Requested By
DukeOfLuke and ebbit on Discord
What do I know about this series going into it?
It is a single-season revival of Twin Peaks, a David Lynch series from the late 80s or early 90s. I’ve never watched either series, but I know a lot about it through cultural osmosis. Some of the following will be mildly incorrect:
A girl named Laura Palmer is found dead, and an FBI agent named Dale Cooper, played by Kyle McLauchlan, is assigned to investigate it. David Duchovny plays Cooper’s supervisor at the FBI, who is a crossdresser.
Cooper begins to have strange dreams in which he is in a red room with Laura and a dwarf and other strange people who speak backwards and act strangely. They say insane things like “The owls are not what they seem”, which I don’t think is ever explained.
The murderer turns out to be Laura’s father, but he was possessed by some malevolent being named BOB, in all caps. BOB was added to the series because a disheveled-looking member of the show’s crew (a prop master, I think?) was accidentally caught by the camera through a bathroom mirror during one scene and his appearance fit the vibe of the series so well that David Lynch decided to use that shot in the broadcast and even build the show’s mythology around it. There is a second supernatural creature, whose name I forget but is also in all caps, against whom BOB is fighting, but I don’t think either of them are good guys. The series continued after the discovery of the murderer because there were all sorts of other insane things happening that needed to be explored (but it’s David Lynch, so not resolved in any way).
Recap
We open on fog, a woman’s face, and the famous Twin Peaks opening theme song played over waterfalls, rapids, and strange patterns of red hair and zigzags.
A man – possibly Dale Cooper – is sitting in a chair in the Red Room, on fire. An older, bearded man with no left arm places a bead on the now-empty chair with a little bit of hair. After an incantation, the bead inflates and becomes Dale Cooper again. He asks “Where am I?” a little too gleefully.
A doorbell rings at a house. Janey-E1 opens the door and sees Dale. “Dougie!” she cries out in surprise and embraces him, as does his son running up. So either I’m wrong about the main character’s name or he has two identities.
Another Dale Cooper is leading Laura through the woods, but she vanishes with the sound of flapping wings. He hears her scream.
Back to the Dale Cooper on the chair in the Red Room with the bearded man. “Is it future or is it past?” Bearded Man asks. He vanishes and reappears in different places in the room, as does Dale. Dale follows him into another red room to find a brain attached to a tree. “I am the arm and I sound like this,” says the brain.
So far none of this makes any sense at all.
Dale is back in the chair. Laura whispers in his ear. Then she screams and goes flying up. His gaze follows her, but not quite in the right direction.
Despite having been in the chair moments ago, we see Dale enter the room again. Ray Wise, sitting in the chair, tells him to find Laura. Dale turns and leaves, going down a Red Corridor. He uses telekinesis to make a curtain billow, then walks out of the curtain to find himself in the woods, where a woman with fire-engine-red hair is waiting. He calls her Diane, and she asks if it’s really him. “Yes,” he answers. “Is it really you?”
The curtains behind them fade into nonexistence and they’re just in the woods.
It’s the next day. Dale and Diane are driving down an empty highway. He’s planning something significant, but she isn’t sure it’s a good idea. They turn off the road at exactly 430 miles (from where?) and park the car. He gets out; she stays in the car, visibly nervous.
The powerlines along the side of the road are crackling noisily. He listens to cawing birds, then returns to the car. This is the right place, he says, the place where they are going to “cross”. He asks her to kiss him first, because after they cross “everything will change”. They do, then drive forward a little bit – and find themselves hurtling down another highway, at nighttime. A parallel universe? They slow down and drive more sensibly. But something has shifted in their behavior; they seem more robotic. Fade out.
They pull into a motel. Dale gets out of the car and heads to the front office. While he’s inside, Diane waits in the car and sees another Diane step out from behind a pillar. After a few moments, Dale comes back out with the key to the room he’s bought. Has Diane been replaced?
They enter the room and she turns on the light. He tells her to turn it back off and come over to him.
