10 Things You Need To Know About Twin Peaks: The Return
9. Things In Twin Peaks Look Decidedly Bleak...
In that aforementioned teaser, and especially the teaser released prior to it, the vast majority of the characters wear haunted expressions.
Big Ed Hurley plaintively toys with an empty coffee cup; it appears he is still waiting for his true, clandestine love Norma Jennings to join him. Carl Rodd, rooted to a park bench, looks up at an unseen figure with the sort of expert, world-weary expression with which he has become an alluring, hinted-at outlier of the wider mythology. Sheriff's Deputy Andy Brennan sees something grisly in those evil, old woods. Special Agent Dale Cooper looks apprehensive, perhaps even guilty.
And poor Sarah Palmer, bug-eyed and shattered, patrols the liquor store aisle looking for some vodka to go with her Bloody Mary mixture. Ironically, this depressing tease of a scene is also the most stirring. The essence of Twin Peaks was inhabited by some unimaginable Black Lodge horror when Laura Palmer's killer was revealed and subsequently killed off. The show was rudderless when its captains all but handed over the reins to the staff, and indulged itself with frankly terrible approximations of Lynch's peerless surreality.
The exclusion of Sarah crystallised the descent into trite camp. Her grief, with which the show was anchored, dissipated into a fugue of silly plots and dissonant character motives.
Her brief presence in the teaser indicates that all is not well within the town, but all is right with the show - another example of the show's beautiful and harrowing duality.