Spoiler alert: this blog is for Twin Peaks viewers who have seen episode seven of The Return, showing on Showtime on the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched.
This third season has already offered a nice line in knowing self-reference (“I don’t understand this situation at all,” said Gordon Cole, as he sat perplexed/enchanted as the rest of us in episode four). In episode seven, the show went a step further and offered something like its own recap. It reprised plot. It revisited old friends, and found that some were much the same. Others, however, were not quite as they once were.
‘Whatever this is about, I hope it turns out all right for you’
Much as Dougie was tasked to review suspect insurance claims, the Log Lady has advised Hawk to investigate the irregularities in what happened to Agent Cooper. So after a brief interlude in which Jerry Horne reveals himself to be the only person psychically robust enough to be stoned amid the symbolic menace of the local woodland, we move to the Sheriff’s Department, where Hawk and Frank are examining Laura Palmer’s diary fragments – discovered by Hawk in the bathroom door last week. As the pair explain for the benefit of anyone watching without also having seen Fire Walk With Me, whoever it was who came out of the clearing with Annie that night 25 years ago, “the Good Dale is in the Lodge”. Frank then reveals a nicely-woodworked PC monitor when he Skypes with the moral centre of the Twin Peaks community, Doc Hayward.
‘There’s a body all right’
At this stage of the game, we think we’re about straight with our Dales. Escape from the Lodge, portals, doppelgangers and the transmission of spirit across space and time. Yep. There was some nasty interference there for a while but, happily, it looks as if Good Dale is slowly coming together, his strands coalescing. Poor old Garland Briggs (in the original show a delightful mirror for Cooper’s spiritual nature and patriotic humility) is having no such luck. His fingerprints are showing up all over the place, cast haphazardly into the world like Cooper’s room key from the Great Northern, and now – as Lieutenant Knox discovers in the morgue at Buckhorn, South Dakota – they come attached to the body of a corpse far younger than he should be. Argh! Where can soul/identity/personality truly be said to reside? While Knox calls in her findings, a figure stalks the halls to a menacing industrial soundtrack.
‘Tough cookie’
So who was that Diane to whom was Dale dictating his thoughts on pie, fresh air and fine coffee 25 years ago? After her fleeting appearance last week, it turns out she was – or at least is now – a hard-drinking, chain-smoking vamp. She has a story but she’s not telling it, and her favourite expression is “Fuck you.” All of which makes her encounter with Bad Dale in the South Dakota federal prison – at the chronological centre of the episode as well as the dramatic – a powerful thing.
Diane, Gordon Cole concedes, will dictate the tempo of the meeting (“You control the curtain and the microphone”) and it proves brief but decisive – a Clarice and Lecter-style face-off, with the balance of power never really in doubt. Bad Dale might be able to set off all the alarms in the building with his rapid speed dial, but Diane knows the real Dale Cooper with the kind of intimacy we perhaps wouldn’t expect. She won’t be sold a doppelganger.
“It’s not the Dale Cooper I knew,” she tells Gordon. “It isn’t time passing … it’s something here,” she says, meaning the heart. “There’s something that definitely isn’t here.”
If only Warden Murphy was ruled by love not fear. A repeat allusion to “Mr Strawberry”, mention of a dismembered dog, and Bad Coop has broken the man’s spirit: talked himself into a beige rental car, through the prison gates, and back out into the free world.
‘Squeeze his hand off’
The innocent Rain Man-style evolution of Dougie Jones, insurance savant, into Dale Cooper, FBI Agent reaches an important landmark. Having solved insurance frauds with his visionary righteousness, discovered his affinity for coffee and law enforcement badges, this week his muscle memory kicked in. As Dougie left Lucky Seven Insurance with his wife, Ike “The Spike” Statdler emerged brandishing a new and unrhyming firearm. With heroic grace, Cooper disarmed him (guesting punningly outside the Lodge, “The arm” crept up from the pavement to suggest removing Ike’s hand), then chopped Ike in the windpipe. The scene closed with detectives scraping some of Ike’s vile hand meat off the butt of the gun and into an evidence bag.
‘Straight-A students’
Back in Twin Peaks, Cooper’s room key, posted by Jade in episode three, returns to the Great Northern – coincident with the arrival of a not unpleasant humming noise – which Ben discusses with his secretary Beverly. Evidently Ben’s flirtatious charm offers a relief from Beverly’s home life with cancer-afflicted, controlling Tom. At the roadhouse, Jean-Michel takes a complaint call about his prostitution empire. As peaceful as is the scene at the diner, things haven’t really changed much round here.
“Who’s Laura Palmer?” Beverly asked Ben earlier.
“That, my dear …” Ben replied “is a long story …”
