Do you ever have that dream where you go to your local music store (and here I'm assuming that you know what those are) and find a trove of rare, possibly imported, material that you've never heard of by one of your favorite artists? Have you ever experienced that thrill?
Well, that's how I felt -- and I assume I will feel again when it actually happens -- when I heard that Twin Peaks was going to return to TV in early 2016. As fraught with peril as the idea of a continuation of one of my favorite televised stories may be -- even though it will be helmed by many of the same artists that created the original -- I can't help but be excited by it.
At the same time, it's also stuck a pin in a project that I had been amusedly musing since the original show went off the air in 1991... my imaginary sequel novel. You see, Twin Peaks, while enjoying immense success in its first limited-run season, really fell off in the second. It was canceled twice, brought back through some of the earliest fan protests that utilized the fledgling Internet, and eventually was scheduled for final demolition at the end of its second season. At that point, original creators David Lynch and Mark Frost -- who admittedly had stepped back somewhat and bequeathed the wheel to other creative minds -- returned to steer the project back into the harbor, and left us with a confounding series finale that included explosions, demonic possession, adventures in other dimensions, and left no less than six major characters in unresolved mortal peril. Not only that, it took a break in the middle so Little Jimmy Scott could sing a slow jazz number.
It was material just begging, if not outright daring, to be continued. After a decade of thought, I felt I could bring a unique resolution to it. And so, now that the actual conclusion is pending, I thought I would put down some of what my novel would have entailed. This way, my theories can either be proven right or wrong by the minds that the source material sprang from. Bearing that in mind, be aware that spoilers abound in what follows.
Let me say a bit more about why I liked Twin Peaks: it gets rhapsodized over time and time again, but it really was unlike anything that had been on TV before. It was a prime-time soap opera, yes, but instead of focusing on how even rich people are messed up (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, etc.), it dealt with a small town and the lurking horror that lies underneath its all-American veneer. Its pioneering skill as a show was in juggling a multitude of tones and genres at once. It was sad, surreal, funny, sexy, and frightening, often in combination. The central mystery of the murder of prom queen Laura Palmer was brutally raw and tragic at first, and then got weirder and weirder, descending first into the dark secrets of the town's denizens, then into a neo-Lovecraftian mindbender of worlds beyond.
But the thing that was truly mesmerizing for me about Twin Peaks -- what made me tape it and re-watch it relentlessly -- was that everything seemed like a clue to a deeper mystery, and more often than not, everything was. It all hung together with the same kind of logic that a dream seems to make perfect sense right after waking. And the atmosphere, thanks in great part to Lynch's odd creative choices and Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score -- gave the whole thing an simultaneous sense of the alien and the familiar that really sucked you in.
Now, when we left FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper at the end of the series, he had solved Laura's murder and had gone on to grapple with his nemesis, a rogue fellow agent named Windom Earle. Together they had gone into that space-between-worlds called The Black Lodge, where they confronted Laura's killer, a demonic spirit named BOB, in its lair. After witnessing BOB kill Earle and becoming possessed himself, Cooper came back into the real world. In the closing moments of the finale, no one seemed the wiser that he wasn't quite himself anymore. The third season I invented in my head centered on defeating BOB once and for all, and recovering the real Cooper from the Black Lodge.
In my story, the possession doesn't remain a secret for long. It's clear that Cooper is not himself. The real challenge for Sheriff Harry Truman and his team is not letting Cooper know that they know he's not really him anymore. This is tough, given that they have new investigations to make at the hospital. There are many new patients, including Audrey Horne, who survived the explosion in the bank, thanks to the fact that she was chained to the vault door at the time; Benjamin Horne, who survived getting his head bashed against a fireplace mantel by Doc Hayward, but who now has a full-scale freak-out when a chest of drawers with many pull-knobs gets brought into his room; and Leo Johnson, who is being treated for multiple venomous spider bites but miraculously regains his speech because of them.
Annie, the third person in the Black Lodge with Cooper and Earle, lies in a coma. Cooper (BOB), after being reluctantly left alone with her by the sheriff, utters some cryptic phrases about how he'll make sure that she is eternally held between worlds so as not to warn everyone about BOB.
Cooper returns to the home he recently bought at Dead Dog Farm, and Deputy Hawk is sent to observe his behavior. What he sees is Cooper walking through the house obsessively, following a curved path that often causes him to bump into walls. Over the course of several days, he manages to break through them, and eventually carves a perfectly circular path through the interior of the house. When completed, he continues to pace this circle obsessively, stopping often to scream up toward the sky.
Meanwhile, Harry and Andy are doing research, and find in the town archives that Dead Dog Farm used to be called Dead Wolf Swamp before it was drained in a logging effort by the Packard Saw Mill almost a hundred years before. It was considered to be an especially haunted place by the local Native Americans, who believed it was the location of a Sounding Stone, which as close to a real-world location of The Black Lodge as there can be. Hawk believes that it is actually below the foundations of Cooper's house, and because BOB is in Cooper's body and thus unable to cross over and get back home, he is in torment.
But why is BOB so weak, when he was formerly so powerful a threat to the town? The answer is provided by Major Briggs, who knows more about BOB than he has let on. Thanks to his work on Project Bluebook, Briggs has inadvertently discovered clues to the existence of both the Black and White Lodges. (Remember, he is the only one who has glimpsed the White Lodge itself, during the period of three days he went missing in Season 2). He takes on the role of consultant for Sheriff Truman and his team now, telling them what he knows...
In the Black Lodge, as we've seen, time is mutable. In general, though, it tends to run backwards. Every time we've seen a spirit speaking in the Black Lodge, it's been in reverse. So while BOB has been haunting Twin Peaks for centuries, he is actually quite young by now, and relatively inexperienced. From this point of view, BOB's power has gradually been decreasing, especially since he killed Teresa Banks, which was the case that initially put Cooper on his trail. With this in mind, Major Briggs suggests that the best way to destroy BOB... is to *create* him.
Here's where my plotting got a little fuzzy. All things coming in pairs in Twin Peaks, I know there would be a White Lodge sounding stone mirrored on the other side of the titular mountains, most likely at One-Eyed Jack's, where the spirit named JUDY (I added the capital letters myself, to match BOB), who just might be the light side of BOB, has been trying to break through into our world to stop her evil twin.
It all ends with a group of people from the town (roster to be determined) breaking through the gateway into the Black Lodge, confronting their own dopplegangers, and JUDY finally combining with BOB to become the entity they had started out being in the first place.
Of course, along the way I planned to make a bunch of other stops... there's still the fact that Leo will want to kill Bobby Briggs for hooking up with his wife Shelly. Audrey will have to decide what to do when John Justice Wheeler comes back to town after hearing of her brush with death, even as she still has feelings for Agent Cooper. Ben Horne will reveal exactly what he saw in his vision the night the doorway to the Black Lodge opened for Earle, and what he knows about Josie's ultimate fate (was she really reincarnated as an end table?). I also wanted to see James ride his motorcycle all the way to Buenos Aires and find what strange portal Philip Jeffries discovered there (my guess is that it would lead back to Twin Peaks somehow. Or Philadelphia.). I also wanted to delve into the history of The Bookhouse Boys, that secret society that protects the town from evil. Cooper will have to figure out how he can keep part of himself in the Black Lodge so that he'll be there with JUDY to lead Laura into the White Lodge, when she arrives, after the aforementioned twenty-five years... And, of course, I'll want Ed and Norma to get their happy ending, finally. Because who wouldn't like to see that?
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