Third Day Theories: A Recap of the Latest Theories, Analysis and Predictions Generated from Season 3 Part 11, There’s Fire Where You Are Going

Welcome back, dear reader. This was an action-packed episode with a lot of guns, and a weirdness-packed episode with a lot of stairways.  Whatever that might mean.  Buckhorn is wrapping up.  Las Vegas is wrapping up.  And Twin Peaks is going to hell in a handbasket.  We’ve only got 7 hours to go, but I’d remind you that the original Star Wars trilogy, all three movies, clocks in at under 7 hours.  So there’s still quite a lot that could happen here.

There’s no backup for this, so grab your big box of cherry pie and let’s theorize.

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Theory: Diane is a member of Team Doppelganger.

Analysis: OK folks, give it up. Diane might not know she’s playing for Team Doppelganger, but she definitely thinks she’s playing *against* Team FBI.  She essentially called out a hit on Hastings and idly watched as he was taken out by a Woodsman.  Who does she think she is texting, if this person can call down Woodsmen to do their dirty work for them?

She’s not exactly super spy material though, with her self-muttering attempt to memorize the coordinates Albert so carefully accidentally let her view. And of course, she notices Albert noticing her.  Everybody seems to be on to everybody.  The real question is whether Albert doctored the pictures of Ruth’s arm to give Diane some fake coordinates to relay.

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

Analysis: Lynch is just plain trolling us in this episode. “Damn good” cherry pie?  I’ll bet it is.  Personally, I’m sticking by my guns that either Laura’s image pulls him back or he’s about to be rescued from the Black Lodge by Hawk.  But Reddit user u/jzcommunicate did have an interesting theory that could completely exist alongside either of these theories.

In Part 10, the Mitchum brothers were going off about Candie taking “four damn hours” to fetch the insurance guy. Now in Part 11, Rodney asks Bradley “can you last 3 more hours?” to kill Dougie Jones.  The theory goes that these characters are expressing the viewers’ frustration at waiting for Good Cooper to “wake up”, but in doing so they are providing us a countdown.  4 hours away, 3 hours away – a countdown leading ultimately to Part 14, where perhaps it will finally happen.  If you think about it, Good Cooper needs to overcome one more attempt on his life from Tony / Mr Todd (Part 12) and we need to resolve the Detectives Fusco running his finger prints (Part 13).  So Part 14 might just about work out.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, there is also the theory that in switching Good Cooper from Outlet #15 to Outlet #3, Naido redirected him from Part 15 to Part 3, so Part 15 is when he will become whole again. That’s pretty meta, but it is starting to look like not such a crazy theory after all, the closer we get.

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Theory: There are alternate realities at work here.

Analysis: OK, I know a lot of people don’t want to hear it, but I’m going to point out two things that have me wondering if there aren’t two Twin Peaks (or more). While Deputy Briggs is clearing up the accidental shooting outside the RR Diner, Deputy Jesse arrives and tells him about shots he heard at Big Ed’s Gas Farm.  Bobby directs him to handle the gun shot family while he tries to get the car behind them to stop honking.  In the very next scene, Deputy Jesse barges in on Sheriff Truman and Hawk, comparing the accuracy of Google Maps versus doodle maps, to see if the Sheriff would like to see his new car.  Was Deputy Jesse just in two places at once?

In Part 11, Becky is a force of nature, looking to not only inflict abuse on Steven, but possibly kill him even. But in Part 10, Steven was the abuser and she was the victim.  And back when we first saw them, she was clearly the adult of the relationship.  So, what’s going on here?  Are they flip flopping abuser / victim roles every other episode?

Now granted, both of these could have perfectly reasonable explanations. But certainly something is wrong in Twin Peaks, and it is building to a crescendo.

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Theory: There are alternate timelines at work here.

Analysis: Reddit user u/ iantsmyth has proposed one of the most compelling multiple timeline theories I’ve heard yet. You should go read it and the comments left by others expanding upon it (https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6oe6u6/s3e10_jack_rabbits_palace_253_and_the_purple_room/), but I’ll do my best to summarize.

