Warning: Major spoilers for Twin Peaks: The Return ahead.
Twin Peaks: The Return has tested the patience of even its most dedicated fans several times since its debut in May, but nothing — not the Dougie-heavy scenes or Candie’s drawn-out fly-swatting shenanigans or the ultra-violent Part 10 — has agitated viewers as strongly as last night’s episode.
Part 12 teased us with much-anticipated information before shutting us down so often that it became a central theme of the episode. Some would argue that at hour 12 of the show’s 18 hour runtime, audiences deserve to get antsy about the lack of answers it has provided for its core mysteries. While I sympathize with how painful the week long wait between episodes has been, the lack of concrete answers this far into the story should come as no surprise.
Mystery has always been what drives Twin Peaks and what fuels virtually all of director David Lynch’s work. Twin Peaks: The Return is no exception. There will be very few neatly packaged answers on this ride, and that’s not only just okay — it’s what the new Twin Peaks is about.
Part 12 was bold in different, more challenging ways.
It’s true that Twin Peaks: The Return has been controversial before. A few weeks ago, Part 8 followed up a live Nine Inch Nails performance with a flashback to a New Mexican nuclear weapons test from 1945 set to the shrieking strings of Krzysztof Penderecki, followed by ten minutes of a Kubrickian hellscape that depicted the moment multidimensional evils first slipped into the cracks in our reality, before another 30 minute black and white sequence involving Laura Palmer in some kind of Dragon Ball, supernatural killer woodsmen, and a demon frog locust.
But unlike Part 12, Part 8 was divisive for taking a bold, abstract turn, which not everyone wanted. In it, we saw elements of Lynch’s surreal stop-motion films, wrapped up in a historical mythos explored in Fire Walk With Me and co-writer Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks. The biggest surprise for most fans wasn’t how weird (even by Twin Peaks standards) Part 8 got — it was that something as glorious as those 58 minutes could even happen on mainstream television.
Lynch’s work has never been easy, but that's why it's captivating.
Part 12 was bold in a different, less visually stimulating way, but no less bold than anything else the show has done. It dared to barely budge its plot, to jump even more frenetically than usual between seemingly disjointed elements: Sarah Palmer having a panic attack over turkey jerky. Jerry Horne finally stumbling out of the woods. Carl Rodd urging one of his tenants to stop selling his blood. Fathers seemed to be a recurring theme, for reasons not immediately apparent, from Dougie’s absent-minded game of catch to the murder of the Warden in front of his son and Ben Horne’s reminiscing about that green bike he loved so much. Part 12 explored all of this, while barely touching on the most burning questions it’s been building up for two straight months and, if anything, introducing even more — who is Tina? Angela? Clark? Mary? Trick? They’re Lynch’s idea of a joke.
After 12 long hours, the show also finally reintroduced Audrey Horne, a beloved character from the original ‘90s run. But in a tragic twist, the adult Audrey seems to have retained none of the youthful spirit and mischievous charm of the girl we knew 25 years ago, and has grown up into a tired, bitter adult. Just like Laura Dern’s harsh and increasingly suspicious Diane, Audrey is not the person we thought she would be.
Fans of Twin Peaks should be well aware that Lynch’s work has never been easy. The fact that the show continues to consciously, at this point comically, defy our expectations is part of what makes it such a breath of fresh air. It keeps it unpredictable, which in turn keeps us vulnerable, unaware of what is to come, which makes its more traditionally exciting moments even more rewarding. We are all Audrey Horne, screaming, “You’re not gonna tell me what she said?” as the show, like her husband, stares in unwavering silence. It might not always be gratifying in the moment, but when media isn’t actively challenging us, it can grow stale. No one should expect Audrey Horne to come waltzing in, 25 years older, still acting like a playful teen. Anything resembling that would have been cheap fan service.
Twin Peaks: The Return is a reflection on the nature of mystery itself.
Twin Peaks will continue to lure audiences deeper into its central mysteries, deny us information, tease us with reveals before mockingly drawing back or giving us something contrary to what we spent the previous week mulling over. It isn’t going to answer every question that it’s posed, but that’s precisely what makes Lynch’s work so captivating and enduring and different. Mulholland Drive never outwardly explains the person behind Winkie’s, the meaning of The Cowboy, what the blue box symbolizes. Eraserhead never reveals the purpose of The Man in the Planet, the nature of the Lady in the Radiator, or why Henry has a dream that his head is turned into erasers. If we had the answers for every puzzling detail in Lynch’s worlds, they would lose their magic. You can know Lynch’s movies inside and out and still never fully know them, and that’s part of the allure. It’s what makes Twin Peaks: The Return more than the simple nostalgic throwback to a cult series many worried it would be, and into something entirely its own.
Mysteries are the "essence of our existence."
Of course, watching David Lynch’s entire filmography won’t necessarily make every decision he and Frost have made with Twin Peaks: The Return more comprehensible. Key to understanding the show’s slow pace and resistance to easy answers is knowing that the story itself is also a reflection on the nature of mystery. Lynch never wanted to reveal who killed Laura Palmer in the original run and most fans agree the quality of Season 2 noticeably dips after we learn the truth. Now that Lynch has been given free reign over Twin Peaks for the first time since Fire Walk With Me, unbound by the restrictions of mainstream cable TV, why would he choose to setup these new puzzles for us only to do something as boring as explicitly solve them?
In co-writer Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Major Garland Briggs and Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Milford reflect on the nature of mystery. To Briggs, mystery is truth itself — the “essence of our existence” and not meant to be comprehended fully. “Mysteries are the stories we tell ourselves to contend with life’s resistance to our longing for answers,” he says.
According to Milford, mystery is also important because of the sense of wonder it generates within us, “which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.”
To Milford, “A real mystery can’t be solved, not completely. It’s always just out of reach, like a light around the corner; you might catch a glimpse of what it reveals, feel its warmth, but you can’t know the heart of it, not really. That’s what gives it value.”
Twin Peaks: The Return, and Part 12 especially, is deliberately teasing its audience. Most mainstream television is so concerned with linear narratives, so obsessed with “plot,” and so willing to provide the kind of instant gratification that instant streaming and binge-watching culture has spoiled us with that it can lose sight of how beautiful a good, unsolved mystery can be. Not enough TV is open to interpretation, and maybe that’s one of the reasons, in addition to the unconventional structure of its episodes, why Lynch has described Twin Peaks: The Return as an 18 hour movie.
None of this means things won’t be solved completely. Part 12 slowly but surely continued to piece things together for us, most notably the location of those coordinates from Ruth Davenport’s arm. Part 8, even in its terrifying abstraction, showed us more about the nature of the Black Lodge and its origins than two seasons and a movie ever did. But it’s like Lynch himself once said, “When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there's got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going.”
Even if the final six hours of this dream don’t neatly solve every last mystery, I’ll still be grateful I got to experience it.
Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN and has watched and read way too much Twin Peaks. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.
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