Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 7

This may require a slight change of attitude on your part.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 7 // Original Air Date June 18, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

In some respects, Part 7 of Twin Peaks: The Return feels unmistakably like the episode that the series has been building up to for some time. It’s the point where a story that been meandering through absurd delays and digressions suddenly takes a lurch forward. It features two conspicuous passages that have a whiff of fate about them. The first of these is the more dramatic of the two, and a welcome development for long-time Peaks aficionados. When confronted by lethal danger in the form of diminutive assassin Ike “The Spike” (Christophe Zajac-Denek), Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) at long last snaps out of his Dougie stupor—if only momentarily—and exhibits the physical lethality and quick thinking of a veteran lawman.

During this skirmish with Ike, Cooper receives some direction from a tiny manifestation of the Arm, which rasps the oddly-phrased exhortation, “Squeeze his hand off!” However, Cooper’s brutal disarming of the assassin feels less like an example of the FBI agent’s newfound second sight than the reemergence of latent, trained muscle memory. In this, it’s a long-awaited sign that the old Coop is finally resurfacing. Moreover, the entire passage in and outside Dougie’s office building is a satisfying collision of several subplots that seemed to be unfolding in isolation until now: the apparent insurance fraud perpetrated by Tony Sinclair (Tom Sizemore); Janey-E’s (Naomi Watts) settling of Dougie’s gambling debts; the abandonment and destruction of Dougie’s car; and the mysterious assassins that have Cooper in their sights.

The other momentous passage in Part 7 is more subtle in its novelty, but just as significant in terms of the series’ narrative. For the benefit of Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster), Deputy Chief Hawk (Michael Horse) reviews the events surrounding the murder of Laura Palmer and the criminal investigation that followed. The impetus for this is Hawk’s discovery of three yellowed pages from Laura’s “secret diary,” which were hidden, of all places, within a men’s room stall door at the sheriff’s station. One entry in the diary seems to point to the vanished Dale Cooper, just as the Log Lady’s prophetic missive to Hawk indicated it would. Viewers who are familiar with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me will recognize these lines. That film depicted the dream that the missing pages describe, wherein a bloody Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham) materializes in Laura's bed and instructs her to report Dale Cooper's plight in her diary.

This scene and the subsequent Skype call that Sheriff Truman places to Dr. Will Hayward (Warren Frost) stand out in part because they represent the kind of “As You Know” expository summaries that Twin Peaks: The Return has generally avoided. More so than in the original series, Mark Frost and David Lynch have been wickedly defiant in their refusal to explain anything solely for the audience’s edification. Hawk’s concise but measured description of the diary’s significance and of Cooper’s emergence from the Black Lodge represents an unusually explicit acknowledgment of the original series’ events, as well as a kind of “Previously on Twin Peaks” nickel summary that feels pitched partly at the viewer. The fact that Frank Truman is the in-show recipient of this exposition somewhat mitigates any sense of artificiality, since the Sheriff likely does need to be brought up to speed on events that transpired before his time.

However, nothing that Hawk or Doc Hayward convey to the Sheriff would necessarily be of much value to a viewer who walked blindly into The Return without first experiencing the show’s original two seasons. To such an individual—or, indeed, to anyone who isn’t thoroughly steeped in Twin Peaks lore, including FWWM—Hawk’s explanations might even smack of bootstrapping, an effort to cram in ex post facto justifications for fresh narrative developments. Cunningly, Frost and Lynch avoid the appearance of overly tidy plotting by littering Hawk’s dialog with hedges and uncertainties. He unselfconsciously responds to many of the sheriff’s follow-up questions with a thoughtful, “I don’t know, but…” (This could practically be the show’s alternate tagline, conveying the simultaneous absence of certitude and pervasiveness of meaning.)

These scenes of glorified “case review” at the sheriff’s station do provide some salient new plot details, such as the fact that Mr. C may have paid a visit to a comatose Audrey Horne in the hospital shortly before he vanished from Twin Peaks some 25 years ago. (Unsettling suspicions about the odious Richard Horne’s parentage are looking more credible.) Still, the overall sensation is one of tumblers clicking into place, and of small plot beats from prior episodes finally paying off.

One minor but vital illustration of this is the long, convoluted journey of the Room 315 hotel key. Jade’s conscientious but seemingly incidental decision to drop the key recovered from Cooper’s pocket into the mail pays dividends when Beverly Paige (Ashley Judd) shows the returned key to Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) at the Great Northern Hotel. Whether this will have any long-lasting narrative ramifications remains to be seen, but it does provoke Ben to reminisce about Cooper and Laura Palmer. It also leads to a delicious moment when Beverly's quizzical “Who’s Laura Palmer?” receives the slightly smug, slightly wistful response, “That, my dear, is a long story.” Not only does this exchange thematically echo the earlier scenes at the sheriff’s station, but it turns Ben and Beverly into a surrogate Twin Peaks fanatic and newcomer, respectively. Meta-textual allusion to the differing perspectives and experiences regarding the original series is emerging as one of the key recurring features of The Return.

Intriguingly, Beverly might never have seen and remembered the key, had she and Ben not been roaming slowly around his office in search of an enigmatic hum or ringing sound. Their almost amused hunt for the noise’s source reflects the pursuit of clues within the text of Twin Peaks itself, but it is also consistent with the half-rational, half-intuitive means by which Hawk discovered Laura’s missing diary pages at the conclusion of the previous episode. This points to the fascinating possibility that the “purpose” of the humming is simply to get the long-lost hotel key into Ben’s hands, to set yet more wheels in motion that may ultimately impact Dale Cooper’s voyage back to Twin Peaks.

In its way, the reappearance of the Great Northern room key represents this episode in a nutshell, as much of Part 7 concerns long-gestating plot points coming to fruition, or at least finally emerging out into the open. Lieutenant Cynthia Knox (Adele René) arrives in Buckhorn, South Dakota to confer with Detective Macklay (Brent Briscoe) and coroner Constance Talbot (Jane Adams), who confirm the bizarre truth that the viewer already knows. Namely, the headless corpse in the Buckhorn morgue is that of Major Garland Briggs, who, impossibly enough, appears to be in his 40s and only freshly dead. (Both cannot be true, since Major Briggs was in his 40s when he last vanished in 1989.)

This sequence has a definite—and, for this season, uncharacteristic—“plot maintenance” feeling, in that it involves bringing the characters up to speed on facts that the viewer knows. Yet Lynch maintains a sense of mystery and menace by adding a discordant element to the scene. While Knox explains the situation to her superior Colonel Davis (Ernie Hudson) over the phone, a filthy, bedraggled man walks steadily towards her down a long hallway. This figure appears, significantly, as Knox utters the line, “His head is not here,” and he is accompanied by an ominous humming. Ultimately, Knox returns to the morgue and the man passes by uneventfully, but in the moment the tension is positively excruciating. The shallow focus and Knox’s obliviousness to the encroaching threat give this passage the fleeting atmosphere of a daylight horror film. (The filthy man, not incidentally, resembles a figure who is briefly glimpsed in a Buchkorn holding cell in Part 2 before he inexplicably dematerializes.)

In another scene that explicitly elaborates on forensic particulars, FBI agent Tamara Preston (Chrysta Bell) explains her earlier findings regarding Dale Cooper’s fingerprints to Gordon Cole (David Lynch) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer). Namely, she reveals that the print on Mr. C’s left ring finger (the “spiritual finger,” as the mystically-minded Cole names it) is the mirror image of Cooper’s corresponding print. Cole connects this to a vocal tic they witnessed when interviewing Mr. C, who mispronounced "very" as the reversed "yrev." The proximal meaning of this anomaly is less significant than what it seems to confirm on an instinctual level: That the man being held in a federal prison is not Dale Cooper, in some puzzling but unmistakable way.

Notwithstanding Tamara’s discovery and his own first-hand meeting with Mr. C, Gordon coerces Cooper’s former assistant Diane Evans (Laura Dern) to fly to South Dakota, in the hopes that she can verify their conclusions. Despite her evidently venomous hatred for Cooper, Gordon, and the FBI in general, Diane eventually acquiesces. Her fraught exchange with Mr. C, dripping with a hidden history of loathing, convinces her that something is indeed horribly wrong with this man who wears Cooper’s face. “It isn’t time passing, or how he’s changed, or the way he looks,” she explains to Gordon through shuddering tears. “It’s something here,” she declares, pointing at her own chest, before gulping down a mini-bottle of booze to recover her courage. (Her spiteful toast: “Cheers. To the FBI.”)

Diane’s confrontation with Mr. C—featuring an exacting yet dizzyingly raw performance by Dern—hints at a disturbing story of abuse and betrayal that Frost and Lynch leave ambiguous, at least for the moment. This caginess might contrast with this episode’s pattern of forthright explanation, but it’s consistent with Frost and Lynch’s general preference for oblique reference rather than straightforward exposition. For every pivotal scene like Hawk’s Cliff Notes on Seasons 1 and 2, or Knox finally laying eyes on Briggs' time-defying remains, Part 7 offers up three or four vague indications of yet more mysteries and misdeeds.

Despite the show’s often mischievous opacity, in this instance that reticence is frequently a concession to the authenticity of character and scene. Diane’s exchange with Mr. C achieves greater pathos by not elaborating on precisely why it unnerves her so profoundly. The lack of clarity hints at trauma so deep, Diane can barely dwell on it, let alone discuss it. (“You and I will have a talk sometime,” she promises Gordon with an exhausted sob.) Likewise, Mr. C doesn’t need to explain the significance of the name Joe McClusky or that of the severed dog legs to Warden Murphy (James Morrison)—or to the viewer, for that matter. The only immediately relevant fact is that Mr. C somehow knows a secret so devastating that the Warden is willing to let Mr. C and Ray Monroe (George Griffith) walk out the door—and provide them with a car and a loaded gun for their troubles—rather than allow that secret to come to light.

Even when Part 7 traffics in deliberately vague storytelling, the overarching meaning of the scene in question is evident. Bartender Jean Michel Renault (Walter Olkewicz) takes a phone call at the roadhouse regarding some dispute over the quantity and age of prostitutes, but since we only hear his side of the conversation, the details are unclear. However, his loathsome description of a pair of underage girls—“straight A students” who are also “straight A whores”—is an uncomfortably apt evocation of Laura Palmer. This points to the crucial takeaway: Notwithstanding the passage of 25 years and its new status as a hip venue for national music acts, the Bang Bang Bar is still partly a front for cross-border sex trafficking.

Similarly, it is not explained why the anxious Farmer (Edward Ted Dowling) refuses to speak with Deputy Andy (Henry Goaz) about his truck, which was last seen running over a boy while Richard Horne was behind the wheel. The Farmer seems fearful that someone will overhear their conversation, and promises to meet Andy later to answer his questions. (In spite of the presumed urgency surrounding the unsolved manslaughter of a child, the deputy is oddly amenable to allowing his primary suspect to get back to him later.) The reason for the Farmer's reluctance is less significant than the fact of it. What matters is the terror engendered by the sight of that dingy little farmhouse's screen door and what lies behind it, not the particulars of what that terror actually entails.

