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EPISODES |
PARTS ONE THROUGH EIGHTEEN (2017)
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Opening Credits (0:55-2:15) Still loitering at the base of the lawman statue, Cooper is struggling to get his closed fist out of Dougie’s garish green jacket, case files hanging in the balance. Officer Reynaldo approaches him again, reminding him of the no-loitering policy, and asks his name. “Dougie Jones,” Cooper offers in his now-signature monotone, reaching out to touch the officer’s badge. Upon being asked where he lives, he mumbles “Lancelot Court, red door.” Upon being asked whether he’s been drinking or taking drugs, he manages “case files.” Sensing that all is not well but that Cooper is more in need of help than a jail cell, Reynaldo kindly offers to take Cooper home, parrying his multiple attempts to touch the officer’s badge. (2:16-4:01) Back at the Jones residence, Sonny Jim is upstairs reading in bed. Janey-E fields a knock at the door to find Cooper with an officer on each arm: “He seems a little disoriented.” “That’s on a good day,” she concurs, and thanks the officers for their kindness, as Cooper reaches out one more time to stroke Reynaldo’s badge. Preparing to depart, Officer Reynaldo notices an envelope in front of the door that he assumes is one of Cooper’s case files and hands it to Janey-E. The police leave, and Janey-E suddenly remembers that Dougie’s car is missing and that she basically left him stranded. She apologizes for failing to pick him up from work and leads him into the kitchen, volunteering to fix him a sandwich. (4:02-5:16) As Janey-E and Cooper enjoy crunchier-than-average sandwiches by light of a stunning yellow lamp, she pledges to take him to the doctor for a good looking-over tomorrow at lunch. She inquires about the pile of folders: “What are these?”. Cooper manages a muddled “case files” through a mouthful of sandwich. “And this one?” Janey-E wonders, holding up the loose envelope that Officer Reynaldo handed her: “There’s nothing written on it.” Getting no response, she bids him to go upstairs and say goodnight to Sonny Jim. He sits munching potato chips. She grabs his arm and repeats the command, shouting it yet again when he fails to ascend the stairs with all due speed. Looking resigned, she takes another bite of the sandwich. (5:17-7:08) Still reading in bed, Sonny Jim sees “Dougie” walk past his room, ambling around aimlessly on the upper level. Cooper reappears in the doorframe and Sonny Jim beckons him to sit down next to him on the bed. After a second, more insistent invitation, Cooper finally joins Sonny Jim on the bed, still smacking on potato chips to Dougie’s son’s delight. Chewing slowly, Cooper sizes up another potato chip for a bite, but offers it to Sonny Jim instead, who declines: “I’ve already brushed my teeth.” He asks if he can keep his cowboy light on until he’s asleep. Cooper drones “asleep,” after which Sonny Jim turns off his reading light and claps to activate the much brighter cowboy light, which fully illuminates the room. The two take turns clapping the cowboy light on and off. They are interrupted by Janey-E, who yells at Cooper to get downstairs immediately. Sonny Jim protests in disappointment that “He was going to stay with me!”, but Janey-E fires back “Not tonight he isn’t!” and goes to the stairs to intercept Cooper on his way down. (7:09-10:06) Janey-E grabs Cooper by the collar and corrals him back to the kitchen table: “You were supposed to set up a time to pay them off, and now this arrives!” She presents him with a photo of him and Jade. With a small but noticeable smile, Cooper says “Jade,” infelicitously following up with “Jade give two rides.” Janey-E, furious, spits “I’ll bet she did! And you admit you know her?! Look at you two holding each other like that.” The phone rings several times. Janey-E finally picks up and Dougie’s extortionists ask her whether she received their note. With each of their attempts to call the shots, Janey-E becomes more belligerent, bullying the debt-collectors into meeting her at a park at the corner of Guenevere and Merlin by the mall: “I’ll be the one carrying the red pursue. Noon thirty tomorrow!” She slams down the phone and sighs deeply: “What a mess you’ve made of our lives, Dougie!” “If that’s work,” she follows up, “you’d better start right away. The last thing we need is for you to lose your job, Dougie!” She gets up to go say goodnight to Sonny Jim, noting that “Tomorrow’s a big day!”. Cooper pathetically repeats “big day” and she somehow finds it within herself, rage notwithstanding, to kiss him on the head. Dougie looks down at the case files from Lucky 7 and puts his right index finger on the 7. We hear a low sonic groan, not unlike that of a lonesome foghorn blowing. (10:06-13:46) As the groan crescendos into a steady hum, we see a trafflic light gently swaying in the night breeze—a light that calls to mind Sparkwood and 21 in Twin Peaks. The light is green, but then progresses backwards, oddly, through yellow to red. A moment after the light turns red, the hum gives way to electrical interference. (13:46-14:02) Philip Gerard, the one-armed-man, casts about the Lodge with his arm extended. He is looking for Cooper at Dougie’s residence. Cooper is seated at the kitchen table reviewing the case files and looks up to see Gerard, aptly framed by the fireplace. Making a forceful waving gesture, as if his arm is a piston generating and radiating energy, Gerard says “You have to wake up. Wake up.” Increasingly agitated, he pleads “Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die,” ramping up the waving gesture, as if somehow to energize Cooper from across an uncrossable boundary. Cooper gazes at the case files, as Johnny Jewel's "Windswept" lulls us into the dream. Pencil gripped in his fist, Cooper begins determinedly to scrawl lines and rudimentary pictures of ladders, stairs, and small explosions on the case files in strategic locations shown to him by pinpricks of green light—presumably illumination from the same “cosmic flashlight” that helped him to find the winning one-armed bandits in part two and ferret out Anthony Sinclair’s deceit in the team meeting at Lucky 7 in part five. (14:03-19:08) Special Agent Albert Rosenfield is driving on a cold, rainy night in Philadelphia, wishing Gordon Cole “a super night.” Gordon replies, “Thank you, Albert, and let me remind you that this work you are doing tonight is very, very important and I’ll be thinking of you as I drink (a woman’s voice interrupts: “Here you go, honey!”) this fine Bordeaux.” Albert replies “I love a night on the town when it’s 34 degrees and raining.” Albert exits the vehicle and opens an umbrella, struggling when it catches the wind as he moves from the street to the sidewalk: “Fuck Gene Kelly, you motherfucker!”