Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 13

Starting position’s more comfortable.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 13 // Original Air Date August 6, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

For long-time Twin Peaks devotees, the arrival of a new season after a hiatus of over 25 years evoked understandable excitement, but also a gnawing anxiety. The years spent revisiting and scrutinizing the original series had naturally created a sense of fond attachment to Mark Frost and David Lynch’s creation, warts and all. However, anyone who has cultivated an admiration for Lynch’s work can acknowledge that much of its power lies in its ability to disrupt the viewer’s comfort zones. The Return therefore elicits two opposing reactions in the Twin Peaks enthusiast: a nostalgic longing for everything to be exactly as they remember it; and a rebellious glee at the prospect of Lynch figuratively burning his most recognizable creation to the ground. Like Audrey in Part 13, the viewer is ensnared by competing impulses: “I want to stay and I want to go.”

At the most reductive plot level, The Return concerns Dale Cooper’s journey back to old self and to the town of Twin Peaks, but the new series is also broadly about the emotional turmoil involved in revisiting anything that elicits strong emotions. It’s about running into an old friend or lover, visiting a childhood home, or witnessing the revival of a favorite television show. There is comfort in familiarity, but because everything changes with time, such reunions also carry a risk of alienation and disappointment. Part 13 acknowledges the joy that reconnecting with history can elicit, but it also serves as a warning about the perils of figuratively traveling back in time. Frost and Lynch suggest that dwelling excessively on the past—or worse, trying to recapture or recreate it—can lead to paralysis and purgatory. In this, the show aligns itself with the outlook of Fred Madison from Lynch’s Lost Highway, who explains that he prefers to leave the past as remembers it, rather than how it actually happened.

In the town of Twin Peaks, many characters are stuck repeating the same mistakes they’ve always made, or vainly striving to reclaim something they lost long ago. It’s a theme that the show has often highlighted in recent episodes, but it’s never felt as profoundly sad as it does in Part 13. When Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) drops by the Double R for dinner, rather transparently hoping to run into his ex-wife Shelly (Mädchen Amick), it’s a bittersweet moment, but it one that also carries the sour tang of irony. Bobby has become a better person in the past 25 years, but in shedding the juvenile, hot-headed aspects of his personality, he’s lost the bad boy erotic heat that caught Shelly’s eyes so long ago. He’s turned into his generation’s Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), who is still pining for high school sweetheart Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton). Ed and Norma remain friendly, but the romantic happiness they briefly grasped at the end of Season 2 is evidently long gone. As Ed explains to Bobby with unintentional frankness, “Nothing happening here.”

Norma, for her part, is still drawn to assertive men with big schemes, although she’s traded felonious sociopaths like her ex-husband Hank for the MBA polish of Walter Lawford (Grant Goodeve), a buzzword-spouting entrepreneur who’s helped her franchise the Double R name and its celebrated pies. Lynch frames Walter such that Ed is visible in the background, slightly out of focus but painfully attentive to the conversation between Norma and her new business and romantic partner. Underlining the point with aching melancholy, Part 13 concludes with a ponderous scene of Ed eating Double R takeout in his gas station, silently sipping soup and reflecting on regrets as cars pass in the night.

Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) continues to wallow (perhaps justifiably) in alcohol and depression, as a 15-second clip of a vintage boxing match plays on a loop on her enormous television. “Now it’s a boxing match!,” the announcer enthuses as the action in the ring escalates, but after the fifth or sixth repetition, the exclamation has become thoroughly lifeless and enervating, amplifying this deliberately sluggish sequence’s air of entrapment. Conversely, there’s a genuine sweetness in the scene where Nadine Hurley (Wendy Robie) and Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) reconnect after seven years, even if both characters aren’t exactly well-balanced individuals. It’s one of Jacoby’s golden shovels that catches the doctor’s eye, prompting him to drop by Nadine's drape runner store. This is consistent with The Return’s assertion that emotions can be valid even when they are built on a foundation of illusion and falsehood.

That theme is also evident in the episode’s penultimate scene at the roadhouse, wherein Shelly’s young friend Renee (Jessica Szohr) is rendered misty-eyed by James Hurley’s (James Marshall) performance. There’s a definite meta-textual aspect to this sequence, in that James’ falsetto rendition of “Just You” in Episode 2 of Season 2—with Donna Hayward and Maggie Ferguson on backup—remains one of the original series’ most divisive moments. Whether the old-school Twin Peaks fan finds James’ original performance touching, cheesy, or utterly intolerable, Lynch’s recreation of it here constitutes yet another instance of the new series’ amiable “Fuck You” gestures. It also underlines the disorienting sensation that Twin Peaks has been preserved under glass for two and a half decades, but with enough telltale differences to render it all the more uncanny.

The most significant and easily overlooked aspect of this scene, however, is the presence of Renee. The actress who portrays her is, not incidentally, at least a decade too young to have experienced the original Twin Peaks phenomenon firsthand. That Lynch shows her character reacting with authentic and unabashed sentiment to James’ performance further emphasizes The Return’s insistence on the subjectivity of emotional experience. This isn’t like Shelly observing that, notwithstanding some fans’ disdain for the character, “James was always cool.” It’s a new character, played by an actress who was six years old when Twin Peaks premiered, being moved by a performance that does not carry the same nostalgic baggage as it does for the viewer. For every middle-aged Peaks aficionado who gasps or groans at those first bars of “Just You,” there is a newcomer who is experiencing it for the first time, and their response (whether touched, amused, or repulsed) is no less real.

Concluding a plot point from a few episodes past, the Detectives Fusco (David Koechner, Eric Edelstein, and Larry Clarke) learn that Dougie Jones’ fingerprints match an escape federal convict and a missing FBI agent, but chalk this up to a bureaucratic error. Accordingly, Dougie’s prints go into the trashcan, and the Las Vegas investigation—which briefly seemed so promising—loops back to square one. This facepalm-worthy moment of missed opportunity dovetails with the notion that while it might be comforting to revisit (or stubbornly remain) in the past, it’s not always fruitful, and can even be counter-productive. This theme is echoed in the Tarantino-esque exchange between Hutch (Time Roth) and Chantel (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who conflate the drug abstinence of contemporary Mormons with the polygamous practices of their church’s past.

Part 13’s thematic preoccupations find their most potent expression in the episode’s standout sequence, in which Mr C. (Kyle MacLachlan) eliminates the traitorous Ray (George Griffith) by arm-wrestling his way into the leadership of a criminal gang. There is an undeniably amusing element to this ridiculous showdown, evoking the campy 1987 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Over the Top. Mr. C even calls out the stupidity of the gang’s rites by mocking it as “nursery school” nonsense. The lead-up to Mr. C’s match with the group’s massive champion, Renzo (Derek Mears), has a sports flick / crime thriller vibe reminiscent of any number of direct-to-VHS features about underground martial arts tournaments. (This episode’s funniest line might be Frank Collison’s consciously stilted delivery of “Commence... arm wrestle!”) In this case, the tone is given a hint of added absurdity by the ludicrous floor-to-ceiling video monitor in the gang’s austere warehouse lair ("the Farm"), and by a tweedy accountant fellow (Christopher Durbin Noll) who seems out-of-place among outlaw biker types but still manages to be coldly menacing.

When the contest commences, this passage takes on the shading of a horror film, with the snapped forearm from David Cronenberg’s The Fly leaping to mind, to nauseating effect. Mr. C’s eerily composed demeanor is justified when it quickly becomes apparent that—by dint of the Lodge’s power—he can beat Renzo without breaking a sweat. Rather than end the match quickly, however, Mr. C toys with his opponent, repeatedly and effortlessly returning their arms to an upright stance while Renzo strains, purple-faced and trembling. “Starting position’s more comfortable,” Mr. C observes with just the barest hint of ridicule, as though giving voice to Frost and Lynch’s disparagement of Twin Peaks nostalgia. Indeed, Mr. C’s stony cruelty in this scene has a vividly metaphorical dimension, in that it echoes the way that the viewer has been tugged this way and that by the new series. David Lynch is in complete control, and his whims dictate whether the viewer will experience agony or respite. Although the show’s periodic check-ins with old friends in Twin Peaks have the soothing quality of the familiar, that comfort is undercut by the changes that time has wrought, and by the anticipation of the suffering yet to come.

Part 13 adds an additional twist to this ambivalent depiction of reunion and relapse by heightening the long-simmering suggestion that Twin Peaks is experiencing a temporal scrambling. In some instances, this is hinted at through design choices in scenes that have little to do with the town of Twin Peaks. Examples include the discordant, arrhythmic conga music that accompanies the Mitchum brothers’ (James Belushi and David Koechner) celebratory arrival at Lucky 7 Insurance, or the mindless way that Sonny-Jim Jones (Pierce Gagnon) repeatedly traces the same path through his gaudy new gym set.

However, the scenes in Twin Peaks itself are where The Return exhibits its most explicit indications of temporal weirdness. Numerous references to specific dates and incidents have previously suggested that these Twin Peaks passages are being presented out of order, and that they may be unfolding either well before or after the events in Las Vegas, South Dakota, and elsewhere. Part 13 is the point at which these apparent discrepancies seem to reach a critical mass. What previously might have been dismissed as honest continuity errors have begun to resemble deliberate monkeying with the show’s timeline. For example, Bobby’s conversation with Ed and Norma at the Double R appears to occur the evening following the discovery of Major Briggs’ secret message in Part 9, but before Becky Briggs’ (Amanda Seyfried) jealous rampage from Part 12.

