Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 5: “Part 5”
Tagline: “Case files.”
Original Airdate: June 4, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Jane Adams, Mädchen Amick, Tammie Baird, Chrysta Bell, Jim Belushi, Candy Clark, Giselle Damier, David Dastmalchian, Josh Fadem, Eamon Farren, Robert Forster, Pierce Gagnon, Hailey Gates, Brett Gelman, Harry Goaz, Gary Hershberger, Michael Horse, Ernie Hudson, Caleb Landry Jones, David Patrick Kelly, Robert Knepper, Andrea Leal, Sheryl Lee, Jane Levy, Peggy Lipton, James Morrison, Don Murray, John Pirruccello, Adele René, Kimmy Robertson, Wendy Robie, Elena Satine, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Shiels, Sawyer Shipman, Frank Silva, Tom Sizemore, Bob Stephenson, Russ Tamblyn
Musical Guest: Trouble (Riley Lynch, Sam Smith, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Dean Hurley)
What does Dougie Jones do? He’s a husband and a father and a very bad dresser. He drinks and gambles, according to his wife, the understandably frustrated Janey-E. He has “episodes,” whatever that could mean for a man who, until recently, has always been a manufactured doppelganger.
He works as an agent at Lucky 7 Insurance in beautiful Las Vegas. He’s not very good at his job, where his best friend is a fellow slimeball named Tony (Tom Sizemore). He is, however, good at wooing a lovely coworker, Rhonda (Elena Satine), who flirts with him sexily even while he does the pee-pee dance. (He’s forgotten the concept of men’s rooms.) Whatever kind of rizz the original Dougie had, it was enough to halfway seduce a woman who rejected the advances of another, younger married man just a few minutes of screentime earlier.
Dougie needs tons of help getting where he needs to go. Janey-E drives him to work since his car is still missing. (More on that in a moment.) His coworker Phil (Josh Fadem) physically moves him from place to place while also managing the coffee needs of the whole office. “Damn good joe,” Dougie says, repeating Phil’s pronouncement about the beverage.
Indeed, everything Dougie says is an echo of something he’s heard…except for one thing. When Tony tells their boss, Bushnell “Battling Bud” Mullins, that a suspicious claim is legit and should be paid out, a light flashes over Tony’s face. “He’s lying,” Dougie says. It’s the first and only time he’s generated a thought of his own.
Beyond Janey-E saying “You’re acting strange as shit,” people mostly take his weirdness in stride.
But “Dougie” keeps catching on to reminders of his past. Pulled aside by Bud after the meeting, he latches on to words like “agent” and “case files.” Outside the office, he fixates on a statue of an olde-timey Western lawman, gun drawn. He may be Dougie to the world, but he’s still Cooper inside.
Weirdly, his evil doppelganger might be able to sympathize with this dichotomy. To the outside world he looks just like Dale Cooper gone to seed after one too many industrial nights at the club. But when he stares into the mirror, his face partially morphs into that of the demon who’s been inhabiting his doppel-body for 25 years: Bob. “You’re still with me,” says the Coop-thing to the silent entity. “That’s good.”
Maybe it’s Bob’s power that helps him pull off the trick he plays on the prison at the end of the episode. Under the guise of making his one phone call, Mr. C first threatens to expose some implied crime involving a now-departed “Mr. Strawberry” by Warden Murphy (James Morrison), who reacts in shock. The evil Coop then types a rapid-fire series of numbers into the landline phone, prompting the lights and sirens in the place to go haywire until he hangs up.
Far away, in Buenos Aires — once the home of Agent Philip Jeffries, the Coopelganger’s accomplice — a strange boxlike device with two red lights beeps…then instantly implodes into a tiny chunk of metal. We’ve seen the device before. Lorraine (Tammie Baird), the “worrier” implicitly hired by Patrick Fischler’s character, Duncan Todd, to take care of Mr. C’s Dougie problem, contacts it when she hears from her assassins that Dougie is still in the wind.
It’s not for lack of trying, that’s for sure. That poor little kid with the junkie mom wanders across the street to check out the blinking device the assassins attached to Dougie’s abandoned car, only to be chased away by a roving gang of car thieves. He’s just far enough away from the car when they hotwire it to be spared from the bomb blast that ensues, killing two of them before his eyes. He trudges back inside to watch the fire from a safe distance. Then his mother wakes up, having slept through her son’s brush with death and almost certain lifelong trauma. (She is a junkie almost certainly due to having experienced a trauma of her own.)
