When Showtime president David Nevins described the network’s Twin Peaks miniseries as the “pure heroin” version of David Lynch, I suspect this eighth episode is very much what he had in mind.
It’s got cinematic antecedents — the “creation of BOB” sequence reminded me of the lengthy creation of the universe sequence from The Tree of Life, and there are shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey in there as well. But for the most part, “Part 8” is more or less Lynch in his purest form, where he’s teasing out the boundaries between experimental film and nightmares, where he uses images as basic and seemingly inconsequential as billowing clouds to create a sense of all-encompassing dread.
Did I mention it’s mostly in black and white and features what amounts to an overture from “The” Nine Inch Nails (as the band is both introduced and listed in the credits)?
The thing that’s so frequently lost in discussions of Lynch’s work is that it’s too often written off as weird for the sake of being weird. Especially when it comes to Lynch’s imitators (or those who rip him off), there can be a sense of things just being strange, because that’s what David Lynch does, right?
But there’s always a sense of something purposeful to Lynch’s oddities. Even if you can’t figure out what he’s going for, or find the connective tissue between his ideas, you can always tell that connective tissue exists. Truth be told, I don’t know how he does it, but an episode like “Part 8” might be a good place to start. Nothing in this hour should fit together — yet everything does. Let’s try to figure out why.
The episode breaks into four sections, which have nothing to do with each other and everything to do with each other
I guess if I were to assign a grand, motivating idea to “Part 8,” it would be “how does evil come to exist in the world?” Sure, the episode is dealing with some very specific kinds of evil — like BOB seeming to arrive in the fury surrounding the explosion of the first nuclear weapon — but it also plays like a treatise on how the more humans trade in personal connection for the kind of faux-connection that technology promises to give us, the more we allow something dark to seep in around the cracks.
The episode begins in the show’s present, as Evil Cooper and Ray are traveling deep into the heart of the American nowhere. (Let me restate that there are few shows out there that capture, as successfully as Twin Peaks does, how gigantic and unsettling of a country America can feel like in the middle of the night, out beyond the city lights.) Ray gets the drop on Evil Cooper and seemingly kills him, only for strange ghosts to emerge from the wild and dance around him like the characters trying to grow a tree in My Neighbor Totoro. (This is literally just the best description I can think of; it plays out as really menacing in the moment.)
The second sequence involves the performance by Nine Inch Nails, always a band you want to have on hand when you’re exploring the nature of all-consuming evil. (I will probably say nothing more about this sequence — it’s a good song and all, but it mostly serves as a scene-setter.)
The third sequence is the episode’s most seemingly plotless and most purely surreal, as the explosion of the first nuclear weapon in 1945 unleashes all manner of horrible things both here on Earth and in the strange cosmic realm that contains the Black Lodge and all of its inhabitants. “Part 8” suggests that those horrible things were just waiting for something like the arrival of BOB to happen, so they could do something for once — or maybe figures like BOB have arrived many times, and this is why we have the other realm. (The many jittery figures outside the convenience store — an important location in Peaks lore — suggest this interpretation.)
Finally, the episode wraps up with a jaunt to the 1950s, where a small town in New Mexico becomes the staging ground for a warped reinvention of the angel Gabriel telling Mary she was going to give birth to Jesus. (More on this connection in a moment.) It’s simultaneously the easiest and hardest part of the episode to explain. Describing what’s happening onscreen is pretty easy — now the frog-bug thing is crawling in the girl’s mouth; now the weird ghost man is crushing the lady’s skull; etc. — but explaining why is far more challenging. That distance between “what” and “why” is the basis of so much great horror and so much great Lynch.
The throughline between these different segments is pretty much nonexistent — the ghost man pops up as one of the figures dancing around Evil Cooper in segment one (I think?), and New Mexico is the setting for both sections three and four (if we can say that section three — which mostly takes place in what amounts to the universe’s HTML code — has a “setting”). But that’s about it. Those looking for a simple “and then!” plot summary might leave mystified.
Except I didn’t find myself all that baffled, even as I understood that what I was watching was very, very strange. Twin Peaks has always been about the thin veneer of civilization we place over the more elemental forces that tug us between the twin poles of good and evil. And in its universe, evil has become almost like a virus, leaping from host to host, working its will in the world, leaving behind husks. Viewed through that lens, “Part 8” is just three literalizations of that idea and a Nine Inch Nails song.
Behold his glorious coming
Do I know what, exactly, happens to the teenage girl who swallows (in her sleep!) the strange frog-bug hybrid that crawled toward her through the desert, after she wakes up in the morning?
No. But as I watched that scene, I had constant thoughts of Gabriel visiting Mary. Except in this case, Gabriel is a strange, smoke-blasted man (whom I believe we saw earlier in the season as a ghost inside the South Dakota jail) who takes over the local radio station and blasts his weird message to an entire little town. Everybody who’s listening passes out, would that the frog-bug — God in this metaphor, I guess — might slide into the girl’s mouth and do whatever it is the frog-bug plans to do.
The concept of inception, of impregnating the world with some ancient evil that needed to find a way to sneak past our defenses, comes up again and again in “Part 8.” Sometimes, it’s even quite literal, as the face of BOB rides into reality on the coattails of nuclear armageddon’s birth. (The sequence is even scored by classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” a none-too-subtle reminder that, hey, thousands upon thousands of people dying thanks to the detonation of a nuclear weapon isn’t a purely theoretical notion, as it was at that first nuclear test.)
Notably, this episode of Twin Peaks spends essentially no time in Twin Peaks (and whether it spends any time there at all depends on how you define the city limits of “Twin Peaks”). But that’s because the series has always suggested the simple pleasures of small-town life as an impotent antidote to the cosmic evils that lurk inside each and every single one of us. BOB is both a malevolent force unto himself and something that could take hold of any one of us at any moment.
I’ve long wondered just how Twin Peaks was going to get around the fact that Frank Silva, the actor who played BOB, died well before production on this season began. The answer has been one part pure sequel to the original show — of course Kyle MacLachlan (whose character ended the original show possessed by BOB) would be his main avatar on Earth. But it’s also been one part suggestion that BOB is everywhere and nowhere, that tapping into his primordial horrors is easier than we might like to admit.
This is why “Part 8” is, in its own, warped way, the perfect mirror image of “Part 7”’s more conventionally plotted hour full of revelations. Twin Peaks can provide answers. It can explain what’s going on, or why a character did something, or what happened to our beloved Audrey Horne. It can even tell us who Diane is and have her played by Laura Dern.
But it can never give us the answers we want, because the answers we want are buried deeper still, in a place where we can’t get to them and wouldn’t dare trying to look. You can’t explain why evil exists in the world — you can only suggest its virality, the way that it spreads from one person to another, a dark religious code of its own, blood acting as its prophet.
You can’t explain evil. Evil is. But you can try to evoke it in the audience, and that’s what “Part 8” does so masterfully. It’s at once thrilling and terrifying, and it’s unlike any episode of television I’ve ever seen.
I think I might go watch it again.