10 Reasons Why "Twin Peaks: The Return" was the Most Important TV Event of the 2010s

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” 

It’s the question that defined TV for much of the nineties, so much so that even if you never saw the original Twin Peaks you are probably aware of the name Laura Palmer, or at least peripherally aware of the madman with the raised hair at its centre, David Lynch. It’s iconic for a reason, and still holds up as one of the most culturally important moments in television history. 

But what about its revival back in 2017? There had been so much speculation in the lead up to its official announcement that it seemed like public interest in Twin Peaks had only grown since the original series aired and the poor critical reception to its prequel/sequel film Fire Walk With Me killed any hope for a continuation of the mystery. Cryptic tweets from Lynch himself and his co-writer and creator Mark Frost fuelled the hypothetical fire (pun fully intended), and fans were sent over the moon with excitement when it was finally announced that Showtime would be bringing Twin Peaks back to our television screens in 2017. After some confusion about the number of episodes and Lynch even saying he had abandoned the project due to lack of funding, we were treated to 18 episodes of Twin Peaks in all of its surreal, twisted, horrifying glory. 

While nobody seemed to notice at the time, not only is it arguably the best television series of the 2010s, it’s also the most important and might have changed the way we watch TV as we move into the 2020s and beyond. 

And a warning – there are SPOILERS ahead. This isn’t by any means a beat-by-beat retelling of the narrative, but key plot points will be revealed in order to discuss what makes the show so special. 

1. It’s 18 hours of David Lynch directed material

David Lynch has only directed ten feature length films in a decorated career that started with his cult-horror classic Eraserhead in 1977 and has seemingly reached a standstill with 2006’s trippy, disorienting nightmare fuel Inland Empire. In that time, he has given us some of the most memorable moments in cinema, whether it be the opening sequence of Blue Velvet or its central villain played by Dennis Hopper, iconic moments from Eraserhead, or the Winkies scene in Mulholland Drive. Regardless of whether or not you actually enjoy his work, it is indisputable that he is one of the more notable directors to have worked in the late 20th century and into the 21st. His style of storytelling and his aesthetic nuance have seeped through popular culture and made its way into heavyweights like The Simpsons, Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live. At this point in Lynch’s career, he is under no obligation (not that he ever was) to continue contributing to the conversation that is cinema, but to come through with 18 hours of material having not delivered anything for a little over ten years is nothing short of a blessing. With his entire career in film before The Return only adding up to roughly 22 hours, you begin to understand just how inspiring and important it is that The Return even exists for us to watch and pour over. 

    2. Kyle MacLachlan’s performance(s)

After the success of the original show, MacLachlan was initially dubious in appear in 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me for worries about becoming typecast, which led to Chris Isaak’s involvement as Special Agent Chester Desmond. MacLachlan has gone on to have a successful and rich career post-Twin Peaks, but you would imagine that the same worries might have plagued him going into The Return. Those worries, perhaps shared by others, turn out to be completely unfounded and put to shame by MacLachlan’s performances is The Return. He plays not one, not two, but three – arguably even four depending on how you interpret the show – roles, all of which would have been noteworthy on their own, let alone together in one body of work. 

Of course he returns as Special Agent Dale Cooper, perhaps his most iconic role, but he steals the show as Mr. C, the evil doppelganger of Coop that we saw leave the Black Lodge and take his place in the season 2 finale back in 1991. This is new territory for MacLachlan, not just playing the bad guy, but a bad guy so intimidating and frightening in an almost reptilian way. He dominates every scene he is in as Mr. C, and almost functions as a magnet for the burning questions the audience has after the final episode in the 90s. What has evil Coop been doing the last 25 years? What about Bob? Is he still in there? Is there any of good Coop in there with him? The answer to that last question turns out to be a definitive no – Mr. C is one of the most compellingly despicable characters to ever grace our TV screens. 

And then there’s his performance as Dougie Jones, a tulpa, or decoy, created by Mr. C as part of his plan not to get taken back into the Black Lodge, and who Coop is stuck as for the majority of the show. This is where Lynch really indulges in his love of the mundane and revelling in the humour of everyday life, and MacLachlan takes than on in – again – a way that has not really been seen from him at all as a performer. There are shades of Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, and even Henry from Lynch’s own Eraserhead that colour his performance. It’s a lot of fun as its own isolated performance, but when imbued with the baggage and emotion that Twin Peaks fans bring to the experience of watching him, it becomes so much more. Dougie comes across hint after hint that might potentially wake Coop up from his state of child-like ignorance – coffee, remember coffee? Or red high heels, remember Audrey? The FBI, surely you remember the FBI? Subtler moments like Dougie being intrigued by a mirror are even more frustrating but border on haunting and melancholic, and MacLachlan plays this role to perfection. 

