No one can deny Twin Peaks: The Return has been a very David Lynchian brand of weird. People speak backwards, tiny men appear out of thin air to tell Agent Dale Cooper to wake up, and demonic mini trees pop up out of sidewalks to whisper, "Squeeze his hand off." But, the latest episode of the cult favorite’s revival, "Part 8," kicked things up a notch when it comes to just how bizarre Twin Peaks can get. The installment included a reintroduction to the "Woodsmen," which seem to be otherworldly lumberjacks with extremely sooty skin and a yen for a cigarette light, an exploration of the Manhattan Project’s mushroom cloud, and a look at where Giant (Carel Struycken) comes from. It ended with the strangest chant in possibly the history of television, which we need to go over.
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The black and white portion of "Part 8" begins with the first testing of a nuclear weapon in American history, which occurred in the New Mexico desert during July 1945. After about 24 minutes dedicated to colorful clouds and the Giant, we return to the same New Mexico desert, only now it’s 1956. Creepy eggs are beginning to hatch in the exact place where the nuclear testing took place and no one is going to like what’s born into the world, since they’re basically locust-frog hybrids with the creepiest movements possible. As the hybrids start squirming around on a foggy night, multiple Woodsmen begin floating down from the sky. Their figures seem to be like shadowy ghosts, until they touch the ground and look more like actual (very dusty) men.
Our main Woodsman (Robert Broski) treks out of the desert onto a highway, where he and some friends terrorize a nice couple and repeatedly ask, "Got a light?" Of course, his voice is the things nightmares are made of, like any other uncanny being in the Twin Peaks universe. Since the couple was too busy screaming and driving off in terror to give Woodsman a light, he goes searching for one and ends up skulking into the apparently fictional KPJK radio station. There, he violently murders the young secretary and the overnight disc-jockey by crushing their skulls with his bare hands. With the microphone now free of its pesky formerly living human DJ, Woodsman takes this opportunity to share an eerie chant over the airwaves.
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"This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, dark within," he says with his very bone-chilling, crackly voice.
If Woodsman had only said the haunting incantation once, it wouldn’t have been that bad. But, he says it over 10 times in less than four minutes. As he speaks about water, wells, and horses, the KPJK listeners all across town pass out. It originally seems as though they died, but a lengthy look at the chant’s youngest victim, named Girl (Tikaeni Faircrest), proves her face is still clearly moving after her eyes shut. Although everyone is alive, their sudden fainting spell left them vulnerable to those horrifying locust-frog hybrids, which end up being larger than squirrels and can fly. One enters the Girl’s body through her mouth after crawling into her room through a cracked window. It’s implied everyone listening to KPJK suffered the same fate. Try sleeping after seeing that visual.
It’s unclear how the Woodsman and the hybrids are connected, or what they want, or what happened to the victims after the "Part 8" credits, but the short synopsis gives fans a hint. The IMDb summary for the episode explains, "In 1945, a bomb is dropped and modern man's evil is epitomized." We’re definitely behind the idea that evil is a sooty demonic ghost running around the Southwestern desert murdering people and tricking young girls into letting plague hybrids slither into their bodies. Only time will tell if "Part 9," which airs July 9, will give us a bigger explanation on what this chant means for the series. But, considering this is Twin Peaks, we may never know. So, get to theorizing, y'all.
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