(Spoilers ahead for Part 5 of Showtime’s “Twin Peaks” revival.)
Late in Part 5 of the “Twin Peaks” revival on Showtime, we’re treated to a pretty unsettling scene at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks. A creepy looking man (Eamon Farren) is sitting by himself at one of the booths smoking a cigarette, when one of the Roadhouse employees confronts him about his smoking. (Yes, it’s no longer the early ’90s and there’s no smoking allowed in the Roadhouse these days.)
The bar worker is interrupted by another, friendlier colleague, and the creepy smoking man hands him a pack of smokes, telling him to keep the whole pack. As the employee walks away he looks inside the pack and sees a wad of $100 bills inside.
Then, a girl at the next booth named Charlotte (Grace Victoria Cox) pulls out her own cigarette and asks the creepy guy for a light. At the man’s invitation, Charlotte sits next to him, at which point he violently grabs her and gropes her.
“You wanna f— me, Charlotte? You wanna f—?” The guy says very menacingly. “Little f—ing smoking babies. Makes me laugh. I’m gonna laugh when I f— you, b—-.”
It’s a fairly typically constructed scene for the “Twin Peaks” revival, in that there’s no context for it and we don’t know who any of these people are. We just know the Roadhouse, and can pretty easily assume that some very shady things continue to go down there, as they did in the original series and also “Fire Walk With Me.”
The biggest bit of context comes from the credits for Part 5, however, where we can see that the creepy guy (pictured above) is listed as Richard Horne. The Horne family is, of course, very important in Twin Peaks. Benjamin Horne runs the Great Northern Hotel, and his brother Jerry was a lawyer in the original show but now deals in marijuana edibles. And Ben’s daughter Audrey, one of the main characters from the original series, has been noticeably absent from the revival so far.
The big question, then, is how exactly Richard is related to the other Hornes and what kind of bad business is he up to in the Roadhouse. The most logical guess would be that he’s Audrey’s son, and that, given that he seems like a terrible person involved in something shady at the Roadhouse, could be continuing the family’s prostitution business in some way. (Ben Horne owned the Canadian brothel One-Eyed Jack’s back in the original series before losing it to Jean Renault.)
We should also remember part of the cryptic message the Giant delivered to Coop in the Lodge in Part 1. One of the things the Giant said was “Richard and Linda” — could Richard Horne be one half of that pairing? We still haven’t met a Linda, by the way.
As with all things “Twin Peaks,” right now Richard Horne is simply veiled in mystery. But just that fact that he is a member of the Horne family seems very likely to be an extremely important part of the puzzle David Lynch is constructing here.