By the time he does finally wake up and step into the shoes of the Special Agent Dale Cooper we all remember and love, it truly is a sight to behold, but made all the more powerful by his sublime and often under-appreciated work as Dougie Jones. For any one of these performances Kyle MacLachlan’s work in The Return would be noteworthy, but combine them all into one magnum opus and you’ve got one of the most impressive TV performances ever. 

    3. In the age of the TV revival, it interrogates the very idea of a revival

It’s no longer surprising to hear that a show that had a huge following at some point in the 20th century is getting a revival – just open up any streaming service’s home page and you are inundated with them. But this is where The Return begins to separate itself from its peers in much the same way it did in the nineties; in an era of TV that is almost defined by the revival or the reboot, The Return is all about interrogating what it actually means to return to something from your past. It is about revisiting things from the past and why we do it, but it’s also about why that is a practice that not only will never yield the results we want but actively works against the development of the art form. 

For starters, it is literally called The Return, making it pretty explicit if it wasn’t already that Frost and Lynch’s script will be focussed on returning to something. In a literal sense, we are returning to the world of Twin Peaks through our televisions for the first time in 25 years – a number that will hold extra significance for fans. But it runs much deeper than that. Within the narrative of the show we can see a number of arcs based around this concept of returning. We watch as Coop desperately tries to return to his reality from the warped reality of the Black Lodge, then to himself after being trapped in the cage of Dougie Jones, and then back to the town of Twin Peaks where his story began all those years ago. We watch that narrative’s equal and opposite – Mr. C’s inevitable return to the Black Lodge. 

The point at which this show becomes something more than its already formidable form, however, is when Cooper travels back in time to rescue Laura Palmer. At this point in the series, the final episode becomes about finding Laura and returning her to her home, in Twin Peaks. But of course it isn’t that simple – she doesn’t know who Laura Palmer is. She doesn’t recognise anything in the town – and come to think of it, there are plenty of things that now seem different. She does recognise the name Sarah, but that could be a coincidence. She doesn’t recognise her home, and it is inhabited by the real-life owners of the house (perhaps a hint towards exactly what is happening in the finale). But the message is as clear as mud: you can’t remake Twin Peaks the way that it was in 1990. It can’t be done. Much like Cooper trying to return Laura to her childhood home, despite our best intentions we cannot return to the Twin Peaks that we remember so well and hold so fondly. Clearly, Lynch wasn’t interested in returning to the quirky, small-town murder mystery with a quaint, gentle sense of humour, because you can’t recreate that magic. If you watch The Return through that lens, it becomes incredibly revealing to both how Lynch feels about ABC pressuring the closure of key mysteries in the original series, and the idea of returning to this property after it had been gutted so mercilessly by its “fans”. 

There is a reading of the show that holds quite a bit of water that suggests that what we are watching is what happens when Twin Peaks is forced to return to screens without the one thing that Lynch felt kept the show alive in the first place; Laura Palmer. In this sense perhaps the finale is a depiction of what happens when we attempt to force continuation and closure to something after we have already gutted its intention from it 25 years ago. 

When you turn your TV on and see revivals like Fuller House, Gilmore Girls, MacGyver, 90210, Dynasty, Roseanne, and Dallas, with shows like Dexter, Frasier, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Gossip Girl, iCarly, Sex and the City, and so many more coming out this year alone, it’s obvious how prescient and timely this critique is. 

    4. Episode 8. Just… Episode 8

There has been a lot of discussion and discourse had over the last few years about Episode 8 of The Return, a lot of which falls into the same category as a lot of other discussion around Lynch’s work that doesn’t take it as seriously as it asks you too. If you have seen it then you will know that it is one of the most remarkable things Lynch has done across his career, which means that to call it esoteric would be an understatement. This means that it can be pretty alienating for viewers, and can lead to statements like “it was so weird, so crazy, so artsy” without actually engaging with the text itself. So it is important to bring up Episode 8 in particular not to draw attention to its aesthetic and structural idiosyncrasies (although that is no doubt part of what sets it apart from the others), but to talk about it as the centrepiece to the entire mystery of Twin Peaks.

