Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 18: “Part 18”
Tagline: “What is your name?”
Original Airdate: September 10, 2017
Writers: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Matt Battaglia, Laura Dern, Francesca Eastwood, Pierce Gagnon, Heath Hensley, Sheryl Lee, Sheryl Lee, Rob Mars, Mary Reber, Al Strobel, Naomi Watts, Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie
There is some justice in the world. Not this world, perhaps, but some world.
In that world, Dale Cooper’s doppelganger burns in the Black Lodge, an infernal payback for his rebellion against the rules that govern his kind. Elsewhere in the Lodge, using the power of “electricity” — the “black fire” that is the lifeblood of the Lodges’ magic — Mike creates a tulpa duplicate of Dale Cooper/Dougie Jones. He sends the handsome, friendly fellow to Janey-E and Sonny Jim to help Coop keep his promise to them. “Home,” says the new Dougie Jones, smiling in his family’s embrace. He was manufactured for a purpose, and this is it.
After that, things go sideways. The final episode of the greatest television show of all time takes one last long detour to another place, before returning us to the place it all began. But what they say is true: You can’t go home again.
We once again watch Cooper lead young Laura Palmer through the woods by the hand, only to lose her when he hers that scratching sound and her echoing scream. The next moment, he’s back in the Black Lodge, with Phillip Gerard, aka the One-Armed Man, aka Mike, asking him once again, “Is it future or is it past?”
Mike leads him back to the Arm. “Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane?” the strange electric tree-creature asks, repeating the words of Audrey Horne. I fear this may answer the mystery of where our one-time heroine now lives, or at least exists.
Cooper once again finds himself in an armchair, and is once again whispered to by the older Laura Palmer, whose earlier absence he noted. She is once again whisked away by some powerful force. Cooper once again gets up and encounters Leland Palmer, who once again mournfully asks him to “Find Laura.”
This time around, Cooper can exit the Lodge as planned. He parts the curtains of the hallway and emerges at Glastonbury Grove, one of the portals in the Ghostwood outside of Twin Peaks. He finds Diane — just Diane, not Gordon or any of the others — waiting for him. Both of them confirm that yes, this time, it’s really them.
The two set out on the open road, across a desert landscape lined with high-tension wires.
“You sure you wanna do this?” Diane asks. “You don’t know what it’s gonna be like, once we…”
When they approach the 430-mile mark from where they set out — “430” was the number the Fireman told Cooper to remember in the White Lodge way back in the premiere — Cooper stops the car and gets out, sensing the electricity in the air.
“Kiss me,” he tells Diane when he gets back in. “Once we cross, it could all be different.”
They kiss. He starts the car. Lights flash as the car moves but the two sit stock still.
Then it’s the middle of the night, and they’re speeding down the lost highway. But their affect is different now. Diane looks chillier. Cooper glowers. His face looks familiar.
They stop at a motel for the night. When Cooper heads in to book their room, Diane sees another version of herself standing outside.
When he returns, the other Diane is gone.
In their room, Cooper initiates sex with a forwardness we’ve never seen from him before…but have seen from his doppelganger. “My Prayer,” the song by the Platters (a group featuring a member named David Lynch) that played at the radio station attacked by the Woodsman, blasts on and off on the soundtrack as the two have sex.
Growing more and more distraught, Diane covers the face of her seemingly emotionless, passionless lover. Maybe she remembers his doppelganger’s visit. Maybe she just doesn’t like what she sees. Maybe, like her own doppelganger, she feels she is somehow not herself.
When Cooper wakes up the next morning, he finds a dear John letter Diane left behind — addressed to “Richard,” from “Linda,” the two names mentioned by the Fireman in that conversation in the premiere. “I don’t recognize you anymore,” it reads.
When Cooper exits the motel, it’s not the one he entered. When he gets in his car, it’s not the one he drove there.
He finds himself in the town of Odessa, Texas, where he sees a sign exhorting motorists to Eat at Judy’s. Acting with some unknown insight or instinct, he heads inside the diner, where he wordlessly accepts a coffee. He asks the waitress (Francesca Eastwood) if there’s another waitress there and learns she’s been out for several days.
Then a trio of all-hat-no-cattle cowboys start harassing the waitress. Cooper tells them to stop. When they threaten him with a gun, he disarms the gunman, kicks him hard in the balls, shoots one of his buddies in the foot, and forces the third one to disarm himself and sit on the ground. He collects their weapons and drops them in the deep fryer, warning the staff to stay away in case the bullets go off. He also demands the address of the other waitress, not bothering to lower his own gun or be at all calming or friendly when he asks for it.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m with the FBI.” Suddenly this sounds much less reassuring.