I can’t really communicate how unnaturally they’re acting. It’s robotic and emotionless, but deliberately so; not in the sense of “the actors are just reading lines” but in the sense of Vulcans trying and utterly failing to pass for human. Even when they start to have sex, Dale’s expression is that of someone attending a routine-but-fascinating national security briefing. Diane, at least, starts breathing heavily, but she keeps covering his face with her hands and staring at the ceiling as though she’s enjoying it but can’t bear the fact that he’s the one she’s having sex with.
When Dale wakes up the next morning, Diane is gone.
There’s a note on the bedside table: “Dear Richard,” it starts, which confuses him as he’s not named Richard. “When you read this, I’ll be gone. I don’t recognize you anymore. Don’t try to find me.” It’s signed “Linda”, which confuses him even more as her name is not Linda. And yet he acts like he has just been given important information. So it seems he was expecting to enter a parallel universe in which their names changed – but it’s not clear why Diane knew their new names and he didn’t.
Dale leaves the room, enters his car (which is not in the same parking spot in which he left it the previous night), and drives away.
He heads for the town of Odessa and parks at a diner named Judy’s. The waitress, whom the captions and her nametag call Kristi, brings him coffee. He asks if there is another waitress who works there, and there is, but Kristi says she’s taken the last three days off.
As Dale mulls over this, three men in cowboy hats start harassing Kristi. Dale tells them to leave her alone, so they approach his booth and pull out a gun. He grabs the gun, kicks one in the balls, shoots the second one in the foot, and orders the third to drop his own gun and sit on the ground. He heads to the counter and demands that Kristi write down the other waitress’s address, still speaking like a Vulcan.
While she obeys, he dips the other three guns2 in the deep fryer, then takes the address and drives away.
He pulls up at the address and notices the electricity crackling again. He knocks on the door, and a woman answers. The first thing she asks is: “Did you find him?”
He has no idea what she’s talking about, but recognizes her all the same: she is the Laura Palmer he is looking for. She, however, has never heard of “Laura Palmer”; her name is Carrie Page. Dale tries to get through to her: your father’s name was Leland, your mother’s Sarah. This does get through to her, a little bit, but she doesn’t understand why.
“I want to take you to your mother’s house,” he says. She tells him that normally she’d just slam the door on somebody speaking this much nonsense, but she needs to flee the town anyway and doing so in the company of the FBI would be great. She invites him in.
There’s a dead man in her living room, shot through the head, which she is curiously unconcerned about the federal agent noticing, and he is curiously unconcerned about investigating. They set off.
As they drive, they grow concerned about a car that seems to be following them. Which doesn’t make much sense; they’re on a two-lane highway with no turnoffs in the middle of the desert, so if a car happens to be behind them it’ll stay behind them indefinitely. Dale turns off the road and lets it pass, then continues driving.
After a long driving montage, they arrive in Twin Peaks. She recognizes none of it, though – not even when he pulls up to the Palmer house.
Now, I don’t understand this from either of their points of view. Carrie knows her own name and life history; in fact, she irrelevantly mentions some of it while he drives. Nothing we’ve seen implies a hole in her memory. So why is she so receptive to this nonsense instead of ditching Dale as soon as she’s far enough away from Odessa?
I also don’t understand what he thinks he’s doing. When he picked her up, I assumed he intended to take her back through the 430-mile portal. But if he is in a parallel universe where everybody has different names and histories, why would driving her to this house in this parallel universe accomplish anything? Surely he’s just going to find somebody else living there, with a different name and history.
They knock on the door several times, and it takes a while until a woman answers. Dale introduces himself3 and asks about Sarah Palmer. She doesn’t know anybody by that name, or is that the woman she bought the house from. So I was right – Dale doesn’t understand how parallel universes work. Carrie looks at him accusingly.
They go back to the car, and he stops in the middle of the road, despairing. “What year is this?” he asks, apparently theorizing that he may have travelled in time4. But then somebody shouts “Laura!” from within the house – and Carrie screams, the same scream we’ve been hearing from illusory Lauras in dream sequences throughout the episode. All the power in the area goes out.
That resolved nothing.
