The following contains spoilers for the original series finale of Twin Peaks, "Beyond Life and Death." It also spoils who Laura Palmer's killer was, which—in my opinion—is a terrible waste of a fantastically-constructed mystery. If you've never seen Twin Peaks and are looking to kill some time reading about a 30-year-old show, this essay will do a better job of wasting your time while keeping the experience unspoiled.

Minor spoilers for the film Fire Walk With Me also appear, but nothing that will particularly spoil the experience of watching it, I think.

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It's one of the worst cases of whiplash in TV history. One moment, you're confronted with a brutal, senseless murder that rips apart reality as we know it. A certain kind of hope is lost—not hope that the world can be made better, per se, but hope that the world might one day be innocent. Because a world where something like this can happen is not a world that was ever innocent. If a human can do this, then humankind is not a benign species that was corrupted: at best, it is a savage species that might one day be soothed.

Then, in a blink of an eye, all that vanishes. Laura Palmer's killer cries, anguished, beneath a fire sprinkler that might as well be cleansing his soul. He wasn't himself, you see. There was a darkness in him. The darkness, not him, murdered three teenage girls—including his own daughter—for no better reason than that they were there. Now the darkness has left him to die. And while that darkness still lingers, cruelly, maliciously, Leland Palmer is made whole. He dies mid-confession, with an FBI agent serving as his priest, and it could not be clearer that, if there is a God, then even He would find Leland worthy of salvation.

What follows is a stretch of truly awful television, coming from a show that was also responsible for some of TV's most brilliant and sublime passages. And while Twin Peaks recovered from its losing streak before it ended, the new show that emerged felt weirdly weightless. It's fun, it's even compelling, but something has gone missing. And if the series finale had been directed as intended, the show would have ended this way: with technical proficiency, when it comes to twisty plots and dramatic character moments, but without the elusive and potent depths that defined Twin Peaks before Laura's killer vanished from it, and Laura herself was all but forgotten.

Instead, infamously, David Lynch threw out half of his co-creator's script, directing the finale he wanted. It's a brutal repudiation of what the show had become in his absence: it's not bleak so much as it's jarring, disorienting, an alarming vision of a world that is no longer okay. Brutal things happen to people in the blink of an eye. Hearts are broken; meaningful lives are snuffed out in a flash. And in a stunning 20-minute sequence, Dale Cooper returns to his old dream, only to find it has become a nightmare that never seems to end. (Canonically, this dream lasts for an agonizing, horrifying 25 years.) The series ends on one of the most unsettling notes in all of film—and Lynch followed up on that with his sole solo Twin Peaks endeavor, a prequel film that is itself an unbelievably harrowing and upsetting watch.

This sharp left turn became necessary the moment Leland confessed his sins. For fully half of the show's run, Twin Peaks did everything it could to look away from its own dark, beating heart. The only way to do it justice in fifty-odd minutes was to make it viscerally clear what had happened, what had been lost, and what that loss had meant. And I would argue that two moments, more than anything else in the series' final episode, distill this more than anything.

The first moment involves Leland Palmer himself, returned from the dead to deliver a strange and not-quite-so-cryptic line. The second moment—one that plenty of people, including seasoned Twin Peaks critics and enthusiasts, overlook—involves Ben Horne, who serves as Leland's doppelganger in some ways, and whose trajectory throughout the series is almost perfectly inverse to Leland's. Our final glimpses of Leland and Ben are like a last look through the looking glass: we see the world as it is, and we see the world as it almost was, and then with an abrupt brutal twist the two switch places, and we realize we were not where we thought we were after all.

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The brilliant poet W. H. Auden once wrote a fantastic essay about detective stories, which he claimed he was addicted to. "The Guilty Vicarage" argues, in short, that detective stories are inherently artless—that is, they have the exact opposite purpose of art itself. If art opens us to strangeness and wonder and possibility, the detective's goal in a murder mystery is to narrow possibility, to excise strangeness, to save a population from a dreadful, ominous wonder. A murder, conventionally, is a rupture in an otherwise idyllic space: it threatens, not lives, but peace. To solve the mystery, to bring a killer to justice, is to assure the townsfolk (or the manor guests or whomever) that the rupture has been dealt with, the peace has been restored, and everyone can safely move on.