. He enters “Max Von’s Bar,” the watering hole alluded to in part four when he assured Cole that he knew where “that one certain person we need to look at Cooper” drinks. The venue teems with people as Albert negotiates his way to the bar. An impossibly elegant woman with exact platinum hair sits smoking at the bar with her back to him. Albert addresses her: “Diane.” Diane Evans, Cooper's legendary secretary and personal confidant, presumed by many to be mythic until this very moment, turns slowly to reveal a worried face both beautiful and severe. She greets him: “Hello Albert.” (19:09-21:14) We see a logging yard and hear industrial milling equipment. The camera pans up from a black late-model Corvette and ranges over several henchmen carrying heavy artillery before landing on Red—the creep from the Roadhouse who was making eyes (and shooting gestures) at Shelly from the bar in part one. Someone off camera is vigorously snorting cocaine, which we soon learn is in fact “sparkle”—presumably the “Chinese designer drug” that Sheriff Truman refers to in part four when discussing TPHS student Denny Craig’s death by overdose with Deputy Briggs. Richard Horne is wiping his nose and trying unsuccessfully to retrieve his eyeballs from the back of their sockets after a monster hit: “Whoa! That is…WHEW!”, Horne struggles to manage. “That’s right, Small Time. You can pick the rest of it up at Mary Anne’s,” Red sneers, as his drum-mag-rifle-wielding bodyguard smirks at Horne’s inept efforts to remain composed. “How’d you know that name. Do you know the area?,” Horne unguardedly blurts, still twitching from the hit (“Shit…that stuff kicks!”). (21:14-22:22) Without warning, Red throws a punch that narrowly if precisely misses Horne, pivoting to the side and then back forward, as if rehearsing a kung fu form: “Have you ever studied your hand?”. Horne looks increasingly unsettled as Red hurls another pulled-punch, adding that he “likes the place” and plans “to bring the ‘sparkle’ directly in from Canada.” Before Horne can respond, Red erupts into a bizarre tantrum, his foot stomping in time with his right arm which slaps into his side. “I have a problem with my liver,” Red offers the bewildered Horne. Horne concurs with Red’s enthusiasm for Twin Peaks—this “sleepy town,” with its elderly Sheriff and law enforcement “asleep at the wheel” (and on the take, too, as we saw was the case with Deputy Chad in part five)—but before Horne can finish his shtick, Red thrusts his arms forward in yet another unprovoked outburst, then absurdly inquires, working his hands through his hair: “Did you ever see the movie ‘The King and I’? As Horne attempts to get his bearings, Red’s tone shifts from menacingly playful to jugular-venting serious: “You got this under control? I’ll be watching you, kid.” In a drug-fueled bout of false confidence that seems likely to cost him his life, Horne sneers “Yes. Don’t call me ‘kid.’” Red doubles over laughing, his bodyguard’s smile widening to the edge of a chuckle. “Just remember this, KID: I will saw your head open and eat your brains if you fuck me over. You can count on that.” As Horne’s confidence evacuates him faster than feral burro urine into a Texas spring, Red reaches into his pocket, puts a dime in the center of his palm (heads-side-up) and—without a word—flips it end-over-end from his thumb high into the air. An undulating, shimmering metallic hum fills the otherwise pin-drop silent room as the coin travels upward. Reaching the apex of its flight, the dime doesn’t fall, but—to Horne’s unmitigated bafflement—turns end-over-end for a full fifteen seconds suspended in mid-air. Red shoots a targeted glance at Horne’s adam’s apple, and the undulating hum terminates in Horne’s disgorging the dime from his mouth into his hand. As he searches his fingers for the coin in utter disbelief, the hum resumes and Red catches the coin in his right fist, opening his fingers to reveal the coin tails-side-up. “This is you,” he says, before transferring the coin hand over fist onto the back of his left hand, where Horne, lips quivering in terror, observes it heads-side up: “This is me. Heads I win, tails you lose.” (22:23-27:33) High as a noctilucent and fuming at his humiliation, Horne recklessly pilots a large old Ford flatbed through the streets of Twin Peaks, desperately trying to regain composure. (27:34-27:52) At the New Fat Trout Trailer Park, Bill is poised to take park proprietor Carl Rodd for his morning drive into town. Mickey, cheerful and slovenly, breaks into an awkward trot that nearly costs him his pants in order to catch a ride into town from Carl; he “needs to get Linda’s mail at the P.O.” Carl obliges him and observes that it’s a beautiful day. Mickey’s noticed that Carl makes this trip almost every morning and inquires as to why. Carl responds that it’s a way to get out of the trailer park—at his age, he has very little to look forward to “except the hammer slamming down.” Mickey protests with apparently genuine compassion: “Don’t say that Carl; you’ve still got a lot of tread left!” They talk in the car about Linda’s slow progress with some physical ailment—it’s taken six months to procure the electric wheelchair they’ve been struggling to get through Medicaid. “Fucking government,” spits Carl, and lights up a smoke, offering one to Mickey (who admits to wanting one despite having quit about a year ago). Chortling, Carl counters that “I’ve been smoking for 75 years every fucking day.” Beaming, boyish grins spread ear-to-ear across both of their faces, as Carl cheats death for another long drag. (27:53-30:07) It’s a slow morning at the R&R and the eternally sunny Miriam and her ever giddy server Heidi are gabbing and giggling about all the restaurants in town that “magically” always seem to have irresistible desserts with Miriam’s “name on them;” this morning, she quips, there were two such piece of pie. Shelly observes that they keep the pie stands full because Miriam is “one of their best pie customers ever.” “That’s because Norma makes the best pies,” says Miriam, and they all agree, as she orders two cups of coffee for takeout: “Decaf for me and one regular for one of the moms who loves R&R coffee!” As Shelly fetches the joes-to-go, Heidi asks Miriam “How’s school this year?”