10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 14

It happened again.

The cool reception to Part 12 was in part informed - or rather misinformed - by a last-minute social media campaign that resulted in widespread confusion. Actor David Dastmalchian (Pit Boss Warrick) tweeted fighting words in front of the iconic Black Lodge curtains...and did not appear. Nor has he appeared since. We remain in anticipation of these promised, earth-shattering scenes. That is, if he wasn't involved in the various pop-up marketing events held in the weeks prior to My 21.

Last week, instead of airing Part 13, Sky Germany dropped a nuclear clanger and instead broadcast Part 14. The hour itself didn't leak onto torrent nor illegal streaming sites, but Reddit was ablaze with spoilers. Those who logged onto the internet with perfect courage and resisted the temptation were still "treated" to an imperfect type of of spoiler - those that ostensibly give nothing away, but create an immense and perhaps unfair anticipation.

I can't stop shaking, some wrote.

This was brilliance from start to finish.

My mind is blown on so many levels. Holy sh*t.

They were not wrong. This hour of television left pacing naysayers in the dust with a propulsive narrative leading towards a third act many could not see through the trees.

The opening scene was phenomenal fan service for both nostalgic old school and the new set apprehensive at the time taken to reconcile the disparate plot threads. Gordon Cole and Lucy Brennan shared a brilliantly, mutually baffled phone conversation, the result of which alerted the FBI to the two Coopers out there in the world.

We also learned that the FBI contingent is drawing ever closer to Las Vegas. This probably wasn't the two birds, one stone clue proffered by ??????? in the premiere - but it was a double dash forward into the final third act of The Return. Shortly after this exchange, Albert let Tammie in on the origin point of the Blue Rose task force. This was another two birds, one stone success story; the character of Tammie, written off by some as a swivel-hipped sex object, was developed as she showed a keen intuitive grasp of the supernatural - and the actress, Chrysta Bell, played it with a dead-eyed certainty, removed entirely from the vacuous eye candy even her superiors initially underestimated her as.

"A tulpa," is how Tammie described Lois Duffy's doppelgänger. A tulpa is a Tibetan concept, of a manifested object conjured through thought - which in the Twin Peaks universe is perhaps an explanation of the phenomenon at the divided heart of Special Agent Dale Cooper, situating Mr. C (or perhaps Cooper himself; we do not know who the "dreamer" is) away from the straight sci-fi trope of a distinct and separate alternate royalty.

This split feels more symbiotic, of a more distressing human nature.