Menu
EPISODES |
PARTS ONE THROUGH EIGHTEEN (2017)
Hover over the featured photo and click PLAY to browse episodes. Click the featured photo to peruse that episode below the header.
Opening Credits (0:55-2:14) Along a sycamore-lined dirt road hemmed by wooden and wire fencing, a blood-soaked Mr. C. walks at a faster clip than one might expect from a man who just survived being shot by his partner, manhandled by a cohort of spectral woodsmen, and exorcised of his demonic companion in Part Eight. He comes upon a red bandanna hanging from a fencepost, presumably marking the path to waiting accomplices, and rips it from the post. (2:15-2:42) On the plane back to Philadelphia from Yankton Federal Prison, Gordon Cole is looking out the window. Agent Preston approaches him from the flight deck carrying a hot cup of coffee, passing, on her way, Diane and Albert who are sleeping on opposite sides of the aisle in the front cabin. She delivers the coffee to Cole and allows him a moment to sip it before handing over the satellite phone: “Patched in through the office, it’s a Colonel Davis for you from the Pentagon. Urgent!”. Gordon takes the phone, and she cautions him to keep his voice down, shooting an exaggerated side-long glance back toward slumbering Diane and Albert as he greets her warning with his signature stentorian “Whaaat?!”. After sternly upbraiding the Colonel for perceived use of profanity, Gordon realizes that the offending word was actually “Buckhorn.” “Buckhorn, South Dakota. West South Dakota. By golly, we’re over east South Dakota right now!”. As the Colonel briefs him, Cole asks Preston to “take this down: K.n.o.x. Knox. Lieutenant Knox. Buckhorn Police Department.” As Cole shouts the letters and repeats the name, Diane stirs from her slumber, seemingly taking note, as a look of knowing concern crosses her face. “Alright. Thank you, Colonel!,” Cole yells, and hangs up the phone. (2:43-4:10) Mr. C. arrives at a ramshackle farmstead just off the sycamore-lined dirt road. As he balls the bandana into his jacket pocket, Hutch approaches and greets him, concerned that Mr. C.’s belated arrival is a departure from the plans laid with his wife Chantal in Part Two: “Hey partner. We was expecting you last night. Looks like you been spillin’.” Never one for pleasantries, Mr. C. gets right to it: “Who owns this establishment?” “Farmers,” Hutch replies, “they’re sleeping out back. Whatchu need?”. Mr. C. produces the firing-pin-less .357 from his back pocket and hands it to Hutch: “A couple of clean phones and something for this.” Hutch sizes up the revolver with contempt, proposing an alternative and announcing Mr. C.’s arrival to his wife, all folksy like: “Aww, fuck that. I’ll get you some real nice puppies and some biscuits. Hey Chantal…boss man’s here…grab the kit.” “Is he hurt?,” Chantal yells with concern, emerging from one of the farmstead’s rustic out-buildings: “Shit (upon seeing his beleaguered condition)…we was waiting for you all night…where’d they get you?”. Mr. C. lifts his blood-drenched shirt to reveal a bullet hole on the left side of his abdomen, prompting a yowl from Hutch and a command from Chantal to rest up: “Looks like you was lucky…I’ll get the kit…get inside!” She retrieves a large blue duffel from a black van with dark-tinted windows (South Dakota license-plate DSX 636) and follows them inside. (4:11-5:15) Back on the plane, Cole approaches a fitfully sleeping Diane, putting his right hand on her left shoulder and gently massaging her awake, inquiring whether she’s willing to abide a brief detour to Buckhorn for something “quite important.” After receiving her emphatic stock reply (“Fuck you Gordon, I want to go home!”), Cole counters (as the awkward shoulder massage continues) that the detour might interest her, given that it “involves a man that Cooper once knew.” “A Blue Rose case?”, Diane asks. “Yes!”, Cole confirms. With a look of resignation, Diane summons the two empty vodka bottles that Albert supplied her for the flight to Yankton and waves them expectantly at Cole. “Coming up,” he promises; “got to talk to the pilots first.” At the cockpit, Cole informs the pilots of the reroute to Buckhorn as Rosenfield, just barely awake, glances across the aisle at a burdened Diane. Noticing his gaze, she prepares an insult, but Albert pre-empts her, turning his back to resume napping: “I know…I know…fuck you, Albert!.” Looking disgusted, Diane takes out her phone and attempts to check it, only to find it blocked. In the rear cabin, Agent Preston answers the satellite phone and then hurries it up the aisle to Cole who is procuring Diane’s vodka provisions from the mini-bar. It’s Crooked Warden Murphy bearing the bad tidings that Cooper has escaped. “How the hell did that happen?!,” Gordon screams into the phone. Dropping the receiver from his ear before Murphy can reply, he conveys the disturbing news to Rosenfield, Preston, and Diane: “Cooper’s flown the coop!”. (5:16-7:15) Mr. C. and Chantal round the corner of a modest ranch farm house, nonchalantly passing by the presumed corpses of its proprietors—a portly, bald man in brown suspenders slumped, seated, against the house with a woman sprawled across his lap. They approach a jacked-up black Silverado pick-up parked behind the house, as a rested and refreshed Mr. C. reaches into his back pocket to produce a pink flip-phone and begins texting while Chantal leans against the truck aggressively chewing gum. The phone display shows the second frame (“2/2”) of a small-case punctuation-less text composed to an “unknown” recipient: “around the dinner table the conversation is lively”; the display reports the time as “11:09p,” though the broad South Dakota daylight suggests the phone is mistaken. (7:16-7:50) After sending the text, Mr. C. immediately dials Duncan Todd in Las Vegas, who sits in dread as the designated iPhone he desperately wishes would never ring buzzes menacingly from a drawer in his desk. “Did you do it?” Mr. C. bluntly inquires without waiting for a greeting from Todd. “Not yet,” Todd reports, petrified. “Better be done next time I call,” Mr. C. replies with cold malice. Badly shaken, Todd attempts to return to working but decides it’s wiser to act immediately and summons Roger into the room. (7:51-8:36) A denim-bedecked, shotgun-toting Hutch shambles up alongside Mr. C. and Chantal with an ammo can and a duffle bag, presenting the open bag—presumably full of weapons—for Mr. C’s approval: “How’s that Boss?” “It’s real good, Hutch,” Mr. C. replies, stowing the weapons in the cab of the truck and nearly taking Hutch’s head off with the side view mirror: “I want you to kill a warden within the next two days.” “A warden. Alright.,” Hutch bumbles, sounding several bicycles shy of a full deck, “you want Chantal to mess with him before I kill him?”. “He’ll sing for me,” Chantal cheerfully offers, smiling lasciviously and lewdly popping her pelvis, thumbs in her front pockets. “Whatever you want,” Mr. C. replies, “and then I’ve got a double-header for you in Vegas.” “Oh let’s play two!,” Hutch exclaims to a guffaw from Chantal. “I’ll text you details after you do the warden. Remember this: Warden Murphy. Yankton Federal Prison. Kill him at home, at work, or on the way.” Hutch dumbly replies “’Kay!” as if taking instructions to replace a spark plug in a lawnmower rather than to execute three human beings, and then instructs Chantal to “give the boss man a wet one.” Mr. C. turns to Chantal who removes her gum and kisses him deeply as Hutch looks stupidly around, distracted by a plane passing overhead. As the embrace ends, Chantal puts her gum back in her mouth, lamenting that she “wishes it was more,” to which Mr. C. offers to take a rain check. “You got it sweetheart!,” she says, pulling a bag of Cheetos from her back pocket and planting it in Mr. C.’s hand while gazing plaintively into his eyes as though a woman sending her man off to war. Taking the Cheetos, Mr. C. produces the flip-phone from his back pocket and tosses it to the ground, telling Hutch to “kill that phone and clear out of this place.” Hutch points the way to main road and, as Mr. C. departs, pumps a flurry of buckshot into the pink flip-phone. (8:37-10:25) At the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Cooper and Janey-E wait in the lobby as the Detectives Fusco finish questioning Bushnell Mullins on Dougie Jones’s situation. “Did he ever give you any problems?,” one of the Fuscos wonders. “Naaaah, I’ve never had any trouble with Dougie at all…he’s a solid citizen!” Fusco: “So you can’t think of any reason why someone would try to kill him?” Mullins (perhaps thinking about the Mitchum brothers): “Not off the top of my head; 'course in the insurance business, people have been known to hold a grudge if things don’t go their way.” Fusco: “It’s usually about money, Bushnell, pure and simple. No one needs any more reason than that. So what’s his background? How long’s he been with you?” Mullins: “Twelve years now. He’s a good worker. He’s slow…steady…” Fusco (prompting an eruption of laughter from his colleague “Smiley”): “Little more emphasis on the slow.” Mullins: “Dougie had a car accident, as I recall, not long before he came to work for me. Every once in a while he shows some…lingering effects…his wife can talk to that better than I can.” Indicating that the meeting is over, the Fuscos express their appreciation to Mullins for coming to the station. The tenor of the meeting, which had been amiable, suddenly sours as it dawns on Mullins that he is being dismissed. He looks intently at the Fuscos, then glances out into the waiting room at Cooper and Janey-E, angry that the Fuscos seem to have no intention of taking the case seriously. After an awkward pause, he says “Well I really appreciate your help” in a register that betrays his belief that they haven’t been much help at all. After a protracted silence from the Fuscos, Mullins continues: “Damn strange business. First his car blows up and then somebody tries to kill him.” The Fuscos look on steely-eyed, not sure what to make of Mullins’ resolve. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we have something.”, Flattop non-committally offers. Mullins draws a deep breath, surveying the Fuscos with a stone-faced frown and closing and opening the fingers of his right hand repeatedly into and out of a balled fist, maybe to communicate that this former boxer means business (or perhaps in a veiled nod to Lil’s code for “trouble with local law enforcement” in FWWM). The detectives watch in silence as Mullins finally departs their office. (10:26-12:46) As the Fuscos leer out from their office window, Mullins enters the waiting area where Cooper and Janey-E are sitting: “Dougie, you can take the rest of the day off.” Relieved, Janey-E expresses her intent to take him to the doctor. Mullins continues: “Starting tomorrow, you and I are going to work together to get some answers.” “Answers,” Cooper blankly replies. Mullins pats Janey-E on the left shoulder in a kind display of empathy and leaves. The Fuscos, watching all the while, resume their conversation: “So get this…there is nothing, I mean nothing on our Mr. Douglas Jones prior to 1997. No driver’s license, no passport, no social…class records, tax records…no birth certificate.” They attempt to puzzle out the mystery, wondering whether Dougie is under witness protection and whether maybe a connection at the Justice Department can furnish answers. Stymied, the conversation takes a different direction, as Cueball suddenly asks Flattop whether he “Got that taillight fixed?”. “To the tune of 239 bucks…for a fucking taillight!”, Flattop snaps. “Must be a beauty,” quips Cueball, prompting Smiley—who is standing in the middle holding the open file on Dougie—to erupt into his trademark oafish laugh. Flattop is not initially amused, and—sensing this—Smiley turns to him and attempts to bring him in on the gag: “Remember that Australian guy with the pliers?”