Twin Peaks sea­son 3 decoder: The glass cube

This arti­cle con­tains spoil­ers for Twin Peaks sea­son 3: parts 1 and 2. For max­i­mum enjoy­ment, we rec­om­mend read­ing after you’ve watched the show.

The stars have turned and a time has pre­sent­ed itself. Twin Peaks has returned after 27 years. Parts one and two (don’t call them episodes) took us back into the world of the small log­ging town in the Pacif­ic North­west and intro­duced a few new spots on the map, too. In fact, most of the action took place out­side Twin Peaks (New York City, Las Vegas and South Dakota).

There were old famil­iar faces (Shelly, the Palmers, Lucy, Andy and James) and fresh ones – most notably Matthew Lillard’s high school teacher, who’s been arrest­ed for a mur­der he swears hap­pened in a dream. Even the white horse Sarah Palmer saw in sea­son one, in one of her visions, turned up for a cameo.

Begin­ning with a sea­son one recap – Lau­ra Palmer’s mes­sage to Agent Coop­er: ​“I’ll see you again in 25 years” – parts one and two set the stage for what will prove to be Lynch unbound, with Show­time hav­ing giv­en him and co-cre­ator Mark Frost carte blanche.

Twin Peaks, its world and mythol­o­gy, is rich in eso­ter­i­ca, the arcane and the strange. Tibetan Bud­dhism sits next to B‑movie sci-fi con­cepts, super­nat­ur­al ter­rors and soap opera beats. Num­bers, glyphs, sym­bols and Dadaist clue played their part in the Lau­ra Palmer and black lodge plots and, judg­ing from the new series, will very much con­tin­ue to do so.

Much of this is actu­al­ly Mark Frost’s doing. Lynch clear­ly digs the sur­re­al pos­si­bil­i­ties and vibes these ele­ments give him, but it’s Frost who intro­duced the black and white lodges into the show, bas­ing it in part on Native Amer­i­can folk­lore. The red room, a sort of pur­ga­to­r­i­al antecham­ber or wait­ing area between the lodges, is pure Lynch, of course.

In his 2016 nov­el, ​‘The Secret His­to­ry of Twin Peaks’, Frost goes into greater detail about Project Blue Book, the top secret search for the ori­gins of the evil roam­ing Ghost­wood For­est which was hid­den behind a fake remit to find evi­dence of UFOs. The Book­house Boys knew of the spir­its in the woods, too, but not on the same lev­el as the mil­i­tary. Win­dom Ear­le (Ken­neth Welsh) went insane dur­ing his stint in the region back in the late ​’60s, grow­ing so obsessed with access­ing the black lodge, he was thrown off the team. Major Gar­land Brig­gs was in charge of Blue Book at the time Coop moseyed into town try­ing to find the killer of Lau­ra Palmer.

Major Brig­gs’ black ops work might well come into play in sea­son three. The device we’ll call ​‘the glass cube’ – which either sum­mons mul­ti­di­men­sion­al beings from the lodge or some­where else entire­ly, or cre­ates a tear in the space-time con­tin­u­um for them to pass through and man­i­fest – might have a direct con­nec­tion to Blue Book and the lodges.

A grad­u­ate stu­dent (played by Ben Rosen­field) is paid to observe the cube, which is under armed guard and ²⁴⁄₇ obser­va­tion. His job is to main­tain the cadre of video cam­eras primed with mem­o­ry cards and watch for some­thing to hap­pen. The cube (its ori­gins and own­er have yet to be revealed) is a por­tal device, though not seem­ing­ly nat­ur­al like the one that opens (when the stars have aligned) at Glas­ton­bury Grove, out­side Twin Peaks.

First, we see a pale humanoid phan­tom with an elon­gat­ed head smash through the cub, killing the grad­u­ate stu­dent and a love inter­est – just as they’re get­ting it on – tear­ing them to shreds. Lat­er, when the Man from Anoth­er Place, now a glow­ing tree with a lumpy bit of flesh for a mouth, tells Agent Coop­er he can­not leave until Bad Coop (pos­sessed by Bob) has been returned to the lodge, the miss­ing spe­cial agent finds him­self in the cube momen­tar­i­ly, float­ing around in a scene rem­i­nis­cent of Eraser­head.

Coop is trapped but he’s also been told he must return the dop­pel­gänger and only then can be be freed from the red room. Is this mys­te­ri­ous glass cube Coop’s tem­po­rary reprieve and tick­et into the real world?

Check back next week for the sec­ond part of our Twin Peaks Sea­son 3 Decoder.