Twin Peaks recap: ‘The Return: Part 8’ – EW.com

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Let it be weird.

No need to explain it. No need to figure it out. No need to tame it with reason or theory.

Just let it be weird. For now.

Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return was the David Lynch on heroin wed been promised. For the most part, it was a mesmerizing rush of pure-cut WTF, albeit one that made a certain amount of sense for those versed with the shows symbol system and Lynchian motifs. Still, I officially gave up trying to make sense of everything during my first viewing right about the time the eyeless transhuman entity known as Experiment started barfing foamy ejaculate containing speckled (Easter?) eggs and a creamed corn glob of BOBs face. I quit taking notes, quit pressing PAUSE so I could Google things like The Manhattan Project, quit sweating that I wasnt getting it. I decided to accept Gotta light? as an act of pure Strangelove. I stopped worrying about it and just enjoyed all the crazy bomb drops.

This is not to say we wont be trying to understand it in this recap. We will! We should! Part 8 was this shows version of Losts Across the Sea episode a big bang creation myth for the evil that haunts and poisons Twin Peaks America and gave rise to abominable mutants and brought otherworldly cosmic horror to a fallen world; it was Lynchs version of a 50s sci-fi/horror movie. (From this perspective, you could see the episode as a big bang creation myth for pop culture.) Still, everything I have to offer in the way of being Mr. Explainer is mostly speculation, and the last thing I want to do is confuse you more than you might be. So Ill try to be disciplined in my theories. I do hope Lynch and Mark Frost will offer some illumination for what we saw here in the episodes to come, especially since some of it was actually hard to see; this was a dusky, dim episode, appropriate for a story about spiritual darkness, but some images were hard to make out. Example: the shot of the BOB embryo harvested from the chest of Dirty Cooper. But for now, Im okay to just let it be weird, and delight in that weirdness. Also, its my girlfriends birthday, and I promised Id celebrate her with an energetic, attentive presence unimpaired by a recap-broken brain. Priorities, people.

Part 8 opened with Dirty Cooper and Ray, newly sprung from prison, traveling by yellowy rental car at night to a place Ray liked to call The Farm. Fitting for a creature from the deep web of Black Lodge space, Dirty Cooper used one of his dark devices some kind of black magic cell phone full of cheat codes for techno-reality to exorcise the vehicle of three tracers and/or cast them upon a truck. (Poor hexed scapegoat truck!) He then threw the phone out the window, the big litterer. The earth cried from mans indifference to the environment, and not for the last time in this episode.

Tension between these two criminals: palpable. Dirty Cooper knew that Ray had accepted a $500,000 contract to rub him out. But he needed to extract some information from his treacherous associate before he made him say hello to his little friend hidden in the glove compartment. (No, not Ike the Spike a gun!) What Dirty Cooper didnt know was that Ray was pretty hip to all this. He had no intention of giving up whatever it was that he knew a string of numbers; coordinates, I believe unless the man he called Mr. Cooper wished to pay for them, or so he intimated; I think Ray has no intention of giving Dirty Cooper anything he wants. Ray also knew all about the concealed weapon, and he wasnt worried abut it for a few reasons, including the fact that he had a revolver of his own, courtesy, we might assume, of the warden whom Dirty Cooper blackmailed last week. Truly, there is no honor among thieves and their corrupt jailers.

Dirty Cooper directed Ray to exit the highway and take a smaller road to their final destination. This led to some long, Lynchian shots of Cooper and Ray driving in silence or shots from their point of view of the car following highway lines and directional markers and pushing into darkness across rough, uneven, unpaved terrain. In retrospect, Lynchs filmmaking choices foreshadow the protracted odyssey to come: This was an episode that basically departed from the shows main narrative (such as it) to go off-roading into the wilderness of Twin Peaks mythology.

Ray stopped the car in the woods because he had to take a leak, because by now, it just wouldnt be an episode of Twin Peaks without someone peeing. (The shows biggest whizzer, coffee-chugging Dougie, was MIA this week.) Perhaps Dirty Cooper could smell the bulls on Ray. He retrieved the gun, checked the chamber, and demanded that Ray cough up the digits in his head. Ray spun around with a gun of his own. Dirty Cooper was the first to pull trigger but the gun didnt fire. Click-click-jammed! Tricked you, fer, quipped Ray, who then put Dirty Cooper down with two bullets in the chest.

And thats when s got weird. (Recap continues on page 2)

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Twin Peaks recap: 'The Return: Part 8' - EW.com