Hello again, and welcome back to my weekly article covering the mystery surrounding the death of Ruth Davenport in Buckhorn, South Dakota and last week I also covered the Buenos Aires scene.
In Part 6 we don’t see any scenes from Buckhorn, Arlington or Buenos Aires so I am going to shake it up a little this week and talk a little bit about what we have seen so far and a few different aspects of Part 6.
And what an episode it is! I am still reeling from what I have seen. In fact, when I talk about it I have a sort of achy tone to my voice; this Part actually hurt my heart.
First, we see a little person, known as Ike The Spike, sitting at a desk in an unknown room throwing two dice and writing down each set of numbers he gets. I have no idea why; I can only imagine that he is trying to work out the probability of throwing certain numbers. Then an A4 manila envelope is pushed under the door. We recognize this envelope from a scene earlier in this episode, where Duncan Todd (who we haven’t seen since Parts 1 & 2 in Las Vegas) is working on his computer in his office. A red square pops up on the screen. He looks a little nervous, clicks the red square off the screen, and turns in his chair to open a safe in the cupboard behind him, whilst holding a handkerchief so as not to get fingerprints on what’s inside. There is an envelope with a large black dot on it. The red square and wherever it came from was obviously a message.
Ike picks up the envelope and opens it. Inside are two pictures. One is of Lorraine, whom we met for the first time in Part 5—the lady who nervously typed ‘Argent 2’ into the BlackBerry. We hear the great “theme tune” for Lorraine play the second her picture is revealed, but unfortunately, it’s for, I would imagine, the last time. The other picture is that of Dougie Jones. The original Dougie I should add, pre-Dale Cooper when he was a much larger and unkempt man. A contact card for Lucky 7 Insurance, where Dougie works, is attached to his picture. Ike picks up an awl tool which is carved with details I can’t quite make out; there is possibly the owl cave symbol carved into the top. He looks at both pictures carefully, outlining their faces and then aggressively stabs both pictures. This does not bode well for either Lorraine or DougieCoop.
Next, we see Lorraine in her office. She’s speaking on the phone and seems fearful already; she still has the bruises on her face from when we saw her last so very little time has passed. We hear female screams from another room, then in storms Ike, straight up to Lorraine who has no means of escape. He stabs her repeatedly with the awl. That’s putting it nicely. In this day and age we are used to seeing some brutal stuff on television and film but this was one of those scenes—a little like the “Red Wedding” in Game of Thrones for example—that is truly shocking. It wasn’t just that she was stabbed; it was close-up stabbing. Every puncture squelched, and Ike really meant it. He was beyond angry; rabid even. And he twisted that awl round and round in her chest so that there was absolutely no chance whatsoever she could survive. You could feel the churning inside her as she coughed up the blood til she was no more. I felt nauseous afterwards and I am not a squeamish person at all. But there was no let-up: a woman, a colleague of Lorraine’s, had been watching from the doorway. Ike gives chase and clearly catches up with her. We don’t see it but we hear her death, too. The little man is disappointed and sighs “No” when he sees he’s bent the awl out of shape. He has feelings for an object, but none for human life.
And take a breath.
Poor Lorraine (and more so her colleagues). Truly a horrific way to go. But she was in charge of the hit on Dougiecoop so perhaps her demise was karma? I think that Lorraine was the woman who “got the job” from Todd in Parts 1 & 2. She was far from innocent, but she seemed desperate too.
Speaking of Cooper, you better snap out of this “dream” sharpish young man as in your current state you are no match whatsoever for Ike! MIKE has the same concerns. He appears to Dougie in his office, telling him he has to wake up, flailing his arms towards him as if to flood him with recognition and memories. Don’t Die.
We all knew Lorraine was probably destined for something unpleasant as she was so scared, but who or what wanted her dead and why? She sent the Argent 2 code which maybe started a series of events or sent a message. She made a judgment call, but was it the right one? It appears not. My thoughts here are that she lied. She was supposed to take out Dougie but failed. I believe she sent a message saying that he was dead and was found out. Someone knows that Coop is still here in Dougie’s body and they are not happy that Lorraine did not do her job properly, and she paid the most awful price. My guess would be Mr C/ Dopplecooper.
