar disruptions in the
1992 follow-up film to the series,
Fire
Walk With Me.
It's amusing that the Twin Peaks-ish music playing as Audrey
slow dances in her father's office at 35:27 on the
Blu-ray
turns out to be music she is listening to on a stereo! The
same musical piece is played by Audrey on the jukebox at the
RR Diner in
Episode 2:
"Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer".
As the Briggs family sits down to dinner, opera music is
heard playing in the background.
At 41:18 on the Blu-ray, Leo is cutting open the football he
will later use in
Episode 2:
"Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer"
to hide drug money.
At 42:49 on the Blu-ray, a funny
wiener-dog tray is seen hanging on the wall of the
Johnson kitchen.
The refrigerator in the Johnson kitchen, seen at 43:05 on
the Blu-ray, is a
General Electric.
At the dinner table at the Hayward home, James tells Dr.
Hayward that his father died when he was ten and his mother
travels a lot, sometimes writing for the local paper.
James' father was Big Ed's little brother, Billy, according
to
The Secret History of Twin Peaks.
The tape recording from Laura that Dr. Jacoby listens to is
dated February 23. This is the day Laura was killed. She
mentions mailing it to him in one of the envelopes he
provided. Most likely he has just received it in the mail
and is listening to it for the first time.
Dr. Jacoby's tie is printed as a large fish! He wears the
same tie in
Episode 22: "Slaves and
Masters".
The closing credits reveal that Ronette Pulaski's parents
are Janek and Suburbis Pulaski. The Actor's Directory
special feature on the season one Blu-ray box set gives Mrs.
Pulaski's full name as Maria Suburbis Pulaski.
Notes from the Audio Commentary by director Duwayne
Dunham on the Season 1 Blu-ray box set
Dunham remarks that the wardrobe choices of Donna and Audrey
change as the series progresses. Both actresses wanted to
dress a bit more in a modern fashion than the small town
clothing given to them in early episodes.
Cooper flirts a bit with both Shelly and Norma at the RR
Diner (not to mention Audrey at the Great Northern). There are hints that he is
often enchanted by beautiful women (possibly a foreshadowing
of the revelation of his affair with Windom Earle's wife,
Caroline).
Memorable Dialog
no lumps.wav
you've heard me tell that story.wav
the true test of any hotel.wav
two things that continue to trouble me.wav
a damn fine cup of coffee.wav
freshly squeezed.wav
it would be my pleasure.wav
guess why I'm so happy today.wav
cotton balls.wav
the health and safety of James Hurley.wav
I better start studying medicine.wav
black as midnight on a moonless night.wav
a fish in the percolator.wav
scrubbing bidets in a Bulgarian convent.wav
I lost you years ago.wav
the metabolism of a bumble-bee.wav
one day my log will have something to say about this.wav
my log saw something that night.wav
my Aunt Nadine.wav
what's up, Doc?.wav
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