Whatever else it is, Twin Peaks is a mystery, so it’s okay to guess at the solution. My sense is that once he “crossed over,” Dale Cooper ceased to be the cartoonishly good-hearted and open-minded fellow we know and love. I think a big part of that person is still inside him, but it shares space with all the traits the doppelganger embodied: cold decisiveness, sexual aggressiveness, quickness to violence, a penchant for grand gestures of domination.
The good Dale is still in control — you’ll note he only gets violent to protect an innocent woman from sexual harassment, and he shows no signs of nonconsensual behavior with Diane — but there’s another side to him now. The person who results is not always a pleasant one, however well intentioned his actions.
Whoever or whatever he is now, Cooper makes his way to the address the waitress gives him. He takes notices of the utility pole outside. It’s the same pole he first saw at the Fat Trout Trailer Park 25 years earlier, near the spot where Agent Chester Desmond disappeared, and where the Black Lodge’s grandmotherly Mrs. Chalfont used to live. More recently, it appeared where his doppelganger’s son Richard Thorne ran over a child.
Cooper knocks, and he’s overjoyed when Laura Palmer answers the door.
Only it’s not Laura Palmer at all, certainly not as far as she’s concerned. She is an identical woman with a Texas accent, named Carrie Page. Is she the missing “page” from Laura’s diary, found at last? She is one final double — Sheryl Lee is even listed twice in the credits for playing Laura and Carrie — from a show, and a filmmaker, fixated on them.
Whoever or whatever she is now, Carrie a hard-luck case. When Cooper introduces himself as FBI, she frantically asks if he found someone, a man she doesn’t identify. When he tells her he believes she is “a girl named Laura Palmer,” she assures him he’s got the wrong person…until he mentions her mother, Sarah. The name makes Carrie tremble. Badly shaken, she jumps at the chance to “get out of Dodge” with an FBI escort when Dale says he wants to take her to her mother’s home, which he reveals to be in faraway Twin Peaks, Washington State.
When Carrie invites Cooper inside her home, he finds a dead man with a bullet hole in his head.
He also sees a figurine on the mantle — a white horse. The phone begins ringing; she ignores it completely as she leaves, almost cheerful now. “At least we’re gettin’ out of this fuckin’ town of Odessa,” she sneers as they depart.
They drive into the night. For a long time a pair of headlights illuminates them from behind, to the point where Carrie starts to wonder if they’re being followed.
Even Coop looks nervous until the car passes and moves along.
“Odessa,” Carrie says dreamily. “I tried to keep a clean house…” (It is in our house now.) “Keep everything organized…It’s a long way. In those days, I was too young to know any better.”
They cross over a bridge and reach Twin Peaks. They pass the Double R, closed for the night. They pull down Laura’s old street. None of it, not even her childhood home, looks familiar to Carrie.
But both she and Cooper approach the door with apprehension, holding hands. After what we’ve seen of Sarah this season, we know they have good reason to be afraid. What’s behind that door could eat them alive, body and soul.
But it’s just some lady who answers the door, and she’s never heard of Sarah Palmer. Though she is played by Mary Rebar, the real-life owner of the Palmer house (we live inside a dream), she says her name is Alice Tremond, and that she bought the house from a Mrs. Chalfont.
Though Cooper doesn’t know it, these are the names used by the grandmotherly woman from the Black Lodge, whom we haven’t seen or heard from all season. Something is wrong here.
Cooper apologizes for disturbing Mrs. Tremond and her unseen husband and departs, Carrie by his side. The two wander into the street, seemingly dazed. Suddenly Cooper stops, turns, and takes a few stagger-steps back toward the house. Laura turns to see.
“What year is it?” he asks.
“Laura!” calls the distorted voice of Sarah Palmer from somewhere inside the house.
Carrie, if she is still Carrie, hears the voice and screams.
The electricity in the house sparks and shorts. The lights go out. The scream echoes on.
As the credits roll to mournful music, we see a slow-motion closeup of Laura whispering to Dale in the Lodge, his face a mask of confusion and dismay.
When the Lynch/Frost Productions tag appears, the customary sound of electricity is absent.
The end.
What does it mean? If you’re asking for my lore deep-dive explanation, it’s this.
Sarah Palmer has been possessed by Judy, the mother of the Black Lodge, since Judy’s avatar the frogmoth crawled into her mouth in Part 8. Her voice in the Season 2 finale, her bizarre behavior this season, the void and grin behind her face, her mutilation of the trucker echoing the mutilation of the young lovers by the entity that also birthed Bob and the frogmoth, her roaring meltdown when Cooper rescued Laura, her face superimposed on the long-nosed Punch-like Jumping Man who seems to be tied to Judy, Phillip Jeffries mistaking the doppelganger for Cooper and telling him he’d met Judy before, the screen in the Fireman’s theater showing the Palmer house when the doppelganger arrived at Major Briggs’s coordinates seeking Judy — all of it points in the same direction.
