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| "She's not dead... not wrapped in plastic!" |
The third season of Twin Peaks
has played out like exactly no other TV show ever. This bizarre,
experimental, fever-dream of a series has instead felt very much like
one giant movie split into chunks; indeed, it was actually written
that way. As a result, the episodes tend to defy the television form,
lacking in beginnings, middles, and ends, with scenes appearing and
then vanishing to presumably set up something later (or maybe just to
be flashes of bizarreness in and of themselves; this is David Lynch,
so who knows). The perfect analogy that keeps coming to mind is that
for the first almost half of the season David Lynch was scattering
pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle, giving us incomplete fragments that
will presumably build up into a bigger picture later. I have loved
(pretty much) the whole thing, mind you, but there is no denying that
it is willfully scattered to the extreme, though brilliantly so. Over
the second half of the season, the great pleasure of Twin
Peaks: The Return has been
seeing these pieces start to fit themselves together. Seemingly
disparate parts of the plot have connected in often-unexpected ways,
things that seemed random or insignificant have taken on deeper
meaning in relation to other pieces, and we are starting to see the
basic framework of the sweeping narrative web that fits it all
together. This week's episode, titled We Are Like The
Dreamer in a perfect metaphor
for the season as a whole, did possibly more connecting and
puzzle-piece-placing than just about any other episode, and the
result was both richly rewarding and very surprising. Still all very
dense and baffling, of course (as is the wont of David Lynch), but
for Twin Peaks season
three, this is what one would call a rapidly-paced, narrative-driven
episode. And it may be one of the best installments yet.
At
long last, we are seeing the (first of several, no doubt) puzzle
pieces fall into place that (might) bridge the gaps between Hawk's
team in Twin Peaks, Gordon's team in Buckhorn, and the hapless life
of Dougie Jones. It is still only a tantalizing hint at the shape the
narrative might take over the final four episodes, but it is at least
enough to get an invigorating sense of the larger schemes at work,
which look an awful lot like the machinations of fate (or those of
the Black Lodge). These linkages are at times very surprising, at
times downright hilarious (the dry-yet-wacky humor of both Gordon and
Lucy just never gets old), and at times very creepy indeed. Some of
them are payoffs for things that we have been hoping to see happen,
while others are totally out-of-left-field surprises that left me
with my jaw on the floor. One of them in particular now ranks right
alongside episode 8's Woodsman sequence as one of The
Return's creepiest moments. The
episode even provides some not-entirely-expected but very welcome
clarification of mysteries that have been left dangling ever since
Fire Walk With Me and
its Missing Pieces.
The episode also includes the season's most surreal imagery since
episode 8 – nothing on quite that level of hallucinatory madness,
but stuff still more than weird enough that it would have blown
viewers' minds on the original series.
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| "Welcome to my favorite dive bar. Drink full and ascend." |
All of
it is acted quite brilliantly by the show's ever-growing ensemble. In
addition to Lynch and Kimmy Robertson's still-great awkward comedy,
the show makes excellent use of a few of the other returning
characters. Once again Dana Ashbrook is excellent, showing a subtlety
of acting and a genuinely emotional dynamic range that he never
really got to explore in the old series, when his Bobby Briggs was so
perpetually over-the-top. Ashbrook remains an unlikely favorite of
mine among the returning characters: his arc is genuinely moving, and
he handles the material far better than his manic-teenager
performance of old would have ever lead me to expect. I really hope
that this season leads to him getting a second career boost as a
dramatic character actor. Also excellent, though less unexpectedly
so, is Grace Zabriskie as the long-suffering, possibly-mad Sarah
Palmer: she has long been one of Lynch's most eerie and unnerving
muses, and that has never been more true than here. Her performance
in this episode provides one of its strongest moments, and will truly
get under your skin. And while we will likely still be debating until
the end of this season and beyond whether James is actually (or ever
was) cool, James Marshall gets some pretty strong material to work
with here, to at least show us that the character he has aged into is
quite a bit better and more interesting than his Roadhouse-favorite
theme song. His scene ends up being another unlikely standout,
although in this case it is largely because his co-star in the scene
steals it out from under him with a wonderfully bizarre monologue.
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| "Bobby is a real cop, and I'm just a security guard... will I ever be better than that guy?" |
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
Thank
Dougie Jones. Share this review.