**Turn back now if your log is afraid of spoilers**
To refer to an episode of “Twin Peaks” as surreal would be to say that water is wet, but last night’s part of the revival, a more-so-than-usual disparate collection of vignettes that found some of our most beloved characters each on the brink of death, new life, or…something else, was somewhere between a hallucinatory nightmare and a gentle kiss goodbye on the forehead. The trees are whispering. The electricity is humming. The end is near. And like Margaret Lanterman (Catherine Coulson), better known as the Log Lady, said moments before her death, “There’s some fear in letting go.” Let’s recap Part 15.
We’re off to an uplifting start in Twin Peaks, where Nadine (Wendy Robie) has walked all the way to Big Ed’s Gas Farm to announce that she’s setting “Big” Ed (Everett McGill) free so he can live a life with his true love Norma (Peggy Lipton). Nadine tells Ed that thanks to Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) she’s been digging herself “out of the shit” and realizing how manipulative she’s been during their marriage. A bewildered Ed, lighter and hopeful, heads over to the Double R Diner, where Peggy has decided to do some letting go of her own. She wants her business partner to buy her out so she can focus more on her family, she says. Both free of their respective albatrosses, “Big” Ed and Norma finally come together as Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” swells over the scene. It feels like a definitive ending for these two and a charmingly fitting one at that for two beleaguered characters who have been kept apart for too long. He asks her to marry him and she accepts.
Then we head into the dark of night to the mysterious place we know as the Dutchman’s, which appears to be a traveling version of the Woodsmen-littered convenience store we last left in New Mexico after the atomic bomb. Bad Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) goes to meet Phillip Jeffries. It’s now official that David Bowie won’t be appearing in the revival. But “giant kettle” is the answer you were looking for if you ventured to wonder how David Lynch would get around his absence. The kettle is voiced by Nathan Frizzell and gives Bad Cooper little information when he grills him about Judy, the character from ‘Fire Walk With Me‘ that Jeffries said they’re “not going to talk about at all.” There are a few pieces of information to chew on, however. Apparently, Bad Cooper and Judy have already met. And then Jeffries blows some steam rings in number form and Bad Cooper writes them down. Upon leaving, he is met with a very aggressive Richard Horne (Eamon Farren), who recognized Bad Cooper from a photo his mother Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) used to have. He’s no match for Bad Cooper, who disarms Richard and takes him on the road to Las Vegas.
It’s time to say goodbye to the Log Lady, who calls Hawk (Michael Horse) for one final chat in a heartbreaking scene that serves as a beautiful sendoff to one of the show’s most beloved characters and the actress who played her who died shortly after filming. She still has wisdom to dispatch before she goes. “Watch for that one,” she urges, “the one I told you about under the moon on Blue Pine Mountain.” She misses the conversations she used to have with Hawk face to face. She’s dying, she tells him, and the wind is moaning. “You know about death; that it’s just a change, not an end.” And she says goodbye to Hawk. And to us. Goodbye, Margaret.
Dougie (the real Dale Cooper, also Kyle MacLachlan) is enjoying a nice moment of domestic tranquility with a piece of cake and “Sunset Boulevard” — a film told entirely by a man who is dead about a woman blurred between the lines of her past, present, and future — when he hears the name “Gordon Cole” mentioned. He is stunned, eyes wide, with maybe flashes of the real Dale Cooper breaking through, and crawls over to an outlet in the kitchen, jamming his metal utensil into the socket. The house goes black, soundtracked by the piercing screams of Janey-E (Naomi Watts). Is Dougie dead? Dale Cooper reborn? What will happen when the lights come back on?
Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) is still arguing with her husband Charlie (Clark Middleton) about heading over to the Roadhouse. But Audrey misses her chance during the conversation, a stilted exchange that feels like a loop they’ve been on before, where he urges her to put her coat on so they can continue. But maybe it’s a ruse, a fake out intended to keep her in a warped delusion, a ride she’s been on many times before from which he doesn’t really want her to get off. It’s late and he’s sleepy, after all, so he finally takes his coat off because he’s not leaving the house. Audrey appears to snap, or maybe wakes up, because she tells Charlie that she’s finally seeing him for the first time. “It’s like meeting a different person,” she tells him. “Who are you, Charlie?” She grows angrier as she insults him, finally pouncing on him. “I hate you!” she screams. And we get the sense that she could kill him in this moment if she wanted to.
We end at the Roadhouse, where earlier James (James Marshall) and his friend Freddie got into trouble after James innocently tried to chat with Renee (Jessica Szohr), much to the unhappiness of Renee’s husband, who could be dead after meeting Freddie’s all-powerful, blue gardening glove. But there’s a different kind of unease brewing now: two big men in need of seats make a young woman (Charlyne Yi) get up from the two-person table she’s at, despite her saying she’s waiting for someone. She sits on the floor for a moment letting it all wash over and maybe she represents us taking in the events of the episode, a daydream filled with hope that turned decidedly darker. Then she crawls over to the feet of the patrons enjoying the night’s performance before letting out a guttural scream, feelings she can’t articulate. Or perhaps it’s a warning cry meant to imply not that something’s coming, but that it’s already here, the true end for so many characters that we love. Not an end, I suppose, but just a change.