Perhaps this, then, is what distinguishes Twin Peaks from all other detective mysteries: above all, it was a detective mystery whose crime would never get solved. You would never stop eyeing every town resident suspiciously, wondering whether they were the ones to rape and murder the most popular girl in school. In a sense, this is what elevated Twin Peaks above its contemporary TV series too: in an era where all other shows resumed their status quo at the end of each episode, Twin Peaks would not, could not, offer you a chance to settle. Even after Peak TV raised the medium of television to what most critics agree is art, its approach was often literary: it typically sells stories with fixed beginnings and ends. Twin Peaks, on the other hand, wanted to be a show that defied even the possibility of an ending. It was all openings and no closure.

When the show's writers were tasked with revealing Laura's killer after all, their struggle had nothing to do with determining the killer: by all accounts, they knew that Leland Palmer was the killer from day one. Instead, their struggle was to reveal the killer in a way that did justice to the idea that had driven their show from the beginning. How do you solve a mystery without solving it? How do you reveal a killer without doing the exact thing that Auden claimed kept detective stories from functioning as art?

"Lonely Souls," the episode in which Leland is unmasked, achieves this in part by the strange and astonishing way that it goes about unmasking him. But Twin Peaks also introduced a subtler and more intricate way of stating its aims—a method that often goes overlooked. It created a foil to Leland Palmer: a man whose obscenities are more obvious and whose crimes are more public, a man who pointedly had every possible motive to murder Laura, and whose character would have enabled him to pull the trigger. It even had this man nearly rape his own daughter, in a way that immediately leads to her getting drugged (mirroring Laura's drug addiction) and nearly murdered.

A savvy, cynical genre enthusiast will call Ben Horne an obvious red herring, given how obvious a candidate he might be. They might also point to Twin Peaks deploying a now-routine cliffhanger technique: strongly implicate Ben in the episode before the real reveal, accuse him of the murder well before the next episode's end, bask in unearned contentedness for a spell, then leap to the actual killer once the audience lets their guard down. Of course, this technique partly exists because Twin Peaks did it first, using TV's episodic structure to deliberately mislead viewers. And the series does a fantastic job of not pointing fingers at Ben Horne, of seemingly luring suspicion away from him, in a way that makes him all the more exciting to suspect.

In the end, there's no reason not to suspect Ben: he has two obvious motives (possessive lust; a close relationship with the other two men who last saw Laura before her death), he has no alibi, and he has a litany of both abusive sexual behaviors and murder (some attempted and some successful). By Auden's standards, he is the perfect culprit. He is a literal fester on the community as a whole, one who plans to destroy its central industry and sell its land to wealthy outsiders, enables the sale of cocaine to teenagers, and systematically coerces high school girls into becoming prostitutes against their will.

By the logic of the detective mystery, Ben is an allegorically perfect suspect: the exact sort of person you want to be responsible, so he can be held accountable for all of society's evils, condemned, and purged, restoring the town to its Edenic grace. Leland Palmer, on the other hand, isn't just a senseless pick in that no seeming motivation explains his crimes: he has been the mirror that reflects the horrible senselessness of Laura's murder. His seeming inability to reckon with the random and horrible death of his daughter plunges him into a grief that is indistinguishable from madness; if Lynch typically depicts "civilized" behavior as the ability to successfully regulate yourself within social contexts, then Leland is a man who in his grief* can no longer hide the profound ways in which this devastation has warped him. Laura's murder has destroyed him, seemingly, as a person. He can no longer serve the function he once served in this society.

If Ben Horne's being the killer would have brought peace and innocence back to the town of Twin Peaks, Leland's being the killer would do the opposite: it would say that Laura's death was the end, not the beginning, of this particular horror. It would mean that the man Laura trusted more than any other man, the man who raised her as a child, had in fact been molesting her from the start of her life. That he might have been planning this from her conception. That, the moment she was born a girl and not a boy, Leland became incapable of comprehending her as anything but a man's possession—and spent every day of her life, from birth to death, taking steps to ensure that she was his.

