[Twin Peaks] Chapter 15: Hour Eight "Gotta Light?"

015 - A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks, 2nd Edition

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Acronyms & Common Terms

• TP = Twin Peaks (1989-1991)

• TPTR = Twin Peaks The Return (2017)

• FWWM = Fire Walk With Me (1992)

• RRL = The Red Room Dream Layer

• TVL = The Version Layer

• MPL = Missing Page Layer

• TFM = The Fireman’s Mansion

• Twin Peaks = The entire franchise

Chapter 15, Part Eight

INTRO8

Part 8: Scene 1

(0:00:00–0:1:40) Local (6:44:52-6:46:32) Global Time

1m40s 

C16

Part 8: Scene 2

The Version Layer: Somewhere in SD

(0:1:40-0:11:21) Local (6:46:32-6:56:13) Global Time

9m41s PN: Black Lodge Plan

Mr. C and Ray drive in the dark of South Dakota. Mr. C pulls his phone out—an app with three black boxes, one with a capital C. The second box says “FIRE,” the third has a small capital D with a large tan circle, a small black circle inset, and a capital “X” next to it. There is a slider arrow at the bottom of the app. Mr. C says, “There are three tracking devices on this car.” He taps each box and tells Ray to get up close behind the semi-truck. 

Mr. C types “DEGWW8” into the phone, rolls down the window, and says, “That should do it.” He throws the phone out of the car. 

Ray says, “I hope you’re not sore at me for running off. It sure was stupid of me to get caught up like I did. Thanks for getting me out of there.” Mr. C says nothing. Ray asks, “How’d you do this?” Mr. C says, “Darya told me what happened. You needed to get out, Ray.” Ray asks where Darya is. Mr. C lies, “She’s waiting for a phone call when we get someplace safe.” 

Ray asks, “Where are we going?” Mr. C says, “You’d probably like to go to that place they call The Farm.” Ray says that’s what he was thinking, and they are heading in the right direction, but they aren’t going to let them walk. “Aren’t they?” Mr. C says, “You have something I want, Ray.” Ray pauses, then says, “Yes, I do. I got it memorized. All the numbers, memorized perfectly. But honestly, Mr. Cooper, I think it might be worth some money.” Mr. C looks at him menacingly. Ray says, “Maybe, quite a lot of money.” Mr. C says, “You think so, do you?” Ray says, “Yes sir, I do.” Mr. C doesn’t respond. A moment later, he sees something up the road and says, “There it is. Take that little road up there on the right. Let’s get off this highway, Ray.” 

They pull off onto a side road, and after a short distance, Ray stops the car in a secluded field. 

Ray asks Mr. C, “You mind if I pull over a sec? I gotta take a leak.” Mr. C says, “Go for it,” and looks at Ray again. Ray exits the car, and the headlights shine into the darkness. He walks away from the vehicle to relieve himself.

In the car, Mr. C opens the glove compartment and pulls a revolver, checking that it’s loaded. Then, he gets out of the car and approaches Ray. Mr. C says, “Ray, I want that information.” 

Ray, still urinating, says, “Yes?” Mr. C raises the gun and says, “Looks like you’re out half a million.” Ray pulls his gun out, his back still to Mr. C, and says, “Well, I think you’re wrong about that.” He turns around, and Mr. C squeezes the trigger three times, but the gun doesn’t fire. He looks down at it with surprise. Ray says, “Tricked ya, fucker,” and shoots Mr. C twice. The bullets ricochet off Mr. C’s revolver into his stomach. Mr. C falls, gut shot. The camera rushes to Mr. C’s body as Ray walks up to shoot him in the head, which doesn’t happen.

