Twin Peaks – The Return: Complete Hour by Hour Guide
NOTE TO READERS – These weekly posts are meant to recap what happened (SPOILERS AHEAD) and provide conversation starters for fans to comment and share theories. Do not read if you have not watched this week’s hour(s) yet.
HOUR SIX
“Diane?”
While Albert fulfilled the promise at the end of Hour Four and finally delivered us Diane (Laura Dern), it was the actress who played another Lynchian Diane, Naomi Watts as Janey E. Jones, who owned Hour Six, channeling the rage of the 99% and teaching some nefarious tough guys who were after Dougie a lesson about how to treat people and collect debt. Her diatribe was all at once heartfelt, clunky, tough-as-nails, and borderline funny (at one point I expected her to echo the words of George Costanza and explain to them, “We’re trying to live in a society!”), and it left the bad dudes shocked and muttering, “That was one tough dame.”
Weather it was the Neanderthal bookie thugs (who might make harassing phone calls or even break a leg or two…but wouldn’t kill a guy, right?), a psychopathic teenager with the last name Horne (who runs over a kid in the middle of the day!), a “magic man” drug kingpin (Balthazar Getty – last seen flirting from afar with our dear Shelly – a scene viewed as sweet in hour two, that in hindsight now hangs with a pall of sickening dread), or a miniature assassin who brutally murders a woman in her office in cold blood…Lynch and Frost are showing us that sickos not only lurk everywhere…but are now out of the shadows and in broad daylight. But for each deplorable in the basket…there were glimmers of decency…as seen in our dear Shelly, giggly Heidi, and a pie-loving teacher; in the officer who takes a dementia-riddled Dougie home; and in chain-smoking trailer-park Carl (Harry Dean Stanton) who comforts a grieving mother in the middle of the street while others look on with distant horror. It was both the distance and intimacy of that universal sense of horror that Lynch so awkwardly captured in tonally discordant ways this hour…capped off by the most haunting closing song yet at The Roadhouse and a soft yet hoarse velvety guitar playing chanteuse singing about wanting to forget…
Meanwhile, in this blatantly violent and misogynistic miasma, it was the ladies previously seen as the nagging, exasperated “ball and chain”, who, in ways both tragic (poor Candy Clark – whose soldier son committed suicide before she fell apart) and heroic (Naomi Watts – sticking up for those who have been trampled on for far too long), show us that the women are just barely holding this shit-hole world together.
If only they could get a little back-up in the form of old Coop.
Oh, and did Hawk find the missing pages of Laura Palmer’s diary in that bathroom stall door?
Until next week…
Commentary by David H. Schleicher
What say you, fellow Peakers? What moments hit you the hardest in Hour Six?
The Schleicher Spin 
The song at the end of the hour was Sharon Van Etten “Tarifa” –
Once again, Rolling Stone says it better than me:
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/recaps/twin-peaks-recap-hit-and-run-w487389
Just rewatched Mulholland Drive a couple of weeks ago, still trying to figure out things. Like a ‘rosebud’ kind of intrigue. Twin Peaks is another one. I’m totally foreign to it… haven’t seen the original series. So, no idea what this is all about. Your posts do help.
Arti – you’re a brave one to watch the new series without having seen the old!
No, I meant Mulholland Dr. is enough to keep me intrigued. Have absolutely no idea what TP is all about and don’t know where to watch it. Reading your posts gives me a taste of it.
Ah, I misunderstood. You had me all intrigued by the idea of someone watching Twin Peaks: The Return cold without having watched the original series. Some would argue it would make about as much sense either way.