Navigating Between Worlds: Understanding Twin Peaks Season 3

Now that this Twin Peaks theory has looked into Twin Peaks reality and how to navigate it, it’s time to put it all together. It’s time to look at the cases of some prominent Season 3 characters.

Audrey

If I’m correct about Billy being an indicator of Lodgespace presence, this means his lover Audrey is trapped in a zone tuned to Lodgespace.

I mention this in Part 3 of my Final Dossier Deep Dive:

Her trauma is both tied to her father, which she seems to overcome by living a simple life and going into business on her own, but also to Dale Cooper’s Double. And as with Annie Blackburn and Harry Truman later on, she could not overcome the trauma incurred by her proximity to Lodgespace, and she remains trapped by it. This seems very much like how her father is trapped by pushing against the prison [that arrived when he sold the land to a shady unnamed company]’s darkness his whole life, except hers is on a spiritual/metaphorical level.

In Season 3 we see Audrey trying to tune from the 3^rd Loop she’s synced with to the middle 2^nd Loop where the Roadhouse naturally exists within Cooper’s loop tuning order.

Her trauma began with the bank explosion and rape by DoppelCooper. We see her stuck in her stagnant period; literally repeating the same scene with Charlie using different words, though her breakthrough moment of restarting her energy is when she screams “I hate you!” while attempting to strangle Charlie. This breaks her energy out of its stasis and she actually arrives in the 2^nd Loop tuning and the Roadhouse. When she dances to “Audrey’s Dance”, this is Audrey being tuned to the 1^st Loop for the first time in a long time.

She can almost feel the Timeline—almost chooses to send her energy in a positive direction—but then her song is interrupted by violence spurned on from strangers’ revealed infidelities (a major repeating theme in Final Dossier by the way), and she chooses to have Charlie get her out of there.

Which means she chooses to return to a negatively charged situation. It does not mean she’s chosen it for good; more so it implies a stalemate.

She can’t get out of her darkness quite yet, but now she’s gotten a taste of the 1^st Loop. She’s seen part of the 1^st Loop, therefore in the end of Part 16 we can see her body in what appears to be the real world, but the face we see speaking is the one in the frame of the mirror. Which means to me she’s officially fragmented. She has more darkness to push through, but she’s gotten through further than she has in a long time. And she’s not entirely tuned to 3^rd Loop anymore; it looks like she’s just as much tuned to the 1^st loop (in a way just like she is in Final Dossier), like she’s splitting the difference and hovering around the middle state of reality but never within it. But, since the bank explosion, she’s closer than she’s ever been.

Norma

An example of dipping into the darkness before turning it around at the last second? Norma.

In the early parts of Season 3, we see Norma mostly doing the Double R’s books in looped footage. She wants to help Shelly with Becky in a Part 5 scene but doesn’t do more than listen (because per pattern of help cannot be forced, merely offered until accepted). Otherwise, it’s mostly her sitting in that booth doing the books.

Per Final Dossier, she puts her entire life into her business rather than her personal life, therefore the Double R is on the same frequency as Norma. That’s why, when she’s so buried and resigned by her lack of self, the entire diner tunes toward the 3^rd Loop at the end of Part 7. That was when Bing pokes his head in and asks if anyone has seen Billy, again a signpost of Lodge presence.

By Part 11, the Diner’s tuned to the darker loop so much that Shelly goes back to bad boys over family, gunshots break through the windows, and people just outside drive zombies to dinner dates and lay on the horn.

In Part 13 we meet Walter, the symbol of the corporation that’s trying to turn Norma’s tried and true recipe for spiritual success into a standard money-hunting franchise. And the natural, organic, local ingredients that go into Norma’s pie are literally under fire for being too expensive. “You make them with love,” Walter says facetiously. “You’re a real artist, but love doesn’t always turn a profit.” The choice between the negative force of profit or the positive force of love is literally in play (I won’t even bring up how this is also David Lynch’s thought process on making movies and the Hollywood system because it’s already obvious which choice is positive and which is negative in his eyes).