No crime could possibly be more absolute. What Leland did not only spanned Laura's entire lifetime, it betrayed every imaginable trust and virtue. This is the true horror of Leland Palmer's crime: it subverts every possible good, puts an end to every possible hope, and mocks and scorns every potential saving grace, every notion of a loving or caring humanity. Family, society, romance... all cruelly, wantonly sundered. Even Leland's purported grief, in the end—a grief which is still one of the most heartrending, vulnerable, anguished expressions in TV history—is turned into a horrible mockery of itself.

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Leland's reveal is an unsettling, upsetting, corrosive moment. But if Lynch, as is often said of him, believes in humanity's profoundest hopes as much as he believes in its most desolate horrors, "Lonely Souls" plants the seeds for that as well. Before Ben's arrest, his daughter Audrey confronts him with what he did. She shows him what he nearly did to her—the grotesque act that would have made him Leland's parallel in every possible way. And Ben, confronted with the evil he committed, doesn't shy away. He doesn't get defensive. He doesn't flinch. Instead, he goes quiet. He reckons with what he now realizes he did. And for the first time, unexpectedly, we see him feel a genuine sense of shame.

In one sense, it's disturbing to learn that Ben isn't the killer: that he is innocent of, at least, this one crime. He is still thrown in jail, but within days, he walks free. The casino and whorehouse that he opened has been shuttered; the business partner that he tried to murder steals his property away from him; his former partners in crime are all jailed or arrested; but Ben is a free man. And as if it were not enough that this perverse, heartless bastard faces no legal retribution for his deeds, he makes the outrageous choice to try and redeem himself: to try and change his ways, to try and change himself, to dare and believe that he might move on from the horrors he himself is responsible for.

And just as the show is utterly blasé about Leland "atoning" for his unatonable sin, the ways in which Ben goes about seeking redemption are... frivolous. Quirky. The near-monster that we knew him to be is barely even mentioned; all that remains is a man who wants to get to know his daughter better, in between staging Civil War reenactments. It's less outrageous than the flippant way in which Leland (and, in effect, Laura) were written out of the series, but it removes all the potential gravitas from Ben's attempted redemption—which is likely why the significance of Ben's would-be arc is so often overlooked.

As with much of season 2, Ben's storyline is thoughtful but pat. Conceptually, there's some substance to the notion that Ben struggles with being good, not in intent but in execution. He ultimately decides to atone for his sins directly, only to find that his attempts to "set things straight" are profoundly upsetting and destabilizing for others: Donna's discovery that Will Hayward is not her biological father doesn't bring her or her family peace or closure whatsoever. Meanwhile, his attempts to include his other daughter Audrey in the family business—ostensibly under the guise of environmentalism—leads to her handcuffed inside a bank moments before a bomb obliterates that bank entirely. In both cases, Ben's attempts to do good—his attempts to be a family man—wind up traumatizing and endangering his daughters. (Once again, his path mirrors Leland's in this regard, but the path is inverted: by seeking closure, he disturbs the peace, and by trying to connect with his real daughter, he puts her in harm's way.)

Lynch's modification to this storyline is less drastic than his other, famous change, but it's significant nonetheless. In the series finale's script, Will Hayward shoves Ben, who strikes his head on a coffee table; the scene ends with Will apologizing to Ben, asking whether Ben can hear him. While it's ambiguous how serious Ben's head injury is, it's a moment akin to Nadine's attempted suicide in the season 1 finale: a soap opera cliffhanger, one that all-but-certainly ends in a recovery or a coma. The real unresolved tension rests with Donna, who contemptuously asks who she ought to consider her father: the man who raised her, or the man whose DNA she shares. This, clearly, is the real "disruption" in the script. Another family has been torn apart, this time by questions of paternity.

Is there something contemptuous to the way that, in Lynch's filmed version, Donna instead throws herself, sobbing, into Will Haywards arms? And weeping "You're my daddy, you're my daddy" to boot? Certainly it seems like a blunt declaration that there is no meaningful ambiguity there: Ben is not and will never be Donna's father in any meaningful way. What's more, Lynch introduces a character who wasn't present in the script, and who was ignored by the back half of season 2 altogether: Ben's wife Sylvia, who is horrified, not by Ben's infidelity—she's well past being surprised by that—but by the suffering that Ben is unwittingly inflicting upon the Hayward family. The tension isn't between Donna's would-be fathers. It's between Ben's would-be families. Ben's idealistic notion of "doing good" is ignoring the pragmatic reality of the world he helped create; he thinks he's trying to put an end to his former abandonment of a daughter, and instead, he's abandoning his real family in the process.