This preference for story over plot is one of the fundamental keys to watching Twin Peaks, and indeed to understanding David Lynch’s oeuvre as a whole: While he often resists explaining things to the viewer, he is always telling the viewer things. The most reliable and facile criticism of Lynch’s work is that he uses impenetrability to mask vacuity. The flimsiness of this critique aside, it’s never been particularly applicable to Twin Peaks, and The Return has only solidified its inaptness. The self-evident artistic and narrative density of the new season—particularly its fussy but never distancing devotion to the esoterica of the original seasons, feature film, and other media—seems wholly incompatible with “weird for the sake of weird” arbitrariness. There is a definite, complex schematic of cause and effect underlying this story, but it is too sprawling to convey in exhaustive detail, even in the span of 18 hours.

And why would Lynch want to do that, anyway?  It would perhaps satisfy a certain streak of obsessive fan, but it would also be dreadfully dry and ordinary. Twin Peaks is both a celebration of and a riff on numerous television genres, but it has no interest in scrupulously embodying any of those genres. This is partly why fumbling descriptions of the original Twin Peaks as “a prime time soap, but weirder” or “a murder mystery, but weirder” always felt wildly inadequate. It’s partly what Todd VanDerWerff at Vox is getting at when he approvingly characterizes The Return as the defeat of recap culture. The world of Twin Peaks is vast, but Lynch cheekily provides only glimpses of the plot gears whirring beneath the story. Counterintuitively, understanding how that plot works isn’t as essential as, for example, witnessing the absurdity of an addled Cooper bumbling through Dougie Jones’ life. When and where it does become essential to know exactly What’s Happening, the show invariably sits the viewer down like Hawk might and explains it, slowly and judiciously. What is the Farmer afraid of? What happened between Cooper and Diane? Who the hell is Joe McClusky? That, my dear, is a long story.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• In Part 7’s opening scene, Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelly) is lost in the forest and stoned out of his mind. When he places a phone call for help to his brother Ben, Jerry’s disordered, paranoid ramblings foreshadow the episode’s later scenes with Cooper-as-Dougie. (“Someone stole my car!”)
   
• Andy agrees to meet the Farmer on a logging road above Sparkwood and 21 at 4:30 p.m. This is the intersection where Laura Palmer notoriously leapt from her boyfriend James Hurley’s motorcycle on the night she died, and 4-3-0 are the three numbers the Giant (Carel Struycken) told Dale Cooper to remember in the new season’s prologue. As one can often say of this season: perhaps significant, perhaps not.
   
• Frank Truman’s computer monitor, rising out of his wooden desk when a secret level is pulled like some gadget on Get Smart, is a marvelously ridiculous design detail, wondrously incongruent with the cozy North Woods theme of the Sheriff’s office.
   
• Gordon declares Diane a “tough cookie,” which puts her in good company with “tough dame” Janey-E Jones. The latter woman once again demonstrates her fed-up ferocity when she steamrolls her way right through the questioning from a trio of Las Vegas police detectives, and shortly thereafter holds her own alongside Cooper in the scuffle with Ike the Spike.
   
• Mr. C’s blunt, ominous recollection of the last time that he and Diane encountered each other—“at your house”—recalls the unnerving Mystery Man from Lost Highway. Approaching saxophonist Fred Madison at a party, the Man asserts that, “We met before. At your house. Don’t you remember?” This gradually mutates into one of the most profoundly and inexplicably terrifying scenes in all of Lynch’s filmography.
   
• The scene depicting Beverly and Ben’s search for the origin of the hum concludes, bizarrely, with a lingering, emphatic zoom on the wooden wall of Ben’s office. This is a provocative gesture, given that the last time Ben’s partner-in-crime Josie Packard was seen 25 years ago, her body had died but her soul had become trapped in the wooden knob of a nightstand drawer. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that Ben rather idiosyncratically refers to Room 315 not as “Agent Cooper’s room” but as “the room where Agent Cooper was shot,” given that the individual who shot Coop was Josie.
   
• Unquestionably the most subversive sequence in Part 7 features nothing more than a man sweeping up peanut shells at the roadhouse as “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s plays on and on… and on. Given the semi-regular use of musical performances at the Bang Bang Bar to close out episodes during this season, the sweeping scene creates a short-lived impression that Part 7 might be concluding with a particularly banal, meditative variation on this device. Then the phone rings, snapping the sense of expectation in a way that somehow generates both relief and tension. The whole thing is soothing and perverse in equal measure.
   
• Sightings: James Morrison, who portrays Warden Murphy, is a veteran television actor, but he is probably most familiar to contemporary viewers for his role as Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit chief Bill Buchanan in later seasons of 24. Beverly’s ailing, suspicious husband Tom is played by Hugh Dillon, who is known for his role in the Canadian police drama Flashpoint and from Jean-François Richet’s 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13.
  
  The trio of Detective Fuscos—presumably brothers—that question Cooper are: 1) the delightfully brash David Koechner, best known for his roles in Anchorman and on the American version of The Office; 2) Eric Edelstein, who most recently appeared as bouncer Big Justin in Jeremy Saulnier’s survival horror thriller Green Room; and 3) Larry Clarke, who had a recurring role in later seasons of Law & Order and has credits in films by Steven Soderbergh (The Informant! and Contagion).

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 6

We are living in a dark, dark age.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 6 // Original Air Date June 11, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

Appreciating the works of David Lynch always demands a bit of patience. Because the filmmaker often works by intuition rather than logic—befitting a man who is a lifelong practitioner of transcendental meditation—attempts to decipher Lynch’s output according to rational investigative methods inevitably run headlong into something that doesn't make any goddamn sense. Sometimes it’s an actual logical contradiction within the story’s plot, but more often it’s a pointedly disconnected cutaway, a vivid but baffling design detail, or a moment (or whole sequence) that seems plucked from a surreal nightmare. Lynch frequently muddies the waters even further by daubing his filmic landscapes with conspicuous numbers, symbols, and allusions that sure seem like they must be significant.

As a result, the viewer can find themselves as frustrated as Dougie Jones’ boss Bushnell Mullins (Don Murray) in Part 6 of Twin Peaks: The Return. The insurance executive flips in growing annoyance through a stack of case files covered in Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachan) outwardly incoherent scribbles, complaining “How am I going to make any sense of this?” Like Bushnell, the viewer may eventually stumble onto the meaning behind a particular puzzle piece if it is studied long enough. However, not all answers can be riddled out through logical lines of reasoning. (Relatedly, not everything that is cryptic is necessarily a code.) The source of “Dougie’s” doodles underlines this admonition: While Bushnell eventually discerns the pattern that Cooper has highlighted, the brain-addled FBI agent did not deduce them through rational study, but in fact traced them according to the supernatural direction of flickering green lights.

While this “storytelling of the subconscious” has long been a feature of Lynch’s work, he rarely (if ever) has spelled out his artistic approach within the text of a film or show, preferring to allow the strangeness to speak for itself. One of the uncanny thrills about the new Twin Peaks—and about Part 6 in particular—is how the show explicitly and repeatedly explains to the viewer how to watch a David Lynch show. In Part 6, this is evident not only in Bushnell’s reaction to Cooper’s pencil scratches, but in Deputy Chief Hawk’s (Michael Horse) retrieval of a clue that has improbably been hidden inside a toilet stall door.

There is a rational component to Hawk’s discovery, in that once he notices the door’s missing bolts and bent panel, the lawman doggedly sets about prying it open. However, the path that leads to that discovery is a meandering, instinctive one: Hawk accidentally drops a coin, which rolls under a toilet stall; he retrieves the coin and sees that it is an “Indian head” nickel, bringing to mind the Log Lady’s message from Part 1; he takes a moment to look around the toilet stall; he notices the stall’s manufacturer (Nez Perce) and Indian logo; and finally he looks up and notices the door’s damaged corner. Similarly, a humble receptiveness to the “fuzzy logic” of intuition can enhance the viewer’s ability to discern meaning in the superficially inscrutable. Lynch’s distinctive approach to cinema reflects the unruly reality of the human mind, burbling as it is with a witch’s brew of perception, reason, emotions, memories, dreams, delusions, and enigmatic twitches. (The location of Hawk’s moment of clarity is drolly appropriate: For what is a restroom if not a sanctuary of meditation?)

There are several sequences in this episode that are purposely patience-testing: Dougie’s ham-fisted tracing, Bushnell’s peevish review of the files, and Hawk’s sleuthing all roll on in relative silence for far longer than another show would likely permit. The potentially significant events that flow from these moments of quiet study illustrate that the universe must be allowed the breathing room to reveal itself in due time. In this, Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton) is partly a proxy for the viewer. He has gone into town for a cup of Double R coffee every morning for what is presumably many years, and nothing noteworthy has ever happened. However, on the particular morning featured in this episode, a horrifying crime is committed in front Carl while he is sitting in his usual spot. In the aftermath, the elderly man witnesses something astonishing, a sight that seems to reveal the periphery of another world. Sometimes, Lynch observes, we must wait and wait and wait for the revelation, and then wait some more.

Perhaps to counter-balance its more deliberative sequences—not to mention the ongoing protracted absurdity of Cooper’s fumblings—Part 6 features some of the most shocking and visceral moments of violence in the series thus far. The Return hasn’t exactly been shy about serving up scenes of brutality, from Mr. C’s cold-blooded murder of Darya to the merciless beating inflicted on a casino pit boss. However Part 6’s bloodiest moments possess a strain of vicious, intrusive horror that is only marginally mitigated by the episode’s more hopeful thematic gestures. It’s cruel stuff, but also consistent with the overall arc of this season’s first third, which has gradually pulled back the curtain on a world of vast, pitiless evil.

Some of that malevolence is all too banal, as epitomized by a coked-up little sociopath like Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) running over a child (Hunter Sanchez) with his truck merely because the traffic at a four-way stop isn’t moving fast enough for his taste. Other aspects of it are outlandish yet inexorable, like the grisly rampage of icepick-wielding assassin Ike “The Spike” (Christophe Zajac-Denek) through the office of Lorraine (Tammie Baird), whose doom was sealed when her minions bungled the contract killing on Dougie. It’s a tough call as to which death is harder to watch. The portentous editing leading up to the hit-and-run creates an unmistakable sensation that something awful is about to occur, but the bluntness of Richard’s truck smashing into the little boy without even slowing is still like a punch to the sternum. The mother’s (Lisa Coronado) bloodcurdling wailing only exacerbates the lingering blow. Still, there’s a slasher movie savagery in the left-field way that the Spike barges in and stabs his way through the office, and particularly in the animalistic howls he unleashes as he gratuitously grinds his weapon of choice into Lorraine’s torso.

Still other evils are (for now) relatively opaque, like the menacing drug lord Red (Balthazar Getty), who gets under Richard’s skin with explicit threats, but also with flurries of pantomimed punches, ominous non-sequiturs, and a trivial but baffling magic trick with a dime. Red is just one of several figures in The Return that hail from America's twilit criminal underbelly. Lynch has long exhibited a fascination with the concept of an illicit, perverse world lurking just out of sight, going back to Blue Velvet with its opening scene of beetles writhing beneath a suburban lawn. The Return, however, is particularly attuned to the paranoid noir fantasies that propel Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Namely, the notion that a sinister network is buzzing underneath society’s glossy surface; a de facto secret society of mobsters, hitmen, dealers, leg breakers, bagmen, pimps, prostitutes, pornographers, bookies, and underlings.

