Twin Peaks Rewatch 37: The Return, Part 3

[Maple Syrup and Ham]

I'll leave it there for now, I could babble on for ages! None of my friends watch Twin Peaks so I have no one to bounce ideas off, therefore you are my sounding board and thinking outloud avenue... apologies!

[Spud]

2 hours ago, Maple Syrup and Ham said:

Also, when the blind woman went up and pulled the lever and seemingly reset the purple room below, changing the "safe teleporting box" number and the woman inside. I'm not sure if this woman was meant ro represent the same woman but before she had her eyes fused closed, maybe by "mother" or whatever is banging on the door. Perhaps suggesting the room has changed in time rather than a change in space? It is then strongly suggested that this purple room is still well within the confines of the black lodge, because it is the only place where backwards talking has been used and exhibited, and that's exactly what this new woman was doing.

 

I had very similar thoughts to this. There's been a lot of talk regarding time in these first few episodes, not to mention how we're seeing the events out of order. But mostly I was trying to explain that purple room scene to myself.

One thing that's a bit unexplained is that it almost seems like the couple in the video room actually caused the black monster to appear by their sexual activity. In that case, it wouldn't really fit with whatever was making the banging noise in the purple room being the same thing.

 

The identity of this "anonymous billionaire" is going to be quite important, I think. I am secretly hoping it's going to be a total curveball like Thomas Eckhardt (although I know it can't be him.)

[Maple Syrup and Ham]

19 minutes ago, Spud said:

One thing that's a bit unexplained is that it almost seems like the couple in the video room actually caused the black monster to appear by their sexual activity. In that case, it wouldn't really fit with whatever was making the banging noise in the purple room being the same thing.

 

True, however i'm as of yet uncovinced that the sexual activity is what caused the monster to appear, It could easily be some misdirection from Lynch and just wanting some close ups and focus on the whirring noises, he seems to be far more focused on sound effcts rather than music in this season than previous ones. If it was them who caused the thing to appear in the box then it opens up possible ideas of how emotions can cause enterances to this other world appear. Such as when Wyndham Earl found out that fear is what opens the black lodge, or love is perhaps what opens the white lodge. Still think that the glass box is a corridor rather than a room in it's own, so don't think it's an entry point as such.

[mikemariano]

Synopsis: Cooper has trouble moving on his own and gets "new shoes."

 

[LadyHawke]

16 minutes ago, mikemariano said:

Synopsis: Cooper has trouble moving on his own and gets "new shoes."

 

I was at least somewhat disappointed that Cooper didn't say "new shoes" when the hooker was putting them on him. Or maybe that's what Leo really meant ...

[Jake]

The podcast is up! https://www.idlethumbs.net/twinpeaks/episodes/the-return-part-3

[richardco]

 

[purps]

Regarding the room with the outlet and the woman with no eyes, a user on the Twin Peaks subreddit has a theory that I think makes total sense

 

Quote

Within the room Cooper enters at the beginning of the episode, we see a massive electrical outlet on the wall, and time appears to alternate forwards and backwards. This alternating direction of time is, I feel, meant to represent alternating current. Alternating current is how we deliver electricity via the wall sockets in our homes. Rather than having to send electrons in one direction for miles to their destination, we just reverse their direction over and over 60 times a second (50 outside of the US). This allows for the transmission of electricity over long distances as safely as possible. The opposite of alternating current (AC) is direct current (DC). DC is what comes out of a battery, and - which is important, here - out of a car's cigarette lighter.

The switch that the woman (called "Naido" in the credits) pulls on the top of the building changed that huge socket on the wall from AC to DC. The room is no longer going back and forth in time. The building is all set to DC mode. Naido did this to help Cooper enter the car where the Doppelganger was. He was nowhere near an AC wall socket, he was in a car in the mountains away from civilization, with only a DC car lighter socket nearby.

What Naido (or Mike or The Arm) didn't know, though, was that Dougie had been created. He was basically a double-doppelganger who the ring from the lodge somehow made possible. So when Coop was all set to go through the DC outlet in the car, he actually ended up going through an AC wall outlet to where Dougie was. This made it so that his mind is now all kinds of scrambled up. That gold ball which (I'm guessing) represents what Coop needs to function properly was filtered out and left in the Red Room. Coop is trapped in a body that can't even seem to retain memories, as we see when he just repeats the last few words of somebody else's sentence.

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6dz7ad/s3e3_electricity_and_what_went_wrong/

 

 

I agree that I think the reason Cooper is so out of it is due to the fact that his re-entrance to the real world has gone wrong, and not just because he's been gone 25 years. I say this because Cooper does seem to be capable of comprehending and participating in a conversation when he talks to Laura and the Giant in previous episodes.

