User blog:ThatScrewyDuck/PE Proposal: Windom Earle

Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well. I'm back with another potential candidate I've been thinking of doing a proposal on for a little while, and he may well be the most subjective one to date. Unlike most of the others I've done, he was not approved elsewhere, but I still firmly believe that he deserves to be, so after giving it some thought, I've decided to apply some seriosu editing to me original post and see what people here think of him. I won't be upset if he gets rejected, just a little disappointed; I've very much considered that he may not stick out enough for some people. I just think he's notable enough to deserve a proposal and a solid consensus one way or another.

Just as a small heads-up for anyone who's read my more recent proposals, even though I'm trying hard to make my proposals shorter and more concise, this one will be longer, because being a recurring character from a TV series, it's pretty much required due to their being more material to cover. There's also a lot of important details regarding the heinous standard to mention, so please bare with me. Finally, for what it's worth, even at its current length, it's still way better than the original post I made (good grief, did I ever have a tendency to include superfluous details that had nothing to do with the actual actions of the proposal subject, nor were they even necessary to help people understand them).

What’s the work?
Twin Peaks is a classic mystery/horror/drama television series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, which originally aired on ABC in 1990 through to 1991 for 2 seasons and 30 episodes before being cancelled due to declining TV ratings. However, it nonetheless became a cult classic which paved the way for many other shows that would heavily borrow elements that more or less originated from it. Eventually, it got revived over 25 years later on Showtime, which, due to its much looser standards, was far more graphic compared to the original series in terms of objectionable content.

Originally, the story was centered around the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer in the fictional suburban town of Twin Peaks (located somewhere in Washington) and the investigation of it, headed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. However, due to a rather unfortunate case of executive meddling, the Laura Palmer  case was settled much sooner than had been planned  (according to Lynch himself, it was never meant to be solved), which left quite a few second season episodes remaining to cover other stories that were made up by different writers. Of all the storylines that came out of the remaining second season episodes of Twin Peaks, the most prominent one involves an old enemy from Agent Cooper’s past re-emerging to mentally torment him, which brings us to the topic of this proposal.

Who is he and does he do?
Windom Earle is a former FBI agent, as well as Agent Cooper’s former partner and mentor. He’s also a very brilliant man who became a chess grandmaster at the age of 14, joined the University of Pennsylvania at 16, and earned a degree in criminal justice at the age of 18 before joining the FBI. However, when he was assigned to something called Project Blue Book, he began to develop an unhealthy obsession with the place known as “The Black Lodge”, to the point that he was removed from the project.

In the present, Windom Earle eventually escapes the institution he has being held in, and introduces himself in the story by playing a twisted chess game with Agent Cooper where they announce their moves through a section of the local paper, with Earle murdering someone as a message to Cooper every time he takes a piece from the chess board. This is first seen when he places the gruesome corpse of a vagrant named Eric Powell in the Sheriff’s Department during a blackout he initiates. As Cooper suspects, the method of murder is a knife wound that’s one inch below the sternum, puncturing and severing his aorta. We learn shortly afterwards that this is the same way his wife, Caroline Earle, had been killed, and while Cooper didn’t see him due to being knocked out while protecting her, he strongly suspects that he committed the crime, then played up his insanity to be sent away and avoid suspicion. This is confirmed multiple times, like when Earle remarks about something, “I haven’t felt this excited since I punctured Caroline’s aorta!”

Later, he makes his first physical appearance when a man named Leo Johnson incidentally comes across the isolated cabin in the woods he’s operating from. At first, Windom Earle puts up a friendly disposition towards him and invites him in so he can get better since he has just woken up from a coma, but the following morning, he beats him with a bamboo flute and fits him with a shock collar to force him into servitude. He uses both methods on him repeatedly to punish him for any sort of disobedience, take out his frustration, and sometimes, just for kicks. For example, at one point, Leo gets a hold of the switch to his shock collar and threatened to use it against him, not recognizing in his impaired condition that he would just electrocute himself by pressing it. Earle, however, trolls him by pretending to be scared and beg for mercy to tempt him to use it, then laughs his head off as he watches Leo fall to the ground repeatedly screaming and convulsing in pain.

Windom Earle later reveals that his real objective and reason for coming to Twin Peaks, however, is to find the Black Lodge, since based on his research when he was involved with Project Blue Book, he believes this terrible place of “unmuffled screams and broken hearts” has spirits that “offer up a power so vast that its bearer might reorder the Earth to his liking”. Shortly after, he proceeds to encase Rusty Tomasky, a random youth/hippie, in a papier-mache chess piece after luring him to his cabin using the false promise of “beer and a party”. He then uses a crossbow to fire an arrow into him, killing him instantly, and sends his corpse to Agent Cooper and the other law enforcers with the message “next time, it will be someone you know” taped to it. He even broke his own rule by not announcing his move of taking the pawn in the paper first.

