Twin Peaks - An In-Depth Critique and Review
Frank Lloyd Wright once said that "Television is chewing gum for the eyes". Well, "that gum you like is coming back in style"...
Well lodged within the Hollywood Cabal, Lynch is one of the most well-respected "Auteurs" I know. Everything he worked on, down to the most ridiculous advertisements for Japanese television, has his signature style of strobe lights, and oneiric bizarre nonsense. It is very easy to pitfall myself into simply gushing over David Lynch and his work in this review, given how sublime, eccentric, unconventional and trailblazing it is --not to mention laugh-out-loud-funny and weird at times. I even learned recently that as early as the 2000s, the guy had already pioneered vlogging and video distribution via the web, publishing works directly onto his website. Twin Peaks was also the inspiration behind a vast amount of video games, such as Silent Hill, Deadly Premonition, and parts of Resident Evil (you can blatantly hear the Angelo Badalamenti in the Resident Evil Save Room Themes). Such a mysterious and convoluted, yet down to Earth and inward person (at least as far as his public persona goes), I call him "Mi Cabecita de Algodón", due to this weird kinship that I feel towards him (even though he probably wouldn't want anything to do with me if I had met him in person while he was still alive --he was patently hard to work with).
Lynch is a person with a very troubled inner world, who doesn't fear going down the rabbit holes of White America and the Pacific Northwest, clearly stemming from personal experiences and pain. From interviews, I recall this quote, that, growing in Boise, Idaho, Lynch's life was all very beautiful, idyllic, all about white picket fences, the Milkman, greenery and clean streets, but, in his words "there's a Dark Side to all of it", of drugs, coffee, cigarettes and neurotic circumcised White incest monsters that feel no pleasure during sex. And he's not afraid to show you it: with every movie, episode, webisode, vlog or essay he's inviting you to Fire Walk With Me. That's why his work prominently features the sick, the dispossessed, the raped, the murdered, the homeless, the strange, the oppressed, the conspiracist, the addict, the dazed, and the scared in contrast to the people who wear nice clothes and travel in private jets. People whom the veil of mainstream society, of normal life, has been taken away from; it is arguable that they know more about how the World really functions simply because of this fact.
And from this well of inspiration we get Twin Peaks (two words that make me long for Audrey Horne and Shelly Johnson...), a show in the eponymous, calm, small and fictional Washington State town that is torn apart after the murder of the local Prom Queen, Laura Palmer, portrayed by the most excellent Sheryl Lee. An FBI agent, Dale Cooper, portrayed by Kyle Maclachlan who's a cutie patootie that I want to protect, is sent to investigate, given a series of similar murders in the area (notoriously the Murder of Teresa Banks, which is dealt with in the prequel feature film "Fire Walk With Me" that serves as a sequel to season 1 of the show). These murders involved death by asphyxiation and abandonment of the victim's body in a lake, wrapped in plastic, with a tiny cutout of a letter under one of her nails. A second girl was also the target of the attacks, Ronette Pulaski, who managed to survive.
Part 1. I Am Like the Blue Rose
From here, Twin Peaks begins to play as a Soap Opera mystery show. It is both shot and edited in a format reminiscent of some Hallmark bullshit that you'd catch your mom watching at 10 AM on some God forsaken open-air TV channel next to the zionist Christian televangelists, following the investigations of the FBI into Laura Palmer's murder and the unraveling of the relationships between all of the Twin Peaks residents. Will the perky, brunette Tibet weeb, coffee loving, donut loving, pie loving and cheery, thumbs-up giving agent that was grafted onto the endogenic Twin Peaks be able to finish his job, and in the process, maybe, make friends, and, perhaps, even find a bit of love?
But see, if Twin Peaks is a Soap Opera, it is a Soap Opera for people who like to make fun of Soap Operas. The show pokes fun at itself, given how the show-within-a-show called "Invitation to Love" seems to mirror the events happening in Twin Peaks. It's a show that's aware that it's a show, and that it's trying to put on its best face, engaging in a conversation with its own audience. Perhaps this is most noticeable as in how they tried (and failed) in Season 2 to pivot the show away from simply being about the Laura Palmer case to instead become more about the case of Windom Earle as a Big Bad, a nemesis to Dale Cooper, who fell in a romantic entanglement with his wife and failed to save her from a murder. Twin Peaks gets way too Scooby-Doo cartoony in this season.
