Twin Peaks sea­son 3 decoder: Nuclear Bo(m)b

This arti­cle con­tains spoil­ers for Twin Peaks sea­son 3 part 8. For max­i­mum enjoy­ment, we rec­om­mend read­ing after you’ve watched the show.

As Dorothy might say, ​“We’re not in Twin Peaks any­more.” Sea­son three part eight is essen­tial­ly a 45-minute exper­i­men­tal short film insert­ed into a tele­vi­sion show called Twin Peaks. This was Lynch ven­tur­ing into new realms of bat­shit crazi­ness. It’s clear now that Twin Peaks is more than a mur­der mys­tery: it’s a com­plete uni­verse. And there we were think­ing part three’s open­er (Coop emerg­ing from a plug sock­et) was pret­ty out there, and part seven’s two-and-a-half-minute scene of a guy sweep­ing up after a busy night at The Road­house was the ulti­mate patience-tester.

Part eight begins straight­for­ward­ly enough, with Bad Coop dou­ble crossed by Ray and left for dead. The scene is linked to parts one and sev­en by the appear­ance of charred-look­ing enti­ties (very sim­i­lar in appear­ance to the float­ing dude in the jail cell, who lat­er turned up stalk­ing the cor­ri­dor of Buck­horn mor­tu­ary). These min­ions of the dark­ness swarmed around Bad Coop, smeared blood over the body and pulled out an orb with Bob’s face inside it (the Borb?) from an open wound. Ray under­stand­ably high tails it.

Lynch then takes us back in time to White Sands, New Mex­i­co and the days of the Man­hat­tan Project (which for­mer Twin Peaks Gazette own­er, Dougie Mil­ford, was involved in). The year is 1945. A nuclear explo­sion goes off in slow motion. If Stan­ley Kubrick thought his starfield sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey was the ulti­mate ​‘far-out, man’ trip, then part eight is Lynch telling Kubrick, ​“Hold my PBR, buddy!”

Mark Frost is all about the eso­teric and secret his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca and his cre­ative con­frère – a prac­ti­tion­er of tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion – is an artist who gets excit­ed about the mys­te­ri­ous union between intu­ition and expres­sion. Part eight weds their pet inter­ests in a way we will nev­er for­get. For if the nuclear bomb is the ulti­mate sym­bol of humankind’s fool­ish­ness, it’s there­fore the per­fect vas­sal for Bob and the black lodge spir­its to enter our earth­ly realm and get up to no good.

In Twin Peaks mythol­o­gy, fire is equal­ly impor­tant as elec­tric­i­ty. The arcane poem spo­ken by Phil Gerrard/​Mike (Al Stro­bel), ​“One chant between two worlds, fire walk with me,” lent the pre­quel its sub­ti­tle. ​“Do you want to play with fire, lit­tle boy?” Leland Palmer said in sea­son two episode two, recount­ing his first child­hood encounter with the bad­die who pos­sessed his body and soul. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, ​‘Lit­tle Boy’ was the code­name for the bomb dropped on Hiroshi­ma in 1945.

In the orig­i­nal (and sig­nif­i­cant­ly cut down) Phillip Jef­fries sequence from Fire Walk with Me, the Man from Anoth­er Place explains in typ­i­cal­ly cryp­tic dia­logue how they appeared on our plan­et: ​“From pure air.” Robert Engels, who co-wrote the pre­quel screen­play with Lynch, has men­tioned in the past how the pair envi­sioned the black lodge spir­its hail­ing from a plan­et made of creamed corn (known in the show as ​‘gar­mon­bozia’). Again, Frost and Lynch have tak­en old ideas and re-used them for revi­sion­ary purposes.

The scene in which the Giant floats up to the ceil­ing in a the­atre and emits gold­en specs of light into a trail, form­ing an orb, is where part eight gets tru­ly weird. Inside the orb is the image of Lau­ra Palmer (Sheryl Lee) as home­com­ing queen. The orb is sent to the Pacif­ic North­west via a tube-like fun­nel and movie screen. Lynch has used orbs before, in Eraser­head, Ele­phant Man and Wild at Heart, where Sheryl Lee’s Good Witch appeared to Sailor (Nico­las Cage). The screen depict­ing a starfield, too, recalls the end scene in The Ele­phant Man. Sea­son three real­ly has been some­thing of a David Lynch Great­est Hits compilation.

In sea­son three part two, Lau­ra Palmer appeared before Coop in the Red Room. As in sea­son one’s icon­ic dream sequence, she kiss­es him and whis­pers into his ear. In sea­son three, how­ev­er, some unseen force lift­ed her up into the sky. Coop looks on, aston­ished. Are these two events direct­ly con­nect­ed? Has the Lau­ra-Orb been sent off to help Coop defeat Bob and avenge her own death all those years ago? From vic­tim to force for cos­mic awe­some­ness. ​“I am dead… yet I live,” she tells Coop.