'Twin Peaks': We Think We Just Saw the Birth of BOB

Major spoilers for episode 8 of “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

Besides being one long, Lynchian visual experiment, this week’s episode of the “Twin Peaks” revival also may have just given us the origin of just about everything — specifically BOB.

And it starts with a nuclear bomb.

A large, black and white photo of a mushroom cloud has been prominently featured in Gordon Cole’s office since the start of the season, but in episode 8, it came to life. A title card shows us that the explosion took place on July 16, 1945 at 5:29 a.m. History buffs will recognize this date as the moment of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Also Read: An Old Minor 'Twin Peaks' Character May Be Very Important to the Events of Part 8

“Trinity,” as it was called, was part of the Manhattan Project, in which the United States developed nuclear bombs. The test was conducted in what is now known as the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, around 35 miles away from Socorro. As can be expected from the world’s first nuclear test, it awed the scientists involved.

These were the trials that eventually led to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Subsequently, the composition that plays over this sequence in the episode is called “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” by Krzysztof Penderecki. A “threnody” is a song that’s composed to pay tribute to a dead person and when hearing the full arrangement performed for the first time, Penderecki, the only thing he could think of was Hiroshima.

The test site is now known as a historic landmark and is marked with an obelisk that looks similar to the tower that appears in the center of the endless purple ocean, which we see after panning into the cloud itself (although I might be looking too hard into things).

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Also inside the cloud we see a white, feminine figure which is named in the credits as the “experiment.” It’s been floating around “Twin Peaks” since Part 1, where it appeared in a glass box in New York City before tearing apart two young people.

Also Read: 'Twin Peaks': All the Big Questions We Have Through Part 8 (Photos)

The destruction of one thing leads to the creation of another. At the Trinity test site, scientists found trinitite, a green-tinted residue. In “Twin Peaks” we see the creation of BOB.

Something that looks like an umbilical cord snakes out of the experiment. While many things which look like eggs float out, a floating bubble with BOB’s (Frank Silva) head also appears.

This is touched upon later when we go to the aforementioned tower, which houses a woman in vintage garb named Señorita Dido (Joy Nash) and the man we’ve come to know as The Giant (Carel Struycken). He watches a movie screen of the explosion and sees the BOB bubble. He then floats up to the ceiling, where a sparkling yellow cloud emerges from his head. A yellow bubble floats downwards, where Dido catches it. We then see the face of Laura Palmer in the bubble before Dido releases it into a gramophone, which in turn sends it down to Earth.

We cut to Aug. 5, 1956 outside an unnamed New Mexico town where one of the eggs hatches. A creature that looks like part frog and part fly emerges and slowly walks away.

Also Read: 'Twin Peaks: The Return' Proves David Lynch Still Has a Woman Problem (Commentary)

Meanwhile, smoke-covered men that have been appearing this season (and which we now know are called Woodsmen) come out of the darkness and slowly walk towards the town. One descends onto a radio station, kills the two people manning the post, and hypnotizes the town into a slumber with a creepy poem he repeats over and over: “This is the water. And this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” What that means is anyone’s guess.

In another part of the town, a young girl listening to the radio falls asleep. Soon after, the creature jumps in through her window and crawls into her mouth.

So what does all this mean? Forgive yourself if you felt overwhelmed by this entire episode since there’s a lot to unpack. But from what we gather, David Lynch was depicting the birth of BOB and the central conflict of “Twin Peaks.”

There’s the symbolism behind the nuclear bomb, which can signal the end of one era and the beginning of another, or of death and birth. In this case, it looks like it was the birth of BOB, who sprung from the experiment. Those in the purple ocean tower were alerted to the situation, where they created a contingency plan — Laura Palmer.

We know from “Fire Walk With Me” that Laura was able to resist BOB’s advances to take over her body by putting on the ring. It’s unclear why BOB wanted to become Laura as well. In a familiar sounding scenario, BOB was seen climbing in through Laura’s window, just like the creature that spawned from the egg.

Also Read: Our Dream Expert Has Made Sense of 'Twin Peaks,' and It's Very Sad

BOB is an entity of pure evil who feeds off the pain and fear of humans. Members of the Black Lodge, including MIKE, have been working to control BOB, signifying that he’s too dangerous for even the Black Lodge.

