Twin Peaks 3.01/3.02: The Return: Parts I-II
Mark Frost and David Lynch
David Lynch
Twin
Peaks
was, in many respects, my first true fandom.
I was obsessed with the dark and dreamy world that David Lynch brought
to my television screen as a senior in high school, pouring over the details of
Laura Palmer’s murder episode after episode.
I became enthralled by the chess match between Agent Dale Cooper and his
insane former mentor Windom Earle. I was
one of the few people to venture out to an actual theater on the premiere weekend
for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And so, when it was announced that the series
would be coming back for a continuation, 25 years later, I didn’t dare believe
that it would actually happen. That I’m
sitting here, writing a review for the first two installments, having seen the
beginning of the third season less than 24 hours ago, is still mind-boggling on
several levels.
One of the biggest question I had coming into
this third season was one of style and tone.
Would it be more like the relatively network-friendly original two
seasons of Twin Peaks on ABC, or
would it be closer to the far more mature and dark incarnation that inhabited Fire Walk With Me? They are clearly cut from the same cloth, but
viewed through a different lens. The
answer, at least based on the first two hours, is that it is definitively an
evolution of Fire Walk With Me. It’s challenging on the same level, utterly
unapologetic in its slow pacing and bizarre surrealistic storytelling. This is not a broadly comic rendition of soap
opera clichés with a layer of darkness beneath; this is peeling away that
surface to dig into the abyss.
In that sense, this could deeply divide those
who were looking forward to the return of the series. I recently binge-watched the entire original
run, and the tonal shift is palpable.
This is Twin Peaks by way of Lost Highway or Inland Empire. And yet, for
all that, this is definitively a continuation.
The opening two installments focus quite strongly on the beginning of
the resolution to the second season’s infamous cliffhanger, in which Agent
Cooper was replaced by a Killer Bob-possessed doppelganger. As noted in Fire Walk With Me, the “good Dale” is still very much trapped
within the Black Lodge.
At first, much of what happens in the premiere
seems disconnected from the world we knew.
Very little of the premiere takes place in the titular town. Instead, it revolves around three locations:
the Red Room/Black Lodge, New York City, and Buckhorn, South Dakota. As one would expect, by the end of the first
two hours, the connections between these locations and the characters that
inhabit them become more realized.
Most of the time is spent in Buckhorn, where a
grotesque murder has taken place. Prime
suspect Bill Hastings, the local high school principal, seems to have no idea
why his fingerprints are all over the murder scene. But even as the audience begins to realize
that his recollections are becoming more and more unsure, recalling how Leland
Palmer would have no recollection of what happened was he was possessed, the
darker and stranger elements emerge. (Could
the strange figure in the jail cell, close to where Bill is being held, hold a
clue to the eventual “explanation”?)
Over time, the murder in Buckhorn begins to
connect with the dealings of Dark Cooper (as I’ll call him), the doppelganger
that has taken a firm command of the seedy underbelly of the northwest. Watching Dark Cooper roam around with casual
violence and malevolence fulfills one of the most necessary functions of the
return: explaining what happened after the original series ended. We don’t know exactly what happened after
Cooper woke up in that room at the Great Northern, or how exactly he
disappeared. But we do know that Killer
Bob has been around a very long time, and he usually knows how to lay low while
satisfying his hungers. Dark Cooper
knows that he is destined to be pulled back into the Black Lodge, and he is
doing everything possible to avoid that fate.
Meanwhile, in New York City, in a nondescript
building, there is a strange experiment taking place. A man is tasked with watching a seemingly
empty glass box and maintaining the cameras that record it 24/7. A lot of time is spent on this, in typical
Lynchian fashion, and yet it seems fairly obvious from the start that this is
connected to the ongoing post-Project Blue Book work that Major Briggs and his
cohorts within the government had been conducting over the decades. And sure enough, it is connected to the Black
Lodge (or what lies beyond it, since it is a “waiting room” of sorts). This is revealed in a moment of terror and
violence that does more to underscore what kind of revival this is than
anything up to that point in the narrative.
Of course, just when the audience is likely
getting impatient for some sense of what is happening to the “good Dale”, the
second half of the premiere (a good chunk of “Part II”) takes place within the
Black Lodge itself. It’s both more
straightforward and more obtuse than anything we’ve seen within the Red Room
before. Take, as just one example, the
scene with a talking tree-like being that is, apparently, the “evolution” of
the dancing midget (aka, “the arm”).
References to potential time loops abound, as do numbers of unknown
importance to the equally evolving narrative.
The upshot is that the first two hours clearly
point to what many would like to see: exploration of how (or even if) Cooper
escapes the Black Lodge and where the story might go from there. Far from being just one of many ongoing
storylines, it feels like the premiere makes the case that the story is
centered on Cooper. That makes a lot of
sense, given that the project started with Lynch only having Kyle MacLachlan
pinned down as a returning cast member, but it also means that those worried his
fate wouldn’t be front and center have nothing to worry about.
For those concerned that there won’t be a
return to the storylines that pertain to other characters from the original
run, there is enough peppered into the premiere to give plenty of hope. A number of returning characters get a moment
or two to bring the audience up to speed.
Inevitably the story will center back on Twin Peaks itself, and these
hints and seeds will become important. For now, it’s enough to remember that
this is not an episodic series in the conventional sense, but rather, a
complete work split into roughly 18 parts.
Circling back to my original comments, it’s
also worth underscoring the fact that Lynch has made it abundantly clear that
this is his ultimate expression of Twin
Peaks, a vision unfettered by network interference. Showtime has openly declared that they gave
Lynch total creative freedom, and he hand-picked those involved with the
original series that he wanted along for this seemingly-final ride. And while this does appear to be one last
season (the song at the end of the premiere being very apropos to this), it
might be going too far to say this is the “conclusion”. One of the hallmarks of Twin Peaks was always that it left much to the imagination of its
devoted fandom, and I can’t imagine this incarnation would deliver anything
less.
- Firmly establishes itself as a direct continuation from the original series and its prequel film
- Clearly everyone involved in the production is highly invested in the work
- Completely unfriendly to new viewers with little or no knowledge of the original
skie
CONCURRING OPINION