Twin Peaks Just Delivered Its Trolliest—and Saddest—Installment Yet
“Just you and I.”
by Laura Bradley
August 7, 2017 7:47 am
Courtesy of Showtime.
This post contains spoilers for Twin Peaks: The Return Episode 13.
David Lynch has only five episodes left to wrap up his Twin Peaks revival, and it’s growing increasingly difficult to imagine how he’ll do so. He literally threw one of Cooper’s potential saviors—fingerprint records that prove that Dougie Jones is actually him—in the trash. Instead, Sunday night’s episode, much like the installment that preceded it, seemed to be a meditation on a theme: purgatory. Throughout the hour, we see characters trapped in tragic loops: Sarah Palmer literally watches a boxing clip looped on her TV; Ed Hurley is back to pining after Norma; an increasingly frantic Audrey can’t quite figure out how to get to the Roadhouse; and James Hurley is reprising his infamous ballad from the original series—albeit to a bigger crowd this time. As Dark Cooper says during his circuitous arm wrestling match, “The starting position is much more comfortable.”
Of everything, James’s song near the end is perhaps the most winking moment. Fans have jokingly suggested that James Hurley, a less accomplished musician than the venue’s usual headliners, take the stage at the Roadhouse. For him to do so—performing a song from an infamous scene in the original Twin Peaks—feels distinctly playful. But as amusing as this is on its surface, it also hints at a more sinister theme. When James first sang the song to Donna—with Laura’s doppelgänger, Maddy, singing along—his inability to focus on just one girl drove home the heartbreak standing in his and Donna’s way. As cringe-inducing as the scene—and James’s falsetto—can be, there’s also an emotional, distinctly teenage tenderness at play. Will Jessica Szohr’s Renee become more important now that we’ve seen her crying to the same song?
And then there’s Ed Hurley, James’s uncle who is apparently suffering through romantic malaise of his own. Norma kisses someone else, and he’s left to watch them from another booth with a similarly afflicted Bobby Briggs. (Those Double R women are real heartbreakers.) What’s more, it seems Nadine might have found a new love interest of her own: Dr. Jacoby, who goes by Dr. Amp on his Web show. Watching Ed sit alone at the end of the episode, burning a piece of paper, it’s hard not to feel deeply sorry for him—and wonder what on earth is on that paper.
But perhaps the most interesting characters in this episode were Audrey Horne and Sarah Palmer, both of whom seemed to be trapped in something more supernaturally sinister. In Audrey’s case, there’s reason to believe that she perhaps never woke up from her coma following the explosion at the bank in the original series. When Sherilyn Fenn finally made her debut in the revival last week, fans were somewhat frustrated by her drawn-out, confusing return, which found her arguing with a man who appeared to be her husband. (For what it’s worth, some fans now suspect he’s actually her psychologist.) This week, we once again find Audrey screaming at Charlie, but this time she seems far more helpless as she suddenly can’t decide what she wants to do: go to the Roadhouse or stay. What’s more, she apparently has no idea where the Roadhouse is. The house’s retro decor, Audrey’s apparent disorientation, and the fact that no one ever references or calls Audrey about her son all support the idea that she’s actually not lucid right now, and that what we’re seeing is what she’s experiencing inside her mind mid-coma. Still no word on who Billy is, though.
Sarah Palmer’s situation is even stranger: we find her watching an old black-and-white boxing match on TV. After a while, it becomes clear that the footage on her TV is looping—and even Sarah seems to be looping in her own way as she gets up to go to the kitchen multiple times as the footage drones on. It’s a sad look into the redundant, sorrowful state of grief in which Sarah lives—and recalls her words from last week, “Something happened to me, and I don’t feel good!” Is there something supernatural involved that might explain her fixation on this one bit of tape, or has grief simply landed her in a fugue state? The tragedy is that it’s impossible to know.
And finally, what Twin Peaks recap would be complete without a visit to Dougie—and Dark Cooper? The former escaped both rescue and death this week: the cops discovered his fingerprints belong to an F.B.I. agent who disappeared from a high security prison, but they toss the results in the trash, convinced they’re “a huge **** mistake.” Anthony also has a change of heart, throwing away the poisoned coffee he intends to give Dougie. You win some, you lose some, right?
Meanwhile, out in Montana, Dark Cooper visits Ray—the guy who tried to kill him in Part 8. Right before Dark Cooper killed him, Ray revealed that he got his order to kill Cooper from Phillip Jeffries—the character played by David Bowie in Fire Walk with Me—and that he’d been instructed to put the jade ring on Cooper once he was dead. (The ring, you may recall, has mystical properties that either keep the wearer safe or mark them for death; the real Dougie was wearing the jade ring in Part 3, and when it slipped off, he disappeared.) Given the repeated references to his character, it stands to wonder whether Bowie shot any Twin Peaks scenes before his death last year. It’s possible that he did, but Showtime is understandably keeping its lips sealed.
Much like last week’s installment, Part 13 has a knowing tone to it. If Part 12 was all about telling fans to just relax and savor the small moments, this week reveled in switching between laughs and sorrow. As funny as these characters’ pain can be, it’s hard to watch this episode and not come away feeling some of that pain ourselves. It’s telling that instead of concluding the episode with James’s amusing encore, Lynch chose to end on a silent shot of a forlorn Ed instead. Laugh all you want at the spectacle; underneath, the reality these characters inhabit is hardly funny.
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Then and Now: The Evolution of the Twin Peaks Cast
__Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer/Maddy Ferguson)__
Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer/Maddy Ferguson)
Ah, the girl whose mysterious death started it all. She’ll probably forever be identified with the two roles she played for David Lynch—or perhaps, to some, as Katrina from Vampires—but Lee also enjoyed a stint on One Tree Hill as Ellie Harp, among other roles, including a supporting part opposite Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and, more recently, the part of Karen Stern in Cafe Society.
Photo: Left, by Lynch/Frost/Spelling/REX/Shutterstock; right, by Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images.
__Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Dale Cooper)__
__Lara Flynn Boyle (Donna Hayward)__
__Mädchen Amick (Shelly Johnson)__
__Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran)__
__Kenneth Welsh (Windom Earle)__
__Russ Tamblyn (Lawrence Jacoby)__
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Laura Bradley is a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com. She was formerly an editorial assistant at Slate and lives in Brooklyn.
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