“The past dictates the future.”
There were a number of points during the two-hour Twin Peaks finale where I turned to Kevin and said, “So… what was that?” We revisited a couple parts over and over, and then eventually came to the conclusion that it sounds like most people have reached: that we’ll never know how much of this was Dale Cooper, the dreamer who lives inside the dream, and how much was real. Certainly there is or was a life beyond any of the three Coopers (I’m including Original Dougie in this), because there were scenes that took place without his perspective, but there’s a point in the finale where what seems clear becomes murky and we end up in as big a tangled heap as we started. It does seem, and this is what most people have determined, that the finale depicts the sad but unsurprising realization that you can’t change the past. There’s no turning back, and no undoing what’s done. Much like Audrey Horne in episode 16, we are trapped in our reality even when we try to dream it away into something else. In the end, Agent Dale Cooper, well, fails.
The episodes were also rife with clips and references to the past, particularly Fire, Walk With Me, including digitally editing Kyle MacLachlan into certain scenes and then presumably doing some CGI work on Sheryl Lee to extend Laura Palmer’s scenes to places they didn’t originally go. This is long, so settle in with your caffeine.
Episode 17
Who is Judy?
It seems Major Briggs and Coop, or Jeffries, or Gordon Cole, or SOME configuration of this merry band of supernatural detectives, had discovered an even bigger bad than BOB: Jow-day, or “Judy.” And there is, I believe, some claim that events all unfolded in a particular way as part of a long-game plan to get Judy. See? I KNEW Judy Blume was up to something.
Gordon confesses all this to Albert, but before we get much further, he finally learns Coop and Dougie Jones are one and the same. Dougie’s boss reads Gordon a message from Coop: “I am headed for Sheriff Truman’s. It is 2:53 in Las Vegas, and that adds up to a 10, the number of completion.” Gordon thanks him and slams down the phone and shouts, “DOUGIE IS COOPER? HOW THE HELL IS THIS?” I feel you, Gordon. But he recognizes that this is a Blue Rose case and they’d better hightail it to Twin Peaks.
Meanwhile, in Twin Peaks…
ASSHOLE CHAD IS DEAD. It was so satisfying. Apparently, this whole time, Asshole Chad had a key in his shoe that would unlock his cell, but he just… didn’t bother using it, despite being super infuriated about being there. It seems like he was waiting for Billy Bleeding Face to stop moaning and fall asleep? Anyway, Asshole Chad has freed himself and scooped up a loaded gun when Andy comes downstairs into the prison. Chad aims the gun and says all sorts of abominable things to poor decent-hearted Andy, and like, I’m frustrated with Andy sometimes, too, but dammit, YOU don’t get to talk to him like that, Chad. He’s OUR nitwit, not yours. Fortunately, before Chad can blow away Andy, he walks past Rubber Glove Freddie, who winds up and punches his way out of his cell — again, why didn’t he try that sooner? — and then delivers a death blow to Chad.
Rubber Glove 1, Assholes 0.
What becomes of Agent Creeper?
His story ends half an hour into the first of the two finale episodes. His magic coordinates take Creeper to this weird ground situation. As he steps close to it, he triggers the vortex whence came the eyeless woman, and sucked up Andy for a brief chat with The Fireman — and that is where it also sends Creeper, where he engages in the most resplendent CGI staring contest with Major Briggs.
He’s shown Laura Palmer’s house, and then — his face in the cage having changed into a black spiky fright wig — is transported via the Fireman’s Seussian soul gramophone to the lawn in front of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. “What is this?” he growls. Which is my reaction to his cage essence.
Also, can we just all agree that’s meant to be Briggs’s actual head, and explains its whereabouts? I find the asinine CGI here absolutely delightful.
