Twin Peaks' final scene: 25 years on, it's as disturbing as ever
It’s the anniversary of the weirdest conclusion to a major TV show ever screened – and one whose mystery may be solved by its return next year
It had been a long season, filled with humour and flailing and complete misdirection, by the time Kyle McLachlan’s Agent Cooper returned to the Red Room, a kind of purgatory in the thick woods outside Twin Peaks. “I’ll see you again in 25 years,” a spirit who looked like Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) told him in that episode, which aired 25 years ago today. Cooper had gone into the Red Room to save his love interest Annie (Heather Graham) from remaining in the Black Lodge – the show’s version of hell – indefinitely. He succeeded, but not before being pursued through the Red Room’s maze by a doppelganger.
Cooper woke up in his hotel room, surrounded by the sheriff and a doctor. He asked, “How’s Annie?” He was reassured that she was all right. He stepped into the hotel bathroom. He picked up a tube of toothpaste. He began squirting it into the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror then, and his eyes went dark. Suddenly, he smashed his forehead into his reflection. But the reflection, as it turned out, wasn’t his: it was of the demon Bob (Frank Silva), a malevolent entity with a flair for denim. The mirror cracked into a cobweb, blood dripped into the sink.
Turning toward the door, where the sheriff was knocking, Cooper took on Bob’s rictus grin, and starts mocking his act: “How’s Annie? How’s Annie? How’s Annie?”
Roll credits.
It was the beginning of a story, not the end. But it was the very last scene of Twin Peaks as a network show that had been weirder than anything television had seen before it aired in 1990 and 1991. ABC cancelled its hit show because it had struggled to keep the interest of its viewers after it revealed that Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), by way of Bob, was the one who’d killed his daughter, Laura. The mystery solved, some obsessives proved fickle and ratings dropped below blockbuster levels.
In hindsight, this seems silly of the network. They had a genuine piece of art in their hands, and one that had proven, with proper directing, to be able to sustain wide popular appeal. Whatever replaced Twin Peaks in its time slot has long been forgotten. Meanwhile our friends of the White and Black Lodges are still hot enough that a prequel appeared in 1992, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And Showtime will air its revival sometime late next spring with nearly the full cast returning, picking up where that uniquely strange scene left off, presumably to illuminate us on what Laura Palmer’s ghost truly meant by “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”
It’s almost like we’ve forgotten that when Twin Peaks disappeared from prime time, it had long been without a narrative direction. According to Brad Dukes’ Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks, for most of the second season, David Lynch and Mark Frost, the show’s creators, were preoccupied with other projects. (Lynch did not participate in the book, but Frost did.) And it’s not clear that there was ever a larger vision for the series than the nine-episode version of its first season. When Laura’s murderer was revealed, for example, even Wise wasn’t entirely sure that he was going to be the ultimate bad guy. “David said, ‘Ray, it’s you. It was always you,’” Wise is quoted as saying in Reflections. “I don’t know if that was true in his mind the whole time.”
Plotting was never the key to Twin Peaks anyway, only an excellent means of advertising, with “Who killed Laura Palmer?” plastered on bumper stickers across the country. Any detective novel worth the price on the cover could deliver twists just as unexpected as those which permeated Cooper’s investigation into Palmer’s death. What most any other show probably could not do is sustain the key Twin Peaks atmosphere of undeniable strangeness, the sweet combined with the sick in, for example, the weird way that Agent Cooper was obsessed with pie. No one is behaving recognizably human, most of the time, but it is possible to have great affection for the characters’ individual quirks. The pitch of the acting was always full tilt, campy without totally abandoning certain emotional undercurrents. It was uncanny camp, at best.
The supernatural elements of the show – the White and Black Lodges, the Red Room – obviously helped to keep goosebumps raised in the audience. But they were not strictly narrative “mythologies” in the way one comes to expect from genre shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or space operas. The horror of Bob was the horror of the way he looked, the way he walked, the fixed gaze of his eyes. He did not need a complicated backstory to menace you. Not unlike another bad guy of early-90s television, Tim Curry’s Pennywise the clown, the very look of him was enough. Backstory was irrelevant.
Whether the new show will be able to recreate that atmosphere is really the key question. Frost and Lynch have had 25 years to build up a proper story. Frank Silva, the set dresser who Lynch cast as Bob on a whim, died in the interim since the last series. But Lynch, reportedly, has directed the entire show himself. His brand of the uncanny can hardly be missing. After all, that unforgettable finale was largely Lynch’s baby. In Reflections, Dukes’ sources told him that last episode was shot largely off script, with Lynch improvising. The result was a magnetic hour that seemed to return to every element that had made the first 15 or 16 episodes of the show so unforgettable. It was too late by the time that last scene aired to save it. Hopefully that won’t be the case this time.
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