Twin Peaks Season 3 recap, intro to the show, my fav fan theory, and just what is going on in Part 8?

There be spoilers in them there woods (seriously, a megaton of spoilers follows)...

It's 1945. In the barren, rocky southwestern dessert, a fluffy grey bulb protrudes out of the earth like the season’s first crocus. But this flower contains a deadly atomic energy that will transform the world.

This is not the only sign of life (or death) in a barren landscape. From a split egg emerges a strange hybrid; an uncanny valley inducing frog-locust that crawls slowly into the sleeping mouths of America’s youthful dreamers.

Shrewd readers will recognise this as not only the lurid centrepiece of episode 8 of the revived (should that be reanimated?) Twin Peaks, but also as an apt metaphor for the impact that this surrealist sultry jazz shuffle of a show had when it first invaded our screens in the early 90s... and continues to have, I'd argue, today, in it's small screen reboot.

Recap

In the original 2 season run, the gruesome discovery of the plastic-wrapped body of a young woman by the name of Laura Palmer sends the sleepy rural lumber town of Twin Peaks into a tailspin of deceit, betrayal, and intrigue.

Enter Special Agent Dale Cooper, an efficient yet strangely innocent seeming FBI operative. He's on the trail of a deranged serial killer (is there any other kind?) who enjoys leaving clues about the personages of his victims in the form of torn up letters that hint at elusive codes.

In his bid to crack the case, the pie munching, coffee quaffing, Dictaphone botherer enlists an unlikely team (is there any other kind?) of locals to aid him on a journey that ultimately leads him to the dark heart of the town's troubles... a strange other-world known as The Black Lodge where visitors must battle their darker selves (yes, literally) to emerge transformed and transcended. Spoiler: David Lynch is huge proponent of Transcendental Meditation, an unlikely meld of mindfulness and Scientology.

This slalom from murder mystery to reality bending head fuck proved too much for some, and the plug was pulled after only 2 seasons. All this left us with a doozie of a cliffhanger, as we discovered that Coops had become possessed by Bob, a marauding spirit responsible for a hella mayhem.

Season 3

To signal that there are to be no compromises this time (amusingly, Lynch's vision was held back by studio bosses on it's first incarnation... the kind of constraint that leads to tired clichés like a main character morphing into a door knob) the first scene of the first episode takes place in the egdol, sorry Lodge, where we discover that Dale Cooper, the good Dale Cooper, is still trapped there after 25 years.

The bad news is that his evil doppelganger, conveniently dubbed Bad Cooper, has been running amok for all that time and is going all Quentin Tarrantino, replete with shady sidekicks and threatening diner dialogues. He's up to something, though we don't know what (which is a pretty good description of David Lynch's vision for season 3 so far).

Bad Cooper is briefly detained by the FBI after resisting his scheduled return to the Black Lodge. He gets out by blackmailing the warden, and goes off on the trail of some secret information or other.

Dougie-Cooper, with tangential help from within the Lodge itself, has begun uncovering a cryptic mystery via his new/old job at an insurance firm. He's also, oh god we hope, getting his old identity back. Very fucking slowly.

Meanwhile, a disgraced Doctor Jacoby is painting shovels gold and selling them. I doubt that's relevant, but I wanted to chuck that in.

Various old characters like Hawk, the Log Lady, Bobby, Mrs Palmer, and the beloved hearing impaired Gordon Cole (played by Lynch himself) are being drawn in to its orbit and new characters are popping up all over the place like spooky mushrooms (I love me a mixed metaphor).

A word on fandom

Twin Peaks was the original sin of TV fan obsession.

Think of it as a culty Beatlemania. Twin Peaks is basically the Beatles (go with me). Accept, more like the beetles (see what I did there?) that writhe beneath the suburban facade of 1986s Blue Velvet (Season 8 continues to reference Lynch's previous tour de force(s) and this film is no exception).

My fav fan theory

One of the more interesting fan theories is that Agent Cooper is actually the vanished extortionist D.B Cooper who parachuted into the Washington night in 1971 and was never seen again.

Indeed, the agent was named after the vanished extortionist. But the theory didn't end there. What if David Lynch himself made that fateful jump in 1971 at the tender age of 25, using the sack of bank notes strapped to his waste to finance his debut Eraserhead, as novelist Karen Karbo speculated wryly in a NYT op ed in 1991? What if. What if indeed.

The thing is, both the wildest and most plausible fan theories are equally likely to be borne out or repudiated as Lynch's chimeric vision unfurls.

It's still a show that can be quite uneven in places, though it's unquestionably worth persisting, especially for the magnificent, ground breaking episode 8.

It's remarkable the extent to which the quality can vary, not only between scenes, but also withinthem.

One scene that exemplifies this features a 3 minute shot of a man unhurriedly sweeping up a bar after hours, accompanied by the uptempo shuffle of Green Onions by Booker T. and the MG's.

This is followed by the crude sexploitation dialog of his pimp boss which shakes us out of a moment of burn-the-rulebook inspiration. But the sheer ambition and ingenuity of the show is enough to rise it above such lapses that would be unforgivable in lesser directors.

Just as it looks like the show might descend into boil in the bag banality we are hit by a dazzling curve ball of an episode like episode 8.

Twin Peaks Part 8 - Gotta Light?

This was really good. I mean really good. It was one of the most surreal episodes yet, but oddly also one of the most coherent.

I'd hate to have to explain what happened. Ok, fine, I'll have a go:

Evil Dale Cooper (EDC), having just been sprung from prison, was double-crossed (I think it may be a triple cross by this point) by his lackie, Ray, who shot him. Just as the lackie was about to finish the job, a bunch of plaid wearing ghost people circled EDC. At first it seemed they were pulling his guts out like zombies, but it turned out they were actually healing him. At one point a strange Bob fetus face emerges from his stomach. Nice.

Source

At this point it gets weird(er).

We are taken back to 1945. Yup, 1945.

A nuclear bomb goes off in slow motion.

We travel through some kind of plasmic, splitting atoms situation to...

A 1920s style drawing room with a large glowing bell shaped object in the middle, which is being tended to by a Lurch-like character from the opening scenes of the season.

Lurch enters a cinema room where he floats up against a black and white film screen, emitting a golden orb containing (it would appear) the spirit of Laura Palmer. The orb is kissed by a buxom woman and injected into the movie screen world via what can only be described as a cross between a gramophone trumpet and a saxophone (I'm sure there are other ways to describe it but you take my point). Parallel to this, a formless monster known as The Experiment extrudes a cloud of ectoplasmic dust, ushering the form of Bob into the world.

Next (yes, it's still going) we see a creepy frog-locust emerge from an egg in the desert, and crawl into the sleeping mouth of a young girl... to what end, we do not know.

The final, horrifying sequence sees a soot-covered figure known as The Woodsman enter a local radio station and crushing the skulls of two of its employees whilst broadcasting a creepy incantation that seems to be having a deleterious effect on the local population.

Fans of creepy incantations can read it below:

"This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, dark within,"

And that was it for the first half of season 3. The rest continues on 9th July.

Well, that was a lot. But there's just so much to say, and the show's proving to be such a joy.

Nothing is as brilliant, balmy, inspired, cheesy, rebellious, childlike, and knowing as Twin Peaks.

Watch it. You won't regret it. Well, you might, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.