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.
Keith: We started this season with three remarkable episodes that quickly established Twin Peaks: The Return would have strong ties to the original series while also letting David Lynch be David Lynch, sometimes at length, as in the amazing, virtually wordless 15-minute opening of “Part 3.” You raised the possibility of mid-season sag, which I brushed away. Mid-season sag is for other shows.
This was a pretty saggy episode. We talked before about how the deliberate pace and the show’s tendency to linger a beat too long — and then a beat more — is part of what makes it work. this is the first time I felt like it wasn’t working. I’m enjoying MacLachlan’s performance as the naive Good Coop (a.k.a. “Mr. Jackpots”) and I welcome Naomi Watts in anything, but I started to lose patience with his domestic scenes. Then there’s Wally Brando, who I’m sure we’ll be discussing at length. This was the most overtly comedic episode of the series so far and I thought it was the least successful — maybe not by coincidence, even though I tend to find Lynch pretty funny. (I think I might be the only fan of Lynch and Frost’s short-lived, post-Twin Peaks sitcom On The Air.) All of which is to say, I liked this episode but I liked it least of this first bunch, and by a sizable margin.
Alan: Yeah, I wanted to discuss “Part 3” on its own because I felt it deserved the special attention. The flip side of that is that we wind up with an episode without much meat on it. Arguably more happens here, plot-wise, than in the previous hour, but it all feels like it’s moving much more slowly, in part because so much of it is just scenes being elongated for humor’s sake. And even though I’m also a sucker for the Lynch/Frost sense of humor — and incredibly relieved that the humor is back, after Fire Walk With Me was such a grim slog — doing an episode that’s virtually nothing but that is a lot.
Kyle MacLachlan is a great physical and verbal comedian, so it’s fun to witness Good Coop parroting other people’s phrases (“HellOOOOOOOOO!”) and gestures, but it felt like that was nearly the whole hour, which… maybe Showtime wasn’t wrong (before Lynch tried to quit the project in protest) to suggest fewer episodes might be necessary? Cooper stumbling around in Dougie Jones’ life feels very much like Netflix streaming drift — or like various cougar or amnesia-related stories midway through 24 seasons — designed solely to elongate the story and keep our hero from getting to where he needs to faster. It’s more fun than most delaying tactics, because Lynch + Frost + MacLachlan (with a little sprinkling of Watts and the charming Pierce Gagnon as Sonny Jim), but it’s the most impatient I’ve felt through these early episodes about anything non-shovel-related.
And yet… I think I could have watched an entire hour that was just Michael Cera doing a pitch-perfect Marlon Brando as Lucy and Andy’s son, Wally Brando. It’s such a weird idea, even for Twin Peaks, and yet I’ve watched so many Brando interviews in my life (and listened to my pal Matt Zoller Seitz’s impression of so many more), and Cera and the script get it perfectly. It seems to have nothing to do with anything — other than providing closure to the pregnancy/paternity story from season two (Wally’s affectations feel like DNA he inherited from Dick more than he might have from Andy) — yet listening to Cera go on and on and on about Dharma and his travels and his great respect for both Sheriffs Truman was delightful to me. And Robert Forster was the perfect straight man for it. Forster’s a character actor for whom I can pay the highest compliment: He always seems so natural that it almost never feels like he’s actually acting, but is just a sheriff or vacuum cleaner repairman or bail bondsman who happened to stumble into a casting call. With Michael Ontkean retired, Forster makes for an excellent sane man at the center of the town’s usual weirdness.
I know you have issues with Wally Brando, Keith, so let’s hear them. How did you feel about Forster as Frank Truman? And are you surprised that we’re four hours in and have barely spent any time with Twin Peaks characters who don’t work at the sheriff’s station? The conclusion of “Part 2” suggested we were going to dive back into personal drama involving Shelly, James, etc., and since then… nothing.
Keith: I’m very much with you on Forster and could not be happier to see him. I hope he has a lot to do in the episodes to come and I like the joke and essentially dressing him in the same sorts of clothes Ontkean wore in the original series. I guess the fashion sense runs in the family. It’s funny, too, because when I interviewed Forster years ago, he told a story about Brando that he’s told a lot over the years, about how working with him and watching his tyrannical behavior on the set made him realize that he’d rather earn others’ respect through love rather than fear.
