‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 11: The Return Of The Real Dale Cooper Is Nigh

It’s the thing that every Twin Peaks viewer has been waiting for. It’s the thing that has confounded, angered, and delighted in equal measure. It’s the thing, along with the present absence of Laura Palmer, that everything else is structured around.

Put simply, we crave the return of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan).

This isn’t to say we haven’t seen some prismatic split of various forms of Cooper, of course. There’s been Cooper’s doppelgänger, an apparent billionaire with an international gang of criminal underlings and mysterious technology at his disposal. There’s been, briefly, Dougie Jones, an overweight, alcoholic, gambling-addicted insurance agent who might have been the creation of Cooper’s doppelgänger, and who is now a tiny gold ball trapped in the Red Room.

The most important of them all is Cooper himself. Having escaped the Black Lodge, Cooper has been sapped of nearly all intellectual faculties, rendering him something akin to Peter Sellers’s Chance the gardener in Being There. Pundits and critics commonly call Cooper by Dougie’s name, since everyone whom he encounters in Las Vegas believes Cooper to be Dougie, in spite of his anomalous behavior.

But we know who he really is. We see him wanting to surface, whether it’s the first cup of coffee he has in “Part 4,” or the declaration that Anthony Sinclair (Tom Sizemore) is lying about various insurance claims in “Part 5.”

How about his coldly efficient takedown of Ike “The Spike” Stadtler (Christophe Zajac-Denek) in “Part 7,” or the sight of an American flag in a police station, accompanied by Audrey Horne-esque red heels, in “Part 9?” Cooper is slowly waking up, as he must, as we so desperately wish him to, no matter how absurdly funny the slow, drawn-out, repetitive antics of Cooper-as-Dougie are. (And they are absurdly funny, something that has gone criminally underdiscussed.)

It is in “Part 11” that we get the closest to Cooper finally arising from his slumber, and in so doing, Lynch coalesces all of the stylistic methods that we see in the four previous iterations of Cooper becoming Cooper—Lynch effectively transmutes fan service into the use of symbols as character totems.

I can’t tell if David Lynch had the climactic scene of David Fincher’s Se7en in mind for an analogous moment in “Part 11,” but it’s hard to not draw that conclusion. Cooper-as-Dougie is driven out into the middle of the desert, holding a large cardboard box, its contents unbeknownst to anybody. The Mitchum brothers (Robert Knepper & Jim Belushi) are waiting to murder him, until Bradley Mitchum realizes that a dream he had the night before is now playing itself out in reality. It all hinges on—how shall I put it—what’s in the fucking box. Wouldn’t you know it — it’s a damn cherry pie.

Lynch couldn’t be feeding fans’ desires harder if he tried. Besides coffee, there’s no other object more powerfully associated with the essence of Dale Cooper than cherry pie. Here he is, at a pivotal moment where Cooper could potentially meet his end, getting his life saved by a cherry pie he bought at the behest of MIKE (Al Strobel), and by a dream of one of his would-be killers.

If that was all there was to that cherry pie, perhaps we might write it off as a corny piece of fan service meant to get people to quit complaining that the show is too slow, or meandering, or un-Peaks-like. Lynch keeps going, however, cutting to a celebratory feast the Mitchum brothers are conducting in Cooper-as-Dougie’s honor, seeing as he got them their $30 million back. Naturally, they serve him cherry pie.

Suddenly, the lounge pianist strikes a plaintive key, the mood shifting toward airy melancholy. The piece is “Heartbreaking,” an Angelo Badalamenti original (but it sure sounds an awful lot like a stripped down rendition of “The Theme from Love Story” to me). Nevertheless, Cooper whips his head around, some deep feeling stirred within him. For a moment, he is truly Cooper again.

We know this because the subtle ways MacLachlan modulates his physical performance. Cooper-as-Dougie is slack-jawed, barely able to enunciate the words he repeats back to his interlocutors. MacLachlan lets his eyes glaze over, staring forward without focusing his attention on any particular point. His body language similarly gives over to leadenness, moving only when it is required or is forced by somebody else.

In that moment the piano strikes that single key, the life returns to Cooper’s eyes. His lantern jaw snaps to attention, his lips slightly apart, his attention held like a laser. That level of physical precision recalls the Ike confrontation in “Part 7.” Lynch pushes in on MacLachlan’s face ever so slightly, as he did for the American flag moment in “Part 9.” When he repeats back the words of the reformed old woman from “Part 4,” he ticks every syllable as he did in “Part 5” when he announced that Sinclair was lying.

Indeed, like a spell being lifted, Lynch tracks back once the pie arrives, and Cooper-as-Dougie seems to return. The spell is cast again quickly, as Rodney says the immortal words, “damn good.” When Cooper-as-Dougie repeats them, he looks perplexed, as if he knows he has said these words before. He knows their import. He doesn’t even bother with the second champagne toast; he cares only for pie.

Twin Peaks is a show littered with symbols. Lynch knows their weight, what meanings they can carry, what power they can hold over people. Dale Cooper is many things, but he can perhaps be distilled right down to the basic, visceral, mythopoetically American pleasures of a slice of cherry pie. If Cooper-as-Dougie potentially an allegory for post-traumatic stress disorder—itself a condition twice alluded to in the series already—then that slice of pie may ultimately be the key to finding himself again.

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

Watch "Part 11" of Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime