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.

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

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

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some miscellaneous observations:

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

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

We are living in a dark, dark age.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some miscellaneous observations:

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