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Twin Peaks starts out with a dead body, the body of the beautiful young girl Laura Palmer wrapped in plastics, a girl who's been everybody's darling, the perfect girl in a perfect little 1950s-like Middle American small town a small town in Washington State, near the Canadian border. The investigation of the death of Laura Palmer brings on the appearance of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, a man whose outlook on life is mostly positive, quite some delightful character and Kyle McLachlan's role of his life, it seems. The weird cast easily anticipates and effortlessly surpasses Picket Fences, the mad Windom Earle anticipates and exceeds Profiler's serial killer Jack of All Trades with all his silly and bloody games. Certain allusions to Project Bluebook make us believe the show deals with extraterrestrial phenomena, other elements indicate metaphysical, spiritual, religious matters: Ghosts, monsters, Evil in general; angels. It's all a big mystery, and it's a strange, strange world inspired to a high degree by Lynch's 'Blue Velvet'.
The episodes flow fluently into each other, the music of Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch and Julee Cruise creates a dark, sad and depressing mood, the characters often act strangely and crazy, sometimes too slow, sometimes erratic.
Twin Peaks can be seen as predecessor of The X-Files, although the character of the show is much different. But through Twin Peaks the ensuing hype regarding unexplained and strange phenomena may have been influenced; but Twin Peaks is still just playing with those ideas, it has more of an adventurous approach. Its paranormal is turned inside, is psychological rather than manifest. If Twin Peaks' mood is sad, the mood of the Chris Carter series The X-Files and Millennium is fatalistic and desperate. The commonality rather lies in a shared look on reality: Nothing is the way it appears to be, "the owls are not what they seem".
While the first season and the beginning and end of the second season are trademark Lynch stuff, the sometimes rather awkward middle of the second season saw Lynch apparently having lose his interest in the television business and turning to 'Wild at Heart' in stead, and sadly, it shows. He returns to end the show with a big bang, and the feeling that, somehow, that kind of ending may not have been accidental, or due to threats of cancellation. It is as it is, and the ensuing prequel movie 'Fire Walk With Me' may be read in that way.
July 5th, 1998 / February 25th, 2003
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