3x01 Part 1

WARNING: THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES EVENTS FROM BOTH PT. 1 & PT. 2. DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE WATCHED BOTH EPISODES.

[7.0/10] So full disclosure, I have no idea how to rate or review this. The first two hours of the revived Twin Peaks are, for better and for worse, much like the old Twin Peaks. There are parts of it that are unbelievably scary, parts of it that are mind-numbingly boring, parts of it that are transcendent and surreal, parts of it that are stilted and dull, and parts of it that just leave you scratching your head. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it something else altogether? I don’t really know. A lot of that depends on where Lynch & Frost end up taking this over the course of the ensuing sixteen episode, much of which the first two installments of this revival season seem to be setting up.

So let’s start with the best part, and what was the best part of the original Twin Peaks -- the Red Room sequences.

There’s a very fanservice-y part of me that is just excited to see Cooper in that room again, sitting across from The Giant, being directed by MIKE, hearing the backwards talk and elegant sound design of the footsteps. It is all familiar, but less in a “hey remember this” sort of way, and more in a way that makes it cohesive (but still different) than what came before. As much as is mystifying about these first couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, I really respect Lynch and Frost for how much they commit to the continuity of their series here.

To that end, the pair sprinkle in little reminders. The episode opens with the “I’ll see you in 25 years” exchange and includes a flashback to Dale chasing his doppelganger around the Red Room. And the revival, admirably, sticks with the idea that the real dale, the “Good Dale” as Fire Walk with Me put it, has been stuck in the Black Lodge for the past 25 years, with the Evil Dale out and about and causing trouble in that time.

And in truth, as awful as it is, there’s something captivating about seeing McLachlan return to the role of Dale Cooper, but play him as a villainous badass rather than a clean cut do-gooder. The Evil Dale has shades of a Tarantino-esque character, wandering into faraway places, disabling rifle-wielding protectors with the flick of his wrist, strong-arming information out of his criminal compatriots, and all-in-all playing the disciplined but effective black hat that we never really saw with The Good Dale. Watch out for the bad fans on this one. (Is Twin Peaks the kind of show that’ll have those sorts of fans?)

But he’s contrasted with The Good Dale still stuck in the lodge. Again, it’s a thrill to see all those familiar faces, plying their usual mysterious trade, but with enough twists not to feel like a repeat. There is a gravity that comes from seeing Laura Palmer reenact Cooper’s famous dream a quarter-century later, telling Coop that it’s time for him to go. There’s a tragedy in seeing Leland Palmer again, still appearing stricken and guilt-ridden about his actions, trapped there just as long. I don’t know what to make of the fact that The Man From Another Place has “evolved” into a tree with a bulbous orb on top of it, or the return of the white horse, but it has meaning when we see Mike once more, invoking the “past or future” aphorism froms Fire Walk with Me to suggest that Good Dale may have a way back to the real world.

The mythology of it is intentionally and effectively fuzzy. Evil Coop is or was in contact with Philip Jeffries and now someone else who knows about the lodge and offers cryptic hints about Evil Cooper’s plan to avoid being sucked back there. There’s a disruption (from the box?) that brings Good Cooper down and out. Hawk goes back to Glastonberry Grove (on a tip from The Log Lady) and sees those famed curtains, flickering like fire. Much of it is opaque, but that part of the narrative has extra weight from picking up the threads that the television series and subsequent film left off.

Unfortunately, the rest of the glimpses we get of the world beyond Twin Peaks (and even within it) are rather hit and miss at best. There’s an extended sequence where Matthew Lillard plays a local principal named Bill who seems to be implicated in a gruesome murder. This seems to be the way the show is setting up a new murder mystery in the vein of the original Twin Peaks, with Bill claiming that it was all in a dream, suggesting that some Black Lodge possession is at play a la Leland Palmer. At the same time, there’s a series of locals cheating on each other, dealing with the out of town investigator, and trying to make sense of such a dark thing happening in their otherwise calm community, making the whole thing feel like Twin Peaks attempting to replay its past with variations on a theme in North Dakota.

