Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 12: “Part 12”
Tagline: “Let’s rock.”
Original Airdate: July 30, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Chrysta Bell, Richard Beymer, Scott Coffey, Ana de la Reguera, Laura Dern, Sherilyn Fenn, Miguel Ferrer, Robert Forster, Pierce Gagnon, Michael Horse, Ashley Judd, Luke Judy, David Patrick Kelly, Sheryl Lee, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sarah Jean Long, David Lynch, Berenice Marlowe, Zoe McLane, Clark Middleton, James Morrison, Johnny Ochsner, Bill O’Dell, Wendy Robie, Tim Roth, Harry Dean Stanton, Russ Tamblyn, Grace Zabriskie
Musical Guest: Chromatics (Ruth Radelet, Adam Miller, Johnny Jewel, Nat Walker)
It’s ladies’ night on Twin Peaks. With the many manifestations of Kyle MacLachlan pushed to the side for the time being — Dougie appears in a wordless minute or so of screentime, in which Sonny Jim Jones tries and fails to play catch with; Mr. C is heard from only via a text message on a phone — big things are happening for many members of the female cast.
That cast is suddenly, strikingly, one major player larger. Sherilyn Fenn makes her long-awaited return as Audrey Horne, who is apparently alive and well and locked in a deeply unhappy marriage. Her husband, Charlie (Clark Middleton, an actor whose bout with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis gives him the appearance of dwarfism), is a harried businessman of some sort, constantly complaining about his mountain of paperwork, his deadline, and his overall exhaustion.
No longer the mixture of wide-eyed ingenue and would-be femme fatale we remember before the bank explosion at the end of Season 2, Audrey has evolved into a very vocal no-bullshit type. At least that’s the charitable explanation for it. The less charitable one is that whatever…arrangement led to her relationship with Charlie — contracts were signed; mysteriously mononymed authority figures are invoked — was a devil’s bargain, and now she wants out of her unhappy existence.
Her island in the storm appears to be a man named Billy, who’s been missing for two days. It seems likely he’s the same Billy that an unidentified guy ran into the Double R calling for a few episodes back. Audrey’s last hope of finding him is the Roadhouse, and she’d like Charlie to accompany her. Personally I’d keep that request and the whole yes I’m in love with Billy and yes I’m fucking Billy because you’re a no-balls loser part of the interaction completely separate, but Audrey is a woman on the brink.
Whatever’s going on with these two, there’s a whole cast of characters involved. According to Chuck (who?), who stole Billy’s truck briefly the other week (Richard Horne’s killer truck?), Billy was last seen with Tina (who??). Audrey thinks Chuck (who is different from Charlie) is “certifiable,” and she hates Tina too much to ask her directly, so she doesn’t know the truth of the matter.
After threatening to involve an apparently threatening figure named Paul (again, who???), Audrey persuades Charlie to call Tina himself to find out the facts. Whatever he hears leaves him stonefaced and silent, refusing to tell Audrey what Tina told him. Seems like a hell of a friend group she’s found. (Where have you gone, Billy Zane’s oft-forgotten Audrey love interest John Justice Wheeler? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.)
The whole convoluted conversation receives a very Lynchian repetition of sorts in the Roadhouse itself. Audrey and Charlie have yet to arrive, but our usual booth is occupied by yet another pair of good-looking young women, who gossip about their acquaintances. Abbie (Elizabeth Anweis) is looking for Angela (who?), whom her friend Natalie (Ana de la Reguera) assumes is out with Clark (who??). Abbie is taken aback, because just the other night she saw Clark slow-dancing with Mary (again, who???) right there at the Roadhouse. What will Angela do when she finds out, so soon after something apparently terrible happening to her mother — and while off her meds to boot?
Just then, a friend named Trick (Scott Coffey) comes careening into the table, badly upsetting the mellow vibes created by Twin Peaks Season 3’s primary artist in residence, Chromatics, up on stage. He loudly complains that some maniac nearly ran him off the road and killed him on his way over, and boy would he like to kill that guy in turn. Offering to pick everyone up a round, he exits, leaving Natalie and Abbie to have an eyebrow-wiggling conversation about Trick’s availability now that he’s no longer under house arrest.
Why put two such similar scenes, slinging around such unfamiliar names, back to back? In part I think it’s meant to reinforce what’s emerging as one of the season’s central conceits: Twin Peaks is everywhere and everyone, not just one little town and the weird people in it. There are weird people there we haven’t met and never will. There are weird people in Deer Meadow, in Buckhorn, in Las Vegas, in New York, in Rio de Janeiro. There were weird people in that rich people neighborhood where James Hurley had his film noir storyline back in Season 2!
