Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 10: “Part 10”
Tagline: “Laura is the one.”
Original Airdate: July 16, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Jane Adams, Chysta Bell, Jim Belushi, Richard Beymer, John Billingsley, Catherine Coulson, Giselle Damier, Jan D’Arcy, David Dastmalchian, Eamon Farren, Miguel Ferrer, Patrick Fischler, Pierce Gagnon, Michael Horse, Caleb Landry Jones, David Patrick Kelly, Robert Knepper, Andrea Leal, Sheryl Lee, Sarah Jean Long, David Lynch, John Pirruccello, Kimmy Robertson, Wendy Robie, Eric Rondell, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Shiels, Tom Sizemore, Harry Dean Stanton, Russ Tamblyn, Naomi Watts
Musical Guest: Rebekah Del Rio (Rebekah Del Rio, Mick Flowers, Nick Launay, Moby)
I almost can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s all coming together. From the trailers of Twin Peaks to the towers of Las Vegas to the nicest hotel restaurant in Buckhorn, South Dakota, clues are being connected, loose plot threads are being braided, and the truth about … whatever is going on seems tantalizingly close.
We’ll start in Twin Peaks, with the ongoing criminal rampage of Richard Horne. His big move today is finding and silencing Miriam, the impoverished but cheerful schoolteacher who saw him run over that poor boy from earlier in the season and got a clear view of him as he sped away from the scene. In a terrifying scene, he grills her through her glass door, the reflection of his face bright and clear, her own face dark and hard to see. Then he charges her trailer in broad daylight, breaking in and beating her unconscious; we hear rather than see this, our view fixed on her mildewed but cheerful home. (There are still Christmas decorations up, for crying out loud.)
Richard leaves Miriam alive, but barely. She’s out cold, bleeding profusely from a head wound, with her gas oven left open and running and a lit candle on the counter, an attempt by Richard to cover up the evidence of his crime.
But even if Miriam doesn’t survive, Richard’s still at risk. She’s sent a letter to Sheriff Truman, telling him what she knows. Richard has his cop contact, the loathsome Deputy Chad, intercept the letter before receptionist Lucy can sort through the mail. (Miriam told Richard she couldn’t understand why no one arrested him after she called in her tip; I’m pretty sure we know who must have taken that particular call.)
Richard, however, is just smart enough to realize he should make himself scarce regardless. To that end, he shows up at the home of his grandmother, Sylvia. She lives in an expensive-looking house in what must be a gated community. (Someone contacts her over an intercom to let her know her grandson is approaching.) But it’s a sad home regardless, a beige lodge where there’s always muzak in the air.
Sylvia’s developmentally disabled son Johnny, his face and head bloodied and bruised from running into the wall, sits tied to a chair, staring miserably at some kind of awful teddy bear with a lightbulb for a head. “Hello, Johnny! How are you today?” it says, over and over and over.
This, and the saccharine Montovani tune playing in he background, continue maddeningly, even as Richard assaults his grandmother, loots her possessions, and threatens both her and Johnny, spewing misogynistic filth all the while.
Afterwards, a beleaguered-seeming Ben Horne listens to the story over the phone, sympathetically ... until Sylvia demands to be repaid, by Ben, for the money Richard stole. (During Richard’s home invasion, she mentioned that Ben has already cut his wayward grandson off.) Sylvia threatens to get lawyers involved and hangs up. Immediately afterwards, Ben asks Beverly out to dinner.
Rounding out the family news bulletin, Jerry is still lost in the woods.
There’s one more very important detail to note here, however. While he’s roaming around doing his dirty deeds, Richard receives a text message in a familiarly simplistic user interface, reading simply “DONE.” This means Richard, like so many of the bad people we’ve met, is taking orders from Mr. C.
I’d say that settles the question of who Richard’s father is. I’d also say it settles the question of the timing and manner of his conception.
Additional developments in South Dakota connect Mr. C to another of the season’s big unsolved mysteries. Tammy receives a surveillance photo taken from the earliest photographic records of that room in Manhattan where that thing mutilated the two young lovers: It’s the Coopelganger, apparently overseeing operations.
So bear with me here. “This is what I want,” Mr. C told his traitorous associate Darya, holding up a playing card with a winged black shape drawn on it. We’ve since seen that shape in the message left behind by Garland Briggs prior to his death. The shape resembles the frogmoth that crawled into the little girl’s mouth … after being extruded from the thing that mutilated the two young lovers, which materialized in a box of Mr. C’s apparent design.
The symbol, the frogmoth, the Experiment entity … to borrow the words of the Black Lodge, are they one and the same?
The news that the doppelganger is connected to the Experiment comes hot on the heels of two other huge developments for Gordon Cole. When Albert comes to his hotel room (where he’s busy doodling and drinking red wine), Gordon opens the door … only to see a harrowing vision of Laura Palmer crying and screaming. This is the first time Gordon himself has experienced a supernatural event during the course of the series.
When Albert enters, his report is disturbing. The Bureau has been monitoring Diane’s phone (no dummies, Gordon and Albert) and saw the coded message that came in from Mr. C. They also intercepted her reply, reporting Bill Hastings’s arrest and their proximity to “the site.” If Mr. Cooper was aware of Bill Hastings and Ruth Davenport’s explorations, was he involved, or were they simply searching for the same thing?
Down in Vegas, storylines are converging in a similar fashion. Remember the Mitchum Brothers, the gangsterish casino owners who were taken for a ride by Dale Cooper in his “Mr. Jackpots” incarnation? When the news breaks about Ike the Spike’s arrest and his attempted hit the previous day, “Douglas Jones” is splashed all over the Mitchums’ TV. Mr. Jackpots is now Mr. Jones — someone they can find. (In the meantime, they call off the hit they apparently had out on Ike the Spike already.)
