David Lynch took back the writer/director’s chair for the eighteen hours of Showtime’s return to Twin Peaks, Washington, delivering an absolutely disjointed and unsettling chapter in the legendarily weird?Twin Peaks?franchise.?Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series?drops viewers into the action of the previous series (1990-91), where it left off last – Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is stuck in the The Black Lodge, with a host of mysteries to unpack.
I’m not even sure what to tell readers about what it means. I’m not sure if it actually means anything! But MacLachlan in Lynchian style plays Cooper, and a doppleganger, and a character named Dougie Jones who is another twist on what is going on here. But the dichotomy between the upstanding investigator Cooper tries to be with his violent alter ego might be enough to create confusion, even before possession, inhabitation, and other sorts of mystical stuff get all?Doctor Strange-d up in this one.
While MacLachlan is are main foil in a story that makes Neil Gaiman’s?American Gods?look linear, there are a parade of additional cast members reprising roles or fleshing out the new Twin Peaks. Actors like Michael Cera, David Duchovny, Ashley Judd, Robert Forster, Moby, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Chamberlain, Miguel Ferrer, David Koechner, Robert Knepper, Tom Sizemore, Matthew Lillard, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Lynch himself cross the screen. It’s another reminder of the singular pull of the director, and the sprawling world that he created.
In the end, you get a cliffhanger – just like it began – showing a circular, tense world of power plays and struggles. What you get out of it probably depends on what you’re willing to put in, but the end result is ultimately an epic power struggle between good and evil.
Special features add even more (four-plus hours worth) to the environment Lynch has created, with “Impressions: A Journey Behind the Scenes of Twin Peaks” that even allow us to see this renowned filmmaker at work, along with a look at the Comic-Con Panel from San Diego that’s an hour by itself, plus Lynch-produced promos, and three special features distinct to the Blu-ray (A Very Lovely Dream: One Week in Twin Peaks, Behind the Red Curtain, I Had Bad Milk in Dehradun).
