10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Finale
8. A Meta Finale(?)
(Much of) Part 17 was Frost's finale. An expert narrative technician, he coalesced disparate narrative threads, dangled across several locales of geography and consciousness, and positioned them in the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department for a knowingly pat superhero set piece of a resolution (retconned though it was in a gut-punching epilogue far more powerful than even the Fireman's deus ex machina glove).
The remainder of 17, and all of Part 18, was Lynch's finale - a love letter to Fire Walk With Me, and a grim exploration of Lynch's favoured latter-career theme of disassociation and möbius strip narrative. Cooper, with Jeffries' assistance, travelled back in time to the night of Laura Palmer's death. The sequence was beguiling, yet another unprecedented technique; Cooper literally entered the events of the newly-appreciated classic film and attempted to save a CGI de-aged Laura from her fate in a dual role as bodhisattva and/or false messiah. He wanted to take Laura "home," and almost did. The opening events of the pilot played out as if Laura's corpse never materialised on the shore. In a touching tribute to Jack Nance, Pete Martel was shown fishing peacefully. As Cooper led Laura to the White Lodge portal, the Judy-inhabited Sarah - what a phenomenal way of underscoring the tragic human slant of the mythology that decision was - stole her away. The past dictates the future, but it cannot be changed, as such: only mangled beyond comprehension and removed from itself.
This act of regression doomed Cooper - a telling development when framed within Lynch's interest in consciousness.
But who is the dreamer?
As a reading goes, a meta interpretation of Frost and Lynch as the dreamers, the titular Peaks in tandem and opposition, is firmly between the lines - but that is the rewarding mystery of The Return, an interpretive work as powerful as the great, negative force coursing through it.