(OBVIOUSLY ONE IMPERIAL FUCK TON OF SPOILERS FOR \u201cTWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN\u201d FOLLOW)<\/p>\n
\u00a0Three years ago, when we found out there was going to be new Twin Peaks, it was the most inconceivable thing imaginable. The notion that after all this time, we\u2019re headed back to that tiny town in Washington – well, what did I say when I rediscovered the series a year before the announcement?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The thing is,\u00a0<\/span>Twin Peaks<\/span>\u00a0in its time tended to parallel my life. It started with a bang in the spring of 1990, when I was through with high school and anxious to get on with my future. \u00a0I even bought the cassette single of the theme, deliberately thinking to myself \u201cyou know, this would make a fine song with the new girlfriend which I will undoubtedly meet once college gets going.\u201d \u00a0And then, when the show came back in the fall, it slowly deteriorated until petering out in April\u2026which is just about how my freshman year went. \u00a0One long slow deterioration until by April, it was obvious that I wasn\u2019t going to be able to save this bird from a hard landing. \u00a0And just like my college career, the series didn\u2019t have a happy ending either \u2013 just a cliffhanger with no obvious hope for how things could be saved.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Twenty-five years on and eighteen episodes later, it turns out – surprise – everyone got old. It\u2019s jarring to have gone from the original series straight into the new one. Everyone got older, everyone got tired, you could see the weight of the years on every single person in that town of 51,201. Hawk especially struck me – hair gone white, moving slowly, connected to a dying friend who maybe only he understood. Special Agent Albert Rosenfeld, gone from incisive snark wielder to just-hanging-on veteran agent with the sort of world-weary hangdog look normally associated with Tommy Lee Jones characters. Big Ed, Norma, Nadine, Dr. Jacoby, Shelly, Bobby – everyone\u2019s older, everyone\u2019s put on weight or gotten gaunt, and if you were already in the workplace back then\u2026well, guess what, you\u2019re probably doing the same job. I was off to college when Twin Peaks came out, and in some ways, I\u2019m still there myself. There\u2019s no question of picking up right where you left off, and when you haven\u2019t seen these people in forever, they certainly aren\u2019t going to look like you remembered.<\/p>\n It\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>definitely<\/span>\u00a0dated, I admit. \u00a0The pacing isn\u2019t quite as bad as you\u2019d expect of an 80s prime-time soap opera \u2013 and make no mistake, that\u2019s what this is \u2013 but then, some of the slowness could be camouflaged by the abiding weirdness David Lynch brings to the table every time out\u2026<\/span><\/span>So many plots and story lines that went nowhere, seemingly. Anything with the Packard Mill got boring in a hurry \u2013 Piper Laurie\u2019s scenery-chewing bitchery seems much more suited to something like\u00a0<\/span>Dynasty<\/em>. \u00a0The switch from the plot being driven by the expanding Renault crime organization to being propelled by Windom Earle seems fairly abrupt. \u00a0And James off with his mysterious woman served no purpose whatsoever. \u00a0No wonder it went off the rails \u2013 there was just too damn much to keep track of. \u00a0Lesson learned: you can be complex without being complicated\u2026<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n The pacing sure didn\u2019t change. If anything it got worse, and you wonder what the show would have been like if it had stuck to the original order of only nine episodes. And the hanging threads – worse than before, if anything, including having no idea what\u2019s the story with some of our most beloved characters. This is one you definitely have to go back and watch from the beginning to see if it starts to make any more sense after the fact, but I\u2019m not a hundred percent sure it will. And in some ways, that\u2019s OK. This isn\u2019t really about driving the plot to its conclusion, it\u2019s about the setting and the atmosphere and the presence of a strangeness that you will never understand or see the end of. Like, well, life. We\u2019ll never know why Sarah Palmer was like that. We\u2019ll never know what happened to Audrey. We\u2019ll never know if that was really Laura or what kind of world they\u2019re in or when or where. There\u2019s every chance that this whole thing is some sort of Owl Creek fever dream in Coop\u2019s dying moments somewhere in Philadelphia in 1989.<\/p>\n Oh, and Josie Packard\u2019s never getting out of that drawer knob, I guess.\u00a0<\/p>\n The look is equally dated, although once again that could be partly Lynch and possibly just an affinity for the era. Let\u2019s be honest; I was 18 and pretty much every one of the women on the show still holds up… Norma in particular is still lovely, although she (and presumably Big Ed) are younger then than I am now, which is kind of disturbing to think about. \u00a0I\u2019m still rooting for those two, of course \u2013 it\u2019s tough to be with the one you love when one has a spouse in prison and the other has a superhumanly strong one with an eye patch and a drape-runner fixation.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The feel was<\/em> dated, and deliberately so. Lynch is committed to his surreal 1950s horror beneath the surface ethos, although nobody does black-and-white better. But so were the actors dated. Many others have said it, but this show didn\u2019t shy away from the brutal fact that we all get old, we all die, and not everyone gets a happy ending. In so many ways, the payoff was in episode 16, when Dale Cooper wakes up, pulls out the IV, is back in the suit, crisply demands a revolver and a flight to Spokane, and says \u201cI AM the FBI.\u201d That\u2019s what we all want to imagine it could be like – that we wake from the dream, somehow, and are fresh and ready to go, capable and confident, with the opportunity to take care of that unfinished business. And just like Coop, the dream of unfinished business runs headlong into the reality that time runs one way, you can\u2019t go home again, and everything that happened really happened with no undoing it. The notion that you can<\/em> always proves to be an illusion. Always<\/em>.<\/p>\n But that said, I\u2019ll say this, spoiler free: if you didn\u2019t jump off the couch screaming and punching the air triumphantly at the 10:00 of episode 15, you don\u2019t have a soul. If that\u2019s the only payoff from the original that we ever get from this series, it\u2019s the one I would have wanted. And it\u2019s proof that sometimes, rarely, you get that piece of a dream you hadn\u2019t thought would ever come around again.\u00a0<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the old Twin Peaks. It never could have been. But it was enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (OBVIOUSLY ONE IMPERIAL FUCK TON OF SPOILERS FOR \u201cTWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN\u201d FOLLOW) \u00a0Three years ago, when we found out there was going to be new Twin Peaks, it was the most inconceivable thing imaginable. The notion that after all this time, we\u2019re headed back to that tiny town in Washington – well, what did … <\/p>\n