. After an almost imperceptible hesitation that nonetheless raises skepticism about what comes next, Miriam replies that “The kids this year are so cute!”, eliciting further giggles from Heidi. Miriam pays her tab, all smiles and pleasantries, offering a sizeable tip that—after she’s gone—Heidi observes she can’t really afford to leave. Shelly says to a receptive, chortling Heidi, “Poor thing! She just loves our pies! Next time, let’s treat her, okay?” (30:08-31:31) Richard Horne barrels down the road, still seething: “Magic motherfucker! I’ll show you a fucking kid!” He shifts down, laughs maniacally, and bellows a war whoop worthy of a drug-addled Howard Dean. (31:32-31:50) Carl Rodd sits on a park bench meditatively (melancholically?) enjoying a cigarette and gazing up into a gorgeous tree canopy. His reverie is interrupted by a mother and her young son joyfully playing some idiosyncratic version of tag: son runs away and then abruptly stops, and mom catches up to him and hugs him. They disappear into the park laughing and Carl smiles into his coffee, even as a foreboding foghorn-like drone sets the jocular mood on edge. (31:51-32:53) As Horne nears a column of stopped traffic at a busy intersection, his high is losing steam and his malice is approaching a boil. He pounds the ceiling and elects to blow the stop sign, pulling across a double yellow into the oncoming traffic lane. As he hurtles toward the intersection with no intention of stopping, the mother and her little boy stray onto the scene, their game of tag momentarily delayed at the intersection. A well-meaning trucker, observing no oncoming traffic, waves the two across. The mother smilingly acknowledges his kindness, releasing the boy from her embrace to resume the game, and he dashes into the road. He stops halfway across and turns to receive his mother, only to be hit full speed by Horne, who predictably doesn’t stop to assess the aftermath. His shattered mother runs to him, undone, pulling him from the pavement and holding his broken body to her breast. Bystanders pour from cars, gaping and gawking. As Horne speeds away, he sees a horrified Miriam clutching her coffee caddy on the street outside the R&R, wide eyes following him and beholding him with sustained, slack-jawed contempt. But for the whisper of hesitation in her response to Heidi’s inquiry about school and her curiously incautious tip, the chilling thought that her response to Horne might be something more than garden variety loathing at witnessing a stranger kill a child and flee the scene would never have crossed our minds. (32:54-34:10) A burgeoning herd of bystanders looks on useless as the grief-dismantled mother cradles her dying son. Carl arrives on the scene and watches with saucer-eyed awe as the boy gives up the ghost and a yellow-green flame-like apparition ascends into the cloudless blue sky, finally dissipating. “God!,” Carl barely manages, and as his gaze descends from the sky to the street, he sees the mother anew, alone and inconsolable, his eyes filling with urgent compassion. He approaches her slowly but deliberately and puts a hand on her shoulder, radiating the fullness of his presence resolutely into her eyes—an act all the more poignant for the irresolution of the gathering crowds that surround them. Nearby, we see a telephone pole labeled with a large number 6 and a string of smaller numbers just above it (324810)—a pole that is seemingly the self-same one as that under which Agent Chet Desmond vanished while investigating the Teresa Banks murder in the old Fat Trout Trailer Park just after discovering the Owl Cave Ring. As our attention is drawn up the pole to the transformer and wires above it, an electrical hum and persistent static drown out the mother’s crying. (34:11-36:10) Mr. Todd sits in his opulent Las Vegas office behind a laptop. As he types, his work is interrupted when a square the color of arterial blood suddenly materializes in the center of his screen. Eyes widening and pulse quickening, he enters a key stroke to dismiss this harbinger of evil, turns to the credenza behind him to secure a tissue, and opens a small safe (combination 1609#), fastidiously using the tissue to remove a white 8.5x11 envelope. He places the envelope on his desk and a petrified sidelong glance reveals that a single black dot menacingly adorns the top of the envelope. (36:11-37:27) As the Coroner van pulls out of Rancho Rosa freshly freighted with three charred bodies consumed in the explosion of Dougie’s car, the police are on the scene towing away wreckage and cataloguing evidence, including Dougie’s license plate which was propelled by the blast all the way to the neighbor’s roof. Across the street, junkie mom is yelling “1-1-9” as usual. The cop who is retrieving the plate reports the number from the roof: “David-Union-George-Edward-Lincoln-Victor—got it?” Authorities evidence-tag and flag the aftermath of the explosion—ash, random bits of plastic, rubber tubing, a stray side-view mirror—and the bombed-out shell of the car is secured for towing. (37:28-38:27) The Premium Motel in sunny Las Vegas looks anything but premium. Ike ‘The Spike’ Stadtler is sitting at a dingy motel desk, drinking Bulleit bourbon and throwing dice, recording the results in a small spiral notebook. An icepick with a braided leather handle and strap sits within arm’s reach. From under the door, the envelope from Mr. Todd’s office emerges into the room onto a nauseatingly deep shag of moss-colored carpeting. The Spike retrieves it and pulls out two glossy photos: one of Dougie and one of Lorraine—the “worrier” hired by Mr. Todd to kill Dougie, presumably to take him out of the equation and thus thwart Mr. C.’s efforts to escape recall to the Lodge. As Lorraine’s theme strikes up in the background (“I'm a...I'm a...I'm a good man!”), the Spike intently traces the outline of each of their faces with the icepick, committing them to memory. The music stops abruptly as he stabs Lorraine’s photo at the left brow and then sinks the pick deep into the bridge