But when did Laura get released to Earth? The timeline is a bit off, although linear, straightforward time doesn’t exist in “Twin Peaks.” According to “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer,” she wasn’t born until July 1971. And it’s unclear who the girl we see in the town is and what happened to her after the creature climbed into her mouth, so the incident might not be related to Laura at all. We also don’t explicitly know what the creature is. Given the apparent cooperation from a Woodsman, BOB would be the logical guess — but it’s also possible that it’s the Laura Palmer spirit sent down by Senorita Dido being implanted in Sara Palmer.

But there might be one connection. One Twin Peaks resident was stationed at White Sands during the time of the test: Douglas “Dougie” Milford, the publisher of the Twin Peaks Gazette. According to “The Secret History of Twin Peaks,” he was also at Roswell when the UFO crashed and later worked with the government — including Gordon Cole and Phillip Jeffries — on secret missions involving the sort of supernatural stuff that has always been at the center of “Twin Peaks.” Dougie was also involved with Project Blue Book (the U.S. government’s attempt to find the White Lodge), which you’ll recall Major Garland Briggs being a part of in the original series run. You can read more about Dougie Milford’s surprisingly complicated past here.

Let’s also not forget the convenience store that was shown in the middle of all this in an extremely trippy shot in which a number of Woodsmen could be seen milling around inside and outside it. Presumably this is the same convenience store that MIKE and BOB lived in, before MIKE “saw the face of god,” chopped off his own arm and dedicated his existence to stopping BOB. We also saw the store later, briefly, when the New Mexico girl found a penny in front of it before she and her friend walked to her house. What the store has to do with anything else that happens in the episode is unclear, however, because we don’t even know where it is — the title card for the part with the girl just designates the place as just the desert of New Mexico.

So this could all be connected and could actually make sense. We could also be reading too much into it. This is also only part 8, after all. We still have 10 hours to go before we see the series’ conclusion and hopefully learn the secrets behind “Twin Peaks.”

'Twin Peaks': All the Big Questions We Have Before the Finale (Photos)