Flashing lights descend, and strange music starts playing—six Woodsmen phase in and out towards the murder scene. Ray is shocked and terrified. The Woodsmen are translucent. They dance around Mr. C’s body. Ray looks around at them all; his gun is limp and useless in his hand. The Woodsmen are on their knees, patting the dirt softly. They work on Mr. C’s body, which is now translucent as it flashes in and out of phase. The ominous music builds while one of the Woodsmen works on Mr. C’s bloody stomach. There is so much blood smeared all around. The other Woodsmen dance in circles around Mr. C’s body. They smear blood all over his face. They start digging in his guts, mixing dirt and blood to smear all over. The dark ritual is complete, and Mr. C’s body lies still. The Woodsmen wait. Ray is sitting on the ground in shock and moaning, watching this grisly scene unfold. Other Woodsmen are still dancing around Mr. C’s body. One Woodsman holds Mr. C’s head up by the neck to look at Ray. Ray scoots backward on the ground, still seated, in terror. A BOB bubble is extracted from Mr. C’s open chest and belly, like an amniotic sac surrounding Bob’s maniacal face. This is Ray’s breaking point; he gets up and runs for the car while the Woodsmen continue their dancing ritual. 

Ray slips and falls, quickly getting back up and bolting into the car. He backs up and floors it in drive, leaving as fast as possible. The license plate on the car is UTD 643. Ray pulls away. 

The Woodsmen phase in and out, dancing while dust lifts and hangs in the air. Finally, they disappear to light flashes, and droll music plays on while dust floats in the supernatural light. The light dims, and the screen fades to black.

Cut to dark shadows obscuring a quarter Moon. 

Cut to Ray in the car, talking to Phillip. Ray says, “I think he’s dead. But he’s found some kind of help, so I’m not 100 percent. And I...I saw something in Cooper. It may be the key to what this is all about. And I told him where I’m going, so if he comes after me, I’ll get him there.” 

Ray hangs up the phone.

Everything has changed in the narrative of The Return, and nearly all bets are off. In a typical crime show, this would be game over. The bad guy is shot, and justice is served. There are no episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos where etheric beings appear from nowhere to resurrect the bad guy (though The Sopranos came close with the Kevin Finnerty storyline). Still, a resurrection happens in this scene of the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks The Return. There are no resurrections in the drama of the Difficult Man, but there is with Dale Cooper. He is not a difficult man, though he is a flawed one. In this scene, we witness the revelation of the depth of corruption in a man’s soul as he lies in a fugue state between dream, sleep, and the termination of conscious existence. The most consequential truth revealed in this scene is that Mr. C will be tough to eliminate in this world we are presented with on-screen, which morphs by the second. Mr. C’s video game-like respawn defines how he controls this dream narrative in the version layer of Dale Cooper’s demented dream. It’s a great story cheat, better than most comic book villains are capable of pulling off, but Mr. C cheating death is not the only example of how dreams break the rules of our shared physical universe. 

We should briefly explore the use of powerful irrational technology in The Return, a subject worthy of its own essay. In this scene, Mr. C defuses all attempts to track him with a few taps into an app that visually makes no sense. He then throws the device out the window and declares himself untraceable. This mind-bending mastery over technology, secret information, and the functionality of respawning from death are all potent clues that we are witnessing a compartmentalized simulation contained within the larger context of the Twin Peaks narrative.  

It’s telling that Ray calls him “Mr. Cooper,” not “Mr. C,” like Otis did, even though they were all in the same house at the time. I take this at face value, as Ray believes this is Dale Cooper, as does whoever was speaking at Phillip Jeffries on the two phone calls we’ve already witnessed from that character in a one-way exchange. Ray is a character locked in this dream narrative without understanding its boundaries. Ray is playing a dangerous that he now knows he doesn’t understand. This is a fantastic scene of measurable deception, where Ray and Mr. C exchange lies but still reveal the truth to one another; one of them has a truth that can’t be spoken here and understood by any character. It barely makes sense visually. And yet here it is. What do we do with this?

Mr. C lies about Darya. Ray lies about the Farm being a welcoming place. This is a dangerous game of misinformation that escalates to the point where both men pull their firearms, and only one of them is loaded. When Ray asks for more money, Mr. C understands that Warden Murphy has betrayed him. But this isn’t the first time things haven’t gone south for Mr. C in this dream. Ray Monroe reveals his part as a double agent, aligned with whoever plays Phillip Jeffries in this scene. Phillip Jeffries serves many functions in the dreamscape. I interpret this Jeffries as the last remaining element of conscience attached to Cooper’s damaged and manipulated memory function.

Ray does not hit Mr. C, but rather he gets hit with a ricochet off his gun, saving his life functionally in the dream. The viewers and Ray Monroe see a more subtle truth about what happens to Cooper’s dark half in this dream, which he is working so hard to control and exit. When Mr. C falls to the ground, the camera zigzags up to him like following a pattern on the Red Room floor.

The Woodsmen are corrupted shepherds of Cooper’s dreaming mind in this layer of his dream. They are aligned with BOB and will be revealed in a segment of the masterpiece in his Twin Peaks drama episode. 

Finally, Ray’s testimony confirms that other characters can see BOB in this dream. Ray witnesses this on the phone with the Jeffries he’s working with to take Mr. C down here and now. Unfortunately...

G4

Part 8: Scene 3

The Version Layer: Twin Peaks, WA

(0:11:21-0:16:00) Local (6:56:13-7:00:52) Global Time

4m39s

PN: Road House Band On Stage

Lights flash. A guitar knob is turned. It sounds like thunder but the electronic kind. Trent Reznor is on stage with “The” Nine Inch Nails. An MC stands in front of a microphone with a large pine cone. He says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Roadhouse is proud to welcome The Nine Inch Nails.” NIN starts playing “She’s Gone Away.” It’s a song about a moment of clarity, where the absence of someone and something collides with time, all being pulled into a very dark place.

Why is this song presented to us at this point in the narrative? Witnessing a Roadhouse band scene so early in an episode is aberrant to what we’ve experienced thus far in The Return, so we must inquire and determine the meaning for ourselves. If the intent is to emphasize Laura Palmer’s absence from this dream, this song is perfectly placed and executed. It begins the revelation at hand, while Mr. C is briefly out of commission. Aligned with the demon BOB, their schemes and mechanisms of deception are on pause, and truth may now be revealed to the dreamer (and, more importantly, to the viewer). She’s gone away.

I consider this scene a moment of reset in this dream. Mr. C’s moment of resurrection, like the hard reboot of a computer, where the operating system hasn’t yet taken over the higher functions of reason and memory, a bare reality floods Cooper’s dreaming mind. The truth of the corruption of his mind will be revealed metaphorically because metaphors are the brick and currency of dreaming.

I do not view what is about to happen in this episode as a literal reveal of how evil came into the universe of Twin Peaks. I do not interpret what will happen as BOB’s origin story within a nuclear explosion. On the contrary, there has been evil since the spark of human cognition. However, for our main character, the dreaming Dale Cooper, this metaphor can be useful in conveying how evil was born into his soul and now corrupts his unconscious reality. So, instead of viewing what will unfold from this scene as an origin story, let us consider it an explanation story told in audiovisual metaphors for what a soul’s corruption looks, sounds, and feels like. 

Twin Peaks is the story of corruption in unfortunate souls. Over the remainder of this episode, Cooper’s dreaming mind will reveal the depth and extent of corruption that has invaded his psyche, threatening what is pure and innate inside the manifestation of his consciousness across every stage of elevation. The dreamer will know, even though he may not understand yet. It is the viewer’s labor to understand and piece together meaning.

C17

Part 8: Scene 4

The Version Layer: Somewhere in SD

(0:16:00-0:16:20) Local (7:00:52-7:01:12) Global Time

20s

PN: Black Lodge Plan

The ring of the Nine Inch Nails song reverberates in the field as Mr. C’s corpse lays peacefully with arms outstretched. He sits up, eyes closed, and the ringing stops. He opens his black eyes, bloody-faced and filthy. Fade to black.

