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"Episode 16" wasn’t clear enough with me when it ended, but when Bob vacated Leland’s feeble body, he took the guy’s soul as a trophy. That is, Leland’s dead, and Sarah Palmer finds herself bitterly alone.

And after the funeral and such, which pillaged only the first ten or so minutes of “Episode 17,” Twin Peaks charted a course that had me believing that perhaps the show would, like Bob to his transitory vessels, vacate the central Laura Palmer story.

You know, Cooper was saying his goodbyes, not one character made reference to Bob nor, I think, Laura… as if the writers were readying a new mystery to take Bob’s place, to maybe pause and later reassess where things stood once a new chunk of story built upon the mythology that was laid over the show’s first chapter.

But then the closing minutes of “Episode 17” had Cooper and Major Briggs sitting ‘round a campfire in the deep woods, contemplating where Bob might be at that moment. (If he isn’t in Leland, where could he be?) Cooper gets up to go piss in the woods, a shot from Bob’s POV pins a camera angle closing in on the Cooper and Briggs compound, and suddenly I’m under the suspicion that Cooper or Briggs will be Bob’s next target.

Were I more liberal with my money, I’d’ve bet that Bob would’ve inhabited Cooper next - a turn of event I honestly would not have (could not have) seen coming but would have celebrated nonetheless. Instead, the episode ended rather ambiguously, with Cooper eying a blinding beam of light and, perhaps, a pair of figures standing off in the distance. In an instant, it’s all gone, and the screen fades to black.

There aren’t too many things that summon light in the dead of night all at once, and then can extinguish it in an instant, too. My initial thoughts, then, aspire to the supernatural. More specifically, aliens. And for a show where even the sheriff admits he doesn’t know what he believes anymore, it’s certainly in the realm of possibility. That final half minute was just too weird to be totally of this Earth.

If this is the case, then super! I went out on a limb super early in these analyses, claiming that our very own Agent Cooper was not from here. As the series has gone on, I’ve eased off that hypothesis and figured Cooper might be more human that I’d realized. That light beam in the woods, though, revitalizes the idea that the series might use aliens in a different way.

But the Bob-lessness of “Episode 17” - save for those final minutes - has me curious about how this episode, and how the series up to this point, was put together. As I’ve said, there was really no allusion to Bob mythology until those final moments. Everything else in “17” was of its own island, as if a few tangents met together to maybe intertwine some and then roam free. I was almost suspecting the series to run off and try some new things, and then eventually return to Laura Palmer and so on.

I’ve done some light research and have found that at about this time, Twin Peaks was struggling. So much so that cancellation probably wasn’t too far off.

But had Twin Peaks been peaches and cream at this point, I wonder whether “Episode 17” would indeed have been a jumping off point for the series to dig into new material. Was it always the intention of Lynch and company to focus on Laura Palmer through to the end, or was what Twin Peaks concentrated on a product of the size of audience Twin Peaks delivered the ABC?

I almost think Twin Peaks could have gotten away with beginning from scratch, as it were, with a new mystery involving characters we’ve already met along with some newbies. That way, Bob would come and go as he pleased, with newer, littler mysteries stepping in to take its place while the writers worked out how long they’d actually be on air.