3x11 Part 11

[7.4/10] Todd Vanderwerff wrote that the mythology of Twin Peaks is one where we are the gods’ playthings, never really understanding why they do what they do, nor they truly understanding us. The more we see of Dougie, the more it feels like this show embracing that idea in a big bear hug.

Dougie, after all, is a naif, and yet there are very strong and powerful forces of evil, both supernatural and human, and powerful forces of good, both supernatural and human, that essentially bat him around like a hapless shuttlecock. The machinations of Bob and The Bad Dale, working through Duncan Todd and Dougie’s co-worker Anthony, mean to get Dougie killed by means of the Mitchum brothers. But the combination of Janey-E, Dougie’s boss, and Mike operating out of the lodge himself are enough to keep Dougie on the side of the vertical.

There’s something that continues to be funny to how oblivious The Good Dale is to all of this (and something tantalizing and frustrating about him saying “damn good” while digging into cherry pie), but there’s also something cosmic and metaphorical about it. Here is this nigh-empty vessel, carrying the essence of The Good Dale within him, and it’s all competing teams of demons and demigods and regular folks can do to either knock him over or keep him afloat.

The back half of the episode mostly turns into a story about all directions pointing Dougie toward shipwreck, only for him to nigh-miraculously muddle his way out of danger. I’ve never been a big Jim Belushi fan, and he’s a little broad, but he and his fellow Mitchum brother kill the scenes of this pair of gangsters being ready to shoot The Good Dale in the middle of the desert, and then turning into a gleeful embrace of the man. Their expressions when they get the million dollar check, or Belushi’s insistence that if Dougie has a cherry pie, they mustn’t shoot him, or even the two just eating breakfast and anticipating the moment of truth is a tidy little vignette about these two men seeing their problems go away in improbable terms.

That’s the theme of the back half of “Part Eleven.” Sometimes fortune smiles upon you in a way that changes your life. It can be a little cosmic greasing of the wheels that spares you from an arid end, or it can be a dream-portended pastry that heralds a big payday, or it can be a simple point to a winning slot machine that brings the old woman we met during the premiere into a new home, a little dog, and back into contact with her son. Good things can happen, Twin Peaks seems to be trying to reassure us, even if we don’t quite understand why or where they come from, just as that beautiful piano music seeps into the celebration.

But the yin and yang of Twin Peaks is that bad things can happen just as easily and just as mystifyingly, and that seems to be the animating theme of the first half of the episode. It’s much moodier and more ambitious in its editing and disorienting qualities. Seeing Becky, filled with rage at her husband(!?) Steven, nabbing her mother’s car and driving around with Shelly grasping on the hood is a tense sequence, one that again captures the terror of the moment like only Lynch can.

We learn, then, that Becky is the daughter of Bobby and Shelly, the latter of whom still carries her husband’s last name, but is no longer with him. Norma’s knowing looks portend this cycle continuing, one that affected both her and Shelly, after Becky nearly kills her husband for cheating on her. There’s a sense that Becky’s parents may have gotten through to her, that maybe they’ve convinced her to move on and things can be different, but then Shelly herself runs outside to smooch with a new bad boy of her own, and there’s the sense that it’s inescapable, just another downward spiral that Carl Rodd gets to witness as a bystander.

Credit where credit is due though, I’ve ragged on Dana Ashbrook a lot over the course of Twin Peaks, but he does good, understated work here. When he doesn’t have to try to cry or anything, he does some good internal work showing a concerned, older version of Bobby, one who can comfort his daughter like an adult and address a bizarre situation going outside that nearly kills her.

That situation happens when a family of three, decked out in a camouflage, inadvertently starts a traffic jam when a spare handgun accidentally gets in the hands of their young son, who pulls the trigger and sends the bullet flying into the Double R Diner. It’s a chance bit of danger, one quite different from the deliberate series of events that sent Miriam crawling through the grass toward a trio of young boys. It’s the random sort of bad can happen.

The same kind of random bad when Bobby goes to check on a woman honking her horn, only to discover a very sick young woman. She begins rambling and screaming at him, declaring that they’re late, that her passenger is sick, and her frantic pleas are absolutely unnerving. That’s only matched by the passenger doing the exorcist routine next to her, a sign that Twin Peaks is stacking bizarre, unsettling misfortune on top of bizarre, unsettling misfortune.

But that’s what this show does, giving Cole a glimpse of the charred men just before one plies their skull-cracking trade on Hutchinson in the cop car (presumably in league with Mr. C). It has Hawk show Frank Truman a “living map” where the combination of a spiritual fire and dying corn leads to a black fire, a intersection of life and death and energy, that causes him to warn Frank away.

So little of anything in Twin Peaks can be understood at anything but a vague level. It’s mystifying by design, intended to disrupt what we think we know rather than affirm it. But sometimes, just as it shows us the incomprehensible horrors, mystical and otherwise, that descend upon regular people, it can also show us the serendipitous joys, the seeming bliss of providence, that can wash over us just as easily.