Twin Peaks: The Return Mini-series

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

Mini-series - 18 episodes
Rent Twin Peaks: The Return on Amazon Video (paid link)
Created by: Mark Frost, David Lynch
Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Michael Horse, Miguel Ferrer, Chrysta Bell, David Lynch, Robert Forster, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern
Rated: TV-MA
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Plot
This resumes twenty-five years after the inhabitants of the quaint northwestern town Twin Peaks were stunned when the local homecoming queen was murdered.

Verdict
Bringing back a beloved show for a victory lap rarely works, but this series is better than the original. Being Lynch, it's not just weird, it's fantastically weird. I feel like I'm always on the edge of figuring out how this world works; there are plenty of clues if only I could decipher them or put them in the correct order. To be able to amend a series twenty-five years later, and not feel like fan service is rare. To best the original is quite an achievement. It creates such an incredible mood. This series is a journey, and like most of Lynch's work, a lot is left open to interpretation.
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Review
Despite season two referencing twenty-five years into the future, this season was not part of an overarching plan when the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (1990) released. For most of this season I had no clue what was happening, but that creates such a mood I was desperate to find out. While the original series was campy and weird, this season is strange, even unnerving.
 
Laura (Sheryl Lee) did say she'd see Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in twenty-five years. Here we are. Good Cooper is in the lodge, this in between space, while Evil Cooper, under the alias of Dougie, is out causing trouble. We have a college aged kid watching a glass box in New York, and those scenes have such great tension. In the first episode Hawk re-opens the Laura Palmer case after a tip from the log lady. The first episode exhibits the suspenseful moments that I expect in Lynch movies with less of the camp from the original series. The original seasons were odd with little explanation. I wondered what insights this season would offer with Evil Cooper as the manifestation of BOB.

E2: Kyle MacLachlan plays Agent Dale Cooper

This creates such a great, creepy mood. It seems the black lodge will open again, giving Good Cooper a chance to get out while Evil Cooper states it wants to bring him back. He plans to prevent that. I don't know what power it has over him or how he can stop it. After I did some research I discovered Evil Cooper created a duplicate or decoy to take his place in the lodge. I didn't understand it, but Cooper leaves the black lodge and ends up in the glass box before ending up in the decoy, Dougie's body. 

An almost catatonic Good Cooper stumbles around Dougie's life while Evil Cooper is detained after a car wreck. Good Cooper wanders around aimlessly, barely verbal. No one knows or cares that he has no agency. He inexplicably fails upwards, uncovering insurance fraud.

In episode six we finally see Diane (Laura Dern). She was just a name in the original series, Cooper's secretary who he'd send audio case notes to.

E5: Kyle MacLachlan plays Dale Cooper mistaken as Dougie Jones

Episode eight is a visual journey of explosions. It's very abstract and easily the most experimental episode of the season. That's saying something for a show like this.

People are out to kill Evil Cooper, and Evil Cooper has his people out to kill Good Cooper. Evil Cooper is double crossed, but in this world death never seems to be final. Meanwhile in Twin Peaks, Hawk finally stumbles upon how the clues the log lady gave him connect to Laura's case.

Good Cooper, still barely conscious, makes an enemy of the casino owners, the Mitchum brothers, after several jackpots on the slot machines. The brothers put a hit on him which is stopped when Good Cooper brings them a pie and a thirty million dollar insurance check. The Mitchum brothers thought Good Cooper cheated them, but it was another insurance agent that's being forced to implicate Cooper. Good Cooper is like Chicken Boo from Animaniacs. Society is gullible enough to believe he's onto something when he's operating on the level of a two year old. He stops yet a another murder attempt on his life by noticing the guy has dandruff.

It turns out the Evil Cooper, well his decoy Dougie, is married to Diane's estranged sister. This is the life Good Cooper has inadvertently assumed and no one realizes he's a fraud. By episode fourteen, the FBI realizes there are two Coopers. The Twin Peaks cops find someone important in the woods from the other dimension, though she has no eyes.

E13: Kyle MacLachlan plays Dougie Jones

Episode sixteen is wild. The guys Evil Cooper has tasked with killing Good Cooper get into an argument with a guy in the neighborhood who pulls an automatic weapon, starting a shootout. The Mitchum brothers are there too, at Good Cooper's house while he's in the hospital, and the FBI are staking out the house because Gordon asked them to find Good Cooper/Dougie. It's a ridiculous and fun confluence of events. Good Cooper finally wakes up with his memories intact, and it's crazy to think it's been nearly the entire season without him.

Cooper is back and this show connects Good Cooper to Laura from the original series. In the final episode Cooper finds Laura Palmer, but she claims not to be Laura. Even approaching the end, I had no clue where this could go. Cooper 'saves' Laura and finds her in the future. Is it an alternate reality? Cooper and Diane call each other Richard and Linda. Laura is Carrie.

Cooper saved Laura, and everyone is different. By trying to save her, he's only subverted one world for another. It seems the conclusion is that you can't beat evil. It's an unwinnable task. Cooper asks "What year is it?" a nod to where they are in space and time.

I'm always dubious of resurrected series, and this seems like a lot of episodes, but I really enjoyed it. This doesn't try to recapture or mimic the original series. It's an evolution of the show, employing modern television ideals with a focus on a serialized story. By it's nature this is a show that can be dissected to generate many conclusions. I didn't quite realize that Dougie was a duplicate construct, but after knowing that now, what I saw makes more sense. This show doesn't hold your hand, forcing you to decipher what's occurring. Not understanding the intricacies of the concepts doesn't hamper the show as the broad concepts are easy to grasp and this creates such a great mood.