In which the mystery gets stranger, the soap opera gets louder, and James Hurley goes for a very long ride.
This article contains spoilers for both seasons of the original Twin Peaks. It was written before watching Fire Walk with Me or The Return.
A guest post by JC Pass from Simply Put Psych
My Twin Peaks viewing progress when this article was written.
Spoiler boundary: Fire Walk with Me
These interpretations are preserved as written. Later discoveries haven't been used to tidy up earlier theories.
When I finished the first season of Twin Peaks, I was surprised by how much I'd enjoyed it. Not because I expected it to be bad, but because it wasn't quite the programme I'd imagined.
Years of cultural osmosis, references in other media, and a substantial amount of time playing Deadly Premonition had given me a reasonably confident idea of what Twin Peaks was supposed to be. Dark, surreal, mysterious, possibly populated entirely by people who spoke in riddles while standing next to trees.
Instead, I found something unexpectedly warm. A peculiar little town full of people who were often funny without seeming to realise it, presided over by an FBI agent who approached a good cup of coffee with roughly the same enthusiasm as a major forensic breakthrough.
Yes, there was a murder. Yes, something was deeply wrong in the woods. But there was also a fish in the percolator, an extraordinary amount of pie, and a sense that the smallest details of everyday life might be as interesting as the central mystery.
I wrote about that first encounter in I'd Already Seen Twin Peaks. Except I Hadn't.
Then I started Season Two.
And somewhere along the way, I began to suspect that the writers had been informed they had twenty-two episodes to fill and responded by opening several entirely new businesses.
Things Are Getting Stranger. Unfortunately, So Are the Subplots.
Season Two wastes very little time announcing that the supernatural elements are no longer content to remain politely in the background.
Agent Cooper has been shot. A mysterious Giant appears. Visions become increasingly important. The Red Room, previously experienced as something between a dream and an exceptionally unsettling hotel lobby, begins asserting itself as part of a much larger mythology.
Initially, this is exactly what I wanted.
The first season had spent considerable time suggesting that something existed beneath the ordinary reality of Twin Peaks. Now the programme seemed prepared to explore it. The woods were becoming more dangerous, the mysteries more elaborate, and Cooper's unconventional investigative methods were beginning to look less eccentric and more necessary.
And then there was the sawmill.
I realise that the mill had been important from the beginning. It represented the town's economic life, the Horne family's ambitions, and an increasingly complicated set of relationships involving the Packards and their associates.
But by the middle of Season Two, the business arrangements had become so convoluted that I was beginning to suspect the mill's primary product was additional plot.
People were dead. Except they weren't. People were conspiring against other people who were also conspiring, occasionally against themselves. Financial arrangements became more elaborate. A woman returned disguised as a Japanese businessman, and another supposedly deceased relative eventually emerged from hiding.
At one point, I found myself wondering whether anyone in Twin Peaks had actually died, or whether the entire town was operating an exceptionally ambitious witness protection scheme.
To the series' credit, one of its absurdly elaborate plots eventually pays off with an actual explosion.
That was appreciated.
Meanwhile, James Hurley Had Somewhere Else to Be
There is a particular kind of television subplot that seems to exist because someone looked at the episode count and became concerned.
For me, that subplot was James Hurley's motorcycle adventure.
James leaves Twin Peaks and becomes involved with a married woman, her husband and a situation that appears to have wandered in from an entirely different programme. The result is a familiar mixture of romantic misunderstandings, manipulation and danger, though without much of the atmosphere that made the original series interesting.
I kept waiting for the story to reconnect with something important.
It didn't help that James himself seemed to possess an almost supernatural ability to become involved in the least interesting romantic situation available.
And the problem wasn't simply that his storyline was predictable. Twin Peaks had always played with soap-opera conventions. The first season featured affairs, jealous lovers, family secrets and business conspiracies. None of that was new.
The difference was that those elements originally felt connected to the town and its central mystery. Even the sillier subplots contributed to the impression of a community whose ordinary relationships concealed something troubling.
James's excursion increasingly felt like a detour from a detour.
Eventually, I stopped wondering what would happen to him and began wondering when he might return to a story I was still watching.
Nadine Is Apparently the Only Student Who Attends Classes
Then there's Nadine Hurley.
Following her head injury, Nadine undergoes a remarkable psychological and physical transformation, believing herself to be a teenager and demonstrating extraordinary strength. This leads to her attending high school, participating in wrestling and pursuing an increasingly peculiar romantic life.
