Third Day Theories: A Recap of the Latest Theories, Analysis and Predictions Generated from Season 3 Part 9, This Is The Chair

Welcome back, dear reader.  Boy, Bad Cooper walking down that dirt road looked rough, didn’t he?  He looked like we felt after watching Part 8.  Thankfully, we’re back on track with Part 9.  All sorts of story lines are converging, and time lines too, it would seem.  The exposition hose was on full blast in a few places, but we also took a smoke break for 2 minutes outside the police station.

We’ve got a lot to talk about, so grab your bag of Cheetos and let’s go for a ride.

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Theory: Bad Cooper is the one who took out the hit on Dougie Jones (aka Good Cooper).

Analysis: Well, there you go.  We finally know who the bad man is that Roger should never let into his life.  I was admittedly a bit resistant to this theory, because I wanted to see the series go down a different path where Good Cooper and Bad Cooper would have to team up in the end against a bigger bad.  Still could happen, but it’ll be a lot harder if one of them wants to kill the other.  The mysterious red square popping up on Mr. Todd’s computer screen was pretty much a dead giveaway, but now we know for sure with Bad Cooper finally calling Mr. Todd directly to see how things are going.

And things are not going so well for Team Doppelganger on the Vegas front.  Bad Cooper instructs Mr. Todd he’d better have the job done by the next time he calls, but it looks like he’s already going to invoke Plan B, by sending Hutch and Chantal in for a “double-header” after Hutch kills the double-crossing Warden.  For his part, I’d bet that Mr. Todd is about to skip the middle hit-men and try to do the job himself this next time.

On the flip side, this would seem to confirm that Philip Gerard and the Evolution of the Arm are indeed helping Good Cooper muddle his way through the life and times of Dougie Jones.  Sure, some of this might just be Good Cooper’s good luck and skills percolating under the surface, but the slot machine icons, the insurance auditing sparkles, and hand-to-hand combat advice are apparently all coming to him via Red Room radio.

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Theory: Diane is a member of Team Doppelganger.

Analysis: So now we’ve gone full spectrum, from Diane being the victim of some form of abuse at the hands of Bad Cooper, to now potentially being a co-conspirator with Bad Cooper.  An evil henchman capable of putting on an Academy Award winning performance for Gordon and the rest of the FBI cohort.  Again, there’s a lot of emotion involved in many of the theories being put out there.  Let’s try to be a little bit more analytical and see what we can determine.

We see Diane first try to check her phone on the flight back to Philadelphia, but cell service is apparently blocked on the plane (Tammy and Gordon are using a satellite phone, not a cell phone).  Once detoured to Buckhorn, she makes an excuse to be alone and checks her messages again as soon as everyone leaves.  She is *expecting* this message.  Bad Cooper is not just pranking her on the heels of their meeting.

The message was sent from a burner phone and shows up as being from “unknown” on Diane’s phone.  But there can be no doubt that this is a coded message expected to be understood by the receiver.  This is a prearranged communication between Diane and Bad Cooper.  The look on Diane’s face when she gets the message is also very interesting.  She’s not confused, she’s not surprised.  She looks calculating, like she’s thinking through what her next move needs to be.

Does this mean that Diane is in cahoots with Bad Cooper though?  Not necessarily.  This could be a code phrase that Diane and Good Cooper had set up between them before 25 years ago (i.e., “if I ever send a tape that says this..”), as suggested on Bickering Peaks podcast.  I can’t quite make that work out in terms of what we’ve seen so far, but I won’t rule it out just yet.

Bad Cooper could certainly have some sort of blackmail on Diane, forcing her cooperation.  He could be threatening to kill Good Cooper, for instance.  It’s been hinted pretty strongly that Diane knows about the Blue Rose cases, so she might well be able to wrap her head around this supernatural situation.  If it really has been 25 years since they saw each other, Bad Cooper would have to have had the foresight of Major Briggs to give Diane instructions, should one day Gordon and Albert come knocking at her door.  This might explain some of her animosity towards them (being more directed at the situation she hoped never to come true).

But we have to allow for the possibility that she is a willing participant.  Whatever happened 25 years ago, Diane certainly is holding some sort of grudge against the FBI.  While there seemed to a lot of truth to the confrontation between her and Bad Cooper in the prison, the reality is that the information she’s given Gordon so far is very nonspecific and just confirming what he thinks he already knows.  Bad Cooper himself gave that much away with his “yrev, very” greeting.

I just keep going back to that look she has after she gets the text in the morgue.

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Theory: Good Cooper will “wake up” when (you name it) happens.

Analysis: A lot of these theories and predictions have come and gone already.  So many that most theorizers are now resigned to the idea that Good Cooper will not “wake up” any time soon, possibly not even until as late as Part 16.  We certainly seem to be running out of magic bullets.  But for what it’s worth, I’ll throw my own wild theory into the mix, just for grins.