 

And also some people have pointed out that electricity, alternating current, and a gold marble are all things that appear in the script for Ronnie Rocket, which was supposed to be Lynch's followup to Eraserhead and spent over a decade trying to get made but never was able to get a studio on board. I haven't read the script, it's out there, but I could see Lynch re-using some of these concepts since he was never able to make it. Also the synopsis for the script on wikipedia is "the story of a detective seeking to enter a mysterious second dimension". Which certainly sounds familiar.

[pyide]

23 hours ago, Maple Syrup and Ham said:

I also found it interesting how Mike knew to cover his eyes just before Dougie turned into the gold ball, has Mike seen this before? He certainly looked perturbed, he was maybe expecting DoppleCoop to be the one who was there.

 

Definitely something that stood out to me, although Mike doesn't shield his eyes until that odd grey (electric tree-like) head thing appears after the clothes propped up by the black smoke fall away. He definitely sees some of the gold ball floating around before that.

 

Someone mentioned it could be related to whatever killed those two getting it on in front of the glass box in Part 1, as that thing didn't attack them until they were looking at it. Hard to discern with it shaking around so much, but the head on that thing did appear to be slightly different than the post-Dougie apparition, and more than just a floating head blob of course. As Mike is shielding his eyes, the head blob thing in the red room sort of deflates and flies around with the gold ball until it disappears in some flashes of light and a small gold ball is all that's left. The head could just be a glimpse of whatever evil Bob used to construct Dougie. IDK. It did look similar in shape to the evolved Arm / electric tree head, but no electric branches attached which makes it seem like something else entirely.

 

Speaking of that, were there two different electric trees in Part 2? One was purported to be to be the evolution of the Man From Another Place aka The Arm, but it seemed like another one appeared later (its own doppelganger?) which freaked out then said "non-exist-ent!" and sent Cooper on that ride. The first tree head was a fleshy pink color and the one that freaked out was a gross sickly yellow. And whatever that was that appeared after Dougie vanished was grey.

 

6 hours ago, purps said:

Regarding the room with the outlet and the woman with no eyes, a user on the Twin Peaks subreddit has a theory that I think makes total sense

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6dz7ad/s3e3_electricity_and_what_went_wrong/

 

I agree that I think the reason Cooper is so out of it is due to the fact that his re-entrance to the real world has gone wrong, and not just because he's been gone 25 years. I say this because Cooper does seem to be capable of comprehending and participating in a conversation when he talks to Laura and the Giant in previous episodes.

 

That guy could be right on the money, but it all seems a bit too specific and elaborate to be accurate. And I personally don't buy the correlation with the gold ball to the real Cooper he's trying to make.

 

I took Cooper's behavior in part as a result of the transference itself seriously messing him up, in addition to the long amount of time spent there (didn't Major Briggs show some problems after vanishing for just 2 days? Crossing over and coming back seems to have some effect on otherwise normal humans).

 

Anyway, when he first gets close to the outlet before getting completely sucked in, he's zapped loudly and in a puff of smoke backs off with a wide-eyed and confused and then part empty look on his face, as if he's already getting a taste of what's to come. It's a huge expression for someone who has been nearly expressionless the entire time we've seen him in this limbo, which also seems to do him no physical harm otherwise - like falling forever into nothing only to land on a concrete slab and getting up like a cartoon character without a scratch. But simply getting near the outlet definitely had a substantial effect on him. And that was just a brief encounter with this phenomena, when he fully commits to going through the shock his body & mind is subjected to could be exponentially worse and take a while to recover from. That's the most basic explanation I could give to what's happening, but also likely to be completely wrong.

 

There is a brief moment of recollection in Cooper's face to what Laura said to him during a previous episode in the red room when Jade says "Yes. You can go out now" when dropping him off at the casino. Cooper visibly reacts to this more than anything else up to that point in the real world, showing he might be able to come back from whatever is wrong with him. Plus Lynch also beats the viewer over the the head with this info by overlaying the footage of Laura herself saying "You can go out now" after Cooper shows some recognition. It's also an odd phrase for someone to use when telling someone else to get out of their car, seemed very deliberate on the author's part.

[James]

7 hours ago, pyide said:

Speaking of that, were there two different electric trees in Part 2? One was purported to be to be the evolution of the Man From Another Place aka The Arm, but it seemed like another one appeared later (its own doppelganger?) which freaked out then said "non-exist-ent!" and sent Cooper on that ride. The first tree head was a fleshy pink color and the one that freaked out was a gross sickly yellow. And whatever that was that appeared after Dougie vanished was grey.

