Ronette’s flashback “May the Giant Be With You, ‘ Episode 201 Twin Peaks got away with showing a lot of scary, violent imagery on a broadcast network, especially for 1990-91, and Ronette’s flashback to BOB killing Laura in the train auto is one of the scariest”.
Advertisement
Where you’ve seen him since: In Lynch’s movie “The Straight Story“, but probably not much else. The series, co-written by Lynch and Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, comes in the form of an 18-part movie disguised as a television series, with each installment directed by Lynch himself.
In October 2014, it was announced that the show would not have a remake or a reboot, but rather a continuation of where they left off.
For ardent fans, it’s been a date circled in red on calendars with the fervent urgency of a thousand birthdays come crashing together; for those new to the show, however, the entire idea can seem a little daunting. To mark the show’s return, TIME commissioned photographer and artist Todd Hido to revisit the forests of Washington state for a photo essay inspired by the locations used in the original pilot.
Interestingly, one hit show has been a bit under the radar with its Twin Peaks references is Stranger Things.
What has seemingly changed is the ability to reach a mass audience with that sort of densely crafted exercise – and an explosion of options that happily cater to a passionate niche.
“The writers would say to me: ‘I didn’t really think it was possible to do this, but because of Twin Peaks, suddenly I felt empowered, this is my vision'”.
Several years ago, apparently, Lynch’s music supervisor, Dean Hurley, noticed something unusual while looking at the MIDI notation of Badalamenti’s song: It pretty clearly resembled the show’s titular geographical features, as seen on the “Welcome to Twin Peaks sign” seen in the show’s credits. But with the arrival of eccentric Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Dale Cooper, the series takes a hard left turn into the realm of the freakish, the supernatural, and the just plain nutty.
“They let me read it all the way through, and then I had to pass the script back”, MacLachlan says.
Allie Cardot (’18), a self-described expert on “Twin Peaks”, does not have any theories regarding the passage of 25 years.
And that’s about all we know. “He only has a few episodes in the original series, and you know which ones they are”.
ABC did order more episodes, but Season 2 imploded halfway through.
His treasured motifs – metaphysical waiting rooms with red curtain walls, unaccountable doppelgangers, shots that plunge into tiny abysses, distorted and disassociated voices (why, exactly, did Freddie Jones have a helium squeak in Wild at Heart?), shrieking psychopathy lurking beneath the surface of ordinary life, etc. – have become, bizarrely enough, recognizable parts of the broad cultural slipstream. And I wanted to go back in there.
Asked why Dern is in this new incarnation, Lynch declared: “I love Laura Dern”.
“I grew up in a very religious household so we were not allowed to watch shows of that nature”, he said. Especially with having the same producers.
Suddenly the quirky cult show from the Nineties has become the biggest television event of the year.
“I wasn’t the same person that I was 25-plus years ago, obviously, and this wasn’t Cooper as he was then”.
The show quickly gained a loyal fan base, which has grown decades later thanks to a new generation of devotees who took to binge-watching episodes. I think that that’s what really made a huge difference then, gave a long-lasting timeless quality to it. I love that world and all the characters from the original series. Sendzimer said, “You don’t realize how much influence the show has had on modern pop culture”.
Another way the revival is “just a little bit different” than most other high-profile television experiments: we know nearly nothing about it, at least on a story level. They end with us exhausted, anguished, screaming to get out.
As cliche as it is, the wait is finally over.
Advertisement
Leland is also discovered to be responsible for the earlier murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) in a neighbouring town, alongside the death of Laura’s doppelgänger cousin Madeleine Ferguson (Lee). Agent Cooper slams his forehead into his bathroom mirror and staring back at him is Killer BOB. How is Annie? These questions will hopefully be answered, but with as arcane as the teasers have been, no one can know for sure. In the show’s heyday, NY magazine’s John Leonard wrote, “Everybody in the continental United States – including my children, my editors, my enemies – wanted to know about the dwarf”.
