A Pilgrim's Peaks - Part 11
Talking Sheriff Truman through an ancient, symbolic map of Twin Peaks, Deputy Chief Hawk talks about a part that can represent fire or electricity as having the possibility to be good or bad, depending on the intentions of the person using it. It’s a handy metaphor for how you choose to interact with the world shaping the world around you. If you’re a shit, you make it shitty for everyone else. If you carry around pie in your heart or in a box, it’s gonna be at least a little bit sweeter for everyone you encounter. There’s been a decreasingly subtle theme of transmission throughout this season of Twin Peaks, with Special Agent Dale Cooper coming back into our world (as much as he has) through electrical outlets, the lumberjack from Part 8 taking over the airwaves to put listeners to sleep, Doctor Jacoby’s broadcasting conspiracy-laced rant sessions and the frequent presence of buzzing telephone lines as harbingers of violence.
The bad vibes from all that ill communication abound in this episode. A dazed Muriel, the teacher who witnessed Richard Horne run over the child in the crosswalk, emerges from some bushes near the Fat Trout trailer park. It seems Horne is as dumb and sloppy a boy as we’ve been led to expect given all the shortcuts he appears to take through life that can come back around like comeuppance to a Bond villain. Becky appears to go temporarily insane in her trailer, grabbing a gun to hunt down her obviously no-good husband, flinging her poor mother Shelley off the hood of a car as she drives to confront Steven and putting several bullets through a perfectly innocent door.
There are more gunshots later on, interrupting Bobby and Shelly’s talk with Becky about her attempt to rage quit her marriage. When Deputy Briggs goes to investigate, he finds an irate mother screaming at her indifferently angry husband whose influence has rubbed off in spades on their alarmingly aggro child whose gaze contains a chilling apathy to the violence he caused. It’s not the lack of knowing that you’d expect from someone as young as him so much as it is a forthright, in-your-face total lack of caring about the rest of the world. It’s one of a pair of nightmarish moments in a scene whose stress level only escalates from there as Deputy Bobby tries to calm down a woman who won’t let up on her car horn. She’s frothing at a near fever pitch about being late for dinner as the child next to her writes up from the darkness of the passenger seat footwell and slowly excretes some kind of thick, beige bile from her mouth. It’s a scene of continuously chaotic escalation where no one is listening to each other and everyone is shouting.
Back in South Dakota, several people see a lumberjack sneaking around the location where William Hastings says he met Major Briggs, but none of them mention it until after the poor poor guy’s head is crushed. FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole and Special Agent Rosenfeld both caught glimpses of the suspicious figure and Diane saw him sneak up to the car that William was sitting in. Deputy Director Cole and Agent Rosenfeld were understandably distracted while investigating the abandoned building that seems to lead to some Black Loge-adjacent place which on the outside resembles the strange gas station the lumberjacks were so busy around in Part 8 after the nuclear test. But why didn’t Diane say anything when she saw the lumberjack sneaking up to the backseat of the car William was in?
Her shady ways and ties to the doppelgänger have yet to be explained, but that connection to Special Agent Dale Cooper is where things start to turn around. He continues to bleed through more and more in this Dougie Jones incarnation. He doesn’t have to communicate meaningfully to be able to communicate effectively. His simple, positively-charged blankness brightens the world around him by letting people follow their own unconscious good natures. The mobsters who we’ve seen beat men for much less than defrauding them for thirty million dollars want to kill him and are about to do so until they literally follow their dreams to the benefit of everyone involved. They get their thirty million, Dougie gets to eat at a nice Italian restaurant, and we get to see another spark of recognition as one of the Mitchum brothers remarks upon the damn good cherry pie. As much as Dougie appears to have made enemies in every aspect of his life, Dale makes friends and brings people together even in his partially recovered state.