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Twin Peaks

‘Twin Peaks’ Season 3, Episode 14: Who Is the Dreamer?

From left, Robert Forster, Michael Horse, Dana Ashbrook and Harry Goaz in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”Credit...Suzanne Tenner/Showtime

Several times during this season of “Twin Peaks,” right before an episode has ended with a musical performance, the show has featured brief scenes of young people talking at the Roadhouse. Sometimes these characters have returned later. But for the most part, these sketches have been disconnected to anything else happening on the show. They’ve functioned more as a reminder that the current generation of fresh-faced Twin Peaks residents is as mired in melodrama as Donna Hayward, Audrey Horne, Laura Palmer, James Hurley and Bobby Briggs once were.

This week, though, the chitchat’s more meaningful than usual. Again, two young women are drinking and talking, unpacking some recent moment of distress in their lives. But when one mentions that her mother’s name is Tina, the soundtrack turns portentous. Observant viewers may remember that “Tina” is the name of the woman whom Audrey’s husband Charlie called to find out what happened to Audrey’s missing lover Billy. Now Tina’s daughter is talking about how she was one of the last people to see Billy alive, when he showed up unannounced at their house and bled all over their kitchen.

We still don’t know much about Billy or Tina, or how this all connects to Audrey. But it’s possibly meaningful that when Tina’s daughter is telling her story, she can’t recall whether her uncle was there that night or not. The deeper she goes into the anecdote, the less it sounds like she’s describing something that actually happened to her, and the more it sounds like she’s trying to recollect the details of a dream.

Dreams are a major part of this episode, which is both the most eventful and evocative “Twin Peaks” in weeks. Early in the hour, Gordon Cole recounts what’s apparently one of a string of dreams he’s had about Monica Bellucci, and he explains that this time out the Italian actress uttered what he calls “the ancient phrase: ‘We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream.’” This sets the tone for an episode that plunges directly into Lynch’s career-long fascination with the human subconscious.

Not long after Cole hears Bellucci ask, “Who is the dreamer?” his dream begins to shade into memory, leading him back to the time when his former partner Agent Phillip Jeffries materialized in the Philadelphia office — in a pivotal moment previously seen in the prequel movie “Fire Walk With Me.” Cole describing this aloud is enough to jar Agent Albert Rosenfield, who suddenly begins to remember the incident himself ... which he should, because as “Twin Peaks” fans know, Albert was there.

It’s too facile to say that the mysteries of “Twin Peaks” can be waved off as “just a dream.” But from “Eraserhead” to “Lost Highway” to “Mulholland Dr.,” Lynch has long shown a fascination with how fragile our reality can be, given that so much of our understanding of ourselves and our world is defined by what our brains have retained — often hazily. We tend to remember dreams as a series of connected events that seemed vivid and logical at the time, but that recede as we try to piece them back together. That’s not too far removed from how we sometimes recall our own pasts.

More than once in this episode, characters describe something that happened to them, in such a way that it doesn’t quite seem right. For example, Albert tells Agent Tammy Preston about the origin of the “Blue Rose” cases, saying that it all started in 1975 in Olympia, Wash., when Cole and Jeffries arrested a woman named Lois Duffy for shooting and killing her own doppelgänger. Before this other Lois Duffy died and disappeared, she said, “I’m like the Blue Rose.” And though Albert wasn’t there that time, he’s so familiar now with the details that he can recount it as though it’s documented history — even though it sounds like fantasy.

Back in Twin Peaks, we meet Great Northern security guard Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle), who tells fellow guard James Hurley that back home in England not long ago, he was sucked through a vortex into what may have been the White or Black Lodge. There he met “the Fireman,” who instructed him to buy a single green rubber glove that would give him super-strength in one hand. This all sounds preposterous ... and yet, Freddie actually can pulverize a walnut with a single squeeze. We see him do it, multiple times.

Similarly, after James hears Freddie’s story, he goes to check on the Great Northern’s furnace and seems to enter an ominous netherworld of shadow and machinery — real, and yet nightmarish. Not long after that, we see Sarah Palmer at a local bar, warning an obnoxious would-be Romeo in a “Truck You” T-shirt to back off ... right before she removes her face, reveals a portal to another dimension, and manifests a set of powerful teeth that rip the jerk’s throat out.

The point is that these stories of strange goings-on that we hear over and over in “Twin Peaks” are no match for what we actually witness. The best case in point is this week’s longest and freakiest sequence, where Twin Peaks Sheriff Frank Truman — along with Hawk, Bobby and Andy — takes a trip up to Jackrabbits Palace in the woods, per the instructions of the deceased Maj. Garland Briggs. There they all find a nude woman with stitches where her eyes should be (the woman Cooper met in space back in Episode 3); and there they encounter another vortex, which transports Andy to a meeting with “the Fireman,” where he’s given a quick summary of the events of this season’s eighth episode. When he returns to the woods, Andy is as lucid as he’s ever been on this show, giving instructions to his boss about how they have to protect this woman.

“The Fireman” looks exactly like an older version of the man we’ve previously known as “the Giant” and may actually be the same entity — or may be yet another doppelgänger, given that he’s in a black-and-white version of one of the Lodges. This is all very beguiling. What we’re seeing is so familiar, yet not quite the same. Is history repeating, but inexactly? Which Lodge are we in? Which giant is the Giant? What’s happened to Sarah? What’s happened to Twin Peaks? Lately, the show seems to be moving toward a resolution that won’t answer these questions definitively, but may at least show how they’re all related.

Extra Doughnuts:

• Plotwise, perhaps the most significant thing that happens in “Part Fourteen” is that we find out Diane’s the estranged half sister of Janey-E Jones, the wife of Agent Cooper’s half-wit doppelgänger, Dougie. Immediately, Cole calls the Las Vegas F.B.I. office, where Agent Randall Headley (played by Jay R. Ferguson of “Mad Men,” barely recognizable in the long shot Lynch uses) promises to pursue the lead. Then he exaggeratedly snaps at a colleague, “How many times have I told you? This is what we do in the F.B.I.!”

• Sometimes the principal pleasure of watching “Twin Peaks” involves the mind-warping metaphysics; and sometimes the joys are simpler, tied to a graceful gesture or a funny line delivery. My favorite few seconds out of this week’s episode may be Sheriff Truman sliding a roast beef and cheese sandwich out of a row that Andy’s neatly arranged, then idly tapping the wax paper while he stares at Hawk. Everything about this is a sensual delight: from the precision of the sandwich layout, to the thoughtful expression on Robert Forster’s face, to his pleasant-sounding pat-pat-pat on the wrapper. It’s a tactile moment that actually happens, right in front of our eyes and ears.

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