'Twin Peaks': Thoughts on a rewatch

Some observations about my latest look at David Lynch’s masterpiece TV series.

Let’s rock…

Like many people, I’ve taken David Lynch’s recent passing as an opportunity to take another look at Twin Peaks, the classic 1990-1991 TV series Lynch created with Mark Frost. The series is streaming on Paramount+ in its entirety.

As I mentioned in my tribute to Lynch two weeks ago, I fell in love with Twin Peaks when I first watched it back during the original run, even though I was in 7th and 8th grade those two years, and was almost certainly way too young to understand it.

I’ve rewatched the show a few times over the years, but I’ve started to realize that most of my rewatches only got as far as the first season, or maybe the first season, and the part of the second leading up to the reveal of Laura Palmer’s killer. When I got to the notorious “bad” part of Season 2, I realized there were certain parts I had no memory of ever seeing before, like the Norma’s-mom-as-a-food-critic plot.

I’m not done rewatching yet; I’m up to the Josie-in-the-knob episode, which, if memory serves, was followed by a long hiatus during the original run. I have not yet revisited Twin Peaks: The Return, which I watched weekly in 2018 but haven’t watched since, but I hope to do so.

Some observations on the rewatch:

• Yes, it’s still great. When it comes to just how great the look and feel is, Twin Peaks has never been equaled once, in the history of television. The visual style, the atmosphere, Angelo Badamalenti’s music… it doesn’t get any better, and none of it has aged a day.

• In the entire run of Twin Peaks, only a couple of weeks pass. This can be easy to forget, but by the end of the second season, Laura Palmer has only been dead for about a month.

• Agent Dale Cooper is still an all-timer TV character, although I must say: If I ever heard a real-life law enforcement authority figure make decisions based on his dreams, supernatural hunches, or that business with throwing rocks at glass bottles, I’d probably want them to take away his badge.

• That whole Bookhouse Boys thing is also somewhat questionable- an extrajudicial, vigilante secret society, led by the sheriff, that does things like kidnap people and conduct raids across state lines.

• The Twin Peaks sheriff’s station employs about five people, yet at any given time there are enough donuts on hand to feed a small army.