10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 4
4. In Parallel, The Old Cooper Is Emerging Just As Slowly
Dale Cooper's journey back both to Twin Peaks and into himself was described by Showtime President David Nevins as an epic odyssey.
It has taken four hours, but the essence of Dale Cooper is hinted at in a series standout thus far, as Cooper-as-Dougie Jones charms his son and the audience by very slowly settling into his thumbs-up groove.
The breezy strands of Take Five by Dave Bruebeck played over the scene. Again, this seems intentionally off. This sort of spiky, jazzy number is very much the preserve of series composer Angelo Badalamenti. He could easily have composed something the crux of the scene demanded. That he didn't underscores something is still missing; fragments of Cooper's psyche are revealing themselves, and revealing themselves to heartwarming effect, but all is still not right with the world. There are echoes of his former life within the sequence; Cooper dives into a sweet breakfast, but he eats pancakes, not pie. He recognises coffee and reacts powerfully (and hilariously) to it, but he doesn't enjoy it.
Take Five echoes Badalamenti's work (well, Badalamenti's work echoes Take Five, but you get the meaning) - and it it seems to have been deployed instead of a Badalamenti number to create a deliberate feeling of deja vu.