Echoing MD, with its cryptic daisy-chain phone calls and Hollywood conspiracies, Part 6 provides vivid glimpses of this underworld and its system of mysterious envelopes and color-coded computer messages. This is consistent with the strange web of calls, texts, passwords, and vanishing black boxes that this season has already revealed. Ultimately, the specifics matter less than the overall impression of a cross-country network of evildoers with their own well-developed systems for conducting their disreputable business.

This sophistication highlights the formidable nature of the malign forces arrayed against the mentally hobbled Cooper. Every episode further heightens the mortal necessity that the FBI agent return to his full capacities as soon as possible, given the number of parties that appear to want him (or at least Dougie) dead. However, one gets the sense that Frost and Lynch are extending Cooper’s awakening partly out of mischievous obstinacy. Undoubtedly, the typical Twin Peaks viewer desperately wishes to see the return of the old Cooper, but that very need seems to have inspired the creators to withhold it for as long as possible, if only to defiantly flout audience expectations. (Frustrated viewers should recall that this sort of nasty cheek is perfectly consistent with a show that delivered the metaphorical middle finger that is “How’s Annie?”)

Regardless, Kyle MacLachlan continues to lend the diminished Cooper an air of melancholy amid all the dazed parroting and plodding. One of Part 6’s most unexpectedly sorrowful grace notes is the wistful way that Cooper reaches out to touch a police officer’s badge. There are stirrings of memory there, but such recollections are still surfacing with almost agonizing sluggishness. Nonetheless, the trajectory of the show’s narrative strands suggest that an upheaval of some kind is imminent, given that both the police and the Spike will be converging on Dougie just as the insurance scam subplot is on the verge of spilling out into the open. In his current state, Cooper is no position to defend himself, but his awestruck mimicry of the pose on Bushnell’s boxing poster foreshadows the clash that is looming.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Cooper’s semi-catatonic state brings to mind the “King in the Mountain” motif that recurs in mythology. In such scenes, a legendary monarch or hero lies slumbering in a hidden underground chamber or hollow. In the English-speaking world, this device's most prominent appearance is in Arthurian legend. Stories assert that King Arthur is not dead but merely deep in an enchanted sleep beneath the Isle of Avalon, where his knights and Excalibur also rest. In some tellings this slumber is linked to the messianic aspects of late Arthuriana: When Britain’s need is greatest, Arthur will awaken to right all the wrongs that have befallen his kingdom in his absence. Notably, Dougie Jones’ neighborhood is rife with Arthurian names: his house is on Lancelot Court near Merlin’s Market, and in Part 6 Janey-E (Naomi Watts) meets the bookie’s bagmen in the park at Guinevere and Merlin.
   
• It’s easy to miss, but an establishing shot indicates that the meeting between Richard and Red occurs at the Packard Sawmill, or what remains of it. This is foreshadowed by the book that Sonny-Jim (Pierce Gagnon) is reading in bed: an early Hardy Boys Mystery titled The Secret of the Old Mill.
   
• Red’s trick with the flipped dime recalls the magic of Mrs. Tremond’s tuxedo-clad grandson, seen briefly in Season 2 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The drug lord’s seemingly incongruous lines about The King and I and his liver problem constitute an oblique reference to Gertrude Lawrence, who played Anna in the original 1951 Broadway production of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. Lawrence won a Best Actress Tony for the role, but suddenly died of liver cancer a year and a half into the hit show’s lengthy initial run. Strangely, Red specifically asks Richard if he has seen the film version of The King and I—presumably the famous 1956 adaptation of the musical, which obviously did not star Lawrence (who was dead) but Deborah Kerr.
   
• Las Vegas executive Duncan Todd (Patrick Fischler) retrieves the envelope with the black dot from a safe, but does not open it. In fact, he seems downright unsettled by the thing, going so far as to touch it only with a handkerchief. Apart from whatever Todd knows about the contents of the envelope, there is a literary basis for his anxiety: In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the black spot functions as a wordless signal of guilt and judgment when it is presented to a pirate. Meanwhile, the Spike’s defacing of Lorraine and Dougie’s photographs with his ice pick resembles the casting of a hex in a number of folk magic traditions.
   
• The Spike’s die-rolling exercise is nearly identical to behavior exhibited by Laura Means in "The Fourth Horseman," the Season 2 finale of Millennium. In what was the most radical sequence in that show’s three-year run, Means repeatedly rolls a pair of dice and records the result, her sanity gradually splintering as her apocalyptic hallucinations unfold to the tune of Patti Smith’s “Land”—which is presented in its 9 minute, and 26 second entirety. Appropriately enough, it was the original Twin Peaks which not only paved the way for unconventional hour-long dramas like Millennium, but which specifically gave showrunners the courage to dabble in such experimental sequences.
   
• Carl Rodd—last seen as the manager of the Fat Trout Trailer Park in Deer Creek, Oregon in Fire Walk with Me—evidently moved to Twin Peaks at some point in the past 25 years and established an identically-named trailer park. The piece of cardboard scrawled with “NEW” and duct taped to the park’s entrance sign is the only obvious indication that anything has changed for Carl. (Presumably, he still doesn’t like to be awakened before 9 a.m.) His observation of an ephemeral form rising from the hit-and-run victim is the first instance in which he has exhibited an explicit sensitivity to the paranormal, but he was always a little bit “off”. His mutterings to FBI Agent Chester Desmond seem more meaningful in retrospect: "I've already gone places. I just want to stay where I am." Like Richard Horne, Carl also seems to perceive the amplified electric crackling in the town's overhead power lines and transformers.
   
• The hit-and-run is foreshadowed in several ways, but the subtlest and most darkly ironic is the preceding dialog at the Double R Diner. Schoolteacher and cherry pie aficionado Miriam (newcomer Sarah Jean Long) gushes to waitresses Heidi (Andrea Hays) and Shelly (Mädchen Amick) about her new crop of students, who are "so cute" this year, and then gets an extra coffee to go for "one of the moms." Shortly after this exchange, Carl watches as the doomed child and his mother wordlessly joke around in some sort of private game of tag.
   
• Although we don’t deserve her, we should all be so lucky as to have a fearless, no-nonsense woman like Janey-E cleaning up our messes. The bagman’s description of her—“tough dame”—is accurate, if a touch anachronistic. (Who says ‘dame’ anymore?) Bonus: The odd tics in Janey-E’s otherwise vanilla-straight demeanor, such as her referring to 12:30 p.m. as “noon-thirty” and her ass-backwards stacking of the dirty dishes from her and Dougie’s late-night sandwiches.
   
• Lynch isn't exactly known for his fan service inclinations, but he and Frost do deliver a treat in this episode with the appearance of Diane Evans (Laura Dern), Cooper's long-unseen assistant and the presumed recipient of the FBI agent's ridiculously detailed audio journal tapes. Dern is delicious casting, but the true pleasure here is seeing how stylish and perfectly poised the famous Diane is in person: the pale and immaculate blunt bob haircut (or wig); the richly embroidered cocktail dress; the coordinated bracelets and multi-hued nail polish; and the martini, half-finished and olive-less. The bar where Albert (Micguel Ferrer) finds Diane is named Max Von's, which recalls prolific Swedish actor Max Von Sydow. Best known internationally for his collaborations with director and fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, Von Sydow famously portrayed a knight who matches wits with the literal Grim Reaper in Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a fitting allusion in an episode that is thick with death.
   
• Every speck of evidence accumulated to date reinforces the impression that Deputy Chad Broxford (John Pirruccello) is a gigantic, raging asshole, but his mockery of a PTSD-afflicted veteran who committed suicide is downright Trumpian in its jaw-dropping heartlessness. Similarly, by the end of Part 6, it’s apparent that Richard Horne is not only a cowardly, unbalanced misogynist and murderer, but also a stone-cold idiot who doesn’t understand how forensics work.
   
• Sitings: Both Balthazar Getty and Laura Dern are, of course, veterans of Lynch World, the former in Lost Highway and the latter in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Inland Empire. Jeremy Davies portrays Jimmy, one of the bagman who agrees to meet with Janey-E. (Specifically, the one with the spectacularly unruly comb-over mullet.) Davies’ breakout was in David O Russell’s feature debut Spanking the Monkey, and he’s since become a familiar face in films by marquee directors (including Steven Spielberg and Werner Herzog) and in recurring roles on shows such as Lost and Justified.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 5

The fucks are at it again!

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: the Return // Part 5 // Original Air Date June 4, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

A good chunk of Twin Peaks: The Return Part 5 constitutes a continuation of the Cooper-as-Dougie Show that has been the headlining attraction for the past couple of episodes. This is welcome in the sense that Cooper’s sluggish, infantile bumbling through Dougie’s world is a showcase for David Lynch the Absurdist Comedian, allowing the director to construct some of his outright funniest sequences since the original Twin Peaks, if not the funniest of his career. Kyle MacLachlan is proving to be The Return’s MVP in a way that he never was in the first two seasons of the show. Granted, his 1990 version of Cooper was a wonderful character, supremely capable and good-natured in an exaggerated manner that never felt implausible, and self-evidently the moral Pole Star of the series. In 2017, however, MacLachlan is working on a whole other level, not only in terms of realizing vastly different iterations of Cooper, but also in anchoring the show to the FBI’s agent’s fate in a way that is vividly dramatic and deeply affecting.

Part 5 offers a case study in the subtlety of both the show’s writing and MacLachlan’s performance in what are otherwise goofy scenes of Cooper’s addled (and agonizingly protracted) blundering. Sometimes it’s the little scripted details like the sudden, inexplicable tears elicited from Cooper by the sight of Sonny-Jim (Pierce Gagnon) sitting listlessly in the family station wagon. Or the way that the gunslinger statue outside Dougie’s office building becomes a totem of deep fascination and melancholy for Cooper, culminating in the episode’s impossibly sad final image: MacLachlan standing very still in the deepening twilight, touching the statue with a sort of pleading reverence.

Just as important, however, is the way MacLachlan adds an ever-so-slightly wistful exhale to Cooper’s repetitions of words like “agent” and “case file,” expertly conveying the rumbling sense of noble purpose somewhere deep within the man’s mind. It’s these touches—as well as more plot-centered revelations like Coop’s emergent supernatural lie detection power—that counter-balance all the wacky Dougie scenes, notwithstanding how intensely entertaining those scenes can be.  (The over-the-top ensnarement of Cooper’s attention by a passing tray of lattes is easily this episode’s funniest moment.) 

One of the pleasures of watching what is for all intents and purposes a 18-hour David Lynch film is the pondering it inspires regarding the story-related significance of any given character, scene, or gesture. Lynch is prone to slathering his works with enigmatic sequences that primarily serve a thematic, tonal, or even free associative purpose rather than a narrative one. Accordingly, it’s often challenging to predict with any degree certainty whether a particular element will ever relate back to the plot. Furthermore, the drawn-out schedule of The Return only amplifies this dimension, as it provides week-long (or longer) gaps in which viewers can deliberate on the latest mysteries.

