'Twin Peaks The Return': The 35 Best Scenes

Sorry, we’re still shook, and yes, we went overboard with this feature. Sunday night was a pretty fascinating evening in the world of media, social media and pop culture at large even from the outside looking in. After 18 hours of one of the most complex and mystifying series to ever air on TV–or an 18-hour movie as the director likes to describe it– one of the most groundbreaking nights of narrative drama came to a haunting and abstractly mind-bending close. On par with or besting David Chase’s notorious “The Sopranos” conclusion, no less. The show in question as the final episode of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” and further compelling was the demographic split. To many, it was another night of Sunday night television, to others, the Telluride Film Festival was coming to a close and their cinematic purview was elsewhere. Yet, to another smaller, but very vocal, ardent and niche audience, they were witnessing TV and narrative media history. Lynch’s show travels far beyond the puny dimensions of the small screen.

So while many have moved on, or in many cases are preparing for the launch of today’’s Toronto International Film Festival, we’re still fairly obsessed and reeling from Lynch’s epic, strange and spellbinding finale. We’ve reviewed the finale (as much as one can review “Twin Peaks”), tried to unpack it in a podcast conversation and now we just thought we’d try and look at, maybe examine, and or just point out our favorite scenes, many of which are wtf crazy and difficult to explicate.

Yes, we’re still sad to say goodbye to “Twin Peaks,” so in our struggle to let go, here’s 12 scenes we loved from the third season or more accurately, “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Obviously, *major spoilers* ahead.

1. Sam and Tracey Killed from the Spirit in the Cube – Part 1 – My log has a message for you.
Episode one, a relatively quiet, slow-burn doozy. It all begins in, strangely enough, New York City of all places, far from the verdant deciduous trees of Washington state, and the show almost never returns to that town again. Sam Colby (Benjamin Rosenfield), is a young man hired in New York City to watch a mysterious glass box. He’s paid handsomely to sit there and watch it. Of course there are video cameras recording the cube every night, he ensures they’re running, but that’s it. He sits and watches and leaves. Sam doesn’t know his job’s purpose, but he doesn’t ask questions because he knows there’s some kind of mystery that shouldn’t be poked at. Enter Tracey Barberato (Madeline Zima), a slinky minx who convinces Sam to let her in the room despite the hard and fast rules. Clearly into each other, eventually, they begin to make out, get naked and have sex. The glass box or whatever’s in it is not having it. A ghostly alien figure appears. After jittering and shuddering like Twin Peaks spirits are wont to do on Lynch’s show, the spooky figure phases through the box and methodically hacks them to death in a fury of blurry images and splattering, gruesome blood. A photo image of the ghost is later shown to FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (David Lynch) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrera) and they are utterly baffled. Weird shit and it’s just the beginning. You can watch the scene here, but it’s very NSFW so we won’t embed. – Rodrigo Perez

2. Cooper Emerges From the Black Lodge to the Purple Sea – Episode 3 – Call for help
Let’s try and keep this straight. In Episode 2, Cooper falls through the floor of the Black Lodge, is briefly transported to the glass box in New York City and then is launched into what appears to be outer space or some crazy inter-dimensional portal. He lands in what’s dubbed “The Purple Sea,” some kind of new astral plane with a industrial complex in the middle of a purple ocean and yes, it’s all strange af. In fact, up until this point, Call for help is easily the most surreal episode of “Twin Peaks: The Return” and it still stands out as a favorite to many fans (though perhaps Episode 8, Gotta light?, challenges it for peak surreality). Appearing like a kind of wordless “Eraserhead,” Cooper comes across the eyeless woman, Naido (Nae), and this entire sequence has been made richer with the revelation that the real Diane (Laura Dern) was trapped inside the eyeless woman the entire time. This makes sense given she is seemingly trying to warn Cooper about something, with her scratchy clicks and tics form of communication–like an insect trying to talk to humans. The scene unfolds in jittery flash frames, highly abstract, far out there and for hardcore fans of the filmmaker is David Lynch sound design porn with all its beautiful/terrifying humming, clanging and atonal industrial noise. As far as pure, bizarre Lynchian cinema and expression, it is a tour de force; haunting, baffling and starts to put the pieces of the plot into gear (though you’d never know this at the time). It’s only retroactively that we can see how this strange sequence makes sense. How the electrical socket in this dimension transports Cooper back into Dougie’s body (his tulpa), Dougie is fired back into the Black Lodge and Cooper’s return threatens to destroy his doppelgänger Mr. C. Hey, we never said any of this made sense to the layman. – RP

3. Sheriff Frank Truman Meets Wally Brando – Episode 3 – Call for help
This scene is pure comedic genius and arguably one of, if not the most talked-about moment of the series, but it should be placed to the side a little bit if only because it’s more a moment of peak absurdism rather than something that has major resonance to the plot. Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster) is introduced to Wally Brando, the 24-year-old son of Lucy Moran and Deputy Andy Brennan (they got pregnant in season two). Wally Brando, a pitch perfect, hilarious Michael Cera, is obsessed with Marlon Brando and his role in “The Wild One.” It’s… strange. Watch for yourself cause it’s hard to do it justice. And obviously, may the road rise up to meet your wheels.

