Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 4: “Part 4”
Tagline: “...brings back some memories.”
Streaming Airdate: May 21, 2017
Cable Airdate: May 28, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Jane Adams, Dana Ashbrook, Chrystal Bell, Michael Cera, Richard Chamberlain, David Dastmalchian, David Duchovny, Miguel Ferrer, Robert Forster, Pierce Gagnon, Brett Gelman, Harry Goaz, James Grixoni, Michael Horse, Jay Larson, Sheryl Lee, David Lynch, Sara Paxton, John Pirruccello, Linda Porter, Kimmy Robertson, Al Strobel, Ethan Suplee, Sabrina S. Sutherland, Jodee Thelen, Naomi Watts
Musical Guest: Au Revoir Simone (Heather D’Angelo, Erika Forster, Annie Hart)
“It’s yrev very good to see you again, old friend,” says the man in the cell. He is, as best as anyone can tell, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. Missing for 25 years, he claims he’s been working undercover in concert with Agent Philip Jeffries, another disappeared member of the Bureau. He needs to see Gordon to be debriefed, he says.
Repeatedly. In a voice that sounds slightly slower and lower than normal human speech, like a record being played at the wrong speed. With black eyes, an unnerving grin, and an unconvincing thumbs up. And if you notice, he says “very” backwards.
This person called Cooper must stay in prison for now, having been found in possession of a brick of coke, a machine gun, and a severed dog’s leg. This is to say nothing of the poisonous vomit he coughed up before passing out, the fumes from which were enough to send a highway patrolman to the hospital.
Albert breaks out in a sweat during their meeting with “Cooper.” In a one-on-one conversation with Gordon outside the prison, he reveals that several years ago he was tricked by Jeffries into giving up vital intel on an asset who wound up dead, supposedly in service of helping Cooper. He’d kept this secret to himself ever since. Gordon seems disappointed, but not angry. I feel he might have done the same.
“I don’t understand this situation at all,” Gordon says after a long moment. “Do you understand this situation, Albert?”
Albert does. “Blue rose,” he says ominously, under outdoor light that is as blue as the flower itself.
“It doesn’t get any bluer,” Gordon affirms.
This momentous sequence reunites writer-director-actor David Lynch with one of his chief muses, Kyle MacLachlan, on camera for the first time since 1992. Maybe that’s why the confusion on his face, as well as that of Miguel Ferrer’s Albert, hits so hard. You really do want this to be Gordon’s reunion with his old friend, but even Agent Tammy Preston, who’s never met Cooper before, can tell something is very wrong with this man. They’ll just need an unspecified woman to verify their suspicions first before they can act, perhaps one who drinks at the Bang Bang Bar.
Tammy deserves a closer look — as Gordon and Albert might put it, boy, does she. But it takes another female agent, FBI Chief of Staff Denise Bryson, to help us do it. Denise, a trans woman, is once again played by David Duchovny, reprising his trailblazing role in Season 2 of the original run. We learn that though Denise was working for the DEA at the time, she was secretly undercover for Gordon all along.
When Gordon seeks out an audience with Denise via her secretary (TV legend Richard Chamberlain, for some reason) in order to gain approval for his mission to see the incarcerated “Cooper,” Denise gives him a hard time for bringing Tammy along with him. Apparently, as a beautiful woman agent who’s barely 30, she fits Gordon’s “profile.”
“I’m old school, Denise,” he says defensively. “You know that.” Gordon points out that before she transitioned, Denise’s behavior was at times both “confused and wild,” but he looked the other way because she was such a good agent. “When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” he adds, with audible passion in his top-of-his-lungs monotone. (The phrase has since become a trans rights rallying cry; as the parent of a trans kid, I have a fundraiser t-shirt with the phrase on the back and Gordon/Lynch’s face on the front.)
All he really asks in return for his prior forbearance is that she trust his judgment. Tammy is a crackerjack agent. Besides, he says, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, as Denise loves to say in full, has room for more than one beautiful woman in it. Apparently, for an old dog like Gordon Cole, flattery will get you everywhere: His three-person investigation gets its approval, and it’s off to that awful rendezvous with the Coopelganger.
Of course, agreeing to behave himself doesn’t stop Gordon from joining Albert in looking longingly at the agent as she walks away from them when they exclude her from their Blue Rose clearance-level conversation. Like the man said, they’re old school. (One need only take a look at the women who’ve starred in David Lynch’s work to understand he’s roasting himself here — right down to the casting of Chrysta Bell, a musical collaborator of Lynch’s with no prior acting experience, as Agent Preston.)
The phrase “Blue Rose,” meanwhile, ties us back not only to Fire Walk With Me’s mysteries, but to the disembodied head of Major Garland Briggs’s use of the phrase when the good Dale encounters him in the space beyond the Black Lodge. In this episode we learn that Cooper — well, “Cooper” — was the last person to see Major Briggs alive prior to his death in a fire the next morning at the top-secret station he worked at. It isn’t yrev hard to guess who might have started that fire.
