We are now almost exactly half-way through Mark Frost and David Lynch’s ambitious, 18-hour Twin Peaks revival, and while there was some debate before the season started over whether the typical Internet obsessive approach would be appropriate here, the season has already rewarded some close watching. This highly abstract eighth episode, in particular, could benefit from some unpacking. Lynch may lead us through a mushroom cloud or two that he never intends to explain, but there are some references in the revival that have deeper meaning—particularly when it comes to the way Twin Peaks: The Return interacts with the mythology of the 1992 feature film Fire Walk with Me.
Allow us, as we have previously, to point out a few references and callbacks you might have missed while not, to put it into Twin Peaks terms, losing the thematic forest for the trees. Pour yourself a hot cup of coffee, dish up some pie, and be prepared to follow every clue from the confounding Part 8. It’s what both Dougie Jones and Agent Dale Cooper would do.
An Inconvenient Truth: Of all the baffling elements within this episode of Twin Peaks, the most confusing may be the lengthy sequence involving an old-timey convenience store/gas station and a group of sooty ghosts. This scene evokes a few things in Peaks-ian lore. First of all, in Fire Walk with Me, a number of Lodge spirits are seen in a room located above a convenience store. And while the convenience store in this episode doesn’t exactly look like it has rooms above it, in Fire Walk with Me, Mike (Al Strobel) shouts to a BOB-infected Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), “You stole the corn! I had it canned over the store!” If you squint closely at the store in this week’s episode, you may see cans stacked in the window.
There’s also Big Ed’s Gas Farm from the original Twin Peaks series.
Big Ed’s doesn’t look identical to the convenience store the soot ghosts are seen milling about. But in case it is related, it might be worth remembering that in this episode, Ray said he was headed to a “farm.”
Ray and Phillip: It’s also worth noting that Ray is still in contact with Agent Phillip Jeffries, the character played by David Bowie in Fire Walk with Me. As far as we know, Jeffries, like Cooper, has been compromised by exposure to Lodge spirits. There was also an implication earlier this season that this evil version of Phillip wants custody of BOB once Evil Cooper is done with him. “I think he’s dead,” Ray says to Phillip. “But he got some kind of help, so I’m not sure about that. I saw something in Cooper. It may be the key to what this is all about.” More about that thing Ray saw in Cooper in a bit.
The Birth of BOB: It’s hard to say for certain what, exactly, we witnessed in this episode, but it seems as though David Lynch is trying to draw a straight line between the creation of Twin Peaks’s most famous evil spirit, BOB (Frank Silva) and the Trinity nuclear test that happened at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. In the lengthy aftermath of the explosion, we see mushroom clouds, particles, and firework effects. Not the first time we’ve seen that atomic imagery this season. . .
Then, eventually, the pale monster from the beginning of the season “births” some gooey substance that contains a shape with BOB’s face. (She appears to be vomiting—a very Lodge spirit thing to do.)
This seems to confirm the popular theory that the pale monster we saw destroy that young couple at the beginning of the season is the same as the “Mother” figure who was banging on the outside of the Purple Room when Cooper was trying to make his escape through a light socket.
Tying the creation of BOB to one of the most horrific acts humans have ever perpetrated makes a lot of thematic sense. (The music during the atom bomb explosion is Penderecki's “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.”) The timeline roughly lines up, too: the late Frank Silva, who plays BOB, was born in 1949. To be clear, the Manhattan Project isn’t responsible for the creation of the Black and White Lodges—their mythologies both significantly pre-date 1945—but that first bomb may have ripped open some kind of barrier between this world and another. “One chants out between two worlds/Fire walk with me” was a significant refrain from Laura Palmer’s original story.
“The” Nine Inch Nails: Do not ask us why The Roadhouse was able to afford NIN, but here we have a rare mid-episode musical interlude before everything really goes pear-shaped. Trent Reznor and the rest of the band sings “She’s Gone Away.” The title of the song is a tidy Laura Palmer anthem all on its own. But if you’re the type to read into every detail, the lyrics might prove even more illuminating. “You dig in places till your fingers bleed/Spread the infection, where you spill your seed” could certainly refer to some of the skull-cracking scenes we see later in the episode. “A little mouth opened up inside/Yeah, I was watching on the day she died” might refer to the young girl who swallows a bug creature. And, finally, “we keep licking while the skin turns black” might evoke the sooty spirits who play a key role in the resurrection of Evil Cooper. Speaking of which.
