Twin Peaks: The Return, Episodes 1 & 2

I decided a bit belatedly that I was going to attempt to recap Twin Peaks: The Return, even though the non-linear nature of the show basically defies explanation. Just a forward: I was late to the Twin Peaks bandwagon. I loved many a show that explicitly called out TP as an influence (The XFiles, the Sopranos, The Killing, LOST, etc), but had never watched it myself until I was stuck at home with the flu in early 2012. Needless to say, it blew my mind and it’s fascinated me since just how prolific and iconoclast it was. I was elated when David Lynch announced its revival (especially since Laura Palmer famously told Agent Cooper she’d see him again in 25 years waaaaay back in 1990 – way to follow through, Fate!). That all being said, consider this a warning:

As groundbreaking as Twin Peaks wound up being, David Lynch isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is. Twin Peaks is profound in spite of this because it’s the closest thing we have on television to a true exploration of the nature of dreams and the powerful force that is the subconscious, but that’s only because Lynch is a stubborn asshole who refuses to put his stream-of-consciousness ideas into the narrative box that viewers/studios expect and are trained in. His work is hardly ever coherent, and to some extent that is the point. You may not remember the literal events that take place in a dream – but you remember the terror you experienced after a nightmare, even after the details slip away. Twin Peaks’ impact is similar – it’s an emotional and psychological event; the content sticks with you long after viewing it. This doesn’t really translate well to serialized story telling format, obviously. Trying to compromise with studio execs and provide narrative answers to satisfy consumer demand obviously defies Lynch’s intent as an artist. Square people want a straightforward murder mystery: Twin Peaks is not that. It was a great amalgamation of things – a noir soap-opera, a surrealist dark comedy, an esoteric supernatural thriller. That’s a lot of threads and Lynch isn’t really great tying up the loose ends, so not everything meshed well together. It was far from perfect; don’t even get me started on the dumpster fire that was Fire Walk With Me. But if you’ve watched anything on TV by JJ Abrams or Damon Lindleoff you should be fucking used to that by now (there are literally 340927345987 mysteries LOST introduced an then never resolved, for example). In conclusion: if you didn’t like Twin Peaks before and you aren’t a lover of frustrating narratives like The Leftovers or LOST, you aren’t going to magically ‘get’ the TP Revival. Even if you did love Twin Peaks and all of the shows that have been influenced by it since – you may not ‘get’ it either. Don’t get pissy about it right away – it may take 2-3 rewatches before you can really make a fair judgment of the work. That’s the nature of David Lynch.

Now that that’s out of the way….

We begin in the Red Room (which is filmed in black and white, because reasons?) with the Giant and Dale Cooper.

 

We last saw Agent Dale Cooper 25 years ago, trapped in the Black Lodge by BOB, his body in our reality now occupied by his evil Doppelgänger. The giant has some strange commentary for Coop as forboding scratching/skipping sounds emanate from an old school gramophone. “It is in our house now. Remember 4-3-0. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone. It all cannot be said aloud now.” We don’t know what any of it means and no one on Reddit will know until at least the end of this season, so relax: you’re not stupid, we’re just ignorant of the symbolism as of yet.

Cut to the woods surrounding Twin Peaks, where Dr. Jacoby (Laura Palmer’s unsanctioned psychiatrist, who according to cannon published in The Secret history of Twin Peaks, actually moved to Hawaii after losing his license to practice in Washington State) is apparently living in a trailer, and is receiving a delivery of shovels. *shrug* Your guess is as good as mine.

We leave there and wind up in NYC, at the top of a building which houses a giant glass cube with a room full of cameras filming it, supervised by a dude in his 20s named Sam who changes the memory cards in the cameras and, as we later learn, is responsible for watching the box in order to observe if something should pop up in there. You know, like, just your standard night gig to pay for college.

Shrodinger's Box

Sam has a lady admirer, Tracy, who shows up to bring him a latte, but she’s prevented by the stoic night guard from tagging along upstairs to watch the box. His work is classified in some way; and we’re not entirely sure if Tracy is genuinely into Sam, or if she’s actually just trying to get a glimpse at what is in the room. Later on in the episode, she returns, only to find that the guard is missing, and Sam confirms that he really is gone and not just using the (disturbingly creepy) bathroom. So he brings Tracy upstairs, where he explains to her the parameters of the job.