At just under 18 hours long, the "Twin Peaks" revival is the longest David Lynch movie ever, so it's only natural that we're gonna have a whole lot of questions nine hours in. There are, of course, lingering questions from the original series -- but for now let's focus on the many new questions we have before the finale (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD).
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One of the biggest twists of the season was when it was revealed that Diane (Laura Dern) was actually a tulpa, or doppelganger. She had been working for Evil Cooper (or Mr. C as he is known) after he raped her decades ago. But what happened to the real Diane and what was the point of creating the tulpa in the first place?
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Bad Coop has a lot of weird scenes in which he seems to be setting the stage for something. That something, though, is still totally unknown at this point. Which leads to probably the biggest question in the revival: After 25 years in the real world, what exactly he trying to accomplish?
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So while everybody thinks the real Coop is somebody named Dougie Jones, the real Dougie Jones is gone now, having been turned into a ball bearing after taking the real Coop's place in the Black Lodge. MIKE says Dougie was "manufactured" for the purpose of that swap. Even though real Coop is back, we still don't know who created Dougie and made the swap.
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We're worried about Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn). For three parts, she tries to leave her home and can't, thanks in part to her husband Charlie. She's acting erratically, jumping from one personality to another. In Part 13 she even says she's a completely different person. "I'm not sure who I am," she says. "But I'm not me" (which is the same thing Diane said before revealing herself as a tulpa). In Part 16, she finally gets to the Roadhouse and becomes herself again only to wake up in a white room. Is she a tulpa and is the real Audrey being held somewhere?
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In Part 7, Sheriff Truman calls up Dr. Hayward to ask him about the night Evil Doppelganger Coop came out of the Lodge at the end of season 2. Dr. Hawyard says he took Coop to the hospital for a work-up, and then later found him in Intensive Care with that "strange face" (presumably when BOB shows through). He speculates that Coop was checking on Audrey, who was in a coma after the explosion at the bank. Might that imply that Bad Coop sexually assaulted Audrey? Is she still in the coma?
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We're not surprised that Laura Palmer's mother Sarah hasn't had a good time since the death of both her daughter and her husband, but what has she been up to? In Part 12 she has a freakout at a grocery store and in Part 13, she's seen sitting in front of a boxing match that continuously repeats herself. Is she just traumatically haunted or does she know something? Her history with visions says the latter, but we're not sure.
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Ray disappeared into the Black Lodge after Evil Coop shot him. It could've been just the ring that did it, but what if there's a connection between Ray and the Black Lodge? He said he was hired by Phillip Jeffries (or a man saying he was him) so there has to be something here. Was he another doppelganger, summoned like Dougie?
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Speaking of which, what happened to Phillip Jeffries? He's a teapot now.
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And then there's this box in New York. When Coop tried to leave the Black Lodge he landed on it, was sucked into it and floated through it before ending up in some other weird dimension. Nobody knows who put the box there and paid some kid to stare at it all day, or what exactly it's supposed to do. Additionally, Albert reveals that Bad Coop knows about it and at one point he was there, along with a bald man in a lab coat.
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What happened between Bobby and Shelly? We find out in Part 11 that Shelly's last name is "Briggs," meaning the two original series lovebirds married at some point. They even had a daughter, Becky. But we see Shelly making goo-goo eyes at a drug dealer named Red (Balthazar Getty), so they're clearly not together anymore.
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What's going on with that magic drug dealer anyway? This character, credited as Red, showed up at the Roadhouse in Part 2, where he shot a finger gun at Shelly. In Part 11, we learn he and Shelly are an item, since she excuses herself from a family meeting to make out with him and tell him she'll meet up with him later. Then, in Part 6, he reveals himself as the person Richard is working for -- and he does a bizarre magic trick with a dime that freaks Richard out something fierce.
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We were treated to a strange scene in Part 11 where Bobby goes to investigate gun shots and comes across a woman screaming in her car about somebody being sick. Then we're introduced to a young girl in the passenger's seat who's practically leaking green fluids as Bobby looks on. Just, what?
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In Part 10, the Log Lady once again calls Hawk to give him a message, which reads in part, "the Truman brothers are both true men, they are your brothers," "the glow is dying" and "Laura is the one." But what does it all mean?
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The headless body introduced in the beginning of the series belonged to Major Briggs, who Bill Hastings claims to have met in an alternate reality he and the deceased Ruth Davenport called "the Zone." And he and Ruth found coordinates for Briggs in a "secure military database," and after handing them over Briggs started to float away while saying "Cooper. Cooper." And then Briggs's head disappeared. Where do we even begin with this?
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Luckily, when the FBI goes to the site -- directed by Hastings -- they do eventually find Ruth's body. However, we still don't know why her head and body were separated.
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25 years earlier, Briggs had given his wife a small tube to hide until Bobby, Sheriff Truman and Hawk all visited together. The tub contained some cryptic instructions that only Bobby could understand, as well as a copy of the transmission from outer space that Project Blue Book had received 25 years earlier. The one that was a bunch of normal gibberish but with "Cooper/Cooper" tossed in the mix. Is the implication, then, that Major Briggs is the one who sent that transmission?
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We should also note that the transmission, which Briggs showed Cooper way back in season 2, would have been sent before Briggs went into hiding. However, given that Briggs had not aged when Hastings and Ruth met him indicates that "the Zone" works differently than Black Lodge that Coop was locked in for decades. Could there be a time travel element in this?
