-- Gerry

the black dog runs at night

Seems to me that that was the point. They built up Earle as an equal to Cooper, and anti-Cooper if you will. And old teacher, who Cooper could have just barely beaten. Then BOB tore Earle apart with ease, and possessed Cooper, thus getting established as much more powerful than Cooper, yet it was to be Cooper's task to defeat him. So, Earle was used as a jobber to BOB, which worked, since just Cooper vs. Earle all the way to the finish would have been a very typical story.

--
Vesa 'wtw' Ahola  wtw@iki.fi.REMOVE
"Tourists are terrorists with cameras; terrorists are tourists with guns."
- Andrei Codresque

I agree that It is very strange that there never was an face-to-face encounter or "normal" conclusion to the conflict between cooper and earle. In most TV series you have that final scene where the good guy wins over the bad guy or opposite.  It is the standard climax in a story where you have a hero and a villain.  But that is not how it works in Twin Peaks, things are a little bit different there.

 You get the encounter between cooper and earle, but in the Red room. Its like the story has been taken to a whole other level, and the more traditional story where Cooper and Earle should have meet and one or the other should have won over the other, that story becomes disrupted when these characters enter the red room. Its like you have this traditional plot with the good guy versus the evil guy heading for an confrontation and a conclusion and in the middle of the story the story or the plot dissolves or takes a completely different turn.  

I didn't feel cheated about the confrontation. I think it is a really original confrontation.  It's hard to explain - it's something about the plot being transcended. Something about a bigger fish in the sea swallowing both Earle and Cooper.
 

This is a sentence and you are reading it now.

I feel that one of the biggest mistakes in the series was how Windom Earle was handled. We saw too much of him; and what we saw wasn't always pretty. I maintain that the story arc could've been phenomenal had we never seen Earle until much later in the season-- perhaps only the last two episodes. When I first heard Earle's first recording to Cooper, the image I had in my head of who Windom Earle was-- how he looked, walked, his expressions, his demeanor-- was built up in a way that, quite frankly, Kenneth Welsh did not live up to. Mr. Welsh's voice was so much more chilling filtered through a casette tape than "in person," and his overall demeanor simply did not match up, IMO. He sounded so exquisitely evil, cunning, and all-powerful that, when we got to the point of this disheveled little man cackling like the Wicked Witch and shock collaring Leo, I found myself tremendously disappointed. Earle should have been a believable successor to Bob as the villain of the series. His dancing and singing while possessing Leland aside, we also got to see Bob doing his freakout thing in Ronette's flashback, as well as myriad other creepy stuff. With Windom Earle, what we saw was some supremely goofy shenanigans on par with Ben Horne's Civil War.

 Now, had we only [i]heard[/i] Earle for most of the duration of the second season, only seen his murderous work after it had been completed, only had him literally taunting Cooper from the shadows, the psychological as well as storytelling impact could have been awesome. Granted, the risk would have been run that the audience would be disappointed come the big reveal-- I imagine that, after so much build up, Earle would have become so mammoth in the minds of the viewers that it would've taken a miraculous feat of casting to have him appear as intimidating as he sounded--but I think that the creators could've pulled it off if they'd chosen to go down that route.

I completely agree. This might be my biggest gripe (out of many big ones) with season 2. There's simply too much of him. Kenneth Welsh was a good choice, but it's the over the top Joker dialogue that's at fault - and it's not even good Joker dialogue. The ending of episode 20 is one of the best endings of the entire series, and even with some heavyhanded touches from Diane Keaton the ending of episode 22 is almost its equal. But from there it all goes downhill when Earle talks about fear and love, kills roadies, walks around dressed like a horse, laughs maniacally, etc. But not only is he not scary, he's most often redundant. I wouldn't be surprised if you could fan-edit out almost every scene he's in and not lose the plot.

In the just-for-fun fan rewriting the poster called Audrey Horne and I are doing over at the Dugpa board, Earle is only heard through tapes but he's also posing as an innocuous character with a pseudonym and meets other people in town, but we don't see him or know it's him until the last three episodes. He's more like Toad until he's revealed. I think this could have worked. In that scenario he also takes Audrey to the Lodge, of course. Heh.

"What credit card do you want to put that on?"
"Caash, prease."

I like windom earle. But i agree that the autobiography of cooper paints a completely different picture of him, in comparison to the character in the series. But i think he is one of the highlights of season 2. He is very cartoonish, that is the first thing that comes to my mind. Like his very essence is made up of different donuts and other pastries and coffee, or something like that. He's a very evil genius but you can't really take the evil very serious..... But all this changes in episode 29.... then all the games and the cartoon - stuff ends, all the illusions wither away - the cartoonish battle between Cooper and Earle dissolves and the seriousness of reality enters - swallowing both Cooper and Earle....

That is my interpretation!  

This is a sentence and you are reading it now.