Twin Peaks Season 3 is God, Pretty Much (Or Thoughts After My Fifth Re-Watch)

Life is full of unanswered questions, unsolved mysteries, curious encounters and stories that end abruptly. If you step outside at all, people appear and disappear in your life all of the time. We overhear the conversations of strangers. We see scenes of other peoples’ dramas. We hear gossip about people we’ve never met and never will meet. It happens so often that we don’t even think about it.

By contrast, movies and television are full of mysteries that are solved. Pieces that fall perfectly into place. Smooth trails that lead to neat resolutions. All ambiguity extinguished and explained.

Movies and television have got it all wrong, so says David Lynch.

With a confident voice, he’s been telling us this since 1977 in Eraserhead and has mostly stuck to it ever since.

My favorite anecdote about him is the one about how everyday for seven years in the 1970s and 80s, Lynch went to the same Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles at around the same time and ordered the same milkshake and several cups of coffee while he wrote down ideas.

There are a lot of things that you can conclude about a guy like that. He’s a creature of habit. He doesn’t care to debate with himself over silly questions such as where to have lunch; he’s got other things to think about. He likes diners. He finds unique inspiration in thinking out in the open, surrounded by life, as opposed to thinking in a secluded private study. The diner might also be respite from a hectic home life (he was married with a child, at the time).

One might also figure that that anyone who goes to the same restaurant everyday for seven years is probably a world class people-watcher and a champion-level eavesdropper. He’s into the mystery and promise of a half-told story. He loves the human parade.

Furthermore, part of Lynch’s singularity as a director is that he came to it as a painter and a sculptor, as opposed to a film school brat. His work is full of right-brain instinct and an abstract artist’s comfort with inscrutability. Still, he’s never abandoned traditional narrative. Lynch always has a story to tell, even if he throws shadows on it for the sake of mystery or refuses logical explanation when he feels it would spoil the mood. Lynch’s favorite logic is dream logic. Everybody dreams. That’s a part of real life, too. Dreams are the self sending a message to the self, the illogical mind telling the logical mind what’s really happening. Lynch’s favorite characters in his work listen to their dreams and believe what they have to say. No other filmmaker cares so much about dreams.

How he became a household name playing around with these screwball obsessions, I’m not sure, but I’m glad it happened because there’s no other way in hell that a work as bold, epic and mystifying as the third season of Twin Peaks would exist.

It’s an eighteen-hour culmination of all things Lynch and if it’s the 72-year-old director’s final work, it’s an atomic-level ball of fire on which to go out. Most every creator of every ambitious serialized television show compares their work to an extended film, but the Twin Peaks revival is one of the rare ones that really goes for it. Lynch directed every episode and wrote it with series co-creator Mark Frost, breaking from the television convention in which a staff of writers and rotating directors execute a showrunner’s vision. Season 3 of Twin Peaks is an auteur’s work in every conceivable way.

For some of us, it was also THE event of the summer of 2017. Every Sunday night we planted ourselves in front of the TV and got smacked upside the head with some of the most unpredictable storytelling in modern media. Then we maybe hit the internet afterward, where the conversation was instantly busy with theories and speculation and interpretation, to help sort out what we just saw.

Me, I watched every new episode twice on Sunday nights and then a few more times throughout the week, something that I’ve never done for any other television series in my life–except for the original Twin Peaks in 1990 and ’91. The first viewing was the heart-thumping nail-biter. The second was to relive the ride. The third, fourth and, sometimes, fifth viewings were further canvassing of the scene that often revealed things that I didn’t notice at first.

There’s a delicious freedom to the storytelling here. Anything can happen at anytime. There’s no idea too off-the-wall for Lynch and Frost. Most shows surprise you by merely killing off well-liked characters, but Lynch and Frost play a more advanced game here, turning their stories and characters inside-out and riding the strangest notes of some very odd music with no fear.

It’s the kind of thing that pretty much no other mainstream television series on Earth would even come close to attempting. None of the producers of Bones spent seven years drinking coffee at Bob’s Big Boy everyday. They’d reject outright the loose ends and impossible puzzles that Twin Peaks embraces.

