10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 4
2. Just Give Kyle MacLachlan The Emmy Now
In the premiere, the shock of witnessing the doppelgänger of Dale Cooper smothering his young lover with a pillow and shooting her in the side of the head was harrowing in itself - but especially so when inevitably compared to the boyish, wonder-filled wunderkind detective of the original ABC series.
It was at first too difficult to absorb. The success of Kyle MacLachlan's performance as Mr. C was almost too upsetting to critique, which is probably indicative of how powerful the performance is. We've had days to acclimatise to the horror; now that those feelings have subsided, pure, unadulterated admiration has taken hold.
The penultimate scene in Part 4 sees Gordon Cole and FBI associates Albert Rosenfield and Tamara Preston examine who they have been told is Dale Cooper in a South Dakota federal prison. In it, Mr. C performs a disturbing approximation of Dale Cooper - almost a slurred tape recording of a book on tape, right down to the skipped repetition and stilted formality ("I need to be debriefed by you.").
MacLachlan's voice has been modulated to convey his speech as otherworldly, but his sensational acting is a special effect in itself; the cadence he uses is lurching, grossly inhuman in its inability to, as he put it in the premiere, "understand human nature".