To whatever extent the original run of Twin Peaks was intended to feel like a peaceful idyll in a town time forgot — obviously it was much more complicated and sinister than that, but that was there — that’s gone now. Everywhere you look, characters on this show are constantly scrambling to stay one step ahead of the collection agency, the oncologist, the friend or family member who gets loose with his fists when he drinks. Poverty, disease, mental illness, and the threat of intimate violence and gun violence are everywhere.
In working on this review, I mentioned that last bit to my wife. “Well, they are,” she said simply.
Mental illness is probably the best case scenario we can hope for with Sarah Palmer. Checking out at the grocery store, she becomes greatly disturbed by an unfamiliar product displayed behind the counter: turkey jerky. (“Gobble gobble.” —Laura Palmer, Fire Walk With Me)
I’m going to write down what she says next verbatim, because the music that plays while she’s saying it was also the music that played when the One-Armed Man pulled over Leland and Laura at that traffic light and told her who her abuser really was in Fire Walk With Me. It’s important.
Here is what she says.
Your room is different. And men are coming. I am trying to tell you that you have to watch out! Things can happen! Something happened to me. Something happened to me! I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good! Sarah? Sarah, stop doing this. Stop doing this. Stop doing this. Okay. Leave this place. Find the car key. Find the car key. Get the car key. Get the car — Get the goddamned car key!
David Lynch is fond of the image of the madwoman as an oracle of sorts. (“Something bad is happening!” —that one old lady, Mulholland Drive) Certainly, we’re not meant to take away from this scene that Sarah is only suffering from PTSD, depression, dementia, or any other psychological or neurological condition. All the way back in Season 1 she had a reputation for psychic flashes, paying off in her visions of Bob.
At the end of Season 2, she’s brought to Major Briggs by Dr. Jacoby to deliver a message from the Black Lodge. “I’M IN THE BLACK LODGE WITH DALE COOPER,” a voice says through her. “I’M WAITING FOR YOU.” We’ve never found out the identity of the entity that made this statement, though we have learned that Major Briggs heeded its summons to the Lodge before long.
Anyway, when Sarah Palmer says “men are coming”; when she says “You have to watch out! Things can happen!”; when she repeatedly says “Something happened to me” without specifying what it was; when the only thing that stops her from repeating the phrase “I don’t feel good” is speaking to herself in the third person…when all that happens, I stop and listen, that’s what I do.
As for the car key she’s searching for, people are always finding and losing keys in Twin Peaks, and in Lynch’s work generally. It reminds me of my favorite chapter from Lynch’s meditation-memoir hybrid Catching the Big Fish, about one of the most mysterious elements of his masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Titled “The Box and the Key,” the chapter reads, in its entirety, “I don’t have a clue what those are.” The beauty of dream logic is that you don’t have to understand what the thing is to understand what it does to you, the dreamer.
Later, Sarah receives a check-up visit from Deputy Sheriff Hawk, whom she greets as if he’s covered in dog poop. She assures him she’s fine, there’s nothing wrong, even as there’s a noise from the kitchen indicating she’s not alone. I suppose when you live in the house where your dead husband raped your daughter and murdered your niece before the demon possessing him made him kill himself, you never are alone. Those ghosts will always live in that house with her. As she puts it with heartbreaking bluntness, “It’s a goddamn bad story, isn’t it, Hawk?”
Back in Buckhorn, FBI Special Agent Tammy Preston receives a major, if highly classified, promotion. Gordon and Albert finally, officially induct her into the Blue Rose Task Force, which Albert describes as a joint military/Bureau attempt to “explore the troubling abstractions raised by cases Blue Book failed to resolve.” Tammy is visibly thrilled to be brought into the circle of trust, which Gordon had been reluctant to expand because three of the four agents he recruited — Philip Jeffries, Chester Desmond, and Dale Cooper — vanished without a trace. Tammy appears up for the challenge.
(All three agents dismiss Blue Book’s claim that UFOs are a nonexistent non-threat as a “massive coverup” out of hand. Fox Mulder, if you still exist in a universe with Denise Bryson in it, request a transfer immediately.)
Diane, of course, remains firmly outside it, though she doesn’t appear to realize it yet. Albert continues to monitor her communications with Mr. C, the latest of which refers to an incident in Las Vegas they haven’t asked her about yet. (Neither Gordon nor Albert knows what that might be.) Meanwhile, her behavior, and her depiction by Frost and Lynch, grows more Black Lodge with each episode. We first see her this time around stepping through a red curtain. They’re not being subtle about it.