Before we leave Las Vegas, we have to pay another visit to the Silver Mustang casino, where gangster owners Bradley and Rodney Mitchum (Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper) are none too happy about being taken for $425K by “Mr. Jackpots.” Rodney beats the living shit out of the supervisor played by Brett Gelman and fires him; Bradley orders him to leave town and never come back.
The job now goes to David Dastmalchian’s pit boss character, who’s understandably less than thrilled. The Mitchum Brothers give him strict instructions: If Mr. Jackpots comes anywhere near the casino again, he’s their most wanted man.
Meanwhile, three nearly identical women named Mandie, Candie, and Sandie (Andrea Leal, Amy Shiels, and Giselle Damier), all dressed in bubblegum-pink mid-century cocktail waitress uniforms that make them look like they once lit Dean Martin’s cigarette for him, look on, bored.
This dreamlike intrusion of the past into the present in the form of beautiful, bizarre women is, there’s no other word for it, Lynchian.
The Vegas storyline doesn’t end at the city lines, however. Constance Talbot reveals that inside the stomach of their headless male John Doe rested an engraved ring from Janey-E to Dougie. (Of course, she has no idea who that is.) Meanwhile, whatever’s going on in Buckhorn hits the Pentagon’s radar, which apparently has a frequency dedicated solely to Major Garland Briggs, who has pinged it 16 times in 25 years. Colonel Davis (Ernie Hudson!) dispatches Lt. Cynthia Knox (Adele René) to see if they really do have a fingerprint match this time. If they do, she’s to inform the FBI, whose agent Tammy Price is seen going over the two Coopers’ prints over and over.
Back in Twin Peaks, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Shelly and Norma (a re-debuting Peggy Lipton) watch concerned as Shelly’s daughter Becky (a radiant Amanda Seyfried) “borrows” money to compensate for the shiftlessness of her husband, Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones). This guy is such a no-account that Mike freaking Nelson (Gary Hershberger, also making his return) boots him from a job interview because he couldn’t even fill out the application properly. Norma and Shelly, who have no shortage of experience with winding up with the wrong guy too young, can only watch and cling to each other.
But even the dumbest young love is still young love. Becky is clearly enamored with Steven’s flattery of her and promises of a brighter future…and with his cocaine, which he hoovers up like a vacuum apparently. He still has enough left over for her to take an absolutely blissed-out, coked-up ride in his convertible, staring up into the sky with luminous eyes while the Paris Sisters’ oldie “I Love How You Love Me” plays on the car radio.
Honestly, someone probably should show the fun parts of dating a dirtbag and doing a lot of blow. These can be fun activities! They just come with some side effects, usually. But Lynch and Frost convert this moment into a kind of ecstatic tribute to the joy of being young, being beautiful, being in love, being alive, the sun, fast cars, fun drugs, good music, grinning from ear to ear just because you feel good. It’s incredible how many moments like this, in how many different moods and tones and genres, the TP braintrust has created already this season. They can shoot threes from the logo or shatter the backboard with a dunk seemingly at will.
Dr. Jacoby is still a wacko, but now he’s gone proto-MAHA.
Under the name Dr. Amp, he does a nightly livestream decrying the corporations, the chemicals, the infringement on LIBERTY and JUSTICE by the FUCKS! Fortunately, you can “dig your way out of the shit” by buying one of his gold-painted shovels (“Two coats!”) for the low low price of $29.99 plus shipping and handling. His loyal audience includes a very stoned Jerry Horne and a fully delighted Nadine Hurley (Wendy Robie is back), one-eyed as ever.
At the Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Frank Truman gets off the phone with his ailing brother Harry to be thoroughly berated by his wife, Doris (Candy Clark). “You’re impossible!” she shouts at him, at the end of a conversation during which he’s been nothing but reasonable and she’s been borderline berserk. Hawk and Andy continue to go through the Cooper/Palmer files, but no missing pieces, nor any “Indians,” have turned up yet. But back in Vegas, Dougie’s escort Jade mails his Great Northern Hotel key back home — that’s a missing piece for sure.
The Twin Peaks cop I’m most worried about his Chad, the sarcastic guy who scoffed at the Log Lady’s prophecy. When we cut to the Roadhouse for this week’s musical performance, we see him accept a payoff from some slick piece of shit smoking a cigarette directly in front of the NO SMOKING sign. We haven’t had cops on the take before right within the department.
Afterwards, Chad’s glowering contact gleefully sexually assaults and threatens a woman right in front of her friends. I was not thrilled to discover in the credits that this person’s name is Richard Horne (Eamon Farren). If he’s a Horne, who are his parents? With Ben and Jerry having turned over new (cannabis) leaves, who is he working for? If he can get away with acting this repulsive and menacing in everyone’s favorite nightspot, what else is he getting away with?
