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"Is this real, Ben? Or some strange and twisted dream?”

Specifically, Jerry’s reacting to an exchange he and his brother just had with Leland, who entered the room with much gusto, recognized Bob plastered on the front of a police handout and says he knows who he is. Leland then leaves, promising to himself and to Ben/Jerry he’ll let Harry know that Bob lived next door to his grandfather in Pearl Lakes.

Ben and Jerry, I guess, can’t wrap their minds around why Leland would so willingly slip information to the other side. It’s all rather puzzling, really, since just an episode ago Leland was prancing around with his new hair and told the boys he “was back.”

But no matter, the line resonated with me because it summed up the goings-on in Twin Peaks since season two’s kick off. Over the last two episodes - including the one being reviewed here - the universe has been playing tricks on its characters and on us, and really, the show’s been nothing short of approaching dream state.

Things have just gotten so weird. And I can’t decide whether this was intended from the get-go, or whether Lynch and company were kindly asked by their network superiors to make significant creative changes to maintain (or better yet, increase) the show’s viewership. My understanding is that the “Pilot” episode did very well, and then Twin Peaks’ ratings steadily fell from there.

Yet with the new season’s shift to the obscure and supernatural comes a startling revelation from “Episode 9”: Twin Peaks might include aliens after all! As far as I can tell, nothing’s surfaced relating to Agent Cooper’s perhaps mysterious origins. But what has happened is possible communications between the otherworldly and Twin Peaks, as revealed to Cooper through Major Briggs and his janky computer printouts.

The Major, who is unable to expose to Cooper what he does for the government, tells the agent that included in his job description is the maintenance of deep space monitors that routinely fire back thickly coated messages of gibberish. Around the time Cooper was shot, though, the Major says he received a clear message: “The owls are not what they seem.” A little while later, he read: “Cooper, Cooper, Cooper.”

“The owls are not what they seem,” of course, was one of three messages the giant shared with Cooper the evening Cooper was shot. We’d also heard the Log Lady say a similar thing the day Harry and the guys visited her in the woods.

What does it mean, then, that the owls are not what they seem? I don’t know yet. I’m more interested in 1) whom the message is from, and 2) how the sender of the message relates to the giant. An episode ago, the giant hinted that he had other people working with him. So, are the senders (or sender, singular) those people? If so, why are they revealing themselves? If no, did the giant send the message to the Major’s deep space monitors? And again, why?

The potential alien reveal excites me like none other, particularly because I went out on a limb early on by questioning Cooper’s credentials as a human being. If I’d been right about him being an alien, then great! But it was mostly hunch - hardly anything concrete or by way of inference.

I don’t know what this new information does for my theory, but what it does do, at least, is ground the show in some supernatural from space. And that confirmation is awesome indeed.

Meanwhile, Ronette isn’t well enough to say more than a few words, but her awakening from her coma is enough for Cooper to push a pair of sketches on her to find out whether either of them looks like the guy who did horrible things to her.

The first is of Leo Johnson, and his photo elicits hardly a bat of the eyelash from Ronette. A sketch of Bob, though, shakes Ronette to her core. Like a beached fish flopping around for oxygen, Ronette bounces around the bed uncontrollably. She can’t say more than “train car, train car,” but her extreme reaction to Bob’s face would be enough for Cooper to make an arrest then and there if Cooper knew where Bob was. (Hence the police printouts, one of which Leland spots moments later).

Concerning the night Laura died, we don’t know much more than we knew from before. For now, at least, because Ronette isn’t speaking. But if there were any doubt that Bob is our man, look no further than Ronette in her bed. It’d be strange for Ronette to react in that way, and for him not to be Laura’s killer.