Spoiler alert: this blog is for Twin Peaks viewers who have seen episodes three and four of The Return, showing on Showtime on the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched.
Episode three – not just weird, but cosmically weird
Ladies and gentlemen, Agent Cooper is drifting in space. Like Alice down the rabbit hole or a parachutist who’s forgotten to pack their parachute, he’s falling, most likely towards oblivion.
But no. Instead, Kyle MacLachlan’s Cooper crashes on to the balcony of some sort of oversized tin can floating in the cosmos. He stands up, apparently undamaged by his crash landing, looks out across the waves of an endless sea, then opens some french windows and heads inside where he finds a woman with no eyes in a red velvet dress sitting by a fire.
Just lower that sceptical eyebrow: nobody said the revival of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s surreal murder mystery was going to be easy viewing. But Twin Peaks, which I thought had hit peak weirdness in the opening episodes, has got even weirder. So weird, in fact, that the appearance of David Duchovny as the transexual deputy director of the FBI called Denise barely warrants a “meh”.
“Where are we?” Cooper asks the woman. She doesn’t answer, so let me try. Where are we? Well, we’re in Lynch’s dreamscape, exploring what FBI agent Albert Rosenfield describes later as “the absurd forces of the strange mystery of existence”.
What seems to have happened, plotwise, is that after spending time with the one-armed man and some other apparently dead characters in the velour-curtained purgatory of the Black Lodge, the soul of Agent Cooper has been sucked into a cosmic realm where he will be given clues as to what to do next. At the same time, his body has been possessed by the demon spirit Bob, who we know to have murdered prom queen Laura Palmer 27 years ago, to whom we cut repeatedly as he drives wildly through South Dakota in pursuit of Ray, a lowlife who crossed him.
Back on the cosmic tin can, the mysterious woman finally breaks her silence: “When you get there, you will already be there,” she tells him, as exasperatingly tautologically as Theresa “Brexit means Brexit” May.
Cooper and the woman then climb up through a hatch in the ceiling. Once on the roof, which commands a vista over deep space, the woman pushes a lever on a bell-shaped protuberance then tumbles off the roof and drifts hopelessly into space. The good Cooper looks out to the heavens and a huge face floats across the sky. “Blue rose,” the passing head intones. Which must be a clue. To something. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Cut to South Dakota where there’s a problem with bad Cooper. The throbbing noise in his head, apparently caused by the clanking we heard in good Cooper’s cosmic realm, makes him crash his car. The laws of physics, like those of logic, don’t apply in Lynchland.
Then we cut to a third character played by MacLachlan getting dressed in a suburban Las Vegas bedroom after having had sex with a prostitute. He’s called Dougie Jones and wears a horrible yellow jacket. He kneels down to throw up on the carpet and we cut to the bad Cooper at the wheel of his crashed car, who is also throwing up.
The bad Cooper looks through his windscreen and has a vision of Dougie sitting in the Black Lodge. Then we cut to Dougie in this velour purgatory talking to the one-armed man. “I feel funny. What’s happening to me?” “Someone manufactured you,” explains the one-armed man. “For a purpose, but I think now that has been fulfilled.” Perhaps Dougie is some sort of golem or robot who is now expendable. That would certainly explain what happens next. Dougie looks at his hand that shrinks so much his ring falls off his finger. Then his head explodes in a puff of black smoke. Soon, all that is left is a golden ball and that ring. So who manufactured him? We may never know.
Cut back to Vegas. Black smoke trails through a socket in the wall and mutates into the suited Cooper. The prostitute returns from the shower and says: “Dougie, what happened to you? Where did you get that suit?” But the good Cooper, having replaced Dougie, can’t speak. Possibly having been transformed into black smoke and sucked through a socket before recomposing in human form has played havoc with his cognitive skills. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
The prostitute drives Cooper to a casino hotel. On the way, they are pursued by two hit men who, it seems, have been hired to kill Dougie. But he evades them by ducking out of sight. He goes inside the casino, gets some change and starts feeding the one-armed bandits (is there some connection between these machines and the mystic in the velour purgatory? I wouldn’t bet on it). This Cooper may seem cognitively damaged, but he has a brilliant gambling system: he sees little visions of red dresses hovering above the machines that are poised to pay out. Within a few minutes, this seeming idiot savant is 28 grand richer.
Kafka in Philadelphia
Cut to FBI headquarters in Philadelphia, where deputy director Gordon Cole, played as a hard-of-hearing comic turn by Lynch, is being debriefed by his agents Albert and Tammy about what they found in New York. It was there that a couple, Tom and Tracy, were making out in front of a glass vitrine when, most likely, they were slaughtered by something or someone that exploded from the box. Tom, a student, was being paid by an anonymous billionaire to sit and stare at this empty box and report anything he saw.
