Has a Hellmouth opened up under Twin Peaks?
you’re free to get lost in your head or lose it altogether pursuing apocalypse of this sort.
Which is why a solitary journey isnt recommended.
Credit: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME
A Watson for your Sherlock, Scully for your Mulder an Albert Rosenfield for your Blue Rose-questing Gordon Cole.
All kinds of hell broke loose in Part 11 ofTwin Peaks: The Return.
Bill Hastings, snotty-nosed challenger of the unknown.)
Deputy Bobby Briggs found himself at the eye of the s storm.
Has a Hellmouth opened up under Twin Peaks?
One to match the one above Buckhorn?
The madcap storytelling befit an hour about a world hurtling toward psychotic break.
(Whats in the box, Dooper?
Whats in the box?)
Last weeks weird on top, wild at heart episode communed with Lynchs dark period in the 90s.
Damn, this was a funny episode!
Even when it was freakin bleak, the gallows humor was hilarious.
Dead + Brainpan = Deadpan.
Last week doted on women suffering a world of vain, vulgar, vicious men.
This week seemed to begin the furiousV for Vendettarevolution.
(Im convinced the spirit of Laura Palmer will inflame the shows women, igniting a pissed-off Pentecost.)
Part 11 also included images and sounds that reminded us of Part 8 (Gotta light?
Looking at Part 11 through the lens of Part 8, we detect resonance and see Gotta light?
as a myth underlying and informing the reality of the present.
God must exist, because my petition was answered.
Part 11 opened with three brothers playing catch in the gravel driveway of their backwater home.
Good luck getting that image out of your head, kid.
Innocence lost strikes again inTwin Peaks.And not for the last time in the episode, either.
Miriam is quite the fighter.
I presume she escaped her trailer before it went BOOM!
and crawled through a thicket to the highway so she could be found.
Do-gooding brothers come in threes trinities!
Miriams young Triple A saviors called to mind the Fusco bros in Vegas.
Something is coming to Twin Peaks, I think.
But is it a Christ or is it Anti-Christ?
A team of veritable Good Samaritans rescued him, too, in the form of Woodsmen.
Becky flipped her lid.
She screamed a Banshee scream, the kind of raw, primal yawp common to Lynchs work.
She phoned her mom about her crisis, said she needed a car.
an image as shocking as it was funny.
Enter another good neighbor: Carl Rodd, first responder to vehicular trauma and comforter to the heartbroken.
He hustled to Shelly and made sure she was okay.
Maggie patched him right through.
Carl and Shelly would be too late to prevent Becky from doing damage.
Fortunately, Becky was too late to Gerstens apartment building to kill anyone.
A neighbor popped her head out to say that Steven and Gretchen were long gone.
But Becky needed catharsis.
F you, Steven!
she shouted and emptied the chamber of her firearm into Gerstens door.
Her violence was satisfying, empty, and alarming all at once.
This would be just the beginning to a long day for Twin Peaks law enforcement.
This shot accentuated another feature of 1601 Timberlake Drive the yellow wallpaper.
Once again, we remember that yellow is the color of pain and suffering, creamed corn Garmonbozia.
By storys end, she disassociates loses her mind and becomes convinced she is that woman.
Prowling her room like an animal, shes liberated, mad, dehumanized.
Beyond Becky, Im reminded of Miriam, crawling out of the woods on all fours.
These women deserve their justice.
The possibility of two-timing infidelity tinted the Boy-Girl romance; it made Girl cautious of being wooed by Boy.
The certainty of adultery in the Steven-Becky marriage caused Becky to go ballistic.
(Recap continues on page 3)
It was like something no one has ever seen before!
Ive never seen anything like it!
Ive never read anything like it!
It was beautiful…Bill Hastings was wrong.
There wasnothingbeautiful about the swirling maelstrom hidden in the skies above Buckhorn.
Dream the next-gen Star Child, people!
Forget the satanic Moonchild!
And yet, upon reflection, how could I possibly think otherwise?
Of course theyd be hanging out on a yellowy spit of urban blight!
(Note: the address was 2240 Sycamore.
junkie mom and her neglected child.)
