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Navigating Between Worlds: Understanding Twin Peaks Season 3

This Twin Peaks theory has finally arrived at the big questions: Was Dale Cooper following a plan? Did he take away Laura Palmer’s agency and/or blow up reality as Twin Peaks knows it? Is he dead?

Every interpretation of these questions’ answers seems to hinge on how you view Dale Cooper’s decisions to do what he did in Parts 17 and 18 of Season 3.

Dale Cooper

Two trauma cycles

From the point of view of Dale within his “is it future, or is it past” loops, he’s within this kind of trauma cycle:

Dale's chronology within Twin Peaks in a diagram to show her personal growth.

Being possessed would be a most excellent example of a major trauma that stops Dale’s energy in place. You can see him being in a state of hibernation in the Waiting Room. You can see his Dougie version as a pure receptacle of stalled energy. You can see Dale’s energy starting up again when he stuck that fork in the socket (complete with Janey-E’s not-understanding scream in the room), then becoming himself in Part 16 before he takes the path of constantly helping people (however suspect his methods may appear). You can really see him trying to be a golden shovel for people, from Diane to the Judy’s Diner waitress to Carrie Page. Except through it all he’s cold, fairly heartless, and lacking intuition as he does it. All of us fans agree in some capacity that Dale is a different guy, and probably missing something. Or at least he’s still calibrating as I say in The Dale/Mr. C showdown begins in Part 18 when Dale becomes DoppelCooper.

But I think the BOB-related trauma is only so much of the picture, and isn’t the focus of Dale’s trauma cycle as he intuitively seems to think it is. Much as Audrey had two levels of trauma, so too does Dale.

Audrey’s traumas are:

  • her real world trauma focused around her relationship with Ben Horne, which she overcame.
  • her Lodgespace-related trauma begun with her rape by DoppelCooper which led—just like with Sarah Palmer—to her birthing a child who was half Lodge. She had not overcome this at the beginning of Season 3.

While Dale’s traumas look like this:

  • BOB-related trauma, solved completely within Season 3, culminating in Part 17.
  • Then there’s the deeper trauma of losing all those years, as Andrew Grevas discussed well in Agent Cooper: My Thoughts & Theories on His Journey Throughout the Series. Dale’s is a deeper, longer-term trauma expressed best when he shed a tear through Dougie likely over the fact that he didn’t have a child of his own, and the child that he had was unknown to him.

Cooper’s BOB-related trauma cycle is entirely associated with the loops that begin with Phillip Gerard saying “Is it future, or is it past?”

This second, deeper-level trauma cycle of Cooper’s is the one that repeats with the Laura whispers.

Let’s Look at Dale’s loops chronologically again in this context:

Cycles of Dale Cooper: Laura's whispers and Gerrard's questions.

What does this mean?

Dale went through three cycles of Laura whispering to him:

  • The first cycle began with his Red Room dream from Episode 2 and ended with Dale entering the Lodge and “Meanwhile.”
  • The second cycle began with Dale needing to choose whether to tune to Laura’s whisper or to Phillip’s “Is it future, or is it past.” Instead of choosing to “go now,” Dale chooses to do the three Phillip loops within this second whisper loop.
  • The third cycle begins in the Part 18 credits with Laura again whispering to Dale. Hopefully Laura will sit Down next to Dale and once again say “You can go out now,” and this time he’ll do it. Because if this cycle of Laura whispers follow the same pattern as the other trauma cycles, it would match up just like this: Dale Cooper's trauma cycle from wider perspective.

Put most simply, the first cycle goes from the Timeline into the Lodge, the second cycle is from within the Lodge, and the third cycle goes from the Lodge back to the Timeline. Visually speaking, it’s personified by the shape of Cooper’s lodge loops:

the visual circle image of Cooper's time loops as represented by time passage in Twin Peaks.

Recalibrating the metaphor to tie Dale’s trauma cycle to the Laura whispers, Dale chooses to follow a darker frequency like Norma and the Diner did between Parts 7 and 15 before he reaches the possibility for a similar re-tuning to more positive pastures at the end of Part 18. For one thing, the Laura Whispers cycles are literally part of the Timeline. The sun can still shine through in Dale’s next unseen scene just like it did outside the Double R with the Otis Redding music.

With all the “Is It Future, or is it Past?” loops happening in the middle, Dale is in his stagnant processing phase, where other characters like Norma and Nadine are shown doing similar looping behaviors. Dale’s loops are more literal, but they are well within established trauma cycle patterns. Alchemically, he’s only had his first coat but he is in his absorbing phase during the entirety of Season 3 save the last five minutes.

And most interestingly, while he’s doing this he is literally living out the poem.