Dale Cooper arrives in Twin Peaks, constantly recording messages on cassette tape for someone called "Diane", his secretary, about Cherry Pie and Coffee. Befuddlement sure to come out of how fucking bizarre this is, it sets the stage for what's to come: this is a kooky weird show and you're going to come out the other side a completely different person if you so dare watch it. Facing some difficulties against the local, mellow police staff composed of Andy (a policeman whose virility/fertility/love triangle subplot alludes to his desire for Lucy Moran, the receptionist, and his belated coming of age), Hawk, a Native American policeman who may know more than he lets on about everything that's going on, and Sheriff Harry Truman, the tough-but-fair leader of the local force who's involved in yet another love triangle with Josie Packard, the widow Chinese National heir to the Packard sawmill that is the main pillar of the local economy, and the old owner family, the Martells, who are both cheating on each other: Catherine, with the owner of the Great Northern Hotel and the biggest department store in town, Benjamin Horne, and Peter with Josie. Catherine plots against Josie to seize the sawmill back.
More subplots ensue, like Ed Hurley's, Nadine's husband, unrequited love towards Norma, the owner of local cafeteria, the RR, who's married to local crook Hank. Nadine, a one-eyed woman who's weirdly superpowered and is obsessed with creating noise-free drape runners, survives a suicide attempt and loses all memory, believing herself to be in High School all over again and forgets her marriage to Ed. Shelly Johnson, a waitress at the RR diner is in trouble due to her chauvinistic husband, Leo, a trucker; she's in a love triangle with Bobby, son of Major Briggs, a member of the Military who is involved in Top Secret matters.
There's also the kids: Bobby Briggs, James Hurley, Donna Hayward and Audrey Horne (Daughter of Benjamin Horne), the first two being former competitors for Laura's affection. We also have the Log Lady, a weirdo who tends to hang around and who claims to hear things from a log that she carries around like a precious being, and which she believes to host the soul of her former husband, and Laura's family's dynamics after the murder, with her Father, Leland and her mother, Sarah. And last but not least, the town Psychiatrist, Lawrence Jacoby (who, by the way, I believe does an excellent job), an eccentric man who knows everyone's dirty little secrets.
In this little, innocent town, things are not quite what they seem... Evident in how they decide to arrange donuts, or brew coffee with fish in the percolator. It seems that in White suburban America people literally do nothing but cheat on each other all the time, listen to dope music at the Bang Bang Roadhouse, use drugs and consume copious amounts of Coffee and Sugar.
It is soon revealed that the murder of Laura Palmer was related to her recreational usage of Cocaine and that she was involved with a "J" from her Diary (obviously because they wanted to make her be involved with a "G" but somebody at NBC probably told them to tone it down). And this is one of the most brilliant parts of the show: how many characters have a "J" as one of their initials and how everyone is suspicious at this point. Is the suspect James, who Laura Palmer was dating? Or Josie, who Laura Palmer was teaching English to? Or does it stand for "Johnson", like Leo?
More FBI agents come into the scene to deal with the investigations: Albert, a forensics expert who's heavily lacking in social niceties and who soon develops a rivalry with Truman, and Gordon Cole, played by none other than Lynch Himself, who's investigating Twin Peaks in relation to the disappearance of FBI agent Phillip Jeffries, portrayed by none other than David Bowie (because of course David Bowie had to be in this!), involved with the Blue Rose task force after the disappearance of Cooper's predecessor, Chester Desmond, the protagonist of Fire Walk With Me. The Blue Rose cases were a series of murder mysteries involving a murder victim's declaration that "I am like the Blue Rose", a mystery that remained unsolved. Phillip Jeffrey's last sighting before his demise was him showing up at the FBI, yelling to his colleagues:
"WE LIVE INSIDE A DREAM"
Then, after arriving at Twin Peaks and settling in, Cooper starts having hallucinations in his dreams. He seems to enter a mysterious dimension, the Red Room, a weird kind of purgatory or in-between dimension between Life and Death, consisting of Red Drapes, a floor in a Black and White Chevron pattern, a few seats and a statue of Saturn and the Venus de Milo with arms, where he meets strange entities such as the Giant, the Dwarf and Laura Palmer. While in the Red Room, the entities speak in audio recorded in reverse and then reversed again: instead of saying: "Cooper", they say "Repooc" and the audio is reversed to make it understandable. These entities begin crossing over to the Real World and appearing in visions to Cooper. They seem to be friendly and want to help Cooper, but only communicate hints to him through allegory and cryptic details. The giant then tells him "The Owls Are Not What They Seem".
