Especially when again is fully twenty-six years later.
I also figured Lynch had to be smart enough to know better than to try.
So now, then, this corollary admission:
The new Twin Peaks, eight of eighteen episodes in, is pretty
dang good.
True, the Dougie Jones stuff is thin gruel. (Kyle MacLachlan’s often
touching portrayal of a fugue-state Agent Cooper isn’t the problem; Lynch and Frost’s meandering, uninspired vision of suburban and corporate Las Vegas is—a problem only exacerbated by the fact
they seem, sometimes, to be trying to spoof Mad Men and Breaking Bad with this stuff.)
Beyond that, though, the show does indeed recapture a fair amount of the surreal, wondrous-strange magic of the ’90 and ’91 seasons.
Beyond that, though, the show does indeed recapture a fair amount of the surreal, wondrous-strange magic of the ’90 and ’91 seasons.
And at least some of
the new season finds Lynch dropping the hammer, leaving behind the delightful, "is this for real?" hokiness that is the show's calling card to do what he did in 1986’s Blue
Velvet and 2001’s Mulholland Drive:
demonstrate he can hang just fine, thanks very much, with the Kubricks, Scorseses, and PTAs of this world.
Episode 8, which Showtime calls “Gotta Light?,” is pretty much
one big drop-the-hammer moment—a not-uncommon assessment, I know, having taken in a fair bit of the best-hour-of-TV-ever! yowling
(this,
for instance—or this)
that started about two minutes after the episode finished airing.
So what is Episode
8?
For its first twenty minutes, it’s just a particularly tense,
taut, strong third-season episode—one
featuring the most unnerving (as of that moment,
at least) incursion yet of surreal/supernatural forces into the show’s universe.
And a Nine Inch Nails musical interlude, too. Because why not?
After that, though, the remaining forty minutes—and they
work well as a standalone short, in case anyone’s intrigued but not familiar with the larger, admittedly
complex Twin Peaks cosmos—are
Lynch’s meditation on…
The bomb.
The nuclear bomb.