. The three of them break into peals of obnoxious laughter, which undoubtedly seems perverse to Janey-E, who peers in disapprovingly from the waiting area. Flattop brings the conversation back on point: “Shall we talk to them again?” “It’s like talking to a dog,” Cueball replies. “And she does all the barking,” Flattop observes, impressed with himself. They look out their office window to see Janey-E reaching across Cooper to put his empty mug on the coffee table next to him. Cue ball has a brainstorm: he delivers “Dougie” a fresh mug of coffee with intent to lift his fingerprints from the previous one. The mission succeeds, and just as he is bagging the evidence (“Gotcha!”), their Sargent emerges to inform them that “the palm prints came back on that gun” with a match to “our old friend Ike the Spike;” “we just got a twenty on him at an off-strip motel.” Preparing to “join the fun” of busting Ike, the Fuscos hand over the evidence bag to their Sargent for “prints and DNA please,” and instruct him to let the Joneses go, which he pledges to do after logging the mug. (12:47-16:55) Stuck in the waiting room until the Sarge finishes with the mug, Cooper swigs coffee while staring at the opposite wall as Janey-E inspects her fingernails, adjusts her hair, and sits in bored silence. Cooper gazes intensely at something across the room which we discover is a gold-fringed star-spangled banner perched in a flag-stand in the corner. A nostalgic arrangement of America the Beautiful fades in and plays as he stares, moist-eyed, at the flag. As the music plays, a trim, smartly dressed woman in bright red stiletto heels walks through the room, diverting Cooper’s gaze from the flag to her shoes, which he follows intently across the room. As she passes an electrical outlet, his gaze is diverted yet again, drawn back to the outlet as the music takes a dark turn into a low groan and a look of deep concentration overtakes his face. (16:56-18:46) The Detectives Fusco traverse the police station parking lot, stopping to admire flattop’s $239 right taillight on a shitty Cherokee before proceeding to their police vehicles. At the Premiere Motel, Ike the Spike is pounding Evan Williams and attempting to raise “JT,” first on his cell phone, and now on his other line: “The message is no cigar; taking medical leave.” He hangs up and downs a shot. As the police gather in the motel parking lot, he pounds another, grabbing a suitcase and throwing his jacket over his wounded right hand to make his escape. As he walks down the hall, three police enter with guns drawn. Ike calmly turns and walks in the other direction, only to end up facing the Detectives Fusco, all brandishing heat in his general direction. Flattop melodramatically announces the charge: “Ike, you’re under arrest for attempted murder.” Cue ball follows up: “We have your palm print.” Not to be outdone, Flattop clinches it: “As a matter of fact, Ike, we have your whole palm.” Smiley erupts, as Ike drops the suitcase and jacket to put his arms up in surrender, revealing a right hand thickly wrapped in gauze and emitting a defeated whimper. (18:47-21:02) The sun breaks through the trees behind the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, where Andy and Lucy are seated at their desks perusing furniture online at the Canworth Furniture Design website. After clicking back and forth between two fabric options on a lounge chair, Lucy stridently walks back to Andy’s desk and peevishly proclaims, “Andy, I really love the beige chair,” before pouting back to her place. Brooding, Andy gets up and bumbles over to her desk, equally petulant: “And Lucy, I really love the red chair.” Once he’s back in his seat, Lucy returns to his desk yet again: “And I really love the beige chair, Andy.” After a short while, Andy is back at her side, repentant: “I’m sorry, Punky. You can get the beige chair.” He nuzzles her head and pats her left shoulder before returning to his desk. With a gleam in her eye and a self-satisfied giggle, Lucy purchases the red chair, twirling in her swivel to catch a glimpse of Andy at his desk, proud of her altruism. (21:03-23:38) We see a shot of ceiling timbers in an as-yet unfamiliar house and hear the heavy footfalls of a large man running, as an agitated voice we discover to be that of Sylvia Horne rings out: “Mary, what are you doing? Who let him out?” A man in blue pajamas streaks across the banisters of a second-story balcony at top speed,” as Sylvia cries “Who let him out? Johnny? Johnny, where are you?” Johnny suddenly emerges from a door on the first floor, running at breakneck speed into a room across the hall where we hear a crash and the electrical pop and flash of a lamp hitting the floor. There’s a blood-smeared hole in the drywall with streaks of blood leading down to the floor, where a frantic Sylvia Horne discovers Johnny lying, bloody face to the baseboard, surrounded by the remains of a shattered framed photograph of the falls at the Great Northern. She reaches out to touch his left shoulder, crying his name. (23:39-24:32) Betty Briggs is seated at a table in her condo logging some screen-time on her MacBook Pro. Bobby arrives and she greets him warmly and offers him coffee. He graciously declines because he’s there on business with Hawk and Sheriff Truman; they have some questions for her. She consents and he goes to the door to usher in Hawk and Truman, giving her a few seconds to collect herself. One gets the distinct impression she knows exactly what’s coming. After the obligatory pleasantries, Sheriff Truman announces their intention to inquire about Cooper’s visit with the Major the day before he died. Betty puts her hand up to stop the inquiry in its tracks and delivers an astonishing monologue that holds her interlocutors mesmerized: “Alright, listen to me. Right after Agent Cooper left that day, Garland pulled me aside and he said that one day our son Bobby, and Hawk, and Sheriff Truman—I didn’t know it would be this Sheriff Truman—he said that they would come and ask me about Special Agent Dale Cooper. He squeezed my shoulders when he told me this. I tried to ask him what it was about, but he wouldn’t say anymore. He just said, ‘When they come to ask you about Agent Cooper, you give them this.’ And now you’re here.” As they dangle at the edge of her every word, she suddenly switches gears and offers coffee to her rapt audience. Shell-shocked, they hastily decline in unison as the burning desire to know more consumes them. “Alright,” she says. “Come with me.” She gets up from the table and walks all of eight steps to an ornate red Victorian arm chair in the living room. Anxiously patting the wood trim of its high back, she says “This is the chair. I can’t believe this day has come.” Pointing to the trim, she instructs them to “watch, right here,” as she bends down and turns a switch on the side, opening a secret panel in the trim containing a mysterious, seamless metal cylinder about the size and shape of a small cigar. She cradles it in her hands and says to an increasingly emotional Bobby, “when your father told me this, you were a very long way from where you are today. Somehow he knew that it would all turn out well. He saw this life for you. Your father never lost faith in you.” She brings the cylinder over to the men who stand dumbfounded, as if in a trance, and hands the cylinder to Sheriff Truman, breaking the spell to the great relief of all by bringing things back around to refreshments: “Well fellas, let’s have that coffee.” (24:33-28:07) At the Buckhorn morgue, Diane, Cole, Preston, and Rosenfield report for their meeting with Lieutenant Knox and Detective Mackley. As they file into a receiving area, Cole conspicuously blurts “the waiting room!” as Diane makes a beeline for a green couch against the back wall and Albert announces the arrival of Knox and Mackley right behind them. Cole invites Diane to join the group and, brazenly lighting a cigarette, she snaps “I’m not in the mood to see a dead body this morning. I’ll just wait for you guys here.” Mackley informs her that she can’t smoke in the building, and after glaring at him for a few seconds to let the full weight of her contempt sink in, she yells “It’s a fucking morgue” and continues smoking with impunity. Defeated, Mackley leads the group back to where Briggs’ body is stored as Gordon, the last one out of the waiting room, casts a disapproving glance over his left shoulder back at Diane. Spitting a homophobic slur in their direction as they leave, she waits to be sure they’re gone and checks her phone. After some frustrated fidgeting to get the phone to comply, she discovers a text message from “Unknown,” properly punctuated and in all caps: “AROUND THE DINNER TABLE, THE CONVERSATION IS LIVELY.” As she looks up from the phone, her eyes narrow to slits, burning holes in the door that the rest of the group just exited. (28:08-29:38) As they walk toward the autopsy room, Knox informs the group that Mackley was the investigating officer and that he’ll bring them up to speed. Mackley unloads the sordid tale: “William Hastings was having an affair with the local librarian Ruth Davenport. Now Davenport’s head was found atop the headless body of your Major Briggs. Once we took Hastings into custody, his wife was murdered in their house, apparently by their lawyer—a man named George Boutzer—who is now also in custody. And the next day, Hastings secretary died in a car explosion.” Before Mackley can get any further, Albert grabs his arm and interrupts: “What happens in season two?”. “Apologies in advance for Albert,” Cole sheepishly adds. (29:39: 30:22) As they file into the autopsy room, Coroner Talbot is waiting for them and wastes exactly no time looking Albert up and down as he sizes up the body. Mackley breaks the silence: “Well, this is your Major Briggs.” He goes on to inform them that “Hastings, along with the help of Ruth the librarian, was researching and publishing some strange little blog about some alternate dimension.” Albert interjects, “This from the principal of your local high school!”, to which Talbot zings “not to mention marble champion of the sixth grade!” Sparks fly between them as Albert takes the bait: “When did he lose his marbles?”. Without missing a beat, Talbot cocks her head and returns volley with perfect poise barely suppressing a self-satisfied smirk forced north to her brow: “When the dog got his cat’s eyes.” Albert offers a sarcastic smile but is clearly smitten, a fact which is not lost on a side-eyed, faintly smirking Cole. Albert snaps the case file and takes the floor: “About one week ago Hastings ended his blog entry with this cryptic sentence: ‘today we finally entered what we call ‘The Zone’ and we met the Major.’” He looks down at the corpse and observes that “this is the body of a man in his forties,” which Talbot breathlessly confirms, gazing luridly into Albert’s eyes. He turns back to Cole with a knowing look, and Cole pulls him out into the hall. (30:23-31:54) Cole puts his arm on Albert’s shoulder and draws him close: “Let’s think out loud.” Albert gets right to it: “Major Briggs would have been 72. As you know, we thought he died in a fire in that government facility outside Twin Peaks 25 years ago, at about the age this man is now.” Cole lets these words sink in and counters: “Well consider this. Cooper knew Briggs, Cooper was around Briggs 25 years ago, and now Cooper shows up in this neck of the woods.” Albert amplifies the point: “On the loose in this neck of the woods.” “Right.”, Cole adds with resolve. As they rejoin the company in the autopsy room, Talbot remembers something and turns to an instrument trolley behind her to retrieve the ring she discovered in Briggs’ gut: “And I found this in his stomach…it’s inscribed; it says, ‘to Dougie, love Janey-E.” Rosenfield, Cole, and Preston all look equally baffled, and Cole announces that they’ll need to interview Hastings. (31:55-33:17) The wind blows and birds sing before a thickly-wooded mountainside. A backpacking-toting, TCH-addled Jerry Horne is still in the woods, still in his mother’s hat, and leering down his right leg to his foot, which timidly explains to him, in a voice caught somewhere between a Teletubby and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, that “I am not your foot.” Unpersuaded, Jerry tentatively reaches down to try to grab his foot, only to recoil, short of breath, as the foot will not move, appearing as though it is staked to the forest floor. He leans back, shifting his weight to his bent left leg, as if engaged in an invisible tug of war. He attempts to grab is foot again and again recoils, practically hyperventilating upon touching it. He steels his resolve to go in for a third attempt and this time succeeds, screaming “Go away!”, before pulling his own foot out from under him and crashing to the forest floor. (33:18-35:17) Ever the epitome of human flourishing, Deputy Chad lunches alone on two microwave dinners in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department conference room; kernels of corn are visible in one of the trays. Returning from their revelatory meeting with Betty Briggs, Sheriff Truman, Hawk, and Bobby enter the building through the front entrance as Lucy cautions them that “I’m not here! I’m on my lunch break!”