Remember last week when we talked about the timelines converging on Oct 1, 2016, and we mentioned two outliers? One of which was Naido’s watch showing a time of 2:53, date of “1” and weekday of “Sat”.  Oct 1, 2016 is a Saturday.  The theory is that Good Cooper was sent back on Oct 1^st at 2:53.  But the “trick” that was played on him was that his consciousness was left tethered in Oct 1^st while his physical body was sent back 10 days earlier.  This would give Bad Cooper a window of 10 days to kill his counterpart while he wandered around in a witless catatonic state.  A window that will close in just another day or two.  And meanwhile, Sheriff Truman, Deputy Hawk and Bobby Briggs are headed to a rendezvous in the mountains on Oct 1^st at 2:53.

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Speed Round: Buckhorn (since there was such a dump of information in that one scene):

• The wallpaper in the stairway Gordon briefly glimpsed through the portal is the same wallpaper that was in the picture Mrs Tremond gave Laura, that ultimately turned out to be a portal to the Lodges. So does this mean Briggs was hiding out / hibernating in the picture in Laura’s bedroom? And it’s now overrun with Woodsmen?
• The Buckhorn portal to “The Zone” is on Sycamore Street. Good Cooper came through the outlet of a house also on a Sycamore Street in Rancho Rosa. Portals are associated with sycamore trees.
• Gordon says he see “it”, referring to the Woodsman. He also asks Albert if he thinks they’ll find “one” in here, referring to a portal (or whatever that was). Albert confirms “now we know” after pulling Gordon out in the nick of time. They know of these things and probably even expected them.
• Gordon standing at the portal with his arms outstretched was very reminiscent of Philip Gerard feeling around in the Red Room with his arms out, when he was warning Good Cooper “don’t die”. Could this be indicating that Gordon was actually performing magic?
• Gordon was about to move through the portal into a stairway. Jeffries teleported (we presume) into an elevator in Philadelphia, and upon return teleported into a stairway in Buenos Aires. Is there something about up/down conveyances that enables these portals?
• There’s even a burn mark on the Woodsmen’s stairway that looks very much like the mark left by Jeffries when he returned to the Buenos Ares hotel.
• Hastings said Ruth wrote the coordinates on her hand, but they were in huge letters on her arm. Are they just trying to show us that Hastings is an unreliable witness?

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Speed Round (the regular one):

• Parallels have been pointed out between Lady Jackpot kissing Good Cooper and Laura kissing Good Cooper. Black evening dress. Showy costume jewelry. Red furnishings / setting. Hmm.
• The piano player during the restaurant scene is played by Smokey Miles. It is not, as many initially believed, Angelo Badalamenti himself. Though apparently Miles is just an actor, and that is Angelo we hear actually performing the song, as mentioned in the credits.
• In case you were unaware, the episode titles for Parts 14-16 have been revealed. They are: Part 14 = “We’re like the dreamer”, Part 15 = “There’s some fear in letting go” and Part 16 – “No knock, no doorbell”.
• Could there be a connection between “black fire” and Annie Blackburn? It was always strange that she was Norma’s sister and yet had a different last name. Now maybe that last name has some significance. [Source: u/RazorRyon on r/twinpeaks]
• Reddit user u/Brettimaeus has a pretty interesting theory based on Hawk’s indian map lore dump in this episode. If corn is good, acting as a fertility/life force, then perhaps the corrupted corn, acting as a death force, is a reference to creamed corn. And if fire (bad intentioned fire, that is) combined with corrupted corn makes the black fire, perhaps that is a reference to scorched engine oil.
• I think everyone knows this by now, but Gersten Hayward, the younger sister of Donna, was the woman hiding in the stairwell with Steven, and the one whose apartment door Becky shot up.
• Sam and Tracy had their skulls opened and their brains scooped out by the Experiment Model. Hastings has his skull crushed and his brains splattered all over Macklay’s car. Red threatened Richard that he would “saw your head open and eat your brains”. Hmm again.
• Per Entertainment Weekly, Sabrina Sutherland, the executive producer, read the Fire Walk With Me poem to the ComicCon crowd at David Lynch’s request. And by the way, she apparently said “one chance”!
• The dollar amount of Mr Jackpot’s big night keeps going up every time it is mentioned. It started at $425,000 per Janey-E’s tally, then Rodney says it was $447,000 in Part 10, and then he bumps it up to $472,000 in Part 11.
• When the Sheriff’s station switchboard operator is repeating “Someone’s on the way” over and over again, was that a meta commentary, indicating that “someone” (Cooper? Laura?) is on their way to Twin Peaks?

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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.