Twitter

Where to Stream:

Twin Peaks: The Return

“She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.”
With five words, the primary narrative engine of Twin Peaks kicked into gear. The dead girl, of course, was Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whom we would eventually discover had been raped by her father (himself possessed by an evil spirit) and who then attempted to annihilate her own identity through drug addiction and prostitution, before finally succumbing to a brutal murder by her own father’s hand, thus achieving some state of grace in the process.
Before we knew most of this, though, Laura Palmer became a structuring absence for the other characters on the show. Twin Peaks would not only be about the attempt to solve her murder, but it would also explore how one person came to affect everyone surrounding that investigation, for good and for ill. Laura Palmer was the beautiful and darkly beating heart of the town, and the show.

It wasn’t immediately apparent how Laura fit into the first nine episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. Instead, it was FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper/Cooper’s doppelgänger/Dale-Cooper-as-Dougie-Jones (Kyle MacLachlan) who was driving the story. Every thread of the ever-expanding narrative circled back to one of those three versions of Cooper.

And yet, Laura kept dancing around the edges, fleeting but always present in some way. In Part 2, she emerged in the Red Room to re-enact the famous dream Cooper had 25 years earlier. “Sometimes, my arms bend back” etc. etc. etc. Only this time, she declares, “I am dead, and yet I live,” before removing her face for a brief moment.
Upon kissing Cooper, she looks up, screams, and is dragged upward and out of frame. Moments later, Cooper stumbles upon her father, Leland (Ray Wise), who simply says, “Find Laura.” That’s the last we see, hear from, or are prompted to consider Laura.

At least, that’s the last we see of Laura for awhile. Cooper exits the Black Lodge, the Dougie journey begins, Richard Horne emerges as a bona fide monster, Hawk and Sheriff Truman begin to piece together the Cooper-Briggs mystery, Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield track down the doppelgänger and find Briggs’s body, and Diane gets involved. There’s a lot going on, but all of it has to do with Cooper and his mirror selves.
Laura almost forces her way to the surface. Her photograph triggers Bobby Briggs’s tear-filled remembrance in Part 4, and marks the first instance of diegetic use of the original series’ score. Hawk finds the missing pages of Laura’s diary, describing the dream she had of Annie relaying that Cooper was trapped in the Black Lodge. Ben Horne receives Cooper’s Great Northern key and is reminded of the events of 25 years ago. “That, my dear, is a long story,” he wistfully remarks to his assistant, Beverly.
Part 8 is the first time where we realize that Laura is as important to “all of this” as Cooper is. BOB is potentially birthed from the Trinity nuclear test, and as a reaction to BOB’s presence, the Giant and Senorita Dido release a golden orb with Laura’s iconic face into the world.

Many have assumed that this sequence follows some strict temporal linearity: Trinity erupts on July 16^th, 1945. The blast opens a gateway to the Black Lodge, which allows for BOB to reach Earth. As a response to the presence of pure evil in our world, Laura is sent as a force of good to counteract BOB. What this theory fails to appreciate is the way in which time is willfully bending in all sorts of directions, none more so than moments involving Laura. That’s the case in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, wherein Laura is visited by Annie before any of the events Annie describes has occurred. When Laura enters the Red Room, she is met and comforted by Dale Cooper, who, if we’re following a linear temporal progression, would be not yet on his way to Twin Peaks at all.
In the Red Room in Part 2, MIKE tells Cooper, “Is it future, or is it past?” After Laura is sucked up from the Red Room, the moment with MIKE repeats itself. The Evolution of the Arm states, “Time and time again.” The Log Lady tells Hawk, “The stars turn, and a time presents itself.” No matter how time actually moves in the series, it is far more elastic than people wish to acknowledge.
This is all to say that we don’t know when the Giant made the Laura orb, nor do we know what purpose it yet serves. We do know, however, that Laura is moving closer and closer to the primary narrative. Part 10 seals this when Cole answers Albert’s knock on his hotel room door, to be greeted by a distraught Laura. Specifically, this is the moment Laura goes to Harold Smith to hide her diary from her father/BOB. Laura’s spirit is puncturing this side of reality, though Cole—and we—don’t know why yet.

Hawk has already answered the clue the Log Lady left for him, and it led to Laura. When she returns, she can only offer one summary passage:
“Laura is the one.”
The one what? Unknown as of yet. What Hawk, Bobby, Sheriff Truman, Albert, Cole, Tammy Preston, Lieutenant Knox, Phillip Jeffries, Major Briggs, Cooper’s doppelgänger, and eventually Cooper himself are all working toward must come down to Laura. Her presence is still felt, even in its absence, even after all these years. Cooper must find Laura, wherever, and in whatever form, she may be. Laura is dead, and yet she lives.