Tuesday 5 September 2017

"What Year is this?" 'It's 2017, and this is seriously DARK' - first thoughts on Twin Peaks: The Return Finale

What Just Happened?
Twin Peaks Episode 18, The Wombat Take


An ancient evil has dwelt on this earth in Sarah Palmer since 1945, and the Laura Palmer spirit was sent to this earth to combat this evil.

The year of episode 18 is approximately the present day - the car models alone tell us this.


Sarah Palmer was behind the door, and Jouei has failed in preventing the historic murder of the Laura Palmer spirit, but has just had Coop deliver her right back again.

Coop's attempt to kill the second bird - Jouei with the one stone failed because preventing Laura Palmer's death was pointless as he delivered the same spirit as Carrie Page back to it's clutches as Sarah Palmer.


The white horse I'm certain was in Sarah Palmer's kitchen has always symbolised the Laura spirit's demise, and is perhaps the pure representation of the ancient evil.

Cooper, along with the rest of us has completely misjudged the role and significance of the Sarah Palmer character all along.

Season 4 or no, we can NEVER get Dale Cooper back again


Neither of what returned to this earth of Cooper or Diane was what left it 25 years ago. What returns to this world is affected, haunted, modified by what of themselves has been left in the lodge.

Every transferral of 'something' across dimensions in the Twin Peaks universe, requires an equal displacement of something else from that dimension or time.

We share a last brief moment with Coop and Diane's former "full" (though still seemingly deeply haunted) identities before the strobe effect that occurs as they pass the pylon - apparently the spot where evil coop was first attempted to be pulled back "in" to the lodge.


In the lodges, time does not pass normally if it passes at all, there is some indication this world exists as a dream of the white lodge beings. If characters have ever spent time there, they are still and always spending time there.

Diane states that she remembers everything, although it's unclear whether as Tulpa Diane or Niadoo or both. She always has to have been missing from this world for 25 years in her experience.

Some of Evil Coop has returned with Cooper, and Diane now has a doppleganger rather than a tulpa. They are Richard and Linda. Irrevocably changed, part of them now lodge dwellers forever.


If the Twin Peaks season 3 finale offered us any hope, it left us more than enough dangling for a fourth season.

For the question of Audrey's obviously significant role in the epistemology, and the dream like pervasivenesss of significant red objects across the various universe (not to mention this would be another permutation of the narrative Lynch has used for his last three feature length films) suggest all the narratives may in fact be part of someone's unitary mental fever or dream somewhere.

Cooper's identity definitively splits in SOME dimension as his disembodied voice says slowly "we live inside a dream" at the end of episode 17. The question of the entire validity of ANYTHING we've actually just been watching remains unresolved.

Intriguing Instagram post from Sherilyn Fenn...

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post on 

Radical Buddhism - A Final Epistemology of Twin Peaks: The Return

Please see also my mad scribblings over the first episode...

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