That’s also where we get the biggest snootfuls of Lynch and Frost’s sense of humor, between a nosy neighbor who can’t work out the process to get the key to the dead woman’s apartment and Bill’s wife who complains about her husband being arrested because they have guests coming over for dinner. It doesn’t really work for me -- coming off more like “yeah, I can see how that would be funny” than anything that actually makes me laugh, but it’s true to Lynch’s M.O. so I expect partisans will be pleased.

There’s also a big glass box, being watched by cameras and local students at all times, that has some connection to the supernatural. This is probably a reach on my part, but it feels like Lynch’s commentary on television -- people staring blankly at a large box, categorizing the nothing, seemingly captivated by it. It puts me off a bit, but I’d interpret how long Lynch’s camera lingers on Sam, the watcher, dutifully performing his duties is meant as a layered, almost meta reflection of the audience doing the exact same thing at home. The fact that Cooper gets semi-trapped in there or something works as an added dimension, that Cooper was supposed to be in the lodge forever, or at least for a long time, but that the people watching, the people who kept waiting for something new to happen, brought him back and messed with the process.

But even just taking it as text, the scenes with the box provide the most suplerative non-Red Room scenes in the first two episodes. I’ll say this for Lynch, he may not always be my cup of tea in terms of crafting characters or telling stories, but he sure knows how to do horror right. There’s something that feels almost out of a slasher flick about the young kids about to have sex on the couch, when some creature from a different plane attacks and slaughters them. There’s something terrifying about the only vaguely formed, gray phase creature coming at them again and again as blood spurts everywhere. The sound and look of the scene conveys the terror expertly, and it almost makes up for all the doldrums the audience had to suffer to get there.

Along the way there’s other cryptic glimpses as different corners of the world. Jimmy Barrett (of Mad Men fame) is under somebody’s thumb in Las Vegas. Niles Crane’s former fiancee Mel is investigating the murder in South Dakota. And somebody, somewhere, wants Evil Cooper killed. There’s enough wisps and suggestions to keep the mystery-solver contingent of the Twin Peaks fanbase happy.

That just leaves Twin Peaks itself, which appears to have been left in some state of stasis. Dr. Jacoby is doing some work with shovels that requires deliveries out to his hut that are hard to make out. (There’s a recurring visual motif in the episode of figures being shot from far away which I can make neither head nor tails of). Ben and Jerry Horne are still running things at the Great Northern, though both are practically unrecognizable, with Ben enlisting Ashley Judd as an assistant and Jerry (legally) selling pot and pot accessories. James Hurley and Shelly Johnson still hang out at the Roadhouse and weird bands still play there. And The Log Lady is still calling the sheriff’s office with strange messages from her log.

The sherrif’s office seems to have changed the least. Lucy (who’s barely aged a day) is still answering the phone in her usual manner, though she’s now married to Andy, who seems to have the same disposition he always did. They confirm both that Lucy had her baby, named Wally, who’s now 24 years old, and that they haven’t seen Cooper since before he was born. Truman is still the sheriff, but there’s two Sheriff Trumans, though neither is in. And Hawk is still the strong, silent type, not saying much but acting decisively. It’s like we never left, for better and for worse.

That’s pretty much what I have to say about the two-hour premiere for the Twin Peaks revival. The things that bugged me about the original show -- the stilted acting, the rough dialogue, the long go-nowhere scenes -- are still there (though they thankfully seem to have toned down the music a bit). The things that I liked about the original show -- the Red Room weirdness, its capacity for creating great horror, the striking performance from Kyle MacLachlan -- are there too.

You more or less get what you were promised here: a few answers, a lot more questions, and the style that Lynch and Frost delivered twenty-five years ago slickened up for the modern day. That means it’s still amazing at times, still an utter slog at times, but that with a quarter-century worth of mythmaking outside the show to contend with, Twin Peaks adds some intrigue and meaning to the events it depicts. I’m not ready to call it good yet (or at least not uniformly so) but it’s piqued my interest and provoked a response, which is more than enough for a show returning to the airwaves for the first time since 1991.