Five Years Later, ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ Remains Television’s Greatest

When it premiered in 1990, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s ABC series Twin Peaks arrived like a lightning bolt to the landscape of television. In an age where TV had yet to evolve beyond episodic procedurals and sitcoms, Lynch and Frost’s vision of a cozy, all-American small town turned upside down by the brutal murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was simply unlike anything that had come before it. The series broke new ground through its inversion of soap opera tropes, its deconstruction of how an ostensibly wholesome community can become corrupted by forces of evil, and its surreal cinematic flourishes (courtesy of Lynch, already an established filmmaker by that time) that brought the series closer to the big screen than the small screen. It works as a companion piece to Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet, one of the great explorations of how the American Dream can turn into a nightmare.

Twin Peaks was a national phenomenon in its first season, as the question “who killed Laura Palmer?” reverberated throughout the heads of tens of millions of viewers. In its more flawed second season, the viewership declined, and ABC cancelled the series after the season ended on an agonizing cliffhanger. Lynch would go on to direct the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992—an incredible film that was maligned at the time but has since been rightfully reclaimed as a vital work of 1990s cinema—wherein he chose to focus on the last days of Laura Palmer before her death, instead of answering the season-ending cliffhanger. Twin Peaks became relegated to cult status in the years after, as devoted fans rewatched and picked apart the series, wondering if they would ever get a resolution or conclusion to their beloved series. Their prayers were finally answered in 2017, when Showtime commissioned an 18-episode third season titled Twin Peaks: The Return, a revival that almost seemed too good to be true. Lynch returned to direct all 18 episodes, and Frost returned to co-write each episode with Lynch. Fans had been waiting for exactly this for 25 years.

The original Twin Peaks predated the beginning of the “Golden Age of Television” that kicked off with The Sopranos in 1999, which built upon Peaks paving the way for novelistic serialized storytelling and a cinematic level of artistry. The Return would be arriving in the wake of all the shows that Peaks influenced, as well as shows like Sopranos and The Wire and Mad Men that took the medium in new directions of their own. So how fitting it is that a series that redefined television in its original run, would go on to redefine the medium yet again in an entirely different way in 2017. Fans expecting a conventional return to the beloved original characters and setting were in for a shock with the revival’s bold and patience-testing premiere, which immediately established that the new Twin Peaks would not be the same as the old one. It may not have been what people wanted right away, but as the series would go on to prove throughout the unforgettable 18-episode run, it was what they needed.

Lynch and Frost gave us the answer to the cliffhanger from 1991, in which Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) had been possessed by the serial-killing evil spirit BOB. The Return drops us 25 years later, where the Cooper we know is stuck in the purgatory known as The Black Lodge, and his possessed doppelgänger Mr. C (also MacLachlan) has been roaming around the country on a two-decade killing spree. When returning from the Black Lodge, Cooper comes back replacing a lookalike named Dougie Jones (MacLachlan again) who’s sent to the Lodge in his place, and Cooper is essentially stuck in a catatonic state as a result of his time away from the world, bumbling around aimlessly. But this was just about the only concrete answer given in a deliberately jarring premiere. Fans were almost immediately bursting with questions. Where are all the original characters? Why is the pace so slow and methodical? Why are we spending so much time in New York City with two characters we don’t know, simply watching them stare at a giant mysterious glass box? Over the course of the season, some of their questions would be answered, and others wouldn’t. But ultimately, The Return proved that it wasn’t all about answers (and any fan of his films knows that Lynch has never been interested in convention). Instead, it was after something much deeper and more resonant than simply returning to the coffee and cherry pie of the cozy town of Twin Peaks.