of Dougie’s nose, leaving it stuck in the desk. (38:28-40:05) At Lucky 7 Insurance, the coffee-running intern and Cooper are exiting the elevator into the office suite. As the intern hustles his standard cargo of two full caddies of joe through the lobby, Cooper dallies in the elevator, goofy grin on swole and case files clutched to his chest, allowing the doors to open and close twice before disembarking with a huge smile. He pauses for a jolt of joe and the doors close hard around his shoulders, sandwiching him between them. An electric buzzer sounds and Cooper looks with befuddlement back into the elevator as the intern frantically gestures for him to get the lead out. (40:06-41:03) Glass, metal, granite, and succulent-studded Danish modern planters in beaming primary colors are the order of business in the indoor office courtyard at Lucky 7. Bushnell Mullins stands sentry at the door of his posh executive suite as the intern and Cooper enter the courtyard. Mullins yells “Jones!” twice, getting nowhere with Cooper, but alerting Anthony Sinclar that something is up. Losing his patience, Mullins screams “Dougie! In my office! Now!”. The intern temporarily parks the coffee on a cactus planter and pushes Dougie into Mullins’ office, as a paranoid, shifty-eyed Sinclair peers anxiously through the blinds from his nearby office. (41:04-42:13) As Cooper vacantly drinks coffee with both hands, Bushnell Mullins is perusing “Dougie’s” case files in all their scrawled, ladder-and-stair-bedecked glory. Throwing up his arms in frustration, a bewildered Mullins barks, “What the hell are all these childish scribbles? How am I going to make any sense out of this?” Cooper’s jaw tenses and he speaks with more labored determination than we’re used to: “Make…sense of it.”. “I’m thinking you may need some good professional help, Dougie.” “Help Dougie,” Cooper stammers. As Mullins returns to the documents and Cooper to two-handed coffee consumption, the latter becomes transfixed by a poster behind Mullins depicting him in his much younger years as dashing boxer “Battling Bud” Mullins--“Tougher than the rest,” with eyes on lock, gloved fists raised, and a rakish half-smile. Cooper puts up his dukes in imitation of the young Battling Bud, as the old one sizes him up disapprovingly and continues to consult the files. In returning to a claim about plate glass loss for a policy Dougie wrote, Mullins has a moment of vision; he begins moving back and forth between policies issued by Dougie and policies issued by Sinclair, noting discrepancies and eventually detecting a disturbing pattern. In disbelief, he looks up at Cooper and says in full earnest: “Dougie! Thank you! I want you to keep this information to yourself; this is disturbing to say the least. I’ll take it from here, but I may need your help again. You’ve certainly given me a lot to think about.” “Think about…”, Cooper repeats, as Mullins rises to offer him a well-earned, heartfelt handshake. Cooper slowly rises from the chair and instead of taking Mullins hand, he turns and mimics Mullins’ gesture. “You’re an interesting fellow,” Mullins bemusedly observes. (42:14-46:09) Children are swinging in the park and a lone plastic camel observes an anxious Janey-E from a sand-covered play area as she sits at a picnic table awaiting Dougie’s extortionists. Two garden variety Vegas sleazebags approach and she wastes no time: “Now let’s get to it!” She demands to know what Dougie did to end up indebted. They explain that he took points on a game, got greedy and doubled-down, failed to pay up the $20,000 he owed, and has now been delinquent for three weeks. “The meter’s still running…it’s up to 52,” says a raspy-voiced, chopped-and-mulleted ‘stache in a Rogers & Hollands rope chain. She recaps the deets to their satisfaction, and then rips them a new one, informing them in no uncertain terms that the Jones family cannot and will not be paying them $52,000: “We are not wealthy people. We drive cheap, terrible cars. We are the 99-percenters and we are shit on enough and we are certainly not going to be shit on by the likes of you!” ‘Stache-chain attempts to take back the mic, and gets steam-rolled: “$25,000-that is my first, last, and only offer.” She produces a huge cash roll and when one of them attempts to grab it from her, she spits another stream of vitriol: “What kind of a world are we living in where people can behave like this—treat other people this way without any compassion or feeling for their suffering. We are living in a dark, dark age and YOU are part of the problem.” Expressing her intention never to see either of them again, she shoves the cash at the grabby one and storms off in a fury. As she slams the car door, grabby shudders with a start and ‘stache-chain wheezes, “TOUGH dame.” “Tough!”, grabby concurs. (46:10-48:37) Lorraine—the “worrier” whose botched hit on Dougie has her in the shit with Mr. Todd (and now Ike the Spike, too)—is seated at her desk talking on the phone. Behind her head, a makeshift panel of cardboard is haphazardly affixed to the wall with electrical tape; a small pipe protrudes from the middle of the panel, which close observation reveals is cut from a box of the same make as those seen in the glass box room in NYC in part one. “Three bodies?!,” she exclaims with terror into the receiver, presumably in response to being informed of the car bomb by her associate Gene, the muscle-car assassin who failed her. These words have barely escaped her lips as screams, slashing, and the sound of a body hitting the floor ring out from an adjacent room. A blood-spattered Spike comes tearing around the corner and into the office, overwhelming a resistant Lorraine with relentless stabbing, savagely twisting the icepick in her heart to make sure the job is done. A second unlucky co-worker stands astonished in the doorframe and, having seen too much, meets a similar fate off camera after a brief chase, becoming Spike’s third victim—yet again, “Three bodies!”, as if Lorraine’s final words on the phone had been a prognostication of her own violent end. As he leaves the scene, Ike notices with anguish that his spike has suffered irreparable damage, bent beyond repair at a ninety-degree angle, the tip twisted and blunted. “Oh no!,” he whines in a wildly incongruous pip-squeeky tenor. (48:38-49:45) Richard Horne drives the old Ford flatbed into a secluded area