Laura Palmer kept her promise. In the Season 2 finale “Beyond Life or Death,” Twin Peaks’ tragic, troubled prom queen — memorably portrayed by Sheryl Lee in the series and its masterful spinoff, Fire Walk With Me — tells Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), “I’ll see you in 25 years.” And indeed, if you fudge the details a little (FWWM came out in 1992, so that counts), the show returned 25 years later with Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017.
The revival tripled down on co-creator David Lynch’s dark, cryptic style, raising more questions than it answered and splitting fans into two groups: Those who liked Twin Peaks for its soap-opera aspects, and those who appreciated it as an auteur work. But the coffee-and-pie set shouldn’t have been surprised: All the signs were there on June 10, 1991, when Lynch and Mark Frost reopened, and then closed, the door to the nightmare dimension known as the Black Lodge.
That fan divide has been present since since Twin Peaks fever first hit America in the summer of 1990: A New York Times article from May 1991 describes the show’s mass audience dissipating towards the end of its first season, while a die-hard cult formed around the show’s occult symbolism and unnerving tone in Season 2. In the end, the Peaks loyalists’ numbers were too small to secure the show a Season 3 renewal. But those who hung on until the bitter end were rewarded with one of the most visionary episodes ever to air on TV. (In fact, its only real competition is other Twin Peaks episodes.)
David Lynch and Mark Frost both returned for what everyone thought at the time would be the series finale, taking the show back to its surrealist roots in the process. Although it has its share of both comedy and melodrama — some of it combined into the same scenes, like Audrey Horne’s (Sherilyn Fenn) infamous exploits at the Twin Peaks Savings and Loan — the primary mood of “Beyond Life or Death” is fractured and dreamlike. The line deliveries are very Lynchian, as are the performances: Lee in particular dials into the bottomless pitch-black terror that lies just underneath the show’s affected quirkiness, with a scream that you can feel all the way down to the tips of your toes.
Midway through “Beyond Life or Death,” Cooper goes to Glastonbury Grove in the woods outside of Twin Peaks, where a circle of sycamore trees marks the entrance to the Red Room, a sort of interdimensional waiting room between our neutral reality and the evil one of the Black Lodge. Cooper first visited this iconic location — red curtains and a chevron floor, later seen in countless Twin Peaks pop-ups around the world — in a dream during the show’s first season. Since then, his encounters with the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) and his companions have grown increasingly sinister, until not even Cooper’s beloved coffee is safe.
Without totally spoiling the rest of “Beyond Life or Death,” Twin Peaks Season 2 concludes on a bleak and sobering note, as evil runs unchecked out into the world with Cooper helpless to stop it. As a finale, it was controversial, the opposite of what many viewers wanted for the noble, good-hearted Cooper and for poor Laura, who suffered so much in her brief life.
Lynch would later double down on this as well, giving the iconic characters an even darker ending in the series finale of The Return. The only hope for any of these characters comes at the end of Fire Walk With Me, which also features some of the most harrowing sequences not only in the series, but of Lynch’s entire career. It’s all a reminder that Twin Peaks is not a TV soap opera — it’s a David Lynch TV soap opera. Score one for the auteurists.
