The return of Twin Peaks is a lot to process. After each episode, Uproxx’s Alan Sepinwall and Keith Phipps — or, this week, Josh Kurp pinch-hitting for a vacationing Keith — attempt to hash out what we all just watched.
Alan: First of all, Josh, welcome aboard this crazy train. Should we toast some champagne to your arrival? Chow down on some damn good cherry pie? Or just share a VW Microbus ride into town after you get thrown off a car-hood, T.J. Hooker-style?
I’m curious for both your overall thoughts on the revival so far, and on the many strange doings of “Part 11” in particular. This was, like most of The Return, a hodgepodge of ideas and tones — one minute broad comedy with Dougie and the Mitchums and Candie, another loud melodrama with Becky and her parents, another pure supernatural horror like the Charred Man crushing William Hastings’ skull while Gordon Cole is busy staring at a cosmic sinkhole — yet so many of the individual pieces were stunning to experience. And occasionally, like the long sequence in and outside of the Double-R, it felt like we were getting all the disparate pieces of the revival at once, like how the family drama (Bobby is revealed to be Becky’s dad) keeps morphing into something both more ridiculous (the mom angry about the gun in the minivan) and unsettling (Shelly abruptly rushing out to kiss Red as if she’s under some spell, the sick passenger of the honking woman seeming to levitate out of the seat to slowly vomit up some disgusting fluid) at the same time.
On social media tonight, I saw a mix of people feeling despair at how slowly the story is moving — and how clear it is by now that if Dougie turns back into Good Coop at all, it’ll be very close to the end of things — and others marveling at the individual sights and sounds and emotions on display. I fall somewhere in the middle, though more towards the latter group: I wish there was more story here than Lynch and Frost appear to have, but damn if this show doesn’t consistently make me feel like I’ve never seen or heard these things before. What about you?
Josh: Thank you for having me. I was planning on making my presence known by obnoxiously honking my horn, but your introduction works, too.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the revival so far, despite (or maybe because of?) Dougie, the tangents that go nowhere, and the extra-long runtimes. It’s nice to live in this world again, even if a good chunk of the revival takes place outside of Twin Peaks. And if I’m being honest, the Double-R scenes have been some of my least favorite. That’s especially true of “Part 11.” You know that crinkled-face look a disapproving Norma gives from a nearby booth? That’s me whenever Becky and/or Steven are around. I’m trying to find something interesting about them, outside of her being related to characters from the original series (Shelly and an impossibly cool-looking Bobby), and failing. I’m surprised by how little I care. I’m also shocked by — and I feel dirty just typing — how much I like Jim Belushi as one-half of the Mitchum brothers. His howling at the sky, after realizing that his dream came true and, yes, that is a cherry pie in the box Dougie is holding, was a moment of pure catharsis. For a second, I even thought Dougie might snap back into Good Coop, but the moment was short lived. A familiar tune on the piano and pie awakened something in Dougie, but not what you and many others hoped for.
Earlier, you mentioned the hodgepodge of ideas in “Part 11.” Did this episode feel like Twin Peaks greatest hits to you? I don’t mean that in a bad way — if the show was a band, it would be selling out arenas, not playing state fairs in Nebraska — but the episode had nearly all of his Lynch’s trademarks: dark comedy, melodrama, extreme violence, surreal visuals (the electric sky portal) and visions (the Charred Men), the Red Room, the Log Lady’s vague clues, the coffee and doughnuts and pie, fire, a car traveling down an empty highway. Albert even guesses what Diane is going to say (“fuck you”) before she can say it.
Alan: Yeah, I don’t think it was nearly as cohesive an hour as the birth of evil episode — it’s funny for me to think of that episode as cohesive, given how initially baffled I was by it, but it’s easily the strongest hour of the revival in terms of all the pieces belonging together tonally and thematically — but in its individual, mismatched pieces, it had most of the things I hope for from Lynch and Frost at their best.
Don’t feel guilty for praising Jim Belushi! When he’s in character actor mode like this, as opposed to According to Jim mode, he’s often really good — see also Salvador, The Ghost Writer, or Show Me A Hero — and ever since he appeared in one of the earliest Twin Peaks ripoffs, the Oliver Stone-produced ABC miniseries Wild Palms, I’ve been curious to see him in the genuine article. Like most of The Return, the Mitchum brother scenes tend to linger several beats too long, but Belushi and Robert Kenpper have fit in quite nicely, and at this point, their presence can be more comforting than hanging with the townies. I’m not hugely engaged by the Becky drama, in part because Lynch and Frost have done such a poor, intermittent job of featuring her across these 12 episodes, but the way that Shelly went from fiercely protective mama bear insisting on spending the night with her daughter to sprinting out the Double-R doors to kiss Red was really unsettling. When he did the coin trick with Richard Horne, the show seemed to be suggesting Red had actual magical powers, and Shelly’s reaction in this moment seemed like she was entirely under his control. Red’s appeared even less than Becky so far — the adventures of Dougie consume a lot of oxygen that might otherwise be more evenly distributed among characters both old and new — but he’s one of the newcomers I’m most eager to see more of, even if it feels like we’re running out of time, two-thirds of the way through this experiment.