Call for help also introduces Dougie/catatonic Dale Cooper and for that we should be eternally grateful.

4. The Woodsman Attacks the Airwaves – Part 8 – Gotta light?
Picking a standout moment from one of the series’ standout episodes is a difficult task. There’s the memorable opening where Dark Dale Cooper is attacked by who we find out are “The Woodsmen,” a great performance by “The” Nine Inch Nails (with a track aptly titled, “She’s Gone Away”), an atom bomb test in White Sands, New Mexico that evokes a nightmarish version of “The Tree of Life,” and the yellow orb that stems from The Giant/The Fireman (Carel Struycken) with Laura Palmer’s prom photo inside. But, if only one has to be chosen, we have to go with the haunting appearance of the lead Woodsman (Robert Broski) who, in 1956, attacks a local radio station in a gruesome way and takes to the airwaves uttering the phrase, “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full and descend; the horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.” Along with his appearance, an egg hatches revealing a hideous, overgrown bug who, during the Woodsman’s announcement, crawls into the mouth of an unknown girl (Tikaeni Faircrest). Fans have long speculated that the girl is a young Sarah Palmer, and while there’s not evidence to confirm nor deny the case, it’s a good theory given how crazy momma Palmer becomes later on. However, the convenience store where the Woodsmen reside comes back into play, as well as the horse imagery mentioned in the speech. – Ryan Oliver

5. Bobby Discovers [Some] Truth About Major Briggs – Part 9 – This is the chair.
This season of “Twin Peaks” had no shortage of brain-scrambling imagery, but it’s made all the more impressive by the fact that Lynch and Frost never lost sight of the smaller character arcs within this sprawling story. There’s no denying that in the original series run, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) was a pathetic annoyance. A caricature of the high school jock, he was also a drug mule enabler for Laura Palmer’s dark demise, and his boots and flannel jacket around his waist suggested that he was gunning for first place in a Mark Patton lookalike contest. In ‘The Return,’ he not only has a built-in arc from becoming a troublemaking youth to a deputy at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, but the central mystery revolving heavily around the disappearance of Major Garland Briggs gives Bobby’s role a greater purpose. When Bobby, Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster), and Hawk (Michael Horse) visit Betty Briggs (Charlotte Stewart), she tells them that the day before Garland disappeared, he told her that one day Bobby, Hawk, and Truman (though at the time, she assumed Harry Truman) would arrive at her house to ask about Special Agent Cooper. She gives them a piece of paper that contains a set of coordinates, but in the process tells Bobby that his father, “saw this life for him” and that he never gave up. It’s a touching scene that shows that even amongst the darkness, even amongst the shroud of fog slowly coming down Snoqualmie Falls, that some characters are given their redemption. – RO

6. Gordon Stares into The Vortex; Hastings’ Demise – Part 11 – There’s fire where you are going
A crucial piece to Gordon (Lynch), Albert (Miguel Ferrer), and Tammy’s (Chrysta Bell) Blue Rose case is William Hastings (Matthew Lillard), the Buckhorn school principal accused of murdering Ruth Davenport, whose head was found with the body of Major Garland Briggs in episode one. Hastings and Davenport claimed to have traveled to another dimension (which they called “The Zone”) and confirmed that they found Briggs there. When Hastings takes the FBI to their coordinates, Gordon peers into a vortex that forms and sees who he later refers to as, “dirty, bearded men in a room,” those men being the Woodsmen from the convenience store. During this encounter, one of the Woodsmen finds their way out, sneaking behind the cop car, and brutally murdering Hastings. Given the fate that had befallen Davenport, it was only a matter of time before Hastings was killed for being where he didn’t belong. This scene is crucial not just for being the culmination of the Hastings arc and another piece to unraveling this mystery that defies time and space, but on the rewatch, look closely at Diane’s (Laura Dern) reaction to the whole thing. It’s a tell that should have clued us in many episodes earlier to what was going on with that character. – RO

7. Truman, Bobby, Hawk, and Andy Look for the Coordinates – Part 14 – We are like the dreamer
There are many coordinates to keep track of in “The Return,” but the one thing that’s clear is that the Black Lodge, White Lodge, “The Zone,” “The Purple Sea,” or any of the otherworldly places are not just specific to the town of Twin Peaks, Washington. Though for this particular set of coordinates — the ones that were left by Major Briggs — it is located where Cooper went searching for the Black Lodge in the Season 2 finale. When they arrive at the location, they find Naido (Nae) — the woman from the room in the Purple Sea in Part 3 — naked and shivering. They give her a blanket and are ready to head back, but the vortex opens up and Andy (Harry Goaz) gets sucked up into it. He meets with The Giant (“I am the fireman”), who shows him imagery that comes back into play in the two-part finale. Though when he comes back down to the woods, he and the rest of deputies have no recollection of what they have seen. It ultimately ends up being a big moment for the sweet, dimwitted Andy, as he has the confidence afterwards to take charge of the situation, and subconscious knowledge of what’s to come. – RO