Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 17: “Part 17”
Tagline: “The past dictates the future.”
Original Airdate: September 3, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Jay Aaseng, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, Chrysta Bell, Jim Belushi, Richard Beymer, Joan Chen, Giselle DaMier, Eric DaRe, Don S. Davis, Laura Dern, Jay R. Ferguson, Miguel Ferrer, Robert Forster, Nathan Frizzell, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Robert Knepper, Piper Laurie, Andrea Leal, Sheryl Lee, David Lynch, James Marshall, Don Murray, Jack Nance, Walter Olkewicz, John Pirruccello, Kimmy Robertson, Carlton Lee Russell, Amy Shiels, Frank Silva, Al Strobel, Carel Struycken, Jake Wardle, Ray Wise, Nae Yuuki, Grace Zabriskie
Musical Guest: Julee Cruise
In Memory Of: Jack Nance
It’s possible none of the events described below ever happened.
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Long ago, before they disappeared, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and Air Force Major Garland Briggs made a secret plan with FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole. It’s a plan so secret, in fact, that neither Special Agent Albert Rosenfield nor we in the audience had seen or heard a word of it until Gordon spills the beans to Albert and Tammy in Buckhorn following the incident with Diane’s tulpa. I suppose that’s as good a reason as any to lay all your cards on the table.
Back in 1989, Gordon says, Major Briggs had a lead on a powerful evil entity known as Jowday in antiquity…and Judy today. The three men, familiar with the Blue Rose project, put together a plan to find Judy, with Coop telling Gordon he planned to “kill two birds with one stone” prior to his disappearance. (In the season premiere, the Giant/Fireman used this same phrase.) But then he (or rather his doppelganger) disappeared, and the Major vanished in the blaze that consumed his listening station. Philip Jeffries, whom Gordon says no longer exists in a form you’d recognize, was onto Judy prior to his own disappearance years earlier. Thanks to a tip from Mr. C’s traitorous sidekick Ray, who was an FBI informant on top of everything else, Gordon now knows the evil Cooper was after coordinates from Major Briggs, implicitly the ones that lead to Judy. Obviously, Judy is bad news.
Just as Gordon is wondering why they haven’t heard from Cooper, Agent Headley calls from Vegas, with Bushnell Mullins butting in on the call. They’ve found Dougie Jones…and he’s Dale Cooper.
“I am headed for Sheriff Truman’s,” Bushnell reads from the note Coop left behind. “It is 2:53 in Las Vegas, and that adds up to a ten, the number of completion.” As Tammy relays the misadventures Coop got into under the guise of Dougie Jones, Gordon gives the order to head out to Twin Peaks, to which the good Dale is racing even now.
(In a brief aside, we learn that Jerry Horne survived his close encounter with Mr. C and the mystical trap that killed Richard Horne. The cops call brother Ben from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Jerry wandered out of the woods in the nude, claiming his binoculars killed a man.)
–
While Naido, the disfigured woman Andy rescued with the help of the White Lodge, grows more agitated in the Sheriff’s Department’s jail cells, the evil Cooper arrives at the spot in the woods near Jack Rabbit’s Palace where Naido emerged. When he steps toward the pool of yellow liquid, he too is transported to the room in the White Lodge where the giant Fireman and his machinery dwell. Unlike Andy, who was there in full-body form, the doppelganger is a floating face in a cage, opposite the free-floating head of Major Briggs.
On the screen, the Palmer house appears. The Fireman waves his hand, and the images shifts to the road outside the Sheriff’s station. The doppelganger-cube floats through one of the Fireman’s golden tubes and into the screen, seemingly diverted from his original target, which we know to be the location of Judy.
There’s only one person left in that house. So now we know what Philip Jeffries meant when he told he evil Cooper, whom he believed to be the real one, that he’d met Judy before.
Why, of course Agent Cooper met Sarah Palmer.
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Mr. C is unhappy to see where he has arrived, but not for long.
First fooling Andy, then Lucy into believing he’s the real Cooper, he has an audience with the new Sheriff Truman. (They should know something’s off when he declines their offer of coffee.) He’s there, he says with a smile that could curdle milk, for “unfinished business.”
This is the dark Cooper’s apotheosis, the hour he has been waiting for. He can afford to take his time with these nothings. His appearance from the moment he fakes happiness to see Andy reminds me of Stephen King’s description of his own Dark Man, Randall Flagg, in The Stand:
“[...His eyes were] windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.”