Meanwhile, one of the other things he does is manipulate all the town’s most popular and beautiful girls into participating in the Miss Twin Peaks Pageant, with the apparent intention of killing the winner, since they would represent the queen in this chess game. He does this by utilizing his talent for disguises and accents to send them messages, and sometimes, even interact with them directly under different aliases. Along the way, he discovers that the symbols and patterns in Owl Cave are in fact, a map to The Black Lodge, and proceeds to kidnap Major Garland Briggs to interrogate him for information, since he knows quite a bit about both the White and Black Lodges since he’s been assigned to help find them. He initially proceeds to pin him to a wall, shooting arrows at him and deliberately just missing, but when the Major doesn’t budge, he forcefully injects him with haloperidol to force the truth out of him. After managing to get cryptic information about “Jupiter and Saturn meeting”, Major Briggs becomes incomprehensible from the effects of the drug, after which he chains him to the wall alongside Leo and delights in torturing the both of them.

However, Leo, having developed real feelings for his wife, Shelly (whom he previously treated horribly and abused) during his enslavement, manages to free Major Briggs when he gets a hold of the key to his chains, telling him to save her, since she’s one of the ones he manipulated into entering the pageant. Later on, while Windom Earle claims he’s not mad at Leo for letting him loose since “it’s too late for that to do any real harm”, he leaves him for certain death, having him chained to the ground with a rope in his teeth, that if he lets slip, will let a bunch of caged tarantulas down on him, and bids him a fake fond farewell. On a side note, there’s apparently a weird continuity error in the revival where Leo was confirmed to be killed in a completely different way; by 5 shots to and around the heart, although regardless of what one chooses to accept, yes, that is confirmed to be Earle’s doing as well.

When Annie Blackburn, a sweet young woman whom Cooper has just been developing a relationship with, ends up winning the Miss Twin Peaks Pageant, Windom Earle infiltrates it disguised as The Log Lady and uses a set of flashing lights and random explosions that he set up in advance. After knocking her out with a chloroform rag and stealing Pete Martell’s truck in the resulting chaos and confusion, Earle takes Annie to the suspected location of the Black Lodge, terrorizing her and remarking how much he “likes the fear he’s feeling” from her. After entering a circle of sycamore trees that acts as the hidden entrance to the Black Lodge with her, she enters a sort of trance and enters willingly. When Agent Cooper eventually comes in after them, just like he anticipated since he knew they were close due to previously spying on them, he uses her life as a bargaining chip to force him to give up his soul. After he agrees without a second thought, Earle stabs him to do just that… only for none other than the malevolent entity Killer BOB to show up and take his soul instead, since he apparently violated the Black Lodge’s rules by trying to take his soul, bringing him and his part in the story to an abrupt end.

Does he have any redeeming/mitigating qualities or a valid excuse for his actions?
By the present tense of the series, Windom Earle is completely devoid of mitigating, let alone positive qualities. He apparently used to be a good man prior to his obsession with the Black Lodge when he was still an FBI agent and Agent Cooper’s mentor, but he’s long since abandoned any remotely good traits he once had. He certainly has the “Faux Affably Evil” act down, especially when he’s in disguise and manipulating people to his liking, as well as when interacting with Leo, but he never shows any real care or empathy for anyone whatsoever. He also has a very noticeable sadistic streak, an example being when he gloats how the murder of his own wife “took the boy (meaning Cooper) right to the edge”, as if he’s actually proud of it and how it mentally affected him.

As for a potential excuse, we’re told he went insane due to his obsession with the Black Lodge, However, even as a homicidal psychopath, he is still very high-functioning and self-aware, as shown by his intricate planning and pattern of murders, being ridiculously prepared for almost every situation he encounters, and his ability to feign friendliness. He’s even shown to actively detest all the good things he knows about the White Lodge, the Black Lodge’s good counterpart. So clearly, he actively became obsessed with the Black Lodge, its evil, and what he could potentially do with it on his own accord, as opposed to it somehow forcefully corrupting him against his will. In other words, he’s shown to still clearly understand the concepts of good and evil, and actively chooses the latter out of a practical infatuation with it.

