10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 8
9. Is Jeffries Now With BOB?
After Ray shoots Dale Cooper in the gut, a series of figures slowly materialise - multiple versions of the blackened entities haunting the prisons and morgues of South Dakota.
"That f*cker Ray" acts as audience surrogate, sinking to the floor with an expression of terror plastered across his face. The spectres fade in and out of the picture, performing a shamanistic ritual. They spring up and down on their haunches, circling him, smearing his blood across his stomach, and, in an echo of the two-hour premiere, using it as lotion to massage his face.
It's a grisly, almost upsetting sequence. This bastardised version of Cooper is a being of unspeakable awfulness for reasons both evident and implied. Still, whether it is the faint recollection of the split half - or, simply and more likely, the absolute brilliance that is Kyle MacLachlan's portrayal of the character - this is not the end we want for him. He deserves to be destroyed or subsumed by the man he has supplanted in the material world.
The leering visage of BOB, peering from within an amniotic sac, is then removed from Mr. Cooper's bowels. It isn't the end of Mr. Cooper - he rises from the dead - but BOB is no longer "with" him, which might - might - indicate that these woodsmen are acting as agents for Philip Jeffries, with whom Mr. C is seemingly at war for.