But man oh man, that sequence in the abandoned lot where Gordon saw the sky invert, Albert saved him from blinking out of existence, and the Charred Man slipped into Detective Macklay’s backseat to let his fingers do the walking across William Hastings’ skull. That’s Lynch at the height of his powers as a visual and aural stylist: the hum of electricity, the very different ways the scene looks from the perspective of Gordon versus Albert versus Diane versus William, the way the Charred Man kept appearing and disappearing at will, and then that sound of finger-on-bone again — which did not help me sleep at all despite staying up very late to watch this and write our first entry after my Game of Thrones duties were complete.
Every now and then in The Return, we’ll get an exchange that feels meta, even if it’s not meant that way. For me last night it was Hawk showing Frank Truman the map, explaining that it’s, “Very old, but always current. It’s a living thing.” We can try to analyze what the map means, how it links up to the coordinates Albert found on Ruth’s arm, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-her reintroduction of Alicia Witt as Donna Hayward’s younger sister Gersten — a character whose existence I had forgotten, and who appears to be the mistress Becky is so upset about — and a lot more if you want. But for all its frustrations, Twin Peaks: The Return really does feel like a living thing.
Josh: And much like a living thing, it’s imperfect. But that’s honestly one of my favorite things about The Return, especially when, as you mentioned, watching it after Game of Thrones. HBO’s mega-hit can occasionally be stuffy in its preciseness. (I could go the rest of my life without a scene set around a table that doubles as a map again.) Meanwhile, Twin Peaks feels spontaneous and scruffy. It’s impossible to predict where it’s going, and even when it gets there, it’s hard to tell why. Why does that child look so casually evil staring at Bobby? Why did Jesse ask Sheriff Truman if he wanted to see his new car? And to combine the two, what’s with the zombie girl? Who knows! It’s Lynch and Frost at their most mischievous, and “Part 11” was particularly rascally. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say about an episode where a nearly-beaten-to-death woman crawls out of the woods and Becky tries to shoot her cheating boyfriend and Matthew Lillard’s head gets crushed by a “dirty bearded” man (leading to one of my favorite deadpan lines of the season: “He’s dead”), but there was a lot of playfulness among the terror. Mister Jackpots!
Which is good, because there’s darkness on the edge of Twin Peaks. The Charred Men are omnipresent, Hawk and Truman are out of their league (even the Log Lady warns them, “There’s fire where you are going”), and let’s not forget the headless, naked corpse (with coordinates on her arm) near the cosmic vortex, either. I can easily imagine a scenario where Lynch, that scamp, has Dougie being the only character who gets out of The Return alive and/or not-miserable. Have you started thinking end-game yet, or are you along for the twisting-and-turning, hood-of-a-car ride, not the destination?
Alan: It feels silly to try to predict where the story’s going at this point, especially since there are so many dangling threads, and since Dougie still feels so far away from becoming Good Coop. At this point, I’m not expecting everything to tie together neatly, nor for many of the detours to justify their existence. I’m just enjoying the parts I can — and when it’s a moment like vomiting zombie girl, or the cosmic sinkhole, I’m enjoying it a lot — and shrugging off the other stuff as the cost of doing business with Lynch. (Cherry) pie in the sky world where most of it makes narrative sense? Well, I want to see Good Coop return to confront Bad Coop, and to share significant moments with Diane, Gordon, Albert, and preferably a few townies (we’re still waiting on an Audrey appearance, for instance). I’d like to see Laura manifest in some form beyond archival footage or her brief appearance in the Lodge in the premiere (the Log Lady did, after all, remind us last week that Laura is “the one”). I’d like to see some version of Major Briggs encounter the man his son has become. I’d like to see if there’s really a point to Ray and Becky and Steven and Richard and some of the other newbies I’ve already forgotten because we haven’t seen them in five or six weeks. I wouldn’t object to a continuation of the New Mexico story from “Part 8” and see if it more directly ties into the Laura/Leland/BOB story.
But I’m not expecting most of that. Two-thirds of the way in, I’ve calibrated my expectations to “Wait for David Lynch to show me something I’ve never seen before so I can say, ‘Whoa,'” and anything beyond that is a second slice of that damn good pie.
Josh: I referenced my Dougie prediction earlier, but I have another. Are you ready for it? In headline speak, This Twin Peaks Finale Will Literally Blow Your Skull Open Like It’s Just Been Crushed By a Woodsman. Here it is:
[20 minutes of car horns, static, screaming, Harry Dean Stanton blowing a whistle, and vomiting noises]
I can’t wait.