Anyhoo, I assume Creeper got sent there because the Fireman and Briggs knew this was the step toward obliterating him for good. Lucy and Andy fall for the dupe Coop, although Frank Truman seems wary, until Agent Cooper himself calls and shocks Lucy into realizing that there are two Coopers, and the wrong one is in her office. Lucy patches him through to Frank with as subtle a nudge as she can manage. Sadly, Frank has a terrible poker face, so he stares daggers right through Creeper while he’s on the phone and it prompts Creeper to pull out a gun. And this is where Dale Cooper arrives in the nick of time and saves the day, and has a great showdown with himself, right?
WRONG. Creeper shoots at Truman. But he misses and only twiddles Truman’s hat. Why? Because LUCY F’ING BRENNAN, in her very worst murder clothes, plugged him in the back. Well done, Lucy. “I finally understand cellular phones!” she shrieks at Andy, as if they represent the same kind of duality the two Coopers present. I’m glad disabling a supernatural being has provided her such clarity.
Then, Coop shows up, followed by the Mitchum brothers, and Hawk. Thanks I suppose to his supernatural vortex vision telling him what to do, Andy leads the group from prison into the room — this is why I started with Asshole Chad; his demise comes about because Andy went downstairs to release everyone — and that’s why everyone is present to witness the Woodsmen doing their weird, bloody restorative work on Creeper. Instead of bringing him back to life, though, this results in BOB’s face in a giant bubble being released into the room. So this is when Dale Cooper faces off against his mortal enemy, the being that possessed him, and saves the day. Right?
WRONG. This is when Agent Cooper summons a new tertiary character, Rubber Glove Freddie, so that his bionic fist can fulfill its destiny. What ensues is a rousing game of volleyBOB.
Three or four different times, Bubble BOB starts to gnaw on Freddie’s face — in the vein of the Being in the New York Box that we’ll never hear about again — only to get punched away again and again until he finally disintegrates. So basically, a character we’d never met until a couple episodes ago a) completed the takedown of the season’s most infallible villain, b) took down the entire canon’s most infallible villain, and c) killed Asshole Chad just for good measure. Why did Agent Cooper even need to rush there, if he had nothing to contribute but his suave looks?
Rubber Gloves 2, Assholes 0, Original Characters 0.
How did the Mitchums handle all that?
“One for the grandkids,” they say, gruffly.
At least they brought sandwiches. They are welcome at my house anytime, and we don’t even have to sucker punch a douche in a bubble, either.
What the hell happened after the volleyBOB match?
This is where things start to fracture for my comprehension. I mean, more than usual. In the sheriff station, Coop puts the ring of doom on Creeper’s finger, thus consigning him to the Black Lodge. Then Coop looks at the eyeless woman and stops in his tracks, staring at her curiously. Suddenly, a shot of Agent Cooper’s face is superimposed, transparently, atop all the subsequent scenes. Like so:
Bobby Briggs arrives and says, “What’s going on around here?” (The Mitchum Brothers, my new favorite TV couple, agree that’s an excellent question.) Coop tells Bobby that Major Garland Briggs was well aware of these events, and gave them the information that brought them all here today. This is the worst answer to that question, Coop. You have told him nothing. NOTHING.
Then he intones, “Now, there are some things that will change,” and it may or may not be significant that we cut to Hawk here for an understanding nod. “The past dictates the future,” Coop adds. I take that, in retrospect, as the key that Coop thinks he’s going to try and undo Laura’s death.
Back to Eyeless: She and Coop touch hands — Coop’s face is still hanging out over all this like a spectre — and then we flash to her faceless in the red room. It reforms as a pink-haired Laura Dern, wearing the SHIT out of that wig, and then materializing in the police station wearing Eyeless’s bathrobe and PJs (loaned to her by Lucy).
“Diane,” breathes Coop, and then they MAKE OUT. She sighs, “Cooper. The one and only,” as an allusion to when she kissed Creeper and knew something was amiss. GET IT, DIANE. Or, frankly, GET IT, COOP, because she is a damn dish. In fact, she even looked gorgeous when she only had half a face:
Back to the sheriff’s department: “Do you remember everything?” Coop asks Diane. She slowly, even sadly, nods. This reveal that Diane and Eyeless are either one or connected, which had been a popular fan theory, also recontextualizes Eyeless’s brief appearance in Episode 3.
