Twin Peaks

I can't quite gather all my feelings and emotions and put them into words, but simply put: I have an emotional connection to Twin Peaks.

First things first - if you asked me, "What is art to you?" my answer would be Wajdi Mouawad or Peter Brook's plays, cinematic visions like Mulholland drive or 2001 : a space odyssey , Dostoevsky's novels, or Mozart's music. I would never mention a TV show.

Then came Twin Peaks: The Return - and now, I consider a series to be one of the finest pieces of art I've ever experienced, perhaps even surpassing many cinematic works. David Lynch reached the peak of creativity with this.

I started watching it nearly a year ago, and for me, Twin Peaks became a companion through my lonely days and nights. Every character felt like a family member over these months, and I'll never forget any of them.

Maybe it's the finale that shook me the most - it disturbed me in a way I wasn't prepared for. I felt confused, even a little lost. But that confusion is exactly what makes it so unforgettable. It's haunting because it refuses to give you closure. It forces you to sit with questions that don't have easy answers - questions about identity, time, reality, and whether we can ever truly go back to anything. The whole season slowly unravels into something deeply existential, and by the end, I realized Lynch never intended to comfort us. He never offers answers - he just holds up a mirror and dares us to look. That, to me, is what makes The Return so profound.

When I watched Twin Peaks: The Return, I felt like I was witnessing a director working at the absolute height of his creative freedom. David Lynch didn't just make a sequel - he made a statement. This wasn't about fan service or wrapping things up neatly. It was about transforming the medium itself, about what television could be if it weren't bound by convention. I genuinely believe there's no other show like it. The Return is something closer to a moving painting, or maybe a dream you keep having but can never fully understand.

What makes Lynch's directing style so brilliant - and so frustrating to some - is that he embraces ambiguity. He isn't concerned with clarity. He chooses to focus on mood, texture, and raw emotion. There's a confidence in the way he holds on a shot just long enough to make you uncomfortable, or lets silence fill a room until it becomes its own character. He doesn't spoon-feed you anything. And somehow, it works.

Visually, The Return is stunning. He uses darkness like no one else. Shadows dominate scenes - both literally and metaphorically. And when there is light, it's often cold and surreal, or violently artificial, like the flickering neon in the Bang Bang Bar. His framing is deliberate, almost painterly, with so much attention given to the awkwardness of space and distance between people. It all adds to the unease. Even the digital cinematography, which some might find jarring at first, feels like a deliberate choice - a way to show the world through a warped lens, to blur reality with fiction.

Narratively, The Return is a maze. Lynch completely subverts the idea of nostalgia or resolution. Instead of giving us Dale Cooper as we remember him, we get Dougie Jones - a hollow version of him for most of the season. And somehow, that absurd, frustrating choice becomes brilliant. It forces us to feel the weight of lost time, identity, and purpose. When Cooper finally returns, it's euphoric - but even that moment doesn't last. Lynch is constantly reminding us: "You will never go back to how things were."

The themes of Twin Peaks as a whole are so profound that I still don't think I've fully unpacked them. Identity, trauma, duality, the nature of evil, the illusion of time - it's all there. Laura Palmer isn't just a girl who was murdered. She becomes this symbol of suffering, of purity corrupted, and also of resistance. Lynch doesn't treat evil as something that can be easily explained or defeated. It's everywhere - in the woods, in our homes, in ourselves. And then there's Judy, or Jowday, this metaphysical force of pure malevolence that's never truly seen but always felt. You can't fight it head-on. You can't even fully understand it.

And then there are the absurd fan theories - which I love. Some people think Cooper is trapped in a time loop. Others say Laura is actually the dreamer, or that the whole thing is playing out in some alternate dimension within her mind. There's the idea that The Return is a meditation on art itself - Lynch literally creating a world and then trying to save his own creation. And of course, Monica Bellucci's dream - "We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream" - is maybe the most cryptic, and most revealing, line in the entire show. That moment hit me hard. It felt like Lynch wasn't just telling a story - he was questioning the very act of storytelling.

What makes Twin Peaks: The Return a masterpiece in my eyes isn't just the complexity or the visuals or even the sound design (which is incredible). It's the feeling that David Lynch is operating on a frequency most people can't hear. He's not trying to impress anyone. He's just being, expressing something deeply personal, something raw and often uncomfortable. It's not always fun. It's not always entertaining. But it's honest. And in a world full of media that's trying so hard to be palatable, Lynch's work feels like a scream in the void - haunting, beautiful, and impossible to forget.