Even as Mr. C prowls around the station, the no-good Deputy Chad uses a hidden key to escape from his holding cell. Moving quietly to avoid rousing the noisy drunk, he raids the gun locker. For a few unbearable moments, everyone in the station is at risk. But Freddie acts before Chad can shoot Deputy Andy, punching his cell door clean open and right into Chad’s sneering face.
Meanwhile, Lucy gets a call from Cooper — the real Cooper, who asks if the coffee’s on with a happiness you can hear through the phone — and realizes something has gone terribly wrong. She urgently patches the call through to Sheriff Truman.
Sensing something is wrong, the evil Cooper draws, and Frank does too. But Lucy gets the drop on them both and blows Mr. C away from the doorway, exactly the place Andy saw her in his vision in the White Lodge.
Following his own steps in the vision, Andy himself brings Freddie, James, and Naido in to serve their own purposes in the grand drama, with Hawk arriving close behind.
They’re not alone. The Woodsmen emerge, once again tending to the evil Cooper’s body. At that very moment, Cooper and the Mitchum Brothers pull up, and Cooper runs full tilt into the station.
Before his eyes, the Bob-orb emerges from his doppelganger’s body and begins attacking him, to the Mitchums’ horror. Then it turns its attention to Freddie, who realizes his destiny is upon him. Bob attacks, bloodying him. “CATCH YOU WITH MY DEATH BAG,” it growls, repeating a chanted line from the original run.
But Freddie fights back, pounding the orb down into seemingly literal hell, then shattering it into pieces that float upward and disappear. Cooper then puts the ring on the doppelganger’s finger; the being vanishes, and the ring clatters to the floor of the Black Lodge. With that, the threat of both Bob and Mr. C is ended.
Then Cooper looks at Naido, and things change.
–
Suddenly, Cooper’s concerned face is transposed over the image; it fades away at several moments in the following minutes, only to return again. By the end of the scene, Bobby, Gordon, Albert, Tammy, Candie, Mandie, and Sandie all show up to bear witness to the events playing out beneath the superimposed Cooper’s gaze.
In his traditionally confident voice, the real Cooper says “There are some things that will change. The past dictates the future.” He and Naido touch hands, and through a series of surreal images we see her face give way to the stripes and curtains of the Lodge. A strange object floats there, revealing Diane’s face, but with red hair rather than blonde.
Suddenly we’re back in the station, and Diane stands in Naido’s place. Cooper smiles, and the two old friends reunite and kiss passionately, with her black and white fingernails against the black of his suit and hair. For this part, Cooper’s superimposed face is absent.
Then the pair of them glance at the clock on the wall, which glitches at 2:53, as the face returns.
“WE LIVE INSIDE A DREAM,” the face says slowly.
Cooper bids everyone goodbye, saying he hopes to see them all again. The scene fades just to the superimposed face, then to the darkness beneath the Great Northern Hotel, where Cooper, Diane, and Gordon walk together, following the high-pitched sound.
Using his old room key, which he retrieves from Frank, Cooper opens the door.
“See you at the curtain call,” he says to his old friends. The door shuts behind him.
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Mike, the One-Armed Man, greets him. He recites the familiar poem, and somehow you can feel it’s the last time we’ll hear anyone say it.
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me
Light flashes and sizzles.
The two men then follow the same path to Philip Jeffries that Mr. C followed. They go through a long black passage that’s mapped onto Ghostwood, the forest outside Twin Peaks. They reach the staircase, and the Jumping Man descends shortly after they go up. They step out into the courtyard, which has no guardian this time, and enter Philip’s room.
As usual, the Jeffries teapot seems vaguely confused about who he’s talking to or why. “It’s slippery in here,” he says apologetically. Cooper asks about a date: February 23, 1989, the night of Laura Palmer’s death. “I’ll find it for you,” the former agent tells him.
“This is where you’ll find Judy,” Philip says. “There may be someone…Did you ask me this?” Not exactly.
The teapot’s spout extrudes the symbol of the Black Lodge, which then morphs into an infinity symbol, with a small dark ball in the bottom loop. “There it is,” Philip says, telling Cooper he can go now.
“Electricity,” Mike says, and things change again.
–
It is February 23, 1989. We’ve seen it before, though we’re now seeing it in black and white: James picking Laura up from her parents house with Leland looking on, the two of them stopping to kiss and argue in the woods, James driving her off on his bike, her hopping off at the stoplight at Sparkwood and 21. It’s all footage from Fire Walk With Me, and thanks to Sheryl Lee’s performance it remains as raw and sad as ever.
