My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I enjoyed the original series. It was quirky, confusing, and interesting. The return to it has been rumored for a while, and it is finally here. And it’s- well, it is quirky and confusing. The problem is it just isn’t holding my interest like the original.
If you watched the original, you know we left Agent Dale Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge. The new series is the effort to get Coop out of there and back to Twin Peaks (or at least, back to the real world.) There are (I think) three Coopers: the real Cooper, the evil dopplegänger, and Dougie. The evil Cooper has been out of the Black Lodge since the real Cooper was trapped, and knows he is supposed to go back, but he has a plan to avoid that. Meanwhile, the real Cooper is dropped out of the Black Lodge and into Dougie’s life, while Dougie (it seems) is stuck in the Black Lodge. Cooper/Dougie is in a sort of mobile catatonic state- he can walk and do things, but his speech is limited to repeating what others say, and he needs help to do basic, everyday things. And that doesn’t even touch on what’s going on in Twin Peaks, itself.
Confused? Yeah, me, too. But that was always the thing with Twin Peaks- it is deliberately confusing and misleading. Things happen that are integral to the story, and things happen that just happen. You don’t know which is which at first. To some extent, this is David Lynch at his best: weird, often violent, and sometimes brilliant.
There are many old friends here: Coop, of course, Hawk, Lucy, Andy, the Log Lady, FBI director Gordon, the long-suffering Albert, among others. We have new characters, as well, and finally get to meet the mysterious Diane, Cooper’s assistant in the original who was never on-screen, and she’s nothing like I imagined. The plot is twisty and jumps from point to point to point with what seems little connection. There does seem to be some drawing together of the various threads occurring (Diane has discovered that the coordinates carved on a dead body point to Twin Peaks, for one). There are touches of Lynch’s twisted humor.
Still, I don’t know. It’s got all the markings that should make it more interesting than I am finding it, but it’s failing somehow. I find myself almost bored at times. I want to know what’s going on, and I want to find out if Coop (the real Coop) makes it out of the Black Lodge. I just kind of wish it would happen a bit more quickly.
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