I could have sworn someone mentions a doppelganger shortly before that scene, and it definitely looks different; I certainly took it to be a different entity (or a different aspect of the same entity, or however the doppelganger thing actually works).

 

It seemed pretty deliberate that there was an ominous shot of the classical statue with a missing arm (different than the one in the standard Red Room scene) at the end of a curtainy corridor shortly before that. Does that represent Mike, or Mike's double, or some other ring-bearer with the associated arm numbness (Dougie, for example), or the Arm's former status as part of Mike's whole body?

[dartmonkey]

The statue inside the room (with arms) behind the armchairs is the Venus de' Medici. The one missing arms is the Venus de Milo and that's usually in the red curtained corridor between the rooms. I hadn't made the connection but the doppelganger arm does seem to take that statue's place before screaming "NON-EXISTENT!"

 

I just rewatched ep3. A couple of things stood out this time. On a very personal level, the section in the mauve area really helped me bridge the gap between '91 Dale Cooper and the '17 version. As Chris noted in the podcast, Kyle MacLachlan looks great after 25 years but there has been a disconnect for me between classic Coop from the old show and the stoney-faced older Cooper we've seen up to now. My brain was constantly noting the new lines on his face and how weird it was to be back in the same place (the same exact chair!) after so long from an aesthetic POV. I was watching him until now on that intellectual, 'wow, everyone's worked super hard to nail the details' level. The bleached out contrast of the new area blurred out those wrinkles and sort of linked the old character to this older version, for me. I recognised his silhouette and his guileless expression and, on an internalised level, I really felt like I was watching the same person for the first time.

 

Also, I realised how I loved the lighting in the room where Dougie disappears/Coop materialises. The shadow that creeps along the wall as Cooper's black smoke line stretches out of the plug really communicates that this thing definitely isn't a dream or a vision (unlike, say, the guy in the prison cell fading away which is more ambiguous) but concrete and material. The same with the vomity garmonbozia stuff sitting on the shagpile. I saw a tweet that captures what I mean, and amplifies the '70s vibe the room (and Dougie) had going on.

 

 

[Spud]

1 hour ago, James said:

I could have sworn someone mentions a doppelganger shortly before that scene, and it definitely looks different; I certainly took it to be a different entity (or a different aspect of the same entity, or however the doppelganger thing actually works).

 

It seemed pretty deliberate that there was an ominous shot of the classical statue with a missing arm (different than the one in the standard Red Room scene) at the end of a curtainy corridor shortly before that. Does that represent Mike, or Mike's double, or some other ring-bearer with the associated arm numbness (Dougie, for example), or the Arm's former status as part of Mike's whole body?

 

Yes, the electric tree (the arm) said just before that, when he noticed weird things happening, "My own doppelganger"

Then Cooper walked through the back, where the statue turned into the trippy distorted version of the tree. I assumed this was the doppelganger version of the electric tree.

 

I also noticed the association with the two statues. I'm not sure it's anything more than symbolic at this point.

 

EDIT: Also I just remembered that the purple room had an ocean underneath it before he went inside, and then when he went upstairs, all that was below was stars.

[feelthedarkness]

I'm probably way late to the game here, but:

 

1) I wonder if the glass box didn't do what it was supposed to, and capture some (dark?) essence of coop? Rather than being followed that is.

 

2) I wonder if there is any significance to ronette worrying about "her mother" in the purple room, as a parallel to Leland and the lurking evil within?

[MalcolmLittle]

Okay, this season might even be surpassing my wildest hopes for the series. I should perhaps stop watching the Handmaid's Tale, I can't stop thinking about the episodes so far in The Return, everything else on TV is getting (unfairly) overshadowed.

 

Thoughts on Episode Three:

 

* Cooper materializing in the carpeted room scared the shit out of me. There is something so "waking dream/night terror" about how he forms. Generally goofy effects aside, this particular one was really affecting.

* Dougie's death(?) in the red room: hilariously strange. The sudden "pop" made me laugh and laugh.

* Hawk and the team's survey of the case files and evidence boxes was so drawn out. I loved it, especially Hawk's doubts on whether the bunny was significant.

 

[awesomeocelot]

Hello! New to the forum. 
I went and re watched the NYC glass box room scenes after this episode. It seemed to make more sense when you watch them in order with the purple/space room scenes.  
When ghost/monster women first appears in the glass box she seems to possess something like the small gold bead that Dogie turns into. 
I had a thought that the NYC glass box room was a human manufactured version of the purple/space room as they have so many similarities: a couch, a single observer present, mood lighting, and spooky monster knocking about.
I'm a little more convinced that "my mother" the American Girl is so worried about is the same monster in the glass box trying to capture Agent Cooper and turn him into the gold bead which ended up being Dogies fate. 
Anyone else getting this impression? 
-Laura 

[Atlantic]

In case you haven't seen it, here's David Lynch on the iPhone that was mentioned in this episode:

 

 

[ddennism]

I'm realizing while reading and listening along that my brain constructed a taxonomy of Coop souls that seems to differ from everyone else's. Specifically, I interpreted the abstract sequences in the beginning of part 3 of The Return (pink ocean, weird spaceship, eyeless woman, knocking threat, etc.) to represent the permanent obliteration of Good Dale Cooper, and his subsequent replacement with nothing, resulting in a Mr. Jackpots.

