The Stars Turn and a Time Presents Itself

I have rewatched the first four, of eighteen, episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, AKA season three. (The title, above, is the name of the second episode).

At the end of the original series, the lead character, FBI Agent Dale Cooper, had been replaced with an evil doppelgänger, possessed by the demon BOB. It was this demon that killed Theresa Banks, Laura Palmer and her cousin, Maddie, while possessing the body of Laura's father, Leland. The actual Cooper is stuck in the Black Lodge, the famous red-curtained dwarf-having extra-dimensional parlor Cooper dreamed about earlier in the show. This is how the show ended, with a crushing (and delectable) cliffhanger. The prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), did very little to even address the cliffhanger, so fans had to wait more than 25 years for a resolution.

So it's appropriate that the first thing we see in The Return is Cooper, still stuck in the Black Lodge. Though he's told the time is nearing for him to leave the Lodge, because the evil doppelgänger will have to return soon, it takes rather longer than that for Agent Cooper to fully return. Evil Cooper/BOB contrives to not return to the Lodge—and it appears he has prepared for this by installing another Cooper doppelgänger nearby, in the person of Dougie Jones, to send to the Black Lodge in his stead. Cooper exits the Lodge the wrong way and encounters a couple of helpful spirit women who facilitate his passage back to earth, even as Dougie, in the Black Lodge is killed (we assume) and turned into a small metal ball. (I love how ridiculous Twin Peaks sounds when you write it out.)

One of the women in the liminal space between dimensions appears to be Ronette Pulaski, another victim of BOB's who survived in the original series—she is played by the same actress, Phoebe Augustine—but her character name is simply American Girl.

The Dougie switcheroo allows Cooper to return to earth, but since it's a a hack to thwart BOB's plan, the trip leaves Cooper with some kind of amnesia. He doesn't remember how to speak or what anything is or what it's for, let alone remember who he is. The Dougie storyline is both hilarious and crazy-making, since Cooper doesn't come back to his senses until episode 16, making for an agonizing wait.

And we're waiting for what? For the real Dale Cooper to return.

It is this return that the season's subtitle references. The season is "about" the return of Agent Cooper from the Black Lodge. Initially, it seemed obvious that the return simply meant the audience going back to Twin Peaks, the show. As the season unfolds, however, the return begins to carry a lot more meaning than that literal read. There's the return of Cooper, of course. But, as Twin Peaks was originally, in part, a parody of the Primetime Soap genre, The Return is a parody of the Reboot Series. It doesn't lean into this directly; instead, Lynch subverts our expectations about what such a series should be from the very beginning and never lets up. It is a return in this way, a comforting return to nostalgic places and characters, except Lynch and Frost make it clear that there is never any going back. You cannot return to your original experience with Twin Peaks any more than you can return to your youth, to your old life, to your old loves.

As the season continues, it's at times a huge shock to see how the characters have aged. Many of them have moved forward, but haven't changed at all. Some who have changed have only changed superficially; others seem stuck in the exact same rut they were in 25 years earlier. Some of them are gone altogether because the actors have died, or the characters have died, or they have gone far away, perhaps unrecoverably so. The adults from the old show are elderly now; some are gone and several of the actors lived to appear in the season, but died before it was released. The kids from the old show are middle aged versions of themselves; their kids' generation is running around making messes every bit as bad as the messes their parents made. Some of the cast have aged gracefully, some less so. One of the major themes of season three is simply about time and about change, or the lack thereof, and about death. Lynch and Frost seem to be telling us, most emphatically, that you can't go home again, and there is a sense of sublime melancholy. The glory days are gone, but we're still here.