Twin Peaks

I do not wait to eat the entire cake before I know if it is any good and that I enjoy it, do you? I don't stuff my face full of mouthfuls of dry, sawdust tasting frosting while I wait to see if there is a hidden treat in the midst of the baked mound. Do you? I like to enjoy what I do and what I watch while I am doing it and while I am watching it. Call me old fashioned.

If you're not a fan of David Lynch then you're not going to like this show. End of story. Unless you've watched and loved Lynch's movies like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, then you're not going to like The Return. This is hardcore Lynch, challenging for even his biggest fans. I wouldn't call The Return a sequel to the original Twin Peaks. It's more a sequel to Fire Walk With Me than anything else, with a few elements of Twin Peaks sprinkled in. So, if you're just a fan of the original Twin Peaks and you're not familiar with Lynch's work, then The Return is not for you. You're not going to like it, I can assure you of that.

This is ARTHOUSE TV. It's not a murder mystery like the original. It's a hardcore surrealist midnight movie style psychological horror. And while I love it because of that, I can see why some people hate it.

A quarter of a century after it ended, Twin Peaks gets a season 3. That in itself is part of the weirdness of Twin Peaks; it's not a reboot, or a remake, it's just ... season 3, picking up just where season 2 left off.

No one but David Lynch would do that.

I suspect whether you will love or hate this series return (and people seem to do one or the other) will depend on what you liked about the original Twin Peaks. If you liked the quirky soap opera aspect of things in plot threads like the lumber mill, well, this might not be for you. If, like me, your favorite scenes were the really weird ones like the hotel scene that began episode 2 and the amazing scene of the kid and the creamed corn, and if you didn't understand while people didn't appreciate the utter brilliance of Fire Walk With Me, then you'll probably like this.

The series begins with the weirdness turned up to ten and the eventfulness turned down to zero, as though Lynch is saying, yes, I made Twin Peaks, but don't forget I'm also the guy who did Inland Empire.

After a while the Inland Empire aspects thankfully become fewer and there is more of the quirky humor of the original series (as in a scene with cops try to track down a key to an apartment), actual story and character, and Lynch's typical approach of painting a placid surface and then showing the rot underneath. And some of the old elements of the series, like a weirdly ageless Kimmy Robertson as Lucy and Lynch as Gordon Cole, are every bit as fun and funny as they were in the original.

At times full Lynchian madness flares up, like the a-bomb test episode that thrilled some people and that annoyed others, like me. Other times, Lynch shocks everyone by actually offering detailed explanaions of some of the mysteries he has raised in the original series and Fire Walk with Me. At times Lynch seems to be saying, "here's a sensible answer to that thing you've been wondering about for years, but before you get too happy here's another unexplained weird thing to replace that."

I wasn't as fanatic about Twin Peaks as some people. I didn't find the pilot especially interesting until funny, eccentric Dale Cooper appeared, and without Kyle MacClachlan I probably never would have watched the second episode. I didn't fully love the series until the incredible weirdness of the second season, and that love didn't last long since the show quickly spiraled into a disastrous mess.

That may be why I enjoy this third season and Fire Walk With Me; they represent David Lynch giving me the aspects of the series I love without all the boring soap stuff.

Some of Twin Peaks is hugely annoying, other parts are utterly fascinating. Overall, I found it very entertaining, and if it's not everything I want (after 4 episodes I rated this 9 stars, but at season's end dropped it to 8), well, that's David Lynch.

One final note. I've seen several reviews saying that the only people who like this series are "hipsters." This is the silliest critique I've ever seen. I'll admit I don't know much about hipsters except they wear funny mustaches and churn their own butter, but my guess is hipsters are not all people who like to watch a revival of a series they don't remember starring a bunch of people old enough to be their parents. Just a guess.

No, you silly 1-star reviewers, I'm not a hipster, and I'm not, as some have suggested, a "paid reviewer" (although if someone can tell me how to make money by writing IMDb reviews please do so). I'm just someone who likes David Lynch when he's very weird but not tediously, incomprehensibly so. And that's what, for the most part, Twin Peaks the Return gives its audience.

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.