Could it be that Lynch/Frost have hidden the clue for us in plain sight?  Bobby voices the line that becomes the Part 4 title, “…brings back some memories”, when he sees the picture of Laura Palmer.  Laura is always the key to Twin Peaks in David Lynch’s thinking.  Perhaps, like Bobby, Good Cooper just needs to see a picture of Laura to bring back *his* memories.

Working off that prediction, the “Wow Lynch Wow” YouTube channel predicts something will happen to cause Janey-E to pack the family up and flee to Twin Peaks.  This isn’t as wild as it sounds, remembering that Andy indicated there was a Jones’ near his missed meeting place with the farmer.  Maybe they have relatives in Washington.  If we could somehow get Cooper to Twin Peaks, the odds of an encounter with an image of Laura’s face are much improved.

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Theory: The Woodsmen healed Bad Cooper and/or removed BOB from Bad Cooper when he was shot.

Analysis: The Woodsmen are very clearly being shown removing BOB from Bad Cooper, but some are theorizing that was only temporary while they healed him.  I think though that this line of reasoning stems from the erroneous assumption that Bad Cooper needs BOB to fuel him somehow.  If Bad Cooper needed BOB in that way, he wouldn’t have to search for BOB in the prison mirror.  The Woodsmen actually make Bad Cooper’s initial wound much worse in the course of “healing” him, if that’s what they are doing.  Could be some sort of weird blood ritual thing, but I think there’s a better interpretation.

Here’s a crazy thought: Lodge entities can only be killed by head injury to themselves or their host.  Ruth, Phyllis and Darya were all shot in the head.  BOB caused Leland to smash his head into the cell door.  Bad Cooper is shot in the gut though, and he heals.

So, under this line of thinking, the Woodsmen didn’t heal Bad Cooper, they just took advantage of him being down to snatch BOB away from him.  They were keeping his wounds open and maybe even trying to make them worse, so Bad Cooper would stay down while they did their work.

The only thing I don’t like about this idea is that Lynch and Frost have been pretty straight forward with so much of the exposition this season.  If Ray says he found help, then that’s probably how we’re supposed to interpret it also.  Though, he could only mean that the Woodsmen kept Ray from finishing the job, and putting a final bullet in Bad Cooper’s head (they appear just as Ray was about to do this and one contingency of them dance around Ray, seemingly to hold him back and keep him away while they work).  If a head injury would free BOB (as it did with Leland), why prevent Ray from taking the killing shot?  Maybe Bad Cooper had a contingency plan with the Woodsmen to heal him, or maybe even BOB was able to call them to give him and Bad Cooper aid.  Extracting BOB could have been temporary in that arrangement, or could have been the price for their services.

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Theory: There are alternate timelines at work here.

Analysis: This one is just about ready to be put to rest.  Bad Cooper called Duncan Todd, tying the Las Vegas and Buckhorn / Yankton timelines together.  The sheriff puts Twin Peaks on 9/29 (two days before 10/1) and Bill Hastings signs 9/29 on Major Briggs’ picture (he makes loopy 9s), tying Twin Peaks and Buckhorn.  And then Jade sent back the hotel key, which arrived in the mail at the Great Northern, tying Las Vegas and Twin Peaks.  Every location seems to be on the same date now.

That said, I still hold reservations about some scenes being chronologically out of order.  I’m 100% convinced the scene of Hawk going to Glastonbury Grove is set in the future.  Maybe now tied to the planned camping trip to Jack Rabbit’s Palace with Sheriff Truman and Bobby.  Most folks are convinced the black and white scene with Good Cooper and the not-Giant is something set near the end of the series, given how Cooper “understands” the not-Giant’s three clues.  The small vignettes in and around Twin Peaks may also be coming to us in a jumbled order.  Hard to tell just yet.

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Theory: The 1945 convenience store is the one mentioned in FWWM.

Analysis: In FWWM, Philip Jeffries recounts a meeting of Lodge entities that he witnessed in a dream, that was held above a convenience store.  MIKE also reported that he and BOB lived above a convenience store, back in the day.  And now we see this conveniently labeled “Convenience Store” in the 1945 post-blast scenes, with Woodsmen wandering in and out like ants.  But are they one and the same place?

There’s been a bit of back and forth on whether the 1945 store even has a second floor.  It doesn’t seem to, but some think they have spotted stairs on the outside that could be leading to an unseen second floor.  More telling though is that the 1945 convenience store looks to be a prop from the buildings set up around the Trinity test site as part of the experiment.  Thus the label, “Convenience Store”, rather than a real store name.