We get this information from a surprising source: Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Deputy Bobby Briggs. The former captain of the football team and inamorato of both Shelly Johnson and Laura Palmer has aged, as has everyone from the original cast. “Faces of stone,” Gordon intones gravely while looking at a photo of Mount Rushmore on the way to the prison; this is how many of the men of Twin Peaks now look, which is not an insult. But Bobby is still unmistakably handsome, still unmistakably Bobby.
And when he steps into the conference room where Hawk is searching for the missing pieces of Dale Cooper’s files and sees a photo of Laura Palmer, he bursts into tears. Everyone there keeps a respectful silence as he cries. “Brings back some memories,” he finally manages after he collects himself enough to be brought up to speed.
Bobby is not the only new face at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. There’s Maggie the dispatcher (Jodee Thelen), young Deputy Jesse Holcomb (James Grixoni), and sardonic Deputy Chad Broxford (John Pirruccello), who’s got nothing but contempt for the Log Lady’s “something is missing” mumbo jumbo.
But most importantly, there’s a new sheriff in town. More than that, there’s a new Sheriff Truman in town.
Sheriff Hank Truman (Robert Forster, who missed out on starring in the original series due to another job) is the brother of the ailing Sheriff Harry S. Truman. Actor Michael Ontkean declined to return to the show, which I find slightly heartbreaking, but it feels as if the placid, soft-spoken Hank really is Harry’s brother.
We learn much of this information during, how should I put this, an absolutely ludicrous comedy interlude starring Michael Cera as Lucy and Deputy Andy’s now-adult son, Wally Brando. Wally is Michael Cera dressed up like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, doing a bad Brando impression. I mean it — that’s what the son of Lucy and Andy is, for some reason.
And he goes on and on about his spiritual journey across “this great land,” and how much he loves “these good people,” and how he follows in the footsteps of “Lewis, and his friend Clark, the first Cau-CAY-zee-ans to see this part of the world,” and how “my shadow is always with me…except on cloudy days...or at night.”
This takes place in the same episode as Evil Cooper greeting Gordon backwards, and Bobby Briggs sobbing uncontrollably the moment he sees the picture of his dead high school girlfriend.
So too does the absolutely ridiculous material surrounding the real Dale Cooper, who has been dropped back into our plane of existence in the place of some Vegas suburbanite dirtbag named Dougie Jones. “Dougie,” who hits it big on 30 different slot machines, is christened “Mr. Jackpots” by that grimy old lady in the casino. He’s greeted by an old friend named Bill Shaker (Ethan Suplee) who gives him some basic facts about himself. Bill’s wife, played by Sara Paxton, is the only person Dougie encounters who seems to really believe something’s wrong with him.
Winnings in hand in a big bag full of money, Dougie is then ushered home in a limo by the joint’s nervous but obsequious management (played by Brett Gelman and David Dastmalchian). He’s greeted by his wife (Naomi Watts!!), who slaps him for disappearing for three days…then tearfully thanks him when she realizes he’s won enough money to pay “them” off, whoever “them” is. (Presumably, “them” includes the guy who nearly shot at him with a rifle last episode.)
There remain signs that the real Cooper is in there somewhere. When a hooting owl flies overhead, when he looks at himself in the mirror and touches his reflection, he seems to be partially remembering certain details about how the Black Lodge works. Meanwhile, from within the Lodge, the good spirit Mike communicates with him. He tells him he has been tricked, holding up the gold bead representing the original Dougie Jones. “Now one of you must die,” he says.
So we have the stakes: It’s Dougie Jones vs. Mr. C for all the marbles.
But before any of that can happen, Dougie has to relearn how to be human. He does this with a surprising amount of help from his wife and their kid, Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon). They help him get dressed (sort of — his wife can’t do his tie so it winds up on his head), sit down at the breakfast table, eat pancakes (while Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” plays on the soundtrack), and finally drink coffee. “Coffeeeeeeee,” Dougie sighs before taking his first red-hot sip and grinning like very happy ape of some kind. If anything will bring the good Dale back to us, it’s damn good coffee. And hot!
Finally, in a brief return to the Bill Hastings murder storyline, forensic examiner Constance Talbot discovers that the identity of their male John Doe is a classified military secret. Hmmm — anyone know any top-secret government projects around here?
(Also, Lucy doesn’t understand how cellphones work.)
Airing back to back with “Part 3,” this episode rounds out the Vegas storyline somewhat, showing us exactly who Dougie is and what the hell Cooper is going to do in his shoes. What it really does is establish that apparently nobody is going to much notice that the Dougie Jones they know has been replaced with a doddering simpleton who can only repeat snippets of things people say to him and has forgotten how to do all basic tasks, from getting out of a car to urinating.
Maybe that will change, and more people like Bill Shaker’s wife will come along. Maybe Lynch and Frost are making a point about how for certain guys, things kind of just always align in their favor. Maybe it’s just funnier that way.
Regardless, it’s one of the most audacious things this show has ever done — as big a departure from the original in its way as purple oceans and cannibalistic entities mutilating nude people. If you don’t want Twin Peaks at its Dougie Jones, you don’t deserve it at its Dale Cooper or its doppelganger. To paraphrase another great TV show, they’re building something here, and all the pieces matter.
