Twin Peaks: The Return Was an Unlikely and Perfectly Timed Miracle

David Lynch died five days before Donald Trump began his second term as president. It feels too obvious of a metaphor: the artist who best understood and depicted America’s true self dying right before the man who most hideously personifies that true self returned to power. Lynch’s death is an incalculable loss, and the timing gave it an almost mythic relevance. It also underscored how unlikely the existence of Twin Peaks: The Return is, and how perfectly timed the 2017 release of this most crucial piece of Trump era American art was. 

Even with nostalgia’s dominance of pop culture and networks’ ceaseless hunger for content during the Peak TV era, Twin Peaks never seemed like a show that would get a revival. There have been two basic recipes for TV revivals over the last 15 or so years: hit sitcoms brought back with original cast members (Roseanne, Will & Grace, the ill-fated Murphy Brown reunion) or dramas rebooted with new, younger actors (Hawaii Five-0, Dynasty, Magnum P.I.) Twin Peaks was a legit pop culture phenomenon when it started in 1990, with over 40 million people watching its first episode, and remained a cult favorite continually discovered by new viewers every year, but its enduring mainstream reputation was that of a failure—a show that quickly drove away its audience by failing to solve its core mystery and indulging in a level of weirdness never before seen in a hit TV show. Ratings started to plummet immediately after the first episode of Season 2 failed to reveal who killed Laura Palmer, with fewer than a quarter of the pilot’s audience still tuning in late in Season 2. 1992’s cinematic sequel, the misunderstood and, at the time, widely derided Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, was a critical and commercial failure, and for 25 years that was all she wrote for Twin Peaks. The series ended with Agent Cooper trapped in the Hellish limbo of the Black Lodge, replaced on Earth by an evil doppelganger, and for all we knew that bummer of an ending would be the show’s final note. 

It was legitimately shocking when news broke in 2014 that Showtime were giving Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost the money to make a revival. This was almost a solid decade after David Lynch’s last movie, during an inconceivable stretch where nobody would fund a new feature of his. (Indeed, 2006’s Inland Empire was still Lynch’s latest feature film when he died last month, and will forever remain his last.) After the release of Inland Empire Lynch spent his time painting, making music, delivering weather reports on his website, directing a number of short films, and, between 2015 and 2017, working on Twin Peaks: The Return.

Showtime’s interest couldn’t have come at a better time, a stark fact quickly made apparent as actors from the show started to pass away before the series even premiered. Two original cast members, Miguel Ferrer and Warren Frost, died earlier in 2017; Catherine E. Coulson, who reprised her role as the Log Lady, filmed her scenes shortly before dying in 2015. Harry Dean Stanton’s death came less than two weeks after the final episode aired. Another Return actor, Brent Briscoe (who wasn’t in the original series), died suddenly the month after the show ended. In the years since we’ve lost original cast members Piper Laurie, Peggy Lipton, and Al Strobel, as well as Return stars Robert Forster (who stepped in for the show’s original sheriff, Michael Ontkean, playing that character’s brother) and Tom Sizemore, and, on January 15 of this year, Lynch himself. If Showtime had waited even two years to greenlight the revival, three key members of the original cast would’ve been gone, as well as standout later additions like Forster and Stanton. (Sadly David Bowie passed too early to reprise his Fire Walk With Me role as the director of the FBI’s esoteric Blue Rose Task Force; Lynch replaced him in The Return with… a giant telepathic tea kettle. No, it doesn’t make sense, but it also makes total sense.)

The Return’s timing wasn’t ideal just because many of its actors wouldn’t have been available if it was made any later. When it debuted in May 2017, we were still coming to grips with the unthinkable election of reality TV star and real estate huckster Donald Trump. (If that had been a plot point in Twin Peaks, people would have rejected it as being too unrealistic.) Those first few months of Trump’s first term weren’t as wall-to-wall chaotic as these first two weeks of his exponentially more unthinkable second term have been, but they still represented a miserable, embarrassing undermining of whatever positive illusions America had about itself. The Return arrived at a time when so many of the show’s original fans were exhausted, overwhelmed, and legitimately frightened by how Trumpism was tarnishing whatever goodwill or self-respect America had left; I wouldn’t go as far as to say the show gave us a communal outlet for those fears, but in its depiction of the weird, unknowable darkness that has always been America’s true legacy it shadowed what we were all living through, while also giving us something to focus on every week. When Twin Peaks aired in the early ‘90s people would have viewing parties and discuss it in detail around the water cooler or in the school cafeteria the next morning; in 2017 we shared our thoughts and reactions in text chains and social media posts, with a full week to ponder and discuss each episode. In many ways Twin Peaks: The Return was the last of the great weekly watch-alongs, a remnant of an earlier era where we watched TV shows at the same time every week for several months a year, instead of blitzing through them in two days to avoid getting spoiled by social media.

Twin Peaks: The Return was the perfect show for Trump’s first term because Twin Peaks has always been a show about America from all angles—the America we want to believe in and lie to ourselves about, and the America we actually live in, the America that would elect Donald Trump not once but twice: a country that preys on innocence, that exists to corrupt, that prioritizes its own sick desires over the welfare of others, that basically set the ultimate evil loose upon the world when we created the atomic bomb and ushered in a post-modern era where global annihilation was a single push of a button away. For all its esoteric humor, the soap opera pastiches that seem to exist simultaneously as parody and homage, the Eastern philosophy and elevation of non-traditional modes of thinking, that is Twin Peaks’ central message, and the one most synonymous with what Trump represents: there’s an evil at the heart of the world, and that evil is us.

We’re also good, though. There are decent people, and there are good people, and they may not make much of a difference, and they may constantly wilt in the face of the world’s true evil, but they do exist, and maybe if more of them existed the scales would even out. It took forever for Dale Cooper to escape the Black Lodge in The Return—almost the entire series, with the “real” Cooper only returning in the second-to-last episode—and when he did he was hopelessly confused and unprepared for the world he found himself in. Still, he made it out, and although many good people suffered under Trump, and many more will suffer even worse over the next four years, there’s still at least a slim hope that his catastrophic movement and the hatred and bigotry that he stands for will eventually pass, and that whatever goodness remains in America will be able to start countering the evil. We won’t have Twin Peaks to help us through this time—we’ll never have Twin Peaks, or anything else by Lynch, again—but, like the original series, The Return is always there when we need it. And “Fix Your Hearts or Die”—which Lynch’s character Gordon Cole says in The Return in response to anybody who mocked or belittled David Duchovny’s trans FBI agent Denise Bryson, and which has become a rallying cry against the Trump government’s war against trans people—might just outlive all of us and the show itself. Maybe it’s time to queue it up again and watch it every Sunday for the next 18 weeks?

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.