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And why was Dougie's wedding ring inside Major Briggs' body?
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By the way: Bill's wife seems to have known Evil Doppelganger Coop -- who murdered her in Part 2. Were the other people in the Zone working with Bad Coop somehow?
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So it turns out, according to Part 9, that Duncan Todd (Patrick Fischler) was working for Bad Coop (before his death)-- and thus Bad Coop was the one sending assassins after Dougie/Good Coop. How much did Bad Coop know about what's going on with Dougie?
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Is it just a coincidence that Johnny knocked a picture of White Tail Falls off the wall when he ran into it? What is the significance of that? And what was the point of that scene anyway?
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At the end of Part 9, we see a young woman named Ella (Sky Ferrera) meet with a friend at the Roadhouse. She has a weird rash on her armpit, and she and her friend exchange weird sentences like "Have you see that penguin?" So, yeah, what does this have to do with anything?
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In Part 1, our favorite otherworldly giant (Carel Struycken) returned to present Agent Cooper with some knew cryptic sayings: "Remember 430. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone." We know now who Richard and Linda both are but what is their connection, especially now that Richard is most likely dead?
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As Agent Cooper was journeying out of the Black Lodge toward reality in Part 3, he encountered the spectre of Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) in some new extra-dimensional space. She warned him that he needed to hurry because "my mother is coming" -- possibly implying a new major paranormal force. And another thing the giant said was, "It is in our house now," which maybe could be referring to that "mother." But what is it?
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In Part 8, we saw a floating woman with what looked like an umbilical cord coming out of her face -- and an image of BOB appearing on the cord. So is this "Mother?"
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Who is the woman in the evening gown (credited as "Senorita Dido" and played by actress Joy Nash) with the Giant in Part 8? They live on some part of the spectral plane and appear to have been monitoring that mysterious Mother somehow -- and they apparently created Laura Palmer in response to seeing BOB's face in the umbilical cord. So... what's all that?
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What's the deal with the hobo ghosts, aka the woodsmen? We'd seen them a couple times in the "Twin Peaks" revival in random spots, but they were front and center in Part 8, seemingly resurrecting Bad Coop and then showing up all over New Mexico in the 1940s and '50s. But what did they actually <em>do</em>? And where did they come from? Did the atomic bomb test bring them into this world from the Lodge?
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Who was the girl in New Mexico? The frog bug thing, which we believe is BOB, crawled into her mouth, but we have no idea who she is. Sarah Palmer maybe? Could the bug actually be the Laura spirit rather than BOB?
In that other dimension with Ronette and the woman (listed in the credits as "Naidu") whose eyes were covered in flesh, we see a couple of strange machines -- one labeled 15 and the other, which transported Coop to the real world, labeled 3. Later, Coop finds a hotel key from the Great Northern in Twin Peaks for room 315, which is the room Coop stayed in during the original series. Connected?
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In Part 6, Hawk took apart one of the bathroom stall doors and discovered three missing pages from Laura Palmer's diary -- including the page on which she wrote the supernatural message from Annie from "Fire Walk With Me." Hawk speculates in Part 7 that Leland Palmer hid them there when they brought him in for questioning for Jacques Renault's murder. But where's the other missing page, and what does it say?
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How's Annie? Heather Graham has said she wasn't returning for the "Twin Peaks" revival, which could be misdirection -- or it could mean she's dead or missing or some other nefarious "Twin Peaks" thing. We've had multiple reminders of her important role in the past, though, which would seem to imply she's still important now, in some way.
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What is this black box sitting in an ashtray in Buenos Aires? In Part 5 we see it twice, first when the assassins trying to kill Dougie Jones report in to a woman named Lorraine, who then calls the box. Then, later, Bad Coop seemingly also calls the box from prison, after which it morphs into a small piece of metal. Also, Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) is said to have disappeared from Buenos Aires in "Fire Walk With Me." And Rosenfield says Bad Coop and Jeffries worked together on a thing together in Colombia at some point? And apparently Phillip wants to kill Bad Coop. So what does all this mean and how do the dots connect?
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What was that weird hum/ringing sound that Ben Horne and Beverly Paige heard in the Great Northern in Part 7? It seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere -- could this be Josie Packard continuing to haunt the place? Remember, Ben Horne previously saw her face in a drawer pull in season 2 after she died.
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While Carl is in town, he has a sort of encounter with Richard Horne, when he witnesses Richard plows over a young boy with his truck. In a weird way, we could consider this Carl's "Richard and Linda" day, though that could be a reach. Also, Carl seemingly saw the boy's soul float away after he died -- we know that Carl likely was taken to the Lodge when he was young, but why would a Lodge-related vision manifest for him now?
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We finally get to meet the kid Lucy was pregnant with all through the original series, and he's a weirdo named Wally Brando played by Michael Cera who makes this really bizarre speech to Sheriff Other Truman (Robert Forster). Somehow this scene is weirder than everything else in the show thus far. What the hell?
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We examine all the new mysteries (major spoilers ahead)

At just under 18 hours long, the "Twin Peaks" revival is the longest David Lynch movie ever, so it's only natural that we're gonna have a whole lot of questions nine hours in. There are, of course, lingering questions from the original series -- but for now let's focus on the many new questions we have before the finale (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD).

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'Twin Peaks': All the Big Questions We Have Before the Finale (Photos)

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