This year marks the 20th anniversary of the debut of Twin Peaks, and the USA Network series Psych will be paying its own unique tribute to that show at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 1, with the episode "Dual Spires" (get it?).

My fellow Twin Peaks aficionado first tipped me off to this news, and my old college buddy James Murphy reminded me of it just recently, and while it's rare that I make appointments for any television programming anymore that isn't Battlestar Galactica or Caprica, both of which are now gone (being American, I always just download Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures from online), this is such must-see-TV for me that I've literally made an entry in my Google calendar for it.

But what makes this particular tribute so special? Check it out:

When Psych returns for its fall run in November, viewers will be treated to a Twin Peaks-inspired episode scheduled to premiere on Wednesday, December 1 at 10/9c. Entitled "Dual Spires," the episode celebrates the 20th anniversary of the cult favorite with guest star casting that includes Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, Dana Ashbrook, Ray Wise, Robyn Lively, Lenny Von Dohlen and Catherine Coulson. Series star James Roday serves as co-writer along with Bill Callahan.

The episode kicks off with Shawn (Roday) and Gus (Dulé Hill) receiving a mysterious e-mail inviting them to the annual Cinnamon Festival in Dual Spires, a quirky Northern California town nearly invisible on the map. When they arrive the pair quickly find themselves embroiled in the mysterious death of local high school student Paula Merral. As Shawn and Gus unravel the many secrets of the town, they meet several local residents including town doctor/lawyer/veterinarian Donna Gooden (Sheryl Lee), Sheriff Andrew Jackson (Lenny Von Dohlen), proprietors of the local diner Robert and Michelle Barker (Dana Ashbrook and Robyn Lively), the mysterious Woman with Wood (Catherine Coulson) and enigmatic bookish beauty Maudette Hornsby (Sherilyn Fenn). The pool of suspects proves to be deeper than suspected as Shawn and Gus must work to figure out who killed Paula Merral. Ray Wise reprises his role from last season as Father Westley.

Additionally, songstress Julee Cruise, who performed music during the original run of Twin Peaks, has signed on to perform the Psych theme song for the episode.

SEVEN of the actors from the original series. That's a goddamn Twin Peaks cast REUNION.

AND LOOK THERE'S PICTURES OF THEM RIGHT HERE:











And because the following two photos are so beautiful that they deserve to be set aside for special consideration:





... This is the face of 45 years old, folks.

To put this into its proper perspective, I would estimate that this woman alone was responsible for approximately 39.75 percent of all the erections that I had through all four years of my high school career, because she was just that goddamned fucking white-hot.



And yet, throw a pair of glasses and some laugh lines on her, and it's simply no contest; 25-year-old Sherilyn Fenn can't hold a candle to the even more gorgeous gal that she's become 20 years later.

Hef already offered his tribute to Twin Peaks, which inspired some passing recollections of my own.

As an aspiring storyteller in my teens, I couldn't believe what Lynch got away with, in terms of just completely random plotting and characterizations. The idea of storytelling as an almost pure stream-of-consciousness exercise was fascinating to me, with its implicit trust in the idea that the story will ultimately resolve itself. Of course, that notion pretty much fucked up an entire generation of storytellers, who thought they could get away with throwing any collection of bullshit they wanted at the audience under the pretense that IT'S ALL VALID MAN. There's a difference between being a Dadaist and being Joe Quesada.

At a Halloween party in high school, back when I was skinny and had a smooth, hairless face, I was dressed as Dale Cooper when a gorgeous Persian girl named Atusa Melanki showed up dressed as Audrey Horne. It was a Seven Deadly Sins-themed party, so I'd taken a sticky tag that said "Pride," and she'd taken one that said "Lust." I didn't get her phone number, but we spent the entire night roleplaying as our characters almost without even realizing it, with me being affectionate but appropriate, and her making constant innuendoes just to see me clear my throat and smile nervously. I've since learned that "Atusa" translates to "beautiful body." Oh dear God yes.

As I stop to consider it, though, I'm not quite sure that any of us can adequately express why it meant so much to those of us who were actually there for it while it was still a living thing, before it became a pop-cultural historic artifact.



Here's one of the big factors for me; David Lynch just plain fucking gets the Pacific Northwest, in ways that so few other filmmakers do. For a kid who'd lived most of his young life in Washington state, before moving to New England a few years before Twin Peaks premiered, this was HUGE to me, because I hated everything about living in Massachusetts when I was a teenager. All the "nature" was so safe and tame and cozy, and all the "mountains" were these gently sloping little foothills, and everything was so fucking built up that there wasn't even a goddamn HORIZON LINE.

The area of untouched wilderness in the state of Washington takes up roughly a QUARTER of its territory, and is equal to the total area of the ENTIRE state of Massachusetts. When I tell people that I believe in the existence of Bigfoot, that's one of the big reasons WHY, because the Pacific Northwest actually has such a huge expanse of wilderness that an entire SPECIES of heretofore-undocumented hominids could remain relatively undiscovered in its vast stretches of in-between spaces.

And THAT, as much as anything, was what Lynch captured in Twin Peaks, was the sense of forests so dark and deep that you could easily imagine them concealing a gateway to another place like the Black Lodge. For a Washington state kid who missed having that sense of mystery right in his own backyard, the fictional town of Twin Peaks felt like home.

... Anyway. I fully expect that James Roday's nods to Twin Peaks on Psych will feature more than a few comic touches, which I'm more than okay with, since David Lynch sported a subversive sense of humor on Twin Peaks itself, but if Roday also manages to capture even a fraction of what made Lynch's work on that series so haunting, then he'll have succeeded in creating a truly worthy tribute.

Well, then there better be a backwards-talking little person.