Its hard to remember our first sighting of Major Briggs onTwin Peaks.
Don S. Davis played the Major in life, and now, in death.
Major Briggs seemed glued into his uniform, and you might have thought he was a real hardass.
Credit: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME
But humans contain unknowable multitudes, and Major Briggs revealed himself as a seeker of the highest order.
He had visions of white light and palazzos.
He disappeared into the woods and returned with memories of stone thrones lurking in distant cosmic Edens.
He was tapped in to the peculiar energy ofTwin Peaks.
He was some kind of mystic, and some sort of hero.
Major Briggs was there at the start of this revived season, too, in a line of dialogue.
Recall the nefarious Cooper doppelganger in Part 2, speaking to a synthesized voice.
I missed you in New York, the voice said.
And: You met with Major Garland Briggs.
Briggs has lingered throughout the season ever since.
His bodys trapped with us here on Earth, cooling in the Buckhorn morgue.
In Part 9 ofTwin Peaks colloquially titled This Is the Chair major characters and events swirled around Major Briggs.
He was the glue, sticking together so many different strands of this strange story.
Or perhaps he is the drain they are all spiraling down.
What an honor to be filling in on the recap of this episode!
Im not half thePeaksscholar that your regular recapper Jeff Jensen is.
But I am a Major Briggs fanboy.
And although Part 9 was a much more down-to-earth chapter than last episodes cosmic origin story people discovered things!
this hour ofTwin Peakswas an intriguing progression from the last one.
Part 8 described the birth of some sort of evil.
Was Part 9 the story of the death of goodness?
Perhaps Major Briggs is gone for good.
But gone is not forgotten.
He met two of his sharpest operators.
And there was Chantals husband, Hutch.
Theyre a wild pair, the Hutchens couple.
Cooper can count on them for anything.
They stitched up his wounds.
They get him a new car, some guns.
Chantal gave him a kiss, and then gave him some Cheetos.
He told Hutch, Kill this phone, and Hutch shot the phone with a shotgun.
He gave them an assignment.
And he promised them another assignment: a double-header in Vegas.
Can we indulge ourselves, and wonder if that is an embedded joke?
Before Hutch killed his phone, Cooper had two final messages to deliver.
He sent a text message: Around the dinner table the conversation is lively.
Did you do it?
Not yet, Todd said.
Better be done next time I call.
So the doppelganger continues to target Dougie.
This invites tantalizing questions.
Who else can Todd call on to eliminate his target?
And just who does Cooper need the Hutchens duo to kill in Vegas?
Are they also targeting the Joneses?
Or is this the dark Cooper cleaning up after himself is he sending his most trusted assassins to killTodd?
One note:This meeting between Cooper and his constituents took place on a farm.
We know this, because Hutch said the place was owned by Farmers.
(They were sleeping out back, and they wont ever wake up.)
I have no idea if this wastheFarm mentioned in Part 8, or justafarm.
Perhaps all farms in the universe ofTwin Peaksare just one single collective farm.
A car blows up, and they show up to interrogate the owner at his insurance agency.
He barely says anything; his wife does the barking.
Then the husband and wife walk outside of the office and get attacked.
Now the detectives have got a gun with a whole human palm grafted onto it.
The boss gave us some intriguing information.
Douglas Jones has worked for him for 12 years now.
Apparently, Dougie had some kind of car accident not long previous.
Every once in awhile, he shows some…lingering effects, Mullins teased.
The Fusco Brothers were all done with him.
Mullins didnt quite want to leave.
Damn strange business, he said, sounding like a literary sleuth in a drawing room.
First his car blows up, and then somebody tries to kill him.
Mullins left, not before promising Dougie that tomorrow they would start getting to the bottom of things.
But Mullins doesnt know what the cops know.
The littlest Fusco has made a strange discovery.
Imagine what kind of red lights will go off when those prints pop up on the database.
There was some good luck for our boys in the Vegas PD.
The prints came back from the gun and they belonged to their old friend, Ike the Spike.
Ike the Spike finally fed himself!
Hed been tracked to a nearby hotel room, and the police moved in to capture him.
Hell have to take that medical leave behind bars.
They dont just have his palm print; they have his whole palm.
Meanwhile, the Slow and Steady Return of Agent Dale Cooper continued, slow and steady.
Dougie sat patiently next to Janey-E, and his eyes suddenly focused on something.
It was the American Flag, standing curtained and windless in the corner of the corridor.
A blonde woman in red shoes walked by the flag.
Was Dougie-Dale remembering his curious rebirth into this world?
Receiving a message from the cross-dimensional beings who live inside electricity?
Suddenly noticing how much the three-pronged electrical outlets look like one face atop another a double-header?
(Recap continues on page 3)
In South Dakota
Or rather, East South Dakota.
Gordon asked Diane nicely: Would she like to come along?
F you, Gordon, I want to go home, said Diane.
(Diane said f, DRINK!)
But when Diane heard about the case the proximity to Cooper, the Blue Rose factor she seemed intrigued.
Gordon received some disturbing information, too, from the Warden at Yankton: Cooper flew the coop!
But one problem at a time.
The Gordon Cole Bunch rode out to Buckhorn to investigate the body.
Diane opted to avoid the morgue, nominally because she didnt feel like seeing a dead body.
Why is the nefarious Cooper contacting Diane?
Is he taunting her?
Or perhaps she knows and is seeking her own reckoning with Cooper.
Maybe Dianes out for her own vengeance; maybe she just wants to understand what is happening.
Detective Macklay is a veritable font of understanding.
He brings the FBI agents up to date on the strange doings here in Buckhorn.
The principal having an affair with the librarian.