Coop glances at the clock. It tries to tick up to 2:53, but jumps back to 2:52 each time. From what I can glean, this is the time printed on Major Briggs’s note that was found in his chair, along with coordinates. Taking that with Coop’s note to Gordon, this shot may suggest that Coop cannot yet reach completion, and we’re not talking in a sexual sense, because that does happen later (presumably). It suggests he’s either delayed in the short-term, with one more thing to go, or permanently stalled in his objective.
“We live inside a dream,” he tells the room, except we hear it as a slowed-down combo of his regular voice and Creeper’s. Back to normal for this: “I hope I see all of you again. Every one of you.” So, again, it seems like he’s going to try and unwind the past, but suspects it will erase this future and render it merely a memory.
The lights go dark. “Gordon?” Dale appears to panic. “COOP,” Gordon shouts. We fade to black.
Phew. Take a breather.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?
Just kidding. Okay, immediately we go a nondescript corridor. Diane, Coop, and Gordon walk Coop to the edge of reality, and bid him adieu. “See you at the curtain call,” he says to Diane and Gordon. He uses the Great Northern Lodge room 315 key — that numerology, I have no sense of — and passes into an encounter with MIKE, who quotes verse from Fire Walk With Me:
“Through the darkness of futures past, the magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds. Fire, walk with me.”
MIKE then escorts Coop up the same stairs that Creeper traversed a few episodes ago and into the steamy garret favored by all former FBI agents who’ve turned themselves into gargantuan tableware.
“Phillip?” Dale asks curiously. “Be specific,” Teapot Jeffries burbles. Cooper gives him the date of Laura Palmer’s murder — Februrary 23, 1989 — and while Jeffries locates it, he tells him to tell Gordon hello: “He’ll remember the unofficial version,” Teapot steams. And then: “This is where you’ll find Judy.” Then, he shoots out an infinity symbol with a ball moving around it. “You can go in now,” he says. “Cooper, remember.” And then MIKE says, “ELECTRICITYYYYY,” and Dale is zapped into Fire Walk With Me. Does this mean Laura Palmer is, in some way, Judy? Or is Judy what terrorized her? Please note that I’m asking that question even having seen the second hour.
This is all very Back to the Future.
It is, but with sadly less Doc Brown and “Earth Angel.” Coop is Marty McFly, watching things happen, having traveled from one realm into the next, leaving one future for the one he hopes to trade it for; here, he becomes a spy on the night Laura Palmer died.
We see James and Laura making out, and declaring their passion, before Laura lets out a bloodcurdling scream. “You don’t know me,” she then tells James. “Even Donna doesn’t know me. Your Laura disappeared. It’s just me now.” I think that’s what she’s saying? Laura, crying, then seems to go cold. “I think you want to take me home now,” she says, before falling — or hopping? — off James’s bike as he tries to leave with her. “JUST DON’T,” he says, becoming hysterical. “I LOVE YOU JAAAAMES.” Then she runs off.
Watching this after having seen this revival, it feels like the same duality of The Return’s Sarah Palmer, doesn’t it? In the episode where Sarah tore off her face, she was alternately jittery and preternaturally calm, often within the same scene. Her voice changed from twitchy and panicky to low and smooth, as if the true Sarah poked through in flashes before the other persona won out again. Those echoes must be… on purpose, right? Or are they my hallucinatory attempts to find meaning?
Laura sees something strange in the woods while sobbing, but this time it’s Coop, holding out a hand to CGI Sheryl Lee, never filmed here from anything but a distance as if to mask her wig as best they can.