. Chortling into his magazine, Deputy Chad slurps at his lunch as Sheriff Truman, Hawk, and Bobby bust into the conference room. “No lunch in the conference room, Chad,” Sheriff Truman scolds. “I know, but you guys have coffee and donuts in here all the time,” comes Chad’s sheepish excuse. “Chad, take your lunch to the lunchroom,” Truman demands. Offering a half-hearted apology, he assures the Sheriff it won’t happen again and awkwardly gathers his magazine, bowl, mug, and two trays and makes for the door without a free hand to open it. Hawk stands just a few feet from the door but looks on in contempt, forcing Chad to suffer the indignity of pleading for help before opening the door to let him out. (35:18-36:59) As the door shuts behind him, Truman asks Bobby to open a window to dispel the stench of Chad’s microwaved garmonbozia. Hawk and Truman take places as the table as Bobby leans against the windows. Truman inspects the cylinder, observing its properties: “no seams, no openings—how the heck you supposed to open this thing.” “Maybe there’s a hidden button,” Hawk ventures, but Truman can’t find one. The Sheriff notices Bobby beaming by the window: “What are you smiling at?” Scarcely able to believe it himself, but obviously most pleased, Bobby says “I know how to open that. My Dad brought one home one night.” “You having fun with us, Bobby?”, Truman edgily asks. “Yeah, sort of, yeah,” Bobby admits. “Go for it!”, Truman commands. Bobby informs them that they have to go back outside and, surprised but compliant, Truman and Hawk follow him out, passing Lucy slurping a soda and noshing on an enormous sandwich, her hand raised in defiant signification that she is still off-duty (37:00-38:11) Outside, as Hawk and Truman observe, Bobby winds up and throws the metal cylinder hard against the concrete sidewalk, sending it caroming into the grass. He retrieves it and holds it to his ear as a resonant sound not unlike a long note held on a harmonica fills the air. He runs it back to Hawk and Truman and holds it to their ears to share the sound. Astonished, Hawk exclaims “What the…?!”, only to be shushed by Bobby, who puts the cylinder to his ear again, clearly waiting for something. The single resonant note abruptly transitions into the sound of tiny gears meshing and a pin dropping into place, at which point Bobby hastily throws the cylinder hard against the concrete. As Hawk and Truman look on stupefied, Bobby fetches the cylinder and returns beaming, handing it to Truman in pieces. Truman removes a smaller cylinder nested into the main fuselage and extracts two tiny scrolls of paper from it. He hands the empty cylinders to Hawk, unrolls the first paper, and reads: “253 yards east of Jack Rabbit’s Palace. Before leaving Jack Rabbit’s Palace, put some soil from that area in your pocket. And two dates and a time—same time—2:53. That’s two days from now and the day after. Jack Rabbit’s Palace? I never heard of such a place!” As Truman puzzles through the cryptic message, Bobby looks on, anxiously running his tongue along his smiling top teeth, clearly dazzled and unable to believe what he is hearing. “He did it again! Wow! I know exactly where Jack Rabbit’s Palace is. My Dad, when I was a little kid, took me to this place near where his station used to be. It was our make-believe world, you know where we made up stories and *laughs in disbelief* I was the one who named it Jack Rabbit’s Palace.” Reeling from Bobby’s revelation, Truman manages “He saw all of this…whatever this is…” “That’s my Dad!”, Bobby resolutely confirms. “Well go up there two days from now and you can lead the way, just as your Dad wanted.” Truman suddenly notices the second paper hiding under the thin first layer. “Wait a minute…there’s something else…,” he says, displacing the top sheet to reveal a string of letters and three digit numbers separated by front-slashes and two discernible words back-to-back with a third instance of the word cut in half: “COOPER/COOPER/COO”. “Two Coopers!”, Hawk exclaims, as Bobby and Truman struggle to take it all in. (38:12-41:09) Back in Buckhorn, Diane leans against the wall on the steps of the Police Department smoking a cigarette. Cole and Preston arrive on the scene, and Cole announces with a slight smirk that they’ve come to join Diane while “Albert is indisposed,” presumably carrying out a meticulous inspection of a certain body. A long, awkward silence ensues as Diane smokes, Gordon looks nervously back and forth between Diane’s eyes and her cigarette, and Tammy struggles in vain to conceal that she’d rather be sliding down a razor and landing in a pool of manure than keeping company with Diane. Eventually, Gordon extends his fore and middle fingers to indicate his intent to bum a drag and Diane complies over Tammy’s protest (“Gordon?!”) as he puts the cigarette to his lips and closes his eyes in ecstasy, inhaling deeply and then curling his lips and wincing as the welcome quitter’s wallop hits home. “Whoa!”, he blurts with a wistful boyish grin, admiring the cigarette in his hand. “We used to smoke together way back when, do you remember?” Offering what seems to be a genuine smile, Diane concurs, “Yeah, we sure did, Gordon. Sure did.” Gordon contemplates another hit and raises his hand to take it, but thinks better of it and hands it back: “Thanks, Diane.” “You want to finish it off?”, she asks with a broad grin. He shakes his head no, smiling back. (41:10-43:18) A brown-jump-suited Bill Hastings, head in shackled hands, is blubbering away in a Buckhorn Police Department interrogation room. Mackley, Cole, Preston, and Diane are assembled behind the two-way glass and Cole gestures to Preston that she’ll be doing the honors. She enters the room and introduces herself, spawning a fresh meltdown as Hastings takes in the fact that he is now the target of an FBI investigation. She informs him that she is recording the conversation and requests that he state his name and age for the record: Hastings: “William Hastings. 43.” Preston: “Mr. Hastings, are you the author of an online journal or blog entitled “The Search for the Zone?” Hastings: “Yes.” Preston: “What sort of things do you write about.” Hastings: “Different things.” Preston: “Approximately two weeks ago, did you write an entry about encountering what you described as an “alternate reality”?” Hastings: “A different dimension. Yes. But it’s real. It’s all real.” Preston asks him how long he’s been interested in the subject, and he says many years and that he’s done a lot of reading. She reminds him, however, that his latest post goes well beyond reading: “You actually found and entered such a place and that while in this place, you wrote, “we met the Major.” Hastings concurs and the story comes bursting forth: “You see, Ruth was very good at uncovering hidden records, and she had indications that if we went to a certain place at a certain time we would enter the dimension and make contact with a certain person, and so we went there.” “And that’s where you found the Major?”, Preston inquires. “He was hiding there…or hibernating as he said…and other people were maybe going to find him and he wanted to go to a different place and so he asked us to get him numbers…important numbers…coordinates. And we found them in the place he told us to go—a secure military database.” “Do you still have those coordinates?” “No Ruth had them. She wrote them on her hand so that she wouldn’t forget.” “What happened then, William?”, Preston pushes for pay-dirt and gets it: “We brought him back the numbers last Thursday and then something terrible happened. These others came in and they grabbed me by the neck and they pushed me down and they said ‘What’s your wife’s name? What’s your wife’s name?’. Phyllis, I said. I didn’t kill Ruth! I didn’t kill her! You have to believe me! I loved her! It’s all my fault! It never should have happened!” As Hastings trails off into incoherence, Preston regroups and presents him with six mugshots, asking him if the man he refers to as “the Major” is represented there. He identifies the Major straight away at bottom left and Preston asks him to circle, sign, and date the photo. He does so, mumbling “9/29” as he scrawls the barely legible date next to his signature. Preston returns the document to the case file and goes back in for the goods: “Can you tell me what happened?” Temporarily calmer, Hastings resumes his fantastic story: “We gave him the numbers and he started to float up and he said some words—“Cooper…Cooper”—right before his head disappeared. It was something like no one has ever seen before...YOU DON’T KNOW YOU WEREN’T THERE…he…he…it was beautiful. And then Ruth was dead. It was so terrible and I had to hold her and then I woke up and I was in my home.” Preston presses him for specifics: “Did the Major kill Ruth?” “No…there were so many people there. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill Ruth. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Why can’t you help me? We were so happy together. We were going to go to the Bahamas. We were going to scuba dive and drink mixed drinks on the beach…” As he becomes increasingly agitated and repetitive in his descriptions of their planned Bahamanian escape, Albert sums up what some of the kinder people in the room also seem to be thinking: “Fruitcake anyone?”. (43:19-49:56) Laura’s theme fills the air as we move from fog rolling in over the mountain, to the falls beneath the Great Northern, to a taxidermy ram’s head and mounted antlers inside the hotel. Ben Horne and Beverly are once again at work attempting to suss out the origin of the singing bowl noise that has taken up resonance in the receiving room outside Ben’s office. They move to the lamp in the corner of the room where the sound is loudest and Beverly observes that the tone is mesmerizing, prompting Ben to compare it to “the ring out of a monastery bell—it has the same quality…otherworldly.” They turn toward one another in an accidental embrace that is anything but, her hand on his lapel, his on her arm. He caresses her cheek with more caring than we are used to from him, “Beverly, I can’t do this. I don’t know why it is.” “You’re a good man, Ben,” she replies, though the embrace seems far from over and neither seems convinced. (49:57-52:31) At the Roadhouse, Hudson Mohawke DJs a set as Ella—by all indications a sparkle junkie—sits alone in a booth amidst a bowl of peanuts and a can of cheap-ass beer, in turns moving to the music and worrying at a wicked rash under her left arm. Her friend Chloe (who is also clearly powdered up) plunks down into the booth across the table from her as Ella swigs her beer. “You know that Zebra’s out again,” Chloe says, smiling. They both laugh. A half-hearted, profanity-rich conversation ensues about Ella’s employment situation; she lost her old job flipping burgers because she came in high a couple times, so now she has a new job flipping burgers across the street. They laugh nervously, drink awkwardly, and Chloe shells and gobbles peanuts, Ella scratching away intermittently at the rash. As Au Revoir Simone takes the stage to perform “A Violent Yet Flammable World,” Ella inquires of Chloe, “Have you seen that penguin?”. “Whaaat?”, Chloe counters. “You know, the penguin.” They both sit back, laughing, revealing meth-mouths full of rotting teeth, as Ella goes back to work on the rash. (52:32-55:40) Au Revoir Simone closes out the evening as the credits roll: "Tonight I sleep to dream of a place that's calling me. It's always just a dream, still I cannot forget what I have seen. The crowd's hard to believe, at their faces I'm looking, but your feet I'm following in soft steps on a path the way you lead." (55:41-58:43)
