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Twin Peaks: The Return, Part Five

“Hawk, have you found any Indians? Anywhere? I haven’t found any Indians.”
“No, Andy.”

In his review of Part Three, Thomas pointed out that, although “there is a sense of direction here,” it can be “inherently futile” to review a long-form story like Twin Peaks: The Return. True, since we don’t know which direction we’re going in. But also true because some episodes, like this one, are more impressionistic than plotty. They provide few answers and fewer questions.

The moments that stayed with me from this episode were wordless scenes: Cooper’s empty shell crying at the sight of Dougie Jones’s son. Shelly Johnson and Norma Jennings with their arms around each other’s waists, looking at Shelly’s daughter while remembering their own wild, youthful mistakes. The shot of the man in the bar before he strangled the girl: he looked like the love child of a viper who mated with a young Matthew McConaughey.

That’s not to say that nothing happened. We did learn some things. In the jail cell, EvilCooper, or “Rode Hard and Put Away Wet” Cooper, which is how I think of him, wasn’t certain that Bob was still inside him. That raises an interesting question: if Bob’s presence isn’t driving the EvilCooper body, who is? CooperMinusASoul?

(Can someone please come up with some handy nicknames?!)

EvilCooper also has remarkable knowledge: using an old-fashioned phone he was able to make the jail go haywire. Why? Just to show off his ability? Or was he planning something? The shot of EvilCooper staring at surveillance camera reminded me of Coop doing the same thing in Fire Walk With Me. In that scene, Coop was recreating a dream that involved David Bowie apparently stopping time.

(I have nowhere to go with that, and it's probably nothing more than a visual echo, anyway.)

I assume EvilCooper is the one who wanted Dougie killed. But is he responsible for the gang of thugs in the black car or the explosive on Dougie’s car? Both? If so, that’s some Ramsey-Bolton-level willingness to kill minions.

But all of that is ambiguity rather than direction. Like Thomas, I trust we’re going somewhere. But I’m not sure where that is, or what I’m supposed to want. Besides Coop, of course. I want Coop back. He was the center of the first iteration of Twin Peaks. At this point, The Return is orbiting around an empty space.

Damn Fine Coffee:

• Major Briggs’s fingerprints keep showing up at crime scenes. I’m very curious to see where we’re going with that.

• Dr. Jacoby is a conspiracy-theorist video blogger who sells gold spray-painted shovels. Okay.

• Amanda Seyfried is Shelly’s daughter, Becky Burnett, who is married to a guy who is such a disaster he couldn’t even get a job from Mike, Bobby’s high-school friend.

• The bar scene, in which the probably-a-drug-dealer guy tried to strangle the young woman, reminded me of why I can never finish the last 75% of Fire Walk With Me: David Lynch is excellent at showing the extraordinary, quotidian horror of sexual violence.

• I’ve been reading Mark Frost’s companion book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks. It’s a collection of documents, organized and annotated by an unknown compiler, with additional footnotes by an FBI agent who goes by the initial T.P. That is likely Tammy Preston, or—as I like to think of her—the female FBI agent who isn’t played by David Duchovny.

• The documents collected in that book date back to Lewis and Clark. Lewis was the first white person to discover the weirdness of the Twin Peaks area. The Native Americans gave him a ring with a runic owl sketched on it, but told him never to wear it. Due to Masons, the Illuminati, Aaron Burr, and the Louisiana Purchase, the ring went missing. But I think we know where it is now

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

3 comments:

  1. I'd be very happy if we could see Briggs again. Is the actor signed on? Is he still alive? Thanks for the review :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. The actor, Don S. Davis, died in 2008.

    One fan theory is that the body in the bed (the one with someone else's head on top) belongs to Major Briggs.

    He plays a role in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, although I think the actor brought so much to the part that just reading about Briggs isn't the same.

    ReplyDelete

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