“Slaves And Masters” is an episode of Twin Peaks that’s ripe with the feeling of change. The plots that the show spent too much time on over the last few episodes are finally drawing to a close, and the mysterious figures—Windom Earle, Thomas Eckhardt, Andrew Packard—are emerging from the shadows.
While Twin Peaks is easy to praise for both its alien-like atmosphere and the skill with which it constructed the Laura Palmer investigation, neither of these aspects would resonate to the degree they do if they weren’t built on the solid framework of the show’s world. The residents of Twin Peaks are all distinctly drawn characters with their own set of quirks, biases, and motivations; many of which are only tangentially related to Laura’s death. David Lynch said at the time and in many interviews since that he considered the murder the entry point to the rest of the town, and that in an ideal world it would have turned into a perpetual motion machine of story as their lives progressed.