10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Premiere
2. The Comedy Is Somewhere Within The Trees
The original series was renowned for its offbeat humour; Cooper's boyish enthusiasm undercut the overbearing grief in the best, earliest episodes. But there is no pinching of noses nor dendrophilia here.
The Return is far darker in tone - but Lynch's trademark surrealism manifests itself with his idiosyncratic comedic bent. A portly woman in the South Dakota arc momentarily forgets where she lives when she makes a call to local law enforcement. Deputy Andy Brennan and wife Lucy haven't missed a beat.
Even DoppelCoop, played with a sadistic and controlled zeal by MacLachlan, elicits the darkest of blackly glib laughs, deadpanning "Shut up, Darya," to his murdered lover and bizarrely massaging the face of a mechanic in a classic, elongated Lynchian vignette.
In retrospect, as seamlessly as the original series fused tones and modes, some of the comedy was so broad as to flirt with lowbrow. Here, it is scaled back and incorporated into a wider sense of complete unease, never once incongruous as, say, an elderly mayor scrapping with his brother at the wake of an incestuous father.