Revival is intriguing but lacks the original’s chutzpah
matic gem Blue Velvet, Lynch is a master chronicler of small-town grisliness. It was always suggested that lurking within these people, with their gee-whizz speech and cheery dispositions, was malice at its purest.
The show trailed off in its second season after the US network ABC made Lynch reveal the identity of Palmer’s killer (a demonic entity called BOB). But a scene in the final episode hinted that the auteur might one day return to Twin Peaks. “I’ ll see you again in 25 years,” the spirit of Palmer told FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who was trapped in the show’s Black Lodge netherworld, a place framed by red velvet curtains and zebrastriped flooring.
And so, 26 years after the series finished, Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost have written 18 new episodes — details of which have been kept under lock and key. Until now. Airing in the early hours of Monday morn
on Sky Atlantic in the UK, the first two instalments of Twin Peaks: the Return were Lynch at his most Lynchian: eerie silences, idiosyncratic exchanges, languid shots of trees, and multiple plots strands that were maddeningly opaque at times. From the first twang of Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting theme music, it was as if Lynch was determined to remind all those shows indebted to Twin Peaks — True Detective and Fargo, for example — that no one does weird quite like him.
Set a quarter of a century after the events of the second season, the opening two parts played out like a series of vignettes. In New York City, a young man was being paid by “some anonymous billionaire” to watch a top-secret glass box to “see if anything appears”. This meant we watched him for minutes at a time doing just that. When, eventually, he was joined by a female admirer, the episode gleefully adhered to the slasher-horror rule that sex equals death. In a terrifying scene, a ghostly monster suddenly emerged from the box, and sliced and diced the pair.
In Buckhorn, South Dakota, meanwhile, a woman named Ruth Davenport was gruesomely murdered, with the fingerprints of Matthew Lilliard’s prissy school principal Bill Hastings found all over her apartment. “But the Morgans are coming for dinner,” lamented his wife on his arrest, in a fine example of Lynch’s incidental humour. We were also briefly introduced to a plot thread in Las Vegas, where a mysterious discussion unfolded between Mr Todd (Patrick Fischler) and his assistant, Roger.
As for the titular town, here we were reunited with a few of the old gang: namely Deputy Chief Tommy “Hawk” Hill (Michael Horse) and Margaret the Log Lady (Catherine E Coulson, who died shortly after filming), both of whom were in regular contact. “My log has a message for you,” she told him cryptically. “Something is missing and you have to find it. It has to do with Dale Cooper. The way you will find it has something to do with your heritage.”
In fact, there were two Dale Coopers. The boy-scout one with a character-defining fondness for “damn fine coffee” and cherry pie — who Lynch’s ex-wife Mary Sweeney recently told me is based on Lynch himself — was still imprisoned in the Black Lodge, where he was in conversation with, among others, a talking tree and a soon-to-be-abducted-again Palmer (”I am dead, yet I live,” she uttered). Meanwhile, his evil doppelgänger, possessed by the feral spirit of BOB, was on a murderous spree, sporting a mahogany tan, long hair and a leather jacket. In this dual role, MacLachlan was able to demonstrate his versatility, moving adroitly between eccentricity, laconic humour and lugubriousness.
The juxtaposition of sunny soap opera and dark depravity that made the first series seem like such an accomplished creative experiment was sadly lacking here. In its obsession with creating a perplexing, malevolent atmosphere, it was more redolent of Lynch’s later films such as Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001). No bad thing, of course. As such, the new Twin Peaks is intriguing and smart, with a percolating sense of dread and nerverattling score (Lynch was the sound editor). But in a crowded TV landscape of weirdly provocative series, it needs to work a little harder to remind us why it deserves to be remembered as a landmark in television drama. A damn fine revival? Not quite yet.