Twin Peaks: The Return

Twin Peaks: The Return is the strangest thing ever broadcast by a television network and it is also, in long stretches, deliberately unwatchable, and both of those are the same decision.

Lynch got eighteen hours and final cut and used them to make something that refuses almost every obligation the format has. The thing audiences wanted — Cooper, coffee, the town, the Double R — is withheld for sixteen hours. In its place: a man sweeping a floor in real time, a woman in a casino saying "Hellooo-oo" for several minutes, a long scene of a man counting money, a drunk honking a horn, a boy dying in a road while his mother screams, and two hours of Kyle MacLachlan playing a man with the cognition of a toddler. Viewers who treated it as a mystery to be solved were being told, repeatedly and by design, that solving was not on offer.

What it is instead is the most sustained piece of dread on television. The Return is a horror series, not a mystery series, and the horror is that time has passed and nothing was repaired. Twin Peaks is poorer, flatter and more addicted; Audrey is somewhere terrible; Sarah Palmer has something in her; Laura Palmer's murder solved itself and the evil simply moved.

Part 8 is the best hour of horror ever made for television

It begins with a murder in a field and then abandons the plot entirely: the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, nine minutes of Penderecki and expanding light, a convenience store full of smoke, the Fireman in a theatre, a woman singing into a horn, an egg, and a creature crawling into a girl's mouth in New Mexico in 1956. It has almost no dialogue. It is the series' creation myth and it declines to be legible, and it is the single clearest statement in Lynch's work that the atomic bomb is where the century's evil entered.

The craft, hour by hour

Lynch shot it as an eighteen-hour film and it is paced like one: dialogue scenes play two or three times longer than drama allows, the sound design does the work the score would normally do, and the digital photography is flat and merciless in a way the 1990 series never was. The acting ranges from the greatest thing MacLachlan has done to deliberately amateur. Laura Dern's Diane is extraordinary, and the series' cruellest idea is what it reveals her to be.

Where it will lose people

It does not resolve. Multiple plots stop rather than end — the Las Vegas material, Audrey, Billy and Tina, the tulpa economy, the Jacoby shovels. A great deal of screen time is given to comedy that is not funny, intentionally. And Part 18 asks you to sit through a fourteen-minute night drive before it does the only thing it is going to do.

For the same unexplainable grief in a small town, Les Revenants; for the same marriage-as-possession, Possession; for the same apparatus that generates pages and explains nothing, House of Leaves.

The short answer: in Part 17 Cooper finally reaches 1989 and intercepts Laura Palmer on the night of her murder, leading her by the hand through the woods away from her death. She vanishes from his grip, screaming; in the present, the plastic-wrapped body is gone from the 1990 pilot and Pete Martell never finds it. In Part 18 Cooper and Diane drive four hundred and thirty miles to a crossing point, have sex in a motel, and wake as different people — he is "Richard", her note is signed "Linda". He finds a woman in Odessa, Texas who is Laura's face with another life and no memory of being her. He drives her back to Twin Peaks. The Palmer house is owned by a stranger. Standing in the road, Cooper asks "What year is this?" — Sarah Palmer's voice calls Laura's name from inside the house, the woman screams, and every light on the street goes out.

What is Judy in Twin Peaks: The Return?

The series' name for the thing above BOB. Gordon Cole explains that "Judy" is an anglicisation of Jowday, an extreme negative force that a Blue Rose task force has been pursuing since the 1940s, and that nobody is supposed to talk about it. The Return's implication is that Judy is the entity inhabiting Sarah Palmer, that it is the source of BOB rather than a peer, and that it is older than the Lodges — the convenience store and the 1945 sequence are both its arrival.

Who is Dougie Jones?

A manufactured double — the series calls them tulpas — created by Cooper's doppelgänger to be sent into the Lodge in his place when the exchange came due. When Cooper is finally expelled he lands in Dougie's life instead of his own and spends almost the entire series as a hollowed-out man who repeats the last words spoken to him. Lynch plays it absolutely straight for sixteen hours, which is either the boldest or the most contemptuous structural decision in modern television, and possibly both.

What happens in Part 8?

The Trinity test on 16 July 1945 opens a passage. The series shows the detonation for nine minutes over Penderecki's Threnody, then a convenience store above which woodsmen gather, then the creation of BOB as a bubble inside a mass of vomit. In response the Fireman and Señorita Dido send a golden orb bearing Laura Palmer's face into the world. Eleven years later, a woodsman walks into a New Mexico radio station, asks "Gotta light?", crushes a skull, and broadcasts a poem that puts every listener to sleep while a frog-moth crawls into the mouth of a sleeping girl who is almost certainly Sarah Palmer.

Did Cooper save Laura Palmer?

Not in any way that holds. He removes her from the night of her murder, and she is immediately taken out of his hand by something stronger; the body disappearing from the pilot footage confirms the change took, and the Odessa sequence confirms it did not help. The Return's position is that the past can be altered and that altering it produces a worse arrangement — a woman living someone else's life in Texas, with the thing still waiting in the house.

What does "What year is this?" mean?

It is Cooper's recognition that he has lost track of which timeline he is standing in. He has driven a woman who is and is not Laura Palmer to a house that is and is not the Palmer house, and the owner's name is wrong. The question is the series' final admission that the rescue has displaced him out of his own history, and Laura's scream answers it: whatever year it is, Sarah is still in the house and Laura still knows what happened to her.

What is the Dale Cooper doppelgänger?

The version of Cooper that left the Black Lodge in 1991 — the series calls him Mr C — who has spent twenty-five years as a criminal with Lodge abilities, hunting coordinates that will lead him to Judy. He manufactures tulpas, including Dougie and the Diane we spend the series with, and his death in Part 17 is almost perfunctory. The point of him is that he was loose the entire time nobody was looking.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 098 is the ceiling — 103 of 105 works score lower. Nothing in the series is reliably sequential, a character can be two people, and the final hour relocates the protagonist into a history that is not his.

Pace 020 is extremely slow — only 22 works are slower. Scenes run several times longer than their content, and that duration is the mechanism.

Era bias 084 reads modern — 81 works score lower. Flat digital photography, a contemporary sound mix and an eighteen-hour streaming-era structure, used against a 1990 memory.

Viscera 048 is just under the median — 56 works score lower. A skull crushed by hand, a child killed by a truck, a head wound in a jail cell, an eye injury and a woman's body in a bed.

Tone 032 is bleak — 83 works score lower. Everyone who was damaged in 1990 is worse, and the one act of rescue in eighteen hours fails.

The threat at 025 is well into the supernatural — 24 works score lower. There are human criminals throughout, and all of them are downstream of something that arrived in 1945.

On jump scares: perhaps four in eighteen hours, and the woodsman in the radio station is the worst thing in it.