Hi guys, I have some thoughts on Sarah and Judy. As always, if this post has been tackled elsewhere, forgive me, it's  hard to keep up.

So fundamentally, I'm thinking of Judy in terms of metaphor, rather than in the sci-fi  sense that a lot of people have approached it. When, in the previous series of Twin Peaks, we were presented with Bob as an incarnation of an evil which drives men to unspeakable cruelty, a cruelty that defies understanding, it was so much more interesting that when he's being presented as an entity with his own mythology and logic. When Bob is a real creature existing in our world, (almost like a bad X Files episode), it descends slightly into absurdity. Lynch/Frost as much as acknowledge this by making Bob's defeat absurd at the magic gloved hand of a preposterous character. Bob's power is at its height when he functions as an idea, not an entity.

This is how I want to talk about Judy, as a symbol.

Whereas Bob is the manifestation of some men's lust for carnage Judy is the manifestation of the pain and suffering of the survivors. And more accurately, Judy is the process whereby those who love the victims of abuse, come to despise those self same victims for the grief their loss has caused. 

We've seen Sarah's decline over the course of The Return. She's sitting, drunk and alone, reliving over and again images of violence. She's trapped in the orbit of grief following Laura's death. The more we see of her, the clearer we see that Sarah is all but destroyed. Her mind is cracked, she's talking to herself, paranoid, alcoholic, utterly fractured. We see that she herself has become psychotically violent, and that she's infected with a creature that will kill with ease and feel no remorse. She's no longer Sarah, and no longer on the side of the angels. 

An evil, greater than that that had infested Leland has infested Sarah, Sarah who, for all her faults, adored her daughter. And we see no clearer sign of that evil than when Hawk, our new Coop, pure of heart Hawk, comes to check on her. Rather than turn to him, she shields the entity within from the law. Sarah has turned. It's in our house now.

And this is what it's all been leading up to. Sickened with grief, filled with anger, Sarah finally turns on Laura. She takes the iconic image of Laura at her purest, and she hates it. She hates it for the pain the loss of her has brought, and for the guilt that's turned to gall, and she smashes the picture and she wishes Laura had never existed. This is Judy. Judy is love turned to hate and for Laura it means she can never go home. Home for Laura no longer exists.

This is Laura's fate. Through no fault of her own, she was abused by her father, and ultimately, because of that, despised by her mother.

That is why Judy is the Mother and that is why Judy is more powerful, (and for that reason, not chronological reasons, Judy shown giving birth to Bob,) than Bob. Whereas Bob feeds on the weakness of men, Judy feeds on love, she sours it and turns love into hate, purity into mire. 

Sarah's attack on the image of Laura is the spot on the Jeffries' infinity symbol. This is the act that is repeated across timelines and dimensions. Laura has been locked into a cycle. Her father's abuse has set her on a path that has no exit, because her mother's hatred means there's no home to return to. All she can do is move between the two forces back and forth. When Sarah/Judy smashes Laura's picture that is the moment that Laura is torn away, in the lodge, in the forest. That is the moment that Laura can no longer be saved, because there is nowhere to Return Laura to. So we see Laura/Carrie walk up to a home in which her mother literally doesn't exist. Redemption has been closed off to Laura. Her father raped her and her mother hates her for it. There's no safe haven.

But maybe there's a tiny glimmer of hope.

At the end Cooper seems to come to an awful realization. There's no Cooper, he's Richard. He's dragged some waitress he's probably seen in that diner before and dreamed she's Laura Palmer. He's dragged her across the country and he's coming to realize that she's not who he thought she was, she's just some woman and he's no FBI agent. He's waking up from a psychotic delusion, 'What year is this?' But no. 

Carrie/Laura may have the final triumph over Judy. Because even though Sarah's rejection of Laura has meant that Laura cannot go home, even in this dimension, Laura somehow manages to break out of the infinity loop of suffering she's been sentenced to. She hears her mother's voice, and it's a voice she cannot have heard in life, cannot have heard in the infinity loop Judy has set for her. It's her mother's voice, the first thing Sarah said to her daughter after Laura was dead. It's the voice she would have heard if that body wrapped in plastic never materialized, and Pete had merely gone fishing. Somehow, Laura has broken free of the loop. What that means, who knows?