The Past Dictates the Future

Last week I completed my Twin Peaks: The Return rewatch. I can report that the series hasn’t lost any of its strange power; the power only grows, actually, as it becomes more comprehensible. In my last post about this, I wrote about Ed Hurley—what I had forgotten was that, in the next episode, Nadine finally frees Ed to follow his heart and he makes a beeline for Norma. It looks like they’re going to be together, which makes it one of he happiest moments in the entire series. Nadine’s change of heart—Ed’s sense of duty long prevented him from leaving her—is brought about by her listening to Dr. Jacoby’s online video rants, which is a way of talking about how “the stars turn and a time presents itself.” It doesn’t matter where her inspiration comes from, what matters is Ed’s sense of freedom and the unexpected resolution of the star-crossed love of his life. The way this comes about is as mysterious as anything Cooper has gone through; Ed’s faith is also a lesson for the viewer.

Of course, our faith rarely plays out in a way we could have foreseen. As the series continued, we move from the shock of recognition and the messy procession of time, to a new acceptance of the characters as they are. The resolution can’t happen without this acceptance. We have even gotten used to Dougie and almost accepted that we might never get Cooper back, until we do.

The season converges in a wild scene in the Twin Peak’s sheriff station, with many characters present, rounded up to play their life’s roles in the strange saga of Dale Cooper’s sojourn in Another Place. Freddie, James’s work friend with the green-gloved hand turns out to have a destiny straight out of a comic book; he uses his super-strong magic hand to punch out the evil released from Evil Cooper. The Japanese woman turns out to have been a magically disguised Diane, after we learn that the Diane we’ve seen this whole time was another tulpa. In fact, everything that has happened seems to be part of a Cooper and Diane long game, now finally won.

It all culminates in Cooper finding a way to return to 1990 and save the life of Laura Palmer—but something goes wrong in the process. So, though our faith was rewarded by the return of our hero, more is risked and more is shaken loose; the ending of the season raises more questions than even the ending of season two all those years ago. (Will get a season four? The rumors keep swirling.)

The scene in the sheriff’s station is incredible. It’s a kind of stock scene and played as a satire on it—the scene in which all the right people are in the right place, finally, and they have all the stuff they need, and they finally do the thing that saves the day. There is fire and danger and destruction, but they all come through it, changed and with new challenges. The execution is hilarious and low-tech but spoofs all of the literal action of such a scene, and manages to be silly, frightening, beyond strange, a satire of twenty years of popular entertainment playing out in a conference room.