But then in Part 15 Norma breaks through. She knows what’s causing the darkness. She hits her breaking point the same time Ed does. She releases herself from Walter and his business contract, and next thing you see is light breaking through the trees overhead of the Double R. How do we know this is Norma tuning to 1^st Loop and then through to the Timeline? We never see her again in the show. Also, the Diner looks completely unattended when Dale and Carrie pass by it in Part 18 while within the 3^rd Loop. She doesn’t belong near the “dream” anymore because she woke up. She fixed her heart.

Sarah Palmer

During the Part 12 grocery store scene, the same soundscape is used that was playing during Phillip Jeffries’ original FWWM scene (at the exact moment when he realizes he may be unstuck from time). What is happening to Sarah at this moment? She is realizing she’s being/has been re-tuned. And this is what I’d consider her breaking point, which we’ve established matches really well with Dale’s breaking point.

Were you here when they first came?

Your room seems different, and men are coming.

She’s talking about turkey jerky looking different. I assume a similar switch happened here as happened to the Double R patrons in Part 7, and Sarah’s so Lodgespace-tuned she can recognize the change. She could feel the “dream” coming at her like a river too (after all, she’s one of the gifted and the damned). The wave of the Lodgespace “dream” that hit in Part 7 seems like it began changing her before Part 12; plausibly during her origin in Part 8.

Here’s more from Part 12:

I am trying to tell you, that you have to watch out. Things can happen. Something happened to me. Something happened to me. I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good. Sarah, Sarah, stop, stop doing this. Stop doing this. Stop doing this. Leave this place. Find the car key. Find the car key. Get the car key. Get the car—get the god damn car key.

The repeating words really stand out typed like this. I know I’ve called this behavior PTSD before, and I still mean it, but the metaphor associated with repeating phrases leans towards looping; though it could also be that she is oscillating back and forth between loop frequencies. She could be saying the same thing on two different frequencies as she oscillates at her breaking point between 1^st Loop and 3^rd Loop tuning. She knows she needs to get away from where she is so she can calm down, but it ends up sounding a lot like Audrey’s “get me out of here”. It makes sense they’d be thematically linked, as they both literally gave birth to an actual child made at least in part of Lodge darkness.

Sarah’s breaking point does not bring out her strength like it does with Audrey. Sarah is not that kind of fighter. She instead later watches boxers on TV (a passive activity when she should be actively fighting for herself), and during a knockout punch the TV likely becomes a conduit for Experiment Model to take her over as I suggested in Coordinates (ft. the roving #6 Telephone Pole, Palmer Houses, Two Birds and a Stone). And the knockout punch was to Sarah, falling victim likely to Experiment Model.

How could she have pushed against the darkness? In that same Electricity Nexus I said DoppelCooper uses the coordinates to find the junction point that will take him to the Palmer House in Part 12, which immediately follows the grocery store scene. Instead of DoppelCooper meeting her, this is when Hawk meets Sarah, offers her help, and she refuses it, saying instead how it’s “a goddamn bad story.” Which matches up with other Lodgespace/3^rd Loop-tuned folks talking about the story of the little girl who lived down the lane. Stories are not much different than dreams, and the “dream” is what Margaret warned Hawk about in Part 10. Hawk was tuned to 2^nd Loop when he visited Sarah in Part 12 (and again we see an offer of help that could not move forward unless someone accepted said help), while Sarah was already talking in 3^rd Loop tuning. Whether that sound in the kitchen was Experiment Model waiting for her or the grocery store bagboy stocking her kitchen with left-behind groceries, she was already tuned with negative energy in mind, ready to believe in a story instead of the life she lived. And hence we have Sarah meet the “Truck You” guy in a bar that belongs about as well as Sarah’s new nesting creature.

And what sealed Sarah’s fate? When did she make her decision to go full Lodgespace? When she tried to destroy the homecoming photo in Part 17. Despite her ability to remember everything from before and after re-tunings, and whether or not it was possible to do so, she actively chose to destroy the Timeline symbol of all Timeline symbols from her own house. And if that isn’t a definitive decision I don’t know what is.