Did the message she sent to the transmitter in Buenos Aires somehow get a message to him in prison? The phone call he made with the message, “The Cow Jumped Over The Moon”; was that code for ‘she lied’? Was that message then sent to Todd’s computer in the form of a red square that only he understood? Would that then make Mr C the billionaire box owner perhaps?
Is Ike Mr Strawberry? I have no real idea at this point but the prison warden looked horrified enough when his name was mentioned that this really could be him. Ike is one of the most terrifying “humans” we’ve seen in Twin Peaks thus far, though we do have plenty to choose from. Is he human though? Or do the carvings on his awl relate to the Black Lodge? Is he a new denizen?
So what will happen next? I don’t think I can even begin to imagine. This series has been full of surprises, none more so than this next scene. Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment of television I have ever experienced, and one that will for absolute certain stick with me forever. Whilst I do not usually cover the goings-on in Twin Peaks itself, this next scene is so powerful I felt I had to write about it.
It is at first an absolute joy. We are reacquainted with Carl Rodd. First seen in Fire Walk With Me, playing a small, but brilliant part. He’s a much-loved character, played by the great Harry Dean Stanton. His famous line, ‘I’ve already gone places, I just want to stay where I am”, has made many a fan ponder for 25 years now. Where had he been? And what had he seen that made him look so lost and sad? His past was touched upon in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which told us he was “abducted” as a child along with school friends, Maggie Coulson (the Log Lady) and Alan Traherne, who is now deceased. They all returned with the three triangular symbols branded on their bodies, Carl’s behind his knee. This same branding mark was found on Major Briggs neck after his disappearance from the woods that night.
Today we see Carl take a trip into Twin Peaks town, on a bus with Mickey, to get away from the NEW Fat Trout Trailer Park for a few hours, something we learn he does around the same time every day. He sits on a park bench, staring up at the sky through the trees. He has a look of loss and bewilderment like he’s wondering why he’s still alive, and that he really doesn’t want to be. He smokes like a trooper still and has done for 75 years, but that’s not made one bit of difference, he’s still going strong. I feel this is a tongue in cheek moment on the part of David Lynch. We all know he loves to smoke and no one will tell him it’s going to be the death of him.
Carl laughs warmly to himself as he watches a mother play chase with her young son, around 7 or 8 years old at a guess. Such a beautiful scene. As a mother of a little boy, I found myself grinning from ear to ear as I watched this touching moment. What a wonderful relationship to have. You often see Dads playing football games with their sons in the park but rarely do you see a mother and her son playing like this, really enjoying each other’s company (especially on film). And Carl saw that too. True joy is sprawled over his face. We’ve never seen that from Carl before. He clearly appreciates the moment. It’s touched with sadness too as Carl never remarried or had any children after his Aleut wife and baby died in childbirth.
Elsewhere something wicked this way comes. Richard Horne, high on a drug that is as yet unidentified—a designer drug from China—is racing angrily through town in his truck. Red, who it seems is using Richard to deal the drugs to high school kids, has just belittled him, called him a kid, and scared him using magic tricks and this has ignited a fire in his psyche. I mean, don’t they know who they’re talking to? He’s Richard Horne and he does what he wants! The truth is he’s a pathetic little pussy of a man, who cries when he gets threatened by a bigger man than him. The combination of drugs, anger and embarrassment has created a deadly chemical reaction.
He angers further when he reaches a road where the traffic is stood still and he doesn’t want to wait for the road to clear. You may recognise this road. It is exactly the same spot we saw Laura and Leland waiting in traffic in Fire Walk With Me. The crossing where the elderly people are taking too long to reach the other side, when Mike/Phillip Gerard pulls up alongside them, shouting over the screeching engine of Leland’s car that, “It’s him! It’s your father!” and accuses Leland of stealing the corn that he had saved above the store.
Twin Peaks is clearly no longer a place where the amber light tells you to slow down not speed up. Richard can’t wait for the traffic, so he pulls out, driving at high speed on the wrong side of the road. The boy and his mother that we have seen lovingly playing together reach the crossing. The waiting truck driver at the crossing nods at them to carry on, they’re still playing their chase game. Mum ushers him to go and in that instant Richard’s truck hits the boy and his body disappears underneath it. It happens with such force you know in an instant there’s no way he could survive. The blood-curdling screams of his mother are almost impossible to bear. She lifts his limp, lifeless and bloodied body into her arms.
