The key image in Part 5 of the revived Twin Peaks is of a woman in ecstasy. Recall, however, the subtitle that series co-creator/director David Lynch appended to his thorny 2006 masterpiece Inland Empire: "A Woman in Trouble." The line separating rapture and anguish is a blurry one, especially for Lynch's ladies, who are as likely to end up exquisitely chiseled corpses (the ubiquitous Laura Palmer; Part 2's doomed henchwoman Darya) as they are world-weary survivors.
It's funny to think about how just two weeks ago, a mainline dose of co-creator/director David Lynch's most abstract and brutal work in years made the goofball charms of Peaks 1.0 seem a million miles away – for three or so episodes, anyway. But then Dale Cooper reentered the real world in the guise of one Dougie Jones, a Vegas-area insurance agent with bad habits and worse jackets, and hilarity ensued. So now, we can spend the bulk of The Return's fifth chapter following Dale/Dougie around as he tries to figure out cars, coffee cups, elevators, statues, conference rooms, etc. – and just laugh our asses off at it.
For people wanting a linear story from these long stretches of waiting, watching, and [...] driving, it must be brutally frustrating to see the atmospherics overtake the story, to see the series as a vehicle for strangeness. But the atmospherics of Twin Peaks always outranked the story—or maybe it’s more precise to say the atmospherics were the story. Twin Peaks isn’t, and never has been, a procedural adorned with transcendental flourishes. The meaning has always been in the arcane, in the inscrutable, in the transcendental. The procedural elements are just the vehicle they ride around in. They’re the flashy details that get us to hop in for a ride, not the engine driving this thing.
Lynch turns the tables on us to show us why Becky would be with Steven. Lynch enjoys distantiation. Long shots, long scenes, and raw sound serve to disorient the viewer. When he uses close-ups, they carry with them greater emotional power. And so it is with Becky, when Steven charms her into laughing at a dumb pun, and the smack hits, and The Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” comes on the radio. Lynch cuts to an overhead close-up of Becky looking up and out of Steven’s convertible, the wind blowing across her beatified visage. She grins from ear to ear.
The shot is inherently beautiful, but it is also deeply unsettling. We haven’t seen many close-ups in these five episodes yet, and certainly no close-up quite like this. Lynch holds the shot for 50 seconds, so that we can drink in Becky’s glazed-over, smacked-out euphoria. He overexposes the shot, making it resemble some close-ups from Inland Empire. There is such darkness in that beauty.
One of the biggest questions I had going into a new season of Twin Peaks was how the show would fare against the instant scrutiny of the recap age—whether the ambiguity that made the original series so memorable could withstand so many knee-jerk Twitter reactions and morning-after analyses, all pulling at its myriad threads. Five episodes in, I think we’re already learning how: Lynch and Frost will just keep introducing newer, knottier threads to the larger tangle, all of which may or may not end up connected when this is over.
Right now, it’s hard to divine just how the War of the Coopers is tied to the murder of Ruth Davenport, to Hawk’s reopening of the Laura Palmer case, to the mysterious reappearance of Major Briggs’ fingerprints on Ruth’s corpse, to Jim Belushi’s crime syndicate guy, to Amanda Seyfried’s Laura Palmer-esque relationship troubles, to Dr. Jacoby’s paranoiac libertarian act, to the cigarette-smoking scumbag who threatened to rape Jane Levy’s friend in The Bang Bang, etc. Certainly there are thematic parallels here to characters and events from the original series—most notably Lynch’s usual motifs of duality and innocence corrupted. But look, we’re not even a third of the way through the season, and already these roundtables have pretty much devolved into a litany of disconnected details that we’re struggling to compile and make sense of, followed by reminders to each other not to do that.
If the first four episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return were a mainline injection of all the most surreal Red Room madness of Fire Walk With Me, the fifth marks a modest return to vaguely conventional storytelling. It’s still full of outlandish non sequiturs and supernatural events, but it’s markedly easier to articulate the actual events that take place in this hour of television. [...]
Perhaps it’s changed because Coop himself has finally come down to earth. Sadly, the curative power of coffee did not restore him to his former self as we had all hoped, and he’s still sleepwalking through Dougie’s life like a Coop-shaped tabula rasa. Dougie’s wife, Janey-E, packs him off to work in a piercing lime green suit, where he proceeds to steal people’s coffee, make elevators uncomfortable, and call people liars.
We don't really endorse the rest of this article but want to share it with you though. The writer lengthily describes what she considers a "male gaze" in Twin Peaks.
Through five episodes of “Twin Peaks” and two-and-a-half hours with the Dougie experience — meaning the real Dougie doing his own thing as well as Cooper standing in as Dougie — Cooper’s tomfoolery has brought on the biggest laughs of the new season. “Hello-o-o” is an instant classic, and Cooper’s addiction to and inability to cope with the result of drinking coffee has been consistently charming. (Credit to Kyle MacLachlan for inhabiting pure evil and sheer innocence simultaneously, with layers of unprecedented awareness in the former and utter obliviousness in the latter.)
After being mentioned by her mother in episode two, the first time viewers see Becky is when she delivers bread to the diner and borrows money from Shelly. [...]
In this scene and the one that directly follows it, three very different Beckys are shown. The first, the public face that walks into the diner, is all smiles as she greets people and hands off her bread. Then, when asking her mother for money and when she first sees Steve after leaving the diner, she’s scared and angry. This isn’t the lot Becky wanted for herself in life, but she feels trapped.
It’s the third side of the character that is the most interesting, though. After snorting cocaine with Steven, she almost immediately softens, delighting in the drug. In her place is this euphoria-driven version of the character, without a care in the world.
Seeing these three vastly different faces of the character makes her seem very similar to another Twin Peaks face: Laura Palmer. Before she was killed at the beginning of Twin Peaks, Laura was a very different person publicly than she was personally.