9. The Log Lady
Every moment with the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) is peak ‘Peaks,’ but we’ll go with her first proper interaction with Coop and Harry at the diner, which also, incidentally, gives us a fine cherry-pie moment too.
10. Coop Tweaks Harry’s Nose
Of all the tangled relationships in “Twin Peaks,” the one reliable throughline is Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman’s (Michael Ontkean) ongoing bromance, which they seal not with a fist bump, but with a nose tweak.
11. Agent Cooper’s Dream
This dream contains almost everything substantive that we’ll spend the next 19 episodes, and a feature film, deciphering, and it is uncanny how much the aged-via-makeup Kyle MacLachlan looks like the aged-via-the-actual-passage-of-time Kyle MacLachlan.
12. Laura’s Funeral
“Twin Peaks” was often frightening and very often funny, but it was also, on occasion, truly sad. But maybe the best scene for combining all three emotions was this one, which lurches from uncomfortable to portentous to all-out absurd when the grieving Leland (Ray Wise) prostrates himself across his daughter’s coffin, causing the lowering mechanism to malfunction.
13. “Invitation to Love”
These days, every show that’s any show has a show-within-the-show that allows them to slyly comment on their own narratives, but “Twin Peaks” pioneered that with the recurring soap “Invitation to Love” that everyone in the town seemed to watch, despite it seeming to boast plotlines nearly as bad as the second half of “Twin Peaks” season 2.
14. Leland’s Dance of Grief Becomes a Hit At The Icelandic Party
Leland dances a lot in “Twin Peaks,” and often his delirious joy turns to desperate grief in the process, but at no other time do his paroxysms look like they might spark a Macarena-style craze back in Reykjavik.
15. Aid to the Beast Incarnate
We’re supposed to love this scene because Cooper encounters a llama. But it’s also ok to love it because of the Veterinary Clinic’s slogan “Aid To The Beast Incarnate,” and because the clinic is called Lydecker’s, and the mynah bird is called Waldo and Waldo Lydecker was the name of the Clifton Webb character in the very great Otto Preminger 1944 noir “Laura,” in which a lawman becomes obsessed by the framed portrait of a beautiful dead woman…called Laura.
16. “How long have you been in love with Norma, Ed?”
He does it with Harry and Josie, too, and later will have it done back to him when Harry guesses Coop’s feelings for Annie (Heather Graham), but Coop’s opening line to Ed (Everett McGill), whom he’s only witnessed having the most innocuous encounter with waitress paramour Norma (Peggy Lipton), is gold.
17. Agent Cooper Lets Us in on a Little Secret
18. Audrey Ties a Cherry Stem with her Tongue
This is basically impossible, a fact we all know because we’ve all tried it because of this scene.
19. “Hell of a way to kill a tick.”
A nutty ‘Peaks’ bait-and-switch that kickstarts season 2, here we discover that after the dramatic cliffhanger that ended the first season, when an unseen assailant (Spoiler: Josie) shot Coop at point-blank range, he actually had been wearing a bulletproof vest. Cue groans at the familiarity of this reveal, only for the further explanation for his wound (he’d lifted the vest up to scratch an itch) to yield this absurd image and a some nice dramatic understatement from good old Doc Hayward (RIP Warren Frost, who died at the age of 91 in February).
20. Leland Gets Happy
A completely white-haired Leland attends the Hayward family dinner and entertainment in an inexplicable tuxedo and creeps the almighty hell out of everyone (especially his accompanist, Alicia Witt) by simply increasing the tempo during his party piece.