10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 15
7. Everybody Loved Steven
A daylight scene set in the woods followed that mystifying, blackly-lit supernatural sojourn. It was equally as strange.
We discovered Steven, gun in hand, sitting by a tree with illicit lover Gersten. Their dialogue was near impossible to follow, sans closed captioning. Steven, in a state of drug-addled paranoia, spewed out a nonsensical stream of consciousness. He talked of "going up". His admission of being a "high school graduate" was framed and received as some bizarre transgression of...something. The scene was baffling, unhinged through semantic choices and the purposeful obfuscation of them. Steve loaded his gun and talked of lightning in a bottle. The colour turquoise. A rhinoceros. It's as if the Sparkle addicts of Twin Peaks all exist in a shared hallucination of a zoo. Steven, disturbed by a dog walker (Mark Frost in a cameo), then appeared to kill himself offscreen - but not after lavishing praise on Gersten's "c*nt".
Unike Norma and Ed, the brevity of his character's arc was not compensated by the quarter century shortcut, though the thematic echoes between him and the Peaks lowlife of, say, a Leo Johnson, did say something about the cyclical nature of abuse, at least.
The Sparkle subplot remains one of the most fascinating in The Return, this weird hallucination shared by addicts and audience alike. If Steven, ultimately, was a plot device, he died or may have died in service of what might be a game-changer. Nothing about any of this is certain - but Red must feature into the final act in some sort of meaningful way.