Fire Walk With Me

Through the darkness of future past

The magician longs to see

One chants/chance out between two worlds

Fire, Walk With Me

The “Is it future, or is it past?” Loops begin with Dale refusing Laura’s “You can go out now,” and then the curtains fly away, revealing darkness and a white horse, which is equated with the white of the eyes now, which means looking away.

Dale is essentially flying into the darkness. As in “through the darkness.” And “future past” is the dichotomy Phillip Gerard just introduced with his “is it future, or is it past” loops. With that, there’s the first line of the poem.

“The magician longs to see” requires less dissection. Dale Cooper, able to open the red curtains with movement of his hand, is now the magician. And, he cannot see (likely because he is too “far away”), but he sure longs to. He wants, and possibly even knows he needs, to see.

“One chants/chance out” could be:

  • An action Dale takes: speaking out from the darkness, which I could see as everything that happens after he was reformed in black smoke when he replaced Dougie Jones, speaking from inside the lodge as a tulpa-like form within the world. And chanting typically repeats, or loops.
  • A possibility to leave. The one chance he needed to decide between was either believe Laura when she said “you can go now,” or believe Phillip Gerard when he comes up with this incredibly complicated explanation for why Dale can’t leave until his doppelganger comes back in.

“Between two worlds,” as far as I’m concerned, means Dale is in a state between the Timeline and Lodgespace. The material world and the non-material world, in this in-between reality structure.

“Fire, Walk With Me” can mean “energy not unlike electricity, flow through me because I intend to use you with a particular intention.” But just as the 4th Loop is unexplained and the 4th diary page is undiscovered, so too does the poem never explain whether the poem is meant for positive or negative intent. It can be used for either. But the more I write about Twin Peaks, the more I believe Phillip Gerard’s poem has a level of prophecy for Dale Cooper, and that we have seen it literally played out over the 18 Parts of Season 3.

What does it all mean for Dale? He may stay on Jeffries’ path and be absorbed by the Black Lodge, unstuck entirely from the Timeline, or he may turn things around and possibly even return to the Timeline when Laura tells him “you can go out now.”

The 4th Loop

So how does one decide which of Dale’s cycles is a primary one? It’s just like deciding whether Season 3 is a dream or in the real world, or whether Frost’s or Lynch’s interpretation is more important than the other. I expand this dilemma of choosing in The Twin Peaks Ending: Does Dale Fix His Heart Or Die, but for the purposes here, the answer to “which loop is the primary one?” is this: Neither. My preferred way to differentiate the Cooper cycles is this:

The Gerard time loops are of the purgatorial state exclusively dealing with trauma.

The Laura whisper cycles are of the alchemical state of evolution.

And as I’ve already described in Part 4, I’ve given the interrelated nature of trauma and alchemical evolution cycles a shape:

An infinity-shaped illustration showing how trauma leads to acceptance, but back to trauma unless you can use tools to help you overcome your trauma. Then that leads to helping others.

These two cycles are obviously related, but the darkness of the Gerard loops being nested right inside the cycle of Laura whisper cycles gives me hope that Dale is going in the right direction after all, even though all of Season 3 appears to point him straight towards Lodgespace.

I suspect Tamara Preston’s final statement in Final Dossier describes this exact coexistence:

Is the evil in us real? Is it an intrinsic part of us, a force outside us, or nothing more than a reflection of the void? How do we hold both fear and wonder in the mind at once? Does staring into this darkness offer up an answer, or resolution? What does it give us to hold on to? Does it reveal anything at all?

Or can the simple, impossible act of persisting to look at what’s in front of us finally pierce the blackness and reward us with a glimpse of something eternal beyond? Is that “heaven”? How do we manage it? The only answer I can console myself with is this: What if the truth lies just beyond the limits of our fear, and the only way to reach it is to never look away? What if that’s why we can never quit trying to overcome it in every moment we’re alive?

In the Gerard loops, did Dale Cooper pierce the darkness he was in? Did he finally move through the Gerard loops and move onto the last stage of the trauma cycle where he chooses which direction to send his energy? Did he take a long cold look at the evil in himself and alchemically exceed beyond the limits of his fear?

I suspect the answer is yes, because Dale’s breakthrough moment of “what year is this” is a much less wordy version of Jacoby’s realization from Secret History of Twin Peaks which I share again here:

But the truth is Laura’s death has broken me. My own belief system—the fantasy that I could hold these worlds in balance—inner life, outer reality—and bring the truth of one closer to the other, like some free-thinking hippie Prometheus, is shattered. What a hapless fool I’ve been. Actions have consequences. Whatever happens from here, whatever the squares decide about my professional fate, if I can survive this ordeal, find the strength to dig my way out of it, I make this vow: no more lies. Only truth. Straight up. To everyone.

