Twin Peaks season 3, episode 12 review: The not so grand return of Audrey Horne

Plus, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole makes the worst pun of all time

*WARNING: SPOILERS FOR TWIN PEAKS SEASON 3, EPISODE 12*

She’s finally back.

But what games have Mark Frost and David Lynch been playing with us? Audrey Horne was the jewel in the crown, the fan favourite, the star of Tumblr posts and embroidered patches aplenty. To quietly withhold her until well into the second half of the season – is that to lay bare in front of our own eyes the absurdist excesses of our own nostalgia?

And to re-introduce her in such a strange, untriumphant way as well? There were no red heels, no saddle shoes, no fingers dancing along the rims of coffee cups, or hypnotic tunes on the jukebox. Instead, Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey seems utterly changed.

No longer the sweet, yet manipulative girl dreamily yearning for so much more than was even in her reach; this Audrey is like a tiger roaring to be freed from its cage.

Appearing only in one, largely unconnected scene, Audrey rails against her husband Charlie, who she’s desperate to get a divorce from; all while she frets wildly over the disappearance of her lover Billy, who is namechecked in episode 7 by a stranger running into the diner looking for him.

To Charlie, she hurls an endless line of insults - “Spineless, no balls loser!” – and her own frustrations over the situation, especially when Charlie declines to share with her the information he learned over the phone from the last person to see Billy, seem to echo our own bafflement.

How could this be Audrey’s return? This is Lynch twisting the knife. The rudest awakening from our rose-tinted slumbers; Twin Peaks wasn’t what we remembered it, and it’s certainly far from it now. It’s that feeling which explains the sense of exhaustion in the town’s other inhabitants.

It’s in Ben Horne’s mournful speech about the childhood bike given to him by his father when he was child: “I loved that bike that my father got for me”; the way he and Sheriff Truman speak so quietly about Harry S. Truman’s illness; or a shaken Sarah Palmer’s grocery store breakdown which ends in her screaming, “Something happened to me. I don’t feel good”.

The residents of Twin Peaks fight so hard to continue their simple existences in the face of such a momentously changed world. Evil seems rampant. Ben must face the reality that his son Richard was not only responsible for the hit-and-run that killed a young boy, but that he committed attempted murder against the only eyewitness to his crime.

Audrey says nothing on that subject, and seems to have no awareness of her son’s actions. Furthermore, Ben’s chilling words that Richard has no father seem to confirm our worst fears: is Richard the son of Bad Dale?

Twin Peak’s voracious anti-nostalgia stance sprung up in other ways this week, with the episode’s moments of strange humours almost seeming to mock the whole solemnity of the current situation.

Gordon Cole did some serious work in finally inviting Tammy to work on the ‘Blue Rose’ task force, now confirmed to have been established after the end of Project Blue Book and its UFO investigations in the ‘50s and ‘60s, headed up by Phillip Jeffries and including Agents Chester Desmond, Dale Cooper, and Albert Rosenfield.

However, such a productive vision of Gordon wasn’t quite as upheld when it took Albert a full five minutes to have a conversation with him, after first having to shoo out the mysterious French woman (Bérénice Marlohe) who delighted in taking as long as possible to put on her shoes, straighten her clothes, reapply her lipstick, and say her giggly goodbyes.

And that’s after having to endure one of the worst puns on this planet in: “She’s here visiting a friend of her mother whose daughter has gone missing. The mother owns a turnip farm. I told her to tell the mother that her daughter will turn up eventually.”

The wheels are in motion, however, as Diane types in the co-ordinates she memorised from the dead woman’s arm into her digital map: Twin Peaks. It’s like a magnet.

Twin Peaks airs 2am on Mondays on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV with the Entertainment Pass, in a simulcast with the US. The episode will then be shown again at 9pm on the following day. You can catch up now on season one and two via Sky Box Sets and NOW TV.