There are those who claim that in today’s visually-saturated, sonically-bombarded, information-overloaded world, good, old-fashioned words have lost not only, in many cases, their meaning, but also their power — and yet, with nothing more than one word, David Lynch and Mark Frost stopped Twin Peaks fandom as a whole dead in its tracks tonight.
That word? “Diane.”
And here’s the damndest thing of all: It wasn’t uttered into a micro-cassette recorder by Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper, it came from the mouth of Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenfied, and it was addressed to an actual, living, breathing human being — specifically, Laura Dern. But now we know. Now we know who Coop was talking to for all those years, and all those years ago. And something tells me — and I’m telling you in turn — that’s going to have big repercussions.
Oh, and other things happened in part six of Twin Peaks 2017/Twin Peaks: The Return/ Twin Peaks Season Three, as well — in fact, it was an uncharacteristically brisk, dense, and harrowing segment, punctuated by the unspeakable tragedy of a child mowed down by a speeding truck and the hyper-violent outburst of a maniacal contract-killer midget. It re-introduced beloved figures like Carl from the Fat Trout Trailer Park (Harry Dean Stanton only gets more awesome with each passing year, doesn’t he?), dropped Patrick Fischler and Tom Sizemore back into the mix for no apparent (as yet) reason, shed an all-too-human light on the nature of the relationship between Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster) and his wife, Doris (Candy Clark) that perfectly explains both of their demeanors, offered up a genuinely touching moment between Dougie/Dale and his boy, Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon), showcased Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) doing his best detective work to date, took a minute to breathe a bit more character depth into Shelly Johnson (Madchen Amick), proved that Norma must offer way better wages and benefits than the average cafe owner since the Double R has apparently kept the exact same staff in place for 25 years, and gave Naomi Watts’ Janey-E Jones a hitehrto-undisclosed backbone that was definitely worth the price of admission alone. Yup, a whole lot went down tonight — and in the best Twin Peaks fashion, not all of it was entirely explicable.
Take, for instance, Dougie’s idiot-savant abilities manifesting themselves in the form of child-like scrawling all over his “case files.” I couldn’t make head or tail of any of it, but it sure seemed to impress the hell out of his boss. And where Harry Dean Stanton (who gets the best line of the night with “I’ve been smoking for 75 years — every fuckin’ day”) goes, mysterious power lines seem to follow, as the departure of the dead child’s soul/spirit/essence into the electrical grid perfectly recalls a similar “cut-away” shot from Carl in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And I’m thinking those numbers on the telephone pole probably mean something, too.
And since we’re on the subject of speculation, I think this is as good a point as any for me to officially advance a theory I first floated on Facebook a few days back: Eamon Farren’s drug-fueled psychopath? Who can now add “kid-killer” to his resume? The minute I heard he was part of the Horne clan, it hit me: He’s the child of Audrey and “Evil Coop.” And he’s got a lot of his daddy in him. Come on — you know it makes sense.
Fuck me, but there’s a lot to process after this one, isn’t there? We’re officially 1/3 of the way through at this point, and the only thing I can say I know with absolute, lead-pipe-cinch certainty is that John Pirruccello’s Deputy Chad is the biggest d-bag on the planet — but in my experience, that’s almost always the case with grown men named “Chad,” anyway.
At any rate, his is not the name we’re going to keep coming back to again and again as we re-play this episode — sorry, “part” — through our minds, is it? Nope. We finally know who you are, Diane — now, who are you?
Tags: candy clark, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Madchen Amick, Mark Frost, Miguel Ferrer, Naomi Watts, Patrick Fischler, Pierce Gagnon, robert forster, Showtime, Tom Sizemore, TV, Twin Peaks
Thought the exact same thing about Farron’s character. Even to the point of wondering if that has some connection to why Cooper-as-Dougie gets all misty about Sonny Jim.