The system is rebooted, and the plan is back in action, but at what cost? What happened during that gap while Nine Inch Nails sang about how she’s gone away?¹

BOB invaded Cooper’s soul, corrupting the mechanics of his dreams and memories. He also manipulated his emotions, assuming control over the broadcast of “reality” in Cooper’s dream. But the dreamer started to become aware of this dire situation.

H2

Part 8: Scene 5

???

(0:16:20-0:56:43) Local (7:01:12-7:41:35) Global Time

40m35s

PN: Mystery

New Mexico July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m.

Atmospheric wind swirls. We are at the top of a mountain, looking down into a distant valley. We can see for miles; there is so much to look at but little life here. A mechanical voice starts counting down from ten, with a click after one. There is a brilliant flash of light from the valley below. Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima begins to play. We zoom in toward the mushroom cloud in the center of the valley. Lightning strikes all around the periphery of this massive explosion that appears small in scope, given our expansive frame of reference. We are starting very far away from this cataclysmic event. The devastation rises. 

Small clouds gather beneath the more immense mushroom cloud, and there is intense atmospheric whooshing. We move inside the mushroom cloud of devastation and corruption.

The frame is consumed in explosions of colors. Erratic movements of speckles and spots. A black field with hundreds of tittering white dots moving in swarming patterns that are discernible but immeasurable with our limited abilities as viewers. Opaque colors flash in many shades of yellow and red. A negative image moves into the frame, an X-ray with sperm-like objects moving in sync, another pattern. This is followed by an explosion of white flashes against a black background, like an electric dandelion, blown or bubbles underwater, moving at high velocity. A pattern of back-and-forth rowing emerges and morphs into a violent digging of light into darkness. A fiery explosion comes towards us on screen. Blue, white, and yellow stars are born in a nebula of fireworks blasted onto the screen. A dusty tunnel with a bright light in the middle, followed by multiple explosions of light and thunder. 

Yellow explodes into red, each explosion producing a rippling effect on the gas and dust around it. A yellow explosion consumes the screen, growing more significant and more violent. The nuclear furnace burns and swells to the music. There is a shift to black and white. Explosions rip across the screen from every direction. A dark dust cloud rolls across the frame.

The story told here is not a documentarian’s account of the historical nuclear testing of an atomic weapon, but rather the story being told is one of moral corruption. This is a metaphor. All of this nuclear activity is metaphoric of the moment when BOB's evil begins corrupting Dale Cooper's psyche in the Twin Peaks narrative. This atomic explosion is an organizing incident of our hero’s corruption, and his primary task is to wake up from this demented dream with his soul intact.²

We see an empty convenience store with two gas pumps outside. Each pump has one light bulb at the top. There are two hanging lights above the front windows. There is a front door and a phone booth. There are stacks of cans visible through the large front window. There is a staircase leading up on the right side of the building. Lights begin flashing as the door opens and closes like it’s phasing through time. A dust cloud rolls out the front door, phasing in light—bright flashes of light inside the store. More dust rolls out. Bright flashes inside occur more rapidly. The dust cloud grows to cover the entire store and then dissipates. Human-looking figures walk around, phasing in and out. They look like Woodsmen but are not oily and burned (yet). The figures move around the inside and outside the convenience store. They phase in and out, walking all around the pumps. They do not walk up the stairs but walk everywhere else on the screen. Their fists seem to be out in front of them quite often.

Cut close to a gas pump. 

The figures continue walking around with their fists out. They stand behind stacked cans inside the convenience store. There are more flashing lights. The figures disappear. A wide-angle view of the convenience store is followed by the camera going in and out of focus, which repeats several times. Lights flash in static sputters like a 35 mm film rolling in a movie theater. The figures are now back.

Tight shot of the large front window of the convenience store. The figures move around inside the store. Side shot of the store again. The lens goes in and out of focus, sputtering like a needle stuck on a vinyl record. The sputtering stops.

The perspective shifts rapidly between close shots and wide shots. Flashes of light highlight figures moving in the shadows. The image fades to black.