The librarian showing up dead with Major Briggs headless body.
The principalswifeturning up dead, killed by her lawyer.
The principalssecretaryalso dead, a car explosion.
What happens in season 2?
deadpanned Albert, the greatest line of this whole season, R.I.P.
Some intriguing new information about William Hastings: It turns out hes a blogger.
And not just any blogger.
The kind of blogger who tends to post long, heavily researched, densely analytical theories about alternate dimensions.
If he wasnt onTwin Peaks, hed recapTwin Peaks.
Hastings blogis an actual websiterife with Heinlein references and alternate reality theory.
As in: Look out, from here, onto infinity.
Or perhaps: Look out, everyone!
Theres a doppelganger with a bad attitude coming to kill you!
They knew they had to interview William Hastings.
But first, they took a break.
Diane was outside, smoking a cigarette.
Gordon and Tammy walked out to meet her.
Seriously, Tammy, are you nervous or something?
This was one of my favorite shots ever inTwin Peaks.
We used to smoke together way back when, remember?
Yeah, we sure did, Gordon.
(Or you remembered the text message she received and wasnt telling him about.)
I love how this season ofTwin Peaksgrabs moments like this and holds onto them.
(Recap continues on page 4)
The FBI squad assembled while Tammy went in to interview Bill Hastings.
Matthew Lillard was a standout in the season premiere and he delivered a true knockout performance in this episode.
He described a trip to the alternate dimension But its real!
One thinks of Glastonbury Grove, how that certain place at certain times opens a doorway to another place.
One thinks also of the coordinates that Evil Cooper has been searching for all season.
And it turns out that there was another man searching for those coordinates: Major Briggs.
For within the dimension, Bill and Ruth met the long-lost Major.
He asked them for important numbers, and they found it within a secured military database!
and brought Major Briggs the numbers last Thursday.
Whats your wifes name?'
Hold onto that for a second, because Bill had some other memories.
They gave the Major the numbers, and he started to float up.
He said some words Cooper, Cooper right before his head disappeared.
Tammy was searching for some clarity.
Did the Major kill Ruth?
No, Bill said, There wasso many people there.
What is Bill describing here?
Who were these others who followed Ruth and Bill into this strange place?
But what did Bill mean, There was so many people there?
And did Major Briggs head disappear because he was attacked by these strange forces?
Bills description of this scene was oddly beautiful and sad.
Bill seemed like a man who had seen something he could never describe, something he knew was unbelievable.
It was something like no one had ever seen before!
Ive never read anything like it.
Poor Bill doesnt know whats going on with Lodges or Majors or Dimensions or Coopers.
He just knows that he didnt kill Ruth.
I loved her, he says.
We were gonna go to the Bahamas!
We were gonna scuba dive and drink mixed drinks on the beach!
And we were gonna soak up the sun and look at beautiful sunsets!
He went on and on and on, remembering a life he would never live.
(Recap continues on page 5)
In Twin Peaks
Or perhaps the good Major lives on.
At the Briggs household, the widow Betty welcomed her son Bobby and his co-workers Frank and Hawk.
They had questions for her, about Coopers visit with the Major 25 years earlier.
Betty had an unexpected answer for them.
The day had arrived.
She walked over to the Majors chair.
I cant believe this day has come, she said.
Or maybe Lynch and Frost think a lot about chairs.
Maybe we all should!)
Betty pulled a strange metal cylinder out of the chair.
She gave it to them and she had another message, too, something more personal.
Somehow, he knew that it would all turn out well.
He saw this life for you.
Your fatherneverlost faith in you.
Major Briggs saw something greater in his son all along.
He returns to the Sheriffs Department with his fellow officers and teaches them how to open that strange cylinder.
Above the left one, a red sun or perhaps a blood moon.
Are these the two Lodges?
Time for a potentially baseless theory.
We know that the dark Cooper doppelganger did not want to go back to the Black Lodge.
We also know that hewantedto go someplace represented by that head-with-pointy-ears symbol.
Perhaps the Cooper doppelganger wants to go to theWhiteLodge?
Or is there some further-flung location a space castle in a purple infinite ocean?
One thinks of the Giant (or ?
?
?
???
Are these directions to the house?
The dates on the paper are two days away.
The policemen make plans to head in that direction.
Bobby can lead the way; hes not a Major, but he is a Briggs.
I am not your foot, said the foot, with a voice that sounded like a child.
Jerry tackled the Strangeloved limb and seemed to knock himself out.
He is among the trees, and the trees know something they arent telling us.
Meanwhile, Ben Horne and Beverly continued trying to find the source of that strange noise.
They seemed about to kiss and then didnt.
I cant do this, Ben said.
I dont know why it is.
Youre a good man, Ben, Beverly said.
Well, hes getting better.
But the Hornes faced their own tragedy this week.
Poor demented Johnny ran through his house, perhaps let out by someone, perhaps just trying to escape.
He ran straight into a wall, knocking down a picture of a waterfall.
His mother found him lying, possibly dead.
Maybe Johnny just finally decided to end it, after all these sad years.
Or maybe theres something stranger happening here.
Is it possible that someone something was trying to take him over?
Perhaps an entity he once knew in the distant past?
The Roadhouse
Holy crap, Sky Ferreira!
No, Hudson Mohawke played a strange tune in the background while Ferreira debuted as Ella.
Shes got a rash on her left armpit that looks painful.
(You may think of MIKE, whose left arm is missing.)
Her friend walked up, and they had a whole conversation that seemed oddly coded.
Her friend said, That zebras out again.
Are the zebra and the penguin both johns?
Or is something strange afoot between these two?
Seriously, howcanyou f up serving burgers?
Guess they were booked for a double-header.
