Recap / Psych S 05 E 012 Dual Spires

Season 5, Episode 12

Dual Spires

"Worst. Cinnammon Festival. Ever."

Directed by Matt Shakman

Written by Bill Callahan and James Roday Rodriguez

Shawn and Gus receive a mysterious email inviting them to the Cinnamon Festival in Dual Spires, a quirky small town essentially invisible on a map. They arrive to find themselves embroiled in the mystery of the drowning death of a teenage girl, Paula Merral - who was declared dead under similar circumstances seven years ago in Santa Barbara.

This is the series' Homage to Twin Peaks and thus essentially synonymously named.

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Tropes:

• A Family Affair: Robert Barker had an affair with his sister-in-law Lucy, from which Paula Merral was born.
• Actor Allusion: At the end, when the killers are holding Shawn, Gus and Father Wesley at gunpoint, Father Wesley asks if he has a "special exception" from getting killed. In universe, it's because he's a priest, but it's also because like the murderers and unlike Shawn and Gus, Ray Wise was a cast-member of Twin Peaks.
• Affectionate Parody: The episode as a whole is one to Twin Peaks. James Roday has called Twin Peaks his favorite series of all time.
• Artifact Title: The town's diner, owned by the Barkers and where Shawn and Gus feast themselves on pies, is named the Sawmill Diner. That's because there once was an actual sawmill there that got burned down in 1958.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: Dual Spires has no cell phone signal except a very weak one (only 1 bar) in a very tiny space around the lake Paula's corpse was found. A very tiny shift to just outside the space and there would be a Sudden Lack of Signal.
• Chekhov's Gun: Two seemingly minor objects are key to Shawn discovering Dr. Goodman and Sheriff Jackson murder Paula Merral:
  • The equal rings Robert Barker, Dr. Goodman and Sheriff Jackson - and no one else - wear. They symbolize their wearers as leaders of the founding families.
  • The picture of Dr. Goodman with her husband and her dogs hanging at the wall of her office. It shows that she has no kids and uses her dogs as substitute children because she can't conceive.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Adult Maudette Hornsby was sleeping with 17-year-old Randy Jackson. To make it even worse, she was a substitute mother for him. Unlike most examples, everyone except (of all people) Gus - justifying himself with him being 17 and both being hot - condemns their affair. Still, given the comedic bent of Psych, it's treated in a jokey way: there's no way a reverse example would appear, even if so clearly condemned.
• Greasy Spoon: The Sawmill Diner, which is the Local Hangout and main money-bringing activity for the town. Their pies are so delicious Shawn and Gus feast on them, and Lassie likes their cup of cider.
• Homage: There are numerous shots and references to Twin Peaks throughout the episode including several actors from the original series playing different parts in this episode.
• Hot Librarian: Maudette Hornsby. She's explicitely described so by Gus.
• Jack of All Trades: Dr. Donna Gooden, whose sign includes various diverse branches of medicine (including, apparently, veterinary medicine, since one of her patients is a pet) and also says "esquire" (i.e., she's a lawyer). She describes herself to Shawn and Gus as "a woman of science, law and accounting".
• Locked into Strangeness: Averted. Father Peter Westley shows up with hair turned suddenly white, but it's not supernatural. (It's the result of a bad paint job by a nun that helped him. He was trying to look less gray-haired.)
• Man of the City: Sheriff Jackson and Jack of All Trades Dr. Gooden are the town leaders who do a lot of work to keep their small, isolated town functioning and preserve the ideals of its founders, their ancestors. They are so obsessed with the town that they commit murder to keep their chosen successor from leaving.
• Meaningful Name: Maudette Hornsby, who was having an affair with Randy Jackson.
• Motive Decay: Dual Spires was founded after World War I as an ideal community, without the problems that plagued outside society. They lived according to this ideal until 1958, when the local sawmill (located where the Sawmill Diner now is) got burned down. Since then, they've accumulated a lot of skeletons in the closet.
• Our Founder: Robert Barker mentions that Dual Spires was founded by three families, one of which was his and the others were the Goodens (as in Dr. Donna Gooden) and the Jacksons (as in Sheriff Andrew Jackson). It was Donna and the Sheriff who killed Paula since she was leading Randy, the only (known^note Paula was herself the daughter of Robert, but that fact was hidden away from everyone but themselves) direct descendent of the original founders, who would lead the townspeople and carry on their lifestyle, away from the town. Donna could not conceive, and Randy was the only son of the Sheriff, who had cancer.