“Who are you? Do I know you?” she asks. “Wait. I’ve seen you in a dream.” The Laura Palmer theme kicks in full-force here. Is she the dreamer, and he the dream? Or vice-versa? Or neither? As Dale leads her through the forest, we see the shots from the pilot of Laura Palmer’s body bag on the rocky beach. It slowly vanishes. Back to Coop: “We’re going home,” he tells Laura as her theme triumphantly swells. Back in the technicolor world of the pilot, the man who discovers Laura’s body has nothing to discover. It all seems to have worked.
Until. A shot of Sarah Palmer’s dimly lit living room, in what could be present-day, or the past. That, I can’t tell. The sound of a generator powering up. A creaking. A shrieking, a wailing. A low, electronic buzzing. Then, as the music gets vicious, Sarah attacks Laura’s photo with a knife, over and over, stabbing out he glass while she cries. Back and forth, as if caught in a brief loop.
Is this from the pilot? (I don’t think so – J) Or is this current Sarah, maybe inhabited by Judy? Are we meant to think this is the sign that Laura was doomed, no matter what Dale did? Because just like that, we go back to the woods, and as the world colorizes again Coop realizes he no longer has Laura by the hand. She has vanished. Her deathly scream rings through the woods as Coop looks around, baffled. A wave of disappointment washes over Coop’s face, as if he’s failed at his assignment. And Julee Cruise pops up to perform song that kicks us into the credits.
Episode 18
We begin in the Red Room, with Agent Creeper’s body flambeeing in a chair. What ensues is a slight recap of the Red Room scenes with Dale Cooper from the premiere, which makes me wonder if there’s a Harry/Voldemort dynamic at work here: Perhaps neither can live while the other survives, and Dale was only able to return to Earth to dispatch his horcrux, at which point he came back to the Red Room to finish the other part of his assignment: “Find Laura,” as Leland Palmer desperately begs him (here again, and in Episode 1). Or, maybe in the sheriff’s station, when Coop’s voice took on a Creeper quality briefly, it was a way of fusing parts of the two back together, because Dale does start to change in this hour. I don’t know. The moment Coop’s face freezes over the scenes in the police station seems significant. Does it symbolize him realizing that he’s never going to live that moment again, if he changes the past? Does it mean the rest of this is a dream? Is he being erased from existence? Or does it mean he’s just really good-looking and that all scenes should have Kyle MacLachlan’s face over them?
Oh, but first, there can only be two Coopers at a time, right?
I think that’s right. One good, one evil, perhaps? While Coop was in the Black Lodge, I guess Dougie Jones became Good Coop while Creeper was the bad one. And then when Dale came out of the Lodge, Dougie had to die so Coop could replace him, thus maintaining only two at once. So here, as Creeper burns, MIKE reforms Dougie with one of those little gold seeds and a lock of Dale Cooper’s hair. “Electriiiicityyyyyyy,” MIKE intones, placing one of those David Lynch really seems into power. I wonder if he was electrocuted lightly as a child. Its crackle is pervasive in this reboot, and it both gives life and takes it.
Dougie at least gets to be resurrected in Dale’s image, rather than the portly, greying Dougie we saw with Jade. “Where am I?” he booms in the Red Room, beaming widely and with a slight vacuous air. Cut to him ringing Janey-E’s doorbell. (“Just a minute,” she immediately says as she’s walking to the door, which bugged me every time I saw it, because nobody says “Just a minute” when they’re only three steps away from the doorknob.) She and Sonny Jim greet him adoringly with tight hugs, and he bleats, “HOME,” with a genuine but faintly empty smile on his face. So here’s my question: Do we think this is ORIGINAL Dougie, back again, in better shape but still sort of dopey? And does that explain why people weren’t as surprised when he turned into a demi-vegetable? Listen, as long as Janey-E continues to get the best sex of her life, I’m good with whatever.
Back to Coop!
