Cooper enters the building through a set of windows; inside, in a nightmarish blur, a woman with scars on her face and large patches of skin over her eyes (Nae Yuuki) sits in front of a lit fireplace.

Cooper approaches her while she checks her wristwatch; as the watch strikes 2:53, the mechanism on the wall, now labeled with the number 3, begins to hum, and a light on a coffee table turns on.

He continues to feel uncomfortable, while back in the purple room, more insistent pounding is heard, and the American Girl tells Cooper to leave because her mother is coming.

He gags, but holds back his vomit; as the cigarette lighter continues to exercise the force over him, red drapes faintly appear in front of him.

In a house for sale in the Rancho Rosa estates, Las Vegas, Dougie Jones, a man physically identical to Cooper but for his weight, hair and clothes (MacLachlan) sits with prostitute Jade (Nafessa Williams) on his lap, saying that his arm (on which he wears the Owl Cave ring) feels "tingly.

Dougie's hand begins to shrink, and the ring falls down; his heads pops out with a hiss, producing black smoke, and a golden orb floats out of it.

Jade exits the shower, and takes Cooper for Dougie; she is surprised to see him in a suit, with less weight and different hair, but is disgusted by the vomit and suggests that he could be sick.

As the duo drive away, Gene (Bill Tangradi), a paid killer, parks in front of the house, and Jake (Greg Vrotsos), his partner, says he is ready to shoot him if they pass by the entrance.

Jade tells Cooper to call AAA as soon as he finds a wallet or some money; when they pass through Sycamore Street, he takes out the key to his room and begins to observe it.

A boy (Sawyer Shipman) observes the scene from his house across the street, as his drugged-out mother (Hailey Gates) repeatedly yells "One-one-nine,"[9] takes a pill with whiskey and lights a cigarette.

After struggling to pass through the revolving doors, he enters the casino; he is redirected by a guard (Brian Finney) to the cashier (Meg Foster) who changes his money.

He approaches it and repeats the jackpot winner's behavior, gestures and exclamations of verbatim; he hits a mega-jackpot, and is complimented by another patron (Josh McDermitt) for having "broken it.

The critics' consensus reads, "'Part 3' Shifts Twin Peaks signature strangeness into an intoxicating new gear while narrowing the season's off-kilter narrative focus.

"[11] Writing for IndieWire, Liz Shannon Miller praised the way Part 3 "really challenges the show's link to what we consider normality—the first half hour especially proves to be intense."

She called the earlier sequences of the episodes "exhilarating" "[f]or those who want nothing more than to delve into the mysteries of the Black Lodge and whatever happened to Agent Cooper," while also writing that they "provide little respite for fans in search of solid ground."

"[12] The New York Times' Noel Murray called the episode "a dose of David Lynch madness so concentrated and so puzzling that it might've been best just to let it bounce around in viewers' heads for a week"; he compared the episode's early scenes to Lynch's feature debut Eraserhead, "which also has images of a Godlike being yanking levers in a cosmic factory", and called them "wondrously confounding."

"[1] In his recap for Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen gave Part 3 an A−, praising its first scene as a "mesmerizing passage of pure Lynchian invention," "a wonderful flexing of Lynch's intuitive art-making powers, and, in my view, a love letter to filmmaking and his fans."

She wrote that in the episode "women's bodies are even more ostentatiously objectified", noting that Jade, "one of the few black actors in Twin Peaks, is introduced nude" and serves a small purpose to the plot, and that "the silhouette of Agent Tamara Preston [...] frames the scene" in which Cole and Rosenfield are told that Cooper is back; she clarifies that "[t]his is not a complaint", and praises it "as a comment on objectification" rather than "a thoughtless reiteration of it."

Finally, she praises "the imponderable experimentation of the opening, with Cooper descending into a dim room where an eyeless woman powers a clumsy vessel through a starry void.