From that moment we never see her again. We even needed new homeowners to sub in for her in Part 18, even as the house remembers Sarah’s voice. She chose the full “dream,” the darkness, and couldn’t come back to the 3^rd Loop.

Lucy

Back to the lighter side of things, Lucy’s energy restarted at her breaking point, which involved two things from Part 4: her scream when she didn’t understand Frank’s sudden arrival, and Wally releasing her from maintaining his bedroom in what should be a study (this is the equivalent of Janey-E getting that money that released her from Dougie’s financial debts). In Part 9 she and Andy begin to make that study a reality by choosing a chair (from a motivation of love), and she even takes time for herself by making sure no one interrupts her on her lunch break. In Part 10, she tells Chad about a time when a clock stops, alluding to Part 17 when she chooses once and for all to intend her energy to the positive when she literally kills a force of darkness in DoppelCooper.

This is where Lucy’s tuning and her timepiece necklaces fit in; Kylee Karre of Between Two Worlds Facebook group discovered the timing when she was looking for multiple timelines, but it works well in this tuning theory as well. While Lucy’s stuck in place, she wears one timepiece. When she begins to move forward in Part 9 (and her energy is beginning to move), she’s tuned to the 2nd Loop and wearing two timepiece necklaces. Then when she shoots DoppelCooper she’s back to wearing one timepiece necklace, signifying she’s returned to being in the 1st Loop but this time by choice rather than being frozen in place there.

Dale was at the same point as Lucy’s Part 4 scream when he stuck a fork in the socket. You can see Dale’s energy flowing when he has a lapel pin on, but when his energy is stagnant and stuck in the 2^nd Loop there’s no lapel pin. After that fork, his next scene is him waking up, with lapel pin present.

Even if you can connect the fork and the scream, remember it took Lucy 13 full parts to go from her energy moving to her decision to use it in a positive direction. It seems Dale’s got a ways to go beyond Part 18 (while still far away) before he has a true understanding to factor into a proper decision. Until then there could be any number of ups and downs, energy flowing or not.

I don’t think he’s lost to the darkness at all, no matter how bleak things felt in the end. Donna Hayward, in Final Dossier, was so entrenched in the darkness she needed a fourth stint in rehab before she turned her life around, but she did, and simplified while studying to be a nurse practitioner. She chose light almost after it was too late but she did it. If Dale needs the 4^th Loop that begins in the final credits to properly choose light, then I’ll count Donna’s situation as precedent.

Becky and Steven

The best explanation of what happens when you tune yourself completely away from the 2^nd Loop’s in-between zone comes from Becky and Steven, who (in addition to never being seen by us again) literally cannot see each other by the end of Season 3 despite both still being in the show—Becky’s tuned to 1^st Loop and Steven’s tuned to 3^rd Loop. And they can’t see each other at all. They’re standing next to each other looking in different directions.

Becky, in Part 5, hides from her problems in Sparkle and hears “I Love How You Love Me” playing while she is literally a passenger in the car. She tries to believe she has love with Steven, while Steven can’t get a job and turns Mike Nelson’s negative critique into “good feedback.”

In Part 10, we see Steven ready to take a swing at Becky. She’s fearful but not necessarily surprised. And Steven throws a coffee cup out the window. As I’ve mentioned in the previous part that coffee is a visual symbol of the Timeline, this is Steven literally throwing that symbol out of the place where he lives, essentially choosing darkness right then and there.

In Part 11, Becky’s breaking point happens with a scream and gunshots into Gersten Hayward’s apartment door. This unsticks her energy and she begins saying no more to Steven’s treatment of her. She also gets help from Bobby when he loans her the money to pay for the damage she did to the door, and this is the clean break from her trauma’s damage that she needs to restart and reset her energy. Meanwhile, Steven was there down some stairs at a different level altogether, literally and figuratively.

