We’ve hit the halfway mark of the return of Twin Peaks and good god have we had some seriously mind-bending, extremely-Lynchian parts. Don’t event talk to me about Part Eight, but if you know, then you know.
What I’m going to talk about in this is about Part Nine of the series, which aired yesterday. If you’ve not yet watched it and you don’t want to have some pretty solid SPOILERS given to you, I suggest you look away now, or go and have a tea and a sit down. You have been warned.
Part Nine has us returning to a dialogue-heavy plot, which is a breath of fresh air after Part Eight’s nightmare-fuelling terror of the bomb drop and the creation of Bob and Laura Palmer.
Yesterday’s episode had Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfield, and Tammy Preston making an emergency stop in Buckhorn, South Dakota to speak with a character we haven’t seen since Part Two. Remember, he was locked up for the murder of his secret lover/school’s library assistant, Ruth Davenport.
Tammy visited Bill (who was a hopeless, blubbering mess) to ask him questions about his conspiracy-laden website/blog, The Search For The Zone, and possible encounter with Major Garland Briggs.
Turns out, that website is totally real and a really bloody deep dive into the work that Bill and Ruth were doing in the lead up to Ruth’s death.
Having a bit of an explore around the kitschy site – which looks like something from the late 90’s, despite last being updated in 2015 – the first impression is that hot damn this thing is involved.
Shit lookin’ like my old Myspace account.
(Also important to note that Tammy’s questioning of Bill happens two weeks after his last post, which we can assume places the timeline of Buckhorn, South Dakota in late 2015.)
There’s .wav files of “electrical interference”, links out to sites about parallel universes, a paper on electricity by Nikola Tesla, and links to Robert A. Heinlein‘s work.
The site also holds a couple of really unnerving videos, one under Bill’s “previous journal entries”, which is a 13-minute faint static, an indiscernible voice, with music from the bands we’ve seen at the Bang Bang Bar over the top, almost like a radio tuning in and out and picking up multiple frequencies at once.
The second, however, is only found if you run your cursor over the bottom of the page and find the hidden numbers – coordinates. It’s deeply likely that these might just be the “important numbers” that Major Briggs recited to Bill and Ruth before he ascended.
The video is silent and depicts what kind of looks like the convenience store we saw in Part Eight, where all the woodsmen emerged.
You can look up the coordinates, and there’s serious theory around this, but look it pins to a spot that is very close the Mount Rushmore (the “faces of stone” that Gordon talked about in Part Four, and Devil’s Tower, which is explored in Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind).
There’s a guest book on the site as well, because it wouldn’t be a daggy conspiracy theory site without one. I don’t know if I’m reading too heavily into everything but the messages left by people are interesting in themselves. Are they clues? Who is the burned boy?
Keep in mind that Kyle MacLachlan said recently that Twin Peaks will eventually make sense if you stick with it, so maybe Bill’s site is going to help by giving us some more clues.
Please, I just want some answers.
Photo: Twin Peaks / Lynch/Frost Productions.