In the original Twin Peaks, new secondary characters often appeared for an episode or two, and then vanished with no explanation. (Particularly in the back half of Season 2, such phantoms frequently had zero effect on either story or theme, a sign of screenwriter dithering if there ever was one.) In contrast, Part 5 provides glimpses of minor characters from earlier episodes, individuals that could easily have vanished from the show: prostitute Jade (Nafessa Williams), the Dougie-hunting assassins (Bill Tangradi and Greg Vrotsos), the little boy at Rancho Rosa (Sawyer Shipman), and the unlucky manager at the Silver Mustang (Brett Gilman). Here they pop up once again to nudge the narrative along, if only tangentially and unwittingly. As noted previously in the Parts 1 and 2 post, everything Lynch shows in his works matters, but it’s still enjoyable to be teased regarding what matters at the proximal plot level.

Of particular interest are the revelations that Dougie’s wedding band has been recovered from the headless corpse in Buckhorn, South Dakota, and, just as astonishingly, that the fingerprints of said body match the late Garland Briggs, thus tying the murder of Ruth Davenport to Cooper and Twin Peaks through yet more side avenues. Ditto the reveal that the hit men pursuing Dougie report back to a woman (Tammy Baird) who in turn sends a message to a strange black box secreted away in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a box that also has some relationship to the caged Mr. C.  Speaking of Cooper’s doppelgänger, he not only seems preternaturally calm about his confinement in a federal prison, but somehow seems more menacing, like a Batman or Bond villain who has allowed themselves to be caught in order to execute some master plan. Certainly, Mr. C exhibits some intimidating abilities: He unravels the warden’s (James Morrison) composure simply by mentioning a “Mr. Strawberry,” and then appears to seize control of the prison’s electrical systems in order to mask his coded phone message. (Electricity, it should be remembered, is often associated with BOB’s presence.)

If there is a central thematic thrust to Part 5, it’s one that elaborates on the “offness” of the Twin Peaks scenes in the prior episodes. Many of the problems that plagued the town in 1990 are still lurking in the shadows, and, if anything, they have grown even nastier. The roadhouse might be booking hipper acts and attracting a younger, more affluent demographic, but the subsurface vibe is somehow uglier, as evidenced by a cigarette-smoking creep’s (Eamon Farren) brazen acts of bribery and sexual assault. (Notably, the off-duty officer who takes said payoff is the derisive Deputy Broxford seen in Part 4. Is it even conceivable that one of Harry’s deputies in 1990 would have accepted such a bribe?) Dr. Jacoby, for all his affected eccentricities and ethical missteps, was often a genuine source of therapeutic understanding in the original series. Here he’s mutated into a frothing YouTube paranoiac and huckster in the mode of Alex Jones, an evolution that is at once disturbing and weirdly believable.

Relatedly, the cocaine habit and wretched taste in boyfriends exhibited by Shelly’s daughter Becky (Amanda Seyfried) underlines the extent to which history repeats itself endlessly through the generations with small variations. Becky’s blissed-out expression as she savors a snort of coke and the wind whipping through her hair is eerily similar to looks that once fluttered across Laura Palmer’s countenance. It’s all happening again, but the metaphorical reach of the Black Lodge has grown longer in the past 25 years. The stinging lecture delivered by Sheriff Frank Truman’s (Robert Forster) wife Doris (Candy Clark) emphasizes the town’s persistent decay. (That black mold!) She’s not just nagging Frank about his procrastination at home—she’s chastising Twin Peaks’ law enforcement (and by extension the Bookhouse Boys and all of the town’s leaders) for twiddling their thumbs for more than two decades while the rot of violence, addiction, and corruption seeps even further into the community.

For all the show’s flitting between New York, Las Vegas, South Dakota, and so on, the long-term arcs that are emerging in The Return seem to be gradually converging on the town of Twin Peaks. There’s a mounting sense that the old upstanding and intrepid version of Dale Cooper is needed to help right the things that have gone monstrously awry in the town (and the world) for the past 25 years. This foreshadowed conjunction in Twin Peaks is evident in little plot details like Jade dropping the Great Northern key in the mail, presumably sending it back to the Horne brothers at the hotel, where either they or other parties might correctly read it as a sign that the real Cooper has resurfaced. Moreover, Hawk’s (Michael Horse) ongoing search for a missing piece of evidence connected to Cooper—as well as the Deputy Chief’s curious visit to the sycamore ring at Glastonbury Grove in Part 1—points to Twin Peaks being as crucial to the FBI agent’s fate as he is to the town’s.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Mr. C’s observation to BOB—“You’re still with me; that’s good”—also works as an audience-directed bit of encouragement after four straight hours of opaque weirdness.
   
• Mike Nelson (Gary Hershberger), former Bobby Briggs partner in crime and jackwagon boyfriend to Donna Hayward, is the manager who contemptuously dresses down Becky’s weaselly boyfriend Stephen (Caleb Landry Jones) for his lousy résumé. It’s comforting in a way: Even a banal jock bully like Mike eventually settled down and mutates into a banal office bully who berates the next generation for their lack of ambition. However, it’s Stephen’s bizarrely upbeat assessment of Mike’s criticisms—“Great fucking feedback!”—that truly makes the scene retroactively funny.
   
• The defiant smoker and groper at the Bang Bang Bar is identified as Richard Horne in the credits, a detail that has sent the Internet abuzz with speculation as to exactly which Horne sired the little shit. Perhaps the most awful possibility is that he is the fruit of Mr. C and Audrey Horne, a theory that is almost too unsettling to contemplate, but which would explain much about Richard’s vile behavior.
   
• Speaking of smoking, the Marlboro-ish cigarettes glimpsed in the aforementioned roadhouse scene are Morleys, a fake brand that has cropped up in fictional media for decades, although perhaps most famously as the preferred brand of the sinister Cigarette-Smoking Man on The X-Files.
   
• Gordon and Alfred are MIA this episode, but Agent Tamara Preston (Chrysta Bell) shows up in a brief scene in which she contemplates the baffling contrast between the Cooper of 1991 and Mr. C, and then discerns some crucial clue regarding their fingerprints. Given the way Gordon and Alfred gawked at her ass at the conclusion of Part 4, it’s gratifying to see Tamara in a sequence that demonstrates her investigative chops. Indeed, in between Agent Preston, wiseacre Buckhorn medical examiner Constance Talbot (Jane Adams), and the possibility of USAF Lieutenant Cynthia Knox (Adele René) probing around in South Dakota, The Return is making some small progress with respect to its female sleuths.
   
• Sightings: Perennial film and television “regular guy” Jim Belushi appears as one of the Silver Mustang Casino’s two menacing (and presumably mobbed-up) overbosses. The other is the outstanding Robert Knepper, a ubiquitous character actor who usually shows up in villainous television guest roles, but has also had memorable recurring parts on Carnivàle, Prison Break, and Heroes. Candy Clark, who portrays the exasperated Doris Truman, is a prolific performer who is still best known for her roles in American Graffiti and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Interestingly, the former film embraces the sort of mid-century small town nostalgia that Twin Peaks exploits and excavates, while the latter feature stars memorable Fire Walk With Me bit player David Bowie. (“The man who fell to Earth” is also an apt description of Cooper.)
  
  The vile Richard Horne is played by Eamon Farren, who previously appeared in the grueling serial killer thriller Chained, directed by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch. The great Ernie Hudson—of Ghostbusters fame and Golden Age of TV pioneer series Oz—appears as an Air Force colonel who sends Lt. Knox to check into Major Garland Briggs' fingerprints. Dougie’s boss, the awesomely named Bushnell Mullins, is portrayed by Don Murray, who has been working in film and television for nearly 70 years, perhaps most famously in Bus Stop with Marilyn Monroe and on the long-running prime time soap opera Knots Landing. Tom Sizemore, a fixture in R-rated 1990s cinema, makes an appearance as Tony Sinclair, the top agent (and apparent liar) at Dougie’s insurance firm. Omnipresent stuntwoman and occasional actress Tammie Baird shows up as Lorraine, the frazzled woman who sends anxious texts to Buenos Aires. Charlotte, the girl choked and fondled by Richard, is played by Grace Victoria Cox from Under the Dome, while her objecting friend Elizabeth is depicted by Jane Levy, star of Suburgatory and recent horror features like Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 4

I don’t understand this situation at all.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 4 // Original Air Date May 28, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

Part 4 of Twin Peaks: The Return generally maintains the funny, absurdist tone of Part 3’s second half, offering up more scenes of a semi-incapacitated Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachan) coasting through the life of Dougie Jones with stiff but cheerful compliance. Having racked up 30 mega-jackpots at the Silver Mustang Casino, Cooper is sent home with a canvas bag full of cash and a desperate plea that he return very soon to try his luck again. He improbably finds his way to Dougie’s house (“red door”), where he is received by the real estate agent’s furious wife Janey-E (Naomi Watts). (That ridiculous “-E” is pure gold.) Dougie has apparently been missing for three days, but Cooper’s casino winnings manage to mollify Janey-E to some extent. The next morning, the viewer is treated to one of the series’ most openly joyful scenes thus far, as Cooper goofs around with Dougie’s young son Sonny-Jim (Pierce Gagnon), re-discovers the bliss of pancakes with maple syrup, and has his first taste of damn fine coffee in roughly 25 years. (Which he spits out, more out of surprise than disgust.)

Not all is suburban contentment, however, as MIKE (Al Strobel) appears to Cooper in a brief vision and explains that the FBI agent has been “tricked." This appears to confirm that Dougie Jones was some sort of walking supernatural trap—perhaps one of many—that Mr. C laid to disrupt any effort to draw him back into the Black Lodge. This trickery has apparently shattered the rules elucidated by the Arm, which previously asserted that Cooper could not leave the Lodge until BOB returned to it. Yet both Cooper and Mr. C are now roaming the Earth, and, as MIKE warns, "One of you must die."

The generally comical tenor is sustained as the episode checks in on the town of Twin Peaks for some critical scenes. They aren’t particularly significant from a plot standpoint, but they marvelously convey some of David Lynch’s subversive aims in revisiting his cult series. The director’s work has always exhibited an unabashedly earnest dimension, but he’s never been the type of artist who respects sacred cows. In the conventional wisdom of television criticism, there are few cows more sacred than the original Twin Peaks, at least among writers who give primacy to originality and artistic nerve. It makes perfect sense, then, that The Return should in part serve as a bracing slap to Twin Peaks enthusiasts, in the best possible way. That current is prominently on display in Part 4, as the episode works to subtly subvert and mock the original series, and in particular viewers’ cherished memories of it.

Case in point: It is revealed that although Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) still serves as the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department’s front-door receptionist, the building is now a bustling, modern law enforcement office, complete with a dispatcher managing calls via a cutting-edge computer system and a troop of deputies with access to military-grade hardware. As if to underline that the viewer has entered some Bizarro version of Twin Peaks, a grey-haired Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) appears and reports on the remote sensors he’s placed along forest trails to observe border-crossing drug traffickers. Wait—Bobby Briggs?? Yes, Bobby Briggs—football jock, coke dealer, surly delinquent, and all-around 1990 dreamboat—is now a sheriff’s deputy. This shocking development drives home the notion that the old Twin Peaks is gone, and that in its place sits an uncanny clone. Appropriately enough, while there is still a Truman behind the sheriff’s star, it is now Frank Truman (Robert Forster), brother to the ailing, unseen Harry. Fittingly, as a relative newcomer (to the show, if not the town), Frank seems a touch more exasperated than the other natives with respect to Twin Peaks’ dogged weirdness.

