Twin Peaks season 3 on Showtime: episode reviews and news

If you follow enough TV or movie critics on Twitter, you’ve spent much of this week wondering why they’re all (usually jokingly) arguing about whether Twin Peaks, Showtime’s summer revival of the classic small-town mystery, was a TV show or a movie.

I got in on the fun (which I’ll freely admit depends heavily on your definition of “fun”), too:

The conventional wisdom surrounding Twin Peaks — in every one of its several incarnations — is tied up in its inscrutability. Even if you like the show, you like it for its surreal flights of fancy and its nightmare logic, the way that it seeks to explain nothing in concrete terms but maintain a terrifying emotional core.

I felt very differently. Twin Peaks was the only TV show that made sense to me this summer.

“What year is it?” asks Cooper.

Laura Palmer — now a middle-aged woman, going by Carrie Page, whom Cooper found in Odessa, Texas — stares up at the house where she lived and suffered before her untimely death. She hears a dim echo of that suffering, and she screams.

It’s all happening, friends. It’s all finally happening.

Tonight’s episode of Twin Peaks: The Return isn’t technically the penultimate episode, but since Parts 17 and 18 are airing back to back as a two-hour finale next weekend, Part 16 is the functional setup for the finale. And boy, does it go places.

One of the things that makes Twin Peaks so difficult to talk about is that even when a lot happens, it doesn’t feel like all that much has changed.

There were multiple deaths this week — Mr. Todd and his lackey, shot by a breezy Chantal; probably Chuck, punched by Freddie and his mighty garden glove; Steven Burnett, shot by himself — but the only one that feels likely to make a deep mark on the show is the deeply poignant offscreen death of the Log Lady, whose log has turned gold.

We only have three weeks and four hours of this miraculous Twin Peaks miniseries left, which means I forgive you if you wondered why this episode spent so long on Freddie, a character we’ve barely met before (he was in a brief snippet of “Part 3”), explaining to James just how he came to Twin Peaks, wearing a rubber gardening glove on one hand.

To be sure, his long-winded explanation — which involves a trip from his native London to an audience with the Fireman (formerly known as “the Giant” or “???????” in his previous appearances in the world alongside our world), who tells him that if he wears a certain glove on his hand, that hand will have the strength of a pile driver — is a fascinatingly weird dip into Twin Peaks lore.

The most terrifying moment in the original run of Twin Peaks comes about halfway through its second season. What happens is very simple: The demon BOB glides through the Palmer house, coming to the living room. Suddenly he stops. He turns his head.

Unmistakably, he has seen the camera. Which means that he has seen us. He knows we’re watching.

The episode description for “Part 12” is “Let’s rock,” and as Twin Peaks fans know, that’s a phrase that rings a lot of bells.

It’s what the Man From Another Place said to Agent Cooper in the Red Room, right before he informed Cooper that the gum he liked was going to come back in style.

I was having lunch with a fellow TV critic the other day, and our conversation turned (as it inevitably does) to Twin Peaks.

Neither of us would count ourselves in the camp that believes Showtime’s miniseries is literally perfect. It’s been a little herky-jerky and sometimes feels like a TV series stuck on shuffle. But we both could agree that it’s one of just a handful of shows we’ve anticipated so eagerly. Every week, Twin Peaks starts, I sink into its mindset, and I barely notice time passing. In that sense — the sense that it’s trying to get viewers to let go of everything but the show while they watch it — maybe it is perfect.

Hawk sits, listening to his friend the Log Lady, on the other end of a phone call. His eyes are closed. He almost seems like he’s meditating.

After a long monologue that seems like the Log Lady’s usual obtuse profundity, she concludes with a very simple statement: “Hawk, Laura is the one.” Indeed, maybe we should capitalize that O. “Laura is the One.”

One of the most common ways to talk about Twin Peaks’ influence on television is to discuss how it made possible the genre I call “the mystery show.”

A mystery show isn’t about solving a mystery, not really. Yes, it invites the audience to play along at home and try to fill in the blanks surrounding “Who killed Laura Palmer?” or “What’s up with the alien conspiracy hidden in the FBI’s X-Files?” or “What is the Island?” But at its center is the idea that mystery only begets more mystery. Once you answer one question, dozens more spring up. The mystery show is about the contemplation of mystery and the idea that the deeper you go into any question, the more likely it is that you will open up a mineshaft into the darkness of the truly unknowable.

When Showtime president David Nevins described the network’s Twin Peaks miniseries as the “pure heroin” version of David Lynch, I suspect this eighth episode is very much what he had in mind.

It’s got cinematic antecedents — the “creation of BOB” sequence reminded me of the lengthy creation of the universe sequence from The Tree of Life, and there are shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey in there as well. But for the most part, “Part 8” is more or less Lynch in his purest form, where he’s teasing out the boundaries between experimental film and nightmares, where he uses images as basic and seemingly inconsequential as billowing clouds to create a sense of all-encompassing dread.

In the lead-up to this season of Twin Peaks, co-creator David Lynch, who co-wrote and directed all 18 hours of the miniseries, said that it wasn’t just a season of TV. It was an 18-hour movie.

Often, when I hear a comment like this, it sets off alarm bells. TV seasons aren’t typically able to get by on just a single story for as long as they run, and even a show like Stranger Things, which had only eight hours to fill, still had to do a lot of plot stalling in the middle. TV shows that earn the “X-hour movie” label are usually ones that cleverly hide how episodic they really are, series like The Wire and Breaking Bad, where every hour of the show is a small piece of a larger puzzle but a complete piece unto itself nevertheless.