“I’m not gonna talk about Judy; in fact, we’re not gonna talk about Judy at all, we’re gonna keep her out of it.” 

— Phillip Jeffries, Fire Walk With Me (1992)

David Bowie appears in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Not, as some fans hoped, as a surprise cameo filmed before his death last year, reprising his role as “the long-lost Phillip Jeffries” from the Twin Peaks film Fire Walk With Me (FWWM), but in a straight replay of part of his scene from that film. It’s contained within a dream related to colleagues by FBI director Gordon Cole. Cole is played by Lynch himself, and he introduces his dream with the immortal words that have been uttered by so many of us: “Last night, I had another Monica Bellucci dream.” And, lo and behold, Monica Bellucci is indeed in the dream, meeting Lynch/Cole in Paris, where she tells him “we’re like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream,” echoing another statement of Bowie’s from the film.

“But,” she adds presciently, “who is the dreamer?”

When the series ends, five episodes later, the answer is no clearer. Even after a final episode that feels like one long bad dream. Not a nightmare, but one of those dreams that wakes you at 2am, deeply unsettled, that leaves you unable to return to sleep, one that unnerves you hours hence when you recall a fragment of it, giving you an unshakeable conviction that, despite all logic, something, somewhere is very wrong. The final episode is an hour of exactly that feeling, steadily mounting because — as so many fans observed — they started to look at their watches with 20 minutes to go and wondered exactly how the vast number of plots that had unspooled over the course of the previous 17.5 episodes would be wrapped up. Answer: they wouldn’t be. This would be like a dream that ends without any resolution.

So what’s the answer to Bellucci’s question? Whose dream was Twin Peaks: The Return? It might have been our hero Dale Cooper’s. His head appears superimposed over events in the penultimate episode — episodes 17 and 18 ran together as the finale — and he, like Jeffries, says “we live inside a dream”. It might be Gordon Cole’s. It might be Audrey Horne’s. It might be ours. It might be the mysterious Judy’s.

Because we did talk about Judy. We talked about her quite a bit. What seemed like a forgotten footnote to FWWM, an idea flagged for sequels never made, became central to Twin Peaks: The Return, when Lynch/Cole gave us a weird info-dump at the start of the finale. Judy — or Jowday, as she was originally known — was an “extremely powerful negative force” that was being pursued by Cole, Cooper, Jeffries — played in the present by a giant steaming tea kettle with a rotten Southern accent, because, you know, David Lynch — and a deceased character from the original series, Major Briggs (actor Don S. Davis having, like a number of Peaks alumni, died in the intervening quarter century, but that doesn’t prevent him from playing a, erm, major role, as another disembodied head).

This was less a plot twist, or even the introduction of a new Boss Villain, than a complete resetting of the entire story. We’d spent 25 years fretting about how Dale Cooper was trapped in the Red Room while his evil doppelganger, possessed by the monstrous Black Lodge entity BOB, roamed the world committing atrocities. Turns out, Cooper all along had bigger fish to fry: Judy was his real target, not BOB. And we even got the Judy and BOB back story, in the now justly famous episode eight, the most avant-garde hour of television ever broadcast. That’s where the first atomic detonation unleashes a monster that spews evil into the world, including BOB, a cockroach-frog mutant that crawls inside a young girl’s mouth, and a sinister hobo who wreaks havoc in an archetypal small town in ’50s America with his casual crushing of skulls, his incessant demands for a light for his cigarette, and his rather soporific poetry slam. In response, the good forces in the White Lodge appear to put into action a plan involving homecoming queen Laura Palmer, whose murder in 1989 sparked the entire series.

[I’ll watch you again in 25 years: a return to Twin Peaks]

More compellingly, we also now understood that the evil Cooper (called Mr C) also appeared to be hunting Judy, spending the entire season looking for coordinates that would take him to her, and having devoted vast sums of money — his crimes have made him a billionaire — to constructing a box to catch her in. It seemed that not merely did Mr C have the beloved Dale Cooper’s appearance and memories, but he’d taken on his mission as well.

So the much-anticipated defeat of BOB/Mr C, which occurs in the first half of the finale, is almost an aside, a preparation for the final showdown with Judy. Indeed, Mr C, invincible throughout the series, goes down like a schmuck — he’s rerouted to Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Station by the White Lodge, shot dead by assistant and resident technophobe Lucy, and when an blob of BOBness emerges from him, a character with a superpowered gardening glove destroys it by punching the hell out of it. BOB is sent back to the Black Lodge, and a Vegas showgirl enters the station to reflect that it’s lucky she brought so many sandwiches. Yes, all this happened, and bizarrely, it made a kind of sense. But it felt like either a wacky dream or a bizarre send-up by creators Lynch and Mark Frost of the kind of climactic showdown we’d all been expecting. 

At that point, with some 90 minutes remaining, it felt like the series would wrap somewhat conventionally. Dale, Gordon, Sheriff Truman and the Twin Peaks crowd would repair to the RR for some of the damned fine coffee and pie, and catch up on 25 years, perhaps interspersed with some vintage snark from Albert (RIP Miguel Ferrer).

Well, not quite.

Instead, Cooper’s head appeared superimposed over everything, and things shifted up several gears in weirdness. Cooper travelled back to 1989, via the Jeffries/kettle combo — “it’s slippery in here,” Jeffries observes at one stage, apropos of we know not what — and stopped Laura Palmer from ever being murdered. The official answer to that most famous television question “who killed Laura Palmer?” is now “no one”. But, as Cooper leads Laura away on the night she was to die, she vanishes and screams …

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