off-road in the shadow of the mountains. Leaving the truck running, he gets out to inspect the damage from the hit and run. Seeing blood, he curses and violently kicks the grill, hightailing it back to the cab for cleaning materials. With a rag and some bottled water, he hastily and insufficiently attempts to wipe away the evidence and hurries to get back behind the wheel. (49:46-50:49) In the bathroom at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s station, Hawk is washing his hands. After drying them, he checks his look in the mirror and reaches into his front pocket to retrieve a comb, liberating a buffalo nickel which rolls across the room and under a stall, settling Indian-heads-up under an old-fashioned floor-mounted flush pedal. Hawk enters the stall to retrieve this lucky token of his heritage and surmises in a flash of intuition that the Log Lady’s prophecy from part one--that he'll find something missing pertaining to Dale Cooper with a little help from his Native American background--is now coming to pass. He slowly turns his gaze to the bottom corner of the stall door and lights upon immediate corroboration: a metal trademark with yet another Indian head image reads “Nez Percé Manufacturing”—a reference, incidentally, to the tribe that originally held the Owl Cave Ring and whose Chief, Twisted Hair, gifted it to Meriwether Lewis as Lewis described in a letter to President Thomas Jefferson that made it into the dossier presented in The Secret History of Twin Peaks. (50:50-51:40) His attention now acutely focused, Hawk notices that the top right corner of the stall door is missing two rivets where the sheet metal finish plate is pulling away from the door panel. Realizing that the plate and the panel can be pried apart, he gets a step ladder, flashlight, and crow bar to get the job done right. As he’s prying the door apart, Deputy Chad comes in, book and mug in hand: “What the hell?” “Use the ladies room, Chad,” Hawk curtly replies. Chad persists, wondering if Hawk has “cleared this with the Sheriff,” and goads him like a grade-school tattletale on his way out: “I’ll tell him if you don’t.” “You do that, Chad,” Hawk says with contempt. Having popped off the latch, Hawk reaches down between the plate and the panel to retrieve several pages of handwritten notes that look tantalizingly similar to pages one might find in Laura Palmer’s secret diary. [Editor’s note: One wonders instantly whether those pages include the tell-tale words that young Cooper’s future love interest Annie spoke to Laura in a dream the week before her death (as we saw in Fire Walk With Me): “Good Dale is in the Lodge and he can’t get out. Write it in your diary.” We’ll have to wait and see.] Hawk inspects the pages, drinking in the deep significance of his discovery, and leaves the bathroom. (51:41-53:33) Sheriff Truman is doling out assignments in the dispatch room, when his wife Doris comes barreling in with new complaints about her father’s car not being fixed. As she becomes increasingly agitated, he shepherds her off to his office to calm her down. Ever the shitbag, Deputy Chad can’t resist informing his colleagues that he “wouldn’t take that kind of shit off of her.” The compassionate dispatcher kindly reminds him that Doris hasn’t been the same since the Trumans’ son committed suicide, to which Chad callously replies—twisting his fist at his eye in a mockery of crying—“He couldn’t take being a soldier…boo hoo hoo.” Surveying Chad in disgusted disbelief with eyes like daggers, the dispatcher turns away to take an incoming call. (53:34-55:27) Sharon Van Etten performs “Tarifa” at the Roadhouse, singing lyrics at times curiously resonant with the story of which she is a part: “I wish it was 7 all night” and “Send in the owl, tell me I’m not a child.” As the credits roll, the concluding lines of her song may as well be a prayer for Agent Cooper:
“You summon Forget about everyone else Fall away somehow To figure it out.” (55:28-58:25)
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Opening Credits (0:54-2:13) Sin City lights twinkle in the Nevada night as Johnny Jewel’s desperately aloof “Flame” sets a solitary mood. At Rancho Rosa, Gene and Jake, Dougie’s would-be assassins, are still waiting outside the house where Dougie’s abandoned car sits empty. Gene is on the phone explaining their predicament to Lorraine, a neurotic, raven-haired, ren-faire jewelry-bedecked woman sitting at a desk in a dingy office. She’s noticeably terrified and panicking that Dougie is still alive: “Fuck Gene! This job was supposed to be done yesterday. Are you trying to get me killed?” Gene asks for instructions, but she f-bombs him again and slams down the phone. “She’s a worrier,” Jake offers. (2:14-3:00) Obviously in fear for her life and unsure of what to do next, Lorraine hesitantly takes out a blackberry and nervously types something, looking as though she’d much rather be sliding down a razor and landing in a manure lagoon than engaging whatever horrors lie at the other end of her electronic communication. We see a single decrepit lightbulb jutting outward from a makeshift electrical box that dangles from exposed conduit. A windowsill is visible just beneath the filth-ridden fixture, which hangs thick with the remnants of a spider web full of hollow exoskeletons and other detritus. Presumably inside the building (which we later learn is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina), a small black box with two red pinprick lights sits centered on an earthen plate atop what appears to be an ancient copper trunk; we hear the phone ring followed by an electronic beep. Lorraine types the number “2” into the Blackberry, above which we see the abbreviation “ARGENT” (Argentina) followed by the number “159” at the far-right margin. Both pinprick lights on the black box flash twice, accompanied by beeping. (3:01-4:02) The beheaded, gutted torso of a man we assume to have been Major Briggs sits on the autopsy table in the Buckhorn morgue. Constance Talbot informs Detectives Macklay and Harrison of the cause of death, quipping that “It took me awhile, but I think someone cut this man’s head off. But here’s the headline…I already gave you the headline.” When the detectives appear nonplussed, she doubles down that “she’s still doing standup on the weekend,” and proceeds to show them an inscribed ring that was found in the body’s otherwise