Visually, this might be the most stunning thing Lynch has ever done, which is really saying something. While the first few scenes of the film follow on from the episode before it, the episode quickly plays the first card in its mind-blowing hand when we get the sequence of Mr. C being resurrected by the woodsmen. It is simple in its visual representation of evil, with simple overlaying of images and employment of trademark lighting, but it is used to such unnerving and uncomfortable effect. Not only that, but the first reveal of the woodsmen approaching in the dark is a testament to just how frightening “jump scares” can be simply by using the utility of the cut. No big musical sting, no flashy cinematography drawing attention to the scare, just a simple cut to an image we are very much not expecting to see that then stays with you. 

After a quick detour back to the Roadhouse where we see “The” Nine Inch Nails performing a curiously specific song, we are then thrown back in time to 1945, at which point we witness the birth of the evil that resides at Twin Peaks and the good that rises to oppose it. To say any more is to ruin it for those that haven’t yet seen it, but there are lengthy sequences of what can only be described as surreal visual art, sequences of bizarre beauty and mystery featuring the Giant from the original show (now known as the Fireman), and Lynch’s input into the George Romero-inspired horror genre. Yes, it is weird, but it is filmmaking perfection of the highest order by a master filmmaker at the peak of his powers, and it asks you to dive into the abyss with it. Questions and theories abound, but much like Lynch himself the episodes asks you to take responsibility and engage with those questions yourself. But importantly, this isn’t visual inventiveness purely for its own sake. This is visual storytelling of the likes that TV rarely has the opportunity to dive into, and if you devote yourself to it and take it seriously there is a narrative to be found that is mindbowing not only in its attention to detail but also in how it recontextualises almost everything you have already seen in The Return, Fire Walk With Me and the original show. TV hasn’t seen anything like this, and hopefully it has opened the floodgates for more artists to take risks like this and for more TV executives being willing to fund artists to make TV as bold and exciting as this. Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than Episode 8. 

    5. It answers 25-year-old questions that defined an era of TV

While the original series’ well-documented demise was due to the central of question of the show – “who killed Laura Palmer?” – being answered against the will of the series’ creators, there were still questions that haunted viewers for the 25 years before The Return came to screens. If nothing else, the series two finale’s cliff-hanger ending left viewers with questions to spare, but even after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me we were left with even more unanswered mysteries. What’s happened to Coop? Who is Judy? Who’s Phillip Jefferies and what the heck does he have to do with anything? What did Laura see behind James in the woods in Fire Walk With Me that made her scream? How’s Annie? What’s the deal with the jade ring? What happened to Audrey? This is part of what kept people interested and engaged in Twin Peaks for so many years after it was cancelled – the unsolved mysteries at its centre. 

The Return does something really remarkable in response to these questions in a way that I can only think of Blade Runner 2049 as something that treated its original property in the same way. It is aware of the burning questions and mysteries and addresses them in satisfying ways, but does so whilst simultaneously keeping the mystery at the heart of Twin Peaks wholly intact. Some people complained that The Return wasn’t really Twin Peaks; this is the most Twin Peaks element of the show – the fact that it provided as much closure to those unanswered questions as it did and the show still has a strong sense of mystery is nothing short of a minor miracle. The mysteries and questions raised by the original run of Twin Peaks persisted long after its final episode in popular memory, and I guess time will tell if the same is true for The Return. In my case, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. 

    6. It is the culmination of David Lynch’s career in film

For fans of David Lynch The Return is nothing short of a buffet. So much of what Lynch has achieved over his long and exciting career finds its way into The Return, whether it be visually or thematically. At its heart is of course the idea of split identities, doubles and doppelgangers, something present in a very prominent way in the original Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. We have visual links to just about everything he has ever made, whether it be more explicit things like the shots of headlights travelling along a road at night, or more subtle nods to Henry in Eraserhead. The parallels between this and Blue Velvet are undeniable, in particular in its final few episodes with the onscreen chemistry between Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern being absolutely off the charts. This isn’t anything new for Lynch – his work has always been in conversation with itself – but this really does feel like a nexus point of visual and thematic references to Lynch’s body of work as a whole. 

