Well, wasn't this week's episode a massive Pay Off?
******* WARNING. QUITE DETAILED SPOILERS BELOW ********
So, we finally have Coop back! And it only took a major shock to the system in order to achieve it...
That moment is basically what we've been hoping for for the past 14 odd episodes. And not a moment too soon...
But that, ironically, was not the most interesting thing about the episode.
Things have been progressing of late. No further pickup on The Fireman, his conversation with Andy in the Lodge, or his empowering random cockney's with magical gloves. Or why David Bowie appears to have transformed into a talking steam powered boiler...
Still...
What now for Richard Horne? Is that really his end? Used as bait to test a trap, by doppelcooper? Or is there more to this? The effect used seemed to show him being taken apart almost atom by atom. But does that really mean that he's actually dead, or simply taken apart to be reconstructed somewhere else?
These appear to all be traps designed to snare the Bob entity. But not to necessarily to destroy him.
Doppelcoop does refer to him posthumously as 'my son', though. So is/was he the son of Cooper and Audrey as previously speculated.
And then we have Diane.
Well,
that was a surprise!
So we get to finally find out what Doppelcoop did to her, and it is pretty much as many of us may have feared. That scene is brilliantly tense. You can see in Gordon's eyes that he expects her to pull a gun, we know she has a gun, but in the end she doesn't get to fire it.
Only then it gets weird. Diane is
not Diane. She's a Tulpa. Wearing her face, seemingly owning her memories, but not actually her.
This perhaps explains how even though Doppelcoop messed her up she's still doing his bidding...
Makes you wonder if the real Diane is even still alive.
Hell, a lot of people wondered if Diane was even real in the original series. We never saw her her, never met her. She was just the individual who Coop referred to when he recorded voice memos on his dictaphone.
Heck for all we know she always was a Tulpa, created by the real Agent Cooper himself!
So many questions...
Speaking of questions, we still didn't get an answer as to who was in the Palmer house when Hawk visited Sarah Palmer. But it seems that perhaps that was now the wrong question.
It's more of question of who was inside Sarah Palmer.
Because we know now that it certainly seems to look like the entity from Episode 8, which birthed Bob, is inside of her. The question though, is for how long?
Some people have speculated that Sarah Palmer might have been the little girl from Episode 8, for whom that freaky half frog/half beetle thing climbed into her mouth as the smoking obsessed Black Lodge Woodsman spoke on the radio.
Could that be?
Because her responses to Bob in the original series were ones of genuine fear. Fear over
not knowing the man she kept on seemingly hallucinating i her house. The man who was, as we now know, inhabiting the body of her husband.
And finally we have AUDREY.
Poor Audrey Horne, with her quirky looking husband Charlie, and internal anguish over where the Roadhouse is, and if she should go there.
Well, this week she finally got there. And if we thought that might yield some kind of answers to the weird dynamic between her and Charlie? We shouldn't have.
After the usual musical act on stage, the compere announces that it now time for 'Audrey's Dance' - to which Audrey gets up from her stool and genuinely does begin to dance to the incidental music most connected with her in the original series...
After which she appears to wake up, staring in anguish at her own reflection in what appears to be a very bright white space.
So... what the hell???
It certainly doesn't appear that Audrey is in the physical world of the rest of the series. Did she even survive the explosion at the bank at the end of the original series? Is she in some kind of coma? WHAT'S GOING ON?????
It did get me thinking also... the compere. A grey haired African-American gentleman in a light coloured suit. Has he been in every Roadhouse scene? I remember him i recent wees, but not from earlier on in the series.
If he was in Audrey's 'dream' (for want of a better term) are all the scenes which he introduces part of that same dream world? Is that implausible?