The one thing I will admit that could detract from his evil, at least for some people, is that he has some genuinely laughable moments, like when he dresses up in a horse costume (with Leo serving as the rear end) while kidnapping Major Briggs, or his occasional flamboyant behavior, but it never really undermines just how much of a dangerous psychopath he is, and I’d definitely still say he’s played seriously most of the time. He just has a very dark sense of humor that can verge into laughable territory at times.

Is he heinous by the standards of the work?
This is where opinions may be divided, so I’ll do my best to explain why I think he’s sufficiently heinous. First of all, I haven’t seen The Revival, because being a more conservative viewer, I know for a fact that the graphic content that’s supposed to be in it would be far too unpleasant and uncomfortable for my liking. In addition to that, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to compare him to anyone from that season anyway, since being on Showtime, it had far, far looser standards to operate within compared to the network standards of ABC.

That being established, there’s no doubt that Killer BOB is the one who sets the heinous standard in the original series; he has a notable string of brutal murders and suffering to his credit, all so he can feast on his victims’ suffering in the form of something called “garmonbozia”. His repeated rape of Laura Palmer through her father Leland, making it forced parental incest, is especially notorious and hard to top. That being stated, BOB is also a supernatural entity who’s implied to have been around for a long time. Windom Earle, conversely, is just a regular man who happens to be obsessed with the dark side of the supernatural, and he’s definitely the most heinous character from the original series next to BOB, as well as far above the average human criminal.

For starters, he murders several people in fairly gruesome ways, one being his own former wife, he uses said murders to psychologically torment Agent Cooper, and he has some pretty nasty torture to his credit, which virtually no one else has. Some people might argue that Leo was an awful man (which is true), and that makes Windom Earle’s abuse seem less bad, or at least far more tolerable. However, it doesn’t change the fact that he was only recently out of a coma, meaning his motor functions were impaired, he could barely speak, and his personality was almost childlike as a result. When you get down to it, he enslaved and repeatedly abused a mentally impaired man who couldn’t defend himself, which is a very unique and cruel crime for the standards of the series. His drugging of Major Briggs is also notable since it had some pretty bad side-effects on him, leaving him visibly quivering, incomprehensible and almost completely out of touch with reality, complete with his eyes rolling back into his head. He got better, but only because Leo helped him escape while Earle was away. Oh, and even though he ended up getting trapped there anyway, he also tried to steal Cooper’s soul and trap him in the Black Lodge, not to mention what he did to Annie apparently ended up leaving her in a catatonic state, pretty much ruining her life.

However, what probably stands out most of all is his reason for wanting to find the Black Lodge; in his own words, he plans to “reorder the world to his liking”. While it never specifies exactly what that would entail, it’s pretty clear that it would involve something to the effect of gaining ultimate power from the beings that lurk there, which he would very likely use to spread worldwide chaos. Even the vague implication of that is enough to stick out to me, because generally, the crimes that are committed in this show are very intimate, with no one even threatening to commit acts like mass murder, which makes him possibly the only character in the show to threaten to unleash something horrible on that scale, even if he turned out to be way in over his head.

Conversely, this also means that while the heinous standard is still pretty high, it’s not so high that his murders and body count come off as insignificant. While BOB’s murders are pretty brutal, even he doesn’t have a huge body count, at least within the original series, with only 4 confirmed murders (Teresa Bank, Laura Palmer, Maddy Ferguson and Leland Palmer) as well as stealing Josie Packard and Windom Earle’s souls and trapping Cooper inside the Black Lodge to roam in his place alongside his evil doppelganger. Meanwhile, most of Twin Peak’s human criminals/antagonists have maybe one or two murders alongside a similar number of attempts and smaller, more typical crimes. So yeah, between his sadism, torture, psychological abuse, comparable body count to BOB, and a goal akin to unleashing chaos on the world, I think he stands out pretty well in this respect.

What’s the verdict?
As always, what the majority thinks will determine that, but I’m personally of the opinion that he qualifies. Considering he’s just a normal person, I find it impressive that he’s even comparable to abominable supernatural entities like BOB and Coop’s doppelganger, let alone nearly on par with them, and therefore, don’t think that he’s insufficiently heinous when he’s so close despite clearly lacking their capabilities. If anything, I think he’s only lacking compared to BOB at all because he doesn’t have certain things like rape to his credit, and again, if successful, his goal of gaining power from the Black Lodge could have been more destructive than anything anyone else attempted. Therefore, I’m interested to see what other people think. If he doesn’t qualify, that’s fine, but I’m hoping at the very least, I’ll have a better understanding of why others think differently. And who knows, maybe people here will share my opinion. Either way, at least there will be a solid consensus, which he certainly deserves.