Two weeks and one episode after Trinity, the Bob glob, The Woodsman, and an insectoid amphibian prone to crawling down human esophagi, Twin Peaks played it conventional in last night’s episode. But even a conventional episode of Twin Peaks still rings with what Beverly Paige might call “kind of a mesmerizing tone,” be it in the sustained tension of Diane’s smoke break, the inside jokes of the Detectives Fusco, Andy and Lucy’s martial tête-à-tête over the color of a chair, or Sky Ferreira’s rash. The catalog of strangeness within “Part 9” could be made up entirely of Beverly’s employer’s family members: Ben Horne’s back at it with that chiming in his office (“The ring out of a monastery bell has the same quality”), Jerry’s at war with his foot, and Johnny Horne—who was expecting to see him again?—has a run-in with a wall.
Even with all that, I think we’re destined to look back not-so-fondly at “Part 9” as the third-season episode in which the narrative engines clicked on, and clicked on hard, as Bill Hastings is finally pulled into the FBI’s orbit, and the Twin Peaks Sheriffs Department gets headed in a similar direction thanks to the cryptic missives of Major Garland Briggs. As they must, because Twin Peaks is still, at its core, a murder mystery, one we’re now halfway through, and there remain many stones unturned in the strange case of Ruth Davenport. So, as our own Emily L. Stephens notes, David Lynch and Mark Frost dump a ton of information into “Part 9,” some of which I found harder to deal with than the nuclear tests and Dougie savant-isms of past episodes. It’s necessary, but it’s also overwhelming.
At least the delivery mechanism for the most crucial information is sound: For his sniffling punctuation and his crinkle-faced emoting, I hereby nominate Matthew Lillard for induction into the Twin Peaks Crying Hall of Fame. Having lived with the world of Twin Peaks for so long, you might take it for granted that all of these characters are accustomed to the horrifying realities of alternate dimensions and the beings that exist therein. But both “Part 8”—with the emergence of The Woodsman and his cronies—and “Part 9” reiterate the terror of what Bobby, Hawk, and Sheriff Truman (Betty Briggs didn’t know it would be this Sheriff Truman) are gearing up to face. While they reconcile with Jack Rabbit’s Palace and pockets full of soil, Lillard’s bravura, two-take performance transcends the infodump and conveys the fear and confusion swirling within Bill Hasting’s mind. Like the ringing at The Great Northern, it’s confounding; but, also like that ringing, it’s kind of mesmerizing.
Erik, you’re not wrong to call out the somewhat labored narrative efforts of this week’s episode. It was bound to happen eventually: Even though it’s still standing head(less) and shoulders above almost everything else currently on television, “Part 9” is the first installment of Twin Peaks season three that I would characterize as a bit underwhelming. Given the two-week break after part eight’s riveting origin story, it feels like the season is coming full circle back to where it began, with Matthew Lillard and a murder mystery, only now we’re got the accumulated knowledge of the subsequent episodes to lend insight to all that’s happening. And while it’s nice to see these disparate dots start getting connected (or thrown on the ground to ring at a certain frequency and then crack open), the episode struggled to maintain a sense of wonder and mystique, as plot point after plot point was thrown out in an effort to push the story forward.
This was also the first time I became a bit exhausted with the ongoing foibles of the Andy And Lucy’s Wacky Relationship! interludes. Whereas the slow-moving and methodical nature of this series adds layers to the mystery and drama (and occasionally to the floor-sweeping), these two are so clearly positioned as little more than comic relief—and a bit of heart, as she ends up getting the chair color he wanted—that the pacing of their shenanigans feels creaky rather than inspired. Five seconds of Lucy holding up her hand as the men walk by, to signify she’s still on her lunch break, was more engaging and funny than the entire “darn it, we’re having a chair-color fight!” sequence. The best humor on this series comes when little moments on the margins of these people’s lives inadvertently and briefly take center stage, as opposed to treating those little slice-of-life beats as subplots unto themselves. It’s the difference between a scene involving everyone waiting around to continue with the narrative while Laura Dern’s Diane takes a smoke break, versus a scene being about Diane needing to have a cigarette.
But while it was good to get back to some of the promising plot threads introduced at the beginning of the season and immediately tie them in to the larger storyline (Lillard’s William Hastings met Major Briggs in another dimension!), I’m starting to worry that Doppel-Cooper and Dougie-Cooper might be here for the long haul. While the show has already proven it can dazzle without the grounding and comforting presence of Special Agent Dale Cooper, it does still leave everyone else in the cast (intentionally) orbiting around a bit of a void at the series’ core. And it looks like that’s going to be the central purpose of the entire season: restoring a balance lost when Doppel-Cooper used Dougie Jones as his get-out-of-the-Black-Lodge-free card. Dale Cooper will almost certainly come back to us by the end, but I’m no longer expecting to see him until the final few episodes.