1 Comment
Opening Credits (0:55-2:14) Mr. C. and Ray Monroe are driving into the night, putting as much distance as they can between Yankton Federal Prison and the cheap beige rental furnished to them by Warden Murphy. As Ray pilots the car, Mr. C. reaches into his jacket pocket to retrieve his cell phone. Upon waking it, he says “They’ve got three tracking devices on this car.” He observes a blue screen with three black rectangular buttons in parallel: the top one depicts a green capital “C”; the middle one depicts the word “FIRE” in red all-caps; and the bottom one depicts a green capital “D” followed by a symbol that appears to be a DVD or compact disc followed by a green capital “X” (if the DVD icon is a stylized letter “o”, the button would read DOX). He clicks each button and instructs Ray to “get up close behind this truck,” gesturing to a box truck in the left lane in front of them. Ray pulls up behind the truck and Mr. C. types the license plate of the truck into his phone: DEGWW8. “That should do it,” he says, and tosses the phone out the window. (2:14-3:05) With the tracker situation sorted, Ray gets chatty. Ray: "Hope you’re not sore at me for running off. Sure was stupid of me to get caught up like I did. Thanks for getting me out of there. How did you do this?" Mr. C.: "Darya told me what happened. You needed to get out, Ray." Ray: "Where’s Darya?" Mr. C.: "She’s waiting for a phone call when we get some place safe." Ray: "Where are we going?" Mr. C.: "You’d probably like to go to that place they call “The Farm.”" Ray (smirking): "That’s what I was thinking. We’re heading in the right direction. Just saying. They’re not going to let us just walk, are they? Bound to be looking for us soon." Not much for the small talk, Mr. C. curtly changes the subject. Mr. C.: "You have something I want, Ray." Ray: "Yes, I do. I got it memorized. All the numbers. Memorized perfectly. But honestly Mr. Cooper, I think it might be worth some money. Maybe…. quite a lot of money." Mr. C. (perturbed): "You think so, do you?" Ray: "Yes sir, I do." Mr. C. looks at Ray with a contempt that feels certain to be a prelude to violence, but remains composed and lets Ray have the last word for the moment. Highway lights hurtle by as an awkward silence hangs between them. Mr. C. breaks the silence: “There it is. Take that little road up there on the right. Let’s get off this highway, Ray.” They take the right and follow bright yellow curve signs through an S-curve that straightens into a pitch-black two-lane road. The headlights struggle to discern double-yellow as Mr. C. and Ray sit in eerie silence, their faces betraying the imminent treachery they’ve plotted for one another. A white fence materializes out of the darkness into the headlights as the road curves right and the pavement comes to an end. The darkness overwhelms the headlights and the road becomes a narrow band of gravel, barely visible more than a few feet ahead. Ray finally breaks the protracted silence: “You mind if I pull over for a sec? I gotta take a leak.” Mr. C. is amenable to the request (“Go for it.”), but casts an intense sidelong glance at Ray as if to extract a premonition of his true purpose. (2:15-6:40) Ray gets out of the car and goes to the side of the road to urinate. In the car, Mr. C. opens the glove box to discover the “friend” he requested of Warden Murphy: a nickel-plated .357 Colt Python. He inspects the chambers, finds them loaded, and exits the car, making a point to shut the door, arrogantly throwing stealth to the wind. He approaches his accomplice, coming up behind him with the .357 trained on his back: “Ray, I want that information.” Sounding confused, Ray offers a delayed “Yes?”. “Looks like you’re out half a million,” Mr. C. gloats. Hitching up his fly and looking the opposite of concerned, Ray counters “Well, I think you’re wrong about that.” He turns to face Mr. C. brandishing a hand-canon of his own, and Mr. C. immediately pulls the trigger three times, releasing three brittle metallic clicks that betray the Warden’s failure to install a firing pin. Mr. C. looks down at the revolver in shock, as Ray spills the beans (“Tricked ya…fucker!”) and pumps two rounds of hot lead into Mr. C.’s stomach, propelling him backward into the dirt, arms outstretched and legs parted as if mid-snow-angel. (6:41-7:47) As Ray approaches Mr. C. poised to execute a finishing shot to the head, a white light floods Mr. C.’s body and an intervention from another dimension announces itself. As if from the trees but at the same time clearly from another place entirely, throngs of unkempt, bearded men dressed for difficult lives outdoors swarm the scene, feverishly dancing around Mr. C.’s body in an otherworldly ritual as Ray—fallen backwards to the ground in the midst of this spectral dance—looks on in horror. The combination of Ray’s sluggish movements, muted screams, and a sound-tracking of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” slowed to a crawl through molasses over a steel-drum suggests that time is occurring here in two registers: Ray remains on Earthly time while the woodsmen’s ritual proceeds on another clock. Three of the woodsmen huddle over Mr. C’s body and begin scratching at his wounds and smearing his blood over his torso, face, and neck. One of the woodsmen pushes Mr. C.’s head up as another massages his stomach. A grotesque amniotic-sac-like bladder emerges from the gore and BOB’s face gazes out at Ray who looks on in terror. As the ritual continues, Ray scrambles to the car and speeds away, leaving the woodsmen to their exorcism. A fog rolls through as white light intermittently floods the scene and then dissipates into pitch black. From out of the pitch, a half moon briefly emerges from the clouds and disappears. (7:48-11:24) Speeding through the dark, a deeply shaken Ray Monroe leaves a telephone message for “Philip” (who we assume to be Philip Jeffries): “It’s Ray. I think he’s dead but he’s found some kind of help so I’m not 100% and…um…I saw something in Cooper that may be the key to what this is all about. I told him where I’m going, so if he comes after me, I’ll get him there. (11:25-11:54) Amidst an onslaught of industrial noise and feedback, a tuxedo-clad MC welcomes a rowdy crowd to the Roadhouse, “proud to welcome the Nine Inch Nails.” A leather-clad, dark-shaded Reznor growls into the mic: “You dig in places til your fingers bleed. Spread the infection where you spill your seed. I can’t remember what you came here for. I can’t remember much of anything anymore: she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone away.” (11:55-16:33) As the feedback from the end of NIN’s performance drones on, we see Mr. C.’s corpse lying abandoned in the place where he fell upon being shot. Out of utter stillness, he snaps wide awake from beyond death, sitting bolt upright, dead eyes besmirching his blood-smeared visage. (16:34-16:54) An establishing shot of the desert before dawn informs us that the date is July 16, 1945 in White Sands, New Mexico at 5:29 am MWT. A launch countdown commences: “10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1”. At zero, a truncated electronic blip precedes a bedazzling flash of white light and the frenetic strings of Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” scream unimaginable horrors. A deathly mushroom of hellfire blooms from the parched desert floor illuminating and deforming the smoke rocket trails sent up by the unholy gods of scientism to measure the shockwave. As the mushroom expands, the desert floor becomes an obscene, malignant cauliflower spreading inexorably, transforming the blasted earth into a demonic cruciferous mountain range. The burgeoning cap of the mushroom inevitably subsumes all. (16:55-19:02) Squid ink spills dissipating smoke specked amber in blackness star fall specks amber burn black pubic malignant sperm ripples tea-stained rice paper dead starlight swarm wasphorde reverse negative star fall scraping hell fire explodes invaginated fuschia perforations expelling antimatter flak and volcanic proto hatred molten to ashen tsunami rains skyward fire columns voided. (19:03-21:53) A stylized mid-century convenience store materializes from out of the void. A persistent temporal disturbance makes it feel as though we are attempting to tune in what is before us on a ham radio—each time we almost alight upon the frequency the signal is dropped but then weakly reasserts itself again just before we give up on dialing it in. So it is that smoke billows out from the door and then doesn’t. And then does. And then doesn’t. Then it does. And doesn’t. Same with bright light, beaming and not, not and then beaming. Suddenly there are woodsmen, blasted, unkempt, arms at their mid-sections, fists closed or open, shuffling then standing then shuffling again. There are two gas pumps in front, each with a light bulb on top, and stacks of cans—one suspects full of corn—in the windows of the blasted building. Another light beams out from top right and at far right we see a staircase, perhaps to an upper room. At far left, a corner of the gas pump overhang is mysterious illuminated from off camera. As attempts to dial in the scene before us continue to fail, the focus changes and we see a dark field with four halos of light—one at top left by the overhang, one above each gas pump, and one at tip-top right, suggestive of a stellar constellation. Close-ups of the windows flicker and intensify and we see woodsmen at work within the store, but the tune-in failures result in intermittent splicings of an abandoned store. In the midst of an off-kilter backlit close-up of the store, a portal opens out of a widenening gyre into blackness. (21:54-24:35) Experiment is hovering in the black, a female humanoid form, arms outstretched but reversed such that her right arm emanates from her left shoulder and vice versa. Her head is round with petite horns and there is a gaping orifice in the middle of her otherwise featureless face. Seized by a poison, she heaves and wretches three times, forcefully disgorging a vomit of viscous fluid that emanates from her like an umbilical cord or a demonic Nerds-rope. The fluid is teeming with eggs of various sizes and also bears along a large black tumor in which we see BOB’s face. An egg breaks out of the fluid and crosses behind the BOB tumor out into the black. (24:36-25:22) Swirling fire and ash open a burning heart from the deepest of the deep and a pebble of molten gold comes hurtling toward us from the center of the distant heart of fire. Red shooting stars shuttle past at blinding speed, giving way to a violent violet ocean. After a time, we see a distant column of stone erupting