Nothing can prepare you for the finale of Twin Peaks Season 2. For over two decades it was, as far as anyone knew, the finale of Twin Peaks itself. On television, it is virtually without precedent. Before June 10, 1991, when it aired back-to-back with “Miss Twin Peaks,” only the surreal series finale of Patrick McGoohan’s proto-prestige masterpiece The Prisoner was even in the conversation.
In the oeuvre of David Lynch, who returns to the director’s chair, it is a turning point. The most avant-garde narrative work he’d done since Eraserhead, it marked his full-on entrée into the elliptical storytelling and supernaturally tinged surrealism that characterized not only the show’s prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but also Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks’ own triumphant return to television in 2017. Of Lynch’s major post-Peaks projects, only The Straight Story — a rare instance of Lynch directing from someone else’s screenplay — played it straight. Everything else is a zig-zag labyrinth of time and meaning.
As a series finale, it’s a series of controlled demolitions. Storyline after storyline is taken to its logical conclusion, then blown up, in one case literally.
I reviewed the astonishing season finale of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)
Tags: horror, pop heist, TV, TV reviews, Twin Peaks