THE GLASS BOX
The show seemed to set out its stall early — in
no hurry, with meditations on mortality, some
sadness, and grisly violence. What we assumed to
be major new characters, though, were destroyed
almost immediately, with others meeting their
fates a few weeks later. Nothing was certain.
One of the first plot strands concerned
a big glass box, high up a New York skyscraper.
Young Sam (Ben Rosenfield) was being paid to
watch it by a mysterious billionaire out to trap
an entity, but was soon brutally dispatched
by a dark swirling demon. In The Final Dossier,
it is implied that the billionaire is Cooper’s
doppelgänger. “He clearly has some connection
to it,” Frost tells Empire. “He’s the one who’s
motivated to find this entity, and this was
the means through which he goes about it.
Concerning what the entity is, I’ll let you decide
that for yourself. Between the book and the
show I think the answer’s pretty clear, but I’d
rather let you connect the dots.”
Frost is loath to provide any answers about
Twin Peaks — he and Lynch want to keep us on
our toes.
“This is
a piece of
work best left
to the viewer
to interpret for
themselves,” he says.
“I don’t think either of us
wanted there to be just one way
to look at all this. Let people be free
to wander through it and make of it
what they will.”THE ELECTRIC TREE
In the Red Room, Cooper meets an electric
tree with a putty head. The tree announces
it’s the evolution of the arm of MIKE,
previously incarnated by The Man From
Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) — because
a backwards walking/talking dwarf is just
old hat. We’re at new levels of bizarre now.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” says
MacLachlan of filming the sequence. “We
were talking to a giant ‘X’ on the wall,
just as an eyeline; David described that
you were seeing something unusual.”
MacLachlan is as much a Peaks
fan as he is a participant, and saw it
all for the first time week by week
like the rest of us. He loved the
tree. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this
is fantastic!’” he says. “It was
frightening. I thought back to the
tree in Eraserhead. And I thought
back to a little art project that
David had done years ago. He had
come to visit me in my apartment,
and on the risers on the stairs there
was a repeating pine-cone pattern,
and he had taken little army men and
put chewing gum on their heads and set
them up in a tableau and shot that. Also
I thought, ‘The people who are just tuning
in and are not familiar with David’s work
— what must they be thinking?!’”Its effects are still seismically rippling, the
mere title an evergreen touchpoint for anything
approaching small-town surrealism. So when
word hit a few years back that co-creators David
Lynch and Mark Frost were resurrecting the
series, mouths foamed and minds boggled. What
joy it would be to hang out with old friends, to
luxuriate in a bit of nostalgia. Right?
Wrong. The third season was a beast,
actively defying such decadent notions. When
we left Twin Peaks in 1991, FBI agent Dale
Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) had been trapped
in the Black Lodge, swapped on the outside
for a doppelgänger inhabited by evil spirit
BOB, and for the revival Lynch and Frost ran
with the darkness, with absurdist slapstick
and cherry-pie-eating sitting next to
reverberating nightmare-fuel.
With the dust settled, an accompanying
book, written by Mark Frost but under the guise
of FBI agent Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell), has
been published. The Final Dossier has Preston
charged by her boss Albert Rosenfield (Miguel
Ferrer) with mopping up this “gargantuan
multi-dimensional clusterfuck”. To shed further
light on said “clusterfuck”, we decided to speak
to both Frost and MacLachlan, getting exclusive
insights into the biggest talking points of Twin
Peaks’ return. Let’s unravel.
THE ORIGINAL 1990S
INCARNATION OF TWIN
PEAKS INFECTED THE
TELEVISION LANDSCAPE
AND POP CULTURE AT
LARGE FOREVER.
Clockwise from left: The
talking brain tree; The
Fireman and Senorita Dido in
the castle; Laura Palmer as
celestial being; Bad Coop; The
glass box.