A nerve-rattling return for the intriguing Twin Peaks
David Lynch once said: “I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” Twin Peaks, his esoteric soap opera-cum-whodunit, never made much sense either. The series, which debuted in 1990, concerned the killing of highschool homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in a small logging town just south of the Canadian border. This may sound like a conventional murder mystery, but Lynch quickly peeled away the veneer to reveal something altogether more strange and beguiling.
Over its two seasons, Twin Peaks defied conventions and reinvented TV drama. Out went the standard narrative arc; in came offbeat character studies, an elliptical plot, and dialogue that could be hilariously banal or downright bizarre.
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). However, a scene in the final episode hinted that Lynch 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 zebra-striped flooring.
And so, 26 years after the series finished, Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost have written 18 new episodes. Airing on Sky Atlantic, 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 plot strands that were maddeningly opaque at times.
Set a quarter of a century after the events of the second season, the opening episodes played out like a series of vignettes. In New York City, a man was paid by “some anonymous billionaire” to watch a top-secret glass box to “see if anything appears”. This meant that 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 emerged from the box, and sliced and diced the pair.
In Buckhorn, South Dakota, meanwhile, a woman named Ruth Davenport was murdered, with the fingerprints of Matthew Lillard’s prissy school principal Bill Hastings found in 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 some mysterious discussion unfolded between Mr Todd (Patrick Fischler) and his assistant, Roger.
As for the titular town, 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 the new series), both of whom were in regular contact with each other. “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” (which would become his catchphrase) and cherry pie was still imprisoned in the Black Lodge, where he was in conversation with, among others, a talking tree and a soon-to-beabducted-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. It’s intriguing, with a percolating sense of dread and a nerve-rattling score. There was nostalgia, too: a poignant scene at the end in the Bang Bar Bar, where brooding biker James Hurley (James Marshall), no longer a teenager, made eye contact with his old friend Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick), will have made fans feel as if not a day has passed since 1991. However, in a crowded TV landscape of provocative series, the new Twin Peaks 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.
Twin Peaks: the Return ★★★★