Upon their arrival, Cole and Albert immediately glimpsed a flickering Woodsman wandering the grounds.
Do you think one is in there?
They were perched at the top of an indoor stairwell an ironic stairway to heaven reference, Im guessing.
Do I think Lynch was subtly engagingTrue Detective?
Well, why not?
True Detective once paid homage to him with a Lynchian dream scene:
Cole waved at these beings.
Walk with me…'
One more thing about the Woodsmen.
Im not completely convinced theyre evil, per se.
These shady overmen might be beyond notions like good and evil.
(That was for you, Nietzsche.)
Theyre otherworldly police officers law enforcement agents representing Lodge interests on earth.
Yeah, they have a license to kill.
But maybe they have their reasons?
Are they here to facilitate a cosmic horror takeover or stop people from tempting it?
But unlike Miriam, there was no life left in Ruth Davenport.
No head on her shoulders, either.
Her stripped corpse was stiff.
Her arms were reaching out.
Maybe she was trying to touch the face of the abyss.
Maybe she was trying to push it away.
(The music during this beat: a sample of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.)
Did the ghoul become invisible and crush Bills skull?
Or did he inhabit Bill and blow the lid off the top of his head from the inside?
He called for backup.
Theres no backup for this, said Diane, coolly surveying the damage.
Cole settled the matter.
Hes dead, he said.
Question for the Woodsman: Why kill Bill?
Why not slay Cole, Albert and the entire Blue Rose crew, too?
Bill, rest in uneasy peace with Phyllis, Ruth, and your blown-up secretary.
That should be a really fun afterlife for you.
Thank you for your service.
A postmortem scene later in the episode found the team debriefing and recuperating at Mackleys office.
Coles hand was shaking like a cat on a hot tin roof.
Albert suggested he stay away from coffee, but his boss thought that coffee sounded like an excellent idea.
That said, its possible that Diane was playing dumb.
Diane seemed to be committing them memory and Albert caught her in the act.
So now we must wonder if Diana knows that they know that shes Dirty Coopers mole and moll.
By the way, those coordinates?
connection:The black hole sun was the A-bomb explosion.
The three Woodsmen at the dead center?
This was a marvelous scene with many layers.
In Becky, we saw a woman afflicted with battered womans syndrome.
She hates him, she loves him.
She knows she has to leave this monster, yet she cant quit him.
Hell, she cant even admit that hes abusing her.
Bobby who is indeed Beckys father (biological or adopted?
And both he and Shelly asked that Becky dump Steven ASAP.
She wouldnt cut ties with Steven, not now, not yet, maybe never.He can change!
Really, he can!As for paying for Gerstens door, well, that request just burned her.
She deserved those bullets, dammit!
And besides, Becky had no money.
Perhaps Bobby and Shelly have disagreed on best parenting practices with their troubled adult daughter.
Shelly always seems willing to bail her out of jams.
At least, until now.
Bobby was profoundly moved by his fathers act of love from beyond the grave.
You wonder if it has softened his heart toward his daughter.
Meanwhile, Norma watched from afar with a mix of concerned looks.
We know shes anti-enabling; we might guess that she didnt approve of Shelly or Bobby carrying Beckys weight.
The irony of Bobby paying for Beckys sins was knowing that she represents something of the sins-of-the-parents idea.
Our institutional knowledge ofTwin Peaksmade this such a rich scene.
Dude even killed a man once!
(Wonder ifTwin Peaks: The Returnis ever going to deal with that.)
Basically: impostor syndrome.
Supporting this thesis maybe was a surprise visit from Red, the magic man Sparkle-dealing scourge of Twin Peaks.
She ran outside, smooched him, arranged a late-night hook-up, and came back inside glowing.
Bobby was pained by the spectacle.
It must have reminded him* of the good old days with Shelly.
Does he still love Shelly?
Does he know something about Red but doesnt feel he has the right to say something?
I really dont want that to be true.
*You could see Red as Bobbys mirror twin a doppelganger.
Hey, you dont think that maybe gone good Bobby and bad boy Red are Dougie/Mr.
C constructs of the Black Lodge, do you?
