Part 12 - Let's rock (SPOILERS)

[boske]

I know not everybody reads every post on the thread like I do. Some people are still completely baffled by "coordinates+2". I've posted my thoughts on this twice already on this thread, and other people have posted as well, but it seems every new day that goes by, I come back here, and someone new is asking what did that mean? So, I know they haven't gone back 25 pages and read my previous posts.

Diane is using a mnemonic trick - she's either associating letters of the word "coordinates" or its syllables with the numbers on Ruth's arm, as a means of helping her remember them. And then there were two numbers left over at the end. I guess this sort of thing isn't as common as it used to be, as any number of people just have absolutely no idea what she's doing, younger people I suspect. Man, back in the 70s, with New Math and Number Sense, we were being taught to do stuff like this all the time!

I am not familiar with the particular concept, but this would probably be what she is doing now that you have explained it.

[bastia]

There is something that really troubled me. Even if we don't know the character it is really really really strange that a person drinks all that alcohol. Everytime we see her she drinks, we can see that she desperately need it.

Of course we don't give it too much attention, because it seems normal in the object of diane's character.

But.. What if it isn't?

Think about philippe gerard, who used the special drug to keep the possession of his body, against MIKE.

What if the alcohol is a poison who keep the evil spirit in control, doing the opposite of drug?

Idk if I am right. But I am sure that the alcohol has something to do with diane's main story.

If you rewatch the return thinking about that, you will also find it peculiar.

[DeepBlueSeed]

Is there a list of the known communications between Diane and 'unknown'?

It strikes me as weird that the initial message she received was a cryptic "Around the table the conversation is lively" and she sent back a cryptic or encrypted message. And yet this episode there seems to be a quite blunt and specific query about Vegas, where we know a lot of action has actually been taking place, and her quite blunt reply. It seems weird that this last interaction doesn't appear to be in code and, whilst it could be to distract the FBI from rushing to the coordinates before Mr C can, won't Albert and Gorden think it's suspicious that it's not in code?

[sewhite2000]

Although Albert told Gordon that Diane's message was highly encrypted, at least one person on here has previously suggested that was just Albert being his usual sarcastic self, and that Diane just sent an ordinary, easy-to-intercept message. Which would explain why her subsequent texts haven't been shown to be encrypted.

[DeepBlueSeed]

Although Albert told Gordon that Diane's message was highly encrypted, at least one person on here has previously suggested that was just Albert being his usual sarcastic self, and that Diane just sent an ordinary, easy-to-intercept message. Which would explain why her subsequent texts haven't been shown to be encrypted.

It just strikes me as weird then that, following on from the "around the table" message we've now got to the stage where the other person is clearly asking about Vegas. I could understand if the first message was a code supposed to 'awake' or 'alert' Diane as to who the sender was, but why haven't they stuck to coded messages to keep their meanings vague?

On a related note, all these messages are coming from an unknown sender. Could she be receiving messages from multiple unknown numbers?

[EwanM]

I adored ep12 - mystifying, mesmerising and disorienting, no other TV show moves quite so hypnotically.

Lynch alternates between exposition and mystification, clarification and obfuscation. The Return is a puzzle for which most of the pieces are missing. We think we're almost getting a handle on things, and then Lynch pulls the camera back to show that the pieces we've so assiduously assembled constitute little more than a small component of a much larger whole. A riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

In the memorable Bobby / Shelly / Becky Double R diner scene in Ep11, evil courses relentlessly outwards from its epicentre, metastasising exponentially, replicating the inexorable algebra of the atomic bomb.

Diane entering through the red curtains and saying 'Let's Rock' was perfectly subversive, a witty prelude to an episode that was as tightly controlled as anything that Lynch has done so far, the antithesis of rock's wild excesses. The quiet before the storm.

Grace Zabriskie's performance in this episode is electrifying. As otherworldly and menacing as she was as Nikki Grace's 'neighbour' in Inland Empire. Zabriskie invests the brittle broken husk of Sarah Palmer with mystifying depths: a woman touched not only by tragedy, but by evil. Like Carl Rodd, she's 'been places'; places no-one should ever have to go. What lurks beneath the bitterness and the pain? Her personality has disintegrated, shredded into bickering personae. She wrestles with demons - more than a hint of malevolence resides in the fault lines of her shattered soul.