The story (huge, billowing SPOILERS ahead): It’s Twin Peaks twenty-five years later. Agent Cooper has been trapped in the Black Lodge all of this time, getting real familiar with those red curtains. He was there when I started high school, he was there when I went to a doctor for my first old man prostate exam. Meanwhile, his doppelganger, who represents everything bad about him, his dark side, his shadow self, has been out and about in the real world, growing out his hair, wearing leather, talking in a psychopath’s monotone, gladly playing host to evil demon Bob, raping, killing, doing weird things with electricity and talking dirty to Jennifer Jason Leigh. Now, it’s time for things to change thanks to a fortunate bit of foreshadowing in the original series that sets up twenty-five years later as an important marking point. The Evil Cooper’s time on Earth is up and he must now go back into the Black Lodge so The Good Cooper can come back and catch up on Seinfeld.

Complications arise when Evil Cooper, of course, does the evil thing and rigs the game so that The Good Cooper comes back but he’s got mashed potatoes for brains. The great detective is now a walking vegetable in Las Vegas taking the place of a clone of himself named Dougie. He’s got a job as an insurance salesman, he’s got a family, he’s got a hooker habit and he’s got big-time gambling debts. Cooper is in his own body, but he occupies the role of Dougie because that’s how everyone around him knows him. Some fuse got blown during the change and now Cooper doesn’t know how to open doors or dress himself or even urinate. This puts him in a perfect position to murder (and, thus, keep Evil Cooper still out and about, I suppose), BUT Vegetable Cooper and his otherworldly protectors thwart every attempt on his life in a variety of bizarre ways.

Meanwhile, characters from the old series show up and are mostly in no rush to tell us what they’ve been doing for the past quarter-century and every mystery from 1990 and ’91 is now more expansive and convoluted. Twin Peaks not only often leaves Twin Peaks, but it leaves Earth and is now circling around Pluto.

It exceeded my expectations exponentially. I didn’t want this to be comfort food or a nostalgia trip. I wanted a David Lynch film and all that such implies. I wanted the madness of the infamous finale–the amazing Episode 29–of the original run to continue and grow.

And that’s what I got–by the ton.

At this point, after several re-watches, I’ve stopped trying to “figure it out”. I don’t look at it as a puzzle. I subscribe to no fancy theory that explains it all. I don’t know anything about the solutions to the mysteries of Season 3, but here are a few things that I THINK I know:

1) I think “We live inside a dream” is the mission statement of the series.

2) I think “Who is the dreamer?” is its most important question.

3) I think “the dreamer” is the audience.

4) I think the outcomes and effects of this series are meant, like a dream, to be FELT rather than explained logically.

5) I think that Lynch, who turned 70 while he worked on this back-breaking production–an eighteen-hour feature film, essentially–is not setting up future installments. When he responds to interview questions about continuing with it, I think Lynch has learned his lesson about never saying “never”, but I also think that he worked hard to leave Twin Peaks here exactly how he wants to leave it. So, as much as I love Season 3, I am not among those clamoring for Season 4. I think this is it. We are not meant to solve this mystery. We are meant to think about it for the rest of our lives.

6) That said, if Season 4 was announced tomorrow, I’d be over the moon. Not because I’d expect it to provide any answers, but because I trust that Lynch and Frost would only do it if they had something that they were genuinely excited about.

I’m not going to talk about all eighteen episodes of Season 3, but I will address the three most obviously important ones.

EPISODE 1

Where we enter through a glass, darkly.

After Season 3 ended in September 2017, I put Twin Peaks aside to simmer in my brain for awhile.

When the Blu-ray set was announced for release that December, I thought that would be the time when I’d sit down with it again. Have a Holly Jolly Christmas with Dougie and Mr. C and Richard and Linda and the whole gang! Sounds like fun.

