John Bernardy The Fireman believes in balance
Sometimes a crop field needs a controlled fire to raze the land and make it fertile again. It’s possible the Black Lodge goes through ebbs and floes in that way. You know, going back to starting positions.
It’s also possible, if you look at the Evolution of the Arm as an indicator, that it’s a step the Black Lodge needs to go through in order to properly evolve to a new form. Make them die to fix their hearts, so to speak.
Evolution is a state the Fireman fosters in everyone because he believes in balance above all else. Balance leads to evolution.
A major indicator of balance in Season 3 is the color purple. The Fireman’s domain is bathed in a purple sea. Jacoby notes in The Secret History of Twin Peaks that his glasses are meant to balance the two hemispheres of the brain and I believe it’s also supposed to balance the two levels of reality that are causing so much trouble to each other. The colors of Jacoby’s lenses give the wearer a purplish hue to how they see the world. And every chance we see purple in Season 3, it appears on a point of balance. The Polish Accountant who kills Hutch and Chantal has on a purple shirt. Gersten Hayward is wearing purple when she realizes how bad a situation she was in (which says to me she’s acknowledged her genuine reality and can begin healing). Naido herself is dressed in purple and seems to focus Cooper on the task at hand.
And in between Parts of Season 3, we go back to the Roadhouse to achieve a certain balance as viewers. We are supposed to go back to our center, back to starting positions, as we continue to experience the images Lynch puts before us.
Audrey’s own evolution into acknowledging her actual physical situation happens when she’s bathed in purple at the Roadhouse. She finds balance inside herself, acts more like herself than she had in years, and acknowledges the place where she appeared to be is not her physical location. She wakes where she is physically real. She can begin to heal, she begins to evolve.
Outside the musical interludes where our brains are allowed to relax, very few things in Season 3 are balanced. The stuttering time found around portals is unstable and therefore proves an imbalance all by itself. So does the physical world’s appetite problem.
But balance is being achieved, person by person. The Mitchums lose their violent tendencies as they get close to CooperDougie, and they help him get to Twin Peaks. Ben Horne feels the hum and he stops throwing only money at problems, even begins to invest himself in the possibility of growing love with Beverly, while also helping to rescue his brother. Freddy wants to help people and the Fireman enlists him in the quest to knock BOB down for the count. Harriet Hayward and even Donna, per The Final Dossier, find a peace within themselves (albeit on different schedules) and go into the medical profession. Nadine heals herself and finds love prospects with Jacoby while also allowing Ed to heal himself, and Norma heals herself by making her own balance more important than the growth of her business with Walter, thus leaving room for her to find love with the newly healing Ed. Margaret Coulson and Carl Rodd were abducted as children, most likely by the White Lodge denizens, and have evolved into healers as well. Carl helps his tenant not sell his blood, and he brings a mother to accept the situation that her child was killed so that she can begin her healing process. Margaret uses her words to help people find truth within the world and themselves, and once that happens balance begins to be achieved.
Jacoby himself may be doing the Fireman’s work as well: he met giants on a shamanic vision quest, documented in an excerpt from his book in Secret History. He writes about how uncomfortable the tall ones made him feel, that they were cold, reptilian. He had not found balance then (it took the death of Laura Palmer for him to properly begin to shovel himself out of his sh*t, another proof Laura’s death needs to return to the collective consciousness) but I suspect his meeting laid the groundwork for the work he was supposed to do, which I am well on record supporting as one of the most important messages in the show: spreading the message of balance and accepting your reality in order to heal en masse. He’s even working with the Fireman’s alchemical imagery, though it had to be shovels rather than an orb for this worldly agent.
Regardless of which character you look at, the pattern is the same: Once balanced, the instinct is to heal and to grow. Some may call this a way of evolving.
And we can’t talk about evolving without mentioning Major Briggs. The details of Briggs’ role is murky at best as we have no POV from the man himself, but what we do know is he puts in place a number of things that in the end lead the good guys of the sheriff’s department to Jack Rabbit’s Palace. His note directs them to grab a handful of dirt before they get there, which to me is another proof that they were crossing from one reality level to another and they needed a mooring to remember how to come back to Earth.
Why go through all that? So that Andy Brennan, a good man and a helper by nature, can get a vision that will give him the information when needed to help end the earthly tenure of both DoppelCooper and BOB. Briggs knew this would happen most likely because he was working with the Fireman, who plays long game better than anyone. I suspect Briggs also knew that eventually his physical body would be killed along with Ruth Davenport in “the Zone” but I suspect Briggs was completely Obi Wan about it by then because Bill Hastings said his death was beautiful as Briggs’ head separated from his body. Briggs’ head then passed by the purple sea where Cooper saw him (and Briggs may or may not have triggered something in Cooper’s memory by saying “blue rose”), and then took up residence as a Wizard Of Oz-style floating head in the White Lodge as a Lodge entity and peer of the Fireman.