Twin Peaks sea­son 3 decoder: The Owl Cave ring

This arti­cle con­tains spoil­ers for Twin Peaks sea­son 3 part 13. For max­i­mum enjoy­ment, we rec­om­mend read­ing after you’ve watched the show.

Twin Peaks: The Return has been a case of The Good, the Bad and the Dougie Jones. With five parts still to air, how it’ll play out is anyone’s guess. Warn­ing: sec­ond-guess­ing David Lynch is a fool’s errand. Scan­ning fan mes­sage boards, there’s a clear split between those who are total­ly dig­ging what Frost and Lynch have done with sea­son three and those who feel let down, bored to tears or down­right angry at the lack of famil­iar beats and Dou­ble R din­er quirk. But unlike cof­fee and cher­ry pie, nos­tal­gia was nev­er on the menu.

Brim­ming with melan­choly, part 13’s town scenes feel like the final nail in the cof­fin regard­ing fan expec­ta­tion and the appar­ent crav­ing for the old Twin Peaks, the over­all effect a lit­tle akin to Frost and Lynch’s pen­ning a eulo­gy to the orig­i­nal 1990s ver­sion of the show. Big Ed Hur­ley (Everett McGill) and Nor­ma (Peg­gy Lip­ton) nev­er got togeth­er. Bob­by (Dana Ash­brook) and Shelly Brig­gs (Mad­chen Amick) had a baby but are no longer an item. James (James Mar­shall), still haunt­ed by the death of Lau­ra Palmer (Sheryl Lee), is cling­ing to the past, per­form­ing the Lynch-penned dit­ty he once sang in the Hay­wards’ liv­ing room with Don­na (Lara Fly­nn Boyle) and Mad­dy (the back­ing singers in the Road­house were Don­na and Mad­dy looka­likes). Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) has spent the last 25 years slow­ly drink­ing her­self to death and Audrey Horne (Sher­i­lyn Fenn) seems to be severe­ly men­tal­ly ill. In part 13, her brief but heart­break­ing scene brought back mem­o­ries of Fenn’s cameo in Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

The super­nat­ur­al ​‘Owl Cave’ ring cropped up again this week (the first appear­ance since part three). Lynch intro­duced the mag­ic ring into Twin Peaks lore in 1992’s movie pre­quel, Fire Walk with Me. It did not fea­ture in sea­sons one and two at all. Dur­ing the film’s pro­duc­tion, Lynch appeared to recog­nise the ring’s sig­nif­i­cance and poten­tial as a plot device, adding it into scenes not fea­tured in the screen­play he co-wrote with Robert Engels. Rings/​circles also crop up as major visu­al motifs through Twin Peaks, often in super­nat­ur­al con­texts (the green ring, the ceil­ing fan in the Palmer house, the 12 sycamore trees at Glas­ton­bury Grove serv­ing as a por­tal to the Red Room).

Frost, who had noth­ing to do with the movie spin-off, also includ­ed the Owl Cave ring in his 2016 book ​‘The Secret His­to­ry of Twin Peaks’, tak­ing the read­er to its ini­tial ori­gin of dis­cov­ery by Meri­weath­er Lewis, dur­ing the Lewis and Clark Expe­di­tion, which opened the Pacif­ic North­west ter­ri­to­ry to set­tlers, paving the way for the hor­rors of the Native Amer­i­can geno­cide in the region. The ring is giv­en to Lewis by a Nez Per­cé chief (Deputy Hawk belongs to the Nez Per­cé) and he goes a bit doolal­ly. For much of the book, Frost invents and fol­lows the ring’s pecu­liar lin­eage right up to the 20^th cen­tu­ry (Richard Nixon had it at one point). How it came to be owned by Tere­sa Banks (Pam Gid­ley) in FWWM is a mys­tery and like­ly to remain as such.

The ring’s func­tion has changed over the years, and it’s a bit all over the place in sea­son three (much like the show itself). In Fire Walk with Me, the impres­sion giv­en is that any­body in own­er­ship is doomed to be BOB’s vic­tim. The biggest ques­tion of all is: How many rings are there? The trail sug­gests there is one Owl Cave ring, and that who­ev­er sticks it on their fin­ger is in for a freaky trip to the Red Room. But if just one exists, how the heck did Phillip Jef­fries (played by David Bowie in the film) hand it over to Ray (George Grif­fith) if it was also in Dougie Jones’ pos­ses­sion? An intrigu­ing fan the­o­ry cur­rent­ly doing the rounds is that we are watch­ing mul­ti­ple time­lines. Remem­ber the warn­ing about sec­ond-guess­ing Lynch? That still stands, but there is no deny­ing the time­lines, if you attempt to con­nect plot points, sure come off as a lit­tle screwy. (“Is it future or is it past?” MIKE asked Coop in part one.)

In Fire Walk with Me, Lau­ra took own­er­ship of the Owl Cave ring dur­ing her mur­der. Phil Gerard/​MIKE (Al Stro­bel) throws it (off-screen) into the train car, as Leland/​BOB kills his daugh­ter. Before that, she is tempt­ed to take it on sev­er­al occa­sions, dur­ing dream sequences. Coop (in a dream) warns Lau­ra off tak­ing the ring, but is this bad advice? Does the ring, in fact, have a pos­i­tive aspect? Does it stop BOB (Frank Sil­va) from pos­sess­ing Lau­ra and did it allow her to become a Lodge spir­it? Either way, the Black Lodge inhab­i­tants were very keen on Lau­ra accept­ing the ring and it has once again been use­ful to sea­son three’s con­vo­lut­ed narrative.