This becomes a more urgent matter to them when another connection is revealed. Remember Anthony Sinclair, Dougie’s nervous and obviously crooked coworker at the insurance company? Turns out he works for Duncan Todd, the nervous and obviously crooked man in the office who’s been trying to have Dougie killed on Mr. C’s behalf all season.
When he’s not busy running the doppelganger’s errands, Todd is at war with who he describes as “my business rivals and bitter enemies, the Mitchum Brothers.” He and Anthony conspired to label a fire at one of their properties arson, denying them a $30 million payout. Todd tells Anthony to go to the Mitchums and pin the whole thing on Dougie Jones, allowing one problem to take care of another.
This embroils poor Anthony in the episode’s goofiest subplot: the continuing travails of Candie, the most vocal member of the trio of pink-outfitted blonde beauties who … work for the Mitchums? Date them? Were adopted by them? The exact nature of the relationship is unclear; “If we fire her, she’s got no place to go,” Bradley says at one point to his brother Rodney, who exasperatedly acknowledges this.
It certainly doesn’t appear that the ladies would be able to function outside of the Mitchums’ Rat Pack world. When Candie beans Rodney in the head with a TV remote in an attempt to swat a fly, she devolves into horrified, guilt-ridden hysterics for the rest of the night. When she’s sent to bring Anthony from the casino floor to the control room, she instead launches into a whole monologue about the hot weather and the value of air conditioning, as she explains to the brothers several minutes later when she finally gets back.
Regardless, the Brothers hear what Anthony has to say, and believe it. Now Dougie Jones isn’t just the Mr. Jackpots who cleaned out their roulette machines — he’s an enemy with a vendetta who took them to the tune of $30 mil. “You fuck us once, shame on us,” Bradley fumes. “You fuck us twice? Shame on you. You’re dead.” I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes, but I understand the sentiment.
For now, however, things are looking up for Dougie. He gets a clean bill of health from his doctor (John Billingsley), while his increasingly obviously horny wife Janey-E gets a good look at his FBI agent physique. Dougie’s bod raises an important question: During his time in the Black Lodge, did Dale Cooper somehow hit the gym?
At any rate, Janey-E is so revved up by her newly fit and ferocious man that she fucks his brains out. It’s an incredible sequence, with the indelible sights of Naomi Watts acting like a randy wife in a sitcom and Kyle MacLachlan presenting Dougie’s reaction to sex as pure arm-flapping ear-to-ear-grinning delight. (Amen, brother.)
Dougie and Janey-E’s liaison points to another throughline of this episode: romance. The Joneses rekindle theirs, loudly enough to wake Sonny Jim. Albert appears to have found it with forensic examiner Constance Talbot; it’s a hoot watching Gordon and Tammy’s giggly reaction at seeing their gruff coworker in such a different light. Ben finally asks Beverly out, too, a development they both appear to have felt coming for some time.
Even Nadine, now the proud owner of the incredibly named drapes emporium Run Silent, Run Drapes, gets in on the act. Sipping a huge pink drink, she seems head over heels for “beautiful” Dr. Jacoby, aka Dr. Amp, who rants and raves about Big Pharma, sugary cereal, corporate oligarchy, and the government trying to prevent same sex marriage. (His politics are … complex.)
There’s a flipside to the love in the air, though, a black to the white: repeated depictions of violence against women. Richard attacks Miriam, then his grandmother Sylvia. In a brief aside, the soulful singing and guitar playing of trailer park owner Carl Rodd is interrupted when Becky Barnett’s no-good husband Steven throws a mug through their window, then pins her down and threatens her. Even Candie’s accidental assault on Rodney and her subsequent breakdown feels like a mirror-image exploration of this theme.
“Fucking nightmare,” Carl mutters when confronted with the harsh reality of domestic violence, one Mark Frost and David Lynch keep putting front and center in Twin Peaks. If you told me Carl has already tried to intervene personally, maybe even called the cops who either did nothing or discovered Becky wouldn’t press charges, I wouldn’t be surprised. He talks like someone who feels trapped in that nightmare, one he’s had before, one he can’t wake up from. It’s that feeling we all feel sometimes — the constant grind of money, violence, cruelty, illness, aging. As the Log Lady puts it later, “In these days, the glow is dying.”
Yet even Carl still finds the time to sing. He’s seen a soul ascend, hasn’t he? It’s implied he’s seen even stranger things than that in the past. He seems to have seen the best and worst out of people, too. And he’s still singing.
The episode ends with a full performance by singer Rebekah Del Rio, whom Lynch fans will recognize from her performance of the Roy Orbison cover “Lllorando” at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. Her song, co-written by Lynch and John Neff, is called “No Stars,” and it’s about the light of a lost love going out. But the heartbreak of dream pop like the kind Lynch has frequently made or employed in his work wouldn’t connect the way it does if things were hopeless. Songs of heartbreak require still-beating hearts to hear them.
Twin Peaks Season 3 spreads the heartbreak of Laura’s loss all across the country, in one form or another. But at the end of the main action of the episode, the Log Lady calls Deputy Sheriff Hawk again. Hinting that the secrets of “the dream of time and space … that which is and is not” will soon come out, she speaks of a different force.
“The Truman brothers are true men,” she tells Hawk. “They are your brothers. And the others, the good ones who have been with you. Now the circle is almost complete.” She also insists “Laura is the one” in the same episode where Gordon Cole sees her materialize in front of him. That can’t be a coincidence. Heartbreak is everywhere, but there are still people out there trying to mend what was broken, hanging on to hope as the fabric of reality frays.
