Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 9: “Part 9”
Tagline: “This is the chair.”
Original Airdate: July 9, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Jane Adams, Dana Ashbrook, Chrysta Bell, Richard Beymer, Brent Briscoe, Larry Clarke, Jan D’Arcy, Don S. Davis, Laura Dern, Eric Edelstein, Sky Ferreira, Miguel Ferrer, Patrick Fischler, Robert Forster, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Ashley Judd, David Patrick Kelly, David Koechner, Sheryl Lee, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Matthew Lillard, David Lynch, Don Murray, John Pirruccello, Jelani Quinn, Adele René, Kimmy Robertson, Eric Rondell, Tim Roth, Charlotte Stewart, Naomi Watts, Karolina Wydra, Christophe Zajac-Denek
Musical Guests: Hudson Mohawke; Au Revoir Simone (Heather D’Angelo, Erika Forster, Annie Hart)
Diane is a double agent.
Diane is a double agent???
I don’t know why it comes as such a surprise, even a blow. In part it’s because her terror and dismay upon confronting the evil Mr. Cooper in prison a few episodes back was so affecting and seemed so sincere. In part it’s because even in this episode she finally lightens up a bit and speaks warmly with Gordon about their past. In part it’s because this is a character the real Cooper trusted with his innermost thoughts, but now that we’ve met her we learn she can’t be trusted. In part it’s because it’s Laura goddamn Dern, one of David Lynch’s chief muses, and I just don’t want her to be a villain, goddammit. And maybe she’s not, maybe she isn’t a willing accomplice at all. But this one hurts.
There’s at least one red flag prior to the big reveal. When we see Diane using her phone, its user interface is rendered in the same unfamiliar, simplistic style we’ve seen in association with Mr. C before. (I’m not counting her dislike of Gordon, Albert, Tammy, and the FBI; there are any number of reasons to dislike the FBI.) Like so many things involving the Black Lodge, it feels like a Backrooms simulacrum of reality. You humans like this stuff, right? Phone apps? Telling an old friend it’s yrev very good to see them again? Leather-jacket longhairs? Lumberjacks? The phrase “Gotta light?”
As in Backrooms, some humans adjust to the unreality of Mr. C and his world easier than others. Chantal and Gary “Hutch” Hutchens (Jennfier Jason Leigh and Tim Roth, two of the heavier hitters introduced to the cast so far this season) are…married? Siblings? I’m not a hundred percent sure. In fact, I’m not a hundred percent sure they’re a hundred percent sure.
But they’re unrepentant killers in the grinning yokel dirtbag vein — they kill a couple of farmers just to have a place to rendezvous with their infernal boss — and they seem to vibe better with the doppelganger better than any of his other associates. How much better? Hutch grins and then waits patiently while Mr. C and Chantal make out, with her purring “I wish it was more” afterwards, the clear implication being that there’s been plenty in the past. I don’t trust anyone who fucks that thing voluntarily. (She also gives him a bag of Cheetos for the road out of her back pocket, which is somehow even more creepily intimate than the kiss.)
The Coopelganger gives the Huchenses, who clearly do this for a living, two jobs. First, they’re to assassinate Warden Murphy to keep him quiet about Mr. C’s prison break, which Gordon Cole and the rest of the Feds find out about mid-flight. Then it’s off to Vegas for “a doubleheader.” Dougie and Janey-E? Dougie and Duncan Todd? Dougie and Ike the Spike? Considering the way this guy operates I’m surprised it’s not all of the above.
But before he calls Todd to encourage him to finish the job on Dougie and then wishes Hutch and Chantal goodbye (especially Chantal), Mr. C sends an oddly worded text message: “Around the dinner table the conversation is lively.” It’s this message that we see Diane receive in the waiting room at the Buckhorn Police Department, where the Feds have traveled to examine Major Briggs’s inexplicably young dead body and question the only suspect, Bill Hastings.
The body’s age remains as perplexing as ever, but the Feds get a few valuable clues from it. They now know about the ring found in his stomach with the inscription mentioning Dougie and Janey-E. At the same time, down in Vegas, the Detectives Fusco snag one of Dougie’s ubiquitous mugs of coffee to pull fingerprints, having no records of “Douglas Jones” prior to 1997 whatsoever. Before long, the two groups of LEOs will find their way toward each other if they pursue these leads.
Meanwhile, the palm print — actually, the whole palm — the Vegas cops took off the gun that Ike the Spike tried to use on Dougie leads them right to the assassin, who leaves someone named “JT” a message about his failure before the cops catch him. You get the sense this arrest is a big moment for the Fuscos.
As for “Dougie,” you can tell the real Coop remains in there even now. His gaze lingers on a woman wearing red high heels, an American flag (“America the Beautiful” plays quietly in the background as his eyes grow wet)...and an electrical outlet, hinting that he remembers some things about the Lodge, not just his life before it.
Elsewhere, Gordon and company get an earful about, and from, Bill Hastings. He and his librarian mistress Ruth were into some weird, weird shit, maintaining an active research project and a blog about accessing another dimension they referred to as “the Zone.” There, they more than once met Major Briggs, awoken from what he referred to as “hibernation.” After first asking them to find coordinates from a military database for him, he gave them the message “Cooper Cooper” and then floated away.
“You don’t know! You weren’t there! It was beautiful!” Hastings sobs. “And then Ruth was dead!” Read between the lines of Bill’s ravings about “all these people” in the Zone demanding to know his wife’s name and it seems like the work of Mr. Cooper’s confederates, the Woodsmen. Whatever the case, before long, Bill’s mistress, wife, and secretary would all wind up dead.