 

So we have:

 

1. Dale Cooper (Good) - Hero of the original series. Naively inquisitive, and a champion for good. Thinks laterally and likes solving puzzles.  

2. Dale Cooper (Bad) (aka "Mr. C") - Doppelganger of #1. Confronts #1 in the Red Room at the original series finale, and appears to replace him. 25 years later, has bad hair and is running around killing people. A willing vessel for BOB, or perhaps an avatar of BOB himself.

3. Dougie Jones (Merely Existing) - A boring, pudgy Coop of the treeless suburbs. In financial trouble. Not sufficiently interesting enough for most of his acquaintances to distinguish him from #4. "Constructed for a purpose" by #2, presumably to take #2's place when it's time to be sucked back to the Red Room. 

4. Mr. Jackpots (Non-Existing) - A functionally lobotomized Coop in the body and (initially) clothes of #1, occupying the circumstances of #3, after #3 is extinguished in the Red Room. Magically lucky. The doppelganger of Dougie Jones. MIKE and the The Arm are shocked to discover that constructs (such as The Arm) can have doppelgangers.

 

Unidentified Coops:

5. Cooper of the black-and-white room at the very beginning of The Return. Intently receives clues from ?????????. Is actually far away. Probably #1.

6. Blue-eyed coop in the season finale of the original series. Cackle-buddies with BOB. Probably #2.

It seems like most people are interpreting Mr. Jackpots as a temporarily mentally-impaired continuation of Good Dale Cooper. When did this impairment happen? We briefly see the coherent, original Good Dale Cooper in few scenes prior to the chaotic rift in the Red Room, so its not like it happened as a consequence of 25 years of Red Rooming it.

 

I also sometimes find myself conflating all four species of Coops as different modes or phases of a single soul.

 

Either way, I love you, Mr. Jackpots!!!

[Ozzie]

Mr. Jackpots, aka Senor Droolcoop (except even more out of it than the room waiter of the Great Northern)

[Gregalor]

11 hours ago, dartmonkey said:

 

I really appreciate that the chosen font on this is "Cooper"

[Woodfella]

Spoiler

My bro had the interesting idea that the headless John Doe body was Garland Briggs, because of the military restriction on his prints. And we see a disembodied Briggs head floating about.

 Wild speculation above

[Jake]

Oh man the floating head tied to the body! I mentioned "is the John Doe actually major Briggs" in the episode four rewatch episode (coming soon) but didn't tie it to the head. 

[fellintooblivion]

I don't think the "Seriously" conversation was a reference to satellite radio.

 

Here's the exact transcript:

 

Quote

Gordie: Albert, we're headed for the Black Hills of South Dakota.

 

Albie: The Black Hills, seriously?

 

Gordie: As happy as this news makes us Albert, we can't put this on the radio.

 

I took this to mean Albert was annoyed at having to go all the way to South Dakota and Gordon was responding that this news was too sensitive to put out over the "radio" and broadcast it to local agents for them to investigate.

[fellintooblivion]

10 minutes ago, Jake said:

Oh man the floating head tied to the body! I mentioned "is the John Doe actually major Briggs" in the episode four rewatch episode (coming soon) but didn't tie it to the head. 

 

Spoiler

Bobby says how his father died in episode 4. If the fire was hot enough to turn his bones to ash (the only way Cooper could have conceivably taken his body would be to explain away the absence of it) it would have done the same for his skull and I doubt they would have considered Brigg's death a closed case if they found no remains. Of course I have no idea what Bobby is referring to when he says his dad died in the fire at his "station".

 

Spoilers for episode 4, read if you've seen it.

[fellintooblivion]

Can we start referring to Bob/Cooper as Boop and Gordie/Cooper as Goop?

[fellintooblivion]

On 5/23/2017 at 3:10 AM, bioshrimp said:

I have mixed feelings on particular this episode. a large part felt a bit too much like a lynch movie.

 

This is my problem with the show so far, it feels exactly like a Lynch movie and I don't particularly like Lynch movies.

 

Especially Inland Empire which this seems to be following the same formula for.

 

Mark Frost's influence is nowhere to be seen on this show.