The difference this time is that Dale Cooper is there. He appears in the woods, and at one point the hysterical Laura even sees him, screaming.
He’s there elsewhere after she runs away from James, standing on the route that leads to where Leo Johnson, Jacques Renault, and Ronette Pulaski are waiting for her.
He reaches out. She takes his hand.
The next morning, her dead body, wrapped in plastic, glitches and vanishes from the shore outside the Martells’ house. A vertiginous inversion of her empty chair in the pilot, this absence indicates her continued presence.
Pete, Catherine, and Josie, shown in archival footage from the pilot episode, go about what is now a perfectly normal morning.
“Where are we going?” Laura asks Dale, having recognized him from her dreams.
“We’re going home,” Cooper says. Everything’s in color now.
When we cut to that home, however, we are not in 1989, not in the version where Laura goes out that night, not in the version where the older Dale Cooper stops her. We’re 25 years later, in the Palmer family living room as we’ve seen it this season, strewn with empty bottles and cigarette butts. We hear inhuman wailing and roaring elsewhere in the house, slowly coalescing into the more recognizable screams of Sarah Palmer.
She bursts into the room, her face turned away from us, and grabs the framed homecoming queen portrait of Laura from a table. Glitching, knocking shit down for now reason, she puts the photo on the floor, grabs a glass bottle, and smashes it into the frame, shattering it. She stabs downward over and over, growling and moaning, but the photograph itself remains somehow undamaged.
In the woods, Cooper hears a a scratching sound like the one he heard on the Giant’s phonograph in the premiere as they near the portal at Major Briggs’s coordinates. He turns and sees Laura has vanished. Her screams echo horribly through the woods, but Cooper scans them slowly to absolutely no avail. She’s gone away.
In the Roadhouse, Julee Cruise performs “The World Spins.” If the song sounds familiar, it’s because it was playing when the old waiter approached Dale Cooper the night Leland and Bob murdered Maddy Ferguson. Remember what he said?
I’m so sorry.
–
“The past dictates the future.” “There will be some changes.” The missing body. Pete Martell fishing happily. It is not hard to figure out what these things mean when you put them together. If you want to get science-fictional about it — and Twin Peaks bases a large part of its mythology around Project Blue Book X-Files stuff, so I think that’s fair — Cooper has created an alternate timeline by doing what he always wished he could have done and saving Laura Palmer’s life.
But the future dictated by that past isn’t perfect. Judy still lurks in the form of the alcoholic, chainsmoking Sarah Palmer, who still lives alone. How is that possible?
Because Cooper’s mission is not successful. Some force — perhaps the enmity directed toward Laura by Sarah/Judy — yanks her away from safety and off into…where?
As a television show, Twin Peaks is a hybrid: primetime soap opera, murder mystery, horror, parody, comedy, proto–prestige drama, and avant garde/experimental work coexist in the same space. (For god’s sake, this season has musical guests!) The border is always porous.
That’s true within the story as well. Our world and the next one are laid atop one another, red curtains over forest pines, zigzag floors over human flesh. Identity shatters and doubles: People are two people in one, or the same person in two separate bodies. The dead rise. The living go to hell. Now the spacetime continuum itself has been ruptured.
The effect on reality is not dissimilar from the effect of the first atomic blast. There was a world before it, and now there is a world after it.
Or is there?
“We live inside a dream,” Monica Bellucci told Gordon Cole in a dream of his own. “But who is the dreamer?”
“We live inside a dream” says Dale Cooper, as events literally, visually play out within his head.
It would have to be a very detailed dream to make time for Ben Horne to go rescue his naked stoner brother, or to include a joke about how Lucy now understands how cell phones work, to say nothing of all the other wonders and horrors we’ve seen this season in which neither of the Coopers nor any of the Blue Rose team had any direct involvement.
But would a dream like that be beyond an encyclopedic, empathetic mind like Cooper’s? Not a dream perhaps, but a vision, like Major Briggs’s — the mind revealing itself to itself. Few people were more familiar with the dark side of humanity, and few people believed in its goodness more strongly, than Dale Cooper. Such a soul is more than capable of encompassing the dichotomous world that Twin Peaks: The Return has shown us.
Thoughts can be made real in Twin Peaks. People do magic, making something from nothing, creating living beings. Perhaps this boundary is longer and more porous than we imagined. Perhaps someone had 25 years to come up with the idea that love is enough, and this is his opportunity to make that idea real.
“I’ll see you at the curtain call,” Coop says, before initiating the drama’s final act.
We’re going home.