    7. It functions as the perfect eulogy for a great number of Lynch’s collaborators 

There is a real sense in all of Lynch’s work that he has a deep love and appreciation for the performers he works with, and so it’s fitting, in a tragic sort of way, that so for so many performers The Return was their swansong. Most recently we lost Peggy Lipton, the actress who portrayed Miss Twin Peaks herself, Norma Jennings. Miguel Ferrer, whose character Albert Rosenfield was the perfect companion to Lynch’s own Gordon Cole, passed away not long after completing The Return. The great Harry Dean Stanton turned in one last performance for Lynch before passing in 2017. Warren Frost returned from retirement to briefly reprise his role as Doc Hayward before his passing in 2017. Brent Briscoe tragically died at the age of 56 in 2017. Robert Forster passed away in 2019 of brain cancer. 

But perhaps the most emotionally devastating of these final performances is that of Catherine Coulson as Margaret Lanterman, aka The Log Lady. Appearing in the series in her home as she talks to Deputy Hawk over the phone delivering clues, she was fighting complications from cancer and tragically passed just four days after shooting her final scene. Her scenes are almost unbearably sad even when removed from that context, but knowing that the state of her character is borne of necessity and how close she was to death while shooting makes her presence in The Return incredibly raw and inspiring. Her words become haunting in their vulnerability: “you know about death, that it’s just a change, not an end. There is some fear in letting go.” Lynch has always had an undying love for his performers, but knowing both Coulson’s history with Lynch and the circumstances surrounding her scenes makes for an unbelievably powerful and heartbreaking send-off to one of the most striking and enigmatic characters in television history. 

The Return also manages to be a swansong for a number of performers who had passed away before shooting begun, which is remarkable. Notably, the late David Bowie’s Philip Jefferies appears in the show, but with a few aesthetic overhauls. Don Davis’ Major Garland Briggs also somehow plays a central role in the narrative of the show, despite having died in 2008. Frank Silva, the iconic face of Bob, gave a posthumous performance as one of the driving forces in the narrative of The Return. The most jaw-dropping of these, however, is the posthumous return of Jack Nance, a long time Lynch collaborator and the performer behind Pete Martell, the character who discovered the body of Laura Palmer all those years ago back in the pilot, starting this whole mystery. This is a moment worth experience unspoilt, but suffice it to say that it is one of the most emotionally charged and surprisingly powerful moments to appear on network television. 

It is always noteworthy whenever anyone gives a performance so close to the grave, and even more so when they deliver posthumous performances. The Return has so many great performances from either that late point in their lives or after their death that you sort of don’t even know where to start in honouring them all with the equal weight and recognition they deserve. If anyone ever needed more proof of both how much Lynch loves working with his actors and how much they love working with him, The Return is more proof than could ever be needed. These great names are immortalised and allowed to live on through this series, and that is a beautiful thing worth celebrating. 

    8. It’s scarier than any horror series

David Lynch has never been strictly categorised as a horror filmmaker, but he has produced some of the most nerve-shredding and traumatically frightening moments in the history of cinema. This bled over into the original run of Twin Peaks, too, with both subtler moments like Bob’s reflection being seen briefly before his reveal and more obvious moments like Ronette Pulaski’s dream or Bob slow creeping towards camera. 

The Return makes all that look like a Disney film. Where to even begin? From its double-episode premiere it lays out its hand with first the intensely unsettling appearance of the figure in the glass box and then its subsequent butchering of a young man and woman, both now very dead. It then continues to frighten and unsettle throughout – whether it be the bizarre, confusing imagery associated with the Black Lodge, the aforementioned Romero-inspired assault on the radio station in Episode 8, whatever ungodly evil has possessed Sarah Palmer, the woodsmen’s first appearance, or any of the other array of genuinely frightening sequences in The Return. Of course there is so much more to it than its scares, but so much has been said about the weirdness of the show that it seems to have distracted people away from just how masterfully Lynch orchestrates scares of all different technical and formal varieties. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made for The Return being Lynch’s most effectively scary work to date.  

    9. It’s about modern TV

As already alluded to, Twin Peaks can be read as a meta-commentary on the state of television. This isn’t new; the original show’s show-within-a-show Invitation to Love highlighted the show’s awareness of and love for the tropes and cliches present within popular melodramas and soaps of the time. In very much the same manner, The Return turns its focus to the landscape of modern TV. We get Lynch’s take on the NCIS style crime procedural in its first half of the series, with the investigation of Matthew Lillard’s Bill Hastings taking up much of the narrative. In particular, Jane Adam’s performance as the hilarious mortician Constance Talbot feels like a deliberate attempt at playing with those tropes. 

