Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 3: “Part 3”
Tagline: “Call for help.”
Streaming Airdate: May 21, 2017
Cable Airdate: May 28, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Phoebe Augustine, Chrysta Bell, Don S. Davis, John Ennis, Miguell Ferrer, Meg Foster, Hailey Gates, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee, Sawyer Shipman, Al Strobel, Russ Tamblyn, Nafessa Williams, Nae Yuuki
Musical Guest: The Cactus Blossoms (Jack Torrey, Page Burkum, Joel Paterson, Beau Sample, Alex Hall)
In Memory of: Don S. Davis and Miguel Ferrer
We are in uncharted territory. Literally so, as far as Agent Cooper is concerned. His adventures take us far beyond anything we’ve seen on Twin Peaks, even in the Black Lodge. More perhaps than any other destination in the show’s history, it is a place both wondrous and strange.
And purple. Purple has never been a color factored into Twin Peaks in any major way. There’s the red, white, and black of the Lodge, of course, and the rich woody browns associated with the region — its flora and fauna, its fashion, its furniture, its architecture. The occasional splash of blue tends to signify supernatural force.
But we’ve never seen anything like what happens when Agent Cooper…you know, the best way to do this is to spell it out as plainly as directions to a highway on-ramp.
Cooper plummets through the cosmos until he sees a giant, formless purple-white blob forming in a vast cloud of purple mist.
He falls into this mass and lands harmlessly on the balcony of a massive brutalist building, a fortress perhaps, overlooking a vast and perhaps infinite purple-black ocean that brings to mind the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s Odyssey.
Entering the building through glass-paned doors, he encounters a mute and eyeless woman, listed in the credits as Naido (Nae Yuuki). The image glitches and stutters as the two try to communicate. She can only chitter at him wordlessly, but the “86’d” gesture is unmistakable in any non-language. That’s how Naido convinces Dale to stay away from a piece of electrical machinery of an ambiguous nature, labeled “15.” She also hurries him up an escape ladder when some angry thing starts pounding on a metal door into the room, trying to get in.
Coop and Naido emerge onto the roof of the structure, now revealed to be a satellite-like box with an oddly-shaped metal dome on top, floating in space.
Naido pulls a lever on the dome that shuts off the glowy haze that has surrounded them both, but electrocutes her and sends her hurtling horrifyingly into the void. Cooper can only watch powerlessly as she plummets.
Left alone, Coop receives an unexpected and bizarre visit. The disembodied head (the second so far this season) of Major Garland Briggs floats by slowly, saying the familiar phrase “Blue rose.”
When Coop returns inside, he’s in a similar but different room. The strange, art-deco electronics panel on the wall now reads “3,” and the woman present on the couch, called “American Girl” in the credits, is the spitting image of an adult Ronette Pulaski. (Both are played by Phoebe Augustine.)
Speaking clearly, albeit backwards in Lodge fashion, the woman warns Coop to flee before her “mother” comes…referring to the terrifying banging on the door that has once again resumed. Cooper gets closer and closer to the machinery, until his body and face begin to glitch and distort. Slowly he is pulled through a socket in the panel, disappearing completely except for his shoes, which are left behind with the concerned woman.
This journey beyond the infinite deserves, frankly, a round of applause. Coop’s journey is not without precedent: Without straying far from mainstream nerd culture, it’s reminiscent of David Bowman’s travels past Jupiter in 2001, the concept of the Source Wall from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, or the ritual of Chüd in Stephen King’s novel It. Even so, it looks and feels wholly unique. Mark Frost and David Lynch are combining horror, fantasy, science fiction, surrealism, and experimental filmmaking with gobsmacking results — the kind of episode that leaves you either knocked back on your couch or excitedly pacing around the room, recalling favorite moments and spinning elaborate theories. My notes read “THERE’S SIMPLY NEVER BEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS ON TELEVISION.”
As baffling a series of sensations as all that was, the Earthbound material is equally out there on a limb all its own, yet in the end it’s easy enough to understand. This time the best approach is to summarize it like a Cliff’s Notes.