Unresolved questions
How much of Dale and Diane’s personalities and memories came with them when they “crossed”? Dale definitely acts very differently after the change, but he still remembers his real name and his mission to find and return Laura Palmer to her home. Diane remembers him enough to have sex with him but has both their names wrong (assuming she’s the one who left the note). We see Dale’s FBI badge but not his ID; does it say “Dale” or “Richard”?
Why were there at least three Dales in the opening scene? Why was one of them named Dougie?
What happened to Diane? Why were there two of her?
Why was Dale’s car not in the same place he parked it?
Why did Carrie shoot that guy? What’s her story? Why did she ask Dale if he “found him”? Does she know the “Richard” version of him?
Why did Dale try to take Carrie home in this alternate universe when clearly that wasn’t where she grew up? Why not cross back with her to the starting universe? Does he just not understand how alternate universes work?
Is there really no Washington State in this universe or is Carrie just geographically uninformed?
Why was the name “Sarah” familiar to Carrie when nothing else was? Who shouted “Laura” in the house?
What’s the deal with the crackling power lines?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 3/10. The actual sequence of events here is very simple, and there is only one story thread: Dale drives into a parallel universe to find that universe’s version of Laura Palmer and bring her home. There are a lot of driving montages, reaching perhaps half the show’s runtime.
But you don’t watch Twin Peaks for the plot…
Writing: 8/10. It’s hard to be truly random. Ask somebody to say a random word and they’ll probably choose one from a surprisingly narrow list of trochees; as somebody for a random number and it’ll more often than not be 7 or 17. Few things are as predictable as a human trying to be unpredictable.
But this episode actually is unexpectedly random. Diane shoving her hands all over Dale’s face; Dale dipping the cowboys’ guns in the deep fryer, telling the cook to move away in case the bullets go off, and not moving away himself; the man casually sitting in the easy chair in Carrie’s living room, murdered in what was clearly not self-defense; the brain on the tree declaring that it is an arm; the red curtains in the woods.
Some of these are probably not as random as it looks to me. Surely several of them have well-established foundations in previous episodes. But the Leaning Tower of Pisa’s foundation is also well-established; that doesn’t stop the tower from being crooked.
You don’t end up with a finale like this if you’ve been building up a logical universe. You don’t even get to a point like this when you’re deliberately trying to screw with the viewer’s mind; that looks more like John from Cincinnati. Twin Peaks comes across more like David Lynch earnestly trying to show other people what the inside of his perfectly-normal-to-him brain looks like.
And, importantly, he succeeds in showing us just a strange, illogical, crooked brain he has.
Production: N/A. How do you measure the production values of a show like this??? The acting was wooden and robotic? It was deliberately wooden and robotic, aimed at creating a specific effect. The editing was haphazard, with massive continuity errors? All - well, probably all - done on purpose! The driving montages were too long? That didn’t matter! (Although my attention did wander off during the final one.)
Characterization: 2/10. This is perhaps the episode’s weakest link. We spend all of our time with Dale, but we spend most of the time watching him drive. We don’t really get to know him, and even the parts we see are a little bit too bizarre. I don’t know which parts of his personality (such as it is) come from him and which parts come from the alternate-universe Richard. And I’m not sure that I saw enough of him prior to going through Mile 430 to be 100% certain that he acts differently afterwards.
Accessibility: 4/10. Despite the show’s reputation, this isn’t even close to the least accessible finale I’ve watched. The story was surprisingly easy to follow; it’s all the stuff around the story that made no sense.
Closure: 2/10. Dale spent the entire episode trying to accomplish one thing – and at the end was nowhere closer than he was at the beginning. I don’t know if he will even think of trying to go back through Mile 430, much less if it’s possible.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I actually already did want to see it, long before this finale was requested. It’s very famous and my wife has been interested in seeing it as well.
Identified in captions
Three? I didn’t see him pull out his own gun, nor grab a gun from the second cowboy. Maybe I missed it.
Which is a relief, because between the Dougie and Richard nonsense I’d been nervous that I’ve been calling him by the wrong name this whole time.
A stupid theory, because that wouldn’t explain why Laura’s name is Carrie or why the house clearly never had a “Sarah Palmer” living it.