In Part 13, Steven’s been gone for two days, according to what Becky says to Shelly over the phone. The Part 11 call to Shelly (before the gunshots) could’ve been a tuning from 3^rd Loop to 2^nd Loop, but this call is definitely from 2^nd Loop to 1^st Loop as Becky is well on her way back to the Timeline. What seals the deal? Agreeing to go to the Double R and have pie with Shelly. The exact invitation, by the way, that could’ve brought Hawk to the Timeline if he’d taken Margaret up on her offer in Part 2 is exactly what Becky chooses for herself with Shelly and we never see her again. Tuned to positive energy, to the Timeline.

In Part 15, we see Steven and Gersten tripping out of their minds, heavily into the 3^rd Loop tuning that involves nonsense words, and they’re literally lost in the woods. They keep talking about animals, as is customary with people hooked on Sparkle. He chose the darkness, Lodgespace. He chose to look far from the Timeline, so he doesn’t see Becky anymore. He kills himself in Season 3, but per Final Dossier both he and Gersten have disappeared, not died. (Tell me that doesn’t sound like the Laura Palmer ret-con in a nutshell.) They’ve been swallowed up by Lodgespace because they became passengers rather than travelers like Becky. Disappeared, just like Sarah Palmer wasn’t in her house anymore. You choose the darkness and you won’t be participating in any part of the material universe, even in the “dream.” You’re just enveloped.

Diane and Laura

In How the Fireman “Brings Back Some Memories” I made a case for how a tulpa is a physically manifested memory of trauma unable to rest until it processes what happened to its body. In this case Carrie Page was created upon Laura Palmer’s murder and Diane’s tulpa would be created when Diane likely died in the Convenience store after DoppelCooper brought her there in the memory she recounted to the Blue Rose Task Force in Part 16. I made the case that the Carrie and Diane tulpas needed to reach a certain understanding before their original selves could go onto their next stage (say heaven or the like).

I still believe this is probably the case, but I could also believe that Dale Cooper could be part of their creation when Laura and Diane were no longer in the picture because he still needed them to play roles in his Lodge loops. In this case they are still plausibly memories of traumatic events, but perhaps their genesis is being sparked by a magician after they’ve already died.

I would also not be shocked if their states as Naido (Diane) and American Girl (Laura, which though unprovable I make a case for in Permutations of American Girl) were created to house the true versions of Diane and Laura so that:

• The tulpas could exist (traditional takes on the tulpa concept need a living identity to create the thought forms).
• The women’s actual souls would not be attached to the in-between state of reality formed by Dale.

Either way, the purple zone roommates end up feeling like they’re in a witness protection program of the White Lodge (and I apparently can’t let go of as a concept since I wrote about it in Laura Palmer is in the Lodge’s Witness Protection Program in a life modeled after Shelly Johnson.)

Structurally, Laura and Diane’s stories are nearly impenetrable, and as I’ve just proven, you can plausibly go many ways with their plots. But I’ve already explored how their roles work within the structure of reality that I’ve described in the five parts of this unified theory. You can find that exploration in Why Diane and Laura are the Heroes of Twin Peaks. I encourage you to read it if you’d like to know these women’s places in this stacked reality, for instance what Laura’s three screams mean in regards to her breakthrough moment.

In short, I describe their actions as protagonist-adjacent as they are actively trying to untie themselves from this “dream” (at least as of Part 18) so they can return to wherever it is they really belong. I also suggest that if they are able to remove themselves from Dale’s in-between reality state, which I believe they are doing in both active and subconscious ways throughout Season 3, that maybe no one will be there to anchor Dale Cooper (using sight as a tool of object permanence) within the in-between state. If this is true, and Laura and Diane do not tie Dale to the “dream” by seeing him in it, Dale will then unravel from his Lodge loops. And he’s removed from his Lodge loops, therefore Lodgespace and Timeline will separate properly and fall into balance once more beginning with Dale’s 4^th Loop.

Next: Dale Cooper navigates Season 3