Twin Peaks: The Return

The return to Twin Peaks was always going to be a fraught one; no wonder creators David Lynch and Mark Frost left it for a quarter of a century. Not only does this new series fulfil the promise made by Laura Palmer to Agent Dale Cooper in the original finale ("I'll see you again in twenty-five years"), it also allowed its writers and director plenty of time to find a way back in. This is not a nostalgic return or a franchise extension, this is as difficult a piece of filmmaking as Lynch has ever attempted.

If the key figures of the original series were Laura Palmer (dead) and Special Agent Dale Cooper (sent to investigate Laura's murder), they both got resolutions to their story - Cooper in the series' cliffhanger finale and Palmer in the prequel feature, Fire Walk With Me. That film was criticised for not feeling enough like the TV series that preceded it and yet it feels like a piece with the original in a way The Return does not. At least, not yet.

In that long-ago TV finale, Dale Cooper went to another dimension - the Black Lodge - to save his love, Annie; he got stuck there but his evil doppelganger returned to the bucolic small town, ready to wreak death and destruction. But by then the axe had fallen and the TV series was over. The ending to the series, a classic tragedy; a hero defeated by his imperfect courage in the face of evil.

Twenty-five years later, Dale Cooper is still stuck in the Black Lodge and it's almost time for him to leave. DoppelCooper is alive and well (MacLachlan in bad mullet wig) and driving around to a Trent Reznor score causing all sorts of havoc and violence. To friends and colleagues, Dale Cooper disappeared. But the destruction his evil twin is causing is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Meanwhile, Laura Palmer, after suffering terribly in life and finding some measure of peace at the end of Fire Walk With Me, has somehow had her eternal rest disrupted. Where has she gone?

The original show was a small-town detective mystery soap opera with supernatural elements. This new show is defiantly not that. The soap opera elements are all but gone. The detective angle is deliberately obtuse. The supernatural elements have come to the fore, though. This, as we had been warned, was "pure heroin" Lynch, uncut by network or narrative demands. This is the wild ride of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr with a heavy dose of Eraserhead for good and bad measure.

The new series is scattered across the United States. We spend much of the first episode in New York with Tracey and Sam, ensconced on a couch, watching a large glass box, waiting for something to appear. We get a detective mystery in South Dakota, where Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard) is accused of a murder that he dreamed of but insists he didn't commit.

And then there are peeks into Twin Peaks itself, which only resembles the town we remember in the most surface of ways. We recognise the characters but they don't quite feel like themselves; is this the result of twenty-five years of ageing or is this Lynch/Frost resisting the expected? Gone is the passionate melodrama, replaced with long scenes of awkward silences and barely any score to be heard.

Margaret, the Log Lady, is briefly glimpsed in two phone calls to Deputy Hawk, putting him on the path to find something that's missing. The Horne Brothers are still scheming - and selling legal marijuana. Lucy and Andy still work at the Sheriff's station - and Lucy can't get her head around modern technology.

Lynch seems to resist technology, too. It's been a recurring theme of his work, since Eraserhead questioned industry and man-made chickens, through Lost Highway's distaste for video cameras. Behind-the-scenes, Lynch has embraced digital photography, though, meaning the new series looks crisp and clean, but is devoid of the warmth of the old series. And while The Return has laptops and cellphones, Lynch isn't interested in having them work like you would expect.

Frustratingly, as in much of Lynch's work, women get a very raw deal. Even in the original 1950s aesthetic of Twin Peaks, the female characters - though wives and waitresses - had minds and urges of their own. The Return isn't giving us any of that at all. The women are on the periphery, on the margins and the victims of torment and violence. This is something I had hoped wouldn't be a central aspect of this new series, but alas, Lynch seems to have not changed much in this regard.

There's a great balance of humour and horror and the melding of different genres is as striking as you might expect from a Lynch/Frost collaboration. Once something appears in that glass box, it is decidedly freaky. Once Andy and Lucy's son Wally appears, you'll be rolling on the floor laughing. And Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), of all people, brings back a potent reminder of the awkward melodrama the original excelled at.

Lynch and Frost don't seem too concerned about pandering to an audience of fans or casual viewers: story threads are unclear, and we don't have a lead character at all. Mark Frost's book, The Secret History Of Twin Peaks, implied that Special Agent Tamara Preston might take the lead, but so far Chrysta Bell's breathy, swishy supermodel performance isn't really fitting that bill.

But we are only four parts in, barely at the act one turning point of a traditional narrative, and we do get a sense from Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) and Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch, getting more screen time than most of his supporting cast) that the story and characters might converge on that town in the Pacific Northwest soon. I'm not sure exactly what story we're watching, though. What is the narrative hook? What do these characters want? Where are we headed?

As with much of Lynch's work, this new series is fascinating, maddening, compelling and distasteful. Can you go home again? Dale Cooper wants to, but right now he hasn't the coordinates or the basic human functions to make that happen. This series will be Cooper's long, strange journey back to Twin Peaks. Viewers may have thought the 25-year wait to get here was a long and difficult one, but these coming months may prove longer and more difficult.