The return of Twin Peaks is a lot to process. After each episode, Uproxx‘s Alan Sepinwall and Keith Phipps attempt to hash out what we all just watched.
Alan: Keith, there’s a scene midway through Part 9 that captured my feelings about the episode nicely. We have just watched Frank Truman, Hawk, and Bobby Briggs enter the sheriffs station, watched obnoxious deputy Chad have to pack up his entire lunch and carefully carry it out of the conference room because he’s not allowed to eat in there, followed by the three cops attempting to figure out how to open the metal cylinder that Major Briggs left for them 25 years earlier. When Truman and Hawk are finally stumped, Bobby smiles and admits he’s known the whole time how to open it, prompting Truman to ask, “You having fun with us?” Then we follow the guys back out of the station, to the front lawn, where Bobby smashes it against the ground a few times to get it to open and reveal its treasure.
On the one hand, it’s an incredibly charming moment for Bobby, and almost startling in how boyish Dana Ashbrook can still seem, despite the gray hair and the lines on his face. On the other, the amount of time we had to linger on Chad’s lunch, or Lucy telling Truman that she’s not really there because she’s on her own lunch break, just to get to the point of the scene, felt like Lynch and Frost were also having fun making us wait.
This was a much more narratively conventional episode than the insanity of part 8 — what wouldn’t be? — yet there were so many scenes that lingered forever just because they could: Jerry Horne freaking out about his foot, the Detectives Fusco talking in their office about Dougie and a busted taillight, Lucy pulling a “Duck season!”/”Rabbit season!” maneuver on Andy about the chair for the study they’re making in Wally Brando’s old room, Gordon smoking with Diane, even that last scene with two brand-new characters discussing an armpit rash.
There’s some really good stuff in the episode, too — including some marvelous comic deliveries from Laura Dern and Miguel Ferrer that I’d love to talk about — but not enough for my preferred ratio of genius/self-indulgence that many other hours have achieved.
What did you think of this one? Were you disappointed that the only follow-up to last week’s episode involved Evil Coop?
Keith: But the thing is, I liked all those scenes you cite as indulgent, for a couple of reasons. We’re now at the halfway point and I’m starting to realize Twin Peaks: The Return isn’t going to last forever. Sure, it’s going to last a long time and it’s not going to rush to get to the end, but some Sunday night in the not-too-distant future I’m going to turn on the television and it won’t be there. So I don’t mind lingering in this world. But I also find all the lingering compelling on its own terms. Take that smoking scene: My eyes kept flitting from Diane, to Gordon, to Agent Preston and there’s not a moment when one of them’s not doing something interesting to express their discomfort or contempt or confusion and when Gordon finally breaks the tension it has the timing of a good punchline. The Fuscos’ conversation about a taillight made me laugh too. And so did Lucy, in part because I related to her “I’m not here. I’m on my lunch break” moment as she sat behind the desk trying to get just a moment to herself and her sandwich. (Look for this to become my new away message on Slack.)
And, on the other hand, there is a lot going on in this episode in terms of narrative. We return to William Hastings, who’s as broken as before, and we get a bit more about his ill-fated explorations of what he calls The Zone. (And a real blog to go with it. We get the returns of Johnny and Sylvia Horne. And when Bobby finally does crack open that little metal tube, it suggests he and the others will soon be off on an adventure. (And who would have thought that Ashbrook would get the chance to give this revival some of its most emotionally moving moments?) Anyway, this wasn’t the left-field tour de force of two weeks ago, but I still found this a pretty satisfying episode. If nothing else, it makes a solid point about the absurdity of having smoking rules in morgues.
Alan: Laura Dern’s delivery of “It’s a fucking morgue!!!!” was a work of art, for sure. And perhaps the biggest development of the whole episode is the revelation that Bad Coop is communicating with Diane in code — that she is somehow part of whatever his agenda is. Now I want to go back and rewatch their scene together at the prison, to see if Lynch, Dern, or MacLachlan left any hints about it being a work.
I poked around The Search For the Zone a bit, and while the web design is impressively Angelfire circa 1998, I was disappointed there weren’t actually any old blog entries: when you click on that link, it just takes you to a loop of roadhouse musical performances, accompanied by static. Good on someone for making sure there was a real tie-in website, which wasn’t a concern when the show was originally airing on ABC. And I was amused to see that William Hastings was basically still in the same state — head in hands, vibrating with fear and pain — we left him in waaaaay back on that first night of the series.
Ashbrook was pretty great in this one, with the scene at his mother’s house recalling Major Briggs sharing his vision with Bobby at the Double-R. The first half of the season has suggested Lynch and Frost are ambivalent at best about revisiting most of the original characters — I wouldn’t be shocked, for instance, if this was both the first and last we’ll see of poor Johnny Horne, who may have killed himself smashing into that wall. But Bobby maturing into the man his father always believed he would be — and being able to acknowledge his Garland’s pure goodness in a way he really couldn’t 25 years earlier — was a lovely linkage of this new story to the old ones.
Have you a particular theory on the code Garland left for them to find? It recalls the message he read out from the space telescope, which also had Cooper’s name mixed in with a lot of numbers — in this case pointing out that there are, as Hawk says, “Two Coopers.” Also, how long do you reckon Lynch and/or Frost have been waiting to use the phrase, “Cooper has flown the coop”?