But I didn’t do that. It took me about a month to start digging back into the entirety of it because, after watching the amazing bonus features that show exactly how clearly realized is Lynch’s vision, I got hooked on watching the first episode again and again. I watched the first hour at least ten times that December. Occasionally, I’d advance forward a few episodes, but I’d always double-back and start over. It was a very Lynchian time loop.

I was (and still am) obsessed with the lushly mysterious, agonizingly slow and beautiful way that Lynch and Frost re-introduce this world. The first episode brings nothing but questions and zero in the way of answers. It piles on the shadows. It’s an army of shadows overwhelming you. Yet it’s still absorbing in a trance-like way. As Pauline Kael wrote back in 1980 in her glowing review of The Elephant Man, “Lynch holds you in scenes with almost no action”. In 2017, he still does exactly that. The first hour of the Twin Peaks revival is aloof. Its back is turned to you, but we can feel the faint tremors of wild things happening.

Also, there’s next to no music, which is probably the starkest contrast from the original series, which was carpeted nearly wall-to-wall with Angelo Badalamenti’s swinging score.

Makes sense to me.

What do you do when you’re driving and you get lost? You turn down your music until you understand better where you are. Same thing here.

It begins with a unique opening credits sequence (later episodes have a different edit of it) that reminds you that, despite what the overlords at ABC in 1990 thought, Twin Peaks is about the tragedy of Laura Palmer and its endless mystery. The title of the show is stamped square on her familiar prom photo from the original series. Laura’s murder is not merely a storyline to be resolved and discarded. Twin Peaks will never get over her.  It was never intended to get over her.

HOW she fits into all of this is going to take time to tease out though, and Episode 1 is in no rush whatsoever.

It begins with a brief scene in black-and-white and with a low rumbling open-air sound. We’re not in the Red Room, but we’re definitely in another world. The Giant (Carel Struycken) from the original series is dressed in a smoking jacket and he sits across from Cooper and warns him of an urgent threat that’s characterized only by a small clicking sound heard through the single speaker of an antique gramophone.

I don’t know where David Lynch got this sound. It could be a squeaky door hinge. It could be a bird. It could be the sound of someone opening a bag of Doritos, slowed and amplified. It’s impossible to tell and it’s so unimpressive that it wouldn’t even make a good cellphone ringtone. Whatever the hell it is, Lynch decided that this little noise represents something evil.

In the same spirit that the embodiment of evil in the original series was simply named Bob, this new series represents its big beast with an innocuous piece of audio.

From there, the Giant gives Cooper three cryptic clues to think about, none of which pay off until the end. Cooper says that he understands and then magically vanishes, via whose will–the Giant’s or Cooper’s–we don’t know.

The next scene takes us back to the familiar woods of Twin Peaks in the sunshine. Wind rushes through trees. Birds call out. We see a secluded trailer house. A pick-up truck arrives over a makeshift “road” to deliver two large cardboard boxes. A man steps out of the trailer and it’s Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn). He makes light chit-chat with the driver, but when the driver offers to help unpack the boxes, Jacoby refuses because he says he likes to work alone. Lynch’s camera hangs back from a distance, never going in close. The people are in the background, while trees and foliage occupy the foreground in most shots. It’s a distancing scene. Lynch makes us feel like a spy. All we know after it is that Jacoby seems to be healthy, but he also looks to be a hermit. It’s our first taste of the Pacific Northwest woods and it tells us nothing. Fade out.

Fade in to the New York City skyline. Night. A young man sits in a big blank room full of weathered surfaces and stares at a large empty glass box that sits against the opposite wall which has a round window, that resembles a submarine porthole or a camera lens, that overlooks the city. The box is lit brightly from several sources like a stage and is surrounded by cameras that record its emptiness from every angle. The soundtrack is another low drone punctuated by the electronic buzz of the machines.

A pretty young woman visits to bring the young man coffee, as well as flirt with him and try to satisfy her curiosity (her main agenda, it seems) about what he’s doing.

