I guess we’re beyond wondering how they even put this stuff on TV, right? Extended visions from within an atomic explosion… strange darkened apparitions that crush skulls and broadcast weird poems… that frog-bug that hatched from an egg and climbed inside a teenaged girl’s mouth… a rare familiar character in the episode ascending into the air and releasing a golden eminence from his head that birthed an orb containing the visage of another familiar character which was then released with the blessing of another character into a projection screen that housed the whole planet… this was an incomparable episode of telly.

Just that opening ten minutes, that was enough for several gasps, several moments of jaws having to be scraped off the floor. Even for the world of Twin Peaks there’s no context that you can view this in – it was an utterly unique hour of visual stimulation.

Things began honestly enough. DoppelCoop on the road with his mate Ray, even though they’re probably not really mates anymore given the layers of deception going on. DoppelCoop needs his information. As soon as he lies about Darya “waiting for a phone call” (when he’d already killed her in the premiere), you figured that meant that Ray was in his final moments too. More so when Coop suggests that Ray hold out at “that place they call The Farm”. So… RayRay’s gonna buy the farm is that it?

Luckily for him he’s perfectly memorised the information that Mr Cooper needs and he thinks it’s worth some money, the audacious son of a bitch. Time for some David Lynch favourites with those unbelievably tense shots of winding road under headlights, a frightening reminder that you’re heading into the unknown with every passing second. If ever that’s been truer than this episode then I’m yet to see it.

Coop had a gun stashed away in the car but Ray got the better of him – the first time that’s ever happened where DoppelCoop seemed to lose control, at least other than the garmonbozia-spewing car crash. Coop pulls the trigger but Ray’s sabotaged it and he caps the bugger with a few of his own, watching him fall dead on the ground.

Except… do you remember the first episode of the season when the camera panned along the jail cells from where Shaggy from Scooby Doo was sitting towards a darkened figure that looked like some kind of mining casualty who then fades into nothing? And then I think it was last week when we saw that terrifying man again, strolling through the corridors at the coroners where the wrongly aged body of Garland Briggs was stashed. Yeah well there are a few of those sooty bastards and as Ray watched on in horror, they appeared from nowhere, ritually bobbing around the body of DoppelCoop as they meddled and mashed with his corpse, everything happening in flickers of light and sound.

The sound editing in this scene – in this entire episode – is absolutely stunning, by the way. Same for the CGI which up until now has shown some fairly severe shortcomings, the likes of which you tend to get with TV. Game of Thrones has the same issue with its massive dragons. But maybe Lynch just saved the extra pennies for this one.

The creepoids then extract some kind of balloon or sac something out of DoppelCoop and within that balloon is the face of BOB. At this point Ray’s had enough and he gets in the car and drives the hell away as the ghosts finish and fade. We return to the scene five minutes later to see DoppelCoop snap back to attention, back to life. It’d seem he no longer has BOB but… damn, I don’t know what to think.

Then the message that Ray leaves on the other end of some phone call as he drives away in shock:

“Phillip, it’s Ray. Ah… I think he’s dead. But he’s found some kind of help so I’m not 100%. And… uh, a-and then 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.”

First off, loved the acting there from George Griffith. A great blend of total fright and necessary pragmatism. Quality stuff. Next up, Phillip has to be Phillip Jeffries, still holding out on that beyond the grave Bowie cameo meanwhile now I’m seriously wondering what PJ’s been up to all this time. We know he went rogue but which side has he been playing? Finally, the “key to what this is all about”? Seems a pretty decent read on the whole scenario.

We then cut to a full song performance at the roadhouse by “the” Nine Inch Nails and you wanna know how good this episode is? It made me like Nine Inch Nails… so… I guess I like Nine Inch Nails now. Reznor you mangy dog, you.

Sharp return to see Doppelganger Cooper revive and then…

Flashback baby, better fasten the ol’ seatbelt because this is not a safe ride you’re about to embark upon. It’s not a ride that can be explained, that can be described in any way that does it justice. Luckily if you’re reading this then you’ve already seen it so allow me to pontificate on what I took from it all.

An atom bomb goes off in testing. This is a thing that really happened, culminating in the big ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – The Trinity Test they called it. Following more than five minute of nuclear psychedelics scored by Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”, appropriately, we come to a convenience store. The imagery here is astounding, I’ve got no doubt that the episode will take on all sorts of new meaning when watched again at the end of the series. Things we suppose now might become stupid in the future but this is now so here we go.

The convenience store is scene is stabbed at by a frenetic amount of jump cuts, back and forth, as smoke emerges from within and the windows glaze over and those hobo ghosts wander around outside in no real formation with no real purpose. Then more psychedelics and whatever the hell this thing is it appears to vomit BOB into existence.

