5 Years Later Twin Peaks The Return Ending Finally Makes Sense

He is unwittingly mirroring the masterplan of his shadow self. If Mr. C is still in there, and Judy is lurking somewhere within the Tremond residence, the world ends. When Laura hears an echo of her mother's call, the lights go out, and she screams. Even without this overt explanation of Mr. C's motivation, we can infer from the atmosphere created and the brilliance of Kyle MacLachlan's performance that something ominous is imminent.

Does the world end?

With no electricity, the ceiling fan, the eternal metaphor of abuse, no longer spins. This timeline ends, but there is no one timeline, no one world. As indicated in Part 17, Cooper is deemed to repeat his mission ad infinitum. The lights going out in the Palmer household feels like a cruelly layered taunt. Judy - and this is behaviour consistent with the mischievous leanings of the "Lodge spirits" - is at once telling Cooper that he has succeeded at the ultimate cost and sending him on his way to failure all over again.

What Judy is also doing, by conflating the real Cooper with his doppelgänger, is exerting her extreme negative force onto him. She has locked him in an eternal battle with his Dweller on the Threshold, and he is now facing him for every second of his being. He is reliving the worst and most transformative point of his life, constantly, and in a particularly cruel twist, he has been robbed of his deductive reasoning to work it out. He doesn't even know what year it is. The moralistic "greatest lawman" has been doomed to a life of residual guilt and strange, unproductive thinking.

What Lynch did, somehow, using his unparalleled genius, was convey the extreme negative force through cinema. This is more telling than any narrative reading.

CONT'D...(5 of 6)