Laura was birthed into the world by the White Lodge in the form of the offspring of Bob/Leland and Sarah/Judy in order to keep Judy at bay, despite the risk to her. I don’t think Bob was aware of Judy, and I think as long as Laura was alive, Judy laid dormant.
When Bob/Leland killed Laura, Sarah began self-medicating to subdue the thing inside her. That thing, Judy, spoke to Major Briggs in the Season 2 finale, canonically just days before his disappearance into the world of the Lodges. This season, Judy was finally on the verge of breaking out, only to be subdued once again when Cooper rescued Laura from death.
The plan Cooper told Gordon years ago, the plan the Fireman told Cooper in the White Lodge at the start of this season, is to kill two birds with one stone. Dale meant to rescue Laura, and to use Laura to neutralize Judy, whom he knew to be Sarah. Information to this effect may have been what Laura whispered to him in the Lodge, along, perhaps, with its chances of success.
The plan doesn’t work as expected. Sarah herself isn’t present at the house, just other owners, who share names with a being from the Lodge. The change dazes Cooper, who loses track of when he is in time and space. Or perhaps he senses that it is happening again.
The pain and sorrow of the Palmer family — one for my master, one for my dame, one for the little girl who lives down the lane — leaks through into whatever reality they now inhabit. Sarah/Judy shouts Laura’s name, Laura screams and screams, and the electricity goes out. Then we’re back in the Lodge again, Laura is whispering into Dale’s ear again, and he again does not like what he hears.
The optimistic interpretation, not just of the lore but of the imagery and sound of those final moments, is that the plan worked. Judy was lured forth and destroyed, but at the cost of Laura herself, and Dale, and the reality they inhabited. That’s the glass half full version.
The pessimistic interpretation is that it was all in vain. The entire season— the journeys through space and time and beyond the infinite, the Dougie Jones ordeal, the race to stop Mr. C and save Laura, all the efforts of all his friends and all their friends — all of it was for nothing. Cooper can change the course of history temporarily, perhaps, but its flow always returns you to the same place. For Cooper and Laura, that place is the Palmer house, the oblivion of death, and the placid hell of the Black Lodge. Laura is screaming for a reason. The lights are going out on her.
When we flash back to Laura whispering into Dale’s ear again, maybe that’s what she’s telling him: win or lose, half full or half empty, the light behind Laura’s face will be extinguished.
That’s if any of it happened at all.
We live inside a dream, but who is the dreamer? The Arm’s pointed reference to the little girl who lives down the lane earlier in the episode may mean Dale is going through something similar to what Audrey appears to have gone through: living out a whole life that vanishes in an instant when something shatters the illusion and returns you to whatever hell you are stuck in.
In this interpretation, Cooper, his face briefly superimposed over all of reality, is the dreamer, generating the entire season as a pocket reality while trapped between the red curtains of the Black Lodge forever. But if that’s the case, my god, what a dreamer he is.
Look at it this way: Forget, if you can, all the questions you still have about what really happened to Dale and Laura and why, whether you hold to my theory or something totally different. Forget your questions about the metaphysics and magic of the Black Lodge, the White Lodge, and their inhabitants.
Now forget all the questions you still have about how things turned out in all the storylines our heroes and heroines got partway through. Forget whether Shelly will ever find out her new boyfriend’s a drug-dealing sorcerer, or how her daughter Becky will react when she learns her shiftless husband killed himself in the woods outside their trailer park, or whether Norma and Big Ed (or Albert Rosenfield and Constance Talbot) really do live happily ever after. Forget all of those loose ends.
Instead, just think of all the plot threads Frost and Lynch introduced just to be loose ends. Think of all those seedy, drunken conversations between women at the Roadhouse, all the gossip about affairs and crushes and people getting out of jail and back on the dating market with lousy men. Think about all the detours into the lives of random people on the wrong side of the law — the super at an apartment complex who’s secretly into some shit, the addict who lives across the street from the house where the original tulpa Dougie Jones conducted his extramarital affairs, the Renault Brother who’s keeping the family business running while someone else sweeps up the mess, the small army of contract killers who fail to kill “Dougie Jones” and get killed for it in turn.
Then think about this season’s biggest questions, its boldest moments. Cooper’s journey through the cosmos. The detonation of the first atomic bomb. The death of the Log Lady. The killing of that little boy and the ascension of his soul. The mysterious but clearly tragic fate of Audrey Horne, separated from her Special Agent forever.