When the crime scene is finally discovered by the local police, the words "Fire Walk With Me" are revealed. Another vision in Cooper's Dreams called "Mike", aka "The One Armed Man", recites a poem to him:
"Through the darkness of future past the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds: 'Fire, Walk With Me!'"
This Mike is found to be in Twin Peaks as Gerard, a simple shoe salesman, from a secondary clue as to who could be the murderer, disclosed by Leland Palmer. After Laura's Mother had a vision of the murderer appear inside her house, as a Greasy, long haired and skinny Native American Indian man, the police create a portrait of him which Leland recognizes as his old neighbor, "Bob", who had a connection with Gerard. Unbeknownst to people, he will be also heavily important to the plot. Leland's hair mysteriously turns White soon after.
A subplot related to an underground brothel and casino, One Eyed Jack's, is revealed. Jacques Renault, a Canadian, operated as the Pimp; Laura Palmer became involved in prostitution to fund her Cocaine habit and as a way to cope with turmoil at home, which is explored further in depth in Fire Walk With Me. Aware of the operation, Audrey Horne infiltrates it as a working girl to learn more, only to be apprehended and drugged with Heroin as a hostage. Jacques Renault, who was one of the prime suspects in the investigation, is murdered once One Eyed Jack's is busted before he can actually contribute further clues to the investigation.
Bob is revealed to be an inhabiting spirit, part of a series of mysterious interdimensional DMT Elves Native American entities who, among other things, represent the Good and Evil in people. Some of them are vicious for revenge over the colonization of Twin Peaks by the White race, which is constantly the target of many real estate developments by moguls and the powers that be, and is constantly trying to lure Norwegians, Icelanders and other Scandinavians into moving into it. This contrast between the Anglosphere and its machinations and the lamentations of the Native American Spirits is thus a pivotal point of the plot, with many allusions, such as Audrey's mentally challenged Brother bumping his head against the model of an American Style home while wearing a Native American headpiece, or Leland Palmer's frequent bouts of crying and randomly springing into dance or panic attacks to grieve over Laura when faced with the prospect of importing in even more White people into Twin Peaks.
In time it is revealed that Bob possessed Leland to rape Laura --his own daughter-- for years and then finally murdered her. This is shown with a very interesting device with Laura's brunette cousin, Maddy, who is also murdered in cold blood by Leland while possessed by Bob. Maddy, who is also interpreted by Sheryl Lee, visits and integrates with the community to help her uncle and aunt mourn, but Leland murders her with the exact same modus operandi as he did Laura. Cooper is made aware of this while hanging out at the Roadhouse in one of the most shocking moments I've ever seen on TV. I went in completely blind, with no prior knowledge of this, so it made an impression on me: the Giant appearing on stage, interrupting one of Julee Cruise's incredible numbers (particularly her beautiful song, "The World Spins") while the entirety of the Roadhouse remains static, frozen in time, except for the Log Lady and Cooper. The Giant then says:
"IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN"
Leland tragically dies after the Maddy incident happens.
I will now mention that the most pivotal point in the show is that all of this is connected to an ancestral cult in Twin Peaks that knows of the "Black Lodge" and "White Lodge", an extra-dimensional space that opens during the astrological conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, in a very specific place in the woods of Twin Peaks, knowledge guarded by a local fraternity called "The Bookhouse Boys", that some people in Twin Peaks are secretly members of, and is alluded to by ancient paintings and signs present in Twin Peaks in the shape of an Owl. People who are members of this fraternity don certain paraphernalia with this symbol, a ring of which Laura was wearing on the night of her murder. The government of the United States, represented by Major Briggs, was aware of this and its connections to paranormal activity in the town, particularly of signals received from outer space from entities unknown, seeming to be talking about "COOPER/COOPER/COOOPER". And yes --The Owls are connected to this.
The Black Lodge (which is the exact same Red Room Cooper saw in his dreams) is host to a variety of Inhabiting Spirits, Native American Spirits that have "been here before all of mankind" and that have mysterious agendas and machinations, concerned with the procurement of "Garmonbozia", a substance obtained from fear and suffering of humans, much like the Archons in Gnosticism, which in the Show is represented by Creamed Corn. The Spirits feed upon it and use it as their "economy" of sorts -- it is implied that the good spirits such as The Giant and Mike that wanted to help Cooper with his job to take down Bob were actually doing so more because of the fact that Bob owed them Garmonbozia and needed to cash out than anything.