from the violent sea. Up the slender island of rock we slowly climb to a silver castle with a silo-like dome. A small slot in the wall approaches and we pass through it. (25:23- 29:25) Old jazz music, possibly bask-masked, plays quietly from a phonograph in an elaborate room with a dazzling woman—Señorita Dido—sitting placidly on a sofa. It appears to be the same room, or at least a room within the same place, where Cooper and the Giant (credited as “???????”) were sitting in the first scene of the new series. At left is a large thimble-shaped transmitter, similar to the one Cooper encountered on the odyssey with Naido in Part Three. Señorita Dido is swaying almost imperceptibly gently to the music. There are traces of reversed sound as she moves, indicating that sound is backwards here, despite the fact that the music at times seems as though it is playing forward. The thimble transmitter begins to ping and the Giant (“???????”) emerges from behind it, looking curiously at it. He turns to face Dido and they come to an understanding. He gazes out toward the slot from which we entered with a look of grave concern as the pinging thimble continues to transmit its warning. He turns to the thimble, looks down at two circular gauges in front of him and reaches out to flip a switch that stops the pinging. He walks over to Dido, they come to an understanding, and he turns to leave the parlor, disappearing behind the thimble. (29:25-32:55) As the music grows faint, the Giant ascends a flight of stairs. His footfalls are reversed and they make a gentle, disorienting plinth-plinth-plinthing on the rug. He enters a large room with another thimble transmitter in the center and walks across to a large stage with a third thimble and a small balcony nearby. He looks up at the stage, puts up his hand, and a screen appears, depicting the atomic explosion at White Sands that we witnessed just minutes before. He takes in the mushroom cloud, the convenience store and woodsmen, and finally the Experiment through which the malignant destroyer of humanity that is BOB was spewed forth into the black. He pauses the feed on BOB’S image. The music turns ethereal, almost funereal, and the Giant ascends toward the ceiling alongside the stage and hovers in mid-air, a spotlight from the back of the house illuminating him. Señorita Dido enters from the back of the hall and is walking with somnambulant dignity toward him as the music and lone spotlight lull us into a dream-state. One is moved to certainty that they are up to something very serious. The spotlight projects her shadow onto the wall beneath the Giant and as she approaches him, her shadow and her figure nearly converge at the very moment that a faint orange light begins to emanate from his head. She takes up a place just under his floating feet near the lip of the stage as the freeze-frame of BOB is replaced by a skyfull of twinkling, falling stars. She looks up at the giant and smiles in awe, breathing in deep drafts. Light teeming with particles emanates from the Giant’s head and takes up the form of a river and tributaries, then a uterus with fallopian tubes pushing out of the river, particles swarming. We feel that universes are being born as thick coils of particles form at the top of the light funnel, like a labyrinth of possibilities for being. Dido looks on with increasing wonder. One light particle becomes particularly large, and as Dido gazes above her, enraptured, it gathers momentum and burgeons into a large pearlescent orb, pushing out from the uterus of light and floating down into Dido’s outstretched hands. She receives it and pulls it toward her like her beloved, fully present to the experience and awed by it. Gazing into the orb, she sees Laura’s face amongst the stars, which twinkle and drift and shoot across the tiny globed sky. She kisses the orb and lifts it back into the air, setting it free. It ascends to a magnificent golden machine where it enters a flute-like tube, gets distilled into a single particle, and then launched from the tube on a collision course with Earth, moving like a suspended penny toward its destination. Dido looks on in awe as the golden penny descends. (32:56-41:19) An establishing shot of the New Mexico desert clicks off the numbers from 1945 to August 5, 1956. A single egg sits amidst the ripples of windswept desert sand. The egg hatches and a creature emerges, insect-like and winged, but with the hindquarters of a frog. It struggles off into the desert like a clumsy beetle. In the sky, a full moon is overwhelmed by clouds. (41:19-43:23) On a moonlit evening alive with the music of crickets and cicadas, a teenage boy and girl emerge from behind a New Mexico gas station that can’t help but bring to mind a certain convenience store. The boy asks the girl, “Did you like that song.” “Yes, I did like that song,” she self-assuredly replies. They walk slowly, encompassed by the magic of anticipation. The girl stops short: “Oh, look! I found a penny! And it’s heads up! That means it’s good luck!” As she inspects it, we wonder whether it might be a manifestation of the golden penny distilled from pearl of light bearing Laura’s image, sent to Earth to protect her. The boy offers, “I hope it does bring you good luck.” She repays him with a winsome smile. (43:24-44:27) A black silhouette descends from the sky and a woodsman walks forth into the desert. Meanwhile, a couple drives along a country desert road in the dark. Up ahead, another car is stopped and overtaken by woodsmen. We pick up the signs of temporal disturbance and discontinuity again, as the muffled screams of the man and woman in the car seem slower and farther away than the distorted speech of the woodsman: “Gotta light?”, he inquires repeatedly. Though we hear these words intelligibly, the temporal divergence of the couple from what we see unfolding on screen suggests that the words may be unintelligible to them. They speed away in terror but seemingly unscathed. (44:28-46:38) The boy and the girl are walking down the road to her house, making awkward but expectant small talk. Girl: “You live in town don’t you?” Boy: “Yes.” Girl: “You live by the school?” Boy: “How did you know that?” Girl: “I just do. So, I thought you were going with Mary.” Boy: “No, that’s over.” Girl: “Are you…sad…about that?” Boy: “No.” Girl: “Ok, that’s good…that’s good…that’s good.” (Her hands are together; she’s fidgeting with her thumb.) Girl: “It was really nice of you to walk me home.” Boy: “I really wanted to. Do you mind if I give you a kiss.” Girl: “Sigh…I don’t I don’t know. I just…” Boy: “Please. Just one.” Girl: (sigh…nervous laugh…closes eyes and tilts head) Boy: (leans in and gives her a gentle peck on the lips) Weak-kneed, the girl makes her way to the house, clearly on cloud nine. She waves dreamily from the porch at her smiling boy. (46:39-49:00) The woodsman traverses a hill and sees a radio station. He walks toward the station amidst a symphony of cricketsong. At the station, a 45 spins on the platter as a voice sings out “When the twilight is gone and no song birds are singing…” KPJK is “On the Air.” A disc jockey sits behind a booth sizing up the plan for the evening broadcast. The clock in the booth reads 10:16 pm. As the song plays, we see a radio in a mechanic’s garage where a man is working on a car; we see a lunch counter in a diner where a woman is cleaning up. We see the freshly-kissed young girl sitting on the bed and beaming (and notice that she has two curious abrasions on her knees about the size of quarters). The woodsman enters the radio station, shambling into the office. A receptionist approaches him and shrinks back in horror when he asks her for a light. He grabs her head with black hands and crushes her skull. She sinks ruined to the floor. He casts his eyes on the man in the booth and enters, asking yet again for a light. The man turns around, utterly petrified, as the request is repeated in the same distorted monotone. The woodsman takes the disc jockey’s head in one hand and applies pressure. We hear the skull begin to give way, as the woodsman violently rakes the record off the platter, broadcasting static into the night. The auto mechanic, the woman at the diner, and the young girl—all of whom were listening to the broadcast—notice the abrupt interruption. In full knowledge of how to broadcast, the woodsman goes live into the mic: "This is the water and this is well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.” All the while torturing the disc jockey, he repeats this mantra a second time and the woman in the diner collapses. After the fourth time though, the mechanic drops to the floor. (49:01-53:24) The locust-frog crests a hill and moves slowly but inexorably toward its destination. (53:25-53:55) The young girl is still listening to the broadcast, the woodsman’s occult mantra filling her room. She reaches toward the radio presumably to turn it off, but just as he repeats “and dark within,” she succumbs to sleep. Outside, we see the locust-frog pull to within striking distance of her open window. It haphazardly flies up to the window and crawls in. As the mantra continues, it crawls over to the girl and we observe that its feet have five distinct digits that eerily resemble the fingers of a human hand. On cue, she opens her mouth wide and the locust-frog crawls in, its humanoid feet pulling into the cavity. She closes her mouth and swallows. All the while, the woodsman’s mantra incessantly repeats: “drink full and descend.” The disc jockey, who has by now suffered prolonged and merciless torture at the hand of the woodsman is finally done in, as blood cascades to the floor in what seems to be buckets. The woodsman’s eyes roll back in his sockets such that only the whites remain visible as he finally finishes the job. He shambles out of the station and is briefly bathed in white strobing light as he emerges into the night. As he disappears into the pitch black, we hear the distressed whinnying of horses or indigenous ritual chanting or perhaps a mélange of both. (53:56-57:23) The credits begin to roll and we are taken abruptly from the black night back into the girl’s room. She is asleep and her eyes flicker as if she is having a dream. We hear the faint scratching of the needle on the vacated platter back at KPJK still broadcasting into the night and it faintly reminds us of the sound coming through the phonograph when the Giant gave Cooper the clues and this terrifying warning: “You are far away.” (57:24-58:00)