We revisit him losing Laura in the woods, then smash to him in the Red Room with MIKE from Episode 1: “Is it future, or is it past?” Which, again, takes on more retrospective meaning now that we suspect Coop is going back and forth. Not that I’m blessed with a TON more clarity here. I don’t know if this is happening for the second time, or the first. But we go through a couple more paces — we see Laura whisper in his ear before her signature scream sounds again and she’s sucked up into the ceiling — before Coop passes through a curtain and revisits the Arm. And the Arm says to him something that we all may have ignored from Episode 1: “Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane?” That has resonance now because it was Audrey’s trigger phrase with Charlie. Not a coincidence, but I’m clueless as to the meaning, unless the idea is that it tips to how both women are stuck in a weird netherworld.
This time, when Coop goes through his final curtain — indeed, the “curtain call,” to use his phrase — he appears in a garden of dead twigs and sees Pink Diane. “Is it you?” she asks. “Is it really you?” He looks emotional and asks, “Is it really you?”
There is so much love in their eyes. You would never guess Laura Dern has no history on this show.
The room fades. They appear to be in Twin Peaks at night, by the strange ground situation near the vortex thing. What a marvelously specific sentence that was.
Cut to: Diane and Coop in a car, driving by day. He’s in something of a jalopy, and to me the light seems like it’s trying to express that we’re in the past. “You sure you want to do this?” Diane asks. “You don’t know what it’s going to be like.” Cooper says they’re already at that point: “I can feel it.” They travel exactly 430 miles — it’s noted twice — as Diane’s nerves grow, and then Coop pulls over at a spot that looks a bit like where Richard Horne was electrocuted by Agent Creeper’s OTHER coordinates. “Just think about it, Cooper,” Diane begs him, but he gets out and walks toward another site rife with electric crackling and power lines. He nods and checks his watch, then returns to the car. “This is the place, all right,” he says. “KISS ME. Once we cross, it could all be different.”
They pass through an electric field and suddenly it’s night. (There is so much night driving on this show, by the way.) They are silent and taciturn until they pull into a single-story motel in Coop’s banged-up classic car.
Coop gets out without a word, and Diane sits there until she notices herself huddled over by a brick pillar.
They glare at each other — our Diane stern, other Diane almost sad — until Coop returns, and the vision is gone. Still without a word, Diane follows Coop into Room 7. She flips on the light; he orders it off, and when she asks what they do next, he says, “You come over here to me.” He calls her Diane. And they have sex.
But it’s unsettling, as Twin Peaks usually is. There’s a mix between an oldie and menacing music, as the two have sex, Coop staring passionlessly at her while they kiss. It read as angry to me for a second, but on another viewing, I think he was just studying her. Halfway through, she begins to cover up his face with her hands as the pleasure becomes increasingly upsetting and she begins to cry. The next morning, when Coop wakes alone and calls out for Diane, there is nothing but a note from someone named Linda, telling Richard that it won’t work for her anymore because she no longer recognizes him. Dale halts confusedly on “Richard” and Linda.” (In Episode 1, The Fireman told Dale, “Remember Richard and Linda,” in addition to giving Dale the 430 number, which is how far they drove before they got to this place.)
My theory on this is that Coop was watching to see when Diane might cease to become Diane, and that Diane as she inched toward climax knew that she was slipping away from herself and becoming something else.
And that’s not all that’s changed.
When Dale emerges from the motel, it’s suddenly two stories, and he’s driving a modern, nicer car. He looks back at the building as if fumbling for an awareness that it wasn’t where he began his night, and I can’t tell if he eventually realizes what’s happened, or if he too is slowly losing parts of himself. He certainly never ceases being FBI, nor starts calling himself Richard, but he does comport himself with a slickness more typical of Creeper. The latter mostly occurs when he’s inside Judy’s Coffee Shop.
The name not being an accident. Perhaps the instructions Jeffries gave Coop — “This is where you’ll find Judy” — were separate from sending him back in time to 1989. Don’t ask me why.
Coop is in search of a particular waitress who isn’t there. The one who is gets harassed by some locals, and watches three guys harass the waitress. First, he asks after the other waitress — who is at home — and Coop coolly snatches his gun, kicks him in the balls, and shoots him in the foot before turning the gun on his armed friends.
