As Twin Peaks fans know, the role of Killer Bob—the evil spirit who acts as the show’s main villain—was played by a crew member named Frank Silva. There are various legends that explain how a set dresser became an iconic part of the show’s bananas mythology, but they all tend to revolve around some variation of Silva getting trapped on set, having his reflection accidentally show up on a mirror during filming, and his face being just spooky enough to catch the eye of series co-creator David Lynch. Unfortunately, Silva died in 1995, leaving Showtime’s revival of Twin Peaks without its Killer Bob.
However, the premium cable network just released the full list of production crew members who will be working on the new Twin Peaks episodes, so one of them could very easily end up joining the cast by being the show’s next homicidal ghost dude. After all, they just have to look spooky enough, get trapped in a room, or accidentally be in the background of a shot and they could catch Lynch’s eye as well. The problem with this is that the list of crew members only has their names and job titles, so it’s impossible to tell if any of them will have the same kind of terrifying vibe that Silva did in the old Twin Peaks, but we’ll just have to try and solve this mystery anyway.
The list itself is 11-pages long, and includes everyone from the director (Lynch for all of the episodes) to the drivers, so to narrow it down we should start by looking at the people who have the same job that Silva did: the set dressers.
None are named Bob, which would’ve been a big giveaway, but one of them does share their name with an MSNBC political commentator. (That probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s still important to note.) It looks like the set dressers are a dead-end, which is probably because making the evil murder spirit have the same job would be too on-the-nose.
The costume department gives us a slightly better clue, with a Sue Bub working as a costume supervisor. It’s a letter off from “Bob,” but having a woman be the scary villain would be a good change of pace. However, it’s still not quite good enough.
The crew has a painter named Lilly Kristin Frank, but Frank Silva himself wasn’t the evil spirit, so that also doesn’t really give us anything. Really, though, to find the next incarnation of Bob, we should go back to his origin. Specifically, we should go back to the part about the camera catching his face in a mirror while filming. A camera. Hmm….
Bob Webeck is the only Bob on the whole Twin Peaks crew. That either means nothing, or it means everything. Unfortunately, we won’t know which one it is until Twin Peaks debuts on Showtime in 2017.