So I can’t help but wonder what was going through his head playing opposite Cera’s impression, which is very good. I like Cera a lot and I the idea of Andy (?) and Lucy’s kid being a pint-sized biker who’s internalized Brando’s personality and his florid, halting, self-important way of speaking is funny. And even just talking to you about it amuses me. (Also: “Caw-kay-see-ons.”) Wally Brando! But the scene itself… Yeah, I don’t know. It’s four-and-a-half minutes that feels like 20. On the other hand, I can also see this scene becoming my favorite during some future rewatch. Such is the way of Twin Peaks.
This episode’s other big introduction takes place in the scene before with the return of Bobby Briggs: bad boy, small-town drug dealer, long-ago murderer and now police officer. His breakdown after seeing Laura’s picture gives the revived series one of its rawest moments and suggests these characters’ pasts will return to haunt them in one way or another. (You can even see Wally’s unexpected return as a comic echo of this moment.) What did you think of it and what do you think of Bobby’s apparent reformation?
Alan: I had mixed feelings about Bobby’s tears. The original show featured many different styles and levels of performance, and they mostly all fit together because all but a few of the really versatile castmembers (not just MacLachlan, but Piper Laurie, Ray Wise, and Richard Beymer, among others) were asked to stay in their respective lanes. As a smug, snarling to the point of caricature teenage bad boy 26 years ago, Dana Ashbrook was an important and memorable piece of the puzzle. As a seemingly reformed Bobby crying the kind of copious tears he didn’t let himself have when Laura actually died, he didn’t quite work. (Also, my recent Fire Walk With Me rewatch reminded me that teenage Bobby killed a cop — albeit a crooked, drug-dealing cop — shortly before Laura was killed. Interesting to see him wearing a badge now, and wondering if that will come up at some point.)
But then, other characters in new contexts also felt not quite right. When a young, unknown David Duchovny played DEA agent Denise Bryson in season two, it felt like a real performance that took the character and her gender transition seriously. When Duchovny does it now, he’s playing it in a more self-conscious and hammier way — less about the trans part than about the fact that Duchovny is returning to this character at all. In particular, his delivery of the line about Denise being chief of staff of the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation was one of the more stilted bits of dialogue in the whole revival so far. And Gordon Cole’s denials to Denise that he’s attracted to his young sidekick Tammy Preston (played by singer/actress Chrysta Bell, whose albums Lynch has produced in the past) didn’t exactly hide the way the camera lingers on Preston’s figure as she walks away from Gordon and Albert while they’re in South Dakota.
How did you feel about all the FBI material in this one, including the sound distortion effect on Bad Coop when he’s being interviewed by Gordon at the prison? And perhaps more importantly, which is the episode’s best thumbs-up?
Keith: Duchovny’s scenes felt a bit off for all the reasons you mentioned, but I still hope it’s not the last we see of Denise. She’s too interesting a character to leave behind the desk reveling in the words “Federal Bureau of Investigations.” (Nice to see Richard Chamberlain again, though.) I left those later FBI scenes intrigued about where they were going. The Bad Coop interrogation scene was suitably creepy, down to that lingering thumbs up and the look on his face that’s this close to looking like the Good Coop of old while not quite getting there. (I vote for the middle picture above for that reason.) I’m intrigued by the talk of Jeffries and the “blue rose” reference. (Someone on Twitter directed me to theory that “blue rose” is code for any case with a supernatural element, which makes sense to me. See also: Project Blue Book.) And I’m dying to hear your thoughts on the female drinker Albert and Cole will be seeking out, since I’m not sure who, of many candidates, it could be. (Mrs. Palmer? The Log Lady? Audrey?) But mostly all this played like set-up for something down the line, and not that satisfying on its own. “Part 4” introduces a lot of compelling new elements and I still can’t wait for the next episode. I just hope it’s more satisfying as an episode than this one. We’ll always have Wally Brando, though.
Alan: Albert knowing where she drinks, followed by the cut to the bar, suggested it might be Shelly or one of the other characters we’d seen there at the end of the second hour. But no, it’s just another musical performance to close the show. Assuming Audrey survived the bank vault explosion, I’d be happy to see her back, and she knew Cooper as well as any of the original female characters.
But lots of set-up so far, which is just entertaining enough because of the creative talent involved, even as this was the first hour to make me feel impatient with the pace as a whole. (I was half-hoping, for instance, that Cooper drinking coffee from Dougie’s wife — whose name is spelled “Janey-E,” for reasons — would have an effect like Popeye eating his spinach, and bring his memories flooding back at once.) But as you say, we’ll always have Wally Brando. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to watch that scene again. It’s only been twice today so far.
“Part 5” won’t be available until Sunday night, June 4. Look for our discussion of it here sometime on Monday.