3x17 Part 17

[7.0/10] Well, I’m back to giving flat sevens to “The Return” as a shrug, because I have no idea how to rate this thing, which is, I think, a good thing. But when lost in a sea of images and scenes you’re not sure you understand, it makes sense to return to the very basics, so let’s go with what I liked and didn’t like.

I liked the reveal that the eyeless woman was, in fact, the real Dianne. A good reveal should recontextualize what the audience has already seen in an interesting and natural way, and the Dianne reveal does that. It makes sense how she would try to communicate with Coop in the nether realm and endeavor to get back to the real world. It makes sense that The Bad Dale would try to hide her away as part of his plan in order to have someone close to the real Cooper on his side in her place. (And the change in hair color to signify the difference was a sort of easy choice that nevertheless worked really well.)

And somehow, despite the fact that we’ve never actually seen the two of them together before, there was something really heartwarming and cathartic about Cooper and Dianne kissing. Dianne was always an unseen but clearly felt presence in the original run of Twin Peaks, and so I can accept the two of them as an OTP. There’s enough hints of something there in the past, and a sense that they’ve been separated for so long that it works.

I did not really like Freddy with the green glove Iron Fisting the Bob orb into shards. It’s fine as a nuts and bolts “we have to move the plot forward” sort of thing, but there’s just no emotion there. I do appreciate how they worked around the death of Frank Silva, and the zooming and biting put the Bob Orb in line with the shapeless form that killed those two young people in the premiere. But I don’t really care about Freddy, and if anything, despite the weirdness, it felt like more of a superhero film solution to this problem than a more off-kilter Twin Peaks resolution to it. (Though I would have been perfectly satisfied if he merely punched the jail cell to knock out Chad and get the rest of the gang in place -- that was a nice moment.)

I did like that Lucy gets a chance to save the day in a scene that seems to call back to Andy pulling a similar trick with Jacques Renault. The quick draw where The Bad Dale shoots Frank Truman’s hat but Lucy takes him out is a little cheesy, but it worked to hold the tension in the moment. Hell, as much her and Andy’s antics have annoyed me in the past, I even got a kick out of her line about understanding how cellular phones work now (all it took was an explanation from The Good Dale)! I’ve given my fair of crap to Lynch and Frost for seemingly pointless nonsense (and granted, there’s still plenty of it) but I’m impressed at how many of their digressions have actually had relevant payoffs.

I did not particularly care for The Bad Dale’s journey into the White Lodge. There’s lots of ways to interpret it (and it’s striking seeing the floating head of Major Briggs there), but The Giant putting his face in a cage and sending him to the sheriff’s office via the same device he once used to send the Laura orb to Earth just didn’t click with me for some reason.

Still, I did like the prophecy/clockwork element to the climax here. Presumably, The Giant acted to get everyone in the right place at the right time, hence keeping Mr. C out of the White Lodge and sending him back to Twin Peaks. Sure enough, at 2:53, the forces align to get everyone where they need to be at the sheriff’s office. Twin Peaks has always had an interesting sense of time dilation, but I like that enough folks picked up on Major Briggs’ hints to get the players in place to banish The Bad Dale, revive Dianne, and set the next step in motion.

And yet, there was something kind of unsatisfying about it that I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s that I think I wanted a scene with The Good Dale confronting The Bad Dale, just to see Kyle MacLachlan act against himself. Maybe it’s that the key to defeating Bob (however temporarily) turns out to be a green gloved rando rather than anything one of the better known characters did.

But in some ways, Twin Peaks thrives on anticlimax and subversion, and I can admire that even if it leaves me cold. I can easily see Lynch & Frost delighting in the notion that they set up this seemingly inevitable, epic showdown, and it comes down to a gunshot from Lucy and some punches from a kid in a gardening glove we only met three episodes ago. It might be a stretch, but I think it’s speaks to a point about the inscrutability of the will of the gods and the randomness of life, that even seemingly unremarkable folk like the Brennans and Freddy can have a vital role to play in the face of cosmic events.