Worse, when she agrees to Gordon’s (presumably fake) plan to deputize her as an agent to help with the investigation, her response is “Let’s rock,” which you may recall as one of the Man from Another Place’s catchphrases in Cooper’s initial dream of the Lodge, and the message written in lipstick on the windshield of a car near where Agent Chester Desmond disappeared without a trace in Fire Walk With Me. Probably not the kind of thing you want a person in your company to be saying when you work Blue Rose cases.
Which is not to say that it’s all work and no play for our boys in black. Gordon spends the evening canoodling with a comically French beauty (Berenice Marlowe).
Her sexiness practically qualifies as some sort of physical impairment: When Albert shows up to Gordon’s room to warn him of Diane’s latest secret communiqué, she takes so long primping and preening before she leaves that you can all but see the smoke rising from the impatient Albert’s ears.
Later that night, Diane takes her platinum bob and her yellow American Spirits and sits down at the bar. Recalling the numbers written on the corpse of Ruth Davenport, she enters them into her map app and comes up with a familiar location, to her visible dismay. Will Diane herself finally enter the town of Twin Peaks, like her coworker Cooper did all those years ago? Who or what is waiting for her and her dark boss there?
Elsewhere, Hutch and Chantal execute Mr. Cooper’s hit on Warden Murphy, the crooked corrections official who sprang him from jail. He’s saved from being tortured to death by Chantal’s hankering for Wendy’s, but his young son (Luke Judy) is not spared the horror of discovering his father’s dead body outside the family home. “Next stop, Wendy’s,” Hutch announces while you can hear the child screaming “Daddy, Daddy!” over and over.
Near Twin Peaks, the apocalyptically stoned Jerry Horne finally makes it out of the woods, if not back to civilization. Carl Rodd takes pity on an impoverished resident of his trailer park and offers to hire him for odd jobs in lieu of rent, just so the guy doesn’t have to sell his plasma anymore. Dr. Jacoby does another one of his “Dr. Amp” podcasts, with an enraptured Nadine Hurley talking to the screen, saying his golden shit shovel is working for her; his rant about corporations buying politicians whom they pay to poison the rest of sounds entirely reasonable in 2026
Sheriff Frank Truman pays a visit to Ben Horne to let him know the terrible news that his grandson Richard was the driver in the fatal hit-and-run accident. “That boy has never been right,” Ben laments. He agrees to pay for all of Miriam’s medical expenses — as a nursery school teacher, she has no health insurance. The poor and the medicalized, everywhere you look. As I write this the Trump administration has announced its plans to kick a million people off their health insurance, which I bring up just for rage’s sake, and to show that Twin Peaks: The Return had its ear to the ill wind.
Ben asks about the old Sheriff Truman, Harry. “We’re hoping for a miracle,” Frank says. Ben turns over the key to Agent Dale Cooper’s room that the real Dougie Jones’s escort Jade recovered from Cooper’s pocket and put in the mail, hoping Harry might like having it as a keepsake. Both men note how strange it is that the key showed up after all this time, especially since Frank has reopened Cooper’s case.
After their meeting, Ben calls in Beverly to make the arrangements with the hospital. He tells her the horrible story, and says “Richard never had a father.” This prompts him to wax nostalgic for a bicycle his own father refurbished for him as a boy, a way of living long gone in the Horne family.
So here’s where we address the elephant in the room. Soon after this conversation about Richard’s fatherlessness, Ben’s daughter Audrey, Richard’s mother, shows up. She appears to live the life of a desperate housewife, in a loveless and sexless marriage to a wealthy and inattentive (if not actively hostile) man, barely even sneaking around with her affairs.
Has Audrey been too busy doing…whatever all that is to mother her murderous son? If so, why doesn’t Ben single her out the way he singles out Richard’s lack of a father? Is she neglectful or is she the only thing that’s kept him from being even worse? Why hasn’t she been contacted by the police over the hit-and-run, or by her mother over the money her son stole from her? Is she out of his life the way Ben is trying to be?
But in the meantime she’s on the search for Billy, and we don’t know who he is. Or Chuck, or Tina, or Paul, or Clark or Mary or Angela or any of the other randos who get mentioned on this show. But we kind of do know them by now, don’t we? We’ve seen how people live around here, and everywhere. Hanging on in disquiet desperation is the American way, and Twin Peaks Season 3 has peeled back the curtain on it.
