The third season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks completed its 18-part run on 3rd September, a full 25 years after the previous installment of the franchise: the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Like so much of contemporary culture, it promised my generation the chance to ‘relive’ a cultural memory that, although deeply engrained, we were too young to actually experience. It was carried onto screens on a wave of pre-emptive nostalgia, with a new generation of artists and commentators attesting to the deep and lasting influence of a cultural event that they missed the first time round.
Perhaps it was a lot easier to talk about Twin Peaks Season 3 (aka Twin Peaks: The Return, but henceforth Twin Peaks 3) before it actually happened. I've been struck by the comparative paucity of public discussion—especially now, in the wake of its cataclysmic final episode. I understand that this is partly a symptom of a strict taboo on spoilers (one of our culture's newest and most fearsome taboos), combined with the asynchronous nature of today’s streamed television ‘event’. Nevertheless, is there actually a consensus on whether Twin Peaks 3 was good or not? Was it as good as the original? Was it even better? From the few critical perspectives that have risen to the surface of public consciousness, it remains pretty hard to tell.
Still, this is hardly surprising. Twin Peaks was hard enough to talk about already, requiring 25 years of cultural digestion and canonisation to provide the meat for the think-piece previews. What's more, Twin Peaks 3 is nothing like Twin Peaks; in fact, taken in its 18-hour entirety, it is nothing like anything else. Showing an indifference to its own cult that borders on the sadistic, it seemed dead set on wrecking every planned fancy dress, coffee-and-cherry-pie viewing party. Of course, in denying the critics another shallow reboot that would cement the franchise’s existing reputation with triumphant reviews that read like eulogies, the new season has hopefully furnished us with decades of actual conversation, once the dust settles. This series of blogposts is my attempt to get in (relatively) early on the action.
