Season 3, Episode 9
In the original run of “Twin Peaks,” Maj. Garland Briggs was a rare voice of optimism, in a show that usually depicted a world suffering from irreversible entropy. The Major’s son, Bobby, was a high-school delinquent who sold drugs, slept with a married woman and spent a long stretch of the series masterminding an ill-considered insurance scam. Yet in the Season 2 premiere, in one of the series’s most emotional moments, Garland moved his son to tears by describing a vision he had of his boy leading a happy, upstanding adult life. And sure enough, in “Twin Peaks: The Return” that dream seems pretty much fulfilled, with Bobby now serving as a trusted deputy in his town’s police department.
Of course, Major Briggs never saw any of this come to pass, because apparently for about 25 years he was stranded in another dimension, waiting to deliver a message he’d been guarding for decades: a set of coordinates, interrupted by the words “Cooper Cooper.” It was just Garland’s bad luck that when he finally received a visitor, it was a hapless paranormal dabbler (and, even worse, blogger) named William Hastings, whose trip with his secret lover, Ruth, to the place they called “the Zone” ended with Briggs’s headless body and Ruth’s disembodied head turning up in a shabby apartment in Buckhorn, S.D.
Episode 9 of “Twin Peaks: The Return” is unexpectedly Briggs-centric, and is the most plot-heavy episode in a while. After the trippy flashbacks of Episode 8 (and a week off for the holiday), this was a return to “normal” … inasmuch as that term ever applies to this show. The town of Twin Peaks played as big a role as it has all season, too, with Major Briggs’s linking the action in Washington to the multiple mysteries playing out a few states to the east…
