A foggy morning; a grizzly murder; good coffee. Yes, Twin Peaks has returned! Only this time, those three things aren’t all in the same place as each other (or the same U.S. state, even.)
Welcome to season 3, which has been dubbed Twin Peaks: The Return. It may not be what we were expecting, it may not even be what we hoped. It is but an uncertain walk down a particular red-curtained hallway that audiences worldwide are taking once more…
The two-hour premiere event, which aired Sunday, May 21 to an audience of more than half-a-million viewers, showed parts 1 and 2 of what will be 18 full hours of television. Fans old and new could finally see and learn what became of Dale Cooper, and the evil forces which threateningly bested him, during the closing moments of the finale over 25 years ago.
Warning! Twin Peaks 3×01 spoilers below.
The verdict? Dale Cooper… is still in the Red Room. And, his doppelganger is still in the real world, with BOB potentially alongside him. It is perhaps the most devastating verdict that co-writers Mark Frost and David Lynch could have chosen. It means that, for all of the time Dale spent in Twin Peaks and all of the lives he touched, no one fully grasped the events surrounding Laura Palmer’s murder, nor the supernatural elements surrounding the area of Twin Peaks, as well as Dale himself did.
Certainly not enough to recognize that he had been possessed, and to do something about it which would have ensured a swift return of the real Dale Cooper to his body in our realm. As Lucy Moran states towards the end of Part 1, none of Cooper’s friends have seen or heard from him in more than two decades.
And with that, dear reader, we must brace ourselves. Frost and Lynch know what we want — that much is clear from a premiere which gives us scenes like Dr. Jacoby receiving a ridiculously large shipment of shovels, Benjamin Horne lighting a cigar while his brother Jerry consumes potent drug-induced banana bread, and Shelly Johnson telling everyone at the Bang Bang Bar how cool James Hurley is and “has always been.”
Those scenes together add up to mere minutes and a fraction compared to the time spent on new characters, in new places, with new mysteries and relationships unfurling. Frost and Lynch will not go easy on us. There is more story to tell, but they’re telling it their way.
Twin Peaks: The Revival is, as expected, a wider one than the world of the original series. Entire scenes and character arcs take place not only in Twin Peaks but in places such as South Dakota and New York City. The pull of the Black Lodge is stronger than ever… a window to it exists atop a New York high-rise… and no one is safe from the horrors that dwell within.
The characters feel real, and lived-in. The casting is superb. Once again we are introduced to small town people, to whom murder is shocking, and law enforcement officials to whom it is not. And speaking of murder, there is quite a bit of it in Parts 1 and 2. Sam and Tracey are brutally killed by an unidentifiable creature which spawns from nothing right in front of them.
Ruth Davenport and an unknown male victim were murdered, decapitated and posed for police to find them. Evil Cooper (Bobcoop? Coopbob?) wields two separate handguns and scores two headshots with killer accuracy. This is already a much more violent season of Twin Peaks than its predecessors.
The question to ponder is whether this is a marked departure from the original series, or a logical progression. Could David Lynch really have fully explored the intricacies of a place like the Black Lodge — and done justice to his own concept – on ABC network in the ’90s? We will never know. Yet cable in 2017 seems far more suited to exploring the darker corners of human nature and that, in many ways, is what the show was always about.
While there’s no pie to be found in the premiere episodes (the Log Lady does promise some to Hawk), this series may jar viewers but never completely steps away from its origins. The threads of plot are being woven, yet the pattern is red. There’s a congruence and a unity of vision here, a sense that we are looking at the first two pieces of a larger puzzle (but all the pieces are present in the box.) Cooper is still the hero, too — he is just very, very indisposed at the start.
Time is running out for Doppelcoop (there we go.) Before killing Darya he confesses that tomorrow he is “supposed to” return to the Black Lodge, but has decided to skip out. For some reason, Laura Palmer’s 25-year prophecy has become — almost — a contract and that contract is due.
Is that Bob, inside the other Cooper? One would love to think so, with his Frank Silva-length hair, the malicious look in his eyes as he growls to Ray that he has wants, not needs. But if Bob controls this Coop, then who or what force possessed Bill Hastings to kill Ruth Davenport, in what he described as being a dream?
Her murder *does* have a much different MO than the ones of Laura Palmer and Theresa Banks. Speaking of: have there been no letters-under-the-fingernail killings by Bob for Coops’ friends at the FBI to follow? Looking like Coop, sounding like Coop, how is it possible in this era of digital surveillance that nobody has found him for 25 years? Especially if he continues to associate with lesser criminal elements, he must have turned up somewhere somehow. Have Gordon Cole and Al Rosenfeld, Sheriff Truman, Deputy Hawk, all really given up on Coop? And how easily?
While Real Cooper struggles to take in all of the information he is being given, and embarks on this seemingly Sisyphean odyssey to return home (two hours in, he has not had full success), Doppelcoop decides to break the rules and stay behind on Earth. But David Lynch hasn’t broken his contract with we the viewers. 25 years later, he is delivering the brethtaking, persistent conclusion that will at first keep us up at night, and then… keep us up more nights….
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.