As covered already, The Return is also very conscious that it is a revival, and that the modern television landscape is dominated by revivals and reboots. You could almost say that we’re watching Twin Peaks itself having an identity crisis. Twin Peaks’ response to this seems to be to actively avoid everything about the original series that we liked in the first place. You want to see Coop back in action solving crimes? Bad luck, most of the time he is stuck in a different identity with the brain of a four-year-old. You want to catch up with all those wacky characters you loved from the original series? Bad luck, we’re going to spend most of the time not even in the town of Twin Peaks. You wanted to know what happened to Audrey after that explosion at the bank? Tough luck. What this means is that not only do we have a show that is knowingly pushing back against the idea of revival that seems to be driving so much of television today, but it also means that the moments where it does indulge in revisiting the past are incredibly rewarding and satisfying. And they aren’t cheap, unearned, surface level references, either. 

At no point are Frost and Lynch asking us to watch The Return as a recreation of or replacement for the original series. Instead, we get Bobby Briggs’ raw reaction upon seeing Laura Palmer’s photo for the first time in years. It is one of very few uses of the iconic original score, and it isn’t to blindly prod at our nostalgia receptors. It’s use of imagery and musical cues from the original is specifically to make us consider the passage of time between when they first occurred and the place from which we encounter them now in the 21st century. As we see Bobby’s reaction, we are also comparing the troublemaking teenager we knew from the 1990s (don’t forget, Bobby killed a guy!) with the grown-up law enforcement officer we see in front of us. The characters within The Return are confronting the reality of twenty-five years gone by, and our experience of returning to Twin Peaks is a mirroring of that – not the other way around. As Bobby manages to squeak out through his tears, “man, that brings back some memories.” 

    10. That finale… what year is this?

There is no other series finale in television in the last ten years as haunting, frightening, disheartening, alienating or enigmatic as the one-two punch of The Return’s feature-length two-episode finale. In keeping with the show’s metacommentary, this finale is very much two separate episodes; one is the ending that Lynch and Frost know that you want, which is quickly followed by Episode 18, the ending that they give us. There is nothing quite like the experience of reaching the end of Episode 17 and getting that sinking feeling when you remember that there is an entire episode left, and asking yourself where on Earth it could possibly be going. There has been no other show in history that has so knowingly taken what audiences want and given it to them whilst violently taking it away from them simultaneously and with such skill. 

By the end of Episode 17 almost all the loose ends of the main narrative have been tied up. Bob has been defeated, and Freddie has fulfilled the purpose bestowed upon him by the Fireman. Cooper has woken up from the haze he spent most of the series in, and Mr. C has been sent back to the Black Lodge. Lucy has finally figured out how mobile phones work. Most of the main characters are present at the Twin Peaks police station for the grand finale, and it’s all coming together. It’s like the show is making fun of the idea of such a perfect ending when it is so unearned, and the Wizard of Oz parallels shouldn’t go unnoticed in this regard. But this is only Episode 17. There is a whole episode left. That feeling of seeing such an almost comically perfect ending of the overarching story but knowing that it is all false, compounded by the unnerving spectre of Coop’s face superimposed on the scene entire, is one that no other show has replicated. 

By the time the final episode has come to a close, one begins to realise that The Return pulled off the impossible. Not only was it a successful return to a 25-year-old property, but it did so whilst simultaneously giving audiences the nostalgia they were after in small doses and forcing them to look at what Twin Peaks actually looks like if you reboot it for an audience in 2017. It interrogated the central mysteries of the show that were left after the unceremonious reveal of Laura’s killer back in 1991 (and we all know what that did to the show) but left them entirely intact at the same time. If anything, the show’s final moments have only compounded the mystery at the show’s centre, embodied by Cooper’s final confused rumination before Sheryl Lee’s iconic scream cuts the show short; “what year is this?” Whilst theories and interpretations abound for the show’s final episode, that lingering question is not only what drives interest in the show forwards (especially as speculation grows around Lynch’s upcoming Wisteria project) but is a fitting thesis statement for The Return overall. What year is this? It certainly isn’t 1990 anymore. 

No other show in thus current age of the TV revival has returned in such a triumphant, successful manner whilst being completely aware of the absurdity of returning to a classic show after so long. It might have just changed television forever, much like the original show did in the early nineties – but we’ll have to wait and see.