Coop Lives: I guess it takes more than bullets to kill Mr. C. That’s odd, considering the last BOB-infected person we saw on Twin Peaks, Leland Palmer, did die from blunt force trauma to the head. But maybe here is where we try, once again, to nail down the difference between humans infected with BOB and Evil Doppelgangers in the Twin Peaks mythology. Leland Palmer, as we knew him outside the Red Room, was a human. Evil Cooper is a Doppelganger. The dead giveaway? The eyes. In the Red Room, Doppelgangers have pure white eyes. Out in the real world, Doppelgangers appear to have entirely black irises. The point of all this being, if Dale Cooper wants to defeat Evil Cooper (and the Lodge spirits have made it clear that the two can’t co-exist in the same plane), he’ll have to do more than fire bullets at him.
A significant element of Evil Cooper’s resurrection here involves what appears to be the removal of BOB by the soot ghosts. Just a few episodes ago, Evil Cooper was in his jail cell checking to make sure that BOB was still with him. He likely won’t be pleased to find BOB gone.
“The Woodsman”: In this episode, we meet one of the scarier figures in Twin Peaks’s long history, and that’s saying a lot. If this terrifying figure—named “The Woodsman” in the credits—looks like a demonic Abraham Lincoln to you, there’s a good reason why. He’s played by Robert Broski, a known Lincoln impersonator. Between repeated and creepy readings of “gotta light?” and “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within,” The Woodsman had all the right stuff to leave a nightmarish impression on viewers. Oh yeah, and his fondness for crushing skulls didn’t help much either.
A popular theory floating around is that at least one of the soot ghosts haunting the fringes of this Twin Peaks revival is the Log Lady’s husband, who died, significantly, in a fire on their wedding night. The Log Lady says her husband “met the devil.” If one of the soot ghosts is the former Mr. Log Lady (who happened to be a lumberjack), he might be this lumberjack. Time doesn’t flow linearly when it comes to Lodge spirits (remember Annie appearing in one of Laura Palmer’s dreams), so a dead Mr. Log Lady could be menacing New Mexican residents in 1956. For what it’s worth, there are two men credited as “Woodsmen” in the Fire Walk with Me convenience store scene.
“Señorita Dido”: If The Woodsman is a new Peaks-ian force for evil, there’s also another force for good. This woman, a White Lodge companion to Carel Struycken’s Giant (who is officially listed as “??????????” in the revival) is played by Joy Nash. The (maybe) Giant and Señorita Dido, apparently perturbed by what looks like the birth of the evil spirit BOB, appear to send a figure of goodness and light to earth. Possibly to combat him. That figure comes straight out of the Giant’s head. . .
And bears the face of Laura Palmer. . .
The Giant and Señorita Dido send off the golden Laura ball off with all the tender, hopeful affection of Lara and Jor-El sending baby Superman off to Earth. If this interpretation—that Laura sprung from the head of a White Lodge spirit—is correct, then this is a fairly major revelation in the mythology of Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer may not just be a teenage girl gone wild in the Pacific Northwest. She could be a figure of elemental good sent to our world to help combat the elemental evil that is BOB. Both BOB and Laura, then, would have, in a way, occupied Leland Palmer at some point in his life.
Alternatively, whatever this “good” spirit is just happens to look like Laura Palmer. In one of Cooper’s dreams from the original series, the Man from Another Place refers to a character played by Sheryl Lee as his “cousin” and then says “but doesn’t she look like Laura Palmer?”
He also says that where they come from, there is constantly music in the air. That would be right in line with the music-filled room in this episode where we first meet Señorita Dido. Could all of that abstract dialogue from Cooper’s dream be more literal than we ever thought?
The Locust/Frog: The episode eventually zooms forward from 1945 to August 5, 1956. We see an egg hatch, and a locust/frog (a Biblical plague combo if ever there was one) creature crawls out. (At least it won’t bump its ass when it hops.) The hatched egg looks exactly the same as the ones in the goo emerging from the Mother figure earlier in the episode.
Whether this creature is actually BOB or another evil spirit, we don’t know yet. (My money is that it’s another spirit.) The Woodman’s refrain—“This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within”—lures anyone listening to the radio into a zonked-out state. At least one of those New Mexicans, a character only listed as “Girl,” then becomes a host for the locust/frog which crawls in through the young girl’s window in the same manner as a BOB-infected Leland did in Fire Walk with Me. Who could this girl be? Grace Zabriskie, the actress who plays Laura Palmer’s mother, Sarah, was born in 1941. A Twin Peaks wiki (without any sourcing) lists Sarah Palmer’s DOB as 1945 (the same year as BOB). So Sarah could perhaps be the same age as this girl (11 or 15) in 1956. But we’ll have to stay tuned and find out.