I don’t think I took a breath for the whole of this scene. I didn’t really believe it, surely we are going to have a rewind and this didn’t really happen or something miraculous will happen and he will somehow be saved? Twin Peaks residents just stand and stare in horror; the truck driver who ushered them to go buries his head in his hands. Richard doesn’t stop, he just shouts, ‘Hey! I told you to get out of the fucking way!’. As he’s moving off he clocks a lady called Miriam, who we have just seen Shelly and Heidi praising in the RR Diner for being so nice and loving the cherry pie so much. She clocks him too, but somehow I don’t think he’s going to be the one in trouble here, she will be. I doubt she’s going to be getting the piece of pie they want to treat her to, or making any trips to the RR anytime soon, if ever again.
Carl Rodd, who has witnessed this terrible scene, approaches the mother cradling her son’s body. As he watches he sees a greenish-gold mist appear above the boy, which rises up into the sky, past electricity cables, and floats away. The boy’s soul is gone. Hopefully to a better place than this wicked world where innocence and love can be taken in the blink of an eye.
Carl comforts the mother by holding her and looks deep into her soul. He doesn’t say a word but his look starts to calm her wailing. I don’t know what power he had, or even if he had a power, but the way he looked at her…she knew. Of course she is not going to be ok—nothing is going to be ok ever again—but her son is ok. His spirit is ok, and let’s face it that’s all any of us want to know, whether you believe in any god or an afterlife or that souls really exist or you think it’s all a load of bullshit, we all just want to know that in heaven everything is fine.
I watched this episode very early in the morning, I wasn’t able to stay up until 2am when it is first shown in the UK, but got up at 6am so that I could watch it before work. After watching I got my little boy up for school. My son is autistic and doesn’t really do hugs, but he did today. I got him out of bed and he just stood and held me tight for about a minute. My god, I needed it, and he knew it. It was the best feeling in the world. After I dropped him off at school, the images of this scene stuck in my mind. I cried in my car all the way to work. I am pretty sure every parent across the world watching this felt similarly, but you don’t need to be a parent for this to hurt your heart. This was a big impact stuff.
Perhaps I should have seen this coming. This joyful scene of a mother and child playing smashed with a sledgehammer into tragedy in just seconds. But I don’t think I have ever seen a Lynch-directed moment like this before. Sure I am used to horror, absurdity, sexiness and brutality in Twin Peaks, but we’ve never seen anything quite as shocking as seeing the violent death of a young child. Not even the gut-wrenching murder of Maddy Ferguson or Laura Palmer’s last moments were this hard to stomach.
We were lured into a false sense of security in Part 5, where we saw the son of “drugged out mom” cheat death by car bomb. Our minds were tricked to think that there was no way they would do this, but they did and I am not complaining. This is life, in all its glory and all its tragedy and there is no point in shying away from this. This stuff and much, much worse happens on a daily basis across the world. Once again this is the “Evil that Men Do” and we can’t blame BOB for it this time.
Yes, Richard Horne is an awful human being, and I am sure he will get his just desserts, but he is somebody’s son too—and I can’t wait to find out whose! Why has Richard turned out this way? He clearly has emotional problems. Does it just run in the family or is there more to this?
There will be much more tragedy to come in Twin Peaks for mothers and fathers, for brothers and sisters, for everyone. The children are not safe from harm.
I didn’t know the little boy and mother, they weren’t characters that I know and love. They’d been on-screen perhaps 30 seconds, but they ripped my heart in two. That is what Twin Peaks is all about, humanity, empathy, sympathy and care for one another and in many cases the lack thereof. Perhaps, just perhaps it’s better that we as a species don’t survive, perhaps the Black Lodge denizens aren’t really the bad guys at all—it’s the humans that are the problem, and we are fighting for the wrong side in this game. Or are we just their pawns and they are having a huge laugh at our expense? Are they just playing with us?
Now let’s recap a bit. We are one-third of the way through this triumphant series and Wow Bob Wow what a rollercoaster it has been so far. Some folks have complained that it’s slow and even boring, which in all honesty I can’t quite comprehend. Think now back to the beginning. We have experienced so much in 6 hours yet we haven’t even begun yet!