Let us also note that this waitress resembles Amanda Seyfried very strongly, and I wonder if that’s not an accident either. Cooper stonily extracts his target’s address from this waitress by robotically saying, “Write the address of the other waitress on a piece of paper,” twice, in Creeper’s tones again, and then drops the jackasses’ guns in the deep fryer. His behavior in this scene is very un-Dale-like. “It’s okay. I’m with the FBI,” he drones. But he’s not this wonky anywhere else. I wonder if simply being inside Judy’s drew out the Creeper within?
Where even IS he?
In Odessa, Texas, where he travels to the home of one Laura Palmer. Except she goes by Carrie Page, is somewhat of a hard-luck mess, and has never heard of Laura Palmer. Nothing Dale tells her about Laura Palmer’s life rings any kind of bell except perhaps the name “Sarah,” the sound of which makes her tremble slightly and lose her breath. “What’s going on?” she whispers.
Fortunately for Dale, Carrie has gotten herself into some fairly significant trouble, given that it turns out there’s a dead dude in her living room with flies swarming around the gunshot wound in his forehead. So she’s perfectly willing to skip town with a stranger claiming he’s in the FBI. The night driving scenes — again — are long and fraught, thanks to a pair of headlights in the rearview mirror that create much tension about whether they’re being followed.
It goes on forever, but it’s masterful tension.
Finally, Carrie falls asleep after mumbling, “Odessa. I tried to keep a clean house. Keep everything organized… Those days… I was too young to know any better…” I assume Dale is driving her back along what he hopes is Time Travel Highway, hoping it zaps her back into being Laura. And then MORE DRIVING. SO MUCH DRIVING.
Oh, look what Dale spotted outside Laura/Carrie’s home:
We saw a 6 pole twice in Twin Peaks at significant events — the death of the child, and during Andy’s visit to The Fireman’s land — and Dale gave it a glower of recognition here. DAMN YOU, SIX POLE. WHAT IS YOUR DAMAGE.
Do they ever freaking get there?
Yes. But when they pull up to the Palmer house, the door is answered by the current resident. (Which also, I hear, is the home’s actual current resident.) Dale cannot believe it’s not only NOT Sarah Palmer, but that she has no knowledge of Sarah Palmer, never met Sarah Palmer, and did not buy the house from Sarah Palmer. Let me quote Vulture here because that’s where I got this information:
“When Coop asks who sold them the house, she says, ‘Mrs. Chalfont.’ When he asks about her name, she says, ‘Alice Tremond.’ We know these names were used by the creepy creamed-corn neighbor of the original series, who reappeared as one of the many spirits of the Lodge in Fire Walk With Me. Something is wrong here, but still, the names do not prick up Coop’s ears.”
Coop walks away, stunned, shaking his head, while Carrie stares uncomprehendingly at the house. Suddenly, Coop’s head jerks up. “What year is this?” he asks. Do we think it’s significant here that his car, after the long drive back, remained the new car from the Richard-and-Linda reality rather than somehow reverting to the older Coopmobile he was in when it started? As if he thought he was rescuing Laura from times past and bringing her to the present, but is now marooned there, like Marty getting trapped in 1955? There is a number theory online that this scene is meant to take place on 10/10/2015, also the date it was shot, but that ties into NONE of my theories so I DON’T KNOW.
There is also, by the way, a symmetry between the way Coop leads Laura through the forest in his attempt to redo 1989, and in the way he leads Carrie/Laura up the front steps of the house.
And then, suddenly, faintly, we hear the cry, “Lauraaaa,” on the wind, and Carrie starts to tremble before letting fly Laura Palmer’s signature scream. The lights go out in the Palmer house, and the last shot of the series is a slow-motion, dusky replay of Laura whispering her secret to Dale in the Red Room before she got zapped.
His expression in this shot echoes the one he made when he glanced at Eyeless, and suddenly his visage was projected over the rest of those scenes. An intentional similarity? NO IDEA. Maybe that’s just Kyle’s face, or maybe it all connects.
