10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 4
A dead dog's leg and a demonic debriefing.
Nothing is as it seems or as it was in Twin Peaks: The Return. We're falling, faster and faster, into David Lynch's abyss.
The tone has been relentlessly, almost upsettingly dark. Kyle MacLachlan's Mr. C, Dale Cooper's Black Lodge doppelgänger, is a being of unspeakable evil. That is clear not just in the acts he commits, but the offhand way in which he commits them. He didn't just brutalise Darya to death in the premiere. He punched her in the face and barely moved in order to do it. It was as if he thought so little of her life he didn't expend much energy at all to end it.
Death is everywhere. No effort is made to conceal Catherine Coulson’s cancer; her sparse hair and oxygen tube spells doom for actress and Log Lady alike. Everything is ominous, foreboding. Lynch’s trademark, glacial camerawork is even slower, imbuing even the most innocuous scenes with a lurching sense of dread, which in turn lend the crazed, glitchy Black Lodge sequences a physically impossible power. We’ve seen murderous, alien grey-like creatures. Charred, Victorian urchin-like spectres. We’ve been brain matter spilled on motel bedsheets.
Part 4 of The Return restored some of the goofy levity the darker material almost demands as a respite. The crucial duality of the show is now firmly in place.
10. There Are Bad People In Las Vegas
Part 4 picks up in the casino. Cooper (as Dougie Jones) has unwittingly won 29 - no, 30 now - jackpots, only some of which he has claimed for himself.
Somewhere along the way of his winning streak, the pure goodness within him directs a homeless woman to the prize money. She turns around and clasps her hands together in delight. "Thank you, Mr. Jackpots!" she cries out. Cooper manages the faintest hint of a smile in response. This small moment, beautiful and much-needed confirmation of Cooper's inherent goodness, is contrasted with the cloaking darkness seeping into the Las Vegas arc.
He is directed into the casino's back office by David Dastmachlian's Pit Boss Warrack, who with one hand gesture confirms to Brett Gelman's Supervisor Burns that this Rain Man-child figure is not all there. Gelman is more renowned for his comedy acting, but he settles into a menacing leer with ease under Lynch's expert direction. His words are benevolent, on the page. He congratulates Cooper on his winnings and arranges to send him home in a limo. But the intonation - particularly the emphasis on "come back anytime" - hints at something deeply sinister.
Burns is menacing, but seems to work under Patrick Fischler's Duncan Todd, who himself works under a man already established as both horrible and powerful. That lucky streak seems to be an ironic harbinger of something far, far worse.