When Stanley Kubrick was about to shoot The Shining, legend has it he showed the cast and crew David Lynch’s demented debut feature Eraserhead to get them in the mood. Well watching the first two episodes of the long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks it seems that Lynch is returning the favour. In his own unique fashion.
With austere and painterly compositions and often glacial pacing, Lynch is working beyond the parameters of what we know as television. If Kubrick had gone on to make a television show, season three of Twin Peaks is a glimpse of what it could have been. With added giants, doppelgängers and a weird talking lump of flesh perched on a tree. But we’ll get to that later.
Anyone expecting easy answers to the numerous cliffhangers left dangling after season two was cruelly cancelled all those years ago will certainly be disappointed. Likewise, those more enamoured by the finger-clicking kookier soapie aspects of the show.
These may well develop as the 18 episodes play out but for the opening double episode, Lynch and Frost have delivered a brave, often unfathomable, two hours of absolutely-riveting television. Die-hard Peaks fans will be thrilled.
Welcome to Twin Peaks…
Not that it’s all esoteric weirdness and impenetrable chills. The sight of many of the familiar Twin Peaks locations hits you like a warm hug and it’s genuinely emotional when we start to meet some of the townsfolk we know and love.
And then there’s Agent Cooper. Last time we met the agent he was trapped in the Black Lodge while his Bob possessed evil twin was out on the loose. Things haven’t changed and Kyle MacLachlan has a ball playing the two Coops.
Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks.
Despite an eerie sojourn to New York City where a strange glass box is being fastidiously monitored and a new murder mystery in South Dakota, both proving that expanding the Twin Peaks universe is a good thing, it’s the big return to the Red Room that really sets pulses racing.
Paralleling shots from the classic “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer” episode of season one, Cooper once again meets Laura Palmer and the other denizens of the Black Lodge.
Mädchen Amick and Peggy Lipton in Twin Peaks.
It’s when the aforementioned amorphous fleshy oddity – the evolution of the one-armed man’s severed limb – starts pontificating that Lynch pulls the zigzag carpet from under us.
“He must come back in, before you can go out,” it reveals to Cooper, signposting possible story arcs. But as always with Lynch, we have no idea where those arcs will lead us.
Welcome back Twin Peaks, it’s been too long.
5 stars or slices of cherry pie.