It's condescending to tell people they don't 'get it', and it's narrow-minded to claim anyone who loves it is pretentious. I adored this new Twin Peaks, and I understand why it's divisive.

In his old age, an artist had a chance to throw a kitchen sink's worth of ideas on screen, under the banner of his old show, with complete creative control. Good on him I say! That creative control means many of the aspects which came from others in the original show are missing.

I was compelled from start to finish. I appreciated its slow rhythms, found the pacing hypnotic. I'd understand why many fans would despise its new form. I wouldn't blame them for it.

If you're after a fully-resolved, tightly-plotted, didactic storytelling, you won't get it. You'll be frustrated by scenes which suggest the story is kicking into high gear in traditional Hollywood ways, only to then be presented with a five minute shot of a man cleaning a floor.

This jarring approach... loose ends, unresolved plots, ambiguity and odd pacing are understandably annoying for many. It does lack the melodrama of the earlier series, but there's still a warmth to many of the characters, you are just less guided by music and tight plotting. It's a feat to me that it is somehow utterly absurd yet simultaneously feels more grounded, but this show is not going to tell you a tight story with a guiding hand.

Personally, I haven't received this feeling from any US cinema in the past few decades, and I love it. Twin Peaks The Return gave me space to let my mind wander in the same way an Apichatpong Weeresthekul film might. That's a very personal thing, for me it's not boredom, it's a space to imagine and open my mind.

There's a lot of hyperbole surrounding David Lynch but his works are the summation of his very clear influences, like any other artist. You can see it all very clearly, and I happen to share many of his loves, so it's exciting for me. Here it's the usual Cocteau, Anger visuals, noir and 50s stylings, but there are clear nods to everything under the cinematic sun, from Jacques Tati to Tarantino and early silent cinema. I loved that, it feels like a celebration of cinema!

The tone jumps from humour to horror in a heartbeat, each episode is jarring in barely-cohesive ways but for me, somehow it coalesced. The show feels liberated, free of expectation and cliché. It put me under a spell, certainly not because I was instructed to by critics at large but because together, all these disparate elements felt refreshing.

I don't think it's a puzzle to be solved, I don't think there's a bullet-point explanation to the story sitting in a locked vault. I do believe the broad intention was to make you think, imagine and question what you're used to being fed by TV and films.

Would I watch it if it weren't called Twin Peaks and weren't by David Lynch? Yes. Should it have been called Twin Peaks, and is it kicking fans in the face by doing so? Very likely. I think that's what makes it so anarchic and brilliant. I also fully understand why many wouldn't want that from Twin Peaks.

What a fascinating case of mass self-delusion this has been. It's truly amazing and disgusting how heavily people are stroking themselves over their ability to force themselves to choke down something that is so very poorly executed just so they can reach that oh so "clever" hidden story within.

Look, I know that it must be very comforting to keep talking down to people about how they just don't get the weirdness and complexity of it all (because WOW, use of metaphor and non-linear storytelling in the video medium? UNHEARD OF!), but that's really not the problem here. It's the absolutely abysmal pacing and structure. Yes people, we get it. Lynch likes to pull the same old thing out of his bag of tricks that he always has, where he tries to artificially induce unease by drawing scenes out well past their welcome, except instead of the handful of times spread out across a 2-3 hour movie we are now treated to 45/60 minutes of this filler in each episode of an 18 hour saga, leaving very little room for any actual worthwhile content. You don't need to be a mathematician to see that the ratio between the two is incredibly uneven.

But OK, yippee hooray for ARTISTIC INTEGRITY! He has such complete free rein to spew out completely unfettered streams of consciousness that no one at all will dare to tell him that maybe things like having a confused old woman talking to the police about who has the keys to a door for 10 straight minutes is an absolute waste of film, and none of you will dare admit that this pile of slop is in dire need of editing because you're too busy preening about what an artistic genius Lynch is, and how open-minded and avant-garde you are by extension for being able to wrap your heads around a plot that's literally been done a hundred times before in superhero comic books.

A big slow clap for you all.