What's more, when Will shoves Ben, he lands not against a wooden coffee table but against a brick fireplace. His wound is garish and ghastly; rather than apologizing to him, Will lets out an anguished shriek. The moment isn't dramatic, it's horrifying. The wound we're seeing cannot be healed. What happens in this confrontation suggests futility: Ben might change his ways, but he can never make amends for what he's done, or right what he made wrong. Will Hayward, the father who closed the Twin Peaks pilot by showing Donna a level of love and trust that her best friend never received, may have just murdered a man in front of his wife and daughter; Ben Horne's blood will forever stain his living room, much as Maddy dreamt of her blood seeping into the carpets of the Palmer home. Ben's attempts to turn back time, to be the good father he never was, haven't just been met with failure: they've led the kindest and most decent father in Twin Peaks to commit an act of horrific violence. And Lynch doesn't let Will back out of what he's done with an apology, just as he doesn't let Ben's apologies mean a thing.

Ben Horne will forever live—if he does live—with the consequences of what he's done. He will forever be haunted by his former self, mocked by him. The message here is stranger than a simple refutation of the notion that a man can change for the better: Ben Horne does change, seemingly. He takes responsibility for his behaviors. He learns how to feel remorse. But to change is not to undo. Ben's past will never leave him: it has inexorably altered the present, and there is no going back. The new, changed Ben has to live with the old Ben; their relationship is a cohabitation, not a replacement. And in his unintentional hubris—in his belief that he has the power to make right simply because he was the one who did wrong—Ben has done far worse to the Hayward family than he ever would have if he had simply tried to leave the past behind.

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The Palmer family was never meant to return in the series finale. Sarah Palmer never showed up in the diner. Neither Laura nor Maddie appeared in the Black Lodge. Even Ronette Pulaski, who briefly makes an appearance in the episode opening, was a last-minute inclusion by Lynch. Had Mark Frost's script had its way, Laura literally would have been eradicated from the Twin Peaks universe. Her last mention would have been a throwaway reference during the Miss Twin Peaks beauty pageant: something about how "the town really needs this" after the events of the last month. (Imagine that being the last lingering message of the Laura Palmer story! We need to get over her death by getting all the women in town to parade around in skimpy shorts!)

The narrative, instead, had shifted to Dale Cooper. Our new villain was Cooper's ex-partner; the new "original sin" of the series was Coop's affair with Windom Earle's wife. (Incestuous rape and murder had been replaced by a tryst with a consenting adult. Golly, wow.) And while the central image of male violence ostensibly shifted to Windom's brutal murder of Caroline after the affair, Windom claims that even that was a ruse: he had tricked Coop into sleeping with his wife, in the hopes of forever guilting Cooper over Caroline's death. The looming question has to do with Cooper's soul: can the series' most selfless do-gooder be turned into the world's new Leland Palmer? Can evil triumph over good after all?

From this standpoint, the series-closing cliffhanger again makes conceptual sense, though its intended execution was absolutely inane. We're supposed to be horrified that BOB possesses Cooper. Windom Earle, in a sense, has won. The most trusted man in the world is now free to go about violating that trust in monstrous and perverted ways—though, again, it's hard to imagine how Cooper could possibly do anything worse than what Leland did to his own daughter. (The Return does a nauseatingly good job of figuring out how, to be fair.)

But even this is a bit of a too-cute sleight of hand: it leans into the notion that BOB functions as a demonic hot potato, someone who gets passed around from body to body and makes everybody do bad. This notion starts, not coincidentally, in the same scene where Leland cries over his crimes and then abruptly dies. We see BOB possess Leland's body, snarling and cackling and howling; we see BOB leave Leland; we see the "real" Leland underneath, the "good" one, the one who feels just horrible about raping his daughter when she was a prepubescent child. From there, BOB possesses Josie, and turns her into a doorknob; he spends some time hanging around with owls; Windom Earle gives a videotaped lecture about him, and about how neat he thinks bad guys are. The series divorces itself from the disturbing reality of Laura Palmer's murder as quickly as it thinks it can get away with.