Dale, as I proposed in the first part of this exploration, brought the material and non-material universes closer to one another by switching states with his doppelganger. And he thought he could bring the dream logic of the Lodge onto the reality of the Timeline as if that could heal it. Much as Jacoby realized in 1989, I believe Dale is finally entering his final stage of processing trauma. The same one where Jacoby’s hubris breaks down and which leads, with time, to Jacoby’s understanding of how to truly help the world he resides in.

Because by Final Dossier, Tamara Preston now has this to say about Jacoby:

There is an air of the tarot’s “Magus” about the man—an ancient archetype of a magician who’s outlived or conquered the base temptations of life to reach a spiritual serenity while still maintaining the height of his powers. As I think of “Dr. Jacoby/Dr. Amp,” a character like Prospero comes to mind, a man in the last act of his life who’s survived the “tempest” of human turmoil and by doing so gained the ability to see beyond its commonplace illusions. A man who lives at one with nature and its pagan “spirits,” whose developed senses can now “pierce the veil” of existence and leave him able and willing to share the wisdom one mines from such hard-earned territory. (King Lear would be the tragic version, a privileged man who arrives at the same place through loss and hubris that will eventually cost him his life.)

I’ve thought for a while that the Lear reference was calling out Dale and his actions of traveling back in time, but Jacoby was in the same position as Dale during his breakthrough moment of SHoTP. Jacoby thought he could save a girl from dying. She died anyway. He learned from his mistake and started a cycle of healing and light within a Twin Peaks being drowned in darkness by the riverlike “dream” of Lodgespace Margaret was warning Hawk about in Part 10. And those people who he helped were able to re-tune themselves from the in-between reality right to the Timeline.

Dale has a chance to do the same kind of turnaround. Just because his metaphorical state of understanding has taken a literal foothold upon reality because he has the powers of a magician does not mean he can’t outlive or conquer his own base temptations to reach a similar spiritual serenity. He too can survive this “tempest” and see beyond the illusions he’s veiled over the Timeline.

I believe, much like the Season 3 characters, that we viewers have been presented with a choice of how to see the ending: do we choose to believe it’s moving in a positive direction, or a negative one? If I had to chart my own evolving understanding over time as a viewer, it would look like this:

my understanting of Twin Peaks, in my frequency chart format.

I choose to see Twin Peaks moving in a positive direction, freshly surfacing from a period of darkness. There is hope, both for Dale and for the Timeline. And there is also work ahead. Dale’s going to need more donuts.


This Twin Peaks theory is a collected version of a five-part series of articles published between January 7th and January 11th of 2019.

Thanks go out to Adam Stewart, T. Kyle King, Kylee Karre, Caemeron Crain, Brien Allen and Rob King for their tenacity in reading all parts of this theory and providing me feedback during my writing process. Thanks also go out to Paul Billington for rendering the Season 3 timeline image, and to Matt Armitage for rendering the infinity-shaped trauma cycle image.  

Written by John Bernardy

John Bernardy has been writing for 25YL since before the site went public and he’s loved every minute. The show most important to him is Twin Peaks. He is husband to a damn fine woman, father to two fascinating individuals, and their pet thinks he’s a good dog walker.

4 Comments

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  1. Thanks John!
    After reading Dion Fortune’s ‘Psychic Self Defence’ I noticed she writes about the Qaballistic Tree of Life having a double Of itself. It is called the Qlippoth. This Qlippoth is a ‘Mirror’ set of Demonic emanations which are produced from the instability of the sephiroth of the Tree of Life coming into being. This demonic mirror world is the one that Black Lodge magicians work with in their magick. So we have the two worlds here. This is in tune with what you say about the Buddhist viewpoint of two worlds. Thoughtforms are also mentioned in the book – they require part of the original magician or victim’s prana/chi or life force.
    Mark Frost has been reported to have used this book along with Talbot Mundy’s ‘The Devils Guard’ in the development of the OG twin peaks.

  2. This is great work! There’s so much depth here that I never picked up on before. I’m intrigued and impressed with your theory and research. I’ve been kind of obsessing over the “Fire Walk with Me” poem for a while, since before I ever saw Season 3, and I have an alternate explanation that I think is in line with your primary thesis but not the exact interpretation that you arrived at: It seems to me that “through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see” is about the Lodgespace/dream taking over, changing memories and events. “Future past” would normally mean “present”, but in this context it’s an altered present by a “magician” (Lodgespace / negative energy) using “fire” / electricity / magic, as multiple timeline loops overlap with reality. I think that this is the negative energy “longing to” oppose the reality of trauma and the timeline. I agree that “fire, walk with me” can refer to a positive energy breaking stagnation as you suggest, but I think it was most likely intended negatively, as it was originally BOB / Mike’s saying (before Mike cut off The Arm and was still BOB’s partner). Also, I believe that The Fireman (one who puts out fires) is a clear opponent to the forces of evil, solidifying the “fire is evil” motif.

    Thanks for your great work here. I’m excited to keep digging deeper! Cheers!

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