What first caught my ear in the new Twin Peaks Season – or, rather, didn’t catch my ear – is the lack of music. Whereas the earlier seasons polished out the rough edges of any suspense-packed scene with smooth jazz music or Angelo Badalamenti`s haunting soundtrack music, even used certain tunes as leitmotifs for persons or events, there  now is in many instances complete silence whilst Good Cooper roams about in the Black Lodge and the outside world tries to cope with Evil Coop`s doings. It seems as if the whole Twin Peaks universe would hold its breath in anxious anticipation of a terrifying event that will mark the beginning of a new era.

And then it happens, approximately half an hour into Episode 2. A mysterious alien creature breaks out of a glass box in New York and munches the heads of two innocent lovers. It`s as explicitly gruesome as it will get during the new season (at least as far as we know), and it sure leaves a lasting impression of terror and fascination on me. For days I google “mysterious alien creature”, “creature in glass box”, “thing in box New York” in several combinations. Yes, I confess, I`m not really used to horror films. Images that others take in stride keep popping back into my head again and again. But there`s more to it. I need to process and classify the image in order to be able to fit it into the Twin Peaks universe. It`s the same with fear itself, you need to know the reasons behind it to accept it as a part of yourself and finally come to terms with it.

A few days later, we watch the third part and I get some clues as to the identity of the glass box creature. Good Cooper gets sucked into the glass box in New York and then is then being spat out into outer space – meanwhile, the two people who are about to get attacked by the alien creature come into the room, which means that the creature is bound to appear in the box shortly after Cooper. Shot to Cooper: He`s on board of some strange iron spaceship, the only passenger being an Asian-looking woman whose eyes are sewn shut. She wants to tell him something important, in a strange, muffled voice we do not understand. Suddenly someone knocks at the door of the spaceship, someone or something who is called “mother” by the second Asian woman who appears in the spaceship. Could this be the creature from the glass box who got sucked into space too?

In regard of this haunting scene a bunch of reviewers suggest an interesting intepretation (and I kick myself for not having seen the correlation myself): Is the spaceship the female version of the Black Lodge? Some female ghosts who represent the counterpart of BOB, Mike, the arm and Co.? And are they in conflict with the male ghosts, unable to live side by side with them, in one lodge? We couldn`t blame them, seeing all the violence which is being committed to the women in the Twin Peaks universe, primarily by men.

This thought leads me to a possible connection to the story of Jack Parsons, which is mentioned in Mark Frost`s The Secret History of Twin Peaks and which I also brought up in my last blog post. Is the “mother” who knocked on the door of the spaceship the “Mother of Abominations” Babalon whom Jack Parsons tried to conjure again and again? If we look at the 8th Twin Peaks episode, this theory gets even more plausible: the appearance of the ghosts, of “evil” upon earth is paralleled by the detonation of the first atomic bomb. This was 1945. In 1952, Jack Parsons, not only a spirit conjurer, but also a rocket scientist, also experimented with explosives and was killed in an unforeseen explosion. Could this have been the explosion which led Babalon a.k.a. Mother to incarnate on earth, to be able to inhabit glass boxes and what have you? (We know BOB a.k.a. the toad-cockroach thing also needed an initiation ritual to finally incarnate, i. e. the strange poem transmitted by the Woodsman via radio.) Could it be that the ghosts not only need the collective evil, the atomic bomb, to incarnate, but also the individual which can be completely innocent (the girl which got “impregnated” by BOB), or not so innocent (Jack Parsons, Leland Palmer who “let” BOB in voluntarily)? Or do they need their will, their passion? (The girl was obviously in love with the boy she took a walk with, again the theme of sexual tension; Jack Parsons and probably Leland Palmer wanted to get in contact with the spirits).

Another question that popped into my mind: What happened when the USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Could there be thousands of ghosts on the loose in the Asian hemisphere of the Twin Peaks universe? Was Josie, the compelling but twisted wife of Andrew Packard – once a dangerous ringleader in Hongkong – host of such an evil spirit? And could it be that the Asian women in the space ship “lodge” are also victims of the bombings? (Of course, this is only my way of making some sense of the happenings, based on what I read and combined – feel free to add your own interpretation.)

It might also be interesting that in the mystical system of Thelema, a “religion” founded by Aleister Crowley, Babalon has a daughter which is described as follows: “She has very deep eyelids, and long lashes. Her eyes are closed, or nearly closed.” Is the Asian woman in the spaceship Babalon`s daughter? Well, we will see to which other interpretations Aleister Crowley can take us in the second part of my “Twin Peaks Impressions”.

Laemmchenblog goes English! From now on, I will publish more articles in my non-native language, whenever the topic somehow “feels” English. Please don`t be overly critical with grammatical errors 😉