10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 9
4. "My Slim Gray Tube Has A Message For You."
In a series marked by much doubling and tripling of themes, characters and situations, it would have been a shock at this point if the seating apparatus of the dialogue description ("This is the chair") was a reference to the wheelchair promised to the still-unseen Linda.
The relative mundanity of Part 5's 'Case Files' sparked trolling suspicions during the aforementioned dispute between Andy and Lucy - but it was spoken by the reintroduced Betty Briggs, spinning a new mystery from the supernaturally prescient Major Garland Briggs. Her son Bobby and Sheriff Station superiors Hawk and Frank Truman dropped by her house to answer a question for which she was given the answer 25 years ago. "When they come to ask you about Agent Cooper, you give them this," she says, backed by a beautifully haunting new Angelo Badalamenti number, "The Chair".
"This" is a slim grey tube recovered from the titular chair in which - after much smashing in the Sheriff Station carpark - two pieces of paper are found. On one are instructions concerning a predestined meeting at a "Jack Rabbit's Palace," taking place in two days' time at 2:53, the time both uttered by The Evolution Of The Arm and at which Dale Cooper escaped into the home of Dougie Jones. On the other is the deep space "Cooper / Cooper / Cooper" transcript delivered by Briggs in the original series, the third "Cooper" removed. "Two Coopers," Hawk deduces.
Nothing is clear about Jack Rabbit's Palace (other than, as has already been pointed out, it is sort of about the bunny, after all), but what is is that one of the original series' most heartwarming scenes and one of its most cryptic have been exhumed to propel both the narrative and emotional core of The Return.