Twenty-five years ago, Dale Cooper’s doppelganger trapped him in the Black Lodge and took his place on Earth, with the dark spirit Bob in tow. He’s been roaming around ever since using Cooper’s name (though these reviews most often call him “Mr. C” after one of his criminal confederates to avoid confusion), doing god knows what kind of bad shit. He’s searching for something connected to the Lodge, to which he has no plans to return. He has, however, mentioned a plan to stay out.
The plan, apparently, involved creating a doppelganger of a doppelganger. Dougie (also played by Kyle MacLachlan) is some kind of big-haired, ugly-jacketed Vegas resident, who has sex with his much younger, uh, let’s say “girlfriend,” Jade (Nafessa Williams) in an unpurchased house in a suburban-sprawl development. Whatever this guy has gotten up to is apparently not such great shakes either, since assassins have followed him to his little pied à terre with plans to shoot him to death when he departs.
Today, however, is the day Mr. C is meant to return to the Lodge, whether he likes it or not. Electric currents in his car instrument panel, especially the charger, start sizzling audibly, just as they do in the purple fortress when Coop approaches his own instrument panel. He begins getting woozy, dizzy, swerving the car, getting sick to his stomach. Finally, during the all-important time of 2:53 p.m. — the same time it is inside the fortress — the Dark Coop crashes, flipping his car. He stays conscious just enough to vomit up a vile-smelling tide of garmonbozia, the creamed-corn representation of pain and sorrow that these creeps eat.
The crash appears to be his saving grace. It knocks out the electronics on his dashboard, preventing the charger from fully charging, and stopping the real Cooper from emerging into reality by his side.
There’s no such obstacle in the vacant home, however. Already wearing the Black Lodge’s ring and suffering from the numb arm that has historically presaged those spirits’ intervention, Dougie collapses, vomits up a hunk of gross gunk all his own…and disappears, reappearing in the Red Room.
“Someone manufactured you for a purpose,” Mike the One-Armed Man tells him in backwards-speak, “but I think now that’s been fulfilled.” Dougie’s head vanishes in a puff of black smoke, and a gold ball hovers out of his body, which dissipates, leaving behind his ring and the now marble-sized representation of his life-force. (I think.)
And back on Earth, Cooper, the real Cooper, is extruded into reality from the wall outlet in the room where Dougie disappeared. No car accident means no busted means of re-entry; Dougie, who like Mr. C sees the red curtains of the Lodge before his eyes, is the Dark Coop’s replacement.
So the identity of the manufacturer, and the purpose the creation served, seems obvious enough now: Somehow, the Coopelganger created a third Cooper, gave it the Dougie identity, and set it up to get sucked back into the Lodge in his own place. A doppelganger is a doppelganger to the Lodge’s doppelganger-detection mechanism, perhaps…but I can’t see them putting up with this switcheroo.
So we’re left with “Dougie,” as Cooper is now known. Okay, so he has a different hairstyle and color, and is wearing a black suit instead of a mustard-yellow one. But when she gets out of her (rather glorious) gratuitous shower, Jade naturally assumes that the Dougie-looking guy in the house where she just had sex with Dougie is, well, Dougie.
Even if he’s acting weird. Even if he’s lying on the floor next to a chunk of vomit. Even if he forgets how to tie his shoes, or get in and out of a car, or walk, or speak. Even if all he can do is repeat little snippets of the things people say to him. The journey back into reality appears to have given Cooper near total amnesia, not just of who he really is but of how the world works.
So Coop/Dougie shuffles around where directed, mindlessly repeating phrases like “Call for help,” which is Jade’s advice when she drops him off at a casino. She suspects he had a stroke, but I get the feeling these two are not meant to be together by the way she tells him to forget they ever met and then gets out of there.
“Dougie” wanders his way over to the slot machines after picking up change from the cashier (the striking Meg Foster of They Live and the original Masters of the Universe). After watching a guy hit a jackpot with a happy holler of “Hel-loooooo!”, the nearly zombified special agent gets the hang of things.
