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| David Lych |
Review: In ‘Twin Peaks,’ an Old Log Learns Some New Tricks
One of the creepiest images in the new “Twin Peaks” is a glass box, ensconced in a window in New York City, which is kept under constant observation in case something comes through it. (Not-such-a-spoiler alert: Something does.)
“Twin Peaks,” returning 27 years after its debut, is no longer brand-new under the sun. But in its familiarly inscrutable first two hours, shown Sunday night on Showtime, it still has the ability to turn your TV into that box — a quietly menacing portal through which something horrifying or wondrous might burst at any moment.
The broad strokes of the new story are easy enough to lay out. F.B.I. Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) remains where the series left him: in the Black Lodge, the red-curtained lobby of the netherworld where he’s been trapped for 25 years. A wicked doppelgänger (Mr. MacLachlan, Elvis-ed out in a leather jacket and mane of hair) has taken his place. For Cooper to leave, his evil twin must be returned.
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| Suzanne Tenner |
But there is a lot left hanging in this far-flung narrative, including a briefly introduced thread in Las Vegas and the matter of who is watching that box in Manhattan and why. We’ve also yet to see much of the huge cast — Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Michael Cera and the returning Sherilyn Fenn, to name a few — that will populate this limited series.(Don’t call it Season 3, by the way. The creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, conceived it as a single 18-hour work, and the first two “parts,” as Showtime calls them, don’t feel particularly episodic.)
Alongside the introductions are a great number of curtain calls, among them Margaret the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson), now using an oxygen tube; Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) and Andy (Harry Goaz), whose son, last met in utero, is now 24; Shelly (Mädchen Amick) and James (James Marshall), making eyes at each other across the Bang Bang Bar.The most affecting return, though, is Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, whose death set the series’s original story in motion. Reappearing to Cooper in the Black Lodge, she summons her character’s luminous, doomed teenage smile, as though she really were frozen in eternity: “I am dead, yet I live.”
This is the closest the premiere comes to recapturing the raw emotional pull that — more than any mystery — made the original run great.As inventive as it was, the “Twin Peaks” of 1990-91 was also a creature of its time, borrowing elements from prime-time soaps and detective series. To watch its new iteration is to be reminded of what TV has done in its absence.
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| Suzanne Tenner |
There are shades of “Lost” in that glass mystery box — especially when it eventually fills with a murderous apparition in black smoke. There’s more than a little “Fargo” in the darkly funny subplot in which a South Dakota man (Matthew Lillard) may have committed murder, à la Leland Palmer, under paranormal influence. There may be too much of “True Detective” and other hard-boiled kill-dramas in the journey of Evil Cooper, which culminates in his murdering his lingerie-clad partner (Nicole LaLiberté) in bed.
Of course, it’s ridiculous to suggest that “Twin Peaks” is borrowing these elements so much as borrowing them back.And even after nearly three decades, Mr. Lynch’s visual imagination remains inimitable: an ace of spades with a misshapen symbol in the center; Laura removing her face, beneath which is cold white light; the “arm” — one of the mystic denizens of the Lodge — represented now not by a dancing dwarf but by a tree with a head of blobby flesh. The Black Lodge scenes are as unsettling as any in the second-season finale or the prequel film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.”
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