Lynch is not a filmmaker who typically indulges in this sort of Westworld-style narrative trickery, but he does enjoy violating the rules of the medium, and there aren’t rules much more inviolate than the presumption that scenes edited to adjoin one another are happening roughly concurrently. Yet Part 13 also offers signs that this chronological puzzle is more than a strictly formal choice on the part of the director. The old boxing footage that Sarah Palmer listlessly watches emits a burst of audio static when it loops back on itself, evoking the electrical phenomena associated with BOB and the Black Lodge. Furthermore, an eagle-eyed viewer on Reddit noticed that the episode’s final scene contains a subtle tidbit of strangeness: As Ed stares out the window of his gas station, his reflection in the glass “glitches” as though experiencing a temporal hiccup. It’s an almost subliminal detail, but nonetheless unsettling. Ed, for his part, appears to notice this anomaly, and it’s as much this as thoughts of Norma that provokes his disconcerted brooding as the episode’s end credits roll. Something is dreadfully wrong in Twin Peaks, on a level that goes beyond the banal miseries and supernatural evils that have plagued it before. It’s as though reality itself is beginning to break down.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Beyond Mr. C’s revenge and Anthony Sinclair’s (Tom Sizemore’s) tearful change of heart, Part 13 advances the series’ myriad subplots with typically tiny nudges. However, the episode does establish a potentially significant connection between two storylines that have remained relatively segregated until now. While Mr. C’s unseemly dealings don’t seem to have much to do with town of Twin Peaks, Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) is shown to be hiding out at the Farm. This startling revelation provides a link between Twin Peaks’ narcotics underworld and the far-flung criminal circles in which Mr. C prowls, although its implications regarding Richard’s suspected parentage are still ambiguous.
   
• Walter’s discussion with Norma about her flagship diner’s under-performance and potential changes to her pie recipes is drolly suggestive of the arguments one imagines Frost and Lynch might have had with ABC executives about the direction of Twin Peaks once upon a time. “Norma you're a real artist, but love doesn't always turn a profit… It’s just about tweaking the formula to insure consistency and profitability.”
   
• Sonny-Jim’s backyard play set is a damn peculiar work of design, from its illuminated circus midway arch to its prison yard spotlight. (The appearance of a spotlight, it should be remembered, typically coincided with BOB’s acts of violence on the original series.) The truly striking detail, however, is the relentless music box tinkling of the most famous motif from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The ballet’s plot has obvious parallels with Twin Peaks, featuring as it does supernatural doubles, wicked curses, and a warlock who assumes the form of an owl. Just as suggestive, however, is the work’s role in the political culture of the Soviet Union. Filmed productions of the ballet were often broadcast on television during periods of official mourning, and eventually during times of political turmoil as well. An endless loop of Swan Lake was memorably shown on state-controlled television while the failed 1991 anti-Gorbachev “Bathhouse Plot” unfolded—coincidentally, just two months after the final episode of the original Twin Peaks aired in the U.S.
   
• Audrey’s description of her uncanny, anxious sensation suggests the episodes of de-realization that can affect individuals with epilepsy, migraines, or mental illnesses. British author Simon Winchester wrote vividly and candidly about his struggles with such dissociative attacks of jamais vu (the complement of déjà vu) in his memoir The Man with the Electrified Brain. Charlie’s obliquely threatening response to Audrey’s near-hysterical state—“Do I have to end your story too?”—seems designed to exacerbate rather than soothe the unreal sensation his wife is experiencing. This and other peculiar aspects of their interaction lend it the tone of a psychiatric therapy session rather than a domestic quarrel, stoking suspicions that Audrey’s subplot is not all it appears to be.
  
  Interestingly, Audrey apprehensively observes that “It’s like Ghostwood here.” Presumably, this is a reference to the national forest near Twin Peaks, not the scrapped country club development her father once envisioned for the area. Ghostwood, it should be remembered, includes key mythos locations such as Owl Cave and Glastonbury Grove, indicating that Audrey has some peripheral awareness of the reality-warping character of these Lodge-associated locales.
   
• Even when he’s playing sad sacks and burnouts, Tom Sizemore almost always brings an air of tightly-wound physical menace to his characters. Accordingly, it’s unexpected and a little amusing to witness his portrayal of Anthony in this episode, where he grovels and blubbers like a guilty school boy. His confession regarding his crooked insurance schemes and attempted murder of Dougie plays like a more comedic version of Matthew Lillard’s hysterics from a few episodes ago.
   
• Sightings: Hulking arm wrestling champion Renzo is portrayed by Derek Mears, a prolific actor and stuntman whose most conspicuous claim to fame is playing rebooted iconic movie monsters like the Predator (2010’s Predators) and Jason Voorhees (2009’s Friday the 13th). Frank Collison, who appears as Renzo’s lieutenant Muddy, is a long-time character actor most familiar as telegraph operator Horace on the long-running Western Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Veteran film and television performer John Savage portrays Anthony’s contact in the Las Vegas police, Detective Clark. Savage is probably best known for his roles in The Deer Hunter, The Godfather: Part III, and The Thin Red Line, as well as on Jessica Alba’s breakout series Dark Angel and the period supernatural drama Carnivàle. Norma’s partner-slash-boyfriend Walter is portrayed by Grant Goodeve, whose first major role was on the popular Dick Van Patten sitcom Eight Is Enough, and thereafter became a ubiquitous television presence from the 1980s into the 2000s. Jessica Szohr, who plays James-adoring roadhouse patron Renee, is most recognizable for her long-running role on the New York WASP soap Gossip Girl.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 12

It’s a goddamn bad story, isn’t it?

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 12 // Original Air Date July 30, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

As this site has previously observed, Twin Peaks: The Return has repeatedly indulged in mischievous meta-commentary about the experience of watching it. As series director, David Lynch has habitually drawn out scenes to absurd lengths, in contravention of the customary rules of television narrative. Sometimes this has a deeper purpose with respect to theme, mood, or characterization—e.g., the hypnotically slow zoom into the Trinity atomic explosion in Part 8. However, just as often Lynch seems to be sadistically tweaking the viewer’s patience. It’s all too easy to read sour amusement in the way that Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost have continually pushed some key story milestones, like the re-emergence of the old Dale Cooper, further and further down the road. Relatedly, they often allow the show’s characters to function as viewer surrogates who give voice to the longing, confusion, and annoyance that the creators imagine the audience must be feeling.

This impulse on the part of Frost and Lynch reaches a kind of audacious, alienating crescendo in Part 12, in which the denial of audience gratification becomes a palpable ambition. Most of the action in this episode proceeds at a comically languid pace, from the elliptical conversations to the simple action of a character leaving a room. The centerpiece of this inclination is the much-anticipated appearance of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn). Of all the fates that viewers might have imagined for Twin Peaks’ adolescent brunette firecracker, a loveless marriage of convenience to a tweedy, dyspeptic accountant likely did not rank high on the list of possible futures. Moreover, Lynch and Frost strand Audrey’s scene in a kind of narrative purgatory, isolated from the rest of the episode’s events. She and her husband Charlie (Clark Middleton) argue about situations and characters that are completely unknown to the viewer, in particular the apparent disappearance of Audrey’s lover, Billy.

The exasperating nature of their conversation, and Charlie’s generally tepid, unhurried demeanor—down to the way he dials a rotary phone—make this scene maddening, but it’s Audrey’s reactions that paradoxically turn it into a marvelous bit of self-commentary on The Return. As though she were a viewer standing outside the show, watching her own scene unfold at a molasses-slow pace, Audrey fidgets through a succession of frustrated sighs, squints, eye rolls, appeals, and profanity-studded invective. She’s obliged to listen impotently as Charlie consults over the phone with Tina, who may or may not know Billy’s whereabouts, only for her husband to reveal nothing of his conversation. This provokes her already frayed patience to snap in disbelief: “YOU'RE NOT GOING TO TELL ME WHAT SHE SAID??”

This scene might be the harshest manifestation of Part 12’s penchant for withholding and prolonging, but it’s far from the only candidate. The agonizingly leisurely way that Gordon Cole’s (David Lynch) Francophone “friend” (Bérénice Marlohe) removes herself from the FBI director’s hotel room is perhaps the most conspicuous such sequence, due to the minimal dialogue and Albert Rosenfield’s (Miguel Ferrer) unamused passivity. Significantly, both Gordon and his lady friend take unabashed pleasure in the seductive production she makes of her leave-taking. Lynch’s beaming reaction is perhaps the clearest indication that, yes, he really does derive enjoyment out of fucking with his audience.

There’s also the nearly word-for-word repetition of Dr. Jacoby’s (Russ Tamblyn) Internet rant from several episodes prior, complete with pre-recorded shit shovel sales pitch. Or the abundant awkward pauses in the conversation between Gordon, Albert, Tammy (Chrysta Bell), and (eventually) Diane (Laura Dern), culminating in the latter’s silent preparation of a vodka on the rocks. Or the teasing way that the Room 315 key rests on the desk during an extended back-and-forth between Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) and Sheriff Truman (Robert Forster), as though mocking the viewer with the possibility that Ben will fail to mention it. Or the inclusion of yet another ambiguous exchange at the Roadhouse where unfamiliar characters discuss other unfamiliar characters.

It would hardly be surprising if some viewers regarded these passages as frustrating, since they most certainly are. That frustration, however, is not an artifact of sub-standard screenwriting, but a deliberate and essential aspect of The Return. Perhaps more than any other show in memory, this new iteration of Twin Peaks does not give a fuck about the viewer’s expectations. Its aim is to provoke rather than to entertain, and specifically to provoke in a way that pushes against the conventions and limitations of the medium. The Return is a hand grenade lobbed at the fundamental assumptions about episodic narrative television and how it is “supposed” to work. Yet what's striking about Part 12 is how mellow the show seems to be about its heresies, as if it's urging the viewer to just relax and enjoy the moment rather than wringing their hands about the when, why, and how.

Despite itself, the show often entertains as a side effect of its provocations. Its dominant mode is not disdainful deconstruction but disarming unpredictability. Indeed, Part 12 is often astonishingly funny in its most absurd, patience-straining moments. The French woman’s exit from Gordon’s room, for example, veers back and forth between amusing and annoying multiple times in the space of minutes. Ultimately, the underlying point of this extended gesture seems to be the "live in the present" sentiment mentioned above. Notably, Albert's stony reaction to Gordon's excitement over a bottle of good Bordeaux prompts the older man to express concern about his fellow agent's well-being. If you can't appreciate fine wine and a beautiful woman when they're right in front of you, what's the point of it all?