"I've lived in these old woods all my life," says Sheriff Truman, minutes after Leland's death. "I've seen some strange things. But this one is way off the map. I'm having a hard time... believing."

"Harry," replies Cooper, "is it easier to believe a man would rape and murder his own daughter? Any more comforting?"

That sure would be uncomfortable! Let's focus on the spooky jean-jacket demon instead. Let's focus on whether Coop is a good person. Let's make Windom Earle's final would-be victim the woman who Cooper is falling in love with. Because the real horrible thing about a murdered woman would be if a good man got really upset about her dying! Right? Right...?

If you've never read the original script for the series finale, here's how Cooper's visit to the Black Lodge goes. Windom threatens to murder Annie Blackburn. Cooper selflessly offers to sacrifice himself to save her. Windom takes Cooper to—get this—a dentist's office, where BOB, dressed in a dentist smock, extracts his and Windom's souls as if they were teeth. It's goofy. Windom Earle never stops monologuing. Even BOB gets a whole monologue in and of himself. BOB! The guy who hasn't spoken a word since the third episode of the series!

And then... voila. BOB possesses Coop. Evil demon gets loosed upon the world. Wow. Chilling stuff.

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David Lynch has an undeserved reputation for being an unworldly, disconnected kook, but when he described this script to an interviewer as "completely and totally wrong," you kinda see where he was coming from.

So much of season 2 feels like the TV equivalent of small talk: it's engaging, it's even interesting, but it doesn't exactly have stakes. What's more, the stakes it tries to have feel so trivial. What does Cooper selflessly saving Annie tell us about him that we haven't already seen? What does it say about anything that BOB, who is defined as a creature of pure evil, is excited to do more evil stuff? Why would this show throw its final moments away on a dentist's office? What deeper meaning does Windom "dresses up like a horse" Earle have, beyond his being a mean little goblin who wants to do bad stuff to Cooper?

(Don't get me wrong: I deeply enjoy Windom Earle as a character. But I enjoy him the way Auden enjoyed detective mysteries, which is to say I think he's a silly little bullshit man and I would watch thirty hours of him wearing disguises and saying weird shit to teenage girls.)

What distinguishes Lynch's Black Lodge sequence, beyond its surreal slowness and continually mirrored imagery and sexy jazz music and phenomenal use of strobe lighting—the way he made those lamps look like swaying trees? genuinely brilliant—is a deep sense of wrongness. Laura appears, at long last, but she's absolutely frightening, climbing over furniture in ways that make her look and feel like a creature in a horror movie. Long-lost characters reappear, but in deeply discomforting ways: Maddie, the Giant, even Señor Droolcup, all appear to be smirking and sneering at Dale in every appearance, as if he's a punchline to a joke that they all know and he doesn't. Windom Earle abruptly appears, and just as abruptly bursts into flame. (It really is amazing how dismissively Lynch treats every character that he didn't introduce: the only three "back half of season 2" characters in the finale are all summarily wiped from existence, and neither Fire Walk With Me nor The Return acknowledges any story arc that took place between Leland's unmasking and Coop's getting trapped in the Black Lodge.)

And BOB doesn't steal Cooper's soul. What happens instead is more jarring: for the first time, we see Cooper lose his cool. He turns and bolts from BOB, and from his own cackling doppelganger. He's lost in a world of featureless rooms, unsure of where to go, unsure of how to leave. The horror is not that there's evil in Cooper's soul: the series has never shied away from that fact, and in fact presents Cooper as someone who understands his own darkness, and is in control of it. No: the horror is that Cooper runs away. The horror is that we see Cooper get scared. In a world of fathers and father figures, Coop is the one who always reassures us, the one who grinned a macabre grin in the operating room right next to Laura Palmer's body, the one who's excited to explore the weirdnesses and horrors of the world. But Cooper flees, and in the moment that he flees, we lose our anchor. We lose the one person who reassured us that things would eventually be okay.