At the beginning of this scene, these figures appear to be uncorrupted Woodsmen. By the end of this scene, I believe they become corrupted. Through their manipulated function in this dream, corruption can spread to higher mental functions like memory and the arrangement of reality. This scene begins with a calm, serene atmosphere and passes through chaos to conclude with a new evil order. For the Woodsmen, their oily, vacant faces are marks of their corruption. The corruption of the Woodsmen and the deterioration of the function of memory (represented by the Phillip Jeffries machine) empowers Mr. C to run this dream layer like the warden of a prison.

A strange creature floats on a screen filled with black, androgynous, pale like an alien, and monstrous. The creature vomits into the black a viscous, plastic-looking substance that moves closer in the frame. The creature has horns, resembling the image on Mr. C’s playing card from Part 2. We zoom into its vomit, and we see hundreds of small egg shapes. There is a dark globe here with BOB’s maniacal face. This is the bubble we saw earlier during the Woodsman’s resurrection of Mr. C. One egg breaks from the fluid and floats off. Inside the liquid, eggs are now floating all around with bubbles.

There is a burst of music and flame. Multiple explosions jet across the screen. A large pool of fire morphs into the shape of a heart. Finally, a golden orb emerges from the heart of fire and moves towards the screen, eventually consuming the screen to reflect all the explosions. The golden orb comes close, and the music speeds up rapidly. Red blobs move very fast, like blood cells in a vein. Thousands of these red orbs move at blinding speed against the flow of this environment. The activity and movement slowly shift into a view of a massive dark ocean.

An important shift happens in this scene. We move from corruption to the mitigation response. First, the causality displayed on screen reveals the nature of nested evil within the mythology of The Return. In this scene, BOB is a by-product of this creature; his manifestation is an extension of whatever this creature represents here. Logically, an order implied here must be respected in any analysis of the relationship between these images and concepts portrayed on screen. The bubble in the puke derives its existence from this creature, which is preternatural. BOB is a powerful agency of corruption and malice, but BOB is only a facet of the evil represented here in this scene, embodied in what this floating creature represents. Note the eggs and how many there are because we will follow the journey of one of them at the end of this episode.

But then we shift into the mitigation response, which will guide us through a beautiful image of disaster response to a soul’s corruption. The fire produces the golden heart, which morphs into a golden seed, revealing a pure human soul's innate power and structure. When we enter the orb, we find a world of blood cells that, when we probe deeper, reveal a dark tower in the middle of a violent ocean. Inside this tower is the last remaining measure of hope to combat this terrible corruption. 

In this ocean, great waves move and crash. The pervasive sound of wind consumes our audible focus. A dark tower appears in the distance, a large protrusion jetting up from this immense ocean. Massive waves break against these rocks, spraying water violently exploding up the cliffs—the wind whistles. The screen follows the cliffside to a vast, smooth, modern structure. The screen focuses on a dark rectangular window high up the structure. 

Inside, ambient vintage music plays from a gramophone in a room resembling a grandparents’ sitting room. In this room, a pretty woman (Lady Dido) in an elaborate sparkly dress sits on a couch. The floor has a swirly appearance. There is an iron screen in front of Lady Dido. A floor lamp with a teardrop shade and tassels is rooted to a circular mat on the ground. There is a large gramophone piece of furniture next to the couch she sits on and two recessed circular structures on the ceiling. Covered windows hide the ocean view. A rectangular tapestry hangs on the wall to the right of Lady Dido. A sizeable bell-shaped object with two transistors on top and two dials on the front sits on a large circular rug. A mirror on the ceiling or a large beam running down the center. Lady Dido sways to the music. Her hands are folded in her lap. 

A clanking alarm begins. The Fireman appears from behind the bell structure. He looks at Lady Dido and then turns to look into the camera. The Fireman seems concerned with what he sees and hears. Eventually, he turns to the bell structure and pushes a button. The alarm stops ringing after 64 times. The Fireman looks at Lady Dido again and turns to walk behind the machine.

