Hope and Tragedy Repeated Themselves in the ‘Twin Peaks’ Finale

“Find Laura.”
“Laura is the one.”
Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) really was the center of it all. Twin Peaks: The Return wasn’t only about the odyssey of Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan); it was also about Cooper’s mission to correct the catalytic tragedy of everything that followed in the wake of Laura’s murder. Cooper, from the very moment he sat down with the Fireman (Carel Struycken) at the very beginning of “Part 1,” was on a mission to rescue Laura Palmer.

For about four minutes, it appeared that he had done it. One of the most breathtaking things ever to air on television began when Cooper traveled back to the night Laura died, and stepped in before she could ever reach Leo, Ronette, and Jacques. He came to bring Laura home. “Laura Palmer’s Theme” swelled. We relived the opening moments of the pilot, only this time without a plastic-wrapped body washed up on the shore in front of the Martells’ house. Everything would be different. The evil that men do could be made good.
David Lynch and Mark Frost did not give us the satisfaction. Cooper hears the crackle from the phonograph in that first scene with the Fireman, and Laura is gone. We don’t get our happy ending, nor do we get any easy answers about what may have occurred in reality, what may have been a dream, and what may have been manipulated by Lodge forces. We are left stumbling around in the middle of the street, wondering what year it is.

In the immediate aftermath of what has easily been the most groundbreaking piece of mainstream American narrative television in a generation, it is hard to gain perspective on what Lynch and Frost wish to leave us with. Cooper woke up from his Dougie haze back in “Part 16” armed with both knowledge and an “assuredness,” to quote Bradley Mitchum (James Belushi), which suggested his mission would be completed successfully. Indeed, the final showdown with his doppelgänger and the spirit of BOB, along with the return of Diane (Laura Dern), pointed in the right direction. There was even a classic TV moment of all the main players gathered in a room, about to hear a warmhearted valedictory from their leader. I couldn’t help but think of the Happy Days finale when Cooper basically gave the “In the end, it was the friend we made along the way” speech.
Lynch destabilizes this resolution almost immediately. Cooper’s face becomes superimposed over the scene once he sees Naido (Nae Yuuki), and possibly realizes that she is Diane. His blank stare colors the restoration of Diane, Cooper’s heartfelt goodbye, and his entrance into the Great Northern basement. The sequence lasts for nearly six minutes, and it perhaps most crucially contains the phrase, “We all live inside a dream.”

That sentence of course echoes “the ancient phrase” proffered by Monica Belluci in Gordon Cole’s (Lynch) dream from “Part 14.” Does what follows the superimposition merely a dream? Is the moment after Cooper and Diane cross that 430-mile threshold when the dream kicks in? Or perhaps has Cooper fundamentally altered reality by saving Laura that crossing the threshold throws everything else akimbo?
One can’t deny that the final 40 minutes of the series carries overtones of the second halves of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, not to mention the splintered realities coursing through Inland Empire. Cooper seems to revert to his doppelgänger persona when he seduces Diane in the motel and when he disarms the cowboys in the Odessa, TX diner. Diane sees herself, or a doppelgänger, or a tulpa, outside the motel. Cooper wakes up to find Diane gone, but a note from “Linda” telling “Richard” that she’s leaving him. He exits, and finds himself in a completely different motel, driving a completely different car.
And then there’s the small matter of Carrie Page, who looks the spitting image of Laura Palmer. (Is she a tulpa?) She has no idea who Laura Palmer is, or who Leland and Sarah Palmer are, or where Twin Peaks is. (“Washington D.C.?” she queries.) For the first time since he woke up, Cooper feels unsure of himself. He seems genuinely surprised when Carries pleads ignorance to his entreaties. Cooper’s pushiness—his desire to make Carrie into Laura—bears no small resemblance to a little film called Vertigo. The name of Kim Novak’s double-crossing doppelgänger who Jimmy Stewart’s washed-up detective desperately wishes to remake into his former lover? Judy. Somebody tell Gordon Cole!

Perhaps we are meant to understand that Cooper’s supposed rewriting of the past is the dream. You can see the confusion, terror, and heartbreak in his face, and hear it in his voice, when he discovers that Sarah Palmer does not live at her house, and maybe never did. The names Chalfont and Tremond indicate Black Lodge interference, but in the immediate, Cooper appears to be utterly unmoored by whatever reality in which he and Carrie find themselves. “The past dictates the future,” Cooper announces to those gathered in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station in “Part 17.” But in those final moments of “Part 18,” that rings all too true. The past does indeed dictate the future, but it cannot be changed. Laura Palmer is dead. She does not live. The tragedy of her murder can’t be easily erased, the warm comfort of nostalgia filling in its absence.
Twin Peaks: The Return cries out for repeat viewings, for close analysis, and most of all, for a viewing experience that fulfills Lynch’s intended “feature film in 18 parts structure.” In the coming days, I will do just that—watch the whole series in one go. I hope that structural, stylistic, and thematic patterns will emerge that just wouldn’t be possible when digesting the show one hour at a time, with seven days between those hours. How we understand this epic undertaking will most certainly evolve.
With that said, I think that Lynch and Frost have driven home a primary thematic strain that has rippled through all 18 episodes: Nostalgia is a weapon used to disguise the sadness of time passing, and of our desire to erase the past. It can’t be done. The more genuine reaction to such an impulse is to stare at the symbol of our longing, hear the warped cry of your mother, and issue a blood-curdling scream. Cut to black. It is brutal, and it is deeply sad. But it is honest. Across 18 hours of television, David Lynch and Mark Frost were never anything less.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports.

Stream Twin Peaks (2017) on Showtime