I don’t know if this was a Dale vs. Judy, Good vs. Evil, vicious cycle kind of thing, or if Dale never left the Red Room at all, or if he did to rid the world of BOB and Creeper but then — by intervening to save Laura Palmer from whatever evil murdered her — created a world that has no place for either of them. It’s… I can’t wait to read your theories, because I’m fresh out of logic. Every time I think I’m onto something, I circle back to confusion. But I’ll say this: I thoroughly enjoyed that befuddlement. The revival was shot through with so much unexpected humor, and I found myself frantically Googling whether another season is in the works. The answer: No. At least, not right now.
But tell me that wasn’t laying the framework. We can never go home again, David Lynch may be saying, but — like Nadine, Ed, and Norma — we can go forward from wherever we are.
LINGERING QUESTIONS
ALL OF THEM. EVERYTHING. But especially:
What was that box in New York, anyway?
No idea. NO. IDEA. Presumably it wasn’t part of Project Blue Rose, especially given how hazardous it was to that one dude’s health — in that he and his lovah got their faces eaten off.
Why did Major Briggs’s headless body land in South Dakota, aged nary a day?
Nope. No clue. Maybe it dropped through a vortex it shouldn’t have, given that it was commingled with parts from poor dead Ruth the secretary, who was — with Matthew Lillard — poking around these weirdo space-time-dimensional shenanigans. I’m also not clear on how her head and his body made it all the way back to Ruth’s apartment so that it could rot in comfort, but Ruth’s body was lying in the field near the mouth of the vortex, ingloriously spit out onto the ground.
Do we think Sarah Palmer was Judy? She ATE A MAN’S NECK.
Maybe. I’m guessing Sarah’s story was really just about how grief paralyzed and destroyed her, with a dash of supernatural face cabinetry. But it’s interesting that when Laura opened up her face in the Red Room, it shone only light; when Sarah did it, there was a giant mouth, and we know how that went. Maybe the argument Lynch made is that Laura got off easy in death, and what’s left behind was the true muck.
What became of Shelly and Red?
Shelly and Red and even Audrey may tie into the idea that you can’t escape your past — and this obsession Lynch seems to have about death and change. He seems not to believe anyone truly can change. Shelly, for instance, appears to get her act together, only to end up involved with a guy more dangerous than Young Bobby Briggs ever was. Her daughter, Becky, repeated those mistakes with druggie Steven. And Audrey seems to have been trapped in her own brain, or perhaps in her madness, because we can’t undo that explosion that cost her a future. Nadine — and, in his way, Dr. Jacoby — is the only person who seems hell-bent on changing her future by starting with the present, and she did it. Nadine might be the hero of the piece.
Does anyone care that Steven, Becky’s husband, may have shot himself?
WHO KNOWS.
And did Gersten–
BEATS ME.
Hey, did Beverly (Ashley Judd) ever–
SHRUG.
Wasn’t it implied at one point that the Roadhouse was a front for prostitution?
Sure! Did it go anywhere? HELL NO.
And what about all those random conversations at the Roadhouse, about people we’d never heard of before? Or Sky Ferreira and her itchy arm? Or the dude who showed up ranting that he almost got run off the road and was lucky to be alive?
NADA. I actually wonder if it doubled as a way station of sorts. That doesn’t explain scenes that featured Jimmy and Freddie, or Shelly, or Renee, but those other bits and bobs of conversations — and Charlyne Yi’s scream — felt a lot like some kind of purgatory. As in, maybe Mr. Lucky To Be Alive was, in fact, caught somewhere in between.
Remember when Bobby went to deal with the kid who “accidentally” shot at the diner, and there was a woman leaning on her horn screaming , “THE MEN ARE COMING,” and then her zombified daughter threw up some primordial ooze?
Yes. THAT WAS GROSS. We never heard from her again.
HOW CAN I PROCESS THIS?
In the comments. Let’s do it together.