Moreover, the episode often wryly acknowledges its methods through dialog. Gordon’s appeal to Albert and Tammy at the beginning of the episode (“Please speak succinctly!”) comes off as ironic in retrospect. In light of a brief check-in with “Dougie Jones” (Kyle MacLachlan), Charlie’s observation to Audrey regarding Billy plays as a notification to the viewer that no, the old Dale Cooper will not be appearing just yet: “He’s out there somewhere, but you’re not going to find him tonight.” As though speaking on the behalf of the impatient audience, Chantel (Jennifer Jason Leigh) maintains to Hutch (Tim Roth) that there’s just no time to torture the warden before they murder him on Mr. C’s behalf. (Providing the most uncomplimentary product placement in television history, she declares that she is hungry for Wendy’s.)

Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) delivers Part 12’s most caustic line directed at the show itself, when she rhetorically snaps at Hawk (Michael Horse), “It’s a goddamn bad story, isn’t it?” The Return is kind of a bad story, in the sense that a “good” story in the realm of narrative television has narrow constraints that this show can’t be bothered to obey. Ironically, it’s Sarah’s breakdown and her tense conversation with Hawk that most resemble vintage Twin Peaks, with its distinct evocation of menace in mundane, daytime spaces. Sarah’s rambling meltdown at the store counter seems to touch on her memories of Laura, and the scene is backed with a menacing, distorted musical cue taken from Fire Walk with Me. (As is Diane’s mimicry of the series' vaguely threatening line, “Let’s rock!”) While Part 12 doesn’t provide any explicit scenes of Black Lodge forces, a suggestion of their power can be discerned in the puzzling sound from Sarah’s kitchen, and in that ominously humming ceiling fan, still spinning away. Something lurks within the Palmer house yet, and Sarah is alone with it.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Fathers are a major motif in this episode. Ben Horne observes that his grandson Richard “never had a father,” suggesting that this has contributed to the young man’s violent, anti-social behavior. Later Ben reminisces about a bicycle he owned as a boy, which he valued less for its features than because his father had given it to him. Sonny-Jim (Pierce Gagnon) attempts to coerce his father into an archetypal backyard game of catch, but Cooper-as-Dougie just stands there unresponsively as a baseball bounces off his head. The warden’s young son (Luke Judy) discovers his father sprawled dead in front of their house, the victim of two bullets from Hutch’s sniper rifle.
   
• The notion that the FBI has been following Tammy’s academic and professional life since she was in high school speaks well of her abilities, but it’s nonetheless kind of creepy.
   
• Diane’s peculiar, out-loud enunciation of the word “co-or-din-nates” may be a mnemonic device, allowing her to call up the numbers she saw in Part 11 from the depths of her apparently eidetic memory.
   
• It’s unclear why the turkey jerky display at the grocery store triggers Sarah Palmer’s meltdown, but it’s worth noting that individuals with PTSD are often unable to articulate why certain stimuli can provoke an acute emotional response. It may be salient that the package’s logo bears some resemblance to the owl glyph associated with the Black Lodge, while the brand name, Albatross, evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and bird's association with a psychological burden. Furthermore, Sarah’s question about the jerky—“It it smoked?”—suggests the sooty Woodsmen and the smoldering, extra-dimensional convenience store where they dwell.
   
• Much has been made of the apparent discrepancies in the show’s timeline, and the possibility that Frost and Lynch are cross-cutting between storylines that are occurring over different, non-overlapping periods. Such theories received a bit of a boost in this episode by a conspicuous contradiction: After Albert observes that it’s 11:05 p.m., Lynch cuts to the opening of Dr. Jacoby’s show, which, as he announces, begins at 7:00 p.m. Even accounting for time zone differences, these adjacent scenes cannot be unfolding concurrently.
   
• Charlie’s reference to some “fishy” papers that Audrey wants him to sign—and his reluctance to do so without his attorney’s guidance—calls back to the original series. At one point Catherine Martell discovers that Josie Packard had taken out a lucrative life insurance policy on her, declining to sign when an agent brings the irregularities of the policy to her attention. Audrey also threatens to renege on an unspecified contract out of frustration with Charlie’s tepid ineffectualness, prompting disbelief on his part. This mirrors the tension that Frost and Lynch are deliberately eliciting in the relationship between Twin Peaks and its audience, placing the implied artist / viewer “contract” in jeopardy.
   
• Audrey and Charlie’s conversation about the mysterious Billy, Tina, Chuck, and Paul (and a stolen truck) tracks somewhat with the saga of Richard Horne’s hit-and-run. Part 7 included a scene with a man (identified in the credits only as “Farmer”) who had an anxious confrontation with Andy about his truck, and then subsequently failed to show up for an arranged meeting with the deputy. It’s conceivable (if a bit unlikely) that this is Audrey’s missing lover Billy. Notably, Part 7 concluded with a man bursting into the Double RR and asking urgently, “Anybody seen Billy?”
   
• Gordon’s trembling hand from his brush with the Black Lodge in Part 10 is echoed when Trick (Scott Coffey) holds up his hand to Natalie (Ana de la Reguera) and Abbie (Elizabeth Anweis), illustrating how shaken he still is about his accident on the way to the roadhouse. Intriguingly, Trick claims he was pulled from his car by a “farmer.”
   
• Sightings: Clark Middleton, who portrays Audrey’s husband Charlie, is best known for his appearances on the paranormal thriller series Fringe and in films including Sin City, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Birdman. (Middleton’s stature and physical disabilities are a product of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.) The role of Gordon’s lady friend is performed by French actress Bérénice Marlohe, known in America primarily as the Bond girl Severine from Skyfall. Mexican actress Ana de la Reguera, who plays roadhouse patron Natalie, is most familiar to English-speaking audiences from the Jack Black comedy Nacho Libre and numerous television series, including Eastbound & Down, Narcos, Jane the Virgin, and From Dusk Till Dawn. In the role of accident victim Trick is Scott Coffey, who previously appeared in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Rabbits shorts.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 11

Someone’s on the way.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 11 // Original Air Date July 23, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

The search for answers and meaning has been at the forefront of Twin Peaks: The Return’s entire run up to this point. Indeed, one might say it is the new show’s primary preoccupation, particularly as it relates to the rapport between the pop culture artist and the observer. (“Consumer,” if one is going to be blunt about it.) The series is almost two-thirds complete, and in that span Mark Frost and David Lynch have returned repeatedly to the concept of mystery and the detective’s relationship to it. Although, where Twin Peaks is concerned, “detective” can refer variously to literal investigators within the show's universe like Dale Cooper, the obsessive viewers who parse the series’ every detail for esoteric clues, and all people generally who are groping through life and searching for meaning.

It’s in Part 11, however, that this cluster of ideas receives substantial attention, albeit in vastly different ways. A little over a third of this episode is concerned with the tawdry melodrama of life in the town of Twin Peaks, where the tragedies of the past continue to repeat themselves. These passages contain some notable revelations concerning both contemporary events and the past 25 years. Miriam (Sarah Jean Long) is still (barely) alive after suffering a brutal beating and attempted murder at the hands of Richard Horne. It is confirmed that Becky (Amanda Seyfried) is indeed Bobby Briggs’ (Dana Ashbrook) daughter, and that he and Shelly (Mädchen Amick) were married at one point. (She’s kept his surname, despite the split.) However, Shelly is currently sweet on Red (Balthazar Getty), Richard’s dime-flipping drug supplier, although she is presumably ignorant of Red’s career as a narcotics trafficker.

The Becky-Bobby-Shelly plot largely serves to highlight that Twin Peaks’ uglier side is just as sordid and dreadful as ever. For a while, this section seems to swap the show’s more customary small-town gothic tone for something closer to Cops-style trailer park scuzziness: Shelly clinging to and them tumbling from the hood of her car; Becky shooting with frustrated fury into the vacant apartment of Stephen’s mistress; Becky tearfully insisting that she both despises and love her shitheel husband. It’s miserable to see Becky repeating some of Shelly’s worst mistakes, but the truly bleak flourish comes with the revelation that Shelly herself is still making terrible choices in men, as exemplified by her girlish, besotted manner with Red. (Bobby’s awkward, wounded expression is almost as heartbreaking.)

However, as he often does in this iteration of Twin Peaks, director David Lynch abruptly shifts the tone into something more bizarre and nightmarish. The Briggs’ unhappy gathering at the Double R is interrupted by gunfire and shattering glass. Becky’s traumatic misfortunes and Red’s appearance naturally incline the viewer to assume that this explosion of violence is somehow related. (Perhaps the shots were fired by a vengeful, unstable Stephen.) However, it turns out to be a freak, unconnected occurrence. In a minivan stopped just outside the diner, a child picked up a gun left in the vehicle by his father, and the weapon went off in the boy’s hands.

Much like Bobby, it takes the viewer a moment to process that this incident is merely a weird coincidence. Bobby is also taken aback by the sight of the trigger-happy child, who is camouflage-clad and slouching silently in a manner that almost exactly mimics his father. (It’s a disarming touch that neatly calls back to the inter-generational echoes that had been playing out at the Briggs’ booth in the Double R.) The confusion of the scene is exacerbated by the incessant honking of the car idling just behind the minivan, and it’s when Bobby approaches the irate driver (Laura Kenny) that things switch from just uncanny to downright demented. The woman wails in disjointed anguish that she is late and desperate to get home, and that “she’s sick.” At this point a young girl (Priya Niehaus) rises, zombie-like, out of the passenger seat, croaking and retching some vile fluid as she reaches towards Bobby. The driver, meanwhile, repeatedly exclaims “Aghh!” in a way that is simultaneously ludicrous and utterly terrifying. It’s pure horror movie insanity, dropped inexplicably into Bobby’s already strange evening like a sack of slimy, squirming eels.

Part of what makes this scene so disorienting is its contravention of the basic rules of televisual storytelling. The proximity of the three sub-scenes—Becky’s conversation with her parents, the aftermath of the gun accident, and the vomiting child in the car—naturally leads one to suppose that there is some narrative relationship between them. There isn’t, at least in the plot sense: It’s just a sadly typical angst-laden family conversation, interrupted by a random incident of accidental violence, interrupted in turn by an unexplained, disturbing jolt of surrealism. Bobby even seems to betray some extra-textual awareness of how nuts it all is. As the obligatory detective in this scene, he’s trained to think in terms of cause and effect, but the collision of events he witnesses is pure happenstance. His wordless reaction matches the one presumably provoked in the viewer, while also effectively paraphrasing Sarah Palmer’s rhetorical wail from Season 1: What is going on in this town?

