TWIN PEAKS Finale: What Does it All Mean?

The Twin Peaks revival series has ended, fittingly with a final scream of horror from Laura Palmer, just as the original series began with another scream.

The new series was uneven, with striking moments at times, and other scenes that seemed to add little and go nowhere. The series was overlong at eighteen episodes, where a tighter run of ten episodes could have been more compelling. Most enjoyable was the chance to return again to the town of Twin Peaks itself and reconnect with familiar characters, much older now, from the original series.

Key to understanding the storyline are some basic themes from director David Lynch:

1. The fluidity of time between past and future.

2. The link between conscious reality and dream world reality.

3. The existence of a transcendent evil force beneath the surface of the normal world.

4. The idea that individual selves may exist in multiple different time streams.

Twin Peaks is a surrealist narrative, driven by psychological/emotional meaning, not literal, conventional plot structure. This has the effect of floating through a disjointed, fragmented nightmare with no logical anchor.

The series ends with FBI Agent Dale Cooper returning to one happy time stream self as Douglass Jones with his family in Las Vegas. In another variation, Cooper finds Laura Palmer living as a different self in another time stream life and he tries to undo the events of her murder in Twin Peaks. The result is Laura's terrifying vision back to her murder that began the original TV series.

That final brilliant sequence was a fitting jolt back to the sinister mystery coiled beneath the placid, quirky surface of Twin Peaks.

TWIN PEAKS Return Doesn't Disappoint

It is happening again.

David Lynch's surrealist mystery Twin Peaks is back again after 25 years, on Showtime cable network, and it remains as eerie and disturbing as ever.

The narrative resumes where the original series left off. Familiar local characters return, much older now --- Deputy Hawk, Lucy Brennan, the Log lady. New characters are introduced in other locations. Beneath the surface, the transcendent evil that inhabited the woods around Twin Peaks has now spread through a portal to infect the wider world.

All the trademark Lynchian themes are present. The link between reality and dreams. The fluidity of past and future time. The synchronicity of seemingly separate occurrences. It's all a metaphysical jigsaw puzzle overlaid against a criminal investigation mystery.

We wait until FBI agent Dale Cooper can find a way to escape from the limbo place where he remains trapped. When that happens, Cooper can begin to oppose the shape-shifting evil that has been set loose. In Lynch's vision, gateways exist between different levels of reality, doorways often represented by the crackling of electricity.

The dreamy, disorienting spell of Twin Peaks pulls us in once more.