empty stomach: “To Dougie, With Love, Janey-E.” The detectives exchange befuddled glances. (4:03-5:04) Mr. C. lies in his cell staring at the ceiling. He says “And now, food is coming” and on cue, a guard brings a square and pushes it through the tray gate in the cell door. Mr. C. turns to wash his hands and has a vision of he and Bob laughing maniacally in the lodge, followed by Cooper’s doppelganger bashing his head into the mirror in room 315 of the Great Northern and seeing Bob there. We return to the cell, where Mr. C. gazes into the mirror to witness his face morph almost imperceptibly into the visage of Bob. “You’re still with me, Mr. C. observes. “That’s good.” (5:05-7:22) In a bland suburban office building in Twin Peaks, Mike Nelson sits behind a computer at an unkempt desk, his cheap suit hanging on him like a cheap suit. He requests that his assistant send “Steven” in, and Steven Burnett—the drug-addled boyfriend of Shelly’s daughter Becky—slumps into the room, clearly expecting good news about a hoped-for job. Still an Olympic-sized douchebasket even after all these years, Mike gratuitously dashes Steven’s hopes in a stream of unremitting verbal abuse about the inadequacy of his resume and work ethic, finally inviting him to “Get his ass out of here.” As the door closes behind a crestfallen Steven, Mike scanlessly observes, utterly without irony, “What an asshole!” (7:23-8:43) At the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, Frank Truman is sitting in Hawk’s office talking to his brother Harry about his illness. Over the intercom, Lucy interrupts to inform Frank that his wife Doris is coming back to talk with him. She rages onto the scene, complaining about everything from “Dwight’s” diarrhea, to an imminent visit from the twins, to a leaky pipe that she suspects is destined to lead to a black mold infestation. Frank assures her that the busy plumber has promised to have the pipes fixed by tomorrow, but she rants on—unsatisfied—now about the cost of a bigger bucket to catch the drip, and then onto “Dad’s car,” which she deems a “deathtrap” notwithstanding Frank’s protest that “Sammy” declared it sound. “You are impossible!”, she yells at the seemingly impassable Frank as she departs. (8:44-11:21) Janey-E hustles Sonny Jim out to the car for school. As she fixes Cooper’s tie, she informs him that she stashed the $425,000 in their “secret place,” and bids him to call the people to whom he owes money and give them their $50,000, after which “we’ll be free and clear!” As she talks, Cooper gazes off toward Sonny Jim, waiting seemingly dejectedly in the car, and tears up in an uncharacteristically emotional moment, given his fugue state. “You’re acting weird as shit,” Janey-E exclaims, finishing his tie. “Don’t forget to call them, and no more drinking and gambling,” she admonishes him. “Now get to work.” As he vacantly repeats “Work!,” she realizes that his car is still missing and scolds him into the car for an unscheduled ride to work. (11:22-12:48) At Rancho Rosa, hapless assassins Gene and Jake fruitlessly roll past Dougie’s abandoned car yet again in their orange Toxic-Masculinity-Mobile SS. As they disappear around the corner, the camera tracks back up the street to reveal a second muscle car, jet black and tricked out with stoopid aftermarket rims and tires. Five young men size-up Dougie’s car and then drive away. (12:49-14:33) Janey-E, Sonny Jim, and Cooper pull up in front of Dougie’s workplace, Lucky 7 Insurance. After several unsuccessful attempts to get Cooper to leave the car, she inquires whether he is “having another one of his episodes.” She opens the door and pushes him out. He shuffles away from the car, leaving the door wide open. (14:34-15:34) On the way into the office, Cooper stops to gape at a statue of an old west lawman pointing a six-shooter at nothing in particular in the general direction of the building; red balloons that seem to be sculptural elements of another nearby building hover in the distance under the lawman, as Cooper raises his arm to mimic the lawman’s stance. He enters the office building and stands awkwardly in the lobby. After an excruciatingly long take of Cooper turning aimlessly in place, a breathless intern from Lucky 7 breezes onto the scene cradling two full drink caddies to his chest: “Off in dreamland again Dougie? Well get the lead out, pal, because team meeting starts in three minutes!” Nose to the coffee, Cooper briskly follows the intern toward a bay of elevators. (15:35-17:20) They board the elevator and the intern hits “7 UP!”. Cooper begs for coffee and through persistence persuades the intern to give him “Frank’s coffee. He never drinks it anyway.” As Cooper awkwardly but wholeheartedly imbibes, the intern notices his enthusiasm and excitedly laughs, “Hahaha! That’s DAMN good joe, aye Dougie?”. “Damn good Joe!,” Cooper vacantly repeats as a women looks on incredulously. The elevator opens and the intern laboriously shepherds Cooper through the lobby of Lucky 7 Insurance into a conference room. (17:21-19:12) As people filter into the meeting, Anthony Sinclair—a pugnacious alphacock later described as Lucky 7’s “top agent”—grabs the man he believes to be Dougie from behind, applies a playful headlock, and says “Look who’s back from bendersville—and with a new haircut—I covered for your ass, so you owe me bigtime!” Getting zero back from zombie Coop, he gives up. At the conference table, some creep called Darren comes onto a female colleague who brazenly reminds him that he’s married, as poor Frank realizes with frustration that “Dougie” has commandeered his coffee. The intern proffers an extra green tea latte in its stead and Frank seems pacified, smiling oddly as he sips the tea. (19:12-21:35) The head suit, Bushnell Mullins, calls the meeting to order and becomes agitated as “Dougie” fails to comply until the intern rustles him into place. Once everyone is seated, Tony Sinclair leads, informing the group that the Beeker case and the Littlefield case have been proven and must be paid out. When Mullins protests that forensics made Littlefield for arson, Sinclair rebuffs him, saying that it all checked out and that the claims must be honored. As Sinclair waits for Mullins’ reply, a pale green light emanating from Cooper’s direction subtly flickers across his face, compelling Cooper loudly to interject: “He’s lying!”