There are, of course, thematic threads running through this passage of the episode: the cycles of ruin and violence reverberating down through the generations; the intrusion of annihilating chaos into familial normalcy; and the unseen disease that’s been metastasizing in Twin Peaks for decades, a cancer that seems to inflict its most severe damage on the young. However, Bobby doesn’t have the privilege of the viewer’s vantage point. He can’t see the big picture, and from his perspective the events in this episode surely feel like dissolute madness, a malignant counterpoint to the cosmic order and purpose that he might have discerned in his father’s oracular message from Part 9.

Bobby could use some sort of signpost to help make sense of all the chaos, and it’s no accident that the following scene involves Hawk (Michael Horse) and Sheriff Truman (Robert Forster) pondering the deputy’s map, which is “very old, but always current.” In the relative calm of the sheriff department's conference room, they have the time and quiet to ruminate on the map’s mysterious symbology. It’s not a traditional map, but there’s little precedent for the journey they’re contemplating. (The Sheriff portentously describes the location indicated in Major Briggs’ message, “There’s no road there. Road’s gone.”) Their conversation is mostly speculative, but the glyphs painted on the leather and Hawk’s interpretations reverberate with the series’ existing motifs: trees, fire, electricity, corn, disease. When the Sheriff ask about the familiar owl-like symbol at the top of the map, Hawk’s response (“You don’t ever want to know about that. Really.”) calls back to Agent Desmond’s rebuke regarding the blue rose on Cousin Lil’s dress in Fire Walk with Me.

Meanwhile, the FBI and Buckhorn police investigate the location where Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard) claims he entered “the Zone” with Ruth Davenport and encountered Major Briggs. Gordon (David Lynch) and Albert (Miguel Ferrer) seem to have some notion of what they will find there, but they also don’t seem to have any particular plan. Gordon tentatively approaches a spot in the scrubby backyard of a run-down house, whereupon he witnesses a vortex opening in the sky. Everyone seems to have a different perspective on these events: only Gordon can see and hear the dark, ethereal maelstrom; Albert doesn’t seem to perceive it, but he does witness Gordon’s form wavering and blurring; everyone else (at attested by a splendid wide shot) merely sees Gordon wave his arms slowly over his head, staring intently at something that they cannot discern. Only Diane (Laura Dern) notices a Woodsman, who is fading in and out like a weak radio signal, sneaking up to the car in which Detective Macklay (Brent Briscoe) and Bill Hastings sit. She doesn’t do anything to alert them, and seems dully amused when Bill’s head subsequently implodes. (Credit to Biscoe for his shocked, utterly genuine reaction to this horror.)

Later, when the group confers on these events over coffee and donuts, their manner is matter-of-fact, despite the fantastical nature of what has occurred. (Although Gordon confesses that his hands are still shaking.) The sinister forces they are pursuing are enigmatic, seemingly operating outside the realms of reason and even physical laws. In the face of such inscrutable malevolence, this gaggle of detectives is left dazed and uncertain, retreating to the comfort of “the policeman’s dream” of caffeine and sugar, as Gordon puts it. Only Diane smokes a cigarette, perched higher than the rest on a narrow stool; she’s distinguished from the rest visually, mirroring her ambiguous loyalties. When Albert shows Gordon a photo of the coordinates written on the arm of Ruth Davenport’s body, she leans in to furtively memorize the numbers. (He notices, and she notices that he notices.)

Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachlan) lethargic misadventures in Dougie Jones’ life reach a turning point when he comes face-to-face with the nefarious Mitchum brothers (Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi). In an extended sequence that plays like a riff on the climactic scene of Seven, Cooper is driven out to the desert for his planned execution. His fate takes a 180-degree turn, however, thanks to bit of preparatory guidance from MIKE (Al Strobel) and Bradley Mitchum’s prophetic dream of a cherry pie. Knepper and Belushi approach this passage with profanity-studded broadness, while MacLachlan heroically maintains “Dougie’s” signature bovine impassivity. It’s an unabashedly entertaining sequence, capped with a champagne toast that commemorates the Mitchums’ unlikely transformation from Cooper’s would-be-murderers to his close personal friends.

What’s remarkable about Cooper’s pastry-borne salvation, however, is how neatly it fits with the rest of Part 11, despite its tonal dissonance with everything else that transpires in the episode. (Indeed, this is arguably the most tonally fractured episode of new series to date, and that schizoid personality is part of what makes it so marvelous.) Elsewhere in Part 11, characters contend with the elusiveness of answers and the challenge in unraveling complex events from a limited viewpoint. The Mitchums think they understand their situation and what needs to be done, but the hidden world of dreams and visions throws a monkey wrench into their bloody-minded plans. The inscrutable intensity of Bradley’s dream vexes him as much as his anxiousness to kill Dougie Jones. When the absurd events of that dream actually comes to pass, his grievances with Dougie are entirely forgotten. In an instant, the cherry pie triggers a Jubilee of sorts: debts are forgiven, mercy rains down, and former enemies break bread. (As if to underline this streak of good luck, the bedraggled woman (Linda Porter) from the Silver Mustang in Part 3 appears, newly glamorous and profusely thanking “Mr. Jackpots” for his benevolence.)

This reversal of Dougie’s fortune has little basis in logic. Indeed, the Mitchum brothers had every reason to kill Dougie, even if their reasons were tangled up with falsehoods and misconceptions. It’s not detective work that saves Cooper, but a receptiveness to whispers from the subconscious (or from other dimensions, in Cooper’s case.) Even a testy, world-weary criminal like Bradley recognizes the importance of doing what feels 110% right in his gut, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense. The marvel of the Mitchum brothers farce is that Cooper and his Lodge allies aren’t hoodwinking the gangsters, but setting them back on track. Killing Dougie would have been the reasonable thing to do, but it also would have been a terrible mistake. It’s not reason but paranormal omens that paradoxically allow the Mitchums to discern the facts: namely, that Dougie Jones is not their enemy.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• The house where Gordon encounters the vortex to the Black Lodge is located at 2240 Sycamore, solidifying a motif that seems to occur in association with Earth-to-Lodge gateways. The housing development where Cooper emerged from the Lodge via an electrical outlet had a street named Sycamore as well. And Glastonbury Grove near Twin Peaks, where Cooper first entered the Lodge so long ago, is surrounded by sycamore saplings.
   
• Lynch is one of those filmmakers who can find ways to make both inky shadow and full sun equally menacing. The latter is exemplified by the vortex sequence, which unfolds on a clear day in the prosaic setting of a run-down, overgrown suburban backyard. There’s something particularly unnerving about the stillness of the scene’s wide shots, where one can just make out Gordon in the distance with his arms in the air.
   
• As in all Twin Peaks episodes, there are abundant little touches that give even the most straightforward scenes an element of the weird. The fact that wealthy, hardened gangsters like the Mitchum brothers awaken at 2:00 in the afternoon to eat a breakfast of cold cereal is particularly amusing. However, in terms of sheer whimsical randomness it’s hard to beat Carl’s (Harry Dean Stanton) van-hailing flute, which recalls, of all things, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
   
• When Red trots away from the Double R, the jingly clicking of loose change in his pockets can be faintly heard. A nice sound design touch, that.
   
• One of the recurring features of The Return’s dialog is that Frost and Lynch often seem to be giving voice to the frustrations they imagine long-time Twin Peaks fans are feeling about the show’s apparent disinterest in bringing back the old Cooper any time soon. The unhinged shrieking of the sick girl’s driver is a vivid example: “We’re late! We've got miles to go! We have to go! Please, we have to get home!” As the AV Club observes, it’s becoming evident that the return of the show's title refers to Dale Cooper’s slow reawakening to his old self as much as it refers to any geographic return to the town of Twin Peaks. The Dougie Jones plot isn’t a speed bump on the way to the real story. It is the story. Viewers might soothe their impatience by taking the efficient, reassuring message of the sheriff’s dispatcher to heart: Someone’s on the way.
   
• Sightings: The credits reveal that the woman glimpsed hiding from Becky in the stairwell with Stephen is Gersten Hayward, Donna’s youngest sister. She was last seen in a fairy princess costume, performing one the piano for her family and the Palmers way back in Episode 8 of the original series. (She’s even played by the same actress, Alicia Witt.) It’s another acute reminder that Twin Peaks finds a way to corrupt everything innocent and lovely.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 10

Now the circle is almost complete.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 10 // Original Air Date July 16, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

Absurdity has always been a key feature of David Lynch’s work. Perhaps more so than any other living American filmmaker, Lynch understands how to use the strange to alter the tone of a scene. He wields the ridiculous like a scalpel: amplifying, re-configuring, and even deliberately subverting the sensations conjured by the action’s broad strokes. Part 10 of Twin Peaks: The Return handily illustrates how the director converts standard TV MA drama into material that is deeper, funnier, and more unsettling by adding splashes of the bizarre and the befuddling.

Reduce many of this episode’s more pivotal scenes down to bare-bones plot descriptions, and one has the stuff of countless television shows about sex, violence, and criminal misdeeds. To her chagrin, a middle-aged woman rediscovers her attraction to her husband, thanks to his newly fit physique. A pair of gangland casino bosses learn that the suspiciously lucky customer who racked up 30-plus slot jackpots is also the do-gooder insurance agent who flagged their fraudulent claim. A young, violently unstable criminal terrorizes his own grandmother and mentally disabled uncle into handing over their cash and valuables. A corrupt sheriff’s deputy surreptitiously intercepts a letter that implicates his benefactor in a child’s murder.

There’s nothing particularly “Twin Peaks-y” about any of these sequences in essence, but Mark Frost and David Lynch give them all half a twist (or more) of absurdity, and in the process, mutate their more obvious emotional registers. The abrupt re-ignition of Janey-E Jones’ (Naomi Watts) lust for her husband Dougie—replaced, unbeknownst to her, by Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachan)—could have been a gesture of playful, suburban eroticism. However, Cooper’s current state, not to mention his blissful floppiness during their lovemaking, turns it into something silly, sad, and a little creepy. (Can the mentally enfeebled Dougie even give consent?)