Opening Credits (0:55-2:14) A paranoid Jerry Horne is alone in the woods at bright midday wearing his mother’s hat. With feverish intensity, he erratically scans his surroundings: ferns, mossy trees, clusters of foliage. Does the field of vision seem to flicker, or is it his imagination? Or ours? He produces an iPhone and calls his brother Ben, informing him that “Someone stole my car!”. Through the speaker phone, Ben confusedly replies, “What’s going on? Someone stole your car?”. As if Ben’s search for clarification is a corroborating piece of evidence for Jerry’s own bizarre claim, Jerry stammers: “You say the same thing?”. A befuddled Benjamin Horne leans into the phone: “What? Jerry?”. In an intense moment of epiphany, an agonized look seizing his face, Jerry yells, “I think I’m HIGH!”. Disgusted and incredulous, Ben’s tone of concern shifts into a more dismissive register: “Oh good lord, Jerry!”. Ben moves still nearer to the phone, as if closer proximity to the mic will illuminate his brother’s unhinged behavior. Fully in the grips of a cannabis-induced existential crisis, Jerry screams “I don’t know where I am!,” his chest heaving in shallow gasps. Ben sits by as the line goes dead. (2:15-4:07) Deputy Chief Hawk and Sheriff Frank Truman sit at the conference table in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department perusing Hawk’s discovery from the bathroom stall door: three of the four missing pages that were ripped from the secret diary that Laura Palmer had entrusted to her friend Harold Smith for safekeeping; a single page remains missing. Truman picks up a page and reads Laura’s words through the evidence bag: “This came to me in a dream last night: ‘My name is Annie. I’ve been with Dale and Laura. The Good Dale is in the Lodge and he can’t leave. Write it in your diary.” Puzzled, Truman inquires: “Dale as in Special Agent Dale Cooper? What do you think it means?” Hawk’s not altogether certain, but he says that he is sure these pages are what the Log Lady wanted him to find in telling him that his heritage would help him to discover something missing. Annie, he thinks, is “Annie Blackburn…a girl who went into that place.” After confirming that these are genuine pages from Laura’s diary, and that one remains missing, Hawk obliges a request from Truman to explain how he thinks they ended up in the Sheriff’s Department bathroom. He hands Truman a page from the diary that more or less outs Leland Palmer, Laura’s father, as her abuser and rapist. Truman reads it: “It’s 1:30 am. I’m crying so hard I can hardly breath [sic]. NOW I KNOW IT ISN’T BOB. I KNOW WHO IT IS.” Hawk follows up: “I’m sure it was Leland who hid these pages. He found them and realized that she knew.” Leland hid the pages, Hawk suspects, when they had him in for questioning for the murder of Jacques Renault; “maybe he thought we were going to frisk him and that’s when he hid them.” Struggling to put the pieces together, Truman quizzically observes that Laura never met Cooper; he came to town after she died. Hawk reminds Truman that Annie’s warning came to Laura in a dream, and goes on to make the terrifying ramifications of this warning more explicit: “This thing she said: ‘the Good Dale is in the Lodge and can’t come out.’ But Harry saw Cooper come out of the Lodge with Annie that night. Doc and Harry took him over to the Great Northern. But if the Good Cooper is in the Lodge and can’t come out, then the one who came out of the Lodge with Annie that night…was NOT the good Cooper.” Truman takes in this unwelcome revelation with a wince, “And he left town soon after…who else saw him that day?” Hawk: “Like I said, Doc Hayward, but I don’t know who else.” Truman: “Let’s bring Harry up to speed and see what he thinks.” (4:08-7:35) Sheriff Frank Truman picks up the phone to reach out to the other Sheriff Truman, his convalescing brother Harry. From Frank’s end of the conversation, which is all we see or hear, we assume that a hospital employee has put him on hold to summon Harry. Harry comes to the phone, and though we must infer the details of what he says to Frank from Frank’s sad if stoic response, it becomes clear that Harry has experienced some kind of set-back in his treatment. Sensing that Harry is too fragile for a discussion of the diary pages at the moment, he demurs on pursuing the conversation, telling Harry not to worry about it and to get some rest: “it’s nothing urgent.” The brothers share a tender moment as the conversation ends: “And Harry: do me a favor; beat this thing!” (7:36-8:42) On a farmstead somewhere in Twin Peaks, Deputy Andy Brennan gestures toward a Ford flatbed truck in the background that sits adjacent to his empty police cruiser, lights still flashing; the truck bears a striking resemblance to the one that Richard Horne was driving in the hit and run in Part Six. A terrified farmer, clearly in fear for his life, pleads with Andy to leave the premises, presumably because the police presence is likely to draw unfriendly attention from Horne or one of his unsavory associates. “But if you weren’t driving the truck, I have to know who was,” Andy scolds. The farmer pledges to tell him the whole story off the premises, and Andy suggests a rendezvous off the logging road above Sparkwood and 21, “just past the Joneses down by the creek.” Growing more paranoid by the second, now veritably begging Andy to go, the farmer pledges to meet him in two hours at the appointed location, to which Andy replies: “4:30 then.” As we take in the possibility that “4:30” might be relevant to the Giant’s command to Cooper to “remember 430” on the outset of the series, Andy returns to his cruiser. No less terrified for Andy’s departure, the farmer retreats into the house through the back door which closes behind him. (8:43-9:44) Still looking for leads on the diary pages, Frank Truman follows up with Doc Hayward, one of the few people to have seen Cooper after he emerged from the Lodge and before he skipped town. After a brief telephone conversation to learn Hayward’s Skype handle—MiddleburyDoc—Truman “saddles up” and they proceed to video chat. “What’s this all about?”, asks Hayward. Truman lays it on him: “Doc, do you remember way back to the night Harry called you in to examine Special Agent Dale Cooper at the Great Northern?” Noticeably chilled by the question, Hayward replies, “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, but I remember that…we all knew Coop and that morning he was acting mighty strange. I took him to the hospital and I had him checked out while I made my rounds. About an hour later I saw him sneaking out of intensive care fully dressed. He turned and looked at me and I saw that strange face again. I called out to him. He didn’t say a word. He just turned around and walked out.” “What was he doing in Intensive Care?,” Truman wonders. Increasingly downcast, Hayward continues: “I thought at the time he might have been looking in on Audrey Horne…that terrible business at the bank and she was in a coma.” Intuiting that this trip down memory lane is upsetting the elderly Hayward, Truman abruptly changes the subject to how the fish are biting. After an odd report from the good Doc about two trout in his pajamas that unluckily ended up breakfast, Truman brings the conversation to a close: “Keep working the sunny side of the river, Doc.” (9:45-13:21) Following up on the hit on Major Briggs’ fingerprints in Buckhorn, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Cindy Knox enters the Police Department and introduces herself to Detective Macaulay, making no bones about her mission: “You submitted fingerprints to our database a few days ago and I need to verify the source.” Playing dumb, Macaulay informs her that he can show them to her, but their search was blocked—“must have been from your end?,” he deadpans. Refusing to play ball, Knox repeats her request dressed up in a patronizing smirk: “I’d like to see the prints please. Where did you lift them from? The crime scene?” “No,” Macaulay laughs, “from the body.” Knox’s confidence dissipates: “There’s a body?” “There’s a body alright,” Macaulay chortles. (13:22-14:13) In the Buckhorn morgue, Coroner Constance Talbot pulls Briggs out of cold storage and lifts the sheet to reveal his beheaded corpse to an astonished Knox. In disbelief, Knox looks to Macaulay: “Where’s the rest of him?” “We don’t know!”, Macaulay replies, exasperated. Knox intensifies her gaze on the corpse: “How old was this man?” “Late forties,” Talbot offers. Looking utterly bewildered, Knox tries again: “When did this man die?”. Talbot does the math and guestimates that Briggs died within the last five or six days. Knox fails to suppress a gasp: “You’re sure this is the body you took the prints from?”. Talbot provides assurances and offers to pull the prints again, as Macaulay—lodging another dig at federal obstruction—sardonically observes how much easier their investigation would be if they knew who the body was. Flustered, Knox excuses herself to make a phone call and walks out into the hall. (14:13-15:21) Shell-shocked, Knox calls Colonel Davis at the Pentagon: “It’s not just prints this time…it’s a body. It’s him.” Surprised but stoic, Davis presses Knox on whether she’s certain, and upon receiving her assurance prepares to excuse himself to “make that other call” to the FBI. “Just one thing,” Knox persists, “actually two things: his head is missing and he’s the wrong age.” As she clarifies the situation for a confused Davis, elaborating that the body is that of a man in his late forties who died a few days ago, a dark blurry figure appears at the end of the hall just barely visible over her shoulder and the music takes a turn for the menacing (16:10). Davis counters that Briggs should be in his seventies if he died recently and that there must be some mistake, but Knox protests that she’s seen the body herself and that the coroner verified the age and the prints; as she speaks the dark figure shambles down the hall toward her, revealing itself to be akin to the soot-faced specter two cells down from Bill Hastings in Part Two (and to the “woodsmen” we meet in Part Eight). Colonel Davis orders her to stay there, pledges to get back to her, and picks up the phone to call the FBI. As Knox turns to rejoin Talbot and Macaulay in the morgue, she seems to sense the dark presence and appears to throw a sidelong glance directly at it, but registers nothing like the response one would expect had she actually seen what the viewer sees. Back in the Morgue, she orders Talbot and Macaulay not to give anyone else access to the body and rebuffs yet another attempt from the latter to wring information from her: “You didn’t hear it from me, but I don’t think this is going to be your investigation for very much longer.” The dark figure walks past the open door and down the hall. (15:22-17:25) Under a print of a stylized ear of corn hovering above a sheath of dense cirrocumulus clouds, Gordon Cole—eyes closed and reclining—has his hearing aids turned up and is whistling himself a tune, the looming portrait of the Trinity atom-bomb explosion threatening to envelop him from behind. A pounding at the door sends his hearing aids shrieking. “Come in!”, he yells, adjusting the aids. Albert enters and Cole asks him how it went. The answer is “not well:” “I said ‘Hello, Diane!’, she said ‘This is about Cooper, isn’t it?’, I said ‘Maybe.’, she said—and I quote—“No fucking way!”; “I was at home dripping wet on the verge of pneumonia fifteen minutes later. How was your evening, Chief?” Cole: “This is not good news, Albert; she needs to see him!”, Cole yells in his signature stentorian tone. In a classic spat of Cole-Rosenfield repartee, they negotiate the terms of their next move: Albert: “Your turn!” Gordon: “But you’ll go with me?” Albert: “Say please!” Gordon: “What?” Albert: “You heard me.” Gordon: “Please!” (17:26-18:52) In an elaborate Philadelphia brown-stone straight from a brochure on affluent living in the atomic age, a boy-toy in a smartly-tailored smoking jacket opens the front door for Cole and Rosenfield: “FBI, Champ! Friends of Diane’s!”, Cole barks. The boy toy ushers them into the living room, and Diane emerges from the dining room in a stunning red silk robe, cigarette in one hand and coffee in the other. She’s not happy to see them: “Oh my God!”. As the boy toy leaves, blowing her a kiss, Diane makes her intentions known to Cole: “Well, this won’t take long: I’m just going to say the same thing to you I said to him.” Refusing to be put off, Cole begins the negotiations, as he and Albert help themselves to seats on the couch in the living room and Diane stands defiantly at the edge of the dining room: Gordon: “Now take it easy, Diane, and let’s just sit down and have nice simple chat. You got any coffee?” Diane: “No. And I don’t have any cigarettes either.” Gordon: “Ahhhh! The memory of tobacco! But I gave it up.” Diane: “Fuck you, Gordon.” Albert: “Now you’re getting the personal treatment.” Diane: “Oh, you want personal? Fuck you too, Albert!” Gordon: “Now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way…” Albert (under his breath to Gordon): “I never even got this far.” Gordon: “Your former boss and former Special Agent Dale Cooper is in a federal lock-up in South Dakota.” Diane (defiantly, clearly trying to mask her pain): “Good!” Gordon: “Diane, this may require a slight change of attitude on your part.” Diane: “My attitude is none of your fucking business.” Diane turns around and disappears into the dining room to retrieve coffee service, as Gordon notes to Albert that she’s a “tough cookie—always was!”