Think about the way you felt when you saw these people again, the way their triumphs thrilled you, the way their failures and torments tormented you in turn.
Think of the musical guests.
Think of Wally Brando.
Did you think of all that?
Look, if there’s a brain on Twin Peaks Earth that’s capable of conceiving of the full personhood of that many people, it’s Dale Cooper’s. It’s certainly possible. I wouldn’t get mad at you if that’s what you thought.
But still.
All of that’s a dream? A literal dream? All of it?
In a sense, obviously, the answer is yes. It’s all the dream of David Lynch and Mark Frost, along with the entire cast and crew that brought that dream to such spectacular life. None of it’s really real, neither the most iconic and impactful moments nor the smallest side plots. And so, if the filmmakers are capable of dreaming all this into reality, surely the fictional Dale Cooper can do so as well.
But I dislike it was all a dream as a literal explanation for what we’ve been watching, this season or any other. For one thing, even within the show, dreams are almost never just dreams. For another, no, it’s not that Lynch is above the Wizard of Oz maneuver, having pulled it in at least one previous project and arguably more than one, but his overall fondness for dream worlds is part of what makes me lean toward rejecting the idea that this is one, too. Revisiting a 25-year-old show just to repeat some other stuff you did elsewhere…it doesn’t track, for me.
More fundamentally, however, the real things these fake people in this fake world have made me think and feel this season are diminished by dismissing their fake lives as mere illusions, as dreams within Lynch and Frost’s dream. It matters more, I think, if we really are witnessing not Dale’s dreams of these things, but the actual joy of Big Ed and Norma’s embrace, the actual pain of that little boy’s mother, the detours into modern life’s dead ends, the illnesses and deaths of so many characters, even the twinned horrors of the bomb and the Woodsmen who embody its awful power.
However you look at Twin Peaks: The Return — as horror, as mystery, as soap opera, as social critique, as surrealist art, even just as a sequel — the season works better and burns hotter if it “really” happened. The we live inside a dream aspect, Cooper’s superimposed face — to me, this symbolizes Dale’s wishful thinking. The justice he seeks, the struggle to save Laura and free Sarah from Judy, is a dream that will not come true.
Now, above, I’ve shared my cosmic rationale for what might have “really” happened, and why. But you’re more than welcome to come up with your own theories. Better researched than me people certainly have.
Of course, nearly all of Lynch’s work is left open to interpretation by Lynch himself in the course of its creation. That’s why I think the real answer to whether it was real or a dream, and if it was a dream whose dream was it, and if it was real how many realities are there, is a shrug.
In the end, theories like mine are a parlor game, because the specifics are irrelevant. The big picture, though, is inescapable. Twin Peaks’ greatest fear, its bad dream, is one it shares with Major Garland Briggs: the possibility that love is not enough.
Despite never actually meeting her, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper loved Laura. Coop loved the whole world, in all its wonderful strangeness. I think his most bone-deep conviction was simply that people should be free to enjoy living, from Twin Peaks to Tibet, from One-Eyed Jack’s to the Black Lodge. He opposed injustice on both a human and cosmic scale, the forces that extinguished Laura’s light, with a pure and passionate intensity, because evil gets in the way of life, of love.
Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper were each embodiments of love in their own way, Laura literally so. Whatever you consider their quest to be, whether you believe they succeeded or failed at it, the electricity short circuits and the lights go out as Laura screams. The final image is as if they never left the Lodge at all.
Laura is the center of it all. Laura the abused and terrified teenager who was raped and murder by her father. Laura the confused and terrified adult, returned to the scene of the crime by a well-intentioned detective who could not protect her from that pain in these final moments.
I want to say that it’s still the right thing to do, to be like Dale Cooper, to be just and curious and kind. I certainly don’t think Twin Peaks is supposed to be a cautionary tale about the knight errant’s hubris. I believe we’re supposed to feel about Coop pretty much exactly the way we’ve always felt about him. There are few characters I love and care about more.
But Laura isn’t just the center of it all. Her death is the hole in the center, the structuring absence, the same way the bomb blew a hole in the world, letting in the evil that defined the entire Twin Peaks saga. Even if by white magic you make it so the beach is empty on that February morning, you can’t unring a bell, and you can’t undetonate an atomic bomb, and you can’t bring the dead back to life, no matter how much you love.
We saw that girl run sobbing and screeching through the courtyard. We saw that vacant desk. We knew what it meant. Even now, after everything that’s happened, its meaning remains inescapable. The chair is empty. The page is missing. The light is out. Twin Peaks, television’s great epic of loss, ends with us unable to hear Laura Palmer. Our memory of her sorrow fills the silence, her scream echoing through the hole in the world she left behind.