. All at the table are shocked, and Sinclair is clearly threatened. Mullins demands to see “Dougie” in his office immediately following the meeting, where he reads him the riot act for publicly slandering Lucky 7’s “best agent.” The word “agent” clearly resonates with Cooper, who repeats it multiple times. Mullins puts a stack of case files in Cooper’s hands and tells him that his future at the company depends on getting them done overnight. (21:36-25:00) Dismissed from the meeting, Cooper stands doubled-over in the hall struggling to avoid soiling himself. Assuming the men’s room is locked, the woman who denied creepy-married-Darren just minutes ago volunteers to sneak Cooper into the women’s room to relieve himself, inexplicably volunteering to make out with him while they’re in there. Despite being an alcoholic gambling addict whose occasional catatonics barely raise an eyebrow from his co-dependent family, friends, and colleagues, “Dougie” apparently still has a way with the ladies somehow. (25:00-25:59) At the Silver Mustang, the pit boss who presided over Cooper’s jackpot spree has just been informed that his mafia overlords are coming for him. Oddly, the wise-guys bringing the hurt are accompanied by three cabaret dancers who look on indifferently as their companions dole out a merciless beating to the pit boss in retribution for the $425,000 that Cooper won on his watch. After throttling him bloody, firing him, and telling him to leave town or die, they give his job to the next guy in line, strenuously requesting to be informed if Cooper ever sets foot in the Silver Mustang again. (26:00-28:47) At Rancho Rosa, the bomb under Dougie’s car blinks away as the little boy from across the street gazes out the window, snacking on Saltines. His drugged-out mother lies slumped in a chair, passed out behind a card table. The boy heads across the street to Dougie’s car and reaches underneath to grab the black device. Before he can do so, the black muscle-car reappears and five men leap out, chasing him from the car. Three of the men jimmy the door and attempt to start the car, causing a violent explosion that presumably kills all three. As the bodies burn, the remaining two men flee, and the boy runs home. His mother stirs from her stupor as he gazes out the window at the flaming wreckage which reflects a roaring fire over his face in the glass. (28:48-31:25) Jade is at the car wash ready to reclaim her sparkling Wrangler when Chris, the man towel-drying it, asks her if she has a John in Washington State. He reaches into his pocket and produces the Great Northern key, room 315 (postage guaranteed if found!). Jade eyes it and sighs “Oh, Dougie!” before walking over to a nearby mailbox and dropping it in. (31:26-32:20) Inside the R&R Diner, Norma is doing paperwork as Shelly attends to the counter. Becky, Shelly’s troubled young-adult daughter, enters dressed in an apron with a bread delivery in tow. Becky and Norma exchange genuine smiles. Norma instructs Toad to receive the delivery and he greets Becky warmly and takes the basket. Becky lingers at the front counter talking to her mother and the mood changes—she needs money. Norma looks on with a sad combination of concern and resignment as Shelly empties her apron and then her purse to assemble a meager $72. Allowing her mother intimately to sweep the hair from her face before she leaves, Becky pledges her love to Shelly and exits to join Steven in a white Trans-Am t-top with a cherry red interior and a phoenix on the hood to match. As she hops into the car, Steven wipes coke-drip from his nose. Shelly heaves a deep sigh as Norma approaches the counter, reminding her that this is the third time Becky’s asked for money in two weeks: “If you don’t help her now, it’s going to get a lot harder to help her later.” “We both know that tune, don’t we?” Shelly dejectedly replies. (32:21-34:33) Becky and Steven count their money, as Steven assures a skeptical Becky that “I’m good for it” and “will pay her back.” Noticing Shelly and Norma watching disapprovingly from the Diner, Steven relocates the car to escape their gaze. He backs the car up to the railroad tracks in a vacant lot, they kiss, and he claims, pathetically, that he’s “going to take my girl out to dinner.” He pulls out a vial of coke for a little confidence-booster, and Becky is incredulous that he has exhausted the whole vial in one day. “You know how nervous I get for interviews,” Steven protests, offering her a hit from the top of his hand which she reluctantly accepts. “Besides, I got some great fucking feedback today,” he lies, transforming his humiliation at the hands of Mike Nelson into a triumph he’ll tell her about at dinner. “And on the way,” he giddily boasts, “I’ll tell you I love you, how beautiful you are, how sexy you are…” He moves on to admiring her physique (“majestic tits” and the like—this guy is all charm) and closes with a pun that seems funnier by dint of the now-burgeoning coke high: “I’ll get you some bread…I heard you’ve been kneading it all day!”. They drive off as “I Love How You Love Me” fills the car and the camera adulates Becky’s bedazzled, soaring, smiling face for what seems like days. (34:34-38:29) Back in Vegas, “Dougie” haplessly impedes a flustered gaggle of Lucky 7 colleagues rushing to exit an elevator at the close of business. He ends up outside, standing under the lawman statue, fixated for some odd reason on the lawman’s pants. A transition indicates the passage of time as Cooper continues to stand, transfixed, at the feet of the lawman. (38:30-40:01) Andy and Hawk are perusing case files in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department conference room. As they search, apparently fruitlessly, Andy asks “Hawk, have you found any Indians?” “No Andy!”, Hawk replies with consternation. (40:02-41:19) “It’s seven o’clock! Do you know where your freedom is?” Coming to us “live and electrified from Studio-A high atop the escarpments of White Tail Peak—the roof (ruff! ruff!) of the American Hindu Kush,” Dr. Jacoby—now in character as the ramped-up, vlog-casting “Dr. Amp”—fires up a Souza march and proceeds to rant against…well, pretty much everything. “The fucks are at it again!”, he cries, targeting “the same vast global corporate conspiracy, different day; you can’t see it without a cosmic flashlight,” which of course Dr. Amp promptly produces, illuminating his face