BOB as a Legacy

If we take to heart the content of the first two novels tied to the world of Twin Peaks, BOB is alluded to initially appearing to his potential victims on the cusp of or during their adolescence. In The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, Margaret Lanterman tells Laura, "Sometimes people go camping and learn things they shouldn't. Children are prey sometimes." Margaret's statement makes one think of information in Mark Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which indicates Margaret, Carl Rodd, and a boy named Alan Traherne were abducted from the woods when they were young. However, they were on a third-grade nature study, not a camping trip, when they wandered from the path and into the woods. Seeing how The Secret History of Twin Peaks wouldn't be published for another 27 years at the time of The Secret Diary's release, there is every possibility that Margaret's words were connected to another force in the woods, one that gravitates toward children, namely BOB.

BOB came to Laura, Leland, and, according to the novel The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper, My Life, My Tapes, Dale Cooper, when they were young.

In episode 16 (Arbitrary Love, 2.009) of the original series, Leland said BOB came to him when he was a child. He invited him in because BOB said he wanted to play.

"I was just a boy. I saw him in my dreams. He said he wanted to play ... he opened me ... and I invited him ... and he came inside me ..."

Laura writes in The Secret Diary that her first memories of BOB were of him playing with her in the woods.

From a poem on page 53,
"We used to skip
Hold hands
Talk about what we saw"

Another example from page 57,
"He first started to play with me. We would chase each other through the woods, and he would always find me . . . but I could never find him. He would come up from behind me and grab my shoulders and ask me my name. I would tell him it was Laura Palmer, and he would let go and turn me around and laugh."

In The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, Laura meets a young girl by the name of Danielle after she accidentally kills the girl's pet cat by not paying attention while driving. Years earlier, Laura's cat, Jupiter, was killed the same way. Laura wrote affectionately of Danielle and claimed to see herself in the child.  After an absence of visits from BOB, Laura worried that BOB may have started visiting Danielle. Of all the people Laura knew, Danielle, the youngest person she writes of, is the person she worries BOB has selected as another victim. At another point in the diary, Laura wrote, "I'm so afraid that anything I touch runs the risk of contact with BOB."

In 2017, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer was re-released as an audiobook read by Sheryl Lee. Unlike My Life, My Tapes, and The Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town, which remain out of print, lending some weight to the diary's importance in the canon of the series.

In the original series, Mike speaks of his former partner, BOB, saying, "Bob requires a human host. He feeds on fear and the pleasures. They are his children." His phrasing almost makes it sound as if fear and pleasure are his children, though Cooper surmised that BOB referred to his victims as his children. Interestingly, in the draft of the script available online, Mike said BOB fed on life force. It is fascinating that BOB refers to his victims as his children when he so often comes to them before adulthood.

Scott Frost's My Life, My Tapes, contains many instances that appear to allude to BOB's presence in Cooper's life before the FBI agent visited the town of Twin Peaks. As an adult, Cooper encountered a teenage girl in a mental ward who seemed to have been tormented by BOB or a similar entity. Marie Schlurman, a childhood acquaintance of Dale's, was never explicitly linked to BOB, though one can interpret her story with such a possibility. When Cooper was a boy, he dreamed of a man whose description sounded eerily like BOB. The man first came to Dale when the boy was weak, and as young Cooper struggled through a lung infection, he continued to dream of the man.

From the novel, "Had a dream in the middle of the night that frightened me a great deal. A man who I have never seen was trying to break into my room. He kept calling my name and said that he wanted me. He then screamed, and after a moment it turned into a kind of roar as if he were some kind of animal. I told Mom about it and she said that she knew about "him," and that she has the same dream, and that I must never let the man into my room."

Cooper's being ill at the time of the mysterious man's first recorded appearance reminds one of Mike/Gerard's words concerning BOB, "He sometimes works among the infirm, the injured of the species."

As stated, the same man also invaded Cooper's mother's dreams and may have been responsible for her death. Cooper's mother, like her son, had prophetic dreams. She would not share with her family the details of her worsening dreams or the extent they were wreaking on her mind and body. In the entry before she is taken ill and admitted to the hospital with an aneurysm, Cooper says, "Mom had another dream last night. She said that he almost got in the door." Dale's mother died shortly afterward. Cooper's mother used a door as an analogy for Cooper and warned her son to never let him in. 

Dale was deeply affected by the death of his mother. Months after her passing, he experienced a vivid dream or vision of his mother as a young girl sitting on the edge of his bed. He could not understand her as she tried to tell him something. She reached out to touch his hand, and he awoke with a small ring in his grasp. He later found a photograph of his mother as a teenager wearing the same ring. Dale's father told him that the ring once belonged to his maternal grandfather and that, upon his death, Dale's grandmother gave the ring to Cooper's mother. However, she stopped wearing the ring shortly after marrying Cooper's father. Uneasy about the ring and hesitant to accept it, Cooper put it away in a desk drawer, though he woke at a later date with the ring on his little finger. He decided to continue wearing the ring, presumably the same one Cooper wears in the original series.

It seems more than a coincidence that Cooper's mother appeared to her son as a young woman in connection with a mysterious ring and with BOB. Cooper described his mother's appearance in his dream or vision as that of a person "barely a woman". Perhaps she chose to appear to her son from a time before BOB entered her life.

There is a possibility that Cooper's maternal grandfather also knew BOB, seeing how the ring was once his. If Cooper's grandfather knew BOB, perhaps BOB also came to the man's daughter and subsequently, through her, without her awareness, chose Dale as another victim. Leland Palmer said he first encountered BOB at his grandfather's house on Pearl Lakes. Perhaps the same happened to him, in that his grandfather was a victim of BOB who, by association, acquainted his grandson with the spirit, who unknowingly passed BOB onto his daughter. Recall how BOB makes his victims forget his presence.

In one of her final diary entries, Laura wrote, "On the way home from Josie's I had a horrible vision of little Danielle running up to me to explain that BOB had been visiting her. He had told her I had sent him to her. When I came out of the vision, I realized that BOB had not come to visit me in over a week. . . . I hoped that this was only a vision, and not a premonition. Perhaps I should warn Danielle. . . ." Recall how Laura previously wrote, "I'm so afraid that anything I touch runs the risk of contact with BOB." In this case, BOB may have chosen Danielle because of Laura's possible maternal feelings for the child. Perhaps, since BOB is alluded to having the ability to read thoughts, he decides to strike at the people that will ensure the most pain in his victims. The people they care for the most.

Mike compared his and BOB's feeding habits to those of the parasite. Perhaps BOB, in this chain, stays within certain families. Almost as their inadvertent legacy.