3x18 Part 18

Holy shit! Lynch and Frost fucking did it! These past three episodes have combined to equal the finale of the original series, maybe even surpass it. This episode is not a tight bow tying up the loose ends of the show but that's because it's not supposed to be. This show is about how evil weaves it's way into everything despite being beaten back countless times. Evil hits you where you least expect it and no one is safe because no one is perfect, not even Cooper. Tying up everything is directly contrary to the very purpose and direction of the show.

This finale is not completely coherent and it's not going to make sense in the way you may want but that is one of it's greatest strong points. Cooper, Diane, and Laura are right there with you, they think they know what's happening and which direction they're going but really have no goddamn idea. Coop specifically thinks he knows exactly what is happening and what he needs to do but is mystified when little things go against his plan. Diane leaves and on the note calls him Richard. Immediately after he leaves his hotel room and it's clearly a different hotel and car. He winces and moves on. He meets the woman he knows is Laura Palmer and she has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. But he persists because he knows in his heart he is right. She invites him into her house while she packs and it's apparent she's just killed her husband. Cooper stares, yet he still knows his mission and moves on despite the signs that he's in over his head. He goes to Laura's house with "Carrie" and is confronted by people who directly refute that Sarah Palmer has anything to do with the house (though oddly mentioning the Chalfonts) and "Carrie" stands there not exactly knowing what to tell him. Then the final breakdown happens where Coop is visibly shaken in the streets. Cooper asking what year it is spins the whole thing in another direction. Is it past? present? future? How long in what direction? We don't know and forced to accept that just like Cooper. The final thing we see are the lights going out as Laura looks onward and screams, as if she is actually Laura not Carrie. As an audience member you are terrified but you don't know why. It's a combination of a universal reaction to a scream and the memory of what that scream implies within the story.

To me the whole thing implies this constantly shifting time frame where the character's names and actions shift slightly. They are not exactly the same just as Dougie wasn't exactly Cooper, but they have similar roles. In one scenario Laura might find herself the victim of abuse and dying young from her abuser. In another she may find herself the victim of abuse but instead the roles are switched and she is the murderer. Cooper may find his dream girl investigating the case around a girl's murder, but if it never happens then even a relationship he had (Diane) may flounder for no specific reason. This uncertainty and randomness in the world gives rise for bad things to squeeze themselves into unexpected places, just as good things squeeze themselves in. David Lynch has stated that much of what Twin Peaks is about centers around coincidence. That didn't fully make sense to me until now where he shows us. Now the quirky nature of the show makes even more sense. These silly, unexpected things happen all the time and mostly they are good and harmless, but the bad also worms its way into everything. This episode and season in general are insanely complex and I'm writing this right after watching it for the first time so I may have mis-remembered some things ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and I have definitely missed some things and honestly I want to hear what because this ending just got my noggin joggin.

[7.0/10] This season ends as it began. That’s not just to say that Lynch and Frost go back to the beginning, with repeated scenes from “The Return”’s opening foray back in the Red Lodge, or that we return once more to the Palmer house where, depending on how you interpret “Part Eight” the instigating events of Twin Peaks started. It’s also to say that I have to rate this thing at a flat seven because, once more, I just have no idea what to make of the possible final bow for this show.

But I can tell you what I both admire and frustrate about it. This was not a traditional season/quasi-series finale. This wasn’t the culmination of everything that had come before (which “Part Seventeen” came closer to.) It wasn’t some triumphant or tidy bit of narrative housekeeping that gave everything meaning and summed up what had come before, even to the extent that the at times mystifying Season 2 finale did.

Instead, it was something entirely different than the Twin Peaks that we’ve come to know over forty seven episodes. It is weird and unknowable in the way that the best of Twin Peaks can be, but not in a way that really harkens back to the other red room or otherwise supernatural shenanigans we’ve seen so far.

Rather, it captures a feeling, one that seems to draw a connection to however and wherever Audrey is trapped. Here is Dale Cooper, restored once more, but finding himself waking up in a familiar yet foreign place. He’s drawn to certain places and names -- Judy’s diner, the face of Laura Palmer -- but the world doesn’t recognize him. Names are different. Everything is so close, to present, but also so just out of reach.

I’ve said before that I think Lynch is oftentimes a pretty crappy storyteller. His characters are hit and miss and his plots sputter and stall to the extent they’re worthwhile in the first place. But he is an almost incomparable crafter of moods, of these motifs and atmospheres that provoke something in you even if you’re not sure where, if anywhere, all of this is going.

“Part Eighteen” captures that sense of alienation, the sense of (again, as Audrey putting it) dreamlike arena where you know what you’re supposed to do and where you’re supposed to be, but something feels wrong, everything you know and want and think is important is lingering at the edge of the frame.