At one point, Bobby wanders into the conference room where the old Laura Palmer evidence is arrayed, and the sight of his slain girlfriend’s iconic homecoming portrait hits him like a punch in the gut. For a moment, the unexpected emotion of the scene is genuinely touching, but the insistent crescendo of Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic Laura Palmer theme and Bobby’s weepy, on-the-nose exclamation (“Brings back some memories!”) derisively punctures the poignancy. Was it always this hokey? Do Twin Peaks devotees look back with rosy fondness on something that was essentially cheesy and manipulative? Lynch seems to be suggesting as much, which isn’t the same as insisting that the emotions elicited by nostalgia aren’t real.

One of the splendid things about Part 4 is the way it manages to have it both ways: It gently ridicules the viewer’s affection for Twin Peaks’ sincerity, tackiness, and quirkiness, while also snorting at the latecomers and naysayers who just don’t get it (and never will). When Deputy Chet Broxford (John Pirruccello) mocks the Log Lady in absentia—“I'll go have a word with my pinecone”—he’s not portrayed as a brave contrarian who is pointing out the emperor’s nakedness, but rather as a blinkered, disrespectful jerk.

The buffoonish, crowning glory of the Twin Peaks scenes in this episode is, of course, Andy and Lucy’s adult son Wally Brando (Michael Cera), who superbly illustrates that Lynch is more than willing to turn a caustic eye on his own creations and preoccupations. With his ill-fitting road warrior outfit that apes Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, exaggerated (and very bad) Marlon Brando vocal mimicry, and penchant for turning every utterance into a ridiculous, meandering beat poem, Wally is a walking satire of the mid-century pop cultural tropes that Lynch adores. James Hurley might still be cool, but Wally—who is aiming for the same soulful, bad boy nomad archetype that James himself embodied in the original series—is definitely not. As Wally self-importantly conveys his respects to Sheriff Truman and waxes forth on his ongoing American odyssey, the sheriff can’t seem to decide whether to smack the kid, laugh in his face, or just walk away.

As if in acknowledgment that Parts 3 and 4 have been heavy on comedy, Lynch concludes this episode with an exceedingly unsettling passage, as FBI agents Gordon Cole (David Lynch), Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), and Tamara Preston (Chrysta Bell) arrive in South Dakota to question the imprisoned Mr. C.  From behind protective glass, Cooper’s doppelgänger speaks in halting, guttural tones that sound like a normal human voice played back at 80% speed. His entire exchange with Gordon is strained and menacing, while being superficially congenial in a way that suggests an alien’s distorted conception of human warmth. It’s party the robotic delivery, which is reminiscent of the mesmerized soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate. (“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”) However, it’s also partly the repetitions and the eccentric turns of phrase, particularly the clunky double prepositions: the car went “over across” and “over off” the highway.

All three agents pick up on the abnormality of this resurfaced “Cooper,” and Gordon in particular seems undone about what it might imply. “I hate to admit it, Albert, but I don’t understand this situation at all.” Lynch’s willingness to commiserate by proxy with the viewer’s frustration over the show’s obscurantism is a welcome touch of explicit humanism from the director, but also a ominous signal that things aren’t likely to become clearer any time soon.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• The chirpy text on Cooper’s coffee mug—“I am Dougie’s Coffee”—doubtlessly reminds many viewers of Fight Club, an association reinforced by the tie draped over MacLachlan’s head, evoking the necktie headband worn by that film’s Narrator at one point. Fight Club, of course, concerns two identities who turn out to be inhabiting one mind, which can be seen as something of an inversion of The Return’s scenario, in which two minds are vying for one identity.
   
• There are moments in Parts 3 and 4 when Cooper seems on the verge of remembering something of his past, thanks to external triggers: the Sycamore street sign in the Rancho Rosa subdivision; the owl passing overhead as he and the limo driver (Jay Larson) tarry outside Dougie’s house; and the long scrutiny of his own countenance in Dougie’s bathroom mirror, echoing BOB’s moment of triumph all those years ago. (“How’s Annie?”) Cooper still has a long way to go to get back to his old self, but things appear to be jostling loose ever so slightly.
   
• The return of former DEA agent Denise Bryson is a welcome sight, albeit a bit of a mixed bag in practice. On the one hand, David Duchovny gets to resurrect one of his most memorable characters; on the other, the world surely didn’t need another cisman actor portraying a transwoman character. (Although realistically, if Denise is going to be a part of this story, recasting her seems like blasphemy.) Denise’s gender is played a bit more for laughs this time around than seems tasteful, what with her remarking cattily about Tamara’ beauty and grousing about hormones. Still, there’s the neat reveal that she was actually a FBI mole inside the DEA back in 1990 - 1991, and that she has since passed Gordon and Albert on the career ladder to become the Bureau’s Chief of Staff. Plus, her scene includes Gordon’s instantly immortal line, “When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”
   
• Sightings: There are only a few new-yet-familiar faces in this episode. Ethan Suplee, best known for the role of Randy Hickey in My Name Is Earl, shows up as Dougie’s gregarious (and hungry) pal Bill Shaker. Richard Chamberlain, who appears as Denise Bryson’s aide Bill Kennedy, starred in the popular 1960s medical drama Dr. Kildare and was a fixture in film and television for decades, including lead roles in event mini-series like The Thorn Birds and Shogun. (He was even Jason Bourne!) And of course, there’s the divine Naomi Watts, whose breakout American role was portraying Betty / Diane in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
   
• Notwithstanding Cooper’s coffee spit-take and the fever dream that is Wally Brando, the funniest moment in Part 4, hands down, is Albert handing Gordon a picture of Mount Rushmore in lieu of actually visiting the monument. Bonus: Gordon accepting the photo without batting an eye and musing grandly, “There they are, Albert. Faces of stone.”
   
• Much has been made of Lucy’s borderline cretinism in this episode, what with her apparent habit of forgetting how cell phones work. More charitably, it's in keeping with Part 4's jabs at the obsession the original series engendered—Lucy being akin to a Twin Peaks enthusiast, in that part of her is forever trapped back in 1991. It’s broad as hell, sure, but also consistent with a sly pattern that’s emerged in all of Lucy’s scenes in the new season thus far. She is repeatedly depicted as mired in logical dilemmas related to location, perception, and meaning: 1) politely quarreling with a salesman who won’t specify which Sheriff Truman he’s looking for (neither of whom are around anyway); 2) explaining to Hawk that she can’t look “here” for something that’s missing, since a missing thing would by definition not be “here”; 3) expressing anxiousness about what might be happening to the temperature in the station when no one is around to observe the thermostat; and 4) going into terrified mental vapor-lock when Sheriff Truman walks into the station while she is talking to him on phone. It’s not clear if this will add up to anything, but it’s an intriguing pattern nonetheless. Regardless, Dumb Lucy is still ten times less annoying than sitcom cul de sacs like the “Dick / Andy / Little Nicky” subplot in Season 2.
   
• Twin Peaks: The Return has provided occasion for the perennial analysis of gender and sex in David Lynch’s work, which has resulted in the usual assertions that the director has a “woman problem.” This phrase and its many iterations (race problem, religion problem, homophobia problem, etc.) often seem to be employed as a faint-hearted hedge by critics when the reality is nuanced and contradictory, as it usually is at the intersection of politics, art, and pop culture. This title of this commentary at The Wrap aside, the piece gets at some of Lynch’s legitimate weaknesses, particularly his very male gaze-y directorial approach. However, it’s baffling that anyone could watch films like Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire and conclude that Lynch is peddling misogyny. He has created some of film’s great female characters, and through them he has presented some of American cinema’s most sympathetic and caustic critiques regarding the dehumanization of women. On the other hand, there are moments like the one at the conclusion of Part 4, wherein Lynch (as Gordon) gratuitously ogles Tamara’s backside as she marches away. As with Gordon’s infatuation with Shelly Johnson in the original series, it’s hard to shake the sensation of a dirty old man using his creator’s perch to his advantage. So, yeah... contradictory.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 3

Is it about the bunny?

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 3 // Original Air Date May 28, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

As a showcase for the titular town, the third episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is inarguably weak tea. Writers Mark Frost and David Lynch only provide one substantive peek at Twin Peaks, Washington, in a scene in which Hawk (Michael Horse), Andy (Harry Goaz), and Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) talk in circles about the challenge in discerning the evidence of absence, as well as the potential anti-gas properties of chocolate. This episode is almost entirely the Cooper Show, or at least the Kyle MacLachlan Show. The bulk of its running time concerns the FBI agent’s search for an escape from the Black Lodge, followed by his listless, ludicrous, and yet strangely lucky bumbling through the life of yet another doppelgänger, Dougie Jones. This isn’t to say that the dearth of Twin Peaks in Part 3 is a flaw. In fact, this focus on Coop allows the chapter to serve as a magnificent platform for two discrete modes of David Lynch weirdness: the surreal nightmare and the absurdist comedy.

In the first half of this episode, Cooper—having escaped the Red Room at the end of the previous chapter—plummets, climbs, and tunnels through various peculiar zones of the Black Lodge. These include: a beach swathed in dim, purple light (Homer’s inscrutable epithet “the wine-dark sea” comes to mind); a sitting room with a fireplace and odd, wall-hung electrical contraptions; and an “outer space” region of some sort, observable from atop a floating metal box which, TARDIS-like, seems to contain the other, larger spaces. While these areas feature Escher geometry and backwards-talking denizens, marking them as part of (or at least adjacent to) the Black Lodge, there is a sense that Cooper is temporarily beyond the scrutiny of that realm’s controlling forces, although perhaps not for long. A mute, eyeless woman (Nae Yuuki) in the sitting room gasps and gesticulates at Cooper, warning him away from one of the machines. An unrelenting booming then commences, seemingly originating just outside the chamber, prompting the woman to urgently lead Cooper up a ladder and through a hatch to the “space box.” While atop this platform, she pulls a lever, is electrocuted by a bell-shaped structure, and is then flung into the void. When Cooper peers down into this starry expanse, the phantasmal head of Major Garland Briggs (the late Don S. Davis) appears and utters two distorted words: “blue rose.”

Later, a woman (Phoebe Augustine) warns Cooper that “my mother” is coming, as underlined by the still-insistent booming. Notably, Augustine previously portrayed surviving BOB victim Ronette Pulaski in the original series, but Cooper does not seem to recognize her, and it’s ambiguous whether her character here is intended to be Ronette or if the resemblance is just a product of Lynch’s deliberately confusing casting habits. (The credits, incidentally, identify this character as “American Girl,” which echoes Mr. C’s arrival to the unearthly howl of “American Woman” in Part 1.) Drawn again to one of the humming, crackling wall-hung contraptions, Cooper is eventually sucked bodily into its socket and then sort of… extruded back into the earthly reality he stepped away from some 25 years ago. His shoes are left behind in the Lodge, a droll detail that instantly deflates the anxiety and murkiness of this extended sequence.

