As suspected last week, I can now confirm that watching Twin Peaks hour by hour is probably not the best way to experience it. From publicity before Showtime’s revival began airing that admitted it’s basically an 18-hour movie, to the fact that the last two hours do not have the traditional structure of a television series, I’m now in a quandary about the rest of the season. I really, really want to wait and binge the entire thing at one time. However, I don’t think I can wait until then to see what happens next.
Now that I’ve figured out how the show is going to work, its sixth hour did not test my patience as much as its fifth hour. It begins immediately where hour five ended, with Dougie/Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) standing in front of the Lucky 7 Insurance office building. A security guard assists getting him home where he tells his wife, Janey-E Jones (Naomi Watts) that he seems a little disoriented. She replies, “That’s on a good day.”
She’s a real firecracker, and if you think the way she treats Dougie is any indication, wait until you see what she says to the two thugs she meets to deliver blackmail money. Earlier, she discovered a manila envelope with a photo of Dougie and Jade, the prostitute. She talks to them in a park, telling them $52,000 is ridiculous. She’ll pay them $25,000, her final offer, and never wants to see either one of them again.
Most of the hour follows Dougie/Cooper as his storyline inches slowly forward. The one-armed man in the Black Lodge appears before him with a message: “You have to wake up. Don’t die.” I share the sentiment; wake up, Cooper! I’m eager for him to fully return; however, I also enjoy seeing him as dazed Dougie. The innocence of the “newborn” Cooper is charming, from the way he relishes his coffee to the way he interacts with Dougie’s son, Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon).
The “childish scribbles” he makes on a stack of files at first anger his boss, but then please him. What in the world do they mean? They probably prove the wrongdoings of his colleague, Anthony Sinclair (Tom Sizemore), whom Dougie called a liar during the last hour. When his boss thanks him and acknowledges that the information he provides is “disturbing,” he attempts to shake his hand, then says, “Dougie, you’re an interesting fellow.” Indeed.The next largest period of time is spent with Richard Horne (Eamon Farren). Although there’s no mention of it yet, I think it’s safe to assume he’s related to Benjamin Horne. He’s more despicable than we ever saw Benjamin, though. At the end of the last hour, we saw him threaten to rape a girl at the Bang Bang Bar. In this hour, he makes a drug deal, then is involved in one of the more horrific events we’ve ever seen on Twin Peaks. It leaves us, and the people who witness it, shocked motionless.
The buildup to this event contains seemingly disparate elements, from a dime-flipping bad guy named “Red” (Balthazar Getty) to the return of trailer park manager Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton). Rodd is one of the witnesses and he sees a yellow flame rise from the aftermath and dissipate into the air. The entire sequence ends with a slow pan up a utility pole where the transformer at the top buzzes ominously.
Meanwhile, a man in a Las Vegas office building delivers a white envelope to a man in a motel that’s rolling dice and making notes in a spiral notebook. Inside are two color 8 x 10 photos, one of Dougie and the other of a woman I didn’t recognize. This man stabs the photos with an ice pick, then does the same thing repeatedly later with the real woman (and the poor woman who witnesses her murder). We can assume this violent man will be approaching Dougie/Cooper next, although he’s quite distraught when his weapon is bent.
There are also a few brief, yet important moments in the sixth hour:
- We learn the identity of the woman that Albert (Miguel Ferrer) wants to take a look at Bad Cooper.
- We learn that a woman named Mary Anne is the Double R Diner’s best pie customer, although she can’t afford to leave the big tips that she does.
- Hawk (Michael Horse) discovers some papers within a stall door in the bathroom. Could these be diary pages?!?
- We learn that Sheriff Frank Truman’s (Robert Forster) wife, Doris (Candy Clark) was not always a raging bitch. She changed after their son committed suicide.
As should be anticipated, there are also characters and plotlines that aren’t mentioned at all:
- Bad Cooper
- The murder in Buckhorn
- Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) – could his story be finished now that we’ve learned what he does with the gold shovels?
- Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones) and his wife, Becky (Amanda Seyfried)
Despite my confusion on how to consume Twin Peaks, I continue to love it. If it didn’t create some type of unease, David Lynch and the show probably wouldn’t be doing their job. It’s not just this acknowledgment that caused me to like hour six better than hour five, though. As you can tell from this recap, a lot more seems to happen… or, at least a lot more that seems significant. We’re one-third of the way through it already! Time moves slowly on the show, but it’s racing out here in the real world.