. She reappears momentarily with a tray and cups of coffee for Gordon and Albert. Gordon thanks her with conviction, takes a sip, and obligatorily pronounces the coffee damn good, as Diane settles into a chair across from them, looking pained and dragging deeply on her cigarette. Tossing her head with a flourish, she dares Cole to get on with it: “So, say what you came here to say.” Cole looks at Albert and nods at him to fill her in: Albert: “We have a feeling something is wrong. We don’t know exactly what it is. But we need someone who knows him extremely well to have a talk with him and afterward to tell us what you think.” Diane: (heaves a sigh, looking terrified) Gordon: “This is extremely important, Diane, and it involves something that you know about. And that’s enough said about that.” Anxiously rubbing the thumb and middle finger of her smoking hand together, Diane exhales and steels her resolve. “Federal prison. South Dakota.” She is resigned to making the trip and determined, too. (18:53-22:01) A Gulfstream G450 is in flight on its way to South Dakota, windows mysteriously blinking some unknown code as the jet passes over a snowcapped mountain. Aboard are Diane, Rosenfield, Cole, and Special Agent Tammy Preston en route to Yankton Federal Prison in Souix City for Diane’s private meeting with Cooper. Gordon looks on as Albert procures vodka from the snack cart and hands it to Diane: “Judge not lest ye be judged. Just the fact that you’re here speaks louder than words,” he offers. She raises the bottle in a mock toast and wearily replies, “Fuck you, Albert!”, as he walks to the rear cabin with a wry smile to join Cole. Preston follows Albert into the back cabin and presents Cole and Rosenfield with a side-by-side of Cooper’s finger prints from twenty-five years ago and Cooper’s finger prints in prison two days ago: “Identical, right?” (as Preston talks, we see Diane looking put out in the front cabin, as Tammy clearly grates on her). “Maybe,” Albert hesitates. “What do you see,” Preston asks? Albert observes that the scoop mark is reversed, hypothesizing that an incompetent guard flipped the print trying to make it look like the original. Cole points to the reversed print, looking knowingly at Albert, and cryptically says “Yrev…the backwards word.” A puzzled Preston is lost: “What does this all mean?”, she wonders aloud. Cole congratulates Tammy for doing excellent work—“passing one test after another!”—and bids her to put out her hands. She offers them palms up and he tells her to flip them over. Starting with her left pinky finger, he takes each of her fingers between his right pointer finger and thumb, lightly pinching each while saying one word per finger: “I’m very, very happy to see you again old friend.” When he’s pinched each finger, he returns to her left ring finger—the same one whose print was reversed on Cooper’s recent prison prints—and touches the fleshy lobe just above her knuckle: “This is the spiritual mound, the spiritual finger…you think about that Tammy.” She looks utterly baffled, but Albert has new business to discuss and produces the only known photo of Cooper in the last 25 years, depicting Mr. C. looking like a third-rate Miami Vice guest villain poolside at his mansion outside of Rio. “By the time we checked it out it belonged to some girl from Ipanema,” he deadpans. Tammy misses the joke completely, exclaiming “Looks like the man we met in prison.” In the front cabin, Diane overhears and winces, either in disapproval of Albert’s sense of humor, or of Tammy’s density, or both. “The man we met in prison,” Cole repeats, nodding his head. (22:02-24:19) Diane, Cole, Preston, Rosenfield and some suits from the prison are walking with purpose down a corridor in the Yankton Federal Prison. Diane reminds Cole of their terms: “Ten minutes, tops! And I speak to him alone.” Cole emphatically affirms the arrangement: “That’s exactly the way it’s going to be, Diane. You control the curtain and the microphone.” As Diane is marshaling her courage and prepping her game face, Preston interrupts in an ill-timed attempt to be cordial, offering to Diane that “we’re very appreciative.” “What did you say your name was?”, Diane snaps. “Tammy.” “Fuck you, Tammy!” (24:20-24:56) Diane enters the meeting room. It’s dark and she collects herself, visibly shaken, adjusting the microphone and finally activating the curtain. It rises to reveal a dead-eyed Mr. C staring out from behind the glass, shackled hands in his lap. Diane stands to meet his gaze. “I knew it was going to be you. It’s good to see you again, Diane”, he drones in a voice so malevolent and dead that it can only be described as a vacuum of empathy. Looking rattled but unblinkingly holding his dead gaze, Diane engages: Diane: “Oh yeah, when was that Cooper? When did we see each other last?” Mr. C.: “Are you upset with me Diane? Diane: “What do you think?” Mr. C.: “I think you’re upset with me.” Diane: “When was the last time we saw each other, Cooper?” Mr. C. (in an especially menacing tone that recalls The Mystery Man): “At your house.” Diane (searching him for any sign of life, as if she suspects that he is pulling memories from her by some feat of magic rather than producing them from the bottomless void of unspooled selfhood before her): “That’s right. [She doesn’t seem convinced.] You remember that night?” Mr. C.: “I’ll always remember that night.” “Same for me. I’ll never forget it,” she replies, but her eyes tell another story and the passion has gone out of her voice. She now knows Cooper isn’t there and that anything Mr. C. says is a feint. “Who are you?”, she asks, eyes boring into him. “I don’t know what you mean, Diane.” Perhaps still searching for a shadow of doubt in what she already feels beyond certainty, she implores Cooper to look at her: “Look at me. Look at me!” Her last ditch hope met with nothing but rapacious emptiness, Diane makes haste to shut the curtain, nostrils flaring and breathing in staccato, and bolts the room. (24:57-27:38) On a beeline from the visiting room, a deeply shaken Diane leads a procession down the corridor with Rosenfield, Preston, and Cole in tow. Halfway down the hall, Warden Murphy intercepts Cole, who offers him the glad hand, thanks him for the opportunity, and instructs him in no uncertain terms to “hold this man until you hear from us!” As Cole departs, Warden Murphy looks troubled, like a man who knows this may not be a commitment he can keep. (27:39: 28:04) Rosenfield and Preston wait by the town car, each signaling via body language that they haven’t gotten anything from Diane, who stands alone on the far side of the car. As Cole approaches and announces himself, she grabs him and pulls him over to a safe distance from the group: Diane (in agony): “Listen to me! That is not the Dale Cooper that I knew.” Cole (turning up his hearing aid): “Please tell me exactly what you mean.” Diane (beside herself): “It isn’t time passing. Or how he’s changed. Or the way he looks. It’s something here (points to heart) or something that definitely isn’t here (crying).” Cole: “That’s good enough for me Diane, that’s good enough for me.” Diane unabashedly embraces him and Cole awkwardly allows it, trying to keep it professional and reluctant really to return the hug in earnest. As she composes herself and fidgets with the vodka bottle, Cole follows up: “That last night you mentioned in there. Something I need to know about?” As Rosenfield, Preston, and assorted prison staff look on at a distance, Diane replies, “You and I (he cannot hear) YOU AND I will have a talk sometime.” She looks at Gordon, struggling to remain composed, and offers another mocking toast, her agony fully on display: “Cheers! To the FBI!” (28:05-29:56) Two guards escort Mr. C. back to cell, and as one of them takes off his restraints through the bars, he says: “Listen to me a minute: Tell Warden Murphy I have a message for him. I need to speak with him in his office.” “Yeah right!,” the guard laughs in his face. “Just tell him we need to speak about…a strawberry.” (29:57-30:34) We see fog creeping up the side of a heavily wooded mountain in Twin Peaks, as Laura Palmer’s theme plays in the background. Off the logging road near Sparkwood and 21 at the appointed rendezvous point, Andy waits for the farmer on whose property he saw the Ford flatbed. He looks up and down the road but sees no sign of the man. A cut back to the farmstead reveals that the back door we saw the farmer close behind him as Andy departed earlier that afternoon is now menacingly ajar; a low drone sounds to confirm our unease. Getting restless, Andy looks at his watch (a Rolex!), which shows the time at 5:05 pm, a full thirty-five minutes after the scheduled meeting time of 4:30. He returns to his cruiser and leaves. (30:35-31:45) Two guards bring Mr. C. into Warden Murphy’s office. “Sit him down and leave,” Murphy barks at them. They shackle Mr. C. to the chair and follow orders. “I’ve turned off the security cameras. We can speak freely…(he pulls out a .357 and points it at Cooper)…and privately.” Mr. C. wastes no time: “The dogleg. That dog had four legs. One you found in my trunk. The other three went out with the information you’re thinking about right now to people you don’t want coming around here if anything bad happens to me.” Initially skeptical, Murphy wonders, “how do I know you know anything about…THIS?” After an agonizing pause, as if perhaps he is extracting the very thought from Murphy’s mind that minute, Mr. C. utters: “Joe McCloskey”. At the sound of this name, Warden Murphy goes ashen and weak-kneed, and—sucking wind and visibly shaking—puts down the gun and takes a seat. “What do you want?, he asks, utterly defeated. “I want a car. Cheap rental if you like. For myself and Ray Monroe. I want a friend in the glove compartment. 1:00 am tonight. Smooth and safe. And if your mind should wander to a place where I might not make it out of here alive, remember the doglegs. I’m not interested in you. You’ll never see me again and no one will ever hear anything again about Joe McCloskey or your late Mr. Strawberry.” Warden Murphy swallows hard as Mr. C. gazes emptily through him. (31:46-34:13) In the circle drive outside Lucky 7 Insurance, Janey-E stands in front her terrible car waiting for the man she believes to be her husband Dougie to finish work. Inside, the corrupt agent Anthony Sinclair is pumping Cooper for information about the meeting with Bushnell Mullins earlier that morning (shown in Part Six). Outside, Janey-E has finally had it with waiting, slams the door to her Jeep, and heads inside to get Cooper. Meanwhile, Sinclair is getting exactly nothing out of Cooper, who is ignoring him entirely while vacantly digging at his desk pad with a pen, as if still hard at work on the illustrated history of Sinclair’s insurance fraud, complete with chicken-scratched chutes and ladders on imaginary case files. Lucky 7’s secretary enters and informs them that police officers are there to talk to Dougie. Sinclair beats it like a broom to a squirrel in the birdseed upon hearing the word ‘police,’ and after an awkward interchange, the secretary assumes that Cooper’s preference is to have the police meet with him in his office. (34:14-36:12) The secretary goes to fetch the police and comes back followed by three homespun lugs who not only seem to have purchased their wardrobes together at Men’s Wearhouse in 1993, but also appear to be brothers or cousins, as the cue-ball of the three holds out a badge and absurdly announces them to Cooper as “Detectives Fusco” (sort of like “attorneys general”; the credits reveal that, indeed, all three characters share the same surname). Cooper repeats “badge” and reaches out to touch it, but before the interaction can go farther off the rails, Janey-E storms in to the rescue in full mama-bear mode, standing at Cooper’s side ambiguously holding his arm at the bicep in a gesture that teeters between controlling and affectionate: Janey-E: “What’s going on here?” Detectives Fusco: “Who are you ma’am?” Janey-E: “I’m his wife. What’s going on here?” Detectives Fusco: “We’re here about his car.” Janey-E: “That’s why I’m here.” Detectives Fusco: “What do you mean by that?” Janey-E: “I’m picking him up. He doesn’t know where his car is.” Detectives Fusco: “Was it stolen?” Janey-E asks Dougie whether it was stolen, and he blankly repeats: “Stolen.” Sensing a break in the story, two of the three Detectives Fusco whip out their note pads, as Bushnell Mullins—attracted by the commotion on the premises of his business—enters behind them looking concerned. Cue ball Fusco asks Cooper directly, “Did you report the car stolen, sir?”