So much of Lynch’s oeuvre has involved capturing the surrealism of dreams, the way that one thought leaps into the next without transition or comprehension. But here, he captures a very different sort of dreamlike state -- the one where you live a different life, inhabit a different body, and everything seems normal enough, but the settings are miscalibrated, the world isn’t as it should be, and you can just barely wrap your hands around the sense that there’s somewhere else, something else you’re supposed to be, but that fought can find no purchase where you are.

It’s a finale with very little closure. We get no confirmation on what’s happening with Audrey. We’re left to wonder about what the implication and, moreover, the point, of Steven and Becky’s story is. We don’t know what happens in Twin Peaks after The Good Dale and cockney Iron Fist save the day. (Or do we?) While “Part Seventeen” closed off a surprising number of loose ends, there’s still so much that’s so up in the air or unclear after the show’s final hour which is, I suspect, how Lynch and Frost like it.

You do have Mike making a new Dougie and depositing him with the Joneses, in one of the few scenes that not only evinces a sense of finality, but also one of heartening sentiment. The other comes with the equivalent of Cooper’s last meal with Dianne. There’s the sense that the two of them know that what Cooper did, his saving Laura from her grisly end, changed something, and that whatever it means to cross over, to go past that spot -- the same place The Bad Dale (who’s consumed in black flame here) seemed to be driving -- exactly 430 miles away, will change it. Dale and Diane get to have one last moment of happiness, one respite from the time and distance in which they’ve been separated, to enjoy that bliss, scored to the dulcet tones of The Platters no less.

Despite that musical high point, “Part Eighteen” is a surprisingly quiet, languid episode. My mind drew back to Shadow of the Colossus, a large, often empty video game filled with far away destinations and long sojourns that force the player to reflect on their task and their role in these events during the journey. The Season 3 finale embraces the same idea, not populating its world with the chatter of conversation or the gooey riffs of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack or even much of the electric hum that’s zapped through so much of the show.

Instead, it offers those hollowing silences, where the road rumbles beneath and the dim lights of the highway peeking through an enveloping darkness. “Part Eighteen” is devoted to the scariness of that silence, the places where unnerving thoughts creep in and disturb or peace. More than painting his own portraits, Lynch in some ways offers an empty canvas, one where we’re left to fill in the disturbed blanks rolling around in the minds of Agent Cooper and Carrie Page.

And then comes the punctuation, the return to Twin Peaks but one that doesn’t feel like the warm place with a dark underbelly that we know and feel comfortable with. Whether it’s shot differently or just put in a different context, the place feels alien. As the camera seems to float up the steps of what we know as the Palmer house, there’s a sense of foreboding, of pulling at the wrong threads, or not being able to pull at them hard enough.

There’s clues. The woman who answers is the door gives her last name as Tremond, and says she bought her house from a woman named Mrs. Chalfont, both names used by the elderly woman who guided Laura in Fire Walk with Me and was served meals on wheels by Donna in Season 2. But they only serve to further disorient. Dale stumbles, almost like Dougie, realizing he’s not sure what year it is, or what realm the forces of Twin Peaks may have deposited him in.
Carrie looks up at that house one last time. Certain names, certain faces, sparked something in her, something that prompts her to ask what’s happening. And in the shadow of the house where so much abuse was visited upon Laura Palmer, the horrible truth seems to wash over her brain, and she lets out one last ear-piercing, blood-curdling screech, as the place seems to pop out and shut down in an instant, one last chilling images to make your heart skip a beat in this alternatively stultifying and unnerving show.

After forty eight episodes, I still don’t know if I like Twin Peaks, if the balance of those stupefying moments and those horrifying moments and those interminable moments and those transcendent moments comes out in the show’s favor or not. It is a show with deep flaws, either ignored or praised, but also a singularness that few series have grazed, let alone matched. It can indulgent, hokey, and downright dumb, but also weird, terrifying, and irrepressible when its stars align.

Its finale represents that, the head-scratch, unpredictability of the show, the long pauses that may leave you checking your watch, but also the strange mood that the show at its best could evoke. Twin Peaks is never going to be a show that makes sense, or even really wants to, but one deeply concerned with how it makes you feel. And that means it’s hard to know whether it’s good or bad, or even whether you like it or not, but it is there, and it lingers with you, like reality lurking on the edge of a dream, present and transfixing whether you seek it or shun it or just sit and wonder what it all means.

this episode wasnt at all what i expected the finale to be, and i cant say i exactly know how i feel about it. i wish we'd had more closure on long term characters we'd come to love. its only now as the series reaches its end that i question what became of donna. i dont recall exactly where she left off but im certain she was alive, and it feels strange to revisit laura with no sign of donna, even if i never liked her much. the finale was weird and wonderful like much of the show, and "carrie"s scream at the end mixed with coopers confused questioning of what year it is was intense and impactful. i dont know how i feel, but i think i enjoyed it. i think to me twin peaks as a whole is much better than most of its parts. much of twin peaks is questionable in quality, but the overall lingering feeling for me is positive — i enjoy this show deeply, cooper has become a strong comfort character for me, and the faults of this show are things i am willing to look past for the sake of my own enjoyment