We still don’t know for sure who killed Ruth Davenport, but it’s likely Doppelcooper was the culprit, but why? The fact that Major Garland Briggs’ headless body turned up in her bed (presumably at least—we still don’t know for sure yet, though I can’t imagine for a second it’s not him) leads us to assume that she and Bill Hastings knew Briggs and were maybe working on some secret task to find the Black Lodge together. Or maybe they didn’t! Perhaps they had never met Briggs before in their lives but they were involved in something that Doppelcooper wanted them dead/incarcerated over.
We know now that Carl Rodd has similar abilities as Cooper. He can see things that other people cannot. He has an intuition, a gift, a second sight. The Log Lady too has this gift. Perhaps she has had it for longer than she realised, that her gift was given to her at the same time as Carl when they were both abducted and this gave her the ability to send and receive messages from her deceased husband through the log. Major Briggs too saw and understood people better than most.
Why is the electricity pole here the same as the one we saw in Deer Meadow? What significance do the numbers have?
Cynthia Knox is on her way to Buckhorn to check out the probable body of Briggs. What will she find next? How will she know for sure it is him? What has made them think the 16 previous database match for Briggs were not real? One thing I haven’t mentioned already is the lump of flesh found in Hasting’s trunk. There’s a chance that flesh is part of Briggs’ neck, and maybe the branding triangles are still visible. Will this be the evidence they need to prove this really is him?
Has Briggs really been dead for 25 years or has he been hiding out somewhere, and if so where and why? Were Ruth and Bill helping him? Hiding him? Has he travelled to the Lodge again since we last saw him? Has he been travelling through different time zones and been spotted 16 times before?
Then there’s the dossier. I still have a feeling that it will be found in Ruth’s apartment as we know it’s found at a crime scene. We also know that Tamara Preston will be the one to investigate the dossier and that the dossier is not what it seems. There are many clues inside left by The Archivist, Briggs, that reveal some truths about Cooper. In particular, the pages with The Bookhouse Boys favourite books. If you use a mirror it reveals that you should “fear the double”. Will she work this out? She’s already got her doubts that Doppelcooper is the real Dale because of the inverted fingerprint records. I think Ms. Preston is smarter than she appears. Cole may love the beautiful ladies but he knows a good Agent when he sees one too.
What is missing from the dossier? Annie. Her life appears to have been wiped from history, her parents and sister Norma’s past also changed to reflect her non-existence. My personal view is that Annie never existed, that she was perhaps manufactured like Dougie Jones, for a purpose, and that purpose was to lure Agent Cooper into the Lodge. She was perfect for Coop in every single way, perhaps too perfect, and he fell for it hook, line and sinker. Love opened the door to the lodge for him and he’s still trying to escape now.
But there is evidence still remaining perhaps that Annie did exist in some form or another. Hawk has found what appears to be the missing pages of Laura Palmer’s secret diary hidden in the Sheriff’s station restroom toilet door. A door made by the Nez Perce tribe. A link to Hawk’s heritage, just as The Log Lady said it would be. In these diary pages did Laura write down what Annie told her to in her dream? That ‘the Good Dale is in the lodge and cannot leave’?
I feel we are at a crossroads now. All the pieces are coming together. Briggs will be identified, the dossier discovered, Hawk will know where to find Dale and Dale himself is starting to find his true self. Just a few more steps Dougie! You can do it! Bring back those memories!
But there’s a long road ahead and many battles to be fought with some seriously sinister characters. We still don’t know who the billionaire box keeper is. Who is Todd’s boss? Are they one and the same? Where and who is Phillip Jeffries? and why is he working with Doppelcooper? Has Jeffries turned evil, consumed by the power and glory of the Black Lodge or is he still really working undercover with Albert? Who is the Charcoal Man? Will we see him again? Does he have a part to play in this mystery?
There is a lot more to ponder, and a perhaps next week we will have a few more answers. Not forgetting that after 27 years of mystery we have finally met the stunning Diane. What a glorious revelation that was! Even if it was widely speculated beforehand, seeing her in the flesh was a wondrous moment. She’s everything we wanted her to be and more. Diane is the key to unlocking the true Dale Cooper from his entrapment, but will she get there on time to save him?
I hope to have a few more next Wednesday! Until then…
All images courtesy of Showtime/CBS unless stated otherwise
