Twin Peaks, Episode 3.3: The Return, Part 3

Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 3
Call for Help

The third installment of “The Return” leaps right into the deep end. Dale Cooper falls through space and lands in another strange place. After encountering an unusual woman, he escapes through an electrical box. In our dimension, another person who looks like Cooper – named Dougie – finishes a meeting with a prostitute. As the real Coop enters our world, Dougie is sucked into the Black Lodge and turned into a golden orb. Coop's evil doppelganger, meanwhile, crashes his car and pukes up garmabozia. Clearly dazed from his experience, the returned Cooper wanders through a casino until he can contact Gordon Cole and the FBI. Meanwhile, Hawk and the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department continue to attempt to unravel the Log Lady's clues.

There's two key lines of dialogue in part three of “The Return.” As Dougie's body begin to collapse in the Black Lodge, he says “This is weird.” Later, when Gordon Cole gets a look at the entity in the glass box, he shouts “What the hell is that?” This is Lynch, seemingly, commenting on the strangeness of his own television show. With episode three, “Twin Peaks: The Return” perhaps becomes the strangest show to ever air on television. The first third is devoted to Cooper exploring a room floating in space, occupied by a eyeless woman pursued by some off-screen individual. He only escapes this place after phasing through a sparking electrical box. Many of these scenes are shot in such a way that the characters seem to quiver and jerk as they move.

Many of these moments are scored to blowing wind and industrial noise, which obviously links Part 3 of “The Return” to everything Lynch has done. But “Eraserhead,” especially, seems to be the common source of reference here. The sequence of Dougie dissolving into a floating gold orb, his head popping away in a cloud of black smoke, certainly recalls Henry's lengthy nightmare.  As with everything Lynch has done, despite the strangest on-screen, there's a line of coherence running through these dream-like images. Somehow it only makes sense for Cooper to disappear into an circuit box and reappear through a plug just as Dougie, another doppelganger of his, disappears into the Black Lodge. By free thought association and a sense of feeling, Lynch links these surreal events.

Something else linking these scenes, creating a sense of internal coherence, is Lynch's absurdist sense of humor. This is most evident during the long scenes centered in the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department. Here, Deputy Hawk scrutinizes the evidence left behind by Cooper's disappearance. Lucy and Andy, meanwhile, continue to somewhat cluelessly attempt to help. This segue into a long conversation about a chocolate bunny rabbit. Or when the hooker Dougie hired has to deal with the clearly stunned, disoriented Cooper instead. Here, once again, we have an example of Lynch's absurd sense of humor, which has grown only more abrasive over the years. Some people will watch this stuff and wonder when the hell we're going to get to the point. Others watch it and laugh their asses off.

As it continues to progress, we get an even better sense than ever before of David Lynch's approach to a mystery. “Twin Peaks,” after all, is a series centered around a mystery. What's been widely misunderstood is that Lynch is not so interested in the traditional means of unraveling a mystery. Or unraveling it at all. Instead, his detectives have always been directed by intuition and a particular feeling. We see this once again in “The Return, Part 3.” Cooper is led to his next step largely by coincidence and strange feelings. He happens to drop his key to his room at the Great Northern – which has presumably been in his pocket for twenty-five years – and reach down for it just as an assassin prepares to point his gun at him. Later, visions of the Black Lodge lead him through a casino. These moments continue to illustrate Lynch's dream-logic approach to narrative.

For long time “Peaks” freaks, “The Return” was a chance to see characters we love for the first time in two decades. In some cases, it was even a chance to say good-bye. Just as Catherine Coulson would return to the role of the Log Lady before passing away, Miguel Ferrer would reprise the role of Albert Rosenfield as his final role. Lynch even finds a (typically strange) way to get Major Briggs into “The Return,” even though Don S. Davis died in 2008.  Of the gang, Albert is definitely among the ones I missed the most. It's great to see Ferrer inhabiting the caustic agent once again, reacting to the still-near-deaf Gordon Cole, as they are presented with more bizarre evidence.

In other words, it's another hallucinatory episode of “Twin Peaks: The Return” that challenges the limits of the medium and what a narrative like this is capable of. Far from simply baiting nostalgia like so many revivals, “The Return” continues to defy expectations in service of truly surreal visions in its third episode. [9/10]