We witness here the moment of alert which follows the detection of an invasion of pure evil into the psyche of our organism, Dale Cooper, who is lost in his dream while we watch. This place is a metaphoric representation of this dreamer’s frontal cortex, where the brain’s executive functions bring memory together with emotion, balanced by an intimate connection with the golden orb, a metaphoric form that every human is innately born possessing. The golden orb represents mercy, compassion, creativity, and devoted kindness. 

This is a moment of revelation, where the danger of imminent moral corruption is made clear to the dreamer's frontal cortex. The Fireman safeguards this organism's overall moral health. Unfortunately, that health is in danger, and we watch him move into emergency countermeasures.

The music stops.  The Fireman ascends an ornate staircase with a railing that begins halfway up. The Fireman’s steps produce scratching sounds. He enters a large vestibule outside the theater of the imagination. Another bell machine is situated on a more prominent circular rug. 

There are two illuminated light sconces on each side of this room. The wavy carpet mesmerizes the viewer. There are distant floating lights in the background with covered windows lining the sides of the room. The Fireman walks through this room into the theater. The theater has a large screen, a balcony, and another bell machine. The Fireman approaches the theater stage, climbs a few stairs, and stands on it as atmospheric music swells. He gestures to the screen, and the images we saw earlier of the bomb exploding play out again. He seems disturbed by what he sees. The fire grows large again. The convenience store is on the theater screen. Lights flash, and the figures walk in phase. The theater screen features the creature vomiting again. The theater screen image freezes on BOB’s bubble. The Fireman walks forward a few steps and turns to face the bigger screen (pointing at us, the viewers). An organ plays as it ascends and hangs in the air over the theater stage.

A light shines into the theater, and Lady Dido walks in; this spotlight lights her way forward to the stage. Flashes of light illuminate the room from the front. Lady Dido approaches the event happening before her reverently. BOB’s bubble appears on the screen again, and she seems very worried as she surveys it. Dido’s shadow appears in the spotlight underneath The Fireman, floating horizontally now, high up above the stage, arms at his side. Lady Dido climbs the stairs to the stage. The Fireman’s head glows, and the BOB image on the theater screen cuts to a space background.

A beautiful, sparkling, golden gas-like substance starts flowing from The Fireman’s head into the room. Lady Dido looks up, smiling in reverence at what is happening. The golden stream of sparkles becomes a flowing river-like structure resembling a tree with limbs emanating from The Fireman’s head. Tributaries of these sparkles gather and form into glowing golden orbs. Lights flash in the room as a small galaxy of sparkles swims in the air above The Fireman. One of these golden orbs grows large and floats out of the stream to Lady Dido. She holds this golden orb reverently, gazing into its depths. Finally, she brings it close, and we see Laura Palmer's face inside the orb. Lady Dido gives the orb a long kiss and then lets it float upward. It moves towards a portal resembling a curving horn with three holes. The horn tube rotates towards the theater screen, changing to an image of the Earth like in an old 1950s documentary animation. The orb drops are transubstantiated from this theater into the screen. In black and white, that screen displays a satellite moving towards the Earth; the orb glows golden as it descends.

Wide angle of the theater. Lady Dido watches the orb descend. Fade to black.

Laura Palmer is a construct in this dream and has always been. She is a figment of Cooper’s imagination, not even a memory (because they never met). And yet, Laura’s trauma and murder are the central supporting column of this entire assault on Cooper’s psyche. When pulled from Red Room in Part Two, Laura Palmer became something different, more meaningful beyond a single layer of this dream. The construct of Laura Palmer is unique within this universe of Cooper’s dream. It is the perfect vessel to smuggle the best part of himself because it is his compassion and empathy with the suffering she endured which led him here to begin with, and this is the irony at the heart of Twin Peaks The Return.

The Fireman’s dream tree in this scene might contain all the characters that populate this dreamer’s mind and memory, including the image of Laura Palmer built up through his investigation. Danger threatens to completely corrupt Dale Cooper, and this essence of his goodness, represented by the golden orb, will have to be smuggled beyond the fringe of this dream, where the cosmic battle of this man’s fictional soul takes place before our eyes on the screen. What is happening here is not distant from the viewer. Instead, we are taking an active part in synthesizing meaning from what we are seeing.