Despite its rejection of convention and embrace of abstraction, The Return is the logical completion of Twin Peaks’ trajectory. The collected Twin Peaks is one of the most dense and layered texts in cinematic history, with so many different thematic angles to approach it from—but primarily, taken as a whole, I can’t think of another work of American art that has so poignantly explored the lingering ripple effects of grief and trauma. From how Laura Palmer’s murder impacted the rest of the town in the original series, to the sadness of the truth of who her killer was, to the devastating exploration of Laura’s last days in Fire Walk With Me, and finally to the 25-years-later ripple effects depicted in The Return. Perhaps the most significant theme of The Return is how it directly acknowledges the passage of time and the process of aging. It’s not just that it’s set 25 years after the original series; we feel it, too. The town doesn’t feel the same. The hazy, golden film glow of the original series has been replaced with sharp, off-kilter digital tones. The characters have noticeably aged and weathered, haunted by the past even as the world continues to go on. Think about Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), former hotheaded jock who’s now a more mellow and upstanding police officer, suddenly showing an outpouring of emotion at just the sight of Laura’s photo. Or the haunting scenes of Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), Laura’s mother, staring emptily into the TV, surrounded by empty bottles and cigarettes. Or how Cooper, spending a great deal of time unable to speak more than a couple words at a time, perks up at the mention of things from his past life, like “FBI” or “badge” or “coffee”. One brief but memorable moment involves FBI commanding officer Gordon Cole (Lynch himself) suddenly seeing a jarring vision of Laura out of the blue. Cycles of trauma and violence continue to repeat; think about Shelly Briggs (Madchen Amick), who was stuck in an abusive relationship as a young adult in the original series, and now has a daughter (Amanda Seyfried) with Bobby who’s falling into the exact same trap. The Return rejects easy nostalgia by instead foregrounding the passage of time and the process of aging (and the occasional moments here and there where Lynch and Frost do indulge in nostalgia are all the more rewarding as a result; they feel earned). “Is it future or is it past?”, asks a certain character repeatedly throughout. By the end of The Return, we’ve come to find that there’s no real distinction.

Another aspect of The Return’s brilliance lies in how much of an anomaly it is in today’s TV landscape. Lynch is perhaps America’s defining surrealist filmmaker, and it feels like something of a miracle that Showtime executives were willing to give Lynch carte blanche to carry out a vision that lands much closer to an 18-hour extension of Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive’s surrealism than anything resembling the current crop of prestige-TV darlings. There’s simply never been anything like it on TV before, and there likely won’t be again. Much has been made of the increasing blurring of lines between TV and cinema (take, for example, Stranger Things having an entire upcoming season of feature-length episodes), but no TV series has come as close to a pure cinematic achievement as The Return.

Such statements like “greatest achievement in the history of television” may sound like hyperbole—that is, until you see something like “Part 8”, an astounding, jaw-dropping hour of avant-garde filmmaking unlike anything else that’s been broadcast on TV screens. The episode serves as the origin story of how the malignant forces in Twin Peaks came to be, having been spurred from the creation of the nuclear bomb in 1945 (depicted in a stunning sequence that’s like the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey on an acid trip). It essentially shifts Twin Peaks’ entire thesis from “good people can be corrupted by supernatural forces'’ to “this evil was manmade, and we’re responsible for it”. The purgatory of the Black Lodge, and the spirits it serves as a conduit for, are effectively a product of our decision to create devices that have the potential to wipe out entire populations of people. And it’s not just “Part 8” that displays Lynch’s cinematic mastery. In fact, the entirety of The Return feels like the work that Lynch had been building up to his whole career, his magnum opus. Whether it’s the avant-garde experimentation of Eraserhead, the narrative idiosyncrasies of Mulholland Drive, or the nightmarish horror of Inland Empire—Lynch is playing with every tool in the shed in The Return while expanding on the foundations built in the original Twin Peaks, and it’s never anything less than watching a master of the craft at work. What’s perhaps most commendable is that Lynch displays a perfection of cinematic surrealism while simultaneously keeping the series rooted in a deep emotional core.

And then there’s the ending, the greatest in any film or TV series, the natural endpoint to this tale of lingering grief and trauma. Its final note is arguably more baffling than anything in the series before it, and yet simultaneously feels like the only way the show could’ve ended. An answer to a question is technically given, yet many more questions are raised in its wake, as it closes on a bone-chilling, primal scream let out into the darkness. It’s stayed in my mind constantly for the year or two since I watched it for the first time. It’s more haunting and spine-tingling than anything else I’ve seen on screen. And it serves as a perfectly ambiguous capstone to the collected Twin Peaks, only further etching The Return into television history as the most singular and unique entity in the medium’s history. No work of art has challenged, stimulated (both intellectually and emotionally), and engaged my mind more than this has. Five years almost to the day after its premiere (the first four episodes debuted on May 21, 2017), The Return has only grown in stature, and it will continue to stand tall for decades to come.