I did not, however, like the sense of a sort of drive by reunion we got once the major threat had been eliminated. Maybe we’ll get more in the final episode, but after waiting so long to get the real Cooper back, and to reunite him with an (admittedly kind of contrived) collection of nearly every major character from the town in the same room, we get some stilted, oddly written remembrances (i.e. statements along the lines of “your dad saw to all of this, Bobby”) without ever really having a chance for the real Coop to actually reunite with anyone other than Dianne. That’s pretty unsatisfying, and maybe that’s intentional, but it’s also a bit frustrating.

That semi-wooden dialogue is part and parcel with some odd expositional moments in this. I don’t know how I feel about the explanation that “Judy” is “Juh-Deh” some ancient dark force (presumably the same one that we saw birthing the Bob orb, destroying those kids in the premiere, and maybe lurking inside Sarah Palmer?). It feels a little too neat for Twin Peaks, and having Cole just give an info dump about it seems odd too. (Plus I could swear I read somewhere that Judy was supposed to be Josey’s sister, not that Lynch & Frost aren’t allowed to change directions from an original plan that never made it to the screen.)

It’s also a bit odd that Gordon Cole and Diane could follow Coop into the furnace-y area that James stumbled onto earlier, but no one else could. I guess to just give them an extra moment to say goodbye? I do like that the Great Northern hotel room key served a purpose (another bit of payoff) in granting Cooper access to the Room Above a Convenience Store, though the sequence itself wasn’t nearly as striking as when The Bad Dale visited there a few episodes ago.

Really, that whole sequence is kind of a mixed bag. There’s plenty to like, with nice moodiness and the melancholy of saying goodbye, but also lots of stuff that doesn’t quite work, like Mike repeating the same old “Fire Walk with Me” poem and more time spent with the enchanted tea pot version of Philip Jeffries making smoke signals in the air.

That said, I loved the tack the episode takes after that. Having spent time in the Lodge, having understood more of the geometry and possibility of this place, Cooper sets out to erase the horrible event that started this all -- the death of Laura Palmer. There’s great symbolic resonance in that -- in the eternal battle between good and evil that has been waged over the course of Twin Peaks, Cooper tries to shortcircuit it at the beginning, to prevent any of these events from happening in the first place.

There’s something affectingly elliptical about that, the notion of Cooper giving up all the life-changing things, good and bad, that happened to him because of Laura’s death, and wipe them away to prevent the instigating evil of the series from taking root. (Granted, he probably should have gone back sooner to stop Leland/Bob, but I’m willing to give the show some leeway in making this more of a symbolic beat than a purely consequential “would you kill baby Hitler?” type deal.) There is a great sense of catharsis in that, in Cooper saving Laura from her fate, while simultaneously erasing all the events the audience has seen over the past twenty-five years. It’s a gusty move from Lynch and Frost, and I admire it.

I also admire how well they integrated Cooper into the decades-old Fire Walk with Me footage and managed to connect it to present footage. Maybe I just need a better TV, but I was impressed at how well they stitched together old scenes and new scenes to make something that feels genuine to what we saw in the film, but also advances the history-changing narrative of the episode in a striking visual way, replete with the body wrapped in plastic disappearing.

I don’t know to feel about the ending, or what to make of it. That ear-splitting shriek can still scare the life out of you, and Cooper and Laura’s trip to (presumably) gastonberry grove in the past is a nicely moody one, filled with the sense of Laura’s distress and possible release an Cooper filled with the righteous, spiritual sense of trying to right past wrongs. But why Laura disappears, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe you can’t change fate, or even saving Laura from being killed still sends her to a difficult place regardless? Someone brighter than me will have to figure that out.

But I can tell you one thing -- I’m still not on board with Julee Cruise reprising her spacy warbling for the show again. Frankly, that goes for all the music in the episode, which understandably reverts to using much of the score from the original series that always put me off sonically. That, however, can be chalked up to taste, and even if it takes me out of some scenes (Cooper’s reunion with Dianne was nearly ruined by that so-cheesy-it-hurts backing track), I can accept it as a part of the show’s DNA.

Overall, this is unquestionably a momentous episode, filled with playoffs and climaxes and challenging new directions to take the narrative. What it amounts to, what it means, and whether it’s any good is something that I just can’t answer. But it got me talking (not necessarily a challenge) and also thinking (maybe more of a challenge) so it’s certainly worth something. Maybe the final episode will help crystalize it all and make things clearer, though knowing Lynch, I’m not holding my breath.