Bérénice Marlohe's bewitching performance reminded me of 'The Woman with No Name', the avant-garde dance artist from On the Air. There may be '6,000 languages in the world', but not all of them are spoken. It wasn't what she said, but her intensely stylised movements, slow as molasses, that spoke to us. She wasn't Cole's 'mother's sister's girl', merely 'visiting a friend of her mother's, whose daughter has gone missing', but she certainly cast a spell over Gordon, as assuredly as she tested the patience of Albert. Is Cole just a honey-trapped old fool, or is he tuned to a different wavelength?

Ben Horne's rose-tinted reminiscence is another example of his self-pitying solipsism. He has always been an enabler of evil, but unlike the go-getter of the original series, Horne is an impotent figure these days. Another insight into the double-edged role of nostalgia in The Return: as likely to provoke regret as to to offer assurance, reconstructed memories of an idealised past provide little consolation for the desolation of the present, as a broken man surveys his barren legacy.

The cut from Jacoby, waxing lyrical about the 'ninth level of hell', to Audrey and her husband, frozen in an icy tableaux of marital misery was not accidental. A scene as redolent of the medieval demonology of Bosch as of the noir trappings of Hopper. In Dante's ninth circle of hell the treacherous (including the adulterous) are trapped in position, each according to their guilt, in the frozen river Cocytus, far removed from the light and warmth of the Sun. A tableau de la mort rather than a tableau vivant. Audrey and Charlie are locked in a hell of their own making. Of course, the ninth circle is where Satan himself resides, so they're close to the heart of darkness here. This is significant. Is it a dream? Perhaps, but Twin Peaks itself is locked in a waking nightmare.
This scene, like so many others in this episode, is so heavily encrypted that attempting to parse it is almost impossible. We simply don't have the tools to crack Lynch's Enigma Code. We've completely lost our bearings, and even Hawk's 'ancient but always current' map won't help us here.

Dropping back into Twin Peaks after an absence of more than 25 years should be a disorienting experience. A conversation between someone we've never met and a character we lost touch with more than a quarter of a century ago (not to mention the strangers in the Roadhouse later) would likely be impenetrably obscure - a complex web of unfamiliar names and relationships predicated upon shared assumptions and knowledge; a bewilderingly abstruse mix of the banal and the esoteric. As has already been observed, we've jumped from series 2 to series 29, with little hint of what happened in between. So much to reconstruct, and so little time to do it. The Return is as dense and as unknowable as an endless forest, or an alien artefact.

Every scene in this episode felt 'off'. Lynch either revealed too much or too little, and even at his most expository, we can't really take anything at face value. The Return is a striptease that that hides more than it reveals. Reminiscent of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the uncanny lurks round every corner. An unnameable, unknowable evil awaits. Time crawls here, like an insect across a desert.

[boske]

Is there a list of the known communications between Diane and 'unknown'?

It strikes me as weird that the initial message she received was a cryptic "Around the table the conversation is lively" and she sent back a cryptic or encrypted message. And yet this episode there seems to be a quite blunt and specific query about Vegas, where we know a lot of action has actually been taking place, and her quite blunt reply. It seems weird that this last interaction doesn't appear to be in code and, whilst it could be to distract the FBI from rushing to the coordinates before Mr C can, won't Albert and Gorden think it's suspicious that it's not in code?

I am not sure if his has been raised before. When we initially heard of the message, we all assumed that was a code word for the FWWM Convenience Store scene. But what if it is something entirely different?

I am not sure what part that came from, it was not part 11 for sure (definitely not 12), it may have been part 9 or 10. Now what if it refers to the conversation between DougieCoop and Mitchum brothers at the end of part 11? That would then indicate that the events in Vegas are showed delayed, so what we see in Dakota in part x, we see that in vegas in part+1 or part+2?

