5 Years Later Twin Peaks The Return Ending Finally Makes Sense
Dale Cooper: Special Agent, or something deeply sinister?
There is no set way of approaching, much less understanding, Twin Peaks.
"A real mystery can't be solved, not completely. It's always just out of reach, like a light around the corner."
If Mark Frost wrote that, in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, then there is no true answer. Frost is (unfairly) maligned as the nuts-and-bolts framework man of the Peaks universe. A lot of the more esoteric material is actually driven by him, but regardless: Twin Peaks is a "continuing story" that does not exist to be resolved. However, after years of delving into that world, as much taunted as enthralled by its mystery, what Dr. Jacoby described as a "personal investigation ongoing for the rest of my life" has, for this writer, concluded.
Spoilers follow, but you're likely reading this as a long-time fan similarly captivated by the unsolvable puzzle. In Part 18 of The Return, a man we don't really know leads a woman he believes to be Laura Palmer to her old home. This follows, on some strange diverted path or other, the events of the whole story. Cooper is freed from the Black Lodge, and after his best, inherent qualities are transferred to Dougie Jones, the tulpa created by his doppelgänger Mr. C, he recovers his true self through the vessel of electricity. In league with the Fireman, he makes it back to Twin Peaks. In a remarkably neat resolution to Mr. C's ambiguous campaign of terror - it is penned in an almost Seinfeldian manner, with every major plot thread converging in a scene that plays off an earlier gag - Lucy Brennan in Part 17 shoots the double, and then a chipper cockney destroys the orb inhabiting BOB with a magic green glove in a deliberate deus ex machina.
The day is saved, and all is well, until Cooper comes face to face with Naido. It is here that Cooper's enlarged face is superimposed on and dominates the screen. The tone shifts from a neat albeit gloriously wacky take on a mystery drama to something profoundly unknowable at this precise moment.
Why?
CONT'D...(1 of 6)