If I had to distill the entirety of Twin Peaks: The Return into one word, this would be it: time. Which isn’t to say that the themes of the original series or film are left behind. There’s plenty of violence directed towards women, there’s doublings aplenty and a beautifully lit, audacious-sounding conflict between good and evil, there’s goofy jokes and a weird relationship between the show and its medium that stops just shy of meta-fiction, but all of these elements that connect the show with its progenitor rea still slightly off. Time, here, changes everything. And not for the better.
Although it was written and shot before Trump took office, The Return is the first show that felt like a product of his era. While there’s still humor, it’s now caustic, hard-edged and often unpleasant. While there’s still naivete, it’s a naivete formed of ignorance rather than faith. While there’s still wind blowing between the trees, it’s no longer accompanied by the comfortingly repetitive Angelo Badalamenti music that permeated the original series. Time has made the entire country colder, more distant, and on the verge of collapse. In the past 25 years, things have only gotten worse, and if this isn’t a metaphor for Trump, intentional or not, then nothing is.
The most striking and immediate change from the previous entries is the replacement of Cooper with Mr. C and Dougie (we’ll get to Richard in a little bit). In the original series, Cooper is the embodiment of goodness. That he’s also a cypher for the audience only makes this connection stronger, a way of implying that we, also, have only people’s best interests at heart, even if sometimes our methodology leaves something to be desired. In his place, we’re left with the malevolence of Mr. C, a doppelganger of Cooper possessed by BOB whose superhuman abilities are matched by a Steve Bannon-ish desire to do evil for the sake of itself, and the unrelenting stupidity of Dougie. On my second time through the series, with the assurance of the real Cooper’s return, Dougie isn’t nearly as grating he is the first time through the series, but to say that he’s miserable to sit through week in and week out during the original run would be an understatement. Dougie, for all of his supernaturally mandated luck, is stupidity incarnate. That he gets through every situation regardless feels, again, like a metaphor for our country, as well as a commentary on how plot works. He doesn’t deserve his good fortune, it arrives at him unearned because the gods of the story have bequeathed these to him, and at the same time we root for him to succeed since at least it’s an escape from the brutality encircling every other part of the show.
Lynch and meta-commentary have always had an odd relationship. He’s not a John Barthian creator, but his works implicitly have a way of speaking about their medium. This ranges here from the television-as-death-box of the skyscraper to Jacobi’s conspiracy-mongering to the intentionally bad deus ex machina that destroys BOB in the second-to-last episode. Twin Peaks was never an homage to soap operas or procedurals, instead it was both. The Return instead takes on prestige dramas, and what it has to say about them is in no ways kind. As with everything else, time has done a number on television, and the show’s commentary on them as unrelentingly bleak, nonsensically plotted, and numbingly free of classically enjoyable characterizations feels like it’s almost a direct commentary on the second season of True Detective. Every one of the 18 episodes is compelling and hard to look away from, but every one of them is also miserable. Lynch hasn’t mellowed in his old age, if anything he’s grown more skeptical in the deceptions and manipulations flooding every corner of modern America.
Within The Return‘s almost dystopian version of 2017, two episodes stick out in particular. The first is episode eight, which gives us a genesis for the entire Twin Peaks mythos as well as an unsettling horror story about the aftermath of the first atomic bomb. While it’s singular, to a large extent a short film that takes place in the Twin Peaks, it’s also more of a tone piece than anything else. I love it, but don’t consider it necessary to go into great detail about what it’s doing unless prompted. Conversely, there’s the show’s final episode, at least as of this writing (rumors of at least something else Twin Peaks-related being shot have been pretty convincing), which takes us outside of the Twin Peaks universe entirely and into reality. At least, that’s what I think it’s doing, with Richard seeming like a combination of all three of Cooper’s previous incarnations, though I’m not here to continue fruitless debates about what exactly is happening here or what it’s all supposed to mean. This episode leaves the world of Twin Peaks and introduces us to a different type of failure, undercutting the deus ex machina to probe past television tropes. To Lynch, closure is always a dead end, and the show’s refusal to offer it here leaves Twin Peaks alive just as the original ending to the television show did more than 25 years earlier. Fan theories and explainer videos, as dumb and borderline insane as they often are, mean that people keep discussing the show regardless of how much hatred it seemed to get on first airing. The lack of closure, the inability to exactly parse what everything means beyond dream-logic, is in fact the point.
If The Return is the last thing Lynch ever directs, I would be fine with it. In this 18 episodes there’s an encapsulation of everything he was interested in going all the way back to Eraserhead, and the series is filled with fitting tributes to the legions of his beloved actors who he’s somehow outlived, the music and films he’s loved, and his entire philosophy of storytelling. When Cooper’s face, superimposed on the screen, tells us that, “We live in a dream,” he’s speaking directly to the audience, a message that cuts through both the show and the idea of subtext; what’s being said is too important here to communicate in any other way. The Return is more than just a swan song though, it’s an intelligent take on the ravages of time and the dismantling of the country. It is 18 of the best hours ever made for television, indelible and unforgettable and completely necessary viewing for anyone deeply interested in considerations about evil, fate, dreams, and television itself.
Richard ends the show by asking, “What year is this?” For me writing these words right now it’s 2019, and for you reading my muddled thoughts about The Return that’s just as easy a question to answer. But the more important consideration, and the one left implicit for viewers of the show to answer, is why that information about the year, the time that we live in today, really matters. Why does time’s onward march feel, of late, like nothing less than a disaster.