A Pilgrim's Peaks - Parts 1 + 2
It’s easy to forget that sometimes, every once in a while, Twin Peaks can be sweet.
Through all the soap operatics, murder, and darknesses supernatural or mundane we do get glimpses of wholesomeness; Agent Cooper enjoying a cup of coffee or lending an ear to Audrey Horne in lonely teenage crisis mode, or the rare times when Bobby Briggs isn’t a dummy and finally does something good and unselfish. The ending to this feature-length introductory pair of episodes of The Return contains maybe the best moment of that in the whole series to this point, especially coming as it does after a gap of twenty five years away from these characters who we spent so much time with, on top of where we left them and the ominously slow boil of violence and mystery that’s filled the preceding hour and forty five minutes.
Our first glimpse of the Roadhouse reunites us with James Hurley, whose soft boyishness has been acid washed by the years, giving the longing stare he sends across the room in the direction of Shelly’s table a gravity that his younger self would have been hard-pressed to muster. As written, it’s him making eyes at one of Shelly’s friends, but it may as well be all of us, seeing someone we knew well, long ago, for the first time after so many years. His intensity is misunderstood by one of her companions, who calls him weird, leading Shelly to defend him with an explanation that a motorcycle accident just left him quiet, but that, “James is still cool. He’s always been cool.” It’s a beautifully simple statement that’s almost heartbreaking in its common decency. Was James ever cool? Debatable! But Shelly thinks he was, and cares enough about him to set the record straight as much as she can in her own little corner of the world. We’ve had to walk through a lot of darkness to get back together with these characters again, and that simple human sentiment reminds us of the connections, unspoken or otherwise, that make it not only bearable, but worthwhile and rewarding. In a show that’s shown us a lot of backstabbing and cruelty up to this point, it’s refreshing to feel like Shelly and James care about each and have each other’s backs.
On the flipside, the darkness that had come to define Twin Peaks in the original run of the show appears to have been loosed on the rest of the world. Where the original show took place almost exclusively within the limits and forests of the city, we spend most of this first pair of episodes anywhere but there.
A semi-industrial room located in the top of a building in New York City is the scene of a bizarrely elaborate technological ritual involving cameras pointed at a large glass box is the first place we get to see outside of the Black Lodge and a brief glimpse of Twin Peaks. It’s as dryly mysterious and surreally metaphorical as anything David Lynch has ever done, the ritual is broken and then shattered when the box goes dark, something appears, and then breaks out of the box to escape and slaughter the two people in the room. Is this BOB, or some new evil released into the world? The method of murder is different from what we know of our old foe and then there’s an altered playing card kept in the jacket of Mr. C, the doppelgänger of Special Agent Dale Cooper, which looks a little like this unsettling and violent new thing.
We catch up with the doppel-Cooper in South Dakota, where he seems to be at the center of a series of murders framing an adulterous high school principal, the decapitated head of the librarian he was seeing, and the body in her bed beneath it, which belongs to some other as-yet unidentified but also dead person. Bodies continue to fall in Mr. C’s shadow as some other enterprise he was planning goes sideways. It’s weird seeing the almost comically affable Kyle MacLachlan calmly exuding a detached, deliberate kind of menace that shifts into violence as soon as it becomes the thing that will get his character what he needs, but it works. His whole look is basically a fancied up version of the BOB we knew; trading denim for leather, and salt-and-pepper for greasy black locks but keeping the malice.
And of course there’s the Black Lodge itself, where our poor, captive friend from the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dwelt all these long years. He is wonderfully unchanged; our stalwart knight stranded far from home, ever patient and accepting of the curious goings on around him, no matter how strange his circumstances have become. Evil is afoot here, too, in ways both familiar and not; Laura Palmer passes information along to Agent Cooper only to disappear in some kind of mysterious punishment that brings forth her inimitably terrifying scream (Sheryl Lee truly deserves a high place in the pantheon of Scream Queens for her work in Twin Peaks). The new twist comes from a doppelgänger of the evolved, tree-like form of MIKE’s Arm, aka The Man From Another Place, which appears as Agent Cooper is trying to leave the Lodge, only to send him somewhere… else. That elsewhere briefly includes an unobserved appearance in a pre-shattered New York City glass box before moving on to realms either uncharted or between those more well-known.
Amongst all this we get a brief glimpse of Agent Cooper’s smile and it brings us back again to the town we thought we knew so well and are soon to become reacquainted with. The warmest moments in these two episodes were the ones that took place there, if only because no one was intimidating, assaulting or murdering someone there (yet). Glimpses of Doctor Jacoby, Benjamin and Jerry Horne, Deputy Chief Hawk, Lucy and Andy Brennan, Margaret Lanterman and Sarah Palmer all provide a grounding to the otherworldly Lynchian happenings afoot. And there’s no mistaking any of this for the work of another artist; in so many ways we are returning to a Twin Peaks that looks to be an eighteen hour David Lynch movie. Sumptuous colors and heavy symbology. Performances that range from deadpan to hysteric. All filtered through a sensibility that contains a deliberate, yet elusive structure whose logic you know exists but the parsing of which requires submission to the experience of the art itself.
All you need to do is show up.