Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 14: "Part 14"
Tagline: “We are like the dreamer.”
Original Airdate: August 13, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Jay Aaseng, Eric Ray Anderson, Dana Ashbrook, Chrysta Bell, Monica Bellucci, David Bowie, Robert Broski, Owain Rhys Davies, Laura Dern, Eric Eynon, Jay R. Ferguson, Miguel Ferrer, Robert Forster, Nathan Frizzell, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee, David Lynch, Shane Lynch, James Marshall, John Paulsen, John Pirruccello, Kimmy Robertson, Frank Silva, JR Starr, Emily Stofle, Carel Struycken, Jake Wardle, Nae Yuuki, Grace Zabriskie
Musical Guest: Lissie (Lissie, Eric Sullivan, Lewis Keller, Jessie Siebenberg)
In Memory Of: David Bowie
In this episode of Twin Peaks, Deputy Andy goes to the White Lodge, Gordon Cole receives a message in a dream from Monica Bellucci (appearing as herself), and Sarah Palmer takes her face off and kills a guy with her teeth. Prior to this episode of Twin Peaks, these are three events the possibility of which had not even occurred to me. I like to think I have a vivid imagination, but nevertheless, I was wholly unaware that Deputy Andy going to the White Lodge, Gordon Cole receiving a message in a dream from Monica Bellucci (appearing as herself), and Sarah Palmer taking her face off and killing a guy with her teeth were even on the table.
The first of these improbable events to occur has, apparently, occurred before: “Last night, I had another Monica Bellucci dream,” he tells his fellow agents, prompting an exasperated “Oh, boy” from Albert. (Clearly, he’s been down this road before.) But there are three major revelations before that happens.
First, Gordon returns a call from Sheriff Frank Truman (there’s a little confusion there at first). Frank informs Gordon that Hawk discovered missing pages from Laura Palmer’s diary, hinting at the possibility of two Coopers.
Next, Albert explains to Tammy the origin of the “Blue Rose” name for Gordon’s task force. As young agents, Gordon and Philip watched a mortally wounded woman named Lois Duffy disappear before their eyes after saying “I’m like the blue rose”...an exact duplicate of her own killer, also somehow Lois Duffy. Tammy correctly infers that the woman is referring to herself as artificial, like blue roses.
“The dying woman was not natural,” she says. “Conjured. What’s the word? A tulpa.”
Now we’re really onto something. A borrowed concept from Cooper’s revered Tibetan Buddhism, tulpas are, roughly, artificial beings manifested by mystical adepts from pure thought. Remember Mike in the Black Lodge, telling the very confused and about-to-vanish original Dougie Jones “You were manufactured for a purpose”? I think this Dougie was a tulpa created by Mr. C to help him dodge the Lodge.
Finally — and here’s something else I never even considered — Gordon learns from Diane that the Janey-E and Dougie referred to on the ring found inside Major Brigg’s corpse are her estranged sister and brother-in-law. (!!!) Now we know how Mr. C settled on some random highly strung woman in Las Vegas as a target for deception: He learned about her through her sister Diane. (Gordon’s subsequent call to the Bureau’s Vegas office asking them to track down Douglas Jones triggers a hilarious outburst from Mad Men’s Jay R. Ferguson, playing the agent in charge.)
All this has given the good Director fresh reason to consider his Monica Bellucci dream. Monica joins him at a Parisian café (shot on location in black and white, bien sur) with friends. Cooper is there too, but Gordon can’t see his face. “We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream,” she tells Gordon, before asking “But who is the dreamer?”
A feeling of unease takes hold of Gordon, who looks over his shoulder and sees himself as a younger man, dealing with Coop and Philip Jeffries on that strange day in the Philadelphia office from Fire Walk With Me and The Missing Pieces. Gordon remembers both that Cooper was worried about a dream he’d had, and that Philip pointed at Cooper and shouted “Who do you think that is there?” It’s yet another hint that there are more Coopers than meet the eye.
Deputy Andy’s excellent adventure is up next. Deputy Bobby (it still feels weird saying that) leads Frank, Hawk, and Andy to Jack Rabbit’s Palace, the huge tree stump where he and his father the Major used to come and play together on the trail up to his top-secret listening station. Following Garland’s instructions, they walk 253 yards east, to a spot where smoke billows and electricity crackles in the air.
What they find is, again, not something it would ever have occurred to me to look for. It’s Naido, the mysterious woman Cooper encountered in the fortress on the purple sea when he was still trapped out in the cosmos. Her disfigured face and inability to communicate beyond wordless whispers and monkey-like moans visibly concerns all four men; Andy kneels by her side to hold her hand and see if she’s okay.
Then another vortex opens in the sky, seemingly enabled by a bowl of golden liquid not unlike the puddle of oil at Glastonbury Grove — its opposite, perhaps. Andy stands, gazes into the white void, and simply…disappears, poof, like that.
He materializes in the White Lodge, with its ornate furnishings and black-and-white, classic Hollywood vibe. He’s greeted by the Giant, who introduces himself by saying “I am the Fireman.” “When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out,” the Log Lady told Laura Palmer; putting out that fire seems to be the Giant’s job.
Using a strange device that coheres wisps of smoke into a cloud, the Fireman shows Andy all the relevant history of the Lodges on a circular skylight-like screen. He sees the demonic entity called the Experiment as it appeared in Mr. C’s glass box in New York. He watches it extrude the ectoplasm that produces Bob, Laura Palmer’s spectral killer. He sees the Lodge’s servants shuffling around the convenience store, and gazes upon the ghastly visage of the Woodsman, who gives us one last “Gotta light?”
Next, he sees power lines humming with electricity, long associated with the Lodge, segueing into the famous shot of the unidentified girl screaming as she runs through the Twin Peaks High School courtyard the day Laura’s death is discovered. He sees Laura’s iconic portrait, flanked by floating angels — does this mean she is still being watched over by her guardian angels, wherever she is now?
Andy sees Naido as she appeared to them in the forest. He sees the two Coopers in the Lodge, the lawman and the psychopath, first superimposed over one another, then clearly separated.
He sees an old phone lighting up with a call at the Sheriff’s Department. He sees himself there with his wife Lucy. He sees Naido again, and then the evil utility pole that marked the disappearance of Agent Chester Desmond and the death of that poor little boy Richard Horne plowed into.
Then the smoke recedes into the object. The object disappears. Andy disappears.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Bobby, Hank, and Hawk are seen as translucent figures, in multiples of themselves, shuffling aimlessly around Jack Rabbit’s Palace before cohering back into solid flesh and bone again. It’s unnervingly like the way the dirty woodsmen congregated outside the Convenience Store.
But never fear: Andy goddamn Brennan is here. He suddenly emerges from the trees, carrying Naido in his arms, his jacket draped over her.
With a voice and an attitude that recalls the best of Season 1 and Season 2 Cooper, Andy immediately takes charge of the operation. He tells his colleagues that Naido is very important and must be transported to the Sheriff’s Department in secrecy to keep her safe from people who mean to kill her.
It’s telling that none of the other men question any of this for a second. They can sense something huge just happened to them, though none of them quite remember what it was. Partial amnesia and gaps in time seem to be common when dealing with the Lodges.
Back at the station, Lucy dresses up Naido in pajamas and a bathrobe she had in her locker from some romantic night with Andy long ago. Per Andy’s instructions from the Lodge, they place her in a cell for her own protection.
Considering the other people she’s locked up with, I feel even worse for her than I already did. Her most prominent companion in the lockup is Deputy Chad. (Hooray!) Turns out Sheriff Frank and the rest of the department have been wise to him for a long time, and were just waiting for the moment to make the arrest and strip him of his badge.
Ever the asshole, Chad gets into it with the other person in the holding cells: a blind stinking drunk guy (Jay Aaseng) whose horribly mangled jaw drips blood and saliva onto the floor in a puddle as he mindlessly repeats anything anyone around him says.
When he starts imitating Naido’s noises, Chad starts imitating him. The noise is as intolerable to us as a window washer’s wiper was to Gordon back in Buckhorn earlier in the episode.
But Andy and Cooper aren’t the only Twin Peaks residents who’ve encountered the Fireman. Over at the Great Northern, we meet up with James Hurley, who works there as a security guard with a young immigrant from England named Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle). With his thick Cockney accent, Freddie seems like a sweet guy, gently ribbing his friend about his crush on the very married Renee and cleverly quoting the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” to James’s delight. But there’s one thing unusual about the London expat: He wears a green rubber glove on his right hand that even doctors have been unable to remove.
Humoring James’s curiosity because it’s the older man’s birthday, Freddie reveals the secret origin of the glove. Walking home from the pub one night, despairing of his aimless life, he got sucked into a vortex. He met the familiar Fireman, who gave him detailed instructions to purchase a particular glove at a particular store, put it on, and travel to Twin Peaks. “And there,” the Fireman told him, “you will find your destiny.”