• Parental Substitute: Maudette Hornsby for Randy Jackson, because the latter's mother had died when he was young. They were also having an affair.
• Racial Face Blindness: The minute Shawn and Gus arrive, the latter is asked by a little girl if he was Frederick Douglass. That's because the town is very isolated and people there had never seen an African-American before.
• Red Herring: Shawn knows Jack is a photographer, so he checks the roll Jack took that day and sees an angry Randy in the background. They track Randy down who confesses he hit Jack, but then Paula was mad at him so he went to the library like he said he did and was not involved in the murder.
• Running Gag: There is a pineapple in a bowl of fruit on the Barker's living room table.
• Scary Librarian: Subverted with Maudette Hornsby. When Gus and Shawn first enter the local library, she tells them to shush - frightening both - and then goes to tell a story about books not being just printed works but each one of them having a life, with her wanting to hear the noises each one made. But then she immediately tells them she was just kidding.
• Shout-Out: So many references to Twin Peaks that it could fill the page, but some are:
  • Paula Merral was found along the shore wrapped in plastic. Paula's name is an anagram of Laura Palmer who was famously found along a lake near a massive log wrapped in plastic. A question sent to the psych phone “Who Killed Paula Merral?” is a direct reference to the catchphrase surrounding the Twin Peaks show “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”
  • Donna Goodwin, whose first name is a reference to the best friend of Laura Palmer, is played by Sheryl Lee who played Laura Palmer and Maddy Fergison.
  • Librarian Maudette Hornsby is played by Sherilyn Fenn who played Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks. Audrey has a massive schoolgirl crush on Agent Cooper. She joins the brothel at One Eyed Jacks after tying a cherry stem with her tongue. She is seen in the episode drinking cherry Coke and making the comment that cherry is just the best.
  • Father Wesley is played by Ray Wise, who played Leland Palmer, Laura’s father. Father Wesley's hair changes color just as Leland's hair changes color.
  • Other actors who also were in Twin Peaks were Dana Ashbrook, Catherine E. Coulson, Robyn Lively and Lenny von Dohlen.
  • The theme to the episode was performed by Julee Cruise, who also performed Twin Peaks's theme song "Falling". The end song was "Kool Kat Walk" by David Lynch and performed by Julee Cruise.
  • Shawn and Gus later ride a tandem bicycle in what Shawn likens to a racially reversed Driving Miss Daisy.
  • Randy reveals that the town gathers every week to watch Everwood.
• Small Reference Pools: In the town of Dual Spires, much to Shawn's annoyance, the only references they get are references to Everwood.
  Shawn: I'm on to you... like the townspeople of Everwood were on to the fact that Nina was a surrogate mother.
  Gus/Juliet: That's enough, Shawn.
  Ralph: [almost whispering] She was.
  Shawn: Thank you.
• Uncanny Village:
  • First, Dual Spires is a very small town (288 people at first, 287 later) so isolated they appear between parenthesis on the map, and their only connections to the outside world are a recently-installed landline (only for phones, no Internet), a very weak cell phone reception which they only get in a very tight spot around the lake Paula's corpse was found^note at the time the episode was produced, there was no mobile Internet as we know it today, only the relatively little used Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). The modern-day, HTML-based, mobile Internet only came to be widely used by the very late-2000s, early-2010s, a dirt road where no car can drive^note Gus and Shawn first, and then Jules and Lassie, have to leave their respective cars in the nearest town, which is still far away and Robert Barker's jeep.
  • Then, after they solve the case, Shawn and Jules wanted to be there in order to continue their secret romance. But, not only did Gus^note who became acquainted with the romance the previous episode, although Julie didn't know he knew, Father Wesley and Lassie remain there, someone orders three cinnamon pies both sounding and pointing creepily, there were people monotonously dancing to a creepy song ("Kool Kat Walk") a now one-eyed and blindfolded Jack put playing on the diner's jukebox, and also Randy was barking at a dog outside (who responded to him) almost to the rhythm of the song. When Jules tells Shawn she found the town creepy and to give a good look, and he does exactly the latter, both decide to leave.
• Variations on a Theme Song: Appropriately enough, the theme is now a shout out to Twin Peaks.
• Wham Shot: Maudette's hanged corpse being discovered in the library, leads to the discovery that she was secretly helping Shawn and Gus in the first place.