I'm sure those of you who've seen it will remember this - the ending of episode 14, season 2. Everyone was talking about the big reveal - a five-minute scene that many found brutal and shocking - and it is. (It's a huge spoiler, and in this YouTube video, it begins at 4:18 and ends at 9:12). But that five-minute scene is sandwiched in the middle of this longer segment (the whole YouTube clip), and that's what haunts me still. That slow progression of mood: from normal, to expectant, to ominous, to a horrid sinking feeling....then that shocking five-minute scene...and then - a vast, soft, bruised, uncanny sadness. All of them feel it, though they don't know why.
And through it all runs another line: the music (and particularly Julee Cruise's singing). It starts out as just a normal part of the setting. And it's pretty, but rather incongruous. As the scene continues however, the music slowly becomes more central. And those two trajectories - the music and the mood - each oblivious of the other, slowly unwind, and finally, in the last thirty seconds they merge together.
That kind of directorial control - to set up such a complex twelve-minute sequence that's really built of slowly shifting emotions - and with clockwork precision to bring it all to a single point at the end - that's very rare indeed.
Edit: spelling.