10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 16
"I AM the FBI."
A note in praise of Dougie Jones:
The character was a brave and necessary artistic decision on the part of Mark Frost and David Lynch. The dramatic heft of both Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return would have been voided entirely, had Cooper reemerged from the Black Lodge, faculties intact. It needed to be this way. And, since David Lynch observes the mantra that necessity is the mother of invention, Dougie never once felt like a narrative obligation. The fish-out-of-water material was handled with care and love. Kyle MacLachlan's Dougie was a delight of physical comedy, empathetic tenderness and a symbol of Twin Peaks' most potent message, sent to both viewers and the characters in his orbit: if you don't fix your heart, you die a spiritual death.
"Was" is the operative word. The headline news following Part 16 is likely to inspire feelings of mass relief. Yes, The Return lived up to its name in stupidly feel-good fashion this week. But to ignore the importance of Dougie Jones would be to miss the point - would be callous, even. The existence of the character, maligned in some circles as a trolling tactic of anti-nostalgia, created the platform for the ultimate nostalgia rush.
It needed to be this way.
10. RIP, Richard Horne
Part 16 began with Mr. C driving himself and Richard Horne to the destination promised by the coordinates - the two matching sets given by...well. It's still unclear who is a collaborator or enemy at this point, though Richard's fate definitively confirmed the existence of the latter. Mr. C led him to the centre of a rock - or a giant stone - as Jerry Horne surveyed the scene looking through the wrong end of his binoculars.
It was there that Richard met his end, sparks flying from his frazzled torso, before he literally popped off the face of the earth. Mr. C observed it all with a passive detachment. "Goodbye my son," he said, with a hilarious deadpan, as his demonic offspring exploded in the flames of electrical fire. It felt anticlimactic, in the moment. Richard was the focal point of so much of the narrative that his absence from the upcoming finale inspired more bafflement than catharsis. As the hour drew to a close, examining his death in the context of the show as already aired - focusing on the donut, not on the hole - indicates something powerful arising from the generational subtext. Mr. C doomed the next generation in life and doomed him to his death with a vile lack of responsibility. In that death, Richard Horne developed new layers. Lynch and Frost posed some interesting questions on nature, nurture and predestiny.
Is Richard Horne a vile being of autonomy, or a tragic metaphor for the consequence of the evil that men do? The character has more depth than that which appears on the surface, even and especially in death.