Deputy Chad Broxford’s (John Pirruccello) efforts to seize the letter from witness Miriam Sullivan (Sarah Jean Long) before it lands on the Sheriff’s desk is crooked skulduggery at its worst. Said missive implicates Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) in the hit-and-run death of a child, after all, so Chad is essentially covering up murder. Yet the way the deuputy goes about this act of treachery is so clumsy and transparent that he resembles a schoolkid trying to furtively remove an embarrassing item from his permanent record. Even ditsy receptionist Lucy Brennan (Kimmy Robertson) is immediately suspicious of his flop-sweat antics.

The travails of the Brothers Mitchum (James Belushi and Robert Knepper) are pure crime drama fodder, presented with the kind of minute, faltering plot movements that are a staple of prestige television. Substantively, nothing much happens with respect to the brothers’ story. They learn (from local television news, no less) that the notorious “Mr. Jackpots” who bedeviled their casino was the intended target of hitman Ike the Spike, who was recently arrested by the Las Vegas police. Meanwhile, Mr. C’s officious lieutenant Duncan Todd (Patrick Fischler) attempts to use the brothers as a cat’s paw, coercing dirty insurance agent Tony Sinclair (Tom Sizemore) to pin their flagged insurance claim for a burned hotel on Dougie Jones’ investigative zeal. Tony does so with halting, hyperbolic portentousness, repeating for good measure, "You have any enemy in Douglas Jones." (The brothers' deadpan response to this revelation—"Yeah? Is that it?"—is one of this episode's priceless lines.)

If one distills these scenes with the Mitchums down, all that really occurs is that they confirm “Dougie’s” identity, and are then superfluously provided with a second reason to want the man dead. However, Lynch turns all of the brothers' scenes into gleefully agonizing exercises in distraction and exasperation. Candie (Amy Shiels), one of the mobsters' apparent trio of hovering molls clad in carnation-pink showgirl outfits, is so obsessed with swatting an irritating fly, she doesn’t even notice Rodney until she brains him with a television remote. Although the casino boss is surprised, he’s not particularly angry at the mishap, but it nonetheless provokes Candie into a clingy, uncontrollable fit of guilt. Later, at the casino, Candie is in such a soporific daze that the process of escorting Tony into the brothers’ presence becomes an excruciatingly protracted test of everyone’s patience. It’s rendered even more baffling by Candie’s lethargic claim that her lengthy, animated discussion with Tony on the casino floor was about, of all things, the weather.

The pinnacle of Part 10’s Lynchian absurdity, however, is Richard Horne’s brutal invasion of his grandmother Sylvia’s (Jan D’Arcy) home in search of money. The scene is properly, stomach-churningly awful, with Richard literally choking his grandmother with his bare hands while his self-injuring, mentally disabled uncle Johnny (Erik Rondell) looks on helplessly and whimpers. It’s horrifying, but Lynch elevates it into the sublimely grotesque by adding saccharine music and one insistent detail: a weird, jerry-rigged talking teddy bear that endlessly repeats the chipper greeting, “Hello, Johnny! How are you today?” It goes on and on for several minutes, effectively functioning as the soundtrack to Sylvia and Johnny’s terror. By the end, the desire to see the vile Richard receive some comeuppance for his flagrantly sociopathic behavior is eclipsed by an appeal for SOMEONE TO PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TURN THAT GODDAMN THING OFF.

As with his use of avant-garde technique, Lynch frequently employs the humor of the absurd to highlight the world’s swollen irrationality. Part 10 of The Return is no exception, but this episode also illustrates Lynch’s complex, faintly disdainful treatment of stock scenarios and well-worn genre idioms. Everything is rendered slightly askew: passionate sex scenes seem fatuous, dirty cops are hopelessly inept, underworld plotting become fatiguing, and frightening yet banal violence mutates into something downright surreal. There’s an abiding sense that both Frost and Lynch are on some level contemptuous of formula, even as they rely on its familiarity and revel in its generally unexploited esoteric possibilities.

Twin Peaks is very much a show about borders and intrusion, not just in terms of its Good vs. Evil story, but also at a metaphysical and epistemological level. This has always been an element of Lynch’s work, but it’s in his collaboration with Frost that this theme is realized with terrific clarity and elegance. The recurring Schrödinger-like paradoxes in Twin Peaks—Laura Palmer is dead yet not dead—echo the rebellious yet fluid way that the series moves between its exaggerated fictional universe and the feisty deconstruction of genre and medium. Absurdity is frequently the mechanism by which the show makes these gear changes. Twin Peaks is perpetually stalling, diverting, and embellishing its stories to poke at the viewer’s expectations. The experience is like that of the Mitchum brothers, watching in fidgety, flabbergasted annoyance as Candie regales Tony with a lecture on temperature inversion and air conditioning.

Not everything in Part 10 is presented with such perversity, of course. Richard’s attempted murder of Miriam is a straightforward scene of disturbing violence, although Lynch elides the bloody details somewhat by keeping the camera outside Miriam’s trailer during the actual assault. As Carl Rodd, Harry Dean Stanton gets to show off his guitar picking and marvelously warm singing voice (at 91 years old, no less) on the cowboy standard “Red River Valley” in a brief scene at the Fat Trout Trailer Park. His performance is interrupted by Steven’s (Caleb Landry Jones) spittle-flecked berating and threatening of Becky (Amanda Seyfried), in a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of Leo Johnson’s past abuse of Becky’s mother, Shelly. Meanwhile, the Log Lady’s (Catherine E. Coulson) latest poetic omen to Hawk (Michael Horse) is, as before, conveyed with potent spiritual earnestness, one echoed in Rebekah del Rio’s wistful outro song, “No Stars.”

Notwithstanding the show’s abundant dissident absurdity, there remains an untouchable, authentic dimension to The Return’s story, one referenced in the aforementioned Log Lady message and in Gordon’s Cole’s (David Lynch) fleeting vision: Laura is the one. Despite being dead for 25 years, Laura Palmer is still the Pole Star of Twin Peaks, but the new series is gradually establishing that she is/was something more than a Madonna/whore victim figure. In this, Lynch is continuing a process that began with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which resurrected Laura’s personhood and emphasized the acute tragedy of her life and death. It's still ambiguous whether this retroactive corrective will ultimately be a worthy response to the original series’ concluding gesture of searing nihilism, but it’s a clear indicator of the humane, cosmic optimism that somehow co-exists with Lynch’s penetrating, defiant pessimism. The Return is resolving into the story of Dale Cooper’s homecoming and his final confrontation with his shadow, but it certainly seems as if the key to that return will—and always has been—Laura Palmer.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelly) speaks for ecstatic and frustrated Twin Peaks viewers alike: "You can't fool me! I've been here before!" Likewise Brad Mitchum's furious, disbelieving, "What the fuck?!"
   
• From a plot perspective, the most crucial revelations in Part 10 are relatively understated. Albert’s (Miguel Ferrer) digital snooping uncovers Diane’s response to Mr. C’s text message from Part 9, in which she alerts him to the developments in the Bill Hastings case. Likewise, Tammy (Chrysta Bell) confirms what many viewers may have suspected: Mr. C was somehow involved in the glass box experiment seen in Part 1.
   
• Dwelling on the physical and spiritual laws underlying Twin Peaks' cosmology probably isn't particularly fruitful, but one does wonder how Dale Cooper was able to maintain his trim early thirty-something physique while wandering lethargically around the Black Lodge for two and a half decades. Although Cooper did age, the Lodge evidently acts as a kind of anatomical Tupperware, preserving his G-man physical condition and "bumblebee metabolism."
   
• Candie's over-the-top remorse at accidentally injuring Rodney strikes an exaggerated contrast with Richard and Steven's utterly unrepentant, loathsome behavior towards their supposed loved ones. Here Lynch points to the double standard that renders misogynistic violence all the more abhorrent, wherein women are obliged to perform elaborate rituals of contrition for the slightest offense, while men are afforded second chance after second chance, despite their unforgivable actions.
   
• Wendy Robie gets an actual line in this episode, when Nadine Hurley murmurs glowingly to herself about Dr. Jackoby (Russ Tamblyn), who is seen once again ranting about unspecified government “fucks” on his Internet show. There’s something improbably fanfic-ish about the notion that Nadine now owns a silent drape runner store, as this episode reveals. It’s one of the few clumsy notes in the show’s resurrection of the original series’ characters. The spotlit golden shovel from Jackoby in her display window is a wry touch, however, as is the detail that Nadine is sipping what appears to be a large, calorie-laden coffee drink while the doctor rails against the evils of Big Sugar.
   
• It's not enough that the Mitchum brothers seem like the humorless refugees from a post-classic gangster film in the style of Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma. Rodney also explicitly and rather vainly compares himself to Marlon Brando—a maladroit reference to the character of Vito Corleone in The Godfather by way of the actor who played him.
   
• The incongruous, transparent head of Johnny’s talking teddy bear resembles the main character of Lynch’s animated DumbLand shorts, which present a grotesque, violent parody of typical suburban sitcom tribulations.
   
• Richard’s rampage through his grandmother’s house evokes the disturbing “Singin' in the Rain” scene from A Clockwork Orange, particularly in Johnny’s miserable helplessness as he watches the violent abuse inflicted on his mother. To quote Albert, “Fuck Gene Kelly, you motherfucker.”
   
• Absent the knowledge that the entirety of The Return was in the proverbial can before it began airing, one could be forgiven for assuming that Constance Talbot (Jane Adams) and Albert enjoying a flirty dinner together is a gesture of pure fan service.
   
• Sightings: Singer/songwriter Rebekah del Rio is a returning Lynch player of sorts, having portrayed a version of herself in Mulholland Drive, where she performed a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” She also briefly appeared in Richard Kelly’s notorious post-apocalyptic mind-fuck, Southland Tales, which plays like a glaringly miscalculated gestalt of Lynch, Robert Altman, Michael Bay, and Mike Judge.
   

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 9

What happens in Season 2?

