‘Twin Peaks’: David Lynch Has A Plan, And He’s Plotting It To Perfection

We’re just about at the halfway point of Twin Peaks: The Return. Eight hours have passed and we have ten more still to go. And while I’m loathe to appraise David Lynch‘s and Mark Frost’s series as a whole until I’ve seen it in full, I do think that we’re far enough into the series to examine how the plotting and pacing is going. It’s going…pretty great?

Again, it’s tricky to appraise how well a plot is executed until you reach the very end and Twin Peaks has always presented us with a sidewinding ouroboros of a narrative that hops, skips, and jumps across both genres and decades. The first two seasons have been often criticized for their knack for stumbling about. Did we really need a subplot about Nadine thinking she was back in high school? Or did Ben Horne have to think he was a Civil War general?

Some of the same questions are being asked again about Twin Peaks: The Return. I see people crack jokes about the plotting and the pacing so far: Do we really need this much time given to Dougie Jones? Did Lynch just drop the Matthew Lilliard storyline? Why did we devote an entire episode to the aftershocks of the first atomic bomb? Where’s Audrey Horne? Even I tweeted a joke in the immediate aftermath of last week’s expectation-bucking episode.

Last week’s episode seemed more determined to confuse us than ever before. After Cooper’s evil doppelganger is unceremonious shot by Ray, a flurry of “Woodsmen” scurry about his corpse and extract the spirit of BOB from his chest. Then we cut to a banging performance of “The” Nine Inch Nails at the Roadhouse. It’s jarring because of the tempos the show itself has established for us. These Roadhouse performances usually come at the very end, or in the final act, of the episodes. Then we go back in time to birth of man-made evil itself: the atomic bomb. The next forty-odd minutes are a sheer explosion of avant-garde references. Lynch draws upon his own forays into experimental shorts to inspire the visual motifs. It is confusing, it is unsettling, and at times, it can grind on one’s patience.

The irony, though, is last week’s episode proved to me that Lynch and Frost know exactly how to carefully construct episodic storytelling.

As unsettling as the pacing was, it was so because they broke away from the episodic rhythm they themselves have spent seven hours establishing for the viewer. As surprising as the Trinity sequences were, they had been foreshadowed in just about every previous episode (if not all the way back to the original series if you want to dig deep). The first new real footage we saw in the series is of Special Agent Dale Cooper sitting with the Giant in the beautiful black & white art deco theater he inhabits with Senorita Dido. Gordon had positioned a larger-than-life office painting of the bomb exploding behind his office desk. It’s placement, at first, seemed to be a stylist quirk, but it was in fact a prelude to the real thing. Similarly, the “tar-faced” ghouls who haunted the jail and morgue in South Dakota seemed to be strange representation of evil. They wound up being “Woodsmen,” a deeper part of a darker conspiracy than their early appearances let on. When asked about the inspiration behind these characters a few weeks back, Lynch was coy about their meaning:

“That’s an example of what I’m talking about. An image came; it was all about translating. And by the way, about that guy, you just keep watching.”

As out there as Episode 8 seemed, it started connecting the dots in the series like never before. Returning to the black & white theater we see in Episode One (and witnessing the birth of BOB and the resurrection of Laura Palmer’s spirit??), beckons us to revisit Twin Peaks: The Return‘s first scenes. Back then, the Giant tantalizingly gives Special Agent Dale Cooper a series of clues: “Remember 430. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone.” While “430” and “Two birds with one stone” are still open to interpretation, we have caught wind of two residents of Twin Peaks with the names “Richard” and “Linda.” One is Richard Horne, the devilish young man who plows down a small child. Linda is a paraplegic veteran whom we haven’t met yet, but we hear Carl inquire about in the scenes preceding Richard’s crime. The implication here is twofold: Richard and Linda are important, and Lynch and Frost have been carefully setting up the plot from the get go. Everything matters. Even the lines and images we think might not be will come back into frame over the course of Twin Peaks: The Return‘s 18-hour-long narrative.

I’ve seen people joke about an extended sweeping scene in Part 7. For almost two and a half minutes, the camera stays still as we watch a young man sweep the floor. I’ve seen people suggest this is an emblem of Lynch’s self-indulgence. It makes sense. After all, it doesn’t seem like there’s any point to watching one guy sweep up the debris strewn across a bar floor.

We don’t see the man finish the sweeping, but we do see him steadily gather the small bit flung around the floor into one massive heap. It’s filler, but it’s also a potential metaphor for Lynch’s process. It’s going to take a while, but he’s aiming to bring all the pieces he’s thrown across the tapestry of Twin Peaks together finally.

Twin Peaks has often felt like a place that David Lynch only invented to be his private creative playground. The mysteries of the show were not there to be answered, but contemplated. It’s been thought that while “puzzle box” shows like Lost feverishly wanted to answer questions, Twin Peaks just wanted to ask them. The irony of this comparison is that Lost was often literally lost in its pursuit of a clean, cogent plot, and Twin Peaks is finally tying up all the loose threads that have been fraying at the edges for two long decades. Sure, the original Twin Peaks may have been uneven at times. Like Lost, It was created in the crucible of network television. It’s a grueling process that Shonda Rimes has likened to laying down train track just in time so that you don’t crash. However, that’s not the environment this final chapter is being forged in. David Lynch and Mark Frost have been given time and trust, which is why I have some sort of odd faith that we’re chugging towards some semblance of a final resolution.

Stream Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime