POP! Television – Twin Peaks: The Log Lady

“One day my log will have something to say about this. My log saw something that night.”

In a show that’s already studded with mysteries, riddles and bizarre characters, the Log Lady still stands out as one of the most enigmatic.

Derided as crazy by most of the town of Twin Peaks, we quickly learn that the Log Lady does have some kind of psychic insight into the strange events occurring in the town. But as with everyone else who’s got something useful to say (The Giant, The Man From Another Place, Laura Palmer et al) it’s couched in highly cryptic terms. Major Briggs comes closest to getting a straight answer out of her – and probably not coincidentally, he’s the character who treats her with the most respect.   

The POP is a solid recreation of her look on the show. If I had to pin down her style to four words, I’d call it “frumpy Sally Jesse Raphael”. Back in Stranger Things week I commented on the disparity between how people now view the 80s, versus how they actually looked. Twin Peaks was set in 1989, at the tail-end of the decade, and again, the clothes look dated – but not outrageously gaudy. So really, it’s pretty typical of what more conservative middle-aged women wore at the time.

Paint is mostly neat, though make sure you check the hairline and the log – these are the likely trouble spots. It’s an all-round solid POP. But with all of this said, I suspect the Log Lady will probably be the lowest-selling figure from the Twin Peaks line. Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper are the obvious pickups, and the rest of the characters scale down accordingly. I’m all in personally, but for more casual collectors, Log Lady is easier to pass on.    

Though Catherine E. Coulson passed away in 2015, the Log Lady will reappear in the 2017 revival as she had apparently already finished filming her scenes. She wasn’t my favourite character from the ensemble, but she was always entertaining. Who knows what the Log will have to share this time?