Tammy showed her boss photos from the scene: Tom and Tracy’s heads had been blown off, their bodies mutilated. Memory cards from cameras taking pictures of the box’s contents were also retrieved from the scene – one of which showed a strange spectral figure floating inside. As we also know, good Cooper floated into this box on his cosmic wanderings. Perhaps it was his appearance that triggered Tom and Tracy’s slaughter? It’s a theory.
But there’s no time to consider that. Deputy director Cole gets a call from South Dakota where someone answering to the description of long-lost FBI agent Cooper has been picked up by cops after crashing his car. The camera sweeps around Cole’s office: on one wall is a huge photo of a nuclear mushroom cloud; on the opposite wall a portrait of Franz Kafka. He knew a little about the absurd forces of the strange mystery of existence.
Episode four: enigmas wrapped in riddles and deep fried in mystery
Agent Cooper, who came through the socket of a Vegas bedroom thereby becoming local lunkhead Dougie, is being chauffeured home from the casino in a limo. They drop him off at Dougie’s home in the suburbs. His wife Janey-E is waiting.
Naomi Watts was captivatingly crackers as Princess Di, but here she’s even more diverting as Janey-E, a woman who doesn’t seem to notice that her husband has been replaced by someone else. Or, if she notices, doesn’t care that much.
“I’m so glad you’re home, Dougie,” she says. But Dougie isn’t home: he disappeared in a puff of smoke and has been replaced by the newly embodied soul of a missing FBI agent. The guy passing himself off as her spouse is 23kg (50lb) lighter, wearing a sharp suit and, crucially, carrying a sack containing thousands of dollars.
The absurd comedy of this scene depends on Lynch’s satire of suburbia: if hubby comes home with wads of cash, who cares if he’s not the same guy who left? Not Janey-E. When Dougie/Cooper comes down for breakfast with a necktie knotted around his head, she isn’t bothered. Nor is she fazed when he wets himself. “Listen, Mr Dream Weaver,” Watts says to MacLachlan as if to a toddler, ushering him into the bathroom, “you go potty and let’s get you dressed fast.”
Watts may be living with an incontinent alien but, quite possibly, is prepared to live in denial thanks to all the dough he’s brought home. Such is conjugal felicity, Vegas-style.
The new Brando
Much of this episode exchanges the dark psychodrama of episode three for Lynchian absurdist humour, some of it misfiring. For instance, in one scene at Twin Peaks police station, batty receptionist Lucy and her daffy spouse Andy tell Sheriff Truman their son Wally Brando is waiting to talk to him. Outside, sitting on his motorbike is their son played by Michael Cera, dressed in Marlon Brando’s leather jacket and cap from The Wild Ones.
“It’s good to see you, Sheriff Truman,” says Cera’s Brando, who explains that he generally spends his life following his dharma on the road. But not today. “As you know, your brother Harry S Truman was my godfather. I heard he’s ill. I came to pay my respects.” Hats off to Cera for so successfully impersonating Brando’s voice and for making the scripted reference to The Godfather work, though the point of this scene is anybody’s guess.
Let’s not forget that this new season started off with the mysterious murder of librarian Ruth Davenport in Buckhorn, South Dakota. Her decapitated head was found in bed above the body of an unidentified man. In this episode, local cops now check the prints on the body against their DNA database and find a match. But access is denied to them because military authorisation is required. This indicates, surely, that the guy they have in custody, local school principal William Hastings, is not the murderer. Hold on, though: didn’t the cops find Hastings’ dabs all over the murder scene last week? Confusing.
Just then, the FBI delegation headed by Cole arrives in Buckhorn to interview the guy who looks like Agent Cooper whom police found at the wheel of his crashed car. Bad Cooper tells Cole he has been working undercover all these years, primarily with a colleague called Philip Jeffries; the same Jeffries, presumably, as the billionaire who hired student Tom to keep an eye on that mysterious glass box.
Cooper tells Cole he was on his way to present the findings of his undercover work to the FBI in Philadelphia when he crashed. But that can’t be true: as Tammy points out, he was headed in the opposite direction. Even more discombobulatingly, the voice coming out of Cooper’s mouth belongs to someone else.
Later, we learn from Albert that Jeffries was a former FBI agent and that Albert had given him some information to help Cooper. The information was the name of the FBI’s agent in Colombia and a week after divulging the agent’s name, he was dead.
“I hate to admit this, but I don’t understand the situation at all,” Cole tells Albert after the interview. Albeit unwittingly, Lynch delivers the funniest line of the show: if you don’t know what’s going on, what hope is there for the rest of us?
“Do you understand this situation, Albert?” Cole asks his colleague. Albert looks across the parking lot and finally says: “Blue rose.” I’m not sure what that means, but it’s what the mysterious face in the sky said in episode three. “It didn’t get any bluer,” replies Cole. Which doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Still, I’m kind of entranced, enjoying being confused. I’m experiencing, thanks to Lynch, what Keats called negative capability, that state of being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. That said, I’d quite like to know what blue rose means and who killed Ruth Davenport. I’ll be back next week to find out if Twin Peaks starts making sense. The safe money says it won’t.