Keith: That phrase feels like it’s been in someone’s back pocket since the original series, doesn’t it? Honestly, I expected the show to ignore season two’s Major Briggs/UFO plotline, treating it like it never existed, like it was one, big Donna Hayward. Instead, it seems like it’s going to be central to The Return, a major factor that can’t just be written off the show (unlike Donna). I suspect, however, those numbers will be retrofitted to have been coming from The Zone (or wherever) all along, rather than outer space. (Theory: Donna is now in space?)
Reflecting on this episode, there’s even more to unpack plot-wise than I thought while watching. Diane talking to Bad Coop is, as you point out, the big one. But I can’t bring myself to think that she’s knowingly helping him do evil. She seems hurt and defensive but not evil, and likely driven by some misguided loyalty to the man she believes to still be the purhearted Dale Cooper, somehow. (Definitely evil: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s returning Chantal and Tim Roth’s amiably malevolent Hutch, who has three people to kill. The warden gets named, but is it safe to assume that his other targets will be Dougie and Janey-E?)
I think you’re right that the show’s reluctant to commit to some of the supporting characters. Right now it seems like there’s the business with Dougie/Coop/Gordon/Diane/Etc. (and the related business of the cosmological system underlying the series, as explored last week) and everything else. So we get a fleeting glimpses of James and Nadine, Shelly and Norma show up for a bit, there’s something going on with Ben and Ashley Judd’s character at the Great Northern, and we meet a handful of new characters only to watch them disappear. I’ve enjoyed all those moments, but they seem a little loosely connected to everything else at the moment. Is that bothering you?
Alan: It’s definitely bothering me, with the new characters even more than the old ones. There are times when the check-ins with James or Nadine feel like exactly that: an excuse to catch up with characters we loved a quarter of a century ago, but who have no real involvement in this new story Lynch and Frost are telling. It’s not always elegant, and it can seem arbitrary which characters appear when, and for how long — there is either going to be a huge payoff to Jerry being stoned out of his mind in the woods, or it’s just something that amuses Lynch — but it at least makes some sense in the context of this being a reunion project. The brief and similarly random deployment of new characters is more of a problem, I think. We were introduced to Becky back in part five, and she seemed like she’d be a big deal, only to not pop up since. Ditto the group of young women at the roadhouse who were being hassled by Richard Horne later in that same episode (though maybe I’d shrug off their absence if one of them hadn’t been played by Jane Levy, who seems an odd choice to use in what could be a really tiny role). Now there are two new troubled young women hanging at the roadhouse — one with a really nasty armpit rash — whom we are expected to care about, when it’s entirely possible they will never appear again, and we will never learn more regarding their inside jokes about penguins and zebras.
A few people have asked me if the Gordon/Bad Coop scenes are meant to be taking place on a slightly different timeline from events in Twin Peaks. I haven’t been keeping track of date references, but another showrunner told me that it feels like Lynch is editing scenes together at random to see what feels most interesting together, and perhaps that’s why the various stories seem to moving at different paces. That can be very effective in terms of the emotional effect of the work (which has always been Lynch’s greatest strength) while also creating problems in terms of narrative coherence (which has generally been the thing Lynch is least interested in, even though his partnership with Mark Frost alleviated that a bit on the original series). He’s not going purely “18-hour movie” for the whole project — the previous episode was very consciously designed to function as an episode (albeit a baffling one) — but a lot of my issues with the revival come from him goofing around in that way.
Hutch and Chantal have the same last name, yet Hutch not only is fine with Bad Coop kissing Chantal, but encourages him to do so. Are they perhaps siblings rather than a more dangerous version of the violent lovebirds Roth and Amanda Plummer played in Pulp Fiction? I’m assuming Bad Coop wants them to take out Dougie and Janey-E, especially since Ike the Spike has failed in that task (and appears headed to prison); perhaps they can distract Dougie with either another mug of coffee, or by Chantal slipping into a pair of red high-heeled shoes, which seemed to fascinate him almost as much as badges and outlets (the latter of which brought him back into this world, while sucking the “real” Dougie out). I did appreciate Bushnell Mullins line about how the other Dougie had a car accident which left “lingering effects.” It doesn’t entirely justify people ignoring Dougie’s borderline-catatonia (which the Detectives Fusco are troubled by), but it at least suggests a reason why Good Coop’s arrival has not set off major alarm bells.
Also, are you now rooting for an Albert/Constance romance after she so deftly parried his “lost his marbles” joke in the morgue? It’s a very strange experience watching every scene with Albert. Miguel Ferrer is far from the only actor to appear posthumously in something they filmed before they died; this show alone has several instances of that. But every time Albert pops up — or, in a moment like the aforementioned smoking scene, we are told he’s indisposed — I begin to worry that this will be the last we see of Albert, because so much of this production was clouded in mystery and we don’t know exactly when Ferrer passed away relative to when his scenes were filmed. So even though Ferrer is sadly no longer with us, I’d like to see something good happen to his alter ego, beyond just great line deliveries like “Fruit cake, anyone?”
Keith: Yes, I picked up on that Albert/Constance chemistry. I guess it’s hard not to. These are two people with similar worldviews. And, yes, Ferrer’s death does lend a melancholy air to all his scenes, particularly in perfect moments like his “What happened in season two?” line. (As for the red shoes, Joanna Robinson has some interesting thoughts on those over at Vanity Fair.) We’ll see where it all goes next week, although a bit later than usual, as I’m making you write about Game of Thrones before we tackle Twin Peaks together. The deteriorating political situation in Westeros demands a quicker response and I think Twin Peaks could benefit from the extra ruminating. So look for us a little later in the day next week. Then, the week after that, Alan will be pairing off with another writer as I’ll be on vacation (though probably wondering what’s going on on the show much of the time).