. Cooper blankly repeats “Sir.”. Getting increasingly hot under the collar, Fusco re-asks the question at a stentorian volume, at which point Janey-E intervenes again: “No. He did not report the car stolen. I would know. His car went missing. We haven’t seen it. Isn’t that your department?” Once again, she masterfully turns a situation in which Cooper is on the ropes into one where his persecutors are eating out of her hand. What began as an interrogation of Cooper over what happened to Dougie’s car ends up an interrogation of Detectives Fusco over their various failures: to find the stolen car, to disclose information about its whereabouts, to refrain from badgering a stressed-out couple at the end of a long day. Sensing that the detectives are withholding important information, Mullins steps forward and skeptically interjects that “you did find his car, didn’t you?”, as Janey-E scowls ever more disapprovingly at their incompetence. Cue-ball admits it: “The car’s been found. It was involved in an apparent explosion.” “Multiple fatalities,” offers Flat-top. Janey-E (yelling): “Why didn’t you tell us that to begin with?” Cue-ball Fusco: “The deceased had ties to a gang associated with multiple car thefts.” Janey-E: “Well, there’s you’re answer. Now, if you don’t mind, our son is home alone waiting for his supper and in case you think we’re neglecting him, he’s being watched by our neighbor as a favor, and we’d like to go—we were supposed to be home by now, at the end of a very long and stressful day, which I’ll tell you about later Dougie, c’mon, let’s go.” Much more conciliatory than we’ve seen him so far, Cue-ball attempts to request further paperwork, to which Flat-top promptly replies that it can wait, hands Janey-E a business card, and cordially invites her to follow up in the morning, thanking them for their time and wishing them a good evening. On the way out, Cue-ball quips to Mullins that “I guess he won’t have any trouble collecting the insurance,” which elicits a bizarre guffaw from the third heretofore silent Fusco, “Smiley.” As the Detectives Fusco depart, Mullins, too, wants a word with Cooper about the Sinclair files, but an indignant scowl from Janey-E morphs Mullins from imposing to cordial like a Jedi mind-trick, putting a prompt end to the would-be meeting: “You go ahead. We can take care of that tomorrow.” (36:13-40:31) Making their way to the car, Janey-E leads Cooper through the lobby of the Lucky 7 building chattering a mile a minute about her snappy solution to his extortionist problem (from Part Six) and her hopes for the insurance money and their nest-egg from the jackpots (from Part Three and Part Four). As they exit the building, she enjoins Cooper to forsake gambling and carousing for the sake of their family future, at which point the soundscape is suddenly flooded with the terrifying musical equivalent of whales sounding off from deep under water. On cue, Ike the Spike Stadtler emerges from a group of bystanders with a .45-magnum trained on Cooper. Muscle-memory kicks in and with speed and precision that one witness later describes as “cobra-like,” Cooper pushes Janey-E out of harm’s way, grabs Ike’s arm with gun in hand, neutralizes him with a devastating open-handed strike to the trachea, and wrestles Ike’s gun-hand to the ground, squeezing it with both hands, as a recovered Janey-E attacks Ike from behind, screaming bloody murder. Without warning, the Arm (or perhaps the Arm’s doppelgänger, though no malignant tissue appears visible) sprouts up out of the very pavement in front of them, repeatedly screaming “Squeeze his hand off!” until Cooper complies and administers a second tracheal strike that sends Spike reeling, sans the heel of his right palm, into the crowd and away. Cooper stands up as if in a trance, eyes drifting toward what we suspect is the lawman statue (though we don’t actually see it) as Janey-E embraces and consoles him. (40:32-41:56) The scene is transformed by dusk as the lights and sounds of a search helicopter, police vehicles, and crime-scene photos shuttering in rapid-fire dramatically fill the square; it almost feels as though we’ve entered a tawdry Las Vegas true crime show struggling to keep its slot in primetime. The off-kilter mood persists as a series of noticeably quicker-than-usual edits depict, in turns, Janey-E and Cooper (ever reaching for badges) interviewed by police, and witnesses describing the attacker (little girl: “He smelled funny.”) and Cooper (young woman: “Douglas Jones—he moved like a cobra—all I saw was a blur.”), presumably to the media. The scene concludes with a shot of the gloved hands of a forensics tech prying Ike the Spike’s right palm flesh from the left side of the handgun’s grip module—a shot that is doubly strange for the facts that it is framed by a spotlight (with the rest of the scene noticeably dimmed) and that the spotlighted event (Ike’s palm-flesh being extricated from the wrong side of the grip module) depicts either a clear continuity error or yet another instance of Lodge-induced mirroring/flipping. (41:57-42:43) Establishing shots of the falls, the hotel, and a yawning concierge pushing papers behind a sweeping wooden desk announce the Great Northern. As we pan past a colorful winged totem sculpture, a sound like a singing bowl fills the receiving room adjacent to Ben Horne’s office. Ben and his assistant Beverly are puzzling over the advent of this humming sound, moving around the room in a vain effort to discern the source of the sound. They stand uncomfortably close together and there is palpable sexual tension between them. “When did you first start hearing this?”, Ben wonders. “Sometime last week? But I think it’s louder now. Maybe that’s because nobody’s here,” Beverly replies. With his hands hovering uncomfortably close to her breasts, Ben says: “Don’t move. Just listen carefully. Where do you think it’s coming from?” They traverse various areas of the room to no avail, chuckling at the awkwardness of the situation. As they move past her desk, Beverly notices the key to Room 315: “Oh, this might be of interest. It came in the mail today.” She tosses it to Ben. Ben: “Wow. My God! That’s an old one! We switched to cards over twenty years ago. Room 3-1-5. Wait a minute. I think that was the room where Agent Cooper was shot.” Beverly: “Who’s agent Cooper?” Ben: “FBI. He was here, I don’t you, maybe 25 years ago, investigating the murder of (with emphasis) Laura Palmer.” Beverly: “Who’s Laura Palmer?” Ben (as if coming out of a trance): “Oh! That, my dear, is a long story!” They stand awkwardly in one another’s presence, Beverly beaming at Ben, no one rushing to fill the maturing silence. Finally, Ben asks Beverly to have maintenance “check out that hum in the morning,” and as Beverly refuses to withdraw her smiling presence, Ben notes that “it’s getting way past quitting time.” Beverly dons her jacket preparing to go, and says “Thank you, Mr. Horne.” “Ben,” he warmly replies. She nods in smiling approval, gathers her things, and walks to the door, pausing for a dramatic farewell: “Good night, Ben.” “Beverly,” he nods. As she leaves, he wistfully sizes up the key (“Hmmm.”) and heads into his private office as the singing-bowl hum rings out from the wood. (42:44-47:32) Beverly arrives at home, where her sick husband Tom is convalescing. His at-home caregiver greets Beverly at the door, informing her that Tom had a rough day and is somewhat better, but needed extra pain medication. She departs on the news that Tom has waited for Beverly’s return to eat dinner, which is on the stove. “He’s missing you,” she says with uncomfortable urgency. Beverly walks in with a smile: “Sorry I’m late, honey. You hungry?” Tom, in his bed clothes, sighs heavily from his wheelchair, oxygen and IV by his side. “I heard you drive up. Why were you late?”, he accusingly inquires. “I had some things to do,” comes the dreaded stock reply; “would you like your dinner?” Tom is curious, and not in the happy sort of way: “What things?” “I had some work to do. Some things came up and I had to do them. Are you hungry?” “Not really,” he heaves, defeated. We get the sense that this routine is pretty well rehearsed, as Beverly’s fuse is short: “I know you’re sick and suffering. Do not use that to fuck with me! Do you know how lucky I am to have this job to help us survive? Oh, for crying out loud, don’t fuck this up Tom!” He stares back at her, dejected. (47:33-49:48) At the Roadhouse, Booker T.’s “Green Onions” rocks the juke. The bar is closed and a bearded young man in black sweeps the floor as Jean Michel Renault attends to business behind the bar. After an ample two minutes of watching the Roadhouse employee sweep the floor, the phone rings and the lascivious Jean Michel picks up, laughing in response to the caller’s opening salvo. “Of course he loved it! Who wouldn’t? Wait, he owes me for two! He wanted blondes I sent him two blonds.” The caller informs Renault that the women were under-aged, and Jean Michel protests that they both had good IDs: “This has nothing to do with the Roadhouse. The Roadhouse has been owned by the Renault family for 57 years we’re not going to lose it now because of a couple of 15-year-old straight-A students.” The caller continues to press for a discounted rate, but Renault isn’t biting: ‘No, those girls…they are whores pure and simple. From what I hear though, they are straight-A whores…He owes me for two.” (49:49-53:12) It’s 1:00 am at Yankton Federal Prison and the plot to spring Mr. C. and Ray Monroe seems to be unfolding according to plan. A guard shines a flashlight down the desolate cell block. The door to cell 27 slides open and Mr. C., now dressed in his civies, emerges into the light. Monroe follows suit from a cell down the corridor and another guard leads them out of the facility and down into a receiving area where a nondescript beige rental awaits them. The guard hands Mr. C. his phone: “Keys are in the car.” Mr. C. tells Ray to drive and they depart the prison as Warden Murphy looks on, troubled, from a balcony above the lot. (53:13-55:35) “Sleep Walk” plays over the juke box as Norma does paperwork in a back booth and Shelly serves coffee to a customer happily ensconced among a sizeable R&R nightshift crowd. A young man (credited as “Bing”) runs into the diner, shouts “Anyone seen Billy?”, and immediately leaves. (NOTE: His words are garbled enough to invite curiosity as to whether he might have said “Anyone seen Bing?”). A look of puzzlement crosses Shelly’s face, but the rest of the diner seems unperturbed, and her concern diminishes as she approaches Heidi and shares a laugh. The diners continue to enjoy the evening as the credits roll, and just one second before the bitter end, Bing is back in the restaurant, seemingly with a companion. (55:59-58:00) In Memory of Warren Frost.
|