10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 9
2. ...And His Character's Website Is Hilariously Real
Enterprising Redditors and sleuthing Twitterers logged on to thesearchforthezone.com immediately, discovering that it exists in hilariously outdated Geocities fashion.
The site, professing to pen Hastings' fascination with "multidimensional/time travel, dark matter, the afterlife, etc" is a smorgasbord of 56Kliche. The journal name is plastered in luminous comic sans. It offers "HOT" reading links denoted by charmingly cheap spinning graphics that somehow garner the Hastings character with sympathy across multimedia platforms. Windom Earle stated in the original series that those with knowledge of the Black Lodge can use it to reorder the Earth to their liking. The tragedy of William Hastings is that his hapless intellectual curiosity was undone by forces with no consideration of such noble human pursuits.
Elsewhere, there are links to WAV files denoting the electrical transmissions elicited by the woodsmen of Part 8 and papers that exhume the supernatural bent of Twin Peaks - electricity, multiple worlds, military intervention into the unknown - with a boyish wonder.
Ultimately, it's a soundtrack preorder advert masquerading as an easter egg, as wonderfully hidden by the "Donate" $ signs. Still, even when Lynch and Frost are battering the viewer with information, their grasp of the depths of the mystery is hidden, insidiously, from the reader.