EPISODES 1 & 2 SPOILERS!
Those expecting the bucolic, incongruously funny piece of small-town Americana with a jazzy perversion underneath—that genius mix of soap opera, comedy and horror that revolutionized 90s television—are in for something of a shock.
From the opening scene of the first episode—an unsettling montage of old and new footage centered on the titular town and the faraway echoes of Laura Palmer’s murder—Season 3 brings with it an entirely new vision. (You get the feeling the town is haunted, stuck in a loop.) It’s 2017, and evil, much like BOB, has spread all over the country: there are scenes in Las Vegas, South Dakota and a memorable segment in an alien-looking New York. A guy in his 20s stares soullessly at a glass box, waiting for something to happen, clueless as to why he’s even waiting: when sometimes finally materializes, it eats away at him. The scene is more frightening than almost anything in horror movies. It seems a violation of reality, both within the show and outside of it, and it has a scarring effect. Right from the onset, Lynch questions our ideas of what’s real, and a new paradigm is set: there are no comfort zones in this Twin Peaks. We might fall into NON-EXIS-TENCE at any second.
Peak Scenes in Episodes 1 & 2
Bad Coop terrorizes Darya: Eliciting a revelatory performance from Kyle Maclachlan, this scene is the tangible reminder that this is still Cooper we’re witnessing, not merely good old BOB. It’s Cooper’s hyper-rational side, his superior intellect and intuition stripped of everything else—fixated on coordinates, on tracing crucial information. It’s the Cooper who wants to stay alive at any cost (“I don’t need anything; I want“) without the full Cooper’s characteristic love of life. The antagonizing duality of the two agents sets the stage for the metaphysical epic to come.
In South Dakota: Potential murderer Bill Hastings and his horrifyingly suburban wife Phyllis face off in an despairingly long take, the camera almost inside their faces: the scene is the deranged offspring of the soap opera undercurrents of the original show, a display of emotional ugliness so heightened that it’s all-out hilarious. As Bad Cooper tells Phyllis, “you’ve followed human nature perfectly.” Lynch turns inevitability and repetition into comedy.
Inside the Red Room: Coop and Laura reunite in the Black Lodge. Sheryl Lee brings a new sadness to Laura’s aging broken soul, but her mischief is ongoing.
In Twin Peaks: A frail-looking Log Lady returns in a poignant scene with a mission for Hank. Andy and Lucy are still adorably lost. Sheriff Truman is missed. And we get a small glimpse of James and Shelly, still visitors of the Bang Bang Bar.
Inside Laura Palmer’s house: The defining moment so far. Sarah Palmer (the unparalleled Grace Zabriskie) has a new flat TV that seems bigger than her living room. She’s dropped soap operas for wildlife documentaries, and we watch as the images of animals devouring each other’s faces engulf both her and the house, and the mirrors in the room duplicate the horrors being projected. The scene embodies with masterly simplicity the essence of the new Twin Peaks: a mood of paralyzing stillness and recurring reciprocal violence (Sarah invites the horrors into her house: they don’t come unwanted.) And just as Sarah’s living room is taken over by wild beasts that aren’t there, reality itself is being overrun, no longer recognizable. Rarely has a scene of everyday domesticity felt less homely and more alien.
As the Log Lady warns us, “Something is missing.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
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