I do not believe that the viewer needs to rely on outside sources of information (Hinduism, other Lynch films, etc.) to derive intertextual meaning from these images. The golden orb represents what is pure inside Dale Cooper, and that quality has been infused into the constructed image of Laura Palmer. This image is then sent into another layer of dream that we will not encounter until the final hour of The Return.

The screen overlay reveals that what we are seeing is a New Mexican desert in the year 1945. The numbers tick up to 1956. The wind roars as the screen zooms in flashes, eventually onto an egg hatching in the desert to squishing, liquid sounds. A creature crawls and slithers out of the egg. It looks like a frog with beetle wings. The creature crawls on the sand and flutters its wings, leaving a slimy trail. It crawls off-screen. Dark clouds move fast across the face of the full Moon.  

It is nighttime outside another convenience store. Crickets chirp into the still night. Two people emerge from the shadows, a young boy and a girl. The boy asks, “Did you like that song?” The girl says she did. She stops, looks at the ground, and exclaims, “Oh, look! I found a penny! Oh, and it’s heads up. So that means it’s good luck.” She runs her thumb across Lincoln’s face. The boy says, “I hope it does bring you good luck.” She smiles at him. Elsewhere, in the desert, a Woodsman floats from the sky diagonally. Another follows him. Their eyes look crazy, and their skin is blackened and oily.

A couple drives on a dark road. Their car approaches another car, which stops in the lane. Shadows cross the headlights. A Woodsman stumbles up to their car, accompanied by growing scratching noises. He leans into the car window, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He asks the man driving, “Got a light?” He repeats this twice more. Another Woodsman is in front of this car, looking through the windshield. The man’s wife screams. Her husband stares in catatonic shock at the Woodsman with the cigarette looming in his passenger window. The woman’s wail is drawn out and distorted as the electricity continues to crackle. The Woodsman continues asking, “Got a light?” The husband slams on the gas, and the car takes off, avoiding the other Woodsman, tearing off into the dark night; the terrorized couple hold hands, tearing away from the scene. 

The boy and girl walk on a dirt road in a valley with a large hill on their left. Crickets chirp. 

The girl asks, “You live in town, don’t you?” He says yes. She asks, “You live by the school?”  He asks how she knows that. She says she just does. She says, “So, I thought you were going with Mary.” He says, “No, that’s over.” She asks if he’s sad about that. He says no. She says, “Oh. Okay, that’s good.” They arrive at her house. She says, “It was really nice of you to walk me home.” He says he really wants to and asks if she minds if he gives her a kiss. She doesn’t know about the kiss. He begs for just one. She exhales and closes her eyes. 

They kiss sweetly, and she exhales. They say goodbye and wave at each other before she enters the house.

Boots walk in the desert toward a flat building with a large antenna. The Woodsman with the cigarette is stalking for prey. He sees the antenna and travels toward it. 

The Platters “My Prayer” plays.

We see the outside of a radio station KPJK. The clock on the wall informs that it is 10:16 PM. 

A disc jockey flips through pages in a binder with a headset while a 7” record plays next to him. Elsewhere, a mechanic listens to the radio in a garage, working on a car. Elsewhere, a waitress cleans tables in a diner, preparing to close up for the night. The young girl is in pajamas and in bed, inside her home, listening to the radio. There are dark, circular marks on her knees. She is smiling. The Woodsman approaches the radio station and enters the front door. A woman files papers with her back turned to the door. She says, “Yes,” her face turns to horror when she understands the danger in front of her. The Woodsman asks her, “Got a light?” An electric hum grows. The woman is frozen but also drawn toward him. He crushes her skull with one hand. The Woodsman sees the DJ in the booth and enters, asking, “Got a light?” The man turns around in horror, and the Woodsman grabs his head and squeezes but doesn’t kill him as quickly as the woman did. There is a horrible squishing sound. The record scratches when the Woodsman pulls the arm and needle off the vinyl record.