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 9 // Original Air Date July 9, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

In the wake of the avant-garde thunderbolt that was Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, it was perhaps inevitable that the episode that immediately followed it would feel comparatively mundane, particularly if it resumed the series’ more traditional narrative approach. (These things are, of course, relative; Parts 1 through 7 being far more bizarre and audacious than the vast majority of television.) While Part 9 is indeed a “normal” Twin Peaks in most respects, it fulfills a necessary function by returning the viewer with a jolt to the comparatively banal reality of the events in contemporary Twin Peaks, Las Vegas, and South Dakota. In doing so, it underscores the stakes of the show’s proximal storyline, in which Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) metaphorically inches his way back to the town of Twin Peaks. Given the nuclear holocaust, demonic poetry, and overall abstract lunacy that preoccupied the previous episode, this sort of throat-clearing restatement is understandable, and even welcome.

Part 9 is also a crucial intersection where numerous subplots that have thus far been trundling along in relative isolation finally begin colliding into one another. To an even greater degree than Part 7, this chapter features some payoff for the table-setting observed in the first third of the series’ 18 episodes. The characters begin to pull together the disparate elements of the show’s mysteries, and in doing so continue to gradually unravel the truth of Agent Cooper’s fate. The buffoonish yet shrewd Detectives Fusco (David Koechner, Eric Edelstein, and Larry Clark), for example, uncover suggestions of Dougie Jones’ “manufactured” nature (though they do not yet comprehend its meaning), and also manage to lift a fingerprint sample from Cooper, a piece of evidence that will likely lead them to FBI chief Gordon Cole’s (David Lynch) ongoing investigation into his former agent’s disappearance and apparent return. The trio of Las Vegas detectives also capture hitman Ike the Spike (Christophe Zajac-Denek), who is on the verge of clearing out of town in the wake of his botched attempt on Cooper’s life.

After receiving the distressing news of Mr. C’s escape, the FBI agents—Cole, Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), and Tamara Price (Chrysta Bell), with ex-assistant Diane Evans (Laura Dern) along for the ride—double back to South Dakota to confer with the Buckhorn police about the remains of Major Garland Briggs. This uncanny meeting manages to put most of the series’ Good Guys outside of Twin Peaks in one room: Cole’s team, Detective Macklay (Brent Briscoe), coroner Constance Talbot (Jane Adams), and USAF Lieutenant Knox (Adele René). The FBI is filled in on the incongruities regarding the Major’s remains, and is also given the opportunity to interrogate accused murderer Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard), who has been AWOL from the show for several episodes but is still sitting in jail, where his mental condition has apparently deteriorated.

Arguably, much of the investigative business in this episode is repetitive, in that it restates facts that the viewer already knows (or at least suspects), primarily for the benefit of the characters. In a more banal police procedural show, this would constitute a fairly elementary storytelling blunder. In this instance, however, Mark Frost and David Lynch are taking a page from post-The Wire prestige television by adhering to a third person omniscient viewpoint where the viewer often knows more about the big picture than the characters. Part 9 illustrates that the slow, fumbling process of traditional detective work is finally begins to reap some modest dividends, and multiple investigative avenues by multiple parties are starting to cohere. Indeed, Part 9 feels like the sort of relatively eventful episode that typically cropped up about three-quarters of the way through a season of The Wire, when small clues at last accumulated into a low-key investigative breakthrough. (Only to peter out or be smashed to smithereens by the end of the season, in fine The Wire fashion.)

While Twin Peaks has always been a show about detective work, the original series rarely allowed mysteries to simmer for long. Questions would arise, Cooper would ferret out the answer, and then he would go dashing off in pursuit of the next mystery. Connections just led to more connections, revealing an ever-expanding maelstrom of disorder and degeneracy with Laura Palmer at its eye. Every villain’s demise seemed to trigger the appearance of yet more antagonists, who frequently proved increasingly kitschy and inconsequential. Mystical omens were often shown to be superficially prophetic but ultimately meaningless. (“The birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air.”) This sense of running in place was partly attributable to maladroit screenwriting—at least in the back half of Season 2—but it also constituted an act of subversion, an illustration that methodical sleuthing could be a compulsive distraction from other matters.

The Return reinforces this theme by depicting the successful employment of intuition and other non-rational means of investigation. Simultaneously, however, the new series is also absorbed with the incremental, often frustrating nature of detective work in a way that the original seasons never were. In Season 2, seeing one of the Giant's messages (“THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM”) floating in an alphanumerical sea of electronic detritus elicits a little tingle of creepy delight in the viewer. However, that discovery ultimately amounts to nothing. The new series acknowledges the more granular and substantial satisfaction to be gleaned from developments that are cursorily small-bore, but momentous in the wider context of the series. For example, to see representatives of the FBI, Pentagon, and Buckhorn police converge after eight-plus hours is to witness the symbolic unification of numerous mysteries surrounding Cooper, Mr. C, Garland Briggs, and the Black Lodge. In this way, the show asserts that all question marks are essentially building blocks in one big question mark.  Frost and Lynch even manage to reclaim and re-contextualize some of the original series' orphan threads, as in the way that the "COOPER/COOPER" found in Major Briggs' electronic flotsam suddenly seems resonant. (Hawk: "Two Coopers?")

The positioning of Dale Cooper’s fate as the central mystery of The Return is indicative of the new show’s marvelous astuteness and its emergent superiority to the original series. Most of the side avenues plumbed by Cooper and others in Seasons 1 and 2 failed to yield any meaningful revelations beyond “Twin Peaks is rotten to its core.”  (Some of the series’ more hopelessly tangential soap opera subplots had even less to say.) Laura Palmer’s murder was so emphatically positioned as the defining mystery of the show that once her killer was revealed and the facts of her death established—to Frost and Lynch’s vehement objections, purportedly—the series slid decisively off the rails. While Twin Peaks’ enduring rot is still one of the show’s operating principals, Cooper is the point of dramatic investment. He isn’t just the protagonist and audience proxy this time, but the character who most insistently elicits that fundamental urge of episodic television, to Find Out What Happens.

While Part 9 is occupied foremost with the coalescence of subplots that were put into motion in prior episodes, this chapter also slathers on a requisite dose of fresh enigmas. In Twin Peaks, Sheriff Truman (Robert Forster), Deputy Chief Hawk (Michael Horse), and Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) are provided with a sealed capsule that the Major left with his wife Betty (Charlotte Stewart) shortly before his apparent death 25 years ago. Bobby, remarkably, comprehends how to open the strange little container, uncovering a message that indicates a date and a geographic location that only he knows how to find.

While these scenes feature law enforcement officers unearthing a crucial new clue, the contrast with the more traditional policing on display elsewhere in this episode is notable. Other characters gradually and logically assemble a clearer picture of the mysteries at hand, but Bobby relies on knowledge he already possesses to reveal a missive left by his father, one miraculously salient to the present moment. This isn’t precisely intuition, but Bobby’s handling of the vibrating, humming capsule (“Shh!”) is consistent with the series’ insistence on quiet receptiveness to the universe’s messages. Memories of the Major’s optimistic reassurances to his son two and a half decades ago—particularly his touching recollection of a blissful vision where he and Bobby embraced as old friends—adds a sweet dose of pathos to the scene’s atmosphere of esoteric revelation.

Other puzzles and general weirdness abound in this episode. A drug-addled Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelly), still lost in the forest, contends with the paranoid delusion that his own right foot is some sqeaky-voiced alien Other. At the roadhouse, two previously unseen young women, Chloe (Karolina Qydra) and Ella (Sky Ferreira) gripe about the minimum wage grind and drop oblique references to a “zebra” and “penguin.” The new series provides its first glimpse of a troubled Johnny Horne (Erik Rondell), who deliberately runs headlong into a wall, knocking himself into bloody unconsciousness.

The most vividly strange gesture in this episode is told rather than shown: Bill Hastings, questioned by Tammy, breaks down into tearful ramblings about his and the late Ruth Davenport’s foray into a bizarre dimension they dubbed “The Zone.” He recounts encountering Garland Briggs there, as well as other less benign entities, and witnessing the Major’s evident decapitation by some otherworldly force. Lynch turns this familiar species of scene—the police interrogation room—into something downright skin-crawling, partly through his and Frost’s unnerving dialog, partly through discomforting sound design, and partly through Lillard’s blubbering, borderline unhinged performance.

That Lynch can conjure such discombobulating eeriness out of such unassuming raw materials is a testament to his cinematic skill. In the broader context of this episode, however, it also illustrates the impressive balancing act that the new series has maintained thus far. The Return is recognizably Twin Peaks, in that it concerns the same characters and mythos, and often evokes a similar gestalt tone of warmth, menace, and absurdity. However, Frost and Lynch have patently absorbed the hard lessons of the original series, as well as those from the current Golden Age of Television. If Part 8 starkly demonstrated that David Lynch’s vision for the new Twin Peaks will not be compromised by the conventions of narrative drama, Part 9 handily exemplifies the show’s achievements as narrative drama: blending steady concrete plot advancements, tantalizing new mysteries, and pure atmospheric weirdness in a way that the original series rarely managed.

Some miscellaneous observations:  

• Tammy’s agonizingly awkward posing and fidgeting as Gordon and Diane share a cigarette is one of this episode’s more delightfully uncomfortable gestures. The sense that Tammy—an accomplished, attractive woman in a position of authority—feels as alien in her own skin as a gawky teenager is weirdly humanizing. As if to balance out the indignity of her squirming, Lynch immediately segues into Bill Hastings’ interrogation, where Tammy gets to demonstrate exactly why she’s a great agent and an asset to Gordon’s team.
   
• Still searching for the source of the mysterious ringing sound in Ben Horne’s office, he and Beverly share a brief, intimate moment, but Ben puts a stop to any further romance. “You’re a good man, Ben,” Beverly observes, and it’s a testament to Beymer’s performance here and in the original series that this doesn’t scan as an ironic line, but a reflection of Ben’s efforts to become a more decent person in the final stretch of Season 2.
   
• Bill and Ruth’s name for the Lodge(s), “the Zone,” evokes Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece Stalker. In the film, a forbidden area dubbed the Zone is known to possess strange, reality-warping characteristics. The titular stalkers act as illicit guides, leading individual seekers into the Zone in search of the Room, a place where one will allegedly find one’s deepest desires. Tarkovsky’s Zone has many parallels with Lynch’s Black Lodge, particularly in the way that they both shift and mutate to befuddle trespassers. They also both exhibit some apparent connection to psychic potential of the human mind. Not incidentally, Hawk's description of the Lodge doppelgänger as the "Dweller on the Threshold" evokes the Room's threshold, a locale that represents the destination and the climactic turning point in Tarkovsky's film.
   
