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Five Thoughts On Twin Peaks: The Return‘s “Part Seven”

By | June 19th, 2017
Posted in Television | % Comments

And with another week in the rear view mirror, we return to Twin Peaks: The Return. This week we get our first one hour episode after two double sized weeks. The seventh part of Twin Peaks: The Return hits us with a whole lot of stuff at once but it is all still pieces of something. Let’s jump into this but note there are spoilers all throughout.

1. Hello Diane

Last week I got to touch on this but Laura Dern as the mysterious Diane is such perfect casting. One of the things that really stood out to me was how shocked I was at what Diane actually looked like. I think because we never actually saw Diane in the show’s first run, that no matter what, I would have been shocked. I never really had a clear vision of Diane in my head because she wasn’t a person to me. Not in the same way that Dale Cooper is for me. She was almost a guiding force for Dale but just this kind of energy and I never associated a visual identity for her.  Dern’s Diane is stylish and very tough. She swears a lot, smokes a lot, drinks even more and it’s basically perfect. Diane is a force to be reckoned with.

However, under all of that there is something very troubling at play here. Diane is not interested in the idea of going to see Dale and so she first denies Albert very firmly. It takes a personal visit from Gordon to finally get her to go. When she goes, she sees him and she’s scared. This isn’t just scared, this is trauma. Something happened between them and she asks Evil Dale a.k.a. Boop (Bob +Coop) when is the last time she saw him. He simply says “your apartment” and she is visibly shaken by this. When she sees Gordon outside, she tells him very confidently that that man isn’t him.

This entire sequence is incredibly chilling because I go back again to our own versions of what and who Diane is. I never really had my own version of her but I know that a lot of other fans of the series did. I can definitely say that I never imagined the relationship between her and Coop as anything but friendly. Her alcoholism and her reaction to him make me think something really, really horrific happened between them. It’s such an interesting twist because Lynch is playing off what we expect and it makes the entire thing so effective. I don’t know if Diane has a role to play that will stretch the entire series but I want to see more of her immediately.

2. Missing Pages

Last week, Hawk found something in between the door of a restroom door in the sheriff’s department. What we find out is that he found the missing pages of Laura Palmer’s diary. What’s on these pages alarms he and the current Sheriff Truman because they talk about Annie and Dale Cooper. Dale Cooper never met Laura Palmer when she was alive so how could she write about him? This leads the current Sheriff Truman to call his brother (the actual Sheriff Truman) and the last person alive who saw Dale before he vanished, Doc Hayward. He doesn’t get a lot of information but this is still a very interesting development within the scope of this story. It’s a timeline that doesn’t make sense which leads us to…

3. How Did That Get There?

Back in South Dakota, the dead body that happens to have Major Briggs’ fingerprints is still in the freezer in the morgue. The military has finally arrived and now someone even more “important” will have to step in. Like Laura’s diary pages, this body makes no sense. Briggs would be at least 70 by now and he’s also believed to be dead. How does a body at least 30 years younger end up in South Dakota with his fingerprints? Can Briggs time travel? Is this another doppelganger/vessel in the sense that Dougie was for Cooper? I have so many questions at how this all ties together. Some big stuff is about to go down with the Black Lodge.

Continued below

4.  Muscle Memory 

Dale is still not awake and he’s still struggling to get through days. On this day we see, things are still very bleak for him. He’s in his office just drawing things and it gets worse when the cops show up to question about his car. Naomi Watts as Janey-E is fantastic. She takes over for Dougie in this scene and answers all the questions and ends up scaring the cops like she did to the bookies last week. Watts just straight up commands attention when she does these scenes and it’s awesome. She might actually be my favorite of the new characters. When they are both leaving the building, Coop is attacked by the person hired to take him out and some muscle memory kicks in.

That’s at least my theory because you can’t become an F.B.I. agent without learning some moves like this. This scene gets a little weird when the new arm from the Black Lodge shows up and tries to get Cooper to be even more violent. Cooper doesn’t squeeze his entire hand off but he does a lot of damage against this guy. I think this right here is the closest we get to Dale Cooper truly being back. He’s in there and he almost got out.

5. Boop Makes His Move

As I mentioned, this episode is jam packed with things that I don’t even get to but one of the things we have to talk about is Boop’s amazing escape where he gets to literally walk out of prison freely. Boop apparently has blackmail on the warden of this prison that involves the dog leg found in his car and some shady folks they both know. Boop is ready to use this information to hurt the warden and so he demands his release. Because blackmail and fear of bodily harm is a good motivator, the warden agrees and not only lets Boop out, but also lets a friend accompany him out of the prison. They give him a car, a gun and a phone and he gets to just leave like he was temporarily staying at a hotel.

Boop is proving to be a very good villain. He’s basically got all the strengths (for good and bad) of Bob and Cooper and that makes him really dangerous. Now, in the early trailers we saw, we got a glimpse of Cooper driving in the dark. We knew this was Cooper because of the hair and suit but what if it’s not? What if Boop decides to assume Cooper’s identity to get into Twin Peaks without issue. Something major is going to go down with the Black Lodge so he needs to get back there and this might be the easiest way to do it instead of sneaking in as Boop with his mullet and bad wardrobe. I don’t know. I could be wrong. I’m probably wrong but it’s definitely something to think about.

What did you think of this week’s episode? Let me know in the comments below!


//TAGS | twin peaks

Jess Camacho

Jess is from New Jersey. She loves comic books, pizza, wrestling and the Mets. She can be seen talking comics here and at Geeked Out Nation. Follow her on Twitter @JessCamNJ for the hottest pro wrestling takes.

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