At the same time, at the end of episode 11 in Vegas Candie talks of the cars, and that part came from part 10 in Twin Peaks, did it not?

Then than would give us:

Dakota = part x;
Twin Peaks = part x+1;
Las Vegas = part x+2;

So are these then delayed by a day or two? These are not alternate timelines, it is just that on e.g. a signal from LV comes two days late and from TP a day later. Or something like that, I am simply raising this as a possibility, it does not mean my math is right here, it is about a concept.

???

[sewhite2000]

"When we initially heard of the message, we all assumed that was a code word for the FWWM Convenience Store scene."

Um ... no, we didn't all assume that, actually.

[boske]

"When we initially heard of the message, we all assumed that was a code word for the FWWM Convenience Store scene."

Um ... no, we didn't all assume that, actually.

You're right, I mispoke there, some of us did assume that it was code word for something of that nature. Not that very scene per se.

[DeepBlueSeed]

Someone has suggested to me on Twitter that, regardless of the meaning of the message, there's a chance that the FBI will then head to Vegas, end up picking Cooper and then head onto Twin Peaks. Much as I wouldn't want the FBI to be distracted away from the coordinates (unless, of course, they've set Diane up), it does seem like this is the most obvious way for the story to deliver Cooper to Twin Peaks.

I can't see any other reason, given events in 'Dougie's' life, why he'd end up on that trajectory. Unless, of course, he suddenly wakes up and is able to respond to the world normally... (I'm not ruling that out but there have been so many times when we've thought we see him wake up next episode, and it just hasn't happened)

[sewhite2000]

I don't think that with the very limited information we've been given that we can interpret anything definitive about the messages receives by Diane, other than Evil Coop (or somebody) thinks Gordon and Albert might know something about Vegas ... which, it appears, they actually don't! Or maybe the message is a plant, to get them to start thinking about Vegas for some reason. Hopefully, all will be revealed in time.

[DeepBlueSeed]

I guess there are two main questions that arise...

1. IF it's not a code, and it's a straight discussion, what possible connection would Diane have to Vegas that the FBI might ask about?

(Is she involved in Mr C's operations there? Or someone else's?)

2. IF the person who sent the message knows (or suspects) the FBI are keeping an eye on the messages (whether Diane is aware or not), why would they gently be prodding the FBI towards Vegas, which Mr C has ties to?

(Is it to hinder them, to keep them distracted from immediately checking out the coordinates? Or is to help them, to point them towards Mr C's Vegas operations and Dougie Coop?)

Those are two IFs by the way - there's nothing to confirm either of these is true at the moment.

[boske]

I have very little to back this up with, but it feels like there is a "Team Mr C" and "Team Jeffries" and they are in some sort of a race/competition. Diane might be a Team Jeffries member and they are working on setting Mr C into a showdown with FBI and Dougie Coop.

[dustoff]

I looked at that picture freeze frame immediately after the show and assumed it was Moby, but it fits that it is Clark Middleton as Charlie in a clownishly large overcoat standing on a ladder, or possibly on Audrey's shoulders, protecting her. The neck seems a little off for either Moby or Middleton, but I could buy it being either one. I also like thinking about Charlie and Chuck, Mr. C, together, which would be a natural pairing. Here's the photo lightened up a little.

Of all the crazy theories I have ever read about Twin Peaks, that the man in this image is Charlie sitting on Audrey's shoulders in a large overcoat is my absolute favorite.

[EddyEdson]

Of all the crazy theories I have ever read about Twin Peaks, that the man in this image is Charlie sitting on Audrey's shoulders in a large overcoat is my absolute favorite.

It's brilliant.

Note that there's also room under the large overcoat for Armstrong the chihuahua to be hiding in there as well.

That we haven't yet heard anything about Armstrong's origin story is a pretty clear sign that the "Audrey" we see is actually the real Audrey's doppelganger, and that Armstrong is in fact the real Audrey, transformed into a small dog by Jeffries (Jeffries = Bowie = bow-wow, and note the role of the Dog Star in lots of deep mystical stuff).