It’s top secret business, though. The young man can’t say a word about it. There’s a part-time bar bouncer-looking security guard there, sitting still but nervously blinking up a storm, to make sure he doesn’t. The young man and woman part, secrets unrevealed, and he goes back in to drink his coffee and stare at the glass box some more.

CUT TO daytime in Twin Peaks again, where we get a little respite from the mysteries to see Ben and Jerry Horne banter like an old comedy team about Jerry’s successful new legal marijuana business and then we see Lucy at the police station deal with a strangely flustered man from an insurance company who’s there to see Sheriff Truman. They’re exactly the light moments that we need before we finally meet Evil Cooper in the next scene, driving in the woods at night.

(This episode constantly changes from day to night and then back again in only a few minutes. It’s a subtle detail that I think keeps us off-balance, never comfortable. If everything here is in exact chronological order–which it probably isn’t since this whole series is a little eccentric about matters of time–then this first hour covers four days.)

From there, the show keeps up the mystery and gives us one more location, a small South Dakota town called Buckhorn, where a brutally murdered woman’s severed head is found next to a mysterious headless male body, two puzzles pieces that literally don’t fit together, and the prime suspect from fingerprint evidence is the straight-laced high school principal (Matthew Lillard).

Let’s also mention Max Perlich’s hilarious, non-sequitur turn in the middle of all of this as an apartment maintenance man who has a shady side hustle going that has nothing to do with anything else that happens in this episode. He’s just a guy passing through, in and out of the permanent Bob’s Big Boy in Lynch’s imagination. We’ll never see that guy again.

This first episode is a bracing and strange hour of filmmaking. Some people who threw cherry pie parties around it, looking forward to a warm reunion with the spirit of 1990, probably left confused and disappointed. Some of them might even have stopped watching the show altogether and thus missed out on one of David Lynch’s finest filmmaking hours. Yep, I’m talkin’ about…

EPISODE 8

A great thing became an even greater thing on June 25, 2017 when Lynch and Frost dropped a bomb on us that we didn’t even know they were holding.

The Atomic bomb, to be exact. Sixteen minutes into the episode, it flashes back to White Sands, New Mexico in 1945 to witness the world’s very first nuclear bomb test. To the horrific, screaming strings and unnerving clatter of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”, Lynch spends five minutes diving straight into the mushroom cloud, all flame and chaos. Then, he spends the next five minutes back down on Earth where, as a result, something very strange happens around a rural convenience store and where we see the origin of Bob, as something vomited out by a featureless gray mother figure.

As a fan of 1950’s sci-fi movies, where every monster was a product of The Atomic Age, the result of radiation, a mutation created by the brave new world of mass destruction, I LOVE this. Bob is another atomic monster. YES. I feel it. I will buy a ticket on this ride. This feels crazy and wonderful.

This is also Norse mythology. This is Ragnarok. The beginning of the end of everything. Everything breaks down and seperate worlds collide. I normally hate backstory fill-in sequences, but this is brilliant. This is a rare origin story that doesn’t come off as mundane and uninspiring, extinguishing every wild thing that the audience came up with in their own imaginations just to fill time.

Episode 8 is the opposite of that and one of Lynch’s tricks is that he makes most of this episode a silent movie. So much happens and nobody says a word. Lynch trusts us to just watch. And interpret. And dream. He maintains this well after he’s finished with the the atomic blast and fades into a dreamy, healing sequence set in a strange otherworld that looks permanently stuck in 1930 (The White Lodge?). Equally unforgettable is the episode closer set in 1956 in which strange, sooty figures materialize in the night in a small New Mexico town–full of Edward Hopper imagery rendered as nightmares–and one of them breaks into a radio station and recites a poem over the airwaves that somehow plays its own part in putting the wheels in motion for everything in Twin Peaks to happen.

I even think that the opening sequence of this episode, with Evil Cooper and Ray Monroe, is amazing and works as a self-contained and very noir, short story.