Cooper’s journey through these peripheral areas of the Black Lodge constitutes one of the most pointedly odd and impenetrable passages in Lynch’s entire oeuvre, comparable to Eraserhead and his Web series Rabbits. Indeed, the booming noise—which sounds for all the world like a giant attempting to pummel down a metal door—calls back to a similarly alarming sound in Rabbits, as well as the cacophonous knocking at Diane’s door in Mulholland Drive. The whole thing is as oneiric and mysterious as anything Lynch has created, and only its relatively coherent linearity (this happens, then that, then this) permits the viewer to follow along with it at all. Its potential meanings are multifarious, but one impression is vital: The zones that Cooper explores feel distinctly like the proverbial crawl spaces, steam tunnels, and emergency exits of the Lodge, as contrasted with the more formal waiting area of the Red Room. (Cooper, it should be remembered, fell through the Red Room’s floor in Part 2, suggesting that these chambers are akin to subbasements.) These are forbidden areas: “Employees Only,” if you will, and prisoners like Cooper aren’t meant to be fiddling with the machines housed there.

The second half of Part 3 follows a physically and mentally enfeebled Cooper as he re-adjusts to an existence on Earth. He has effectively replaced middle-aged Las Vegas schlub Dougie Jones, who is in turn transported to the Red Room. There, Dougie is deflated like an inner tube and then obliterated in a cloud of black smoke, leaving a tiny golden sphere. (It’s even more bizarre than it sounds.) Jade (Nafessa Williams), the prostitute who serviced Dougie just prior to his body swap with Cooper, is baffled at her client’s sudden wardrobe and hairstyle change. Thus begins one of the most unabashedly funny and downright delightful David Lynch sequences in memory, as “Dougie” improbably shuffles his way through the man’s life, up to and including winning multiple jackpots at the Silver Mustang Casino from the $5 bill that Jade presses into his hand.

The overarching joke to this passage is, of course, that none of the individuals who encounter Cooper seem to notice his diminished capacities, or, if they do, they aren’t sufficiently concerned to provide anything more than a pat on the head and a shove in the right direction. (Of all the people Cooper bumps into, only Jade wonders aloud if perhaps he’s suffered “a little stroke,” but she then dumps him at the casino rather than taking him to a hospital.) It’s satire that works on multiple levels: the general self-absorbed obliviousness of people to the plight of others; the unexceptional middle class white man who constantly receives the benefit of the doubt and a helping hand; the dumbing down of American discourse into a slurry of endlessly repeated buzzwords, newspeak, and memetic phrases (“Helloo-oo-oooo!”); and the glad-handing remorselessness of the gaming industry, particularly as seen in its willingness to take anyone’s money in any circumstances.

Lynch doesn’t insist on any particular reading, however. The proximal reasons the outlandish second half of this episode works so well are: 1) MacLachan’s side-splitting and wonderfully precise physical performance; and 2) Lynch’s willingness to let everything play out at an ridiculously glacial pace that is discordant with Cooper’s protracted extra-dimensional exile and the urgency of the show’s parallel storylines. Released after 25 years and presumably in jeopardy from Mr. C and others, this slow-witted version of Cooper obliviously fritters away an afternoon at the quarter slots. It’s completely cracked and yet every minute of it is deliriously entertaining.

The burning questions that emerge from Part 3 concern the dynamics of the Cooper / Mr. C / Dougie triangle, and what exactly occurred during this chapter’s brief glimpse of Mr. C, who crashes his car while driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota. Both he and Dougie vomit up a revolting mixture of creamed corn and blackish blood when Cooper exits the Lodge. This event that occurs at 2:53 p.m., a number previously mentioned by the Arm in Part 2. Within the Red Room, MIKE describes Dougie as having been “manufactured for a purpose” which is now fulfilled, and it certainly seems as though Dougie is gone for good, not merely trapped. The nature of Dougie’s “manufacture” and the significance of his ring (see below) are provocative mysteries. There are textual hints that Mr C. created Dougie to trap Cooper, and that MIKE perhaps sabotaged that trap so that it would backfire on Mr. C. The fact that Dougie disgorges the same foul substance as Mr. C—termed garmonbozia in Peaks lore, this is a kind of demonic manna or ectoplasm composed of “pain and sorrow”—strongly suggests that the unfortunate fellow actually originated in the Lodge, even if he no longer remembers that fact.

So much remains hidden in this story that to draw firm conclusions about the relationships and metaphysics at play is probably a fool’s errand. Undoubtedly, Lynch will leave much unexplained even at the end of the series, given that that’s what he always does, but Parts 3 and 4 in particular both spend a startling amount of time monitoring the movements of Cooper and his doppelgängers. The original series tended to keep the Black Lodge and its inhabitants shrouded in mystery, only providing the audience with glimpses of their otherworldly weirdness at pivotal moments in select episodes. In contrast, The Return feels like a deep plunge into Lodge esoterica, thankfully by showing rather than telling. If this pattern is maintained through the rest of the new series’ run, one suspects that much more about the Lodge will be revealed.

Apart from the stark strangeness of electrical outlet portals and toxic corn vomit, there are several subtler connections and clues in this episode that are ripe for exegesis. The Silver Mustang Casino calls back to the white horse that both Sarah Palmer and Cooper have seen in their visions (Coop most recently during his Black Lodge escape). The numbers on the Lodge’s electric devices are 3 and 15, and Cooper’s room number at the Great Northern was 315, a detail confirmed when a confused Jade discovers the hotel key still in his pocket.

It’s awfully tempting to impart meaning to such signifiers, but the aforementioned scene with Hawk, Andy, and Lucy sifting through old evidence partly constitutes a caveat to Twin Peaks fans (and Lynch fans generally) who are eager to decipher every detail for signs and omens. Just as viewers have gone round and round for 25 years about Owl Cave and drawer knobs and blue roses and whatnot, Hawk hilariously dithers about the significance of the chocolate bunnies: “It’s not about the bunnies. Is it about the bunnies? No, it’s not about the bunnies.” (Horse’s deadpan performance here is a thing of beauty, featuring some flawless comic timing.) It bears remembering that Lynch Country is governed by laws of quantum-like uncertainty: Laura Palmer is dead but she lives. In such a place, paradoxes, dead ends, anomalies, and double meanings thrive. It’s best not to fixate on the bunnies.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Cooper is drawn to the winning slot machines by a flickering symbol that appears to be patterned on the Red Room. (Amusingly, this vision always appears with a jazzy guitar riff.) It’s a device that feels unprecedented in the Twin Peaks universe—an otherworldly signpost that points to good fortune—but it stands to reason that Cooper couldn't spend two and a half decades in the Black Lodge without developing some unusual psychic abilities. The wavering, flame-like Red Room symbol brings to mind Acts chapter 2, verses 3-4, a crucial moment in the purported origin of the Christian holiday of Pentecost, when miraculous powers were bestowed on the assembled followers of Jesus:

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

• In any other show, Lucy and Andy’s beaming announcement to Hawk that they have a 24-year-old adult son named Wally Brando would seem like forced “As You Know” exposition. Except… well, it’s Lucy and Andy. One can easily envision them proudly telling Hawk about Wally on countless occasions, each time as if they were revealing his name, age, and famous birthday for the first time. Lucy and Andy seem somewhat slower on the uptake all these years later, but they also blunder into a kind of profundity of the absurd, like Twin Peaks’ very own Vladimir and Estragon. To wit: If one susses out the dialog carefully, their seemingly dunderheaded objections to Hawk regarding what is missing from the Laura Palmer evidence boxes are really a pedantic criticism of the Deputy Chief’s imprecise use of language.
   
• In the house across the street from the site of Dougie and Jade's assignation, a boy peers out the window while a character the credits literally name as "Drugged-Out Mother" (Hailey Gates) repeatedly shouts "1-1-9! 1-1-9!" before downing her last pill with a glass of whiskey. It's such an inscrutable out-of-left-field cutaway—one never revisited in this episode—that it gives Cooper's Lodge wanderings a run for their money in the WTF department. Reversed, the woman's mantra of course becomes 9-1-1, which is the number one should call if, like the boy, one spotted a hitman placing a bomb on the underside on the neighbor's car. The verbal reversal, intriguingly enough, recalls the backwards-talking Black Lodge inhabitants. The scene might also put viewers of a certain age in mind of Gladys Krabnitz, the nosy neighbor forever peering out her window at the suspicious goings-on at the Stephens' house in Bewitched. And what is Cooper's re-entry into the world if not magic?
   
• What the living fuck is Dr. Jacoby up to with those shovels?
   
• Sightings: There aren't many of those Lynchian new-yet-familiar faces in this episode, but a couple can be spotted at the Silver Mustang. Josh McDermitt, who pops up briefly to marvel at Cooper's first mega-jackpot, is best known as loquacious weirdo Gene on The Walking Dead. The casino's cashier, meanwhile, is played by prolific television and film actress Meg Foster, whose most enduring credit was arguably in John Carpenter's cult sci-fi horror satire They Live.
   
• When he vanishes into the Lodge, Dougie wears a jade or turquoise ring that is a crucial MacGuffin in the Twin Peaks mythos. This ring (or at least one identical to it) was once worn by Teresa Banks, a waitress and sex worker murdered by Leland Palmer roughly a year before he slew his daughter Laura. The item was previously treated as a vital “missing clue” in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. (Hawk, it should be remembered, is also looking for a piece of evidence that is missing.) Dougie’s limp “tingly” arm echoes a detail reported to the investigating FBI agents by one of Teresa’s co-workers: Three days prior to her disappearance and death, Teresa had complained that her arm had gone numb. The green ring has appeared in numerous places throughout the Twin Peaks universe, including the Black Lodge, which is where it ends up after Dougie is disintegrated or transformed. The symbol on the ring, which is intended to evoke an owl, appeared in a more stylized form in the previous episode, on a playing card that Mr. C showed poor Darya before murdering her.
   
• That huge diamond-shaped green keychain from the Great Northern Hotel is reminiscent of a red version used at The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, another malevolent otherworld that seems to exist outside time and space.
   
• FBI regional bureau chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch) has some odd taste in decoration. On one side of his office hangs an enormous photo of an atomic mushroom cloud. On the opposite side is a photographic portrait of German writer Franz Kafka, which is a damn strange figure for a high-level federal law enforcement officer to admire, but then Gordon has never been typical. Interestingly, the original title for Kafka's novel Amerika was The Man Who Disappeared, which is a pretty apt description of Dale Cooper. Meanwhile, Gordon’s query into his phone—“What do you mean ‘trouble’?”—is easily imagined as the no-nonsense FBI chief's theoretical response to Inland Empire’s evocative tagline: A Woman in Trouble.
   