If it’s not *the* convenience store, perhaps it’s only important that it be *a* convenience store.  Perhaps the convenience stores are a network of locations where the Black and White Lodge entities can live and/or meet.  The store MIKE and BOB lived over was in Twin Peaks or nearby, next to the vet where Waldo was treated.  In Jeffries tale, it seemed to be implied that meeting was in Seattle.  The 1945 store is in New Mexico.  But they are all convenience stores.

BTW, on a side note, people have remarked (and this is probably an old one I just hadn’t heard before) that in the meeting scene from the Missing Pieces, you could draw a line down the middle of the room and suppose that those on one side are Black Lodge entities, and those on the other are White Lodge entities.  The Woodsmen, in this case, are on the Black Lodge side, which probably makes sense.

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Speed Round:

• There is a symbol that is part of the original Owl Cave petroglyph that looks fairly similar to the frog-roach creature from 1956. There is also a mention of a flying frog creature in the Access Guide.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is the masterful hand of Mark Frost at work, folding in obscure mentions from the past and making them look like it was the plan all along.
• The not-Giant is possibly identified now as the “Fireman”. This is derived from the recently released name of the new Badalamenti track that was playing during his scenes in Part 8.  [Source: http://welcometotwinpeaks.com/theories/carel-struycken-the-fireman/]
• Amazingly, three weeks later, that damn airplane window puzzle still remains unsolved. By now, it’s even made its way outside the world of Twin Peaks fans and has been analyzed by real-world cryptologists and code breakers.  Sad to say, but the fact that it hasn’t been broken might point to it being meaningless nonsense after all, though that’s a hard pill to swallow.  Maybe there will be a “/COOPER/COOPER/COOPER/” type message embedded somewhere in the noise?
• This is my own theory: I suspect the Woodsman at the radio station absorbs knowledge of his victim as he grabs / crushes their skull. He learns from the receptionist where to find the DJ booth, and he learns from the DJ how to operate the controls (he keeps the DJ alive longer, as he needs to keep the broadcast going).  Perhaps Bad Cooper did something similar to Jack with the mouth massage?
• u/ChefGarmonbozia on r/twinpeaks caught that on the typed up Buick receipt in the Secret History, the ampersands are mirrored. Amazing catch, and more amazing no one else had caught it until now.  Add this to the other Secret History typewriter inconsistencies we’ve previously talked about.  Plus in the comments to that post, there are more inconsistencies mentioned about the car and other aspects of the receipt.  This certainly does not seem to be an artifact from our reality.
• The Trinity explosion was at 5:30am Mountain War Time (MWT). That would be 4:30am in Twin Peaks.  As in the 4-3-0 of the not-Giant’s new set of clues to Agent Cooper.  [Source: Twin Peaks Unwrapped podcast]
• The Experiment, the full-sized version in Part 8, has its arms on backwards. As in, sometimes her arms bend back.  Sound familiar?
• Keep tabs on http://www.commercialsihate.com/. They had the text of Bad Cooper’s message to Diane posted hours before the show actually aired.  They had done the same with the Woodsman’s poem in Part 8.  The guy who runs the site seems to be related to the production, or is a rogue agent within the production staff (unlikely).
• It has now been revealed that there were more than eight Woodsmen in the 1945 Convenience Store scene. This may hurt the 1902 Burning River Woodsman theory, and may help the Sam Lanterman as Woodsman theory.  (If the Log Lady’s husband is a Woodsman, what does that say of all the messages she’s received through her log though?)
• I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but it looks a lot like Bad Cooper has Wyndham Earle’s silver metallic briefcase. Granted, there could certainly be more than one of those out there in the world, they could just have similar tasks in luggage.  But it is feasible that Bad Cooper might have wanted to pick up this and anything else he could salvage from Earle’s operation on his way out of town (BOB may have Earle’s memories / knowledge, but not his equipment).  If so, maybe Leo was “rescued” from his predicament.
• Call me weird, but the 1956 Girl gave off a vibe to me like she wasn’t human. Like she didn’t quite understand human customs and how to carry the conversation.
• Many are theorizing Jerry’s foot could be possessed by a Lodge entity, in the way Philip Gerard’s arm was. Could be.  We’ll find out on beat 3 (we’ve already had beats 1 and 2 of this vignette).
• Prediction: Johnny Horne’s new head injury will snap him into enough coherence that he will be able to report some information on Laura Palmer (who tutored Johnny) that was not previously known and plays a part in finding her.

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As always, please reply below with your own comments and corrections, or give me your own well thought out theory.  You can catch me on various Facebook groups, such as “Twin Peaks (2017)” or our own “25 Years Later” page, on the Reddit r/twinpeaks forum, or email me at catnapspirit@gmail.com.  See ya next week.