Oh, the glove gives him Season 2 Nadine-style super-strength in his right hand, enabling him to crush walnuts between his fingertips. This seems worth mentioning. Again, not a single element of this storyline would have occurred to me before now.
Parting ways to get back to work after their late-night lunchbreak, James descends into the bowels of the Great Northern to check on the furnaces. Down there in tunnels, he hears the same high-pitched tone that has both mesmerized and baffled Ben Horne and his assistant Beverly…and discovers a locked room that appears to be its source.
The episode’s two final scenes both take place in bars, and each is troubling in its own way. At the Roadhouse, where the musician Lissie gives a performance that’s uncharacteristically rousing for the venue, another pair of young women sit in a booth, drink, and discuss the events of their lives. And wouldn’t you know it, they’re worried about the legendary, still-missing Billy. One of the women, Megan (Shane Lynch; no relation), is the daughter of Tina, whom we’ve already heard was the last person to see Billy.
Megan was there too when a bloodied Billy emerged from the night, hurdled their fence, and burst into their kitchen. After briefly hanging his head over the sink, his nose and mouth gushing blood, he fled just as quickly and mysteriously as he arrived, saying nothing. Is it a coincidence we’ve just met a guy with a mangled face that drips blood, or have we just met Billy?
Mark Frost and David Lynch are masters of making things seem just a little bit more off than they need to be, though, and that’s the case with Megan. For some reason, she can’t remember if her uncle was there that night or not, a detail you’d think would stick in her mind. Yet another missing uncle, following the one mentioned by Gordon in Fire Walk With Me (“She’s my mother’s sister’s girl”) and the one mentioned by the distraught woman with the sick child at the traffic jam outside the Double R a couple episodes back. Three times is a pattern.
I’ve saved the worst for last. Sarah Palmer wanders up to an unfamiliar bar to drink and smoke alone, something she’s likely done countless times. But tonight, a trucker (John Paulsen) makes a clumsy pass at her, wearing a t-shirt that reads TRUCK YOU as he does so. Actor Grace Zabriskie, long a stealth MVP of this saga, is at her best as Sarah here: You can hear the woman trying, desperately, to salvage some peace from this ogre.
But when she rejects his advances, he becomes misogynistic and threatening. He uses slurs to call her a lesbian. “You like to eat cunt, huh?” he says, wrapping up a vulgar little rant.
“I’ll eat you,” she replies quietly.
Then, when he persists in his threats, she takes her face off.
The visual never becomes less shocking, I can tell you that much. The woman just straight up takes her face off, swinging it open like a door to reveal a black void where her skull should be. A serpent-like tongue thwips out of the darkness, confusing and terrifying the trucker. A white hand appears, peeling back a layer of blackness, revealing an enormous toothy grin.
“Do you really wanna fuck with this?” she asks. Well, something asks.
Then she puts her face back on, lunges for his throat, and tears it out with her teeth, killing him instantly.
Pound for pound, this may be the single most shocking minute in all of Twin Peaks that doesn’t involve Leland Palmer and a mirror.
Sarah’s reaction afterwards is priceless. Feigning horror, she screams for help, and people come running to her otherwise empty section of the bar to see the carnage. She swears she saw nothing, that he just keeled over, but of course the barkeep has a hard time believing it.
“We’ll see about this!” he says as a waitress calls the cops.
“Yeah,” Sarah says, suddenly cold. “Sure is a mystery, huh?” Something in her voice tells the bartender to back away as clearly as Walter White saying “tread lightly.”
So now we come to it, the big question: What is happening to Sarah Palmer?
That the malevolent force lurking inside her comes from the Black Lodge is clear enough. How did it get there, and when? How long has there been a void where Sarah Palmer should be? How long has she been self-medicating with booze to keep it at bay, like Jeffrey Dahmer did as a teenager, getting drunk all day to suppress his own murderous urges?
Why does Sarah’s method of killing the trucker, lightning fast and gory as fuck, seem so similar to that of the Experiment when it slaughtered those two lovebirds after breaking free of the glass box?
Why did the Experiment secrete the egg that hatched the frogmoth decades ago? Why did it secrete Bob at the same time? Why did the residents of the White Lodge release Laura Palmer’s spirit into the world as a reaction?
Why did the frogmoth crawl into that girl’s mouth?
Who was that girl?
Any guesses?