Bob, a rogue spirit which co-inhabited with Mike in the Human world atop a convenience store in the middle of Twin Peaks, was possessing Humans to do his dirty work as a way to farm Garmonbozia. Laura, unable to process all of this, descended in an inward spiral and eventually collapsed to Bob, more as a way to protect her loved ones and the fellow people of Twin Peaks more than anything. Laura is thus posed throughout the series and the Fire Walk With Me film as a sort of saintly figure who, becoming aware against her will of the machinations of the Inhabiting spirits, decided to offer herself as a sacrifice.
"She would die for love...".
As a small aside, Catherine succeeds in her attempt to seize the sawmill back by scamming people and setting fire to the sawmill themselves, faking her own death. She then comes back in the most egregious usage of Yellowface I've ever seen in my life as "Mr. Yoshimura", an investor that wishes to acquire the fallen sawmill. She subdues Josie, who eventually dies and gets trapped inside a nightstand's cabinet knob from sheer fear, which causes Chief Truman to fall into depression.
Cooper gets into a relationship with Norma's ex-Nun half-sister named Annie. Drawn to her naïveté and her desire to explore more of life after relinquishing the monastery, Windom Earle targets her out of spite and sends her to the Black Lodge. Oh, and by the way, David Duchovny plays "Denise", a DEA agent who's also brought into the fray to help with the Windom Earle investigation and to clear Cooper's name once he's suspended because of the One Eye Jack's incident. Cooper decides to enter the Black Lodge to rescue her and succeeds, but gets stuck inside. This causes it to produce a Tulpa (a concept from Tibetan Buddhism, which is a manifest being in human form that's not actually a human, but behaves and exists like one) of himself --a power that the Black Lodge somehow has--, which is known as "The Doppelganger" or "Mr. C.", and the Doppelganger exits to the real world in his stead.
Stuck in the Black Lodge, he meets Laura Palmer in the Black Lodge, who tells him that she will meet him again in Twenty-Five Years...
Part 2 - We Live Inside a Dream
Season 3 is named "Twin Peaks: a Limited Event Series" or "Twin Peaks: the Return", which happens 25 years after the Season 2 ending. Take note: Lynch and Frost are making it very clear that this is a "Limited Event". It's not here to stay. Enjoy it while you can --there's not going to be a Season 4. It's more of a conclusion, or a way to tie up the loose ends more than anything.
And I have to offer my condolences and kudos to the Twin Peaks audience, who were kept in a cliffhanger and waited for this for TWENTY FIVE YEARS since 1992 to the dot. It probably sucks to be kept on edge like that for so long, even more so after the cryptic ending in Season 2 with the Doppelganger. By then, the World has drastically changed to say the least --we have streaming television and 4K now and everything is done online.
But the Return is a fantastic, pardon the pun, Return to Form. Undergoing a series of bizarre and mystical phenomena from his exploration of the Black Lodge Dimension, Cooper eventually manages to exit the Black Lodge and return to the real world in a catatonic form. There is a problem, however: his Doppelganger (who is a Tulpa) has been living life at large in his stead for twenty five years as a criminal. When the Black Lodge creates something, something else has to be taken back: there is a balance. It is not possible for Cooper and the Doppelganger to both exist in the same World; one of them has to return.
Therefore, season 3 mostly deals with the collapse of the American Dream. It introduces Dougie Jones, also played by MacLachlan, who's Diane's Brother-in-law, married to her sister, Janey-E; Dougie is a sleazy, scummy and unreliable Insurance Agent who lives in Las Vegas and suddenly disappears and gets consumed by the Black Lodge once Cooper exits, since "one cannot exit the Black Lodge unless something else is paid back to it". This duality between the scumbag Dougie and the wholesome Cooper is really interesting; Dougie had gambling debt, was unfaithful to Janey-E (played by Naomi Watts), and was a bad father to his son Sonny Jim; when Cooper takes up Dougie's life, even though he's in a catatonic state, he manages to radically turn it around. Sure, his head is completely empty, everything happens completely by happenstance, and he now behaves like a senile mantoddler, which is never questioned by anyone in the show. He becomes obscenely rich by gambling ("HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"), survives multiple assasination attempts simply by not doing anything, and even manages to get the Italian Mafia on his side by inadvertently doing them justice in an insurance case which he solves by drawing meaningless scribbles on insurance documents which (somehow) make the insurance company discover internal fraud and that the Mafia was in the right to get paid.
