A Pilgrim's Peaks - Part 9
After the journey we went on in the last episode, it would seem that the show is now starting to fold back in on itself. Disparate pieces set up in the first few parts are connecting with each other as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole and his team criss-cross the country in pursuit of Special Agent Dale Cooper. In addition to those early episodes of The Return starting to tie together, we’re also seeing connections between it and the original series coalesce around the departed Major Garland Briggs. Presumed dead after an encounter with Cooper’s doppelgänger not long after the latter escaped from the Black Lodge into our world, we learn that the Major had been hibernating in hiding in another dimension that could have been the White Lodge, the space inside the building on the purple sea, or some realm yet to be seen or named.
Wherever that was, it’s where Principal Hastings and the librarian Ruth Davenport found him after their investigation into other worlds. The experience he recounts to Special Agent Preston is almost perfectly Lovecraftian in its depiction of someone’s encounter with a supernatural force that their mind is unprepared for. His confusion and inability to understand what he and Ruth experienced is a reminder of the world we leave behind when we enter Twin Peaks; the world of homecoming queens, their quarterback boyfriends and small town lives becomes a secretive warren of white picket fences that surround the victim of years of incestuous sexual abuse who copes with substance abuse while dealing drugs with her boyfriend. He’s unable to make sense of what he saw even as he describes it in a fair amount of detail, but it all points to Cooper’s doppelgänger as the architect of the chaos that’s been sown since the end of season two, leaving a long trail of bodies in his wake as he fights to stay in our world, and when he can’t kill someone he frames them for murder.
What Hastings describes makes as much sense to us as it doesn’t to him. He connects the lodge to our world in a way that both formalizes what was implied in the vague mysticism of the late second season Windom Earle arc and aligns with the talk of coordinates, dates and times that The Return has been dealing in. He also describes Major Briggs floating in a way that has strong connections with The Giant floating in Part 8 before it emitted the gold cloud and orb with Laura Palmer’s face in it.
It’s satisfyingly heartwarming how all the ways in which it was implied that the Major was beyond everyone else in the original run of Twin Peaks, he is now with them as they catch up. He’s appeared to Agent Cooper as he worked his way back to our world from the Black Lodge. His body has brought Deputy Director Cole and his team on the path to the real Agent Cooper. And in one of the best and most distant callbacks so far, his wife reminds us that Bobby has now borne out the vision that Major Briggs had about the life of his son Bobby from the first episode of season two when they had a conversation at the Double R.
Further pulling things together is the cadre of bumbling cops in Las Vegas who manage to sneak Dougie Jones’ coffee cup away to gather DNA and fingerprint evidence of who this mystery man that didn’t exist until 1997 actually is. Presumably that will draw further attention from the Deputy Director Gordon Cole’s crack team of cross-country investigators and pull everyone who’s been away that much closer to coming back to Twin Peaks.