• The fact that Chantel (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives Mr. C a small bag of Cheetos as a parting gift is the kind of grubby, incongruous detail that makes the new Twin Peaks such a pleasure. The same applies to Deputy Chad’s (John Pirruccello) consumption of two side-by-side frozen “healthy” dinners.
   
• Sightings: The most familiar new face here is, of course, veteran British film and television actor Tim Roth, who dons a dubious rural American accent for the role of Mr. C’s ruthless ally Hutch. Roth is best known in this country for his frequent collaborations with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who cast him in the director’s debut feature Reservoir Dogs following the actor’s international breakout with the likes of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Notably, Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) and Andy (Harry Goaz), who in this episode are embroiled in a sort of faux argument about the color of a chair they are purchasing, are the closest thing Twin Peaks has to a Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, particularly as they are depicted in the new series.
  
  Singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira portrays Ella, the strung-out ex-burger slinger and victim of a distressing armpit rash. Ferreira parlayed Myspace videos of herself into a music career, and from there into films including Eli Roth’s cannibal exploitation homage The Green Inferno and the recent Baby Driver. Karolina Wydra, playing Ella’s sympathetic (and altogether less ragged) friend Chloe, is known primarily for her roles in Crazy Stupid Love and the indie science-fiction flick Europa Report.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8

Drink full and descend.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 8 // Original Air Date June 25, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

When Part 3 of Twin Peaks: The Return originally aired just over four weeks ago, the first half of the episode stood out as one of the most surreal passages in David Lynch’s entire filmography. Dale Cooper’s unhurried, elliptical path out of the Black Lodge was realized as a kind of Orphic journey, governed by the amorphous logic of a particularly bizarre dream. With that episode, Lynch seemed to be pushing against the limits of what was permissible in narrative television in a way that he hadn’t done since Episode 3 of Season 1 and Episodes 7 and 22 of Season 2. If Twin Peaks: The Return did nothing else so pointedly weird in its 18-episode run, Part 3 would embody the show’s gratifying return to the sort of artistic audacity that was evident in the original series’ best moments.

Oh, how laughably simple the world seemed just a month ago.

Roughly 20 minutes into Part 8 of The Return, it becomes apparent that something is happening. Something strange and wonderful and utterly terrifying. Something that seems to strain against the boundaries of the medium, even against the confines of the physical objects that contain the show’s images: the televisions, the monitors, the laptops, the tablets. When an obscene humanoid entity (Erica Eynon) vomits up an organic nimbus containing speckled eggs and dark spheres—one of which holds the leering visage of BOB (Frank Silva)—this foul plasm seems like it might push, Videodrome-like, right through the screen to engulf the viewer. It’s bewildering and frightening. It’s uncut David Lynch, cooked up and injected straight into the jugular.

Part 8 picks up almost exactly where Part 7 concluded, with Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan) and Ray Monroe (George Griffith) speeding away from prison and through an oppressively lightless night in the South Dakota wilds. What follows is a sequence of betrayal straight out of a gritty Western neo-noir. Ray (perhaps unwisely) attempts to extort money out of Mr. C by dangling the important information he’s been sitting on for several episodes. When Ray stops on a lonely, unpaved road for a piss break, Mr. C attempts to take his lackey unawares, but it is he that is instead shot and apparently killed. “Tricked ya, fucker,” Ray gloats when the gun Mr. C has retrieved from the glove box clicks impotently, allowing Ray to pull a weapon of his own and squeeze off two shots into the man's chest.

Things take a turn for the strange when Ray attempts to put a third and final bullet into Mr. C's head: Rumbling, lightning-like flashes signal the appearance of supernatural forces. While Ray watches in perplexed terror, three identical phantasmal figures (described only as “Woodsman”) scuttle out of the darkness and cavort bizarrely around the fallen Mr. C. These entities resemble the filthy vagrant previously seen in the holding cell and hallway at the Buckhorn police department, but here they seem more like capering demons on Bald Mountain. They appear to claw hungrily into Mr. C’s flesh, smearing blood on his face and ripping open his abdomen, out of which emerges a bulging organ with BOB’s face.

At this point, Part 8 cuts to the roadhouse in Twin Peaks, where “the” Nine Inch Nails—as they are erroneously introduced by the emcee and amusingly named in the credits—perform “She’s Gone Away.” The insertion of what amounts to a performance-style music video into the middle of an episode is unusual, in that The Return has typically utilized the roadhouse shows as outro sequences, providing a musical background for the absorption of the previous hour’s sights and sounds. NIN’s song, intruding relatively early into Part 8’s running time and playing unbroken for four and a half minutes, serves an emphatically different purpose, one consistent with the sharp contrast between the band’s distorted industrial rock sound and, say, the dream pop of the Chromatics (Part 1) or the vintage country of the Cactus Blossoms (Part 3).

In terms of the episode’s structure, NIN’s performance is akin to a hymn during a church service, an interlude that provides a period of expressive release. In this instance, however, the music is not glorifying a deity but seemingly lamenting the predations of some profane, malevolent Other. (The lyrics are eerily applicable to the murder of Laura Palmer: “I was watching on the day she died / we keep licking while the skin turns black / cut along the length, but you can’t get the feeling back / she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone away.”) This is fitting, given that Part 8, perhaps more than any other episode of Twin Peaks to date, is about BOB, and specifically the story of how he slithered his way into the world. NIN’s screeching intermezzo isn’t just a hymn, but also an overture, setting the stage for the violations—of bodies, minds, time, space, and technology—that are about to unfold. Right on cue, the song concludes with a cut back to Mr. C, who awakens from his apparent death with a jolt.

It would be easy enough to simply recount everything that happens on screen in the fucked-up avant-garde nightmare that follows, but no matter how vivid, descriptions cannot possibly replicate the experience of watching it. It's perhaps best to forego encyclopedic recollection of every detail and instead touch on the major gestures and the moods that they evoke. The sequences that make up the remaining 42 minutes of this episode constitute a deep, dizzying plunge into the kind of abstracted imagery and evocative cinematic iconography that characterize Lynch’s early short films, such as “Six Figures Getting Sick,” “The Alphabet,” and “The Grandmother.” Most of all, Part 8 feels like the second coming of the David Lynch who created the freakish Eraserhead, a film where the sheer, menacing wrongness of every frame more than earns the feature’s notorious tagline, “Where your nightmares end.” Part 8 of The Return could be the inversion of that phrase, as this episode reveals the Ground Zero where a cosmic evil wriggled its way into the material plane of existence. This is where nightmares begin.

It starts in White Sands, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 at approximately 5:29 a.m with the initiation of the Trinity nuclear test. The first atomic bomb explosion changes something forever, not just in terms of politics and history, but in terms of humanity’s fundamental place in the universe. Lynch posits this as the moment when the evil that’s been lurking at the periphery of reality (the "Dweller on the Threshold," to borrow Hawk's phrase) finally finds an ingress into the physical world. It seems obvious that the forces that BOB represents are older than the atomic bomb, of course. In Episode 3 of Season 1, Sheriff Harry Truman describes “a sort of evil” that’s “been out there for as long as anyone can remember,” and the show has previously intimated that the Black Lodge is, if not eternal, at least as old as humankind. However, Trinity ushers in an era when a godlike power of destruction would be at humanity’s fingertips for the first time. What better age for BOB, a malicious entity who is “eager for fun,” than the age of nuclear fire and all-pervading fear?

Lynch illustrates BOB’s blasphemous birth or invasion through a smorgasbord of cinematic styles. It begins with a slow, mesmerizing zoom into the Trinity mushroom cloud, its liquid flame somehow rendered even more frightening in crisp black and white. Scored to the demonic keening of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” it’s one the lushest sequences that Lynch has ever directed and it’s utterly, nauseatingly terrifying. There’s no need to project BOB’s face onto the atomic cloud; the unholy screeching of Penderecki's composition and the alarming beauty of the roiling nuclear plasma convey his arrival just as effectively.

From there, Part 8 descends into its most abstract passages, as images flash and ooze at a dizzying pace. Here are blooming inky pools of darkness, swarms of flecks and filaments, and blurry expanses of dully-colored nothing. Here are pulsing tunnels of clouds erupting with magenta and amber fire, evoking the cosmic voyages of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tree of Life, except with a cast of convulsing malignancy. Here is an old-fashioned gas station, bluntly labeled “CONVENIENCE STORE,” where smoke pours from the door in stuttering plumes and figures resembling the Woodsman (Woodsmen?) flicker in and out of existence. Here is the sexless, vomiting creature (named only as “Experiment” in the credits) floating in the void with its stream of ovarian excretions.

Eventually, the raw-nerved momentum of these images dissipates. In the scene that follows, a rocky promontory juts from the windswept, purple sea that Cooper observed in Part 3. Atop this spire stands a pale, fantastical stronghold, where a strange sequence of events unfolds. This is more grounded in conventional narrative than the impressionistic passage that preceded it, but still relatively opaque. The Giant (Carel Struycken) and a lavishly dressed woman named Señorita Dido (Joy Nash) are alerted by the ringing of an electrical bell-shaped structure, one of several such devices throughout the complex. This prompts the Giant to review a film of the preceding atomic detonation and its chaotic aftermath—the very footage the viewer has just seen, in fact. He then enters an altered state of some kind, levitating and spewing golden ephemera from his head, which coalesce into a sparkling orb with Laura Palmer’s face. Dido kisses this radiant sphere and then propels it into a tubular contraption that spews the orb into a projected image of Earth. This whole sequence is at once strange and lovely, but its most intriguing aspect is it otherworldly stillness. The Giant is alarmed at the sight of BOB’s face in the Experiment’s vomited fluid, but his response is not urgent. It’s methodical and reverent in its way, and the manner in which Dido plants a kiss on the “Laura orb” is quietly rapturous.