• At the end of the episode, Albert Rosenfield (the late Miguel Ferrer) mutters a non-sequitur: “The absurd mysteries of the strange forces of existence.” Lynch has previously used this phrase in connection with his abandoned surrealistic sci-fi comedy project Ronnie Rocket. The words refer in part to electricity, which in Lynch’s conception courses through the body of the titular Ronnie as an alternating current, giving off a telltale 60 Hz hum. Electricity (and electric lighting) has always fascinated Lynch, and in the original Twin Peaks electrical phenomena often heralded the presence of BOB. However, Part 3 of The Return exhibits a preoccupation with electrical power and old-fashioned electrical apparatuses that hearkens back to Eraserhead and its strange industrial machinery. Mr. C's car cigarette lighter, which acts as a portal for supernatural energies that threaten to yank him back to the Black Lodge, is itself a sort of old-fashioned electrical apparatus, at least from the vantage of an era when smoking is scorned and USB ports are ubiquitous.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Parts 1 and 2

Is it future or is it past?

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Parts 1 and 2 // Original Air Date May 21, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

When the 30th and (at the time) final episode of Twin Peaks concluded its original broadcast on June 10, 1991, many devotees of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s revolutionary series were left feeling perplexed and betrayed. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) had apparently emerged from the otherworldly realm of evil known as the Black Lodge, but something had gone terrifyingly wrong within that world’s red-curtained confines. The Cooper that had returned was not the squeaky-clean federal lawman that viewers had grown to love, but a malevolent doppelgänger, a creature controlled by the bloodthirsty entity dubbed BOB (Frank Silva). To the horror of those Twin Peaks enthusiasts who had stuck with the series during its uneven and ratings-starved second season, the final shot of “Beyond Life and Death” was that of a bloodied Dale Cooper mockingly repeating the query, “How’s Annie?,” and cackling maniacally. That this was to be the last glimpse of the series’ staunchly upright hero—yet alone the final image of Twin Peaks itself—was almost too much to bear.

Even if Frost and Lynch had no inkling of the series’ looming cancellation at the time of the episode’s production, concluding the second season with a laughing, cracked-mirror "Dark Cooper" was a masterstroke of mutinous storytelling. This was not merely a cliffhanger, but a plunge into an abyss where evil is seemingly victorious and chaos reigns. It was as though the laws of the Black Lodge—the “hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts,” in the vivid words of Cooper’s deranged ex-partner Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh)—had infected the waking world of damn fine coffee and wind-whipped fir trees. This wasn’t just shocking, but wrong; primevally, nightmarishly wrong.

While this unexpectedly bleak end for Dale Cooper and Twin Peaks had an artistic audacity that remains admirable, it never truly felt like the last word. It wasn’t so much the abundance of unresolved and abandoned subplots; such narrative negligence was practically Twin Peaks’ modus operandi. Rather, the revelation that the “Cooper” that had emerged from the Black Lodge was actually BOB in disguise was presented too abruptly and provocatively, just as the closing credits began to roll. That disturbing, nasal taunt to no one in particular—“How’s Annie? How’s AN-NYEE?”—didn’t seem like a farewell gut-punch, but instead a promise that the worst was yet to come. It’s not the shattered exhale of “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.” Or Kevin McCarthy howling “You’re next!” in impotent despair. It’s Gollum's darker half coaxing Frodo and Samwise forward with a malicious leer, “Follow me...."

It’s been over 25 real-world years since Cooper’s entry into the Black Lodge. During that two and a half decades, it seemed vanishingly unlikely that viewers would ever be permitted to return to Twin Peaks and learn the final destiny of the real Dale Cooper. (Not to mention that of Annie Blackburn, Audrey Horne, Benjamin Horne, Pete Martell, and other characters whose fates remained uncertain at the conclusion of Season 2's final episode.) As the months and years passed, even the most ardent enthusiasts of Frost and Lynch’s creation were forced to acknowledge that the 30 episodes that had aired in 1990 - 1991 constituted the beginning, middle, and end of the story, however unsatisfying and disconcerting the end might be.

Now, as if by some dark and esoteric magic, Twin Peaks has returned, transforming the distorted message of Laura Palmer’s spirit (Sheryl Lee)—“I’ll see you again in 25 years”—into a prophecy fulfilled (more or less). Season 3, properly titled Twin Peaks: The Return, is an 18-part limited Showtime series, and every episode is directed by Lynch and co-written by Frost and Lynch. This stands in stark contrast to the original two seasons, which were a collaborative effort featuring a cavalcade of contributing writers and directors over the course of 30 episodes. (In fact, only six of these were helmed by Lynch.) If the first four episodes that have aired to date are a reliable indication, The Return represents a unified (if frequently batshit) artistic vision. Showtime had reportedly given Frost and Lynch complete creative control to deliver the series they wanted, and that freedom is manifest on screen.

Twin Peaks: The Return is pure David Lynch, recognizably and unequivocally a shadowy emanation from the same "wonderful and strange" mind that birthed the likes of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. In imitation of its original series namesake, The Return is unlike anything else on television, but the new season is also quite unlike the Twin Peaks that viewers might remember. This isn’t the Season 3 that Frost and Lynch might have created in 1992. It’s a fever-dream born from all of Lynch’s subsequent works, including the divisive prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the masterful Lost Highway / Mulholland Drive / Inland Empire triptych, and the director’s numerous short films, compositions, paintings, and designs. (“Premonition Following an Evil Deed,” Lynch’s unsettling 52-second contribution to the Lumière and Company anthology film, often comes to mind during the early episodes of The Return.) Most significantly, this new evolutionary form of Twin Peaks is born from 25-plus years of watching and waiting—by the show's characters, creators, and viewers.

Parts 1 and 2, released simultaneously as an unofficial two-hour opening chapter, signal that Twin Peaks: The Return is proximally concerned with the fate of Dale Cooper. They do this in part by giving everything outside the FBI agent’s situation only short spurts of focused attention. Although these episodes check in on several of the surviving denizens of Twin Peaks, Washington—among them psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), a promoted Deputy Chief Tommy 'Hawk' Hill (Michael Horse), sheriff’s receptionist Lucy Brennan (née Moran) (Kimmy Robertson), withdrawn widow Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), and an ailing Log Lady (the late Catherine Coulson, visibly weakened just prior to her 2015 death)—Lynch generally refrains from lingering too long on one character. Nor does he fill in the 25-year gap with the kind of soapy exposition that was at times a feature of the original series. The first pair of episodes offer some tantalizing hints, of course. Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick), for example, kvetches about her daughter’s boyfriend to her friends over tequila shots at the old roadhouse, and later observes that the still-cool James Hurley (James Marshall) hasn’t been the same since his motorcycle accident. Such clues are sporadic, however, and just as often a quizzical opacity prevails. Pre-eminent among such sequences is Dr. Jacoby’s receipt of a delivery of... shovels? Lots of shovels. It's impossible to say what exactly the good doctor—still sporting those natty blue- and red-lensed glasses—is up to in his distinctly non-Hawaiian-themed mountain refuge. If the original Twin Peaks taught viewers anything, it’s that explanations are not guaranteed, a lesson that’s only been reinforced by Lynch’s subsequent and increasingly unconventional feature films.

These vignettes featuring familiar Twin Peaks characters serve to anchor The Return to the original seasons, verifying that the viewer is indeed immersed in the same universe that contains the Great Northern Hotel and the Bang Bang Bar. However, while some of these sequences feature wry humor—Lucy and her hubby Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) are less sitcom-screwy, but an even deeper well of deadpan absurdity—there’s little that is cozy or comforting about them. Lynch cunningly employs the viewer’s lengthy absence from this world to create both shock and a sense of the uncanny. The former stems in large part from the simple sight of familiar faces that have been creased and withered by the passage of two and half decades. Horse’s silver hair and weather-beaten countenance, for example, or Coulson’s pained and whispery frailty, are stark reminders of time’s cruelty, bestowing The Return with a wallop of melancholy. In this light, the welcome return of so many of the series’ original performers isn’t merely an effort of fanboy-pleasing completism. Recasting characters would have been poisonous to The Return’s potent, fleshy sense of inexorable diminishment.

Relatedly, Lynch evokes a sense that something is “off” about the Twin Peaks glimpsed in the first two episodes. The sheriff’s station, the Palmer home, the roadhouse—they are recognizable but somehow not as the viewer remembers. Like a high school hallway traversed during a decades-later reunion, the memories of the past don’t line up precisely with contemporary reality. Lynch underlines this with production design gestures both offhanded (Lucy is no longer behind a sliding glass window at the reception desk) and elephantine (Sara Palmer’s living room wall is now dominated by an enormous flat-screen television). Twin Peaks always seemed like a place out of time—a sister settlement to Blue Velvet’s superficially Rockwell-quaint community of Lumberton, North Carolina—but The Return is a reminder that even a town “where a yellow light still means ‘slow down,’ not speed up” inevitably experiences change. Paradoxically, given the subtitle The Return, a fitting alternate tagline for the new series could very well be You Can’t Go Home Again.

Although Parts 1 and 2 provide some vital bridges to the past, the bulk of the series’ first two hours are spent far beyond the town of Twin Peaks, a contravention of expectations that is consistent with Lynch’s penchant for subversion and audience nose-tweaking. At times, The Return flirts with the form of a cut-up film, splicing together seemingly impenetrable (for the moment) scenes that reveal strange events unfolding in New York City, Las Vegas, and Buckhorn, South Dakota. These might be strands in the same sprawling plot, or they might not. With only a few episodes available at this point, it seems advisable to simply savor the droll humor, discombobulating weirdness, and skin-crawling horror of each segment, allowing them to collide and cohere in the imagination. (This, arguably, is the lesson of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire: Not everything will be clarified, but everything has aesthetic, emotional, and thematic weight.)

The most critical revelation offered in the opening episodes is the one that Twin Peaks aficionados likely suspected and dreaded: Special Agent Dale Cooper is still trapped in the Black Lodge, and his evil doppelgänger (“Mr. C”) has been roaming the world like an unchained dragon, spreading remorseless evil and horrific violence. Mr. C’s various criminal plots remain somewhat obscure, but there is no doubt about his diabolical nature from the moment he enters the show. Greasy-haired, spray-tanned, and clad in a snakeskin-patterned shirt and leather jacket, he comes roaring out of the night in his Mercedes to the jarring, slowed-down thuds and wails of Muddy Magnolia’s “American Woman” cover. (Is there a clearer emblem of psycho-sexual ickiness than a snakeskin shirt?) He exudes menace, but unlike BOB, who giggled and shrieked like a frenzied demon, Mr. C chooses his words carefully. Every utterance that passes his lips is thick with gristle and threat. As he tersely explains to his lackey Ray (George Griffith), “I don’t need anything, Ray. If there’s one thing you should know about me, Ray, It’s that I don’t need anything – I want.” In just a few words, Mr. C conveys what distinguishes him from humankind: He’s a creature devoid of obligations (biological or otherwise), but brimming with unrestrained appetites.

Meanwhile the real Dale Cooper waits in the trans-dimensional purgatory of the Black Lodge, sometimes sitting impassively, sometimes roaming between the innumerable (and nearly identical) rooms and hallways. While the Lodge seems to exist outside of time, things have changed. Laura Palmer's shade, the Giant (Carel Struycken), and former BOB confrere MIKE (Al Strobel) have aged in appearance. Naturally, this is partly because the actors have aged, but it's also because the Lodge’s chronology seems to be simultaneously elastic and divisible into phases. “It all cannot be said out loud now,” the Giant remarks to Cooper in the first episode’s prologue, and that “now” implies that at some point it could be said out loud. (Whatever “it” is.) The “arm” that MIKE chopped off to purify himself of BOB’s corruption, formerly embodied as a dancing dwarf, has evolved into a bizarre entity straight out of Eraserhead: a bare-branched electrified tree, topped by a grotesque, fleshy knob that wheezes enigmatic advice to Cooper. The trapped FBI agent does eventually find an exit from the Lodge’s Red Room, but only by falling through its chevron-patterned floor, passing through a curious container (more on that below), and eventually plummeting into a turbulent, starry void.

