Pettibon Junction, I have never seen Twin Peaks but your post is awesome and I really don't need to be familiar with this show to understand exactly what you mean.
I have been feeling the same way about this show also.
Strictly entertainment and I'm guessing the same folks who watch and BELIEVE reality shows are reality and not scripted/fake, will believe this series.
JMO
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Having not seen the most recent episode (I plan to watch either tonight or tomorrow), I'll refrain from commenting on it specifically, though I will say that I like what little I've seen so far: female voices have been missing from the public discussion of this case and I find Maggie Freleng refreshing and hope that the docuseries will, ultimately, serve as a decent primer/intro to the case and maybe provide a bit of necessary course-correction.
That said, I take issue with the sad reality that to talk about Maura Murray, one must also talk about James Renner and John Smith, the former having written the first and, to date, only book covering her story and the latter running the show online at this point as well as, apparently, officially speaking for the family of the missing. Both of them have done some research and I won't begrudge them those hours they spent trying to figure this out, but they're also very much attention-seekers and very much attached to their pet theories, neither of which is very plausible. They have inserted themselves, enmeshed themselves in this case that we can't talk about it without first acknowledging them in some way, and Oxygen of course couldn't make their documentary without including them. And so their ideas (wrongheaded, in my opinion) are amplified further, as they were on the podcast, where they've gone largely unchallenged.
Every high-profile case has one or two people like this, trotting out their theories in a high-profile fashion and, in their confidence that their solution can be the only possible answer, shut down discussion. Alan Moore, who meticulously researched Jack the Ripper for his graphic novel 'From Hell' called them gull-catchers, evoking the image of a gaggle of men with butterfly nets, chasing birds around a beach and in the process, replacing footprints representing actual clues with their own. It's an apt metaphor for the obfuscating effect these kinds of people have when they try to fit the evidence to a narrative rather than the other way around. What's worse, this could even have a chilling effect on new witnesses coming forward. If the public believes a case is solved, then they won't remain vigilant and when a person is still missing and those who knew them left without answers, this is problematic, to say the least.
Personally, I don't have a strong theory that I'm incredibly attached to in this case, but there are scenarios that I believe more likely than others. When a young woman goes missing, it's almost always because a man intervened to engineer it. To deny that this could have possibly happened and to mock it outright is to dismiss the reality that women live with every single day, whether on crowded university campuses or sparsely populated mountain towns. And to me, that's not just ignorant but actively offensive.
So what's most likely in this case? I'd say either death by misadventure (i.e., accidental drowning or a slip-and-fall incident in the isolated woodlands east of the crash site, a la Misty Upham or any number of young men who turn up dead in the water after a night of heavy drinking) or manslaughter/homicide (i.e., someone hit her with their vehicle or picked her up/let her in to their home and murdered her). Sadly, what's also most likely is that we'll never know for sure but in terms of the latter scenario, I'll say this: there ARE suspects, police HAVE interviewed them, and most of the locals believe a crime was committed and many of them have their own suspicions as to who did it.
