Twin Peaks is weird. Twin Peaks is deeply weird. Twin Peaks tackles painful and uncomfortable truths about human nature. Twin Peaks is rather funny at times. Twin Peaks is not exactly poorly written, but the authors sometimes try to be smarter than they are. Twin Peaks is quite decent, but nevertheless not as good as some people seem to think. Twin Peaks is a lot like this site. 1 As such, it must contain chess, of course, and indeed, at the very end of the thirteenth episode, there’s a corpse pointing at a chessboard, repulsed and in disbelief. 2
It has been staged like this by a madman killer who is looking to force a game of chess on the detective hunting him. It must have been hard to find opponents before the internet, but killing people nevertheless seems a bit extreme.3
And the position he wants to play is even more extreme. In the following position, he apparently has just taken on e5:4
Even with the internet, you’d struggle to find an interested opponent. I must admit that I’m not completely sure about black’s queen’s side, but it really doesn’t matter. Even if there’s no pawn on a7 and there could have been an under promotion to make a piece for the second black pawn to take, the rook on d8 is still an unwanted newcomer in town.
But there’s a big question to answer. The local law enforcement thinks it’s where the next person is going to get killed, but of course it’s actually what the e-pawn could possibly have taken. This question is never addressed in the original two seasons of the show. Probably, the directors overlooked it and made the third season, which appeared more than twenty years after the second one, specifically to answer it.
Realism: 0/5 For some reason, when people talk about David Lynch as one of the great surrealists in cinema, this position never gets talked about. Is it perhaps too obvious?
Probable winner: Black is supposedly to move, in which case Qxh1 would be pretty strong.
1. [I think that’s the most vainglorious thing I’ve ever written, and it pained me a bit to do so.] ↩
2. [I like to think that’s my own future.] ↩
3. [And it shrinks your pool of opponents!] ↩
4. [Of course, in the nineties, everything was extreme.] ↩