What I take away from this part of the plot is how the American Dream is completely fake. Dougie is not really Dougie, but nobody really cares as long as there's money. Janey-E only warms up to Dougie once he begins bringing in the dough and as long as he's more physically attractive than the original Dougie, and his unfaithfulness is immediately and completely forgotten once things start getting better, economically speaking. Ultimately, what Cooper does as Dougie is completely nonsensical and unimportant, but he simply succeeds by Deus Ex Machina as long as he's warming a chair. This part of the show happens in Las Vegas, where a neighborhood called Rancho Rosa is shown to have turned to ruin; here is where Cooper, assuming the persona of Dougie Jones, finally materializes back in the real world after being gone for 25 years. This is representative of the current state of suburban America, corroded and degraded by the powers that be.
On the side of the FBI, Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield return, still involved with the Blue Rose Task Force; tagging along is rookie agent Tammy, who get in contact with long lost Diane for help in tracking down Cooper, who's been missing for 25 years.
To finally get to see Diane was incredibly satisfying to me, a master class in Asian-mystique.
The origin of all of the phenomena in Twin Peaks was the Nuclear Bomb Tests in New Mexico in 1945. This awoke an inhabiting spirit, called "The Experiment", who created Laura Palmer in an orb, and the other Inhabiting spirits of the Black Lodge dimension send her off to Earth. A lady kisses the orb and sends her off as an entity called "The Fireman" who looks exactly like The Giant but isn't, helps the lady in a mystical theater. Laura Palmer is thus born in Washington in the 80s. All of this is explored in "Part 8" of the Return, an infamous episode that plays completely out of sequence from the rest of the series, an "experimental film" of sorts, and which seems a little bit like Lynch wanted to pass the baton to his apprentice/student directors with the show more than anything.
Another incident with a connection to the nuclear test is the appearance of a new Inhabiting Spirit, the "Woodsman"; a homeless looking being covered in oil who goes around in 1956 asking people for a light for his cigarette and assassinating them, saying "Got a Light?". He was one of the spirits that lived in the convenience store. He infiltrates a Radio station and after killing the Jockey, he recites a poem:
"This is the water, and this is the well, drink full, and descend. The Horse is the white of the eyes and dark within..."
Which is a reference to the Horse seen indoors and in the Black Lodge in Cooper's visions. People who listen to this poem immediately drop dead.
In the real world, the actual Twin Peaks in Washington is shown to now have succumbed to the influence of fentanyl "Chinese Designer drugs" rather than Cocaine --a sizeable amount of the population is shown to be living in squalor and pain over this. Most of the subplots here are meant as a way to show what actually was of the Twin Peaks residents after all this time --of notoriety, Lawrence Jacoby's pairing with Nadine (who decides to leave Ed so he can finally romance Norma) after she follows Jacoby on social media from his conspiracy theorist podcast. Lucy and Andy got together and now have a child, brilliantly portrayed by fucking Michael Cera (which is the most perfect casting that I've ever seen in my life). Since, unfortunately, old Sheriff Truman couldn't return to the show for personal reasons, he is instead supplanted by his brother Frank Truman.
Gordon Cole has a dream with Monica Bellucci, where he is reminded of the phrase "We Live Inside a Dream". He seems to have a realization about this being some kind of revelation about life when she says "We are like the Dreamer, who dreams, then lives inside the Dream"; she then asks "but then, who's the Dreamer?". Gordon seems to realize that there may be more to "We Live Inside a Dream" than he realizes.
It is revealed that Diane was raped by the Doppelganger and sent to the Black Lodge. Then a Tulpa exited into the real world, trapping the real Diane; the Tulpa is who the FBI got in touch with. Thus, the real Diane must be rescued from the Black Lodge; the idea of Tulpas thus also alludes to the "Blue Roses", since Blue Roses are not found in Nature, they must be artificial or fabrications, and the presence of Tulpas in the real world goes beyond what's understood. Then, there's a subplot relating to a Bri'ish ol' chap that is told by Mike from the Black Lodge to move to Twin Peaks "to fulfill his destiny", pulling the strings from behind the scenes to help Cooper. The British guy has a thick cockney accent and a magical Green Glove that he never takes off, which gives him superpowers (I shit you not that this is what actually happens). The Doppelganger, meanwhile, is shown to be at large as he commits a series of heinous crimes, slowly becoming aware that his time in the World is over because Cooper has returned. Of notice, he consults with Phillip Jeffries to prevent his fate, who has now been turned into a Teapot and instructs him to return to Twin Peaks.
