10 Things You Need To Know About Twin Peaks: The Return
4. Let's All Forget About Season 2
The mammoth cast list is as notable for its bizarre, seemingly incongruous additions (Eddie Vedder? Michael Cera?) as it is for its omissions. Much like the few teaser trailers released thus far, the list hints that the trivial pursuits of (mid-period) season 2 are as much of an embarrassment to the creators as they are the viewers.
There is no space, even across the epic 18-hour duration, for the widow Lana Milford, whose incongruous succubus mired the post-reveal episodes with tedium. Evelyn Marsh, an even more implausible femme fatale who removed us from the town literally and symbolically, will not be returning. MT Wentz, food critic (!) and harbinger of the free fall, is another welcome oversight.
Dick Tremayne was one of the brighter spots, in all of his sartorial camp, but he isn't back either. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the darkness might not be all-encompassing - it's difficult to envisage Charlyne Yi lending her comedic gifts to the red room - but the characters synonymous with the show's plunge from soap opera pastiche to straight soap opera are all but absent.
Long-term fans, your writer included, can watch back with fondness the sight of a pine weasel shredding Tremayne's nose, but the humour, if much of it even exists, will not be reminiscent of the broad strokes brushed by whichever moron scripted Nadine Hurley to toss a high school wrestler some forty feet in the air.