The sequences in the opening episodes that leave the strongest impression from a dramatic standpoint are ironically those that have little apparent connection (at first) to Twin Peaks or Dale Cooper. In one narrative passage, a decapitated head and a headless body (from two different individuals) are discovered in an apartment in Buckhorn, South Dakota. All the physical and circumstantial evidence points to local high school principal Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard), who seems genuinely baffled and frightened when he is arrested. Memories of Laura Palmer’s murder at the hands of her BOB-possessed father might prompt suspicions about What’s Really Going On, but the show pulls a fake-out: Bill is evidently being framed by his wife Phyllis (Cornelia Guest), who is not only sleeping with Bill’s attorney, but has also been cajoled into this scheme by Mr. C for as-of-yet unknown reasons. This South Dakota subplot is built on well-worn crime procedural clichés, but with just enough added oddness, viciousness, and frank pathos to feel fresh and appropriately peculiar. (Lillard is pitch-perfect as an ordinary man who is suddenly aware that he is in deep, deep shit.)

Of all the strange passages in the first two episodes, however, one is instantaneously iconic in that inimitable David Lynch way: superficially opaque and unconnected to the plot; visually galvanic and guaranteed to be imitated; and ultimately completely terrifying in the fashion of the darkest nightmares. In a secured, windowless room, a young man named Sam (Ben Rosenfield) sits on a couch, watching an enormous, empty glass box. An array of video cameras is pointed at the contraption, recording every angle and second on memory cards, which Sam dutifully removes and replaces at regular intervals. His friend Tracey (Madeline Zima) stops by the building, proffering a gift of lattes and asking if she can come inside and see what all the secrecy is about. On her first visit, Sam demurs, but on the next occasion the security guard outside the room is mysterious absent from his post. Accordingly, Sam ushers Tracey inside and shows her the glass enclosure, offering the non-explanation: “I'm supposed to watch the box and see if anything appears inside." They sit on the couch, sip their lattes, and after a few moments of awkward silence, get down to fucking. Naturally, this moment of distraction is precisely when a shadowy, ephemeral shape materializes within the box. It breaks through the container's glass walls and proceeds to rip into Sam and Tracey’s heads like a cheese grater shaving down a particularly soft fromage.

These “glass box” passages are so terrifically designed, and executed with such darkling precision, that they would work perfectly well as a standalone horror short. Their slanting connection to Cooper’s story is only revealed late in Part 2, when Dale slips out of the Black Lodge, fleetingly appears floating within the glass box, and then vanishes again, evidently just prior to the appearance of the deadly entity of shadow. The origin and nature of the box remains unclear: Purportedly owned by “an anonymous billionaire,” it seems to resemble a trap, like a polar bear waiting patiently for a seal pup to poke its head through a hole in the arctic sea ice. Plot significance aside, these sequences resonate so strongly in part due to their metaphorical richness. What have Twin Peaks devotees been doing for the past 26 years, if not watching a box (television) and waiting for something as bizarre and seductive as the original series to appear? Sam and Tracey’s dialog even suggests the inherent futility in conveying the tectonic impact of the first two seasons to a younger generation:

T: Do things appear?
S: I haven't seen anything since I started. But the guy I replaced, he saw something once.
T: What?
S: He wouldn't tell me. Or couldn't tell me.

Boxes of all sorts are a recurring motif in Lynch’s work, most conspicuously exemplified by Mulholland Drive’s cobalt-blue mystery cube, the symbolism of which (if any) remains stubbornly contentious. (Television set? Movie screen? Vagina? Womb? The secret place where people hide away their worst fears and ugliest sins?) The Return’s glass box is a similarly fecund object, but as with all things Lynch, it’s worth recalling the tow-headed assassin’s dismissive, sinister chuckle in MD when he is asked what the blue key opens. There is power in mystery.

Just two episodes into its run, The Return is already brimming with names, numbers, and poetic imagery. There is an undeniable temptation to fetishize such minutiae, as though a profound secret could be deduced from their collection and analysis. Lynch practically seems to invite as much when he drizzles the show with riddles such as the one intoned by the Giant in the show’s opening minutes, “Remember 4-3-0. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone.” One could, in theory, jot down every cryptic scrap proffered by the show, draw every possible connection on an elaborate flow chart, and parse every line of dialog for hidden meaning. Such detective work is fun, and admittedly consistent with Cooper’s rallying cry from the Season 1, Episode 3: Break the code, solve the crime. However, such endeavors neglect that even Cooper’s more intuitive processes (e.g., the mystical Tibetan rock-throwing experiment in Season 1, Episode 2) consistently led him down fruitless paths, as well as the fact that he often arrived at the truth belatedly. Pointedly, Cooper did not deduce that Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) was Laura's killer until after the man had also slain his niece (and Laura lookalike) Maddy Ferguson. Even then, the FBI agent only put it all together when Leland practically spelled out his guilt in his own words. Ultimately, decoding clues was always a distraction in Twin Peaks: glorified stamp collecting and Hardy Boys tomfoolery that invited characters to neglect matters of the self and the soul. It was virtually blasphemy in 1991, but it now seems self-evident: Cooper’s pride in his own righteous intellect and white knight idealism made him ill-prepared for the Black Lodge's trials.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Lynch draws out the discovery of the mutilated murder victim(s) in the Buckhorn apartment by staging a protracted, digressive, and delectably ludicrous interaction between the investigating police officers and a guileless, distracted neighbor (Melissa Jo Bailey). There’s also a baffling tangent about an agitated maintenance man and a doctor’s satchel containing… something. It’s both agonizing and delightful, and illustrates that the comedy-minded Lynch who crafted the farcical "World's Worst Hitman" set piece in Mulholland Drive is still alive and kicking.
   
• Lucy’s awkward exchange with an insurance salesman gestures towards the current whereabouts of Sheriff Harry Truman, but it also muddies the waters by revealing the presence of another Sheriff Truman. It’s ultimately an utterly pointless conversation: If one Sheriff Truman is out sick and the other is out fishing, then it doesn’t make a difference which one the salesman is looking for, because neither of them are at the station. Oh, Lucy. You’ve been missed.
   
• Mr. C’s suitcase laptop is at once weirdly anachronistic and vaguely fantastical; sort of "Tandypunk," if you will. He can apparently use it to hack into the FBI’s computers, downloading schematics of federal facilities directly to his smartphone. With its cumbersome cables and chunky keys, however, the device has the look and feel of technology 20 years past its prime. There’s also the matter of the phony-looking FBI interface, unconvincingly accessed via the click-clack of keyboard strokes rather mouse taps (just as all computers are accessed on procedurals like Law & Order and NCIS.)
   
• The scene with Mr. C at the hillbilly cabin is so pointedly grotesque it would have seemed out of place in the original series, although perhaps not in some of Lynch’s other works. It feels almost like a lost storyline from Garth Ennis’ Preacher comic series: a little slice of redneck gothic scuzziness dropped into a cross-country supernatural tale. However, with his handlebar mustache and evident affection for moonshine swigged from Ball jars, Otis (Redford Westwood) is one Arcade Fire album shy of being a typical Portland hipster. Intriguingly, Buella’s (Kathleen Deming) priceless remark regarding the poor quality of hired muscle these days (“It’s a world of truck drivers.”) could be the banal 2017 rejoinder to Jeffrey’s awestruck assessment in Blue Velvet (“It’s a strange world.”)
   
• Names of characters both on- and off-screen zoom by quickly in these two episodes, and most of those monikers are unfamiliar. However, “Phillip Jeffries” likely rings a bell for attentive Twin Peaks fans who are versed in the intricacies of Fire Walk with Me. Played in one memorably surreal scene in that film by the late David Bowie, Jeffries is (was?) an FBI agent who somehow became entangled with the entities in the Black Lodge, resulting in a baffling feat of teleportation and time travel. Where exactly Jeffries is in 2017, what dealings he has with Mr. C, and why he would secretly retain Ray and Darya (Nicole LaLiberte) to assassinate the doppelgänger are questions that the series is obviously in no rush to answer.
   
• Lynch famously cast the original Twin Peaks with an eye towards three categories of actors: recognizable performers who were not distractingly famous (Michael Ontkean, Richard Beymer, Peggy Lipton, Piper Laurie, Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, Russ Tamblyn), collaborators from his past projects (Kyle MacLachlan, Everett McGill, Jack Nance, Catherine Colson), and young, relative unknowns (Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dana Ashbrook, Mädchen Amick, James Marshall). He has taken much the same approach for the new additions to the cast in Twin Peaks: The Return. The first two episodes feature some faintly familiar faces from film and television, such as Jane Adams (Frasier, Hung) as a police forensic scientist, Matthew Lillard (Scream, Scooby-Doo) as the accused principal, and New York socialite and occasional actress Cornelia Guest as said principal’s wife. Prior to hooking up with Sam in the glass box room, and before her more recent appearances on Heroes and Californication, Madeline Zima was once little Grace Sheffield on The Nanny. Patrick Fischler—here briefly seen as a Vegas powerbroker named Mr. Todd—previously showed up in Mulholland Drive as the nervous fellow who fears the derelict behind the Winkie’s diner. Brent Briscoe, who plays a Buckhorn detective, is also a MD veteran of sorts, having popped up in that film to deliver a couple of lines as yet another detective character (“Could be, someone’s missing.”). Occasionally, The Return strays a bit too far into the kind of disruptive stunt casting that the original series eschewed. (Was that Jennifer Jason Leigh as one of Mr. C’s henchwomen-slash-lovers? Ashley Judd in a walk-on as Ben Horne’s secretary?) In the main, however, it’s a gratifying mix of old friends, vague acquaintances, and eye-catching new faces.
   
• The most aesthetically significant change between the Twin Peaks of 1990 - 1991 and that of 2017 is arguably an aural one. The ambient droning and ominous wind that were hallmarks of the original series' soundscape have returned in force, but otherwise The Return is thus far a remarkably quiet show. There are exceptions in the form of odd, jarring sonic assaults like Mr. C's entrance song or Cooper's cacophonous ejection from the Black Lodge. However, the new series usually allows its stilted and often plodding dialog to play out over a background of arid silence. This contrasts with the first two seasons, which were eager to dip into Angelo Badalamenti's three or four iconic musical themes at the drop of a hat (sometimes to incongruous effect). In The Return, it's sound effects rather than music that frequently attune the viewer to the scene's mood, as in the distant train whistle that meanders into Mr. C and Ray's tense conversation at a greasy spoon. (Said whistle is also an echo of Lynch's borderline avant-garde—and yet strangely terrifying—Web series Rabbits, which was later cannibalized and sewn into the fabric of Inland Empire.)