I genuinely don't dislike Nadine. In fact, her eccentricities were part of the original series' appeal. But by this point, I was watching a woman who had apparently become a superhero while simultaneously enrolling in the local school.
And she seemed to attend more classes than most of the actual teenage characters.
Meanwhile, Ben Horne undergoes his own transformation, becoming convinced that he is a Confederate general and embarking on a Civil War reconstruction as a form of therapy.
His psychiatrist, Dr Jacoby, enthusiastically participates.
I should probably mention that I've had concerns about Jacoby's professional judgement since the first season. His approach to psychiatric care appears to involve Hawaiian shirts, questionable boundaries and an almost competitive willingness to make an already strange situation considerably stranger.
The Civil War intervention did little to restore my confidence.
Taken individually, these storylines could be entertaining. Ben's descent into historical fantasy produces some genuinely funny moments. Nadine's superhuman adventures are undeniably memorable.
But together, they begin to overwhelm the programme's original balance.
Season One could make ordinary behaviour seem absurd. Season Two increasingly seemed determined to make the absurdity itself the main attraction.
And, curiously, I found it less strange as a result.
The Curious Case of a Mystery Becoming Less Mysterious
This was the biggest surprise.
Season Two is objectively more supernatural than Season One. There are visions, mysterious entities, ancient symbols, inexplicable disappearances, possessed people and increasingly elaborate discussions of the Black and White Lodges.
Yet I found myself becoming less curious about the town.
During Season One, I was paying attention to almost everything. A strange remark, a background character, an unexplained object or an unusual interaction might become important later. I was constantly forming theories and trying to work out which details mattered.
Some of those theories were more successful than others.
At one point, I became suspicious of the repeated references to hospital food. There seemed to be so many hospital scenes, unusual meals, injections and altered states of consciousness that I began entertaining the possibility of something considerably more elaborate.
I won't pretend this was my finest investigative achievement.
Elsewhere, though, I was making reasonably good connections. The Red Room seemed increasingly like a waiting room rather than a conventional location. The relationship between BOB, Leland and the supernatural mythology was beginning to suggest something much more disturbing than an ordinary murder investigation.
And then another sawmill scheme would arrive.
Gradually, I found myself changing the way I watched.
Instead of scrutinising every interaction, I began waiting for the parts involving Cooper, Major Briggs, the Lodges and the main mystery. The rest became something to get through before the interesting material returned.
This wasn't because I had stopped enjoying Twin Peaks. It was because the programme increasingly felt like two different shows competing for the same running time.
One was a wonderfully unsettling mystery about the relationship between ordinary life and something profoundly strange.
The other was a soap opera featuring several competing business empires, unusually eventful marriages and a surprising number of people who had been mistakenly declared dead.
I preferred the first.
When Twin Peaks Remembered What It Was Doing
Fortunately, the mystery never disappeared completely.
The revelation about Leland and BOB is one of the series' most disturbing developments, and it fundamentally changes how we understand Laura Palmer's death. It also raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility, possession and the difference between supernatural evil and recognisably human abuse.
The series becomes considerably darker here, even as some of its surrounding storylines remain determinedly ridiculous.
Major Briggs, meanwhile, becomes increasingly fascinating. His involvement with mysterious communications and unexplained phenomena gives the impression that the world of Twin Peaks extends far beyond the town itself.
Then there's Windom Earle.
His arrival introduces another kind of threat, one that draws Cooper back towards the psychological and supernatural dimensions of the investigation. Earle's elaborate schemes can be theatrical, and at times he seems to possess an almost excessive enthusiasm for disguises, but at least his presence gives the central mystery renewed momentum.
The introduction of Denise Bryson also deserves a mention. I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively sympathetic way the programme initially handles a transgender character in 1990. The writing is not free from the assumptions and limitations of its period, but Denise is allowed competence, humour and a personality extending beyond her gender identity.
And Cooper's response to her is entirely consistent with what makes him such an appealing protagonist.
He simply accepts that his colleague has changed and gets on with the investigation.
For a programme in which nearly everyone has a complicated secret, this may be one of its healthier interpersonal relationships.
Suddenly, Everything Is a Doorway
As Season Two approaches its conclusion, the mythology becomes increasingly elaborate.
There are owls, symbols, caves, mysterious markings and questions about whether the Lodges exist within the woods, outside ordinary reality or somewhere stranger still.
