It’s also time to say goodbye to the evil Richard Thorne (Eamon Farren), Audrey Horne’s disturbed son. He’s now in cahoots with Dirty Dale Cooper, but meets his fate not long after. Cooper’s got three coordinates he says, two of them match, one doesn’t. Presumably these are the secret coordinates that Diane has been texting him all this time. But Dark Dale is suspicious and gets Richard to test out the coordinate spot for him, and he’s roasted alive with electricity. Someone set a trap for Cooper. But was it Diane? She is, after all (wait for it, here comes the revelation), not the real Diane, but a tulpa who’s been under this doppleganger’s control the whole time.
Whatever the case, Black Cooper seems to have no use for her any longer. He texts her “;) ALL” and she too is awakened, but the flood of memories that rush back to Diane are a nightmare. She comes back to to the FBI and Cole (David Lynch) and through tears explains how Dark Cooper raped her. She’s falling apart in this confession/awakening; she’s remembering everything in real time, shocked as it all comes back to her as she explains it to the agents. Finally, with a gun in her purse, and full of inner anguish — suggesting perhaps that two sides of Diane are in a battle for her soul, or at least a conflict of memories and identities — she tries to gun them down, but Albert (Miguel Ferrer) and Tammy (Chrysta Bell) draw first (Tammy gasps as Diane disappears — it’s her first real life experience with a tulpa). Diane is transported back to the Black Lodge where Mike also declares her to be “manufactured” by Dirty Dale. Like Dougie before her, she is destroyed and only an orb is left that eventually turns into a gold seed (I sorta get it, but let’s move on). This is the end of the doppelganger Diane, and we should assume the real FBI secretary is dead too. But there’s a sense of tragic deliverance here in Diane’s final moments. She’s revealed as an evil fake and at the same time, there’s a sense of relief that the spirit of the real Diane is in there somewhere and is now at peace.
Back to Richard Thorne. After he’s killed, Dirty Dale says, “goodbye my son,” seemingly confirming the long-held fan theory that this evil doppleganger raped Audrey Horne when she was in a coma in season two. The despicable Cooper sure did a lot of raping.
What else? Well, Dirty Dale’s assassins Gary “Hutch” Hutchens (Tim Roth) and his wife Chantal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are gunned down in what appears to be a random run in with the wrong gun-toting citizen while trying to stake out the Jones’ household. It’s unclear to me if the man who mows them down has more significance in the show or not, but my guess is they just fucked with the wrong guy.
The last bit that caps off the episode is a bit more ambiguous (to me anyhow). Eddie Vedder arrives at the Bang Bang Club to perform (in what appears to be one of the show’s only truly live performances instead of just the audio playback most musicians rock out to). Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) and her estranged husband Charlie (Clark Middleton) head to the Roadhouse club to get a drink. Of course, all of this is Audrey’s delusion apparently (I won’t pretend to understand any of this, but thanks Internet!), but during the scene she dances solo, swaying around as the people in the club move to the edges of the bar to give her space. Suddenly, after floating around in her trance-like dance, Audrey seemingly awakens, much like Cooper and Diane, and literally confronts herself in a mirror. She’s in a clinical white room, it’s perhaps some kind of limbo, she screams and things come to a close.
Seemingly every major character is aroused from their dark sleep, so presumably more light will be shed next week, but given David Lynch’s penchant for the ambiguous, we should probably expect a lot of loose ends. But if you’ve been waiting around for what feels like agonizing episodes for Dale Cooper to finally come back to life, episode 16 should bring you some cathartic elation. Next week is the two-part finale that will account for episodes 17 and 18 and then that’s a wrap. I’m terrified to recap it, but I’ll do my best to at least enjoy the surreality of it all.