Boy, does he ever. With help from the Lodge, which displays helpful little video game–style icons (flaming triangles showing the red curtains and black and white floors) over the winning machines, “Dougie” hits jackpot after jackpot after jackpot, shouting “Hel-looooooo!” every time, as if this is as key to the process as putting in a quarter and pulling the lever.
“Dougie” even tips off a disheveled, dirty-looking old woman, clearly impoverished by her slots habit, about a winning machine next to the one she’s playing. She blocks him from playing it himself and rejects him as a nut at first, but you can’t argue with his other results. The look on her face when she takes his advice and finally wins is a look of pure joy. You get the impression she doesn’t get many moments like that. But spreading joy is Cooper’s way, apparently even when he doesn’t know he’s Cooper.
Back in Twin Peaks, there’s not a whole lot to report. Dr. Jacoby is using a homemade conveyor to spray paint his shovel shipment gold. Hawk, Andy, and Lucy are, uh, doing their best to find the missing piece from the Dale Cooper files. (No, it’s not the chocolate bunny Lucy ate one day to help relieve gas.) The Catctus Blossoms bring Everly Brothers–style harmony to the Roadhouse as this week’s musical guests.
The big news from the old crew comes at FBI Headquarters in Philadelphia, where our old friends Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield are in the middle of a pretty funny briefing on a congressional scandal involving an uzi, a jar full of pebbles, and some bikini babes. (They’re as perplexed as we are.)
When the meeting wraps, however, Agent Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell; no, this show will never run out of beautiful women) briefs our old friends on something major. She’s leading the investigation into the mysterious murders discovered in that glass-box room in New York. She can’t find the owner of the building. She can’t find the security guards who supposedly worked there. Everything’s a mystery, except the digital files containing recordings of the box, which showed that horrifying white entity just prior to the killings. What’s left of Sam and Tracey’s corpses looks like more like confrontational sculptures than dead bodies, but despite the brutality of their deaths, there’s not a single trace of evidence left on them.
Then, unexpectedly, Dale Cooper calls.
Gordon gets on the horn immediately, asking someone on the other end if they’re sure it’s him. Of course it has to be Mr. C — we see highway patrolmen discover his wrecked car with him still in it and recoil from the stench — but all Gordon and Albert know is that this means trouble.
I find it extraordinary how much granular detail this show packs in, little bits and pieces you can pull out of the overall mosaic and analyze and scrutinize and ponder. The world of the purple sea is so overwhelming, as an image and as an idea, that you’d think smaller, more down-to-earth moments would vanish in that purple haze.
But are you going to forget the junkie mother (Hailey Gates), who keeps creaming “ONE ONE NINE! ONE ONE NINE!” — 911 backwards, for some reason, hmm — while the assassins bug Dougie’s car as her son (Sawyer Shipman) watches? I never have. Its abrasive despair flavors the whole rest of the episode.
There’s reason for hope, though, even aside from the ability of “Dougie” to score jackpots at will. Some parts of the real Cooper are still in there. He takes note of a street sign reading “Sycamore,” recalling the sycamore trees surrounding Glastonbury Grove’s entrance to the Lodge and the song performed by the Singer when he arrived. When Jade tells him “You can go out now,” he remembers Laura telling him the same thing in the Lodge, though he doesn’t seem to know what the memory means.
Meanwhile, his good fortune goes beyond the casino. There’s the key in his suit pocket — a key to room 315 at the Great Northern Hotel. With any luck, this will serve as an “If found, please return to” label for the man, the myth, the mystery carrying it. And when he drops it, he ducks down in the passenger seat of Jade’s car, thus hiding him from an assassin’s rifle scope, so he’s got nothing if not luck.
Though it wasn’t technically part of the season’s two-episode premiere, “Part 3” debuted on the Showtime Anytime streaming app the same night that “Part 1” and “Part 2” premiered on Showtime proper. People who were watching it all saw this as the third and final hour of our return to Twin Peaks. This is where it leaves us: Dale Cooper has taken a journey beyond the infinite, and returned to clean up at the slots. That’s Twin Peaks, alright. More Twin Peaks than ever, I’d say.
