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 EIGHT

“We lived above a convenience store.”

David Lynch and Mark Frost have broken the television.

Like some living, breathing, electrified nightmare, Hour Eight starts with Ray shooting Mr. Cooper, who is then visited upon by the most startling set of engine oil-scorched ghosts whose otherworldly movements and nefarious shamanism bring him back to life.

Flashback to 1945 and a nuclear test site, where Lynch then employs cinematographer extraordinaire Peter Deming to slo-mo pan in on a burgeoning mushroom cloud before going deep inside it to the atom-splitting core. It’s a completely mesmerizing mosaic of meditative horror that could only be done on film (or is this digital, well, you get my drift…it’s purely and wholly cinematic) that seems like the rebirth (or afterbirth) of the artistic medium, though somewhat reminiscent of those fantastic sequences from the close of Kubrick’s 2001 and the middle of Malick’s Tree of Life. The fifteen minute sequence, despite its quasi-eerie familiarity, is completely beyond words and comprehension, and pardon the lame cliché, it will blow your mind.

Coming out of the mushroom cloud, we are introduced to the outside of…yes, a convenience store (presumably the one where Mike and Bob originally lived – and quite possibly the most terrifying convenience store ever conjured?) which soon becomes electrically overrun by those same engine oil-scorched fellows (agents from the Black Lodge, are we to presume?)

Meanwhile, across that vast dark ocean Cooper once got a peek of before becoming Dougie in an earlier hour…we come upon…the White Lodge? Here our good benevolent friend, the Giant (aka ???? and played by Carel Struycken), in an attempt to combat the evil globe containing Bob presumably given its opening into our world after the atomic bomb was set off, conjures up some goodness (in the form of Laura Palmer in a golden starry sphere) that is then transplanted to planet earth (and presumably Twin Peaks) by a hopeful and stunningly dressed lady in a theater.

Back to those engine oil scorched chaps…apparently it took them until 1956 to get their act together, and there in New Mexico they creep upon innocent victims asking, “Gotta Light?” before infecting the airwaves with a most creepy poem that begins, “This is the water…this is the well…” The whole thing is so dreadfully 1950’s black-and-white horror movie dreamy, with two teens walking home, and the girl (exquisitely photographed sitting on her bed listening to the radio with her window open to the hot night) dreaming about that innocent first kiss they just had while listening to The Platters, “My Prayer”. Then, of course, it becomes a nightmare, as that very radio station playing The Platters is the one taken over by Mr. “Gotta Light?”, and while his evil mantra of a poem sends all listeners to sleep, some ungodly moth-like creature that hatched from an egg hops through the open window, onto the girl’s bed, and crawls into her mouth.

So yeah, that ALL happened…and watching it broke the television and will be sure to fuel nightmares for years to come. So, like, thanks for that, Davey Boy.

Until two weeks from now…

Commentary by David H. Schleicher

What say you, fellow Peakers? What WTF moment will give your nightmares from Hour Eight?

POST SCRIPT – I just had to share some of the amazing images from the hour. Thank you to all my fellow fans out there on the Twin Peaks Facebook Page for cobbling these together for me to shamelessly steal: