New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

As Twin Peaks came to an end for me, I sat there even more perplexed than I probably thought was possible. The show managed to end itself with a sense of wholeness, really, but I don’t know that I followed much anything thrown at me those last 20 minutes.

You see, the final half or so of the episode takes place within the Black Lodge. Lo and behold, the Black Lodge happens to be the space with the red curtains, the venue with the dancin’ small person, the strange room where Cooper’s memorable season one dream was set. We’ve had flashes of the lodge since that dream, but it wasn’t until “Episode 29” - Twin Peaks’ de facto series finale - that we actually get to spend significant time inside.

No matter if I write about the scenes in the Black Lodge or the scenes everywhere else in “Episode 29,” the link they all share that can’t be ignored is that it all happens - all of it: the situations, the actions, the outcomes - rather quickly.

Put another way: Lynch’s baby got canceled, and he worked in earnest to give that same baby an ending. A good ending, a bad ending, whatever. Twin Peaks got an ending.

You clearly can see it in how many of the show’s small B-stories are given a scene, sometimes two, to wrap it on up:

• Donna confronts the man she thought was her father, and also her supposed real dad - Ben Horn, Audrey’s papa - and after dramatic deliberation decides the “father” she knows and loves with forever be her true dad.
  
• Nadine is alive and well again by waking from her walking coma without a memory at all of her season-long fling with her young boy toy. She cries out to her former husband, Ed, and he simply looks on.
  
• Audrey chains herself to the vault of the town’s bank just as Andrew arrives inside to open the lock box his key belongs to. Inside the box is a bomb, which detonates. Instant death to everyone inside the vault, including dear Audrey.

Now, would it have been okay by me to cut, say, Donna’s daddy drama if it meant more time inside the Black Lodge? Oh heck yes. Really any of these stories could’ve been deleted, if not trimmed a bit, if it meant more fleshing out of all that was bombarding poor Cooper. Although he chose to go in there alone, so…

I mean, even the clerk at the bank vault. What was his deal in walking around in slow circles, tending to Audrey, shuffling off to his desk, returning to Audrey with a glass of water and the rest of it. As if the show somehow forgot that its 50 minutes of episode is, well, a precious and sacred 50 episodes.





Hello, this is the last 50 minutes that ABC would ever broadcast.

Moments like this didn’t frustrate me. If anything it humored me some. I mean, here we are near the end of the end and Lynch is just training his camera on a geezer we’ve never met before as he’s dragging his sluggish old body around and around tending to the needs of Ms. Audrey Horn.

Looked at one way, it’s as if the old man is an exaggerated attempt at personifying - in Lynch’s mind, anyway - everything else airing on television at the time: the slowness, the dullness, the lack of, you know, life. With Twin Peaks axed after “Episode 29,” it’s “old man goes back to his desk,” “old man fetches Audrey some refreshment” for the rest of us.

But unlike Lynch with his series finale, I don’t want to spend too of much of my valued time on the B-stories. Let’s get to that frickin’ Black Lodge.

Cooper and Harry end up at the spot where Bob appeared only a few episodes ago, and it’s here that Cooper warns Harry that he must proceed the rest of the way without Harry. Cooper steps over the pool of water, the familiar red curtains appear, and the dude is in.

Inside we see our little friend in the red coat, and then another person: The Black Lodge Singer, I guess we’ll call her, who soulfully croons about going under the sycamore trees. She then disappears.

Continued:       1       2