It's not that Cooper was ever going to fulfill Auden's promise of bringing the world back to a place of innocence. Leland's murder of Maddie made that clear. But Coop offered, at least, the hope that we might come to terms with our unsettling world. He was the one who could cope with all this, the one who could not only survive it but thrive in it. Coop's love of coffee and pies and women and Douglas firs isn't just a quirky affection: it's a reminder that, despite the horrors of the world, this is a place of joy and beauty, too. Cooper is the man who lay on the floor in a pool of his own blood and expressed a hope to share an evening with a women he had "genuine affection for." He's the one who still gives a shit about what happened between Marilyn Monroe and JFK.

The original script got it wrong. Cooper isn't special because he's good: he's special because he's proof that the world can be endured, and is worth enduring. And when Coop breaks and runs, we catch the first glimmer of possibility that maybe he was wrong. We're given our first reason to believe that all our faith and trust may have been for nothing. It makes the final reveal that Cooper's doppelganger is the one who made it out—and there's a critical difference between Cooper being possessed and Cooper being replaced—genuinely disturbing. As with Ben Horne and Will Hayward, there's something destabilizing about it. The world hasn't been dominated by forces of evil: it's just less secure than ever. All is not lost, but nothing is safe.

Yet in a strange sense, Cooper has earned this fate. He deserves this fate. There's something almost wrathful about the sequence of him in the Black Lodge, meeting ghost after ghost from Laura Palmer's past. Because as the second season was written, Cooper looked away. He flinched at the implications of Leland killing Laura. He (and the whole series) leaned gratefully into the excuse that BOB was responsible for everything, that BOB was the evil in the hearts of man. He allowed the possibility that Leland was just an innocent victim: not a victim of Laura's death, as the first season so heartbreakingly suggested, but a victim of having caused it. It's the cheapest flavor of "love the sinner, hate the sin" imaginable: really, isn't it sad that Leland couldn't find his way towards being a better man? Aren't all evildoers really just a victim of their own evildoing? Alas, poor Leland: we knew him well, Sheriff Truman.

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Perhaps it was inevitable, after the series' exoneration and burying of Leland, that Lynch would feel the need to write and direct Fire Walk With Me. The prequel film makes it clear that Leland was not, at any point, a victim; he was not a passive observer of his own crimes. And while we see Leland break down crying at some point, feeling just awful about what he knows he's doing to Laura, the film makes it clear that this is part of the cycle of abuse. These are the tender, remorseful, loving moments that Leland himself will then use to coerce and gaslight and manipulate Laura—and the moments that he'll use to justify the horrific violence he'll inflict upon her. "How could you do this to me, when I loved you so?" Even as he hurts her, the abuser blames his victim for making him hurt her; it creates a disorienting narrative, where the abuser is innocent and blameless and loving, and the victim is a monster who needed to be hurt. The horrors of the film, in part, is that we see the ways in which Laura believes this: the ways that Leland has convinced her she is reprehensible and filthy for feeling what she feels, for needing what she needs, for destroying the connections she doesn't know how to maintain, because she was taught how to love by a man who one day coldly wrapped her up in plastic.

This Leland isn't really seen in the TV series, after he murders Maddie Ferguson. The Leland that we see disposing of her body is more of a gleeful imp, dancing with golf clubs, feigning grief within earshot of others, immediately bursting into laughter once they're gone. He's a demon, after all. No need to make him seem remotely human. He died an episode later, he was buried an episode after that, and none of the writers made any plans to revisit him once he was gone. He's barely even mentioned. The series' greatest mystery, the show's most tantalizingly hidden identity, vanishes without a trace.

Well, almost without a trace. Because Lynch brings him back one last time.

Cooper paces from room to room in the Black Lodge, and suddenly, without warning, Leland is standing there. He looks the way he looked in the pilot, the morning that he "learned" that Laura died. But his eyes are milky white, and he has an unsettlingly calm grin on his face. It's not his quirky demon smile: it's the same smile that everybody else here wears, the smile that says he's telling a very funny joke, where the punchline is that Cooper doesn't get it yet. But he will. Oh, Cooper will.

And the joke that Leland tells is this:

"I did not kill anybody."

