10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Finale

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?