Twin Peaks: What's Going On in Argentina?

Part 5 of Twin Peaks: The Return contained references that are baffling to anyone who hasn't seen Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. They're also baffling to people who have seen Fire Walk With Me, but marginally less so.

The episode centers around Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Agent Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) was stationed before he mysteriously disappeared. He briefly reappeared in the Philadelphia office, where he yelled at Gordon Cole (David Lynch) about someone named Judy and infiltrating the room above the convenience store where the evil spirits live before vanishing just as suddenly as he appeared.

In Part 1, Evil Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) talked to someone he thought was Jeffries who said he was calling to say goodbye to the doppelgänger before he got sent back to the Black Lodge. As we know, Evil Cooper didn't go back to the Black Lodge, but he did get arrested and sent to jail in South Dakota. When Cole visited him, he told him he'd been working alongside Jeffries on a deep cover mission. In Part 5, he used his phone call to ring up a mysterious black box in Buenos Aires that turned into a little tiny rock after he delivered a cryptic message -- "the cow jumped over the moon."

Earlier in the episode, a woman in Las Vegas who seems to be managing the hit men sent to kill Dougie sent a text message that said "Argent 2" to that same box.

This seems to indicate that Agent Jeffries is still in Buenos Aires in some capacity and has some sort of adversarial relationship with Evil Cooper. Perhaps, like BOB and MIKE, they used to kill together until Jeffries (or some kind of bizarro-Jeffries, who knows) had a change of heart and is now devoted to stopping Evil Cooper.

Harry Goaz, who plays Andy, said that David Bowie was supposed to reprise his role in the revival but died before he was able to. Lynch hasn't confirmed this. And it's not impossible that Bowie did film an appearance and Lynch is keeping it a secret.

It's more likely, though, that if Jeffries appears, the role has been recast. Perhaps Jeffries' time in whatever limbo he's been in has changed him physically. People transform in David Lynch's works -- earlier this season, we saw the Evolution of the Arm, and in Lost Highway Bill Pullman turned into Balthazar Getty halfway through.

We still have no idea what Jeffries is really up to or how he fits into the larger narrative or even 100% certainty that it is him, but this seems like a rare Twin Peaks mystery that needs to be explained in order to move the plot forward, so we'll get some elucidation of what's happening, if not why it's happening.

Also discussed in the video: Whether Amanda Seyfried's character is the new Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), how Major Briggs (Don S. Davis) connects to all this, and how bad we feel for Dougie.

Twin Peaks airs Sundays at 9/8c on Showtime.

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