Because he didn't, right? It was all BOB. Except for when he smothered Jacques Renault in his sleep. That was just a grieving father, suffering in ways we couldn't possibly imagine. No, wait: that was BOB too, hiding his true motive in plain sight. It was all BOB. BOB and a blameless father, a man who loved his daughter very much.

"I did not kill anybody," Leland insists, smiling. And Cooper breaks. Leland takes a step towards him, and Coop takes a nervous, skittish step back. He looks back at Leland—smiling, innocent Leland—one last time. And that's when he first sees his doppelganger. That's when he turns and runs.

Coop's doppelganger doesn't chase him. He doesn't need to. Instead, he stands there with Leland, sharing a moment, giggling with his accomplice. Then, for a brief moment, his eyes flick toward the camera, and he seems to look directly at you.

Do you get it? Are you laughing too?

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After he finished Twin Peaks, David Lynch directed a series of movies whose narratives mirror themselves. Characters transform into their opposites, halfway through. Sometimes they seem to be living out dream versions of their own lives. Other times, the lives they appeared to be living are abruptly revealed to be the dreams.

The original Twin Peaks, curiously, spends exactly half its runtime as a mirror version of itself. Immediately after Leland is revealed, the show seems to run in reverse, swiftly undoing its own actions, closing Pandora's box immediately after opening it. What follows is a strange inversion of the original show: one where most of the pieces seem familiar, but no longer serve their original purpose, receding back into the flat televisual world of the early 1990s. 

The first season of Twin Peaks was acclaimed for its chic, meta takes on soap opera narratives. This wasn't a soap opera: it was a commentary on soap operas. It even had a soap opera within the show, winkingly reflecting all the plot beats of the actual series. Season 2, before Maddie's death, casts the soap opera somewhat to the side, dipping into stranger territory, doing things that TV had never done before (and mostly hasn't done since). But after the jarring depiction of Maddie's murder, the show makes an even more jarring choice: it abruptly becomes the soap opera it once elevated itself above, complete with side characters who appear and immediately vanish, half of the cast dying or disappearing one by one, bizarre and arbitrary plot arcs that go nowhere and change nothing, and a cackling dastardly villain whose master plan, again, involves his dressing up like a horse.

It eventually works out how to turn this into good television. But it's not the same series that it used to be. It remains that strange, shallow version of itself. When it was time to end, it made a plan to leave one final strange, shallow impression.

What's so unsettling about Dale's visit to the Black Lodge isn't that he goes anywhere new. It's that he returns, all at once, to the Twin Peaks we once had. What's unsettling isn't what changes: it's the realization, in part, that things have already been changed. Things were replaced. And over time, we convinced ourselves that the new things and the old things were one and the same, that everything was what it was meant to be, that Laura Palmer's killer didn't kill anybody, that this new comfortable drama was the same old story we'd signed up to watch.

The Return then presents another stunning inversion: eighteen hours of new series exclusively written by Lynch and Frost, and exclusively directed by David Lynch. Between that, the movie, and the season 2 finale, the series has another near-total bifurcation: all at once, twenty-five years later, fully half of its run consisted exclusively of the show that Lynch wanted to make, done exactly the way that he wanted it done. And the bulk of season 2 simply melted away, as if it had never existed at all. (Questions of just how invested the new series was in the death of Laura Palmer were met with... well, with interesting answers, let's say.)

It's safe to say that Twin Peaks never again forgot what it was. And it's safe to say that viewers never forgot it either—and that they didn't need 25 years to remember it. Nobody forgot it. Not after that final episode. Not after that final scene.

The end of the original Twin Peaks is sometimes cited as one of the most horrific, upsetting endings to a TV series ever. It wasn't written as one. But it had to be that way. There was no other way to bring it back to where it had always been meant to be.

It's not just a matter of Cooper pouring toothpaste into the sink, or smashing his head against the mirror. It's not just a matter of Leland grinning that shit-eating grin, and lying right to Cooper's face. You can see it in Ben Horne's cracked skull, as blood spills out into yet another family's carpet. It was there all along, right from the very first scene of the very first episode, right from the body on the shore, eagerly reminding us, patiently waiting for us to remember: there is no undoing any of this. There is only waiting, dread knotted in our stomachs, to see what happens next.