“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.

The final hour then goes into what might be called pure Lynchiana, an environment we haven’t been since Inland Empire. Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, as Cooper and Diane, or perhaps as people called Richard and Linda, engage in the most disturbing sex scene ever seen on television. She vanishes; he emerges in Odessa Texas, stops at a cafe called Judy’s, beats up three cowboys (one of whom asks, perhaps on behalf of the audience, “what the fuck just happened”), and finds an amnesiac Laura Palmer whom he drives through what appears to be an almost deserted America to Twin Peaks, in probably the longest car ride scene ever shot. Laura’s mother Sarah — whom we are given to believe is possessed, perhaps by Judy — isn’t at her house any more (instead, the real life owner opens the door). A confused Cooper doesn’t know what year it is. Carrie/Laura, however, hears her mother’s voice from within the house, and screams, blasting its lights out. The credits roll over Laura and Coop in the Red Room.

“We live inside a dream.”

Theories about the finale seem to fall into two categories: optimistic and pessimistic. An increasingly popular optimistic theory is that most of the episode occurs in a pocket universe designed to lure and trap Judy, who is drawn by sex, and destroy her by overloading her with the suffering of Laura Palmer, and Cooper is victorious. And there’s plenty of evidence for that interpretation. Another is that most of the last episode is a dream of Cooper’s that he only breaks out of in the last seconds.

But as always with Lynch, it’s not the narrative or plot logic that’s important, it’s the emotional logic. Lynch is an artist, who works in painting, movies, sculpture, furniture, television and music. Like any artist, the question is what emotional effect is he aiming for? The emotional effect of the final episode is bleak indeed. Cooper — if that’s who he is — is not himself. He’s almost Mr C-like in his disposal of the cowboys. When he has sex with Diane, he simply watches her without emotion, until she starts covering his face to avoid his gaze (earlier in the season, Diane related how Mr C raped her years before).

There’s none of the boyish enthusiasm or glowing goodness of our Coop from the old series or even from the moments in episodes 16 and 17 when he wakes from his Dougie stupor. There’s not even the swaggering evil of Mr C. This is much worse: a cold, tired, grim detective taking a woman to an uncertain fate. His final words — “what year is this?” — sound like those of a confused old man who has lost his way, not our hero with whom we fell in love in 1990. The ending is as emotionally devastating as seeing BOB’s face leering back at Cooper in the mirror at the end of the second season.

And Judy, surely, isn’t anything as banal a next-level-up villain (as one observer noted, the Emperor to the Darth Vader of BOB). Despite the silliness of the Freddy versus BOB boxing match in the first half of the finale, this isn’t a video game, or for that matter any linear narrative. Judy, surely, is the ultimate “negative force”, the meaninglessness and indifference of the universe. Judy is the abyss, the void that ignores our existence and everything we achieve as less than trivial. What better way for her to be ushered into our world than via the first atomic bomb, when humankind learnt to manipulate the very forces at the heart of the cosmos?

The icy indifference of the universe to any meaning we can construct makes it the ultimate negative in the world we are ostensibly in: Twin Peaks, a world of police, procedure, investigations, and searches for explanations. Who killed Laura Palmer? The mystery was essential to the original series, but was never meant to be resolved, until the network demanded it. The Return is, in a way, Lynch’s revenge: not merely does Laura not even get murdered once Cooper changes history, but in world of Judy, the very question has no point anyway. It doesn’t matter who murdered her. She doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

No wonder the Blue Rose task force — Cole, Coop, Jeffries, the sour Albert Rosenfeld, Chet Desmond (fate unknown; perhaps Chris Isaak, too, was transmogrified into a kitchen appliance), and new recruit Tammy Preston — wants to destroy Judy. The entire point of the taskforce was to explain the unexplained. Judy is the enemy of all explanation. Coop, in particular, must destroy her. He is a detective, relentlessly curious about the world and deeply committed to justice. To him, everything matters. No mystery can be left unsolved, no wrong left unrighted. “Who really pulled the trigger on JFK?” he muses to Diane in the original series. This is a man obsessed with making order of the world.

But the people who end up happy at the end of the Return are Janey-E and Sonny Jim, Coop’s family in Vegas for most of the series while he was Dougie — the divisive plot line that either infuriated fans desperate to have their beloved Coop back, or made them wish there’d be an entire Twin Peaks: Vegas spin-off series (I’m definitely in the latter camp). Cooper, after waking from his Dougie reverie, organises a duplicate of himself to be dispatched to the family he has been with. This is more than mere wrapping up of plot — most of the plot strands of the series, and especially that of fan favourite Audrey, are simply left dangling at the end. The doppel-Coop that embraces Janey-E and Sonny Jim has a family that loves him and that he loves in return. Rather than questing for meaning, pursuing ever more mysteries to solve and foes to vanquish, this Cooper is content to make a home with his loved ones, presumably to live out his days with “Battlin’ Bud” at Lucky 7 Insurance, while the “real” Cooper continues on his mission to defeat evil. The only other happy ending we see is in Twin Peaks itself: Big Ed and Norma end up together after Nadine finds peace and lets Ed go. Connection, love, family, seem to be the only things that triumph in The Return.

[Rundle: killing Channel 31 is stupid and myopic, just like this government]

Asked once if his films had “messages”, Lynch replied by quoting Samuel Goldwyn: “If you have a message, call Western Union.” But it’s hard to ignore the contrast that Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost draw between the doppel-Coop who, uttering the word “home”, finds contentment by connecting with loved ones, and the “real” Cooper who ends the series in seeming misery and loneliness, doomed to spend eternity (possibly literally) finding new wrongs to right, new Judys to battle, new Lauras to save, perhaps becoming a disembodied entity like Jeffries before him. There’s literally no home for Coop — or Laura/Carrie — at the end of the series; perhaps there can never be a home for him. The finale has been compared by one critic to John Ford’s legendