Shows new tricks
TwinPeaks and Mark Frost, conceived it as a single 18-hour work, and the first two “parts”, as Showtime calls them, don’t feel particularly episodic.)
Alongside the introductions are a great number of curtain calls, among them Margaret the Log Lady (Catherine E Coulson), now using an oxygen tube; Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) and Andy (Harry Goaz), whose son, last met in utero, is now 24; Shelly (Madchen Amick) and James ( James Marshall), making eyes at each other across the Bang Bang Bar.
The most affecting return, though, is Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, whose death set the series’ original story in motion. Reappearing to Cooper in the Black Lodge, she summons her character’s luminous, doomed teenage smile, as though she really were frozen in eternity: “I am dead, yet I live.”
This is the closest the premiere comes to recapturing the raw emotional pull that – more than any mystery – made the original run great.
As inventive as it was, the Twin Peaks of 1990-91 was also a creature of its time, borrowing elements from prime-time soaps and detective series. To watch its new iteration is to be reminded of what TV has done in its absence.
There are shades of Lost in that glass mystery box – especially when it eventually fills with a murderous apparition in black smoke. There’s more than a little Fargo in the darkly funny subplot in which a South Dakota man (Matthew Lillard) may have committed murder, à la Leland Palmer, under paranormal influence. There may be too much of True Detective and other hardboiled kill-dramas in the journey of Evil Cooper, which culminates in his murdering his lingerie-clad partner (Nicole LaLiberté) in bed.
Of course, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Twin Peaks is borrowing these elements so much as borrowing them back.
And even after nearly three decades, Lynch’s visual imagination remains inimitable: an ace of spades with a misshap- en symbol in the centre; Laura removing her face, beneath which is cold white light; the “arm” – one of the mystic denizens of the Lodge – represented now not by a dancing dwarf but by a tree with a head of blobby flesh. The Black Lodge scenes are as unsettling as any in the second-season finale or the prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Lynch’s mastery of tension persists. The script, by him and Frost, recognises the power of silence and anticipation. And Lynch, who is directing the entire revival, still has his penchant for dualities and eerie beauty.
The new installments offer plenty of callbacks and cryptic new utterances to parse: “Remember 430. Richard and Linda”; “Two birds with one stone”; “253. Time and time again.” (I was told there would be no math.)
At times it feels as if it were a nostalgic 1990 version of the show is alternating scenes with a colder, harder-edged 2017 version. Whether and how the two come together may determine whether this sample, one-ninth of a unitary work, has staying power beyond the class-reunion phase.
But there’s enough unshakable imagery to promise a few months of unsettled Sunday nights’ sleep. The original Twin Peaks was powered by two questions: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” and “What the hell am I watching?” The reincarnation doesn’t have the first. But it still knows how to get you to ask the second.