‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 9 Is the Return to Classic ‘Twin Peaks’

Many watchers of Twin Peaks: The Return cite David Lynch’s statement we should consider it a narrative unity — an “18-hour movie.” Lynch, and by extension co-writer Mark Frost, want us to receive the show less as a serial, and even less as a collection of discrete episodes. It’s all one big piece.
Some critics find that pretty impractical, and perhaps even a bit distasteful. A TV show isn’t a movie, the argument goes. If we’re not supposed to take this in one episode at a time, then Lynch and Frost shouldn’t bother with the medium. Furthermore, week-to-week analysis — and traditional, episode-based narrative pleasure — is stymied and obfuscated, as we patiently await Part 18 to arrive in two months’ time. Until then, we can speculate, theorize, and opine as much as we damn please; It all doesn’t matter until September 3, 2017.
Here’s the problem with this line of thinking: Lynch never said that Twin Peaks: The Return was an 18-hour movie. What he did say was that the show was “a feature film in 18 parts.” This may be semantics to some, but I think that it is an extremely important distinction, one with fairly seismic implications for how the show is constructed, and how we should receive it. To put it succinctly, Lynch is making episodes.

My editor, Meghan O’Keefe, was getting at this to a certain extent in her column last week about Lynch and Frost’s plot design. “It’s going to take a while,” O’Keefe says, “but [Lynch is] aiming to bring all the pieces he’s thrown across the tapestry of Twin Peaks together finally.” O’Keefe demonstrates that seemingly accidental pieces of information, slow pacing, and otherwise narrative “bagginess” end up paying off the more we see of the show. Lynch and Frost are embedding key pieces of narrative information early without attaching expository weight to them until they are good and ready to reveal those pieces’ importance.
They are also being extremely deliberate in what pieces they collect into separate 55-minute installments. It’s not an accident that Part 8 uses the Woodsmen’s revival ritual to set up the Trinity sequence, which then leads us to the Woodsmen’s “invasion” of that small New Mexico town. Similarly, it seems particularly deliberate to place the revelatory extended sequence of Dougie uncovering insurance fraud next to the dense and horrifying death of the young boy at the hands of Richard Horne in Part 6.
So too in Part 9, which is a narrative yin to Part 8’s yang. Whereas Part 8 was an overwhelming (literal) explosion of light and color — the likes of which has never been seen before in mainstream narrative American television — Part 9 could have easily fit into the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. It’s the most conventional episode we’ve yet seen in the series.

The first way that Lynch unifies the episode with more traditional television aesthetics is by cutting between plotlines. Lynch has obviously been doing this the whole series, but in Part 9, he does it with greater speed. The opening shot of Evil Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) arriving at the farm takes 28 seconds. We then cut to the plane where Gordon Cole (Lynch) gets the phone call about Major Briggs’s body in Buckhorn. The sequence takes approximately 90 seconds before we’re back to Evil Cooper being greeted by Gary (Tim Roth) and Chantel (Jennifer Jason Leigh) on the farm. A minute later and we’re back on the plane, where Gordon pleads with Diane (Laura Dern) to accompany them to Buckhorn. Gordon gets another call informing them that Evil Cooper escaped, and we get a most delightfully Twin Peaks exclamation: “Cooper flew the coop!”

That sequence lasts a bit more than two minutes, and then we’re back on the farm, where Evil Cooper delivers instructions for two hits, and then hits the road. A total of three minutes and 15 seconds pass before the sequence finally concludes.
The use of cutting between these two sequences lacks the elongated pacing of earlier episodes, where events often seemed to merely transpire. These both offered quick narrative propulsion, moving both storylines along in a crisp fashion. Both contain exposition, but neither are the info dumps that populated Part 7. Both are cut quickly to create the sense of narrative thrust, but neither converge nor climax in the way that Richard’s murder of the boy does in Part 6. In fact, the more than eight minutes of screen time the whole sequence occupies feel like a pretty straightforward A and B storyline in a network cop drama.

Lynch adopts the narrative style of traditional TV here. Later, he repeatedly takes on the tone of early Twin Peaks in one scene after the other. We get an extended moment of Andy (Harry Goaz) and Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) bickering like they used to when Lucy was pregnant. We get some Dale-and-Harry-style sleuthing when Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), Hawk (Michael Horse), and Frank Truman (Robert Forster) try to unlock the secret capsule containing a message from Major Briggs. We get a classic pass at adultery when Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) and Beverly Paige (Ashley Judd) nearly embrace. Hell, even the capture of Ike “The Spike” Stadtler (Christophe Zajac-Denek) plays like Cooper and Truman nabbing a bad guy right before going to commercial, Badalamenti jazz score and all.
Perhaps most emotionally satisfying is the scene where Truman and his deputies visit the home of Bobby’s mother, Betty (Charlotte Stewart). Betty reveals that her late husband had left a message for Bobby, Hawk, and the sheriff, because he knew that they would one day ask her about Agent Cooper. Stewart, a criminally underused asset in the series’ original run, echoes Don S. Davis’s speech to Bobby in the season 2 premiere, using a vision to tell his son that he had hope for his future. Major Briggs channels himself through Betty. A father reassures a son, his love filling a room he does not occupy. Lynch even cuts the moment short in typically Twin Peaks fashion by the four of them sitting down for a cup of coffee.

Lynch didn’t have to put all of these narratives together in this way. And yet, by doing so, he can use the constraints of a 55-minute episode to make each storyline bounce off each other and reinforce his thematic intentions. Lynch lives at the extremes, so why not give us an hour of avant-garde mindfuckery juxtaposed with an episode torn from the Twin Peaks playbook? Not only does Lynch give us the full breadth of his visual style and narrative approach, but he also delineates them into cohesive, weekly chunks, just like a TV show.
Or rather, a feature film in 18 parts.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports.

Stream Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 9 on Showtime