For the first part of this theory, please read here.

Two excerpts from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King: “Ah, yes. How did I know to set breakfast for two? That was why I showed you the looking-glass. Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.” He stopped talking and looked at the Wart in an anxious way. “Have I told you this before?” “No, we only met about half an hour ago.” “So little time to pass?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pyjamas and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?” “I do not know,” said the Wart, “unless you have not finished telling me yet.” “You see, one gets confused with Time, when it is like that. All one’s tenses get muddled, for one thing. If you know what is going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean? Like drawing in a mirror.” … Merlyn took off his hat, raised his staff of lignum vitae politely in the air, and said slowly, “Snylrem stnemilpmoc ot enutpen dna lliw eh yldnik tpecca siht yob sa a hsif?”

“It is happening again.” That’s the tagline for season 3. This tagline embodies two themes important to the series: Duality and Time. Both are important for any good story to work. Think about the movie Tootsie, the original Mrs. Doubtfire, and Mrs. Doubtfire, the Tootsie remake. In both movies, we have a male character seemingly unsuitable in their jobs, one a male chauvinist actor and the other a unreliable father, who prove themselves over time to be suitable for their jobs by skirting society’s view of manhood and dressing up as women. In both cases, the protagonists in both movies are also the antagonists. The protagonists and antagonists want the same thing: To be suitable in their jobs.

Now both of those movies move forward in a linear fashion. There is a beginning, middle, and end told in that order. In the previous article about time, I discussed how certain characters seem to have become “unstuck in time,” a key theme in stories such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Arrival, and how we should look at Twin Peaks in a non-linear manner.

In the third season, David Lynch has either introduced continuity errors or has left the observer hints that time isn’t linear.

In the opening scene of the third season, we see Agent Cooper speaking with an old version of the Giant, now called ???????. The scene is all in black and white, which after viewing the 8th episode, hints that this scene is in the past. And then we don’t see Agent Cooper again until the second episode when he is back in the Red Room and Mike says to him, “Is it future or is it past?” Looking at these two scenes (and following scenes with Agent Cooper before he enters the “real world” again), we see something is missing: Dale Cooper’s FBI lapel pin. Agent Cooper has this lapel pin up until the point when he exits through the electrical socket.

Prior to exiting the electrical socket into the “real world,” Cooper travels through space and lands on the parapet of a large fortress we won’t see again until episode 8, roughly 70 years in the past. But this time it is in color and time is off. When Cooper enters the fortress, time starts to jump and skip forward and backward. Cooper meets Naido and asks her, “Where is this? Where are we?” The eyeless Naido, feeling Cooper, speaks in an unintelligible, breathy language until she is interrupted by loud knocking on the door. Cooper notices a large panel on the wall resembling an electrical outlet labeled 15 emitting a noise the captions list as “eerie humming,” “brooding tone,” and “soft electrical hiss.” Cooper heads towards the outlet but is stopped by Naido who leads him to a hatch at top of a ladder. Exiting the hatch, they are both in outer-space next to a bell-shaped device with a lever. Naido pulls the lever and appears to be electrocuted before being launched off the floating platform. Now the color scheme and movement are back to normal and, once Cooper enters the fortress again, speech as become the more intelligible backwards-reverse speech and the outlet now shows the number 3. The noise being emitted from the outlet is now captioned as “soft electrical humming.” Lynch then cuts to a scene with Evil Coop riding in his car and zooms in on the car’s cigarette lighter [intense electrical scratching], then back to Cooper and the outlet [electrical scratching]. Cooper exits into the house with Jade sans his shoes and lapel pin.

So what exactly was this lever? It would be a pretty safe bet to say it has something to do with electricity [another popular theme in Twin Peaks]. But what exactly did the lever do with the electricity? It changed time. And by time, I mean current, the AC/DC kind (as suggested by Iioninacoma). Electrical current runs in two types of current: Alternating and Direct. Alternating runs in alternating patterns, either forwards or in reverse. Direct runs in one direction.

It is possible that the beings from the Lodge and humans both are types of electrical current. After all, our bodies create and use electricity. Which was also the reason the machines decided to use humans as human-potato-batteries to power themselves in The Matrix. And if this is the case, it would only make some reasonable sense that we are both different types of current. The humans being DC and the beings from the Lodge being AC. This different type of current you are controls how time is experienced. Humans experience time linear (DC). We enter life at a starting point and continue towards an end point, never being able to physically revisit the past. And, unless you are Merlyn, we go PAST > PRESENT > FUTURE. The beings from the Lodge, being AC beings, don’t experience time that way. Time for them can move forward and in reverse, and possibly sideways and diagonal (5th dimension). A being from the Lodge could appear as PRESENT > PAST > FUTURE > PAST > PRESENT > ???, so on and so forth. Not only do they exist on a plane of time where past, present, and future exist together, they also experience with an extra dimension. This would explain in episode 11 how Gordon Cole going to the location of “the Zone” initially appears normal but when getting closer to it, the portal opens. The portal is always there, we just can’t see it as DC/linear-time-experiencing beings. We can only “see” when coming into direct contact with it.

Something to back this theory up is a scene from Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces. The reverse speech spoken by the beings in the Lodge isn’t just spoken in reverse but understood in the reverse. Their language and their understanding of it works in the exact opposite of ours. By this I mean that what we hear at the end of a dialogue in reverse speech isn’t the end but rather the beginning. Think of it like reading a book not only from right to left but also bottom to top. We’re able to understand the right to left speech because it is a reverse in reverse but we are still looking at it top to bottom. It is the flow of the conversation that is misleading as it is still in reverse. For your entertainment and theorizing purposes, I have made this video of the scene in reverse to show how the dialogue in reverse makes the scene a bit more coherent:

So by altering the time we get a better flow to the conversation. The Man from the Other Place offers BOB to fire walk with him to which they both start laughing. To kill the mood a bit, he says, “With this ring I thee wed,” while holding up the Owl Cave Ring. I see this as the Man from The Other Place saying one of two things to BOB.

Let’s join forces! You’re wild years are over.

To which Mini-Lynch, aka Mrs. Tremond’s Grandson, has to spoil the mood by literally pointing out that BOB straight-up murdered someone. But BOB doesn’t care. BOB is the type of guy that moves to the beat of his own drum and, being an energy force created by fission, you know, as Vonnegut once wrote, they can take a flying fuck at the moon. The Man from the Other Place doesn’t really care and decides this is a good time in this conversation to point out the table they are sitting at, describing the type (Formica) and the color (green). Why is this important though?

Formica, a heat resistant material, was originally conceived as a substitute for mica in electrical insulation. In other words, it was used to make sure that electrical charges couldn’t flow freely. And it just so happens that it looks like the Owl Cave Ring, which the Man from the Other Place is trying to control BOB with, is made from a part of the table:

Though not canonical, you can better see this demonstrated in the original script for Fire Walk With Me (see below [start at the end of the second image and then read into the first image]).

What are your thoughts?

Bonus Content: Hawk’s Map in large format

Double Bonus Content: GameSpot Universe’s Episode 11 Breakdown (with one of my theories mentioned)