Right, let’s bookmark things there. It would seem that the purpose of this whole thing is to explain how BOB came into being. The Black and White Lodges are timeless, their history goes back way further as we know because of the stories told by Hawk’s native ancestry. But BOB only goes back to 1945 apparently. Remember Gordon Cole’s office? He had two notable images on his wall: one of Frank Kafka and the other of the mushroom cloud from the nuclear tests in New Mexico. BOB is this personified evil that feeds off of the fear and suffering of human kind and now we learn that instead of being some eternal force, he is actually born of arguably the ugliest, most despicable act of human suffering ever inflicted: the creation of the atom bomb.

Think on that for a second. BOB is the result of human suffering and he feeds on human suffering. Just as in the Fire Walk With Me film he was the face of a terrible darkness (in this case, child abuse – it’s still sickening to recall, tbh), now he’s been represented in as the horror of all humanity. BOB is the evil that lurks unspoken behind doors, destroying lives from within, BOB is also the evil that engulfs and annihilates on the grand scale, destroying lives from without.

And he was borne of that Mother figure, the same one that teleported into the Big Glass Box to kill those two students – credited as ‘Experiment’… which sorta suggests something that itself was created too. It’s also the same thing, pretty sure, that was banging at the door in the Purple Room with the Pulaski lady as Real Cooper escaped through the light socket and into Dougie Jones’ body.

As for the convenience store, recall that the spirits and beings that we’ve seen within the Black Lodge supposedly dwell in a room above a convenience store. This was in New Mexico, not in Washington State, so it might not be the same place. Or that convenience store might not be part of the bomb tests, dunno. Didn’t have a room above it but there were some cans in the window which is probably relevant – canned corn! Again, watch FWWM. Memorise all the small details whenever the supernatural folks arrive.

Next up, what is probably the White Lodge. Which is also probably the same place where Real Cooper found himself as he escaped back into the real world. Where he saw Briggs in the stars on the roof and where Ronnette Pulaski and the lady without a face gave him guidance.

The lady sitting there is Senorita Dido who is a new addition to the family. The Giant also makes another appearance, credited as ??????? (had to be sure on the number of ?s there, bound to be relevant). Bell-alarm rings, he presses a button, then struts away into another room where he honestly starts watching the episode we’re already watching on a projection screen... pausing on the birth of BOB. Aaaand then this happens…

Senorita Dido gives the orb (with Laura Palmer’s face in it) a kiss and sends it off to earth. Hard to know if time works in the same way here – the Giant is obviously aged but, like, you can’t recast him so of course he is – but Laura would’ve been born in the early 1970s.

More interesting is the suggestion that Laura is some kind of counterbalance to BOB. Not gonna lie, I teared up when she got her choir of angels in FWWM.

Argh bro and then we have the 1956 stuff that happens. Specifically the frog-bug that hatches from the egg, the hobo ghost they call The Woodsman and the two youngsters out on an awkwardly cute first date. Woody asks some terrified locals for a light and then wanders into a radio station where he literally crushes the skulls of the secretary and disk jockey as he repeats his strange poem on the air. Everyone who hears it falls asleep and that includes young lassie (credited as ‘Girl’) who then has the bug thing crawl inside her mouth. It’d be disgusting if I had any idea what was happening. This I at least have some ideas on:

“This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eye, but black within.”

There’s some confusion whether he says descend or ascend but the official twitter account says ‘descend’ even if it sounds like at least the first one is ‘ascend’. The white of the eye is a lot like how the Doppelgangers have white eyes within the Lodge (and black outside of it). And white horse, well Sarah Palmer saw one of those once. There’s a theory that Sarah Palmer might be the young girl and that bug, hey maybe that’s the source of her powers of vision and insight? She’d be about the right age although that boy couldn’t be the Twin Peaks native Leland. This is just a theory, I’m not fully convinced but the vague credits (where all the secrets are!) imply her identity could be important. Otherwise they’d give her a name, right?

Anything as horrid as that frog-bug has to be bad. To be honest, having visions like Sarah does hardly seems to be good for you either. Our one glimpse of her so far was a chain-smoker watching violent nature docos on the telly. But in one of the promo clips you see her pushing a trolley down a grocery store aisle so there’s more to come from her alright. Pretty sure the egg came from the same spool of vomit as BOB though, which would solve that thing. Also, there was this thing towards the end of season two where people kept getting sore arms like there was something psychic going on and that’s what the reaction to Woodsman’s poem reminded me of. They never resolved that.

Another theory I’ve seen: The Woodsman is Log Lady’s late husband. Where can I get one of those hats?

Have I mentioned that most of this stuff happens in black and white? Nope, because that’s how dense it all is. It’s beautiful to watch and hear and experience and what the bloody hell is going on? The only thing I’ve ever seen that compares to that middle segment is 2001: A Space Odyssey - presumably the stuff at the start and end will become clearer eventually as we return to the business of actual plot and stuff. As for the middle, that’s our BOB origin story. Now that we know that the great evil has evolved from human violence and disgrace it kinda paints things in a different light.

Do I give a damn that Audrey and Big Ed are still absent? No, this week I do not.

The usual thing: if you enjoy the crap we write then you can support TNC by hitting an ad. Cheers… gonna be hard adjusting back to the real world after this though.