Warning: This review contains spoilers from the first two episodes of Showtime’s “Twin Peaks”
“Twin Peaks” premiered Sunday night on Showtime, with two very long episodes that answered some questions and rais💫ed others. Creator David Lynch, who may be playing a massive joke on the universe, takes viewers from the Pacific Northwest to New York City, Las Vegas and a town called Buckhorn, S.D., that bears a striking resemblance to Fargo, N.D. We also take a mind-bending trip to the Black Lodge, where Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has been trapped since the end of Season 2, which aired on ABC roughly a quarter-century ago.
By the way, he looks great.
Cooper is visited by the dead/alive Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the original “Twin Peaks” heroine, who tells him his time in this prison is up — before she is subsumed into 🐷the atmosphere. But Cooper can’t get out until his doppelganger, Dale Cooper with a bad black wig, returns. The evil Cooper is associated with a string of murders that connect him to the action in Buckhorn, where the severed head of a local woman leads to the arrest of a seemingly guilty man, Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard).
The real Agent Cooper is connected to the New York scenes, where a glass box owned by an anonymous billionaire occasionally serves up violent apparitions. A young man who baby🃏sits the box and his date are viciously attacked early on in the first episode, their skin torn to shreds. When Cooper momentarily escapes the Black Lodge and floats inside the box, we understand that it is connected to his past.
The new storylines and the explanation of Cooper’s spooky days in the Black Lodge assumed more importance in the overall story than whatever was happening in the town of Twin Peaks itself. It was great to see cameos by Richard Beymer (Ben Horne), Madchen Amick (Shelly), James Marshall (James), Michael Horse (Hawk), Grace Zabriskie (Sarah) aꦐnd even the late Catherine Coulson, who has two scenes as the Log Lady,🤡 amusingly cryptic as ever.
Fans who thrill to Lynch’s enigmatic storytelling will no doubt be chewing over the significance, if that word can really be used, of “The Arm,” which looks like a fake tree pulled from the props department with ET’s aged, talking head stuck on top like a Christmas ornament. (In the original ABC series, The ꦜAꦅrm was known as the Man from Another Place and played by Michael J. Anderson.) But the stories will likely prove too confusing to viewers who have never seen the series and don’t have the time to play catch-up. Much of the two episodes were slow going and the Buckhorn scenes, while striving for the quirky humor Noah Hawley has perfected on FX’s “Fargo,” weren’t weird enough.
There is plenty of time — 17 more hours of programming — to sort all of this out and f♒ind a cohesive tone that makes it seem like the weirdness of the Black Lodge storyline and the contemporary crime stories are happening in the same show. In contrast to today’s television directors who favor short scenes and quick cuts, thinking that’s what the kids want, Lynch likes to take his time and let the camera linger over waterfalls, red curtains and other elements of place that made the original series such a weird and wonderful ride.
Will the൩ fans stick around and let him do this🌸 thing or drop him the minute the CGI wizardry of “Game of Thrones” returns? Time will tell.