The Twin Peaks police, tracking down a few clues from the old Palmer case, go into the woods trying to find a clue left behind by Major Briggs --who was brutally murdered in Season 3--, which mysteriously ejects some kind of naked Asian woman without a face from the woods. She is rescued; my headcanon is that this is a reference to Josie, returning from the knob in some bizarre manner, even though this is not canonical by any means and they proactively decided to not write Josie back into the show for Season 3 out of a lack of good plot points for her.
After fulfilling his role as Dougie Jones, Cooper is suddenly reminded of Gordon Cole and electrocutes himself by putting a fork in a wall socket and falls into a coma. When he miraculously wakes up from the coma he completely comes back as Cooper in the second-to-last episode of the whole show. From what I hear, a lot of people had ridiculous amounts of vitriol towards the showrunners for doing this; for teasing people for 25 years about a new Twin Peaks coming, and then having the whole show not actually be quite the same show and not quite having a Cooper, which was the main attraction of the show to begin with. Once he comes back he knows what he has to do: Return to Twin Peaks for closure. Being able to seamlessly talk to the Black Lodge now, he asks Mike to "make another one" of himself, because he knew that he couldn't stay at Janey-E's side. Mike obliges and produces another Cooper.
After Returning to Twin Peaks Cooper meets the British chap at the Twin Peaks police station. The Doppelganger faces off against him and manifests Bob to try to prevent to be sent back; Bob is now an Orb for some reason, that bounces violently around the Police station trying to defeat Cooper, but the British chap smashes the orb with the green glove and completely defeats Bob, which frees Diane from the Black Lodge, who was trapped inside the Lady without Eyes from the forest. Cooper then finds an as-of-yet not found corner of the Great Northern which opened with an old key he originally had in his possession and that he retrieved from Truman, which allowed him to travel back to the past and prevent the murder of Laura Palmer.
Yeah, what the fuck?
Having now tied every loose end, Cooper and Diane elope and drive down the highway to Mile 430 by instruction of the Fireman where they run into an Open Wire Line (coincidentally, an "OWL") that makes them warp timelines, and after spending the night together, Cooper wakes up to realize that not only Diane is now gone and has left him forever, he is now living in the alternate timeline where Laura Palmer never died, and his name is now "Richard". Diane's name is now "Linda". He's also now in Odessa, Texas, where he finds out in a local diner that an employee suspiciously similar to Laura Palmer works there. He obtains her info after quarreling with some crooks who were harassing a waitress; which is incredibly out of character for him --not to mention that this new Cooper, "Richard", doesn't get excited over coffee or does any thumbs ups. Did the real Cooper decide to abandon everything and become a husband to Janey-E? Did he send a Tulpa in his stead to Mile 430, or did he actually elope with Diane? A small, final scene where Dougie Jones in the shape of Cooper returns to Janey-E and Sonny Jim seems to leave this question open to interpretation.
I want to take a step back and draw attention upon Cooper's personality split after visiting the Black Lodge in this last section of the show. It's impressive that MacLachlan interpreted six different Coopers (perhaps alluded to by the 'Coopers' Major Briggs saw in the transmissions from outer space), each with their own personality and quirks:
Cooper
Cooper (Doppelganger)
Dougie Jones (Original)
Dougie Jones (Lobotomized Cooper)
Dougie Jones ("I Need Another One")
Richard
Part 3 - Epilogue
After finding Carrie Page, the Waitress, Richard decides to travel back to Twin Peaks and ask Laura Palmer's Mother, whose iconic house he still remembered, if she had any relation to Carrie Page. Carrie Page takes him up on the offer and they drive to Twin Peaks from Texas, but it is all for naught; Laura Palmer's mother is not even present. The house is the property of a completely different family and they have no idea about who both of them are.
Richard and Carrie then walk onto the street, confused, and in desperation, Richard asks: "What year is it?". This causes Carrie to have a panic attack as she screams in terror, which blows up the lights of the old Palmer house. I take this final, mind-bending section as commentary on Television's part in "the medium is the message". Carrie knows she's actually Laura from some kind of mystical memory, but she cannot prove it; she screams in terror because she realizes she's stuck inside a Television Show, a work of art, this scene therefore functioning as meta-commentary about how Television functions. Carrie knows she's trapped in an eternal loop, and that every time that somebody watches the show, she will continue to die, over, and over, and over again throughout the years; she will continue to suffer all of the horrors that happened to her throughout Twin Peaks without rest.
RIP David Lynch, lover of the Night Blooming Jasmine. He has not died: he simply returned to the Atma.
Greetings from the Black Lodge.