Everyone screamed and went to ground.
Norma killed the lights.
As Frank Booth said inBlue Velvet: Now its dark.
It was about to get darker.
How could you be so careless?
Dad was ashamed yet defensive.
And the kid just stood there with a hand on his hip, looking surly and defiant.
And for a brief moment, thats what it looked like we were going to get.
(Perhaps thats how we look to Woodsman from their eternal home in fourth dimensional myth space.)
But Mother was burying the lead.
Her daughter was sick.
She was also… demon possessed?
She had pale skin and short-short hair; looked somewhat like Eleven fromStranger Things, bit older.
She kept drooling and upchucking green bile, reminiscent of Linda Blairs character inThe Exorcist.
Mother screamed, or tried to; she could only emit a series of clipped, breathy yelps.
He lacked the imagination or confidence to engage with whatever the hell this was.
Personally, I suspect what we were witnessing was a Sparkle overdose.
I like the idea that its iconography might be different each time someone unrolls it.
Hawk identified a few other symbols in play.
An image of fire, denoting a kind of electricity that can be used for good or evil.
An image of charred stalks of corn, denoting something unnatural or death.
An image of black smoke, suggesting fire used for ill intent.
Truman spied the black horned head floating above one of the mountain peaks on the map.
Hawk told Truman to ask no questions about the black horned head.
You dont want to know anything about the black horned head.
The Log Lady called.
She knew Hawk had found something.
Her log had sensed it.
Hawk said he couldnt.
Last week, The Log Ladys bottom line message was this: Laura is the one.
A stretch of intensifying dread was brilliantly defused with a beat of humor.
There was a knock at the door.
I thought for sure bad news was waiting on the other side for Sheriff Truman.Uh, Frank?
Twin Peaks is currently going to hell.
Having time to check out Jesses new car?
Thats the happy ending the heroes of this story are fighting for.
Whats in the box, Dougie?
Whats in the box?
It was distinguished by something else, too: hope.
He was so proud and he didnt know the half of the accomplishment.
That would be the Mitchums.
He wanted to plug Dougie, ASAP, just to make the feeling go away.
He didnt yet understand that the feeling wanted him to do the exact opposite.
Dougie veered toward Szymons, the Starbucks of Twin Peaks USA.
Dougie reached for his face and rubbed his cheeks.
Dead, he said.
Dougie held the pose.
Lynch held the shot.
To be honest, I thought nothing of this in the moment.
But all hail a fella who goes by @fatecolossal on Twitter.
Example: Earlier in the season, Mr. C rubbed out an associate by simply rubbing his cheeks.
This makes Dougie one more person in Part 11 to engage inAmarcord nostalgic revocation, remembering.
If Dougie shares consciousness with Mr. C, does Mr. C share consciousness with Dougie?
If they start sharing more mind with each other, what will that do to each of them?
They are an ironic expression of one of the shows big themes: divorce.
They are what Christian theologian C.S.
Lewis might call the great divorce a division and separation of heaven and hell.
Anyway, Dougie and his box were taken into the desert on a pale horse, a white limo.
But as Dougie arrived, Bradley began to remember that dream.
One part of it involved regeneration: the Candie cut on Rodneys face was healed.
Bradley ripped off the bandage, and lo, the Candie cut was healed!
Bradley was now convinced that if Dougie had brought them a cherry pie, they couldnt kill him.
Bradley checked the box, and lo, there was a cherry pie!
And when he checked Dougies pockets, lo, there was a $30 million check!
The Mitchums clearly think theyre above the law, and we know theyre not above using violence.
But they seem to take no pleasure in killing and would rather avoid it altogether.
Especially if a windfall of $30 million is involved.
An epilogue found the Mitchums partying with Dougie at their favorite restaurant, drinking champagne and gobbling cherry pie.
Once again, it didnt happen.
Candie is still buggy, still at odds with the Mitchums.
Does she exist for them or does she exist for herself?
It was Heartbreaking by Angelo Badalamenti.
Theres healing hope to match all the head-splitting evil under the black hole sun in Twin Peaks USA.
Now if only everyone can remember that.