She asks if it’s some kind of science experiment, and he says he thinks it’s all funded by a billionaire, and that the last guy who had his job actually saw something in the box but wouldn’t or couldn’t reveal what he saw. Naturally, they start fooling around on the couch– which is when darkness itself seems to manifest inside the box. “A watched pot never boils” goes the old proverb – which is an idea confirmed by particle physics; actions are effected simply by being observed. The pair eventually notices the box has filled up with a terrifying blackness, where a pale, naked, faceless creature can be seen, and eventually forces its way out the confines of the cube, filling the room with blackness, where it seemingly tears apart (eats?) the lovers on the couch (It reminded me of the Smoke Monster from LOST, only more obtuse with better effects). Horror 101, guys: sex = death. C’est la mort.

The new murder mystery plot picks up after our first look in on Sam, in a place called Buckhorn, South Dakota, where a woman is disturbed by a smell emanating from her neighbor’s apartment as she heads back to her own, and in an exceedingly long and drawn out sequence, it is discovered by the police that the neighbor, Ruth Davenport, is dead. Not just dead, though. Beheaded, missing her body, but placed very carefully atop a decapitated male corpse under the covers in her bed. So a death as shocking for this small town as Laura Palmer’s was in Twin Peaks.

Then we’re following Doppelganger Cooper, whose long hair and sleazy wardrobe is visual cue enough to convey that he is a Bad Guy. He picks up some colleagues from a house that is, by his standards, very poorly guarded – their names are Ray and Darya. It’s unclear what exactly their roles are; the plan is unspoken if there is one at all. We head back to Buckhorn, where the police there discover that the fingerprints that are all over Ruth’s apartment belong to Bill Hastings, the local high school principle. This is a small town so everyone knows him and it’s understandably awkward when the detectives have to go and arrest him. His wife is more pissed that he’s going to miss dinner with friends than she is that her husband is being arrested for they-don’t-know-what, so right away we’re led to believe something is off with her. Bill is questioned about Ruth, who he claims to have only a passing acquaintance with, but it’s pretty obvious he knows her in the Biblical sense and they were having an affair at some point. Bill is locked up and doesn’t look good – he seems authentically horrified, but also like he knows more than he disclosed. The cops search the house under the glowering supervision of Phyllis Hastings, and they seem to find a chunk of flesh under the fishing equipment in Bill’s trunk. I guess an ear would have been too Lynchian even for Lynch. This concludes Part One of the season opener.

Part Two opens back with presumed murderer Bill Hastings, whose wife has come to visit him in jail. He admits that he had a bad dream where he was in Ruth’s apartment – but insists he wasn’t there in real life. They fight viciously over their separate affairs – his with Ruth, hers with their lawyer George, and the interaction ends with her basically gleefully telling him he’s fucked because his very real prints are all over her room and he’s going to rot in prison. Not exactly the reaction you’d expect from even a moderately unsatisfied wife. Bill has all the tell-tale signs of a BOB possession, which we were privy to with Leland Palmer in the first series. As we pan along the jail cells were Bill is understandably losing his shit, we see a weird, gray, statue-like man sitting on the bed two cells down, and he simply fades away. This all begs the question: was Bill possessed and driven to kill his lover in the same nightmarish way that Leland was compelled to molest and murder his daughter Laura Palmer?

Meanwhile, it seems Bad Dale is somehow tied up in Ruth Davenport’s murder case. We see for sure that Mrs. Hastings is no innocent when she arrives home, where Doppelganger Dale is waiting for her in the shadows. They seem acquainted – he even tells her that she “did good, imitating human nature perfectly.” Wait, does thing imply Phyllis is the meat suit of a different BOB-like entity, or else another manifestation of BOB (this brings up an interesting related question: Is Bad Dale BOB, or is Doppelganger Dale a totally separate entity? A manifestation of BOB? Was that thing in the jail cell another being from the Black Lodge, or again some sort of version of BOB? It’s too early to make assumptions; any of those theories or none may be true)!? He then pulls a gun on her, informs her it’s George’s, and shoots her dead in the hallway. The discovery of her body is going to seriously fuck with the investigation of Ruth Davenport’s murder, it’s safe to assume.

We cut away to a swanky hotel in Las Vegas, where a Mr. Todd implores his assistant Roger to “tell her she has the job.” Roger asks why Mr. Todd allows an unnamed man to coerce him into doing unnamed things, and the response is “You better hope you never get involved with someone like him.” Introducing brand new characters this way is maddeningly pretentious (like being asked to solve a math equation when there are 3 unknown variables), but I suspect the point is to build suspense and suggest that the unknown “him” is either the same billionaire funding Sam’s glass cube project, or perhaps Bad Dale.

