Lynch/Frost GMing

The most entertaining evil genius of all time was Windom Earle, played by Kenneth Welsh in the last half of the second season of Twin Peaks. He really knocked the ball out of the park. Amazing performance. He had humor, wit, and a creepily believable portrayal of a good man gone bad due to dabbling in the dark arts. This man could kill randomly, and then figure out how to make that act retroactively beneficial - even instrumental - to his cause.

What really made it work was the foreshadowing. The viewer fears him long before he ever appears on camera. Earle gets mentioned briefly, really early on. We learn he's escaped from the asylum. Then packages from him start arriving. We hear his voice in an episode, something around episode number 18 out of 29. It's still several more episodes before we see him, and then when we do he seems very calm and measured. The idea is put forth that "he may have faked the insanity that sent him away in the first place."

"Agent Earl's mind is like a diamond, cold and hard and brilliant." - Agent Cooper

Yet, in other scenes, he's a frothing madman. For a while he's hard to wrap our brains around - his faculties are immense, how could such a genius fall so low? Then we see an old film clip that gives us insight into how he became what he is. It doesn't summarize it up neat and pat, but it gives us a really good clue and then lets the intuitive leap be our own. I love that, how it doesn't show the scene in which he turned to evil, but it does give us the clues to figure out when and how it happened, and that it's years earlier than the main character ever imagined. To figure out the show you have to turn off the TV and think about it. Genius foreshadowing and conceptualizing, wedded to a mastercraft execution. That plot is one of the premiere achievements of modern society, I kid you not. It's well worth sitting through the whiny James-and-Donna subplots to get there. And don't worry, nothing I've said here will spoil the viewing experience for you.

Another, related, thing I admire about Twin Peaks is the way the show hides it's meaning till very near the end. It starts off as a crime drama, just some murder mystery. The characters are off-beat and eccentric, but you imagine you're in the "real" world of just another detective show. That of course, is a dirty trick. There's something else going on, something big and world-warping, and the authors just take their sweet time revealing it by means of one tantalizing hint after another. Unlike most TV, there was a huge pay-off to actually watching every week and talking about it between episodes.

When GMing, I'm in it for the long haul. First, I endeavor to figure out what's happening in the "reality" of the setting, and figure out where I'm going. Then I foreshadow like crazy. When I pull off a big reveal, I want it to feel like Windom Earle's end-game, where you look back and realize that clues and hints were hidden throughout every episode. I've achieved it a few times (poor Narwhal) and had some really close failures that were highly enjoyable for the efforts (poor Kelly and Kail) so I'll never stop aspiring. Those were the games that we'll still be talking about years from now.