10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 5
5. The Old Dale Cooper Is Surfacing...
The Peaks fandom is split on Dale Cooper's arc.
Suspension of disbelief is hard; the man known to his family and colleagues as Dougie Jones exists in a borderline catatonic state, his misadventures precariously hovering over the line of plausibility. His wife Janey-E goes some way to assuaging the audience in her brief scenes with him. "Dougie, you're acting weird as sh*t," she says, breaking the self-reflexive housewife facade. She also alludes to this being a recurrence of some known "episodes". It's the barest hint of reassurance, but really, it's all MacLachlan needs to pull off the trick. His acting is easily the best of his career. If this quality is sustained and gradually escalated, as it is here, it might be among the best of anyone's career.
Harder still to bear is the near total absence of the Special Agent, whose boyish wonder and goodness is needed now more than ever, in a deeply troubled real world and a TV landscape overpopulated by the antihero.
The beauty in this storyline is in how masterfully Lynch and Frost have written around the quarter century cliffhanger. Cooper almost has to be an unrecognisable, broken husk in order to convey the awesome power of the Black Lodge. A halfhearted, two episode arc would both dilute that and any dramatic heft.
The return to his self is paved with some heartwarming and comedic moments hinting at the goodness within. The sight of Sonny Jim reduces him to tears - was he mourning a life not lived, or a young life undermined by a grotesque approximation of a father figure?