Speaking of Bad Dale, he and his cronies are at a diner, and we find out he hooked up with these two because he needs information from Bill Hasting’s secretary.  Unfortunately for Ray and Darya, Bad Dale lands proof they were contracted to kill him by tapping a conversation they had on the motel phone. Why and who wants him dead is a mystery (as is everything else in these two episodes), so Bad Dale kills Darya after a long period of menacing her for information about who hired her. We see that Bad Dale has access to FBI databases through a briefcase laptop – who did he steal this from, I wonder?

Back to Good Dale Cooper, who is in the Red Room now with Laura Palmer, speaking backwards like the other beings native to this un-reality (It’s always been my own personal theory that the reverse speak/backward-movement-in-forward- motion gimmick is meant to imply that the Red Room /Black Lodge are a place outside of time, where the future and the past coincide simultaneously –akin to True Detective’s “time is a flat circle” idea.  Earlier, one-armed MIKE even asks Cooper if it’s the future or the past, which makes it seem more likely that when in the Black Lodge it’s unclear to the inhabitants at what point in history it is in our linear reality. The effect is less annoying when I consider it in this way, at any rate). Coop seems unsure whether this is actually Laura or not, because she’s been dead since before he got to this realm. She cryptically responds “I am dead, yet I live.” She whispers a secret in his ear, and then is ripped away from the room in a violent and confusing manner that evokes the carnage that befell Sam and Tracey in NYC.

We spend a lot of time with Good Dale in the Red Room, where he next encounters a thin tree with a pulsating talking brain, who self-identifies as an evolution of “The Arm” (previous manifestations possibly include the dancing dwarf from the original series). This is some straight up Doctor Who type shit, and I fully sympathize with people who “just can’t” when this sort of gimmick crops up because it’s bizarre even for an already bizarre dream-like sequence.

You can't even make this shit up...

The Arm tells Good Dale that it’s been 25 years and it’s time for him to return to his body – but unfortunately before he can return to our world, Doppelganger Dale has to come back to the Black Lodge – which we hear him say explicitly before he kills Darya he refuses to do. Dale meanders around the corridors outside of the Red Room, and at one point The Arm pops up, screams “NON EXISTENT” at him with full Dalek inflection, and the iconic zig-zag floor swallows Dale, dropping him through a jumbled black and white haze, after which he materializes in the very same box that Sam is supposed to be watching, only we don’t see him or Tracy. The cube explodes – was Good Dale the creepy thing that attacks Sam and Tracy on the couch!? Did this take place before or after that event? Was he the thing the guy before Sam saw? We don’t know and if we find out at all it won’t be for a while so I wouldn’t stress it too much.

If you’re upset that we spent so much time with new people and not much with the old cast, I was too, but with so many more episodes ahead, I wasn’t too bothered. The most important of these check-ins are the phone conversations between a frail Log Lady and an aged Deputy Hawk. The Log Lady says that Hawk will find something that is missing that is tied in with his Native American heritage, and it involves Special Agent Dale Cooper. The actress who portrays the Log Lady shot these scenes while battling cancer and later died after her scenes wrapped, so they feel especially raw and poignant.  There’s an irritatingly literal vignette with Sheriff’s Department Secretary Lucy, a cute moment where Lucy and Deputy Andy recall that their son Wally is 24 so Agent Cooper went missing even before his birth. We see Ben Horne and his hippified brother Jerry at the Great Northern (Ben’s new secretary is Ashley Judd!), where they have a humorous exchange about whether Ben is sleeping with the “new girl…woman” after Ben expositorily mentions that a skunk incident at the hotel upset a valued customer from New York, and Jerry expounds his lucrative pot-growing side business. We end Part Two of the opener at the Bang Bang Bar, which is still a happening place with a chanteuse-fronted synth pop band playing to a crowd of people including Shelly and James, who were teens when last we saw them. James spots Shelly from across the bar while Shelly is complaining to her girlfriends that her daughter is dating a jerk named Steve (and she would know a thing or two about shitty boyfriends). Her friends are a little skeeved by the attention but Shelly brushes it off, saying “James is still cool. He’s always been cool.”

Here’s to hoping there’s more clarity about Good Dale/Bad Dale and that we get to see more of the characters we know and love in the episodes to come.