10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Finale
"What the f*ck just happened?"
"My own personal investigation, I suspect, will be ongoing for the rest of my life." - Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, Twin Peaks Season 1, Episode 4.
When David Lynch and Mark Frost first announced Twin Peaks: The Return, in 2014, a sort of tense euphoria engulfed the cult fandom.
We longed for the restoration of our beloved Special Agent Dale Cooper, split into two and inhabited by a demonic entity at the close of the original, landmark series. We also cherished the mysteries spun from the tiniest fibres, poring over the conflicting mythology with the forensic drive of Albert Rosenfield and the astronomical passion of Cooper himself. We wanted both resolution and mystery.
Expectations were vast. The Twin Peaks shorthand description is of a woozy woodland subverted soap opera, a transposition of cinema into a formulaic, static TV landscape. In order to surpass itself, the most histrionic superlatives were not good enough. With The Return, Lynch and Frost had to change the game once again. They did, ultimately. The Return was a work of genius - innovative in format, in the approach to continuation, immersive sound design, outstanding acting performances, unconventional narrative...Lynch and Frost unloaded Chekhov's gun and reloaded the bullet into the temple of the audience in a nihilistic blast of anti-fan service. We will review these events for another quarter century.
In the end - if one can accurately use that word - The Return was an unforgettable meditation on death, the weightier horrors of life, and perhaps meditation itself.
10. A Great Negative Force
Twin Peaks: The Return, a dualistic work of genius, appropriately explored both its expositional and abstract impulses across Parts 17 and 18. It began with a broad comedic joke, and ended with a cosmic one.
Gordon Cole bemoaned his inability to pull the trigger and kill the tulpa of Diane Evans. "You've gone soft in your old age," Albert Rosenfield judged. "Not where it counts, buddy," he replied - not for the first time obscuring the line between the character and creator. In another info dump (interestingly, these sequences were the sole preserve of the FBI, perhaps indicating an institutional failure to grasp the unknown through subtext, more so than poor writing technique), Cole outlined Cooper's retconned, offscreen plan to kill two birds with one stone (somewhat less forgivable, but at least Lynch/Cole apologised. Twice).
He also elaborated on the presence of a great negative force, the elusive Jowday - or, as it evolved into, Judy. One reading of Judy, reinforced in the brutal denouement, is akin to the darkness sweeping through Stephen King's Derry - an elemental curse acting as a grim metaphor for the darkness pervading the world and every soul within it, dooming us to literally repeat the same mistakes and lose our core of goodness in the pursuit of rationality.
Was everything in The Return - the brutal killings, the emergence of the woodsmen into our realm, the now-bleak Peaks community, the ultra-violence levelled against women - a sign of its rise?