“We were gonna go to the Bahamas!” Bill mewls. “I wanna go scuba diviiiiiiing!!!!” About thirty seconds earlier he mentioned being surrounded by people from an alternate dimension who murdered his girlfriend. The whiplash is jarring. Albert has no time for this display…though he does seem to have time for forensic examiner Constance Talbot, who matches him quip for quip.
The rest of the action takes place in Twin Peaks proper. Jerry Horne is still lost in the woods, convinced his foot is telling him “I am not your foot.” His brother Ben’s scene is more interesting: As he and his assistant Beverly continue to hunt for the source of the beautiful tone audible in her office, they nearly kiss before Ben calls it off. Let me repeat that: Benjamin Horne calls off an illicit kiss with an employee. The man really did turn over a new leaf. I’ll be damned.
Ben’s autistic son Johnny (now played by Erik Rondell) runs full tilt into a wall at home, leaving a bloody hole in the plaster and his mother Sylvia (Jan D’Arcy) distraught as she tries to revive him.
At the Sheriff’s Department, Andy and Lucy have an adorable little back and forth about what color armchair to purchase for their home. The moment Andy relents, Lucy secretly buys the color he wanted anyway, just to be nice. I love these two. I’m less fond of Deputy Chad, who remains the worst, doing a whole Paul Rudd in Wet Hot American Summer performance of put-outedness when Sheriff Hank reminds him there’s no eating lunch in the conference room.
Hank, Hawk, and Bobby, meanwhile, pay a visit to his mother, Betty (Charlotte Stewart), to ask for information about the Major’s meeting with “Dale Cooper” prior to Cooper’s disappearance and his own death in a fire. But she stops them before they can ask a single question. She’s been waiting for this moment for 25 years.
Right after Cooper left, she says, Garland told her that one day Bobby, Hawk, and Sheriff Truman (he didn’t specify which) would come asking about the agent. Unlocking a secret compartment in a living room chair (!), she produces a slim, dully metallic cylinder with rounded ends and gives it to the perplexed police.
“Bobby,” she says, “when your father told me this, you were a long way from where you are today. Somehow, he knew that it would all turn out well. He saw this life for you. Your father never lost faith in you.” The love Garland felt for Bobby, the belief he had in him, is one of the most moving subplots in the whole series, particularly after Fire Walk With Me showed us just how bad things had gotten for Bobby before the show began.
And Garland’s faith is well placed. Bobby remembers the trick to opening the thing, because his father taught him: You throw it hard at the ground, triggering some kind of sonic mechanism; when its humming sound stops, you throw it again, and it opens up.
Inside are two slips of paper.
One is a handwritten drawing of two triangles representing Twin Peaks. Around this is text referencing 2:53, both as a time and as a distance in yards from someplace called Jack Rabbit’s Palace. Once again, Bobby comes through: This was a place in the woods where he and his dad used to go to play make-believe when Bobby was little. “He saw all this, whatever this is,” Bobby said. “That’s my dad.”
No one says anything about the black winged object drawn above one of the two peaks, which is identical to the one on the doppelganger’s playing card, but I sure caught it. But they do notice the snippet of that old deep-space radio transmission, cut by the Major so that the words “COOPER / COOPER” are clearly visible. “Two Coopers,” Sheriff Hank says, recalling Betty’s similar warning. Cooper is a literal double agent.
We travel to the Roadhouse for the episode’s final scene, as we so often do, but this is an unusual one. There are two musical guests this time, Hudson Mohawke and a returning Au Revoir Simone. The only dialogue is between two women we’ve never met before, Ella (gloomy alt-pop singer Sky Ferreira) and Chloe (future Pluribus star Karolina Wydra).
Ella complains about getting fired from a burger joint for turning up to work high, only to get a new job at the burger joint across the street. Both women have the balsa-wood teeth of veteran meth users. Ella scratches at a rash that radiates out from her armpit in an ugly red sunburst.
On stage, the band plays on.
As it does. Disease remains a constant presence in this season of Twin Peaks. So do money troubles: The Detectives Fusco commiserate over how expensive it is to get a taillight fixed, even taking the time to check out the replacement before arresting Ike the Spike. Andy and Lucy’s sweet “Gift of the Magi” routine is about a chair that costs under $200 with shipping. But people can’t afford to be loose with their money. Just look at the Hornes: Sylvia is shouting for a home aide when Johnny has his accident. Home aides are not cheap, even for the Hornes. Years later, The Pitt would earn well-deserved praise for its depiction of the ugly, crash-strewn intersection of money, health, and happiness in America. Mark Frost and David Lynch knew it too.
Clearly this episode’s concerns are more down to earth than those of the epochal “Part 8,” both from a visual and plot perspective. Perhaps it suffers by comparison — I mean, what episode of television doesn’t. The show actually took a week off between episodes; though it was due to the Fourth of July holiday weekend, it helped. But the lack of spectacle doesn’t mean this episode isn’t a rich feast of its own. You can basically throw a dart at the map and hit something worthwhile here: “Smiley” Fusco’s hilarious giggle attacks, a fantastic shot that depicts Gordon with a light background and Diane with a dark one, the repeated placement of three characters in a row as a visual leitmotif, you name it. There’s no Bob and no bomb, but there’s betrayal, blind faith, and everything in between.