What follows is the lengthy final sequence of Part 8, which plays like an R-rated variation on an Atomic Age creature feature, with a dash of Night of the Living Dead’s mood of apocalyptic upheaval. In New Mexico it is now 1956, and on this particular night several terrifying and apparently related events unfold in a nameless town. A spotted, rock-like egg expelled by the Experiment lies in the sand, where it hatches into a repellent insect-amphibian hybrid creature. More tattered, soot-caked Woodsmen materialize in the desert and march towards civilization. They encounter and terrorize a middle-aged couple in a car on a lonely stretch of highway, recalling horror features, such as The Hills Have Eyes, where cannibals and mutants come shambling out of the wastes. The lanky leader of these figures (also named the Woodsman, played by Robert Broski), has the chin curtain beard and hollow cheeks of a demonic Abraham Lincoln. He leans with an unlit cigarette through the driver’s side window of the couple's vehicle and repeatedly croaks, “Got a light?”

This particular Woodsman eventually shuffles towards a rural radio station, where he repeats his query mechanically as he crushes the skulls of a receptionist (Tracy Phillips) and disc jockey (Cullen Douglas). Meanwhile, a young teenage Girl (Tikaeni Faircrest) and Boy (Xolo Mariduena) stroll to the end of a date, the Boy concluding the night with a chaste peck on the Girl's cheek as he leaves her at her parents' door. While she lounges on her bed in the afterglow of adolescent puppy love, the Girl and the rest of the town’s residents listen to the crooning sound of the Platters’ “My Prayer” on the radio. The song abruptly ends and is replaced by the buzzing of the Woodman’s voice, who repeatedly recites a disquieting poem that sends the listeners into an unnatural sleep. Everyone but the Girl, that is, who cooperatively lays down and closes her eyes as the Woodman’s words drone on. Meanwhile, the locust-frog critter enters her room through the open window, and when the Girl obligingly opens her mouth, the repulsive creature crawls down her throat. The Woodsman then walks away into the desert night, his silhouette blending into the smeary digital murk.

Though many will doubtlessly try, it’s probably a futile effort to parse what is shown in Part 8 into a totally coherent cosmology or history. Lynch is working partly in the realms of metaphor and abstraction, and through Twin Peaks (and other works) he has expressed an affinity for seemingly paradoxical truths, in the fashion of Zen koans or quantum superposition. Did the atomic bomb give birth to BOB, or did it simply allow the birth of BOB, or has BOB always been out there in the darkness? Yes, yes, and yes. Making sense of it all through strictly rational means is a fool’s errand. Arguably, one of the purposes of avant-garde art—and stretches of Part 8 absolutely constitute avant-garde television—is to reflect the madness that the artist perceives in the world. If the work of art doesn’t make sense, it's because the world doesn’t make sense, notwithstanding the admittedly soothing self-deceptions that everyone internalizes to keep moving forward day after day.

In Episode 9 of Season 2, Albert Rosenfield provided, in an atypically understated way, the clearest description of BOB’s nature: “Maybe that’s all BOB is… the evil that men do.” Much of Part 8 feels incomprehensible because its subject, the evil that men do, is incomprehensible. The original Twin Peaks—and Fire Walk with Me, in a more pointed fashion—was a story about the banal evil of rape and violence that occurs within domestic spaces. While such abuse is routinely declared “unthinkable,” its pervasiveness reveals otherwise. What is truly meant by “unthinkable” is that people would rather not to think about it, preferring to look the other way. One thinks of Bobby Briggs’ outburst at Laura Palmer’s funeral in Season 1, wherein he takes the entire town to task for their denial and passivity: “You damn hypocrites make me sick. Everybody knew she was in trouble, but we didn’t do anything. All you good people.”

In this context, that the Trinity test should be the gateway for BOB’s entry into the world is fitting, as there are few things on Earth more unfathomable than the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. Except perhaps the fact that good people (the freedom-loving U.S. of A., in fact) used such weapons to kill other people by the hundreds of thousands, and the fact that some people alive today would willingly use them again to snuff out millions or billions of lives. The shadow of atomic annihilation—the nuclear sword of Damocles that has mutated from Fat Man and Little Boy to an ICBM to a terrorist’s dirty bomb—is unthinkable in the same way that a father raping his own daughter is unthinkable. To accept the reality of it is to acknowledge that the world is an unsupervised madhouse.

Part 8 looks hard into the white eyes of that madness and doesn’t flinch, even when it discerns that the comforts of modern life are part of the problem. One of the main enigmas of David Lynch’s work is that while he evinces a persistent fascination with the tangible aspects of technology—from the decrepit pseudo-steampunk machinery of Eraserhead to the Giant’s bell-shaped electric receivers in this episode—he also has a strong streak of Luddite skepticism. This aspect of the director’s work is clearly evident in Part 8, and not just in its obvious linking of weaponized nuclear fission with an invading force of absolute evil. Significantly, the same radio signal that brings the smooth harmonies of the Platters into people’s homes and workplaces also broadcasts the soporific chant that primes citizens for infiltration by a mutant horror. Technology doesn’t merely improve quality of life and mediate connections between individuals; it also enables terrible evil, expanding its reach and imbuing it with an enhanced capacity to spread suffering.

The appearance of the otherworldly convenience store—a recurring Lodge-associated locale in Twin Peaks mythos—is likewise evocative. Not only does such a store show up in the flurry of images that follow the Trinity test, but the Boy and Girl stroll right past a similar gas station during their walk home in 1956. (The store where the Lodge inhabitants convene exists outside conventional space, but its real world corollaries are ubiquitous on Earth.) The titular “convenience” of these stores is, of course, for the benefit of motorists, freshly liberated in the 1950s to guzzle petroleum while crisscrossing the nation on ribbons of petroleum-based asphalt. The store is a symbol of automotive modernity, but also of consumption, disposability, and despoiling extraction. The odor of scorched motor oil, it should be remembered, is often presented as a telltale sign of BOB’s presence, and the head Woodsman doesn’t look so much burned as coated head to toe in axle grease.

Ultimately, what is Part 8 about? In the words of Hawk, “I don’t know, but….” It seems reasonable to conclude that the episode is an origin story about evil, although its 1940s-50s setting subverts the expectation that such tales unfold in pre-historical legendary times. To borrow from the lexicon of Christian mythology, this isn’t the story of Lucifer’s Rebellion, or of the Fall of Man, or the Great Flood. It’s the story of Armageddon, with Trinity serving as the first trumpet that signals a new age of ascendant depravity. Only there is no subsequent judgment or second coming, only chaos, much like the little girl’s apocalyptic vision described in Inland Empire: “Fire and smoke and blood rain… you know, like they say. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth.”

More so than the birth of BOB, Part 8 concerns the birth of modernity. It would be tempting for a pedant to second-guess how Lynch chooses to represent this moment. Did the rampant dehumanization that conventional wisdom attaches to the Western world of the 20th century truly begin with the Manhattan Project? A historian might make an alternate case for, say, the debut of mechanized mass murder during the Great War. However, there is something undeniably evocative about the idea of contemporary history kicking off with its own Big Bang, with light and fire blossoming seemingly ex nihilo from a singularity.

Likewise, the timing of the Woodsman’s broadcast and the emergence of the locust-frog has its own thematic weight. Fast-forwarding 11 years after Trinity gives the illusions of the Post-War period ample time to settle over the American landscape like a cozy, woolen blanket. It allows for a neo-Victorian myth of wholesome American innocence to take hold. By 1956 it would be well-established even in Soccoro County, New Mexico, where the most terrible weapon the world has ever known was built literally just down the road. Lynch doesn’t suggest that this wholesomeness is a put-on—the sweet murmurings of romance between the Girl and Boy are painfully genuine—but rather that it conceals something hideous that people would rather forget. Squatting above every squeaky-clean Texaco station is a monster, and it manifests not just through lurid psychopaths like Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth, Wild at Heart’s Bobby Peru, or Lost Highway’s Mr. Eddy. It’s all the evil that men do.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Part 8’s opening scenes recede a bit in light of the massively WTF character of the rest of the episode, but the exchanges between Mr C. and Ray are delectably thick with menace. The highlight is the way that Ray obliviously talks himself into a metaphorical grave when he concurs that he’d “probably like to go to that place they call ‘The Farm.’” This suggests the expression “bought the farm," as well the white lie parents tell when a beloved but ailing pet dog is sent to (ahem) live on a farm. In the context of Peaks lore, 'the Farm,' also evokes Dead Dog Farm, a safe house for cocaine trafficking back in Twin Peaks, which in turn reminds one of the severed dog leg in Mr. C's trunk. Incidentally, Ray is admirably collected and matter-of-fact in his assessment of what transpired with Mr. C’s body and the spectral Woodsmen: “I think he’s dead, but he’s found some kind of help, so I’m not 100%.”
   
• It’s easily lost amid all the other weirdness of the Giant and Dido sequence, but there’s an unsettling moment when the Giant turns and stares directly into the camera (and thus at the viewer) for an awkwardly long time. Something about Struycken’s anxious expression, held in close-up for 24 uncomfortable seconds, gives this shot a disturbing fourth-wall-busting quality, as though the Giant was aware of all the people out there in their living rooms, watching him. It’s reminiscent of the disquieting way that the murderous Lars Thorwald seems to be directly addressing the filmgoer at the climax of Rear Window.
   
• Radio station KPJK’s musical selection is not incidental. The Platters were one of the first African-American R&B groups to crack the Billboard charts—with their massive doo-wop hit, “Only You”—signaling the imminent breakout of rock and roll. In 1956, however, racial segregation was still a matter of law in most Southern states, notwithstanding Brown v. Board of Education. It was the year of the noxious, anti-integration Southern Manifesto, and of Virginia's Senator Harry F. Byrd’s call for “massive resistance” to Brown's implementation. There’s something unnervingly suggestive about a 1950s black vocal group being preempted by a malevolent signal that puts all the white people to sleep.
   
• Sightings: There aren’t too many familiar faces in Part 8, partly because there aren’t that many recognizably human characters. The Boy in 1956 is portrayed by Xolo Maridueña, who is best known for his recurring role as sullen adopted son Victor Graham in later seasons of the Parenthood television series. Otherwise, this episode mostly features returning actors and unknown faces. Oh, and “the” Nine Inch Nails as themselves.