from below. As Dr. Amp ranges through the various poisons to which daily life in late capitalism routinely subjects us, we are treated to a glimpse of his viewership—Jerry Horne sparks up a joint, tuning in from a tablet in the forest somewhere, as Nadine Hurley watches, rapt and smiling, from her home office. Having whipped himself into a fury, Dr. Amp attempts to calm himself with a sip of “huckleberry extract and clean boiled water from the artisan springs of White Tail Peak” (“fuck that acai berry shit from the amazon!”). The rant finally wraps in a plea to his viewers: “You must see, hear, understand, and act…act now!” The recommended action in question, we immediately learn, is to purchase one of the good Doc’s gold shit-digging shovels for just $29.95 (“Dig your way out of the shit and accept no substitutes!”). (41:20-45:55) [NOTE: Be sure to check out my take on the hermeneutic significance of Dr. Amp's role in Twin Peaks so far!] At the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, Lieutenant Cynthia Cox enters Colonel Davis’s office to inform him of yet another database hit on a fingerprint match for the missing Major Garland Briggs—the sixteenth such hit over the past 25 years. The hit came from the police in Buckhorn, South Dakota, Cindy explains. Though Colonel Davis strongly suspects that this is another “wild goose chase,” he observes that “if it’s real…and it won’t be…but if it is, we’ll need to contact the FBI.” Cindy drops a cynical jibe about South Dakota this time of year (seemingly obligatory of government employees traveling to the Badland State, like Albert Rosenfield before her), and salutes the Colonel goodbye, tossing a sarcastic nod at his suggestion that she book a first class ticket. (45:56-47:12) Trouble is performing "Snake Eyes" at the Roadhouse. A cruel-faced young man, Richard Horne, sits alone in a booth for four dragging on a cigarette, flagrantly ignoring a no smoking sign posted just above him. He gapes lasciviously at four young women in an adjacent booth, ashing his cigarette directly onto the table with contempt. When a Roadhouse employee approaches and asks him to stop smoking, he becomes belligerent and replies “Make me!,” as the young women look on with increasing interest. Ever the insufferably meddlesome jackass, Deputy Chad (in plain clothes) intervenes, pledging to handle the situation. He asks Richard for a smoke, and Richard goes one better and gives him the entire pack. As Richard continues smoking with impunity, Deputy Chad leaves the table, looking into the pack to see a fat roll of Ben Frankies inside. He winks at Horne and leaves, removing all doubt that he is the cause of the Twin Peaks' Sheriff's Department's lack of traction on the trafficking of the "Chinese designer drug" coming in from Canada that Sheriff (Frank) Truman and Deputy Briggs discussed in Part Four (and by extension, the cause of TPHS student's Denny Craig's death by overdose). As the band plays, a pretty woman called Charlotte from the next table over asks Richard for a light. He invites her to sit next to him, and as she attempts to sit down, he violently pulls her toward him, groping her breasts. “What’s your name?,” he demands, his voice a toxic cocktail of menace, rage, and contempt. “Charlotte,” she reluctantly offers, petrified. The sexual assault continues unabated: “You want to fuck me, Charlotte?” She struggles and her friends protest as he tightens his hand around her throat and his rapey, misogynistic bullshit becomes too deplorable to repeat. A strobe light flashes as Trouble’s set continues. (47:13-51:27) Special Agent Tammy Preston lingers over a photo of the young Dale Cooper. She lines it up aside a mugshot of the incarcerated Mr. C., opening a fingerprint database on an apparent hunch. She notices something significant, presumably, and enlarges one of the key prints to inspect it more closely, glancing down at the hard copy of the prints and seeming to track some sort of discrepancy in the records. (51:28-53:02) Mr. C. sits handcuffed at a table, preparing to make his “private” phone call about which Gordon Cole expects a full report from Warden Murphy. A security door beeps and opens, and the warden enters, plugs in a telephone, and places it before Mr. C. who thanks him by name, blankly but still somehow malevolently. The warden enters a monitoring room where a guard and a detective assure him that everything is being recorded. Mr. C. is centered on the monitor, staring menacingly into the camera. He says, “Now that we’re all here, I’ll make my call. Who should I call? Should I call Mr. Strawberry?” Visibly shaken, Warden Murphy mutters, “What the hell?” Mr. C. continues, “No, I don’t think I’ll call Mr. Strawberry. I don’t think he’s taking calls.” Warden Murphy puts his hand to his mouth, looking simultaneously incredulous and terrified; the gesture seems involuntary. “I know. I know who to call,” says Mr. C. He picks up the phone, deliberately punches several numbers, receives an unfamiliar tone (as if for an international connection) and then dials a lengthy series of numbers, deliberately but with inhuman speed. As he finishes dialing, there is a mechanical clicking sound, like a metal security door engaging a heavy lock, and then electronic pandemonium ensues, as every light, camera, and siren in the prison begins going haywire at once. The warden and officers watch in astonishment as Cooper sits calmly—phone to ear—gazing piercingly into the camera. He finally speaks into the receiver, “The cow jumped over the moon,” and then replaces the phone in the cradle, abruptly terminating the chaos. Flabbergasted, Warden Murphy queries “What’d this guy just do?” (53:03-56:00) An aeriel shot of Buenos Aires, Argentina, shows us the city before an abrupt cut back to the decrepit lightbulb and a pan down to a long look the enigmatic black box on the earthen plate. The two red lights on the box blink twice, and the box suddenly folds in on itself, rapidly collapsing into what appears to be a small pebble of pyrite. (56:01-56:33)
Dusk has fallen, but Cooper is still in the square outside Lucky 7 standing at the base of the lawman statue, fondling his bronze shoes. A kindhearted security guard informs him that there is no loitering in the square, but then passes by, leaving Cooper unmolested and alone in the company of the lawman as the credits roll. (56:33-58:41) |