Two guys with a strained relationship escape from prison together. It was remarkably easy. Too easy. Something fishy is happening here. One guy has a plan brewing to kill the other guy, but little does he know that his target is a demon from another world who can die and be shortly resurrected afterward via a crew of creepy “guardian angels”. Even if our assasin escapes the scene we know his ass is still grass eventually because the demon ain’t lettin’ him get away with that.

Nothing that happens in this episode will end well.

And speaking of that, there’s…

EPISODE 18

We’re gonna be talking about this final episode for centuries. I remember, at the time, predicting that the show would end on a positive note. Lynch and Frost’s love for the world of Twin Peaks is why it came back in the first place. It’s a love that’s evident in even the darkest moments of the series and, while I didn’t think that everything would be tied up in a perfect bow, my best guess was that it would end warmly. A white light. A flutter of robins. In heaven, everything is still fine.

In other words, I didn’t expect anything even close to the nightmare that we got. It was an invigorating, meticulous, bold and visionary nightmare–but still a nightmare.

If you were too young to have been ambushed by the ending of the original series when it first aired, the ending of this new series was the exact same punch in the gut. Except in 2018, we could all run to the internet to talk about it, while in June of 1991, I didn’t know anyone else who cared about Twin Peaks and there was no internet, so I just had sit in my room with my own thoughts–and watch the episode again (thank you, Oma–my late German grandmother–for that TV/VCR combo Christmas gift in 1989), trying to wrap my 14-year-old brain around the madness that I just saw. I felt like I was the only person in the world who saw it.

In the penultimate episode of the new series, Cooper goes back in time and saves Laura from being murdered with a simple moment of intervention in the woods as she’s heading alone toward her doom. The catharsis builds, the music swells, we see the opening events of the original series being erased before our eyes and then, right in the middle of Cooper’s rescue, Laura is taken from him, Orpheus and Eurydice-style, spirited away, screaming in the night. One moment she was there; the next, gone.

Why? Because Lynch and Frost see eye-to-eye with the Greeks. Laura is tragic. Laura is meant to be tragic. Anything that takes away from her tragedy cannot stand. The tragedy of Laura Palmer is the heart of Twin Peaks.

Even in the original series, long after Laura’s murder was solved by holy decree from ABC Television, Laura’s prom queen photo remained the image that you saw as the closing credits flashed. In the new series, that same image is a part of the opening credits.

Laura Palmer’s fate is an inextricable part of Twin Peaks. Without Laura’s tragedy, there is no show. Cooper is the hero of the series, but Laura is the muse and patron saint. But before she can become that she must die.

So, what happens after Cooper changes history and “saves” Laura?

The result is a final episode that, like the June ’91 finale of the original run, feels like its own island apart from the rest of the series. Aside from a brief opening resolution to the story of Dougie’s family, Episode 18 drops every other plot thread except for Cooper’s journey. Everything is pared down, yet simultaneously more complex. It’s less of a resolution than it is the final stage of a very strange metamorphosis.

The few familiar characters who do show up in it are now changed.

Diane (Laura Dern) now identifies as “Linda”. She also identifies Dale Cooper as “Richard”. Meanwhile, Cooper–more haunted and cold and detached from the rest of the world than we’ve ever seen him before–still considers himself to be Cooper.

Also, Laura Palmer is still alive, but now she’s Carrie Page, a down-and-out waitress, at least twenty-five years older, who lives in Odessa, TX, where the body of a freshly murdered man sits in her living room.

So when Cooper tracks her down (via a vague mystical breadcrumb trail), knocks on her door, shows his FBI credentials and is dead-set on taking her back “home” to Twin Peaks (he doesn’t care at all about the corpse, so focused he is on his mission), Carrie goes along with it because she needs to haul ass out of town anyway. She’s never heard of Twin Peaks and doesn’t care. It’s not Odessa, so it sounds good to her.

After a long, mostly silent car ride from Texas to Washington State, Cooper and Laura/Carrie arrive late at night. The streets are empty. She recognizes nothing. Cooper takes her directly to the old Palmer house, knocks on the door and a woman that neither Cooper nor Carrie nor we have ever seen before answers.

The woman is named Alice Tremond. She and her husband bought the place from someone named Chalfont. (Tremond and Chalfont are names of mystical, unexplained significance in Twin Peaks, mostly associated with an old woman and her magician grandson whom we see in one haunting scene in the original series and in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. They always seem to be disappearing from residences and being replaced with completely different people who have the same name).

No Palmers here. No clue about where to go from here, either.

Cooper/Richard and Laura/Carrie tentatively walk away from the house and back to the car. Cooper stops in the middle of the quiet street to think and it suddenly dawns on him that he has no idea what year it is.

Laura/Carrie has nothing to say about that (this series is full of silent responses to questions and pleas), but she does hear Sarah Palmer calling out Laura’s name. It doesn’t seem to be actually happening; it’s something that she alone hears, or feels, inside.

Her reaction is to scream bloody murder. Cooper reacts like a bomb just went off in his face. The lights in the house all go off. There’s a quick punctuating flash like an electrical power surge and then a fade to black. The end.

The closing credits send us off with a loop of an earlier moment from The Red Room in which Laura whispers some unheard, terrible secret into Cooper’s ear (he reacts to it with shock) while the most post-apocalyptic, depressing piece of music that Angelo Badalamenti has ever composed for Lynch drones on the soundtrack. The signature electrical buzz of the “Lynch/Frost Productions” title card is silent. Even Showtime’s flashy logo goes quiet.

It feels like we just saw the end of the world.

Did the good guys win? Does that even matter? (Come to think of it, Twin Peaks ends exactly like an actual dream does.)

I’m gonna be honest and say that I don’t know what the hell happened. I don’t have any theories. All I have is a strange pit of sadness in my stomach over it tempered by slack-jawed admiration for Lynch and Frost’s ability to conjure up something so bleak and beautiful with very simple parts, a mystery that I haven’t stopped thinking about for almost a year now.

I have no explanations, but I do have some connections to make in regard to episode 18.

In true Lynch fashion, I’ll start with a dream:

1) I’ve had recurring dreams for years about the house where I grew up. I would love to stop having dreams about this house, but they keep coming every few months and they’re ALL nightmares. In most of the dreams, nothing even happens. All that I do sometimes is ride a bicycle around the block, passing familiar houses and alleys, passing rows of cars, passing the old duck pond. Everything is just like it was when I was kid, but I’m my current age. Also, there are no people around, no signs of life. I interact with no one and nothing happens, except for me pedaling away. That’s it.

When I wake up from this dream, I’m crushed by some unexplainable sadness. I can barely move.

Then there’s this dream that I wrote about in a private journal back in July 2011:

A 13 year old girl is asleep in my sister’s bedroom (I don’t know who the girl is–she’s not my sister) and I’m leaving the house late at night with an older woman (I don’t know who she is, either–she’s not my mother, looks nothing like her). We’re going to the shitty Minyard’s supermarket down the street to buy food. I leave the house first and the older woman is behind me. She walks out and casually leaves the front door of the house wide open. I notice this and get angry. “You can’t just leave the door open like that! This is a dangerous area and there’s a 13 year old girl in there!” I, steaming mad, go back to the front door and make sure it’s locked. The street outside is frightening. There’s no light. The street lamps are all burned out. I think we can make it to the car, but I sense things in the shadows ready to leap out at us if we take too long. And that’s it. End of dream.

My single mother died of a liver condition a few days before Christmas in 1998, twenty years ago, when I was 22. That was the end of my childhood home ever feeling like home again.

I would like to get past it. I never visit the place. I don’t even want to visit it. I never even think about it. The house is long sold. I have no idea who is living there now.

But I keep having these dreams. My subconscious keeps going back “home” and finds nothing there but a yawning void.

Sounds like the whole point of Episode 18 to me. No wonder why I’m so stuck on it. I’ve been dreaming about it for years.

(Also, “is it future or is it past?”. In dreams, it can be both.)

2) Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo. There are so many parallels in Episode 18 to that film that I’d bet my left eye and right testicle that Lynch and Frost knowingly took after it. It even calls back to the original series, in which the name of Laura Palmer’s brunette lookalike cousin, Madeline Ferguson, is a straight-up Vertigo reference. Episode 18 really runs with it though, to the point that it almost plays a like a truncated remake.

(Vertigo spoilers, ahoy)

Like Vertigo, it features a damaged detective who feels that he screwed up on the job. Both detectives are haunted by a dead woman. Both detectives rope into their redemption a strangely close lookalike, with whom he has an uneasy relationship. Both detectives make us feel uncomfortable because they’re not the same likable guys we met in the beginning. Both stories end on a downer note in which the detective has lost everything.

Furthermore, when viewed through the Vertigo prism, the whole thing looks like a set-up. The Fireman and the One-Armed Man aren’t looking out for Cooper. They’re using him as a pawn to achieve whatever is that they’re after. They take advantage of his curiosity and his drive and put him on a path in which he radically alters time, but also destroys himself along the way.

I’m not saying that’s what happened, but that’s one of many places where this ending allows you to go.

(End of Vertigo spoilers)

3) The 1921 film Destiny, directed by Fritz Lang.

I have no clue if either Lynch or Frost have ever seen this silent fantasy, but the similarities are striking.

The story in a nutshell:  We have two young lovers, soon to be married. The man dies suddenly and the distraught woman makes a direct appeal to Death, personified as a man in black who hangs out in cemeteries, to bring him back. Death agrees to help her only if she can save three other people due to meet an untimely demise that day. She says yes and then is magically whisked off to three different parts of the world (somewhere in the Middle East; Venice, Italy; and China) for three different adventures.

In each locale, the actress is the same and she knows her mission, but she goes by a different name and occupies the role of a different person (for example, in the Middle East she’s a princess named Zobeide) and the one she has to save in every scenario is her fiancee, who is also a different person and is oblivious to what’s happening.

It’s the same thing as Cooper/Richard working to save Laura/Carrie about two thousand miles away from Twin Peaks.

Destiny even ends on a thematically similar note about the complications of defying the inevitable.

It’s a beautiful, imaginative film rodelent of ancient myths and its parallels to Lynch and Frost put Twin Peaks into similarly mythic perspective. For all of its freshness and left turns, Twin Peaks hangs its hat on some the oldest ideas in storytelling. Fate. Tragedy. Apocalypse. Creation from chaos. Tricksters (those darn Tremonds and Chalfonts). Doppelgangers. Shape-shifters. Oracles. Seers. Other worlds where death is not the end. A hero who’s always being tested (Cooper’s supernatural contacts rarely share information with him outright; everything instead is a challenge, a cryptic clue to decipher).

“Duality is at the heart of mythology and the basic structure of myth”, wrote the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his studies of the similarties between ancient mythologies of disparate cultures around the world–and duality is also the heart and basic structure of Twin Peaks.

In Twin Peaks, the hero’s arch enemy is his own dark side, split off from himself into a whole other person and the series’ two tragic figures (Laura Palmer and Leland Palmer) live their own double lives. The outcomes of this range from darkly funny to completely horrific and there is no simple resolution to this–and to their eternal credit, Lynch and Frost do not provide one.

(While Orpheus is the obvious Greek parallel to Cooper, there’s also a touch of Persephone in his story. Persephone was abducted by Hades and trapped in the Underworld, only able to leave it every six months. The Good Dale Cooper, trapped in the Red Room, seems to have a similar arrangment, only he’s on a twenty-five-year cycle of going out and maybe coming back in.)

(Wild thought: Maybe that unheard, shocking secret that Laura whispers to Cooper is “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years.”)

Meanwhile, Morpheus, the god of dreams, is sending out more messages here than Gmail and maybe there is no happy ending, only infinite cycles of immortals (which is what fictional characters are).

It could be that Twin Peaks has no ending at all, just endless restarts and loops. A recurring dream.

Maybe the only possible follow-up to Episode 18 is to start over from the beginning.

It’s not like we know what year it is.