It's finally here! And the first 2 hour episode of season 3 is an absolute joy to watch. When the original series aired, i was in my early teens, but i could still enjoy the show. I might not have understood all that was going on, but as it turned out, neither did anyone else.

This was the magic behind Twin Peaks, it had no conclusion, like ever. It's the everlasting chase or hunt for something, that is never found. And once the murderer was revealed in the original series, the viewers left the show quickly, it wasn't suppose to be revealing. People watched it for the mystery, and apparently this mystery could have been stretched for 10 seasons, and people would still have been glued to their seats every time a new episode aired. The show was that captivating, more so than almost anything ever aired before.

This was so different from anything else back then, no one had ever dared to make something like this, almost not even with movies. Actually the show was intended to be just a TV movie, but the people that saw it went ballistic, so they decided to make 7 episodes to air. But then the show exploded in popularity and got 10+ emmy award nominations and suddenly the show became insanely popular.

It's kind of a mystery how, it was definitely not a show made for everyone, but still, it ranks as one of the best shows of all time. Why? What was so special about this show? Well you could probably line up 10 professors and movie experts to try and explain it, you would probably get 10 different answers.

So here we are 25+ years later. The first episode of the new season has just aired, and i am thrilled. This was an absolute joy to watch, and it captures the essence of the original series really well. You can tell that Lynch is all over it, he has total control. And just as you would expect, it is bizarre, weird, mystical, scary and incredibly entertaining. And i have no idea what so ever what is happening.

When i saw this first episode i thought of Quentin Tarantino a lot and how great he is at setting up conversation scenes with lots of tension, like the pipe scene at the beginning of Inglorious Basterds. Which is one of the best scenes in all of movie history.

Here in this first episode you have this kind of tension in almost every scene, and the people could be doing anything. Eating donuts, checking voicemails, deliver packages, watch TV, have sex. Whatever, the suspense is with it all the way, and i have no idea why, because i have no clue what I'm watching. It's just there.

This is one of the things that makes Twin Peaks so special, you are just along for the ride, no matter where it takes you, just enjoy the moment. Let it embrace you, it is what you want it to be. And this show does this better than any other TV show in history. The new season is apparently no exception. After the first episode I'm sold, when the song was performed at the end of it, while we see many of the original cast come together, that just sealed it for me, what a way to continue the saga. Absolutely brilliant film making.

I can't wait to see the rest of it, this is quality.

10/10 first episode - Masterful

David Lynch is at his best here in the new Twin Peaks series. There seem to be few restraints on his artistic vision, and it's all framed in a familiar story with Mark Frost's tempering still present.

Disclaimer: if you were not a fan of the original series because it was too weird, or "slow", or disturbing, then you will probably not like this latest season. There are tons of weird and disturbing scenes, and Lynch has no qualms making you stare at something for long periods of time. This has the effect of drawing you in as a viewer, but for some it may be off-putting or even offensive. He definitely, as always, takes firm grip on your viewing experience and will not let go.

I was worried going into watching the first 4 episodes that they would just reunite the cast and kind of riff off the original series. From very early on, however, it becomes apparent this is whole new material. Loved characters are still there (almost all of the old cast), but they are going through brand new things.

However, the charm of Twin Peaks is still alive and well. The most bizarre and yet oddly insightful scenes are counter-weighted constantly with everyday buffoonery.

I was pretty amazed by some of the new visual ideas Lynch had, which shouldn't be surprising because he is a master at surprising his audience, but you never know if someone might just run out of ideas. Clearly this is not the case. In every episode, there is tons to wonder and behold.

I'm very happy that Lynch is directing every episode. In my opinion, much of the "middle part" of the old series was tiresome. This is understandable because apparently Lynch was often off doing his own thing, leaving the production without a guide, but he is apparently fully on-board for this new project, and for that we are thankful.

All of the cast is great, really great, but it's really a treat to see the amazing combination of Kyle MacLachlan's acting under David Lynch's direction. The two just work so damn well together, and there's tons of new material here for MacLachlan to work with. It really is a pairing that ranks up there with Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock.

Kudos to Showtime for reviving my favorite show on TV, and allowing David Lynch to do what he does best. Here's hoping the season is a great success and we get even more! I watched the 4 episodes available tonight, and I am sad that it will be two weeks until I see another new one. However, I've waited 25 years for the first one, so a couple weeks shouldn't be too difficult. It's really nice to have an amazing show to look forward to again.