Josie Packard's death is particularly memorable, not least because her face appears to become trapped in a wooden drawer handle.
I cannot offer a convincing explanation for this.
I'm not entirely convinced the programme can, either.
But the difference between this and the endless business conspiracies is that I actually wanted to understand what had happened.
The supernatural elements were restoring the uncertainty that originally made the programme compelling. I didn't need every question answered. In fact, some of the pleasure came from trying to work out which questions could reasonably be answered at all.
This was the Twin Peaks I'd hoped to find.
And then came the finale.
See You Again in Twenty-Five Years
The final episode is a considerable departure from almost everything preceding it.
The Red Room returns, now less a peculiar dream sequence and more an elaborate nightmare. Characters appear, disappear, speak strangely and behave according to rules that Cooper, and certainly I, don't fully understand.
Time seems unreliable. Identity becomes uncertain. Familiar faces appear in unfamiliar roles, and the distinction between the person we know and the thing resembling them grows increasingly important.
After twenty-two episodes of financial manoeuvring, romantic complications and various forms of local administrative nonsense, the programme seems to have remembered that it can be genuinely terrifying.
Then it ends.
Cooper, the character whose presence held much of the series together, is apparently trapped somewhere beyond ordinary reality. Something resembling him has returned. The final image leaves little doubt that all is not well.
And that's it.
Imagine watching this in 1991.
You've spent two seasons following an increasingly bizarre investigation. You've survived the sawmill, James's motorcycle excursion, Nadine's second adolescence and Ben Horne's military re-enactments.
You've finally reached the heart of the supernatural mystery.
And the programme is cancelled.
I knew, of course, that Twin Peaks would eventually return decades later. It is difficult to approach the series today without knowing at least that much.
But the knowledge doesn't make the original ending any less extraordinary.
The television audience had no guarantee of a continuation. The final image of Cooper might have remained the last thing anyone ever saw of him.
There is something wonderfully cruel about that.
Did Season Two Lose Its Way?
I think it did, although not in the straightforward sense that everything after Laura's murder was a mistake.
The problem wasn't the supernatural mythology. If anything, some of the strongest material comes when the series commits more fully to the Lodges, BOB and the peculiar logic of Cooper's dreams.
Nor was the problem simply that Twin Peaks became a soap opera. It had been borrowing from soap operas since the beginning.
The problem was that the balance changed.
Season One allowed ordinary life and extraordinary events to coexist. The absurdity emerged naturally from characters who felt like inhabitants of a real, if rather eccentric, community.
Season Two often separated those qualities into competing storylines. The supernatural material became more explicit, while the soap-opera plots became increasingly elaborate and disconnected.
One half of the programme was asking profound questions about identity, evil, time and the nature of reality.
The other was asking whether somebody had successfully acquired a controlling interest in the local sawmill.
Both are legitimate questions.
I simply found myself more invested in one of them.
And perhaps that's what makes Season Two such a strange experience. Its worst stretches are frustrating precisely because its best moments are so compelling. I never quite stopped wanting to watch, even when I was increasingly impatient with what I was watching.
It's a peculiar achievement for a television programme to make you feel both fascinated and mildly held hostage.
Somewhere in Those Woods, There's Still Something Worth Finding
For all my complaints, I finished Season Two wanting more.
I wanted to understand the Red Room, the relationship between the Lodges and the woods, and what had actually happened to Cooper. I wanted to know whether the supernatural mythology possessed a consistent logic or whether I was simply constructing patterns from deliberately ambiguous material.
And I wanted to spend more time with the characters who had made the first season so enjoyable.
That, ultimately, is why I can't dismiss Season Two.
It made me considerably less interested in certain inhabitants of Twin Peaks, but it never entirely extinguished my interest in Twin Peaks itself.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the series is that it can become genuinely exhausting while remaining difficult to abandon. It gives you a glimpse of something extraordinary, wanders away for several episodes to discuss property development, and then returns with an image that makes you forget you were ever bored.
I'm not sure that's good television writing.
But it's certainly an experience.
And as I sit here at the end of the original series, with Dale Cooper trapped in a mysterious red room and the fate of the town unresolved, I find myself in a familiar position.
I thought I understood what Twin Peaks was.
Then Season Two happened.
And now I'm considerably less certain.
Although I remain fairly confident that the sawmill should have employed a better accountant.