Elsewhere, the mechanic, the waitress, and the girl all listen to dead air hiss over the radio. 

The Woodsman flips a switch and grabs the microphone, bringing it close to his mouth. 

With a cigarette hanging from his mouth, he recites the following verse several times over and over: 

This is the water /

And this is the well /

Drink full and descend /

The horse is the white of eyes /

And dark within.

The waitress, hearing this recitation, collapses to the ground. Hearing this recitation, the mechanic drops his wrench and collapses to the ground. The frog beetle crawls outside a home. The girl lying in her bed looks at the radio with distaste. She reaches for the dial but doesn’t make it. Instead, she falls asleep on the bed. The frog beetle crawls outside her house. The Woodman’s voice on the radio carries out into the quiet night. Her window is opened, and the frog beetle jumps and flies to her sill. The girl sleeps peacefully. The frog beetle crawls to her face, clucking and fluttering its wings. The girl’s mouth opens wide enough for the frog beetle to crawl inside. She swallows.

The Woodsman ends his repetitious recitation, emphasizing a final “with…IN.” He finally crushes the DJ’s skull, and the man’s eyes turn white as his head is brutally ripped apart, blood pouring onto the floor in chunks. The Woodsman leaves the radio station and walks into the darkness as lights flash before him—a horse whinnies in the distance several times as the credits roll.

The sleeping girl’s eyes blink rapidly with furrowed brows.

Twilight Time is a song about light's departure and night's coming. Birds stop singing. Twilight is a time for affection and curses to slip carelessly into human hearts. In this scene, we see how all these characters become corrupted in this dream. Parasites of malevolence invade these characters, populating this dream world. 

Mr. C was only unconscious for a few minutes of dream time, but it was enough to reveal the truth about the higher cognitive functions of the dreamer’s psyche and the seriousness of his situation. Countermeasures were executed to guide the dreamer to the conclusion. The character construct of Sarah Palmer in this dream is the host of corruption that, if it greets Mr. C at the door of the Palmer home, will end in catastrophe for this dreaming Dale Cooper. Sarah and the creature inside her wait for Mr. C and the payload of BOB that he would carry to the door. Mr. C works desperately to find the coordinates of her nest, and he will find her ready to receive him. Hope is often followed by laughter from beyond the veil.

CREDITS8

Part 8: Scene 6

(0:56:43-0:58:18) Local (7:41:35-7:43:10) Global Time

1m35s

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Music

1. “She’s Gone Away”: Written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: Performed by Nine Inch Nails

2. “My Prayer”: Written by Georges Boulanger and Jimmy Kennedy: Performed by The Platters

3. “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”: Written by Krzysztof Penderecki: Performed by Warsaw National Philharmonic

4. “Slow 30’s Room”: Written and Performed by David Lynch and Dean Hurley

1. Consider what Mark Frost said in a podcast conversation with Sam Esmail:

“The idea [for Part 8] came out of the feeling that the larger issues of what was going on in this world that we’d created needed something like an origin story. It needed, not explanation, but illumination. We had to go back to the scene of the crime, the original scene of the crime, that had, perhaps, engendered all that followed.” TalkHouse Podcast, “Episode 16,” Air Date: 11/16/2017

2. Consider Mark Frost’s words from the Talkhouse Podcast interview with Sam Esmail:

“There are a lot of original sins if you look at American history, but the most modern and the most devastating is obviously the Atomic Bomb and the fact that we developed it and, knock wood, that we’re the only country that’s ever dropped one on other human beings and it felt like that might have been an entry point for something. And we’d been playing all along with this mythological notion of other dimensions and other realms, and our version of a realm of the gods or the demi-gods or a play of good and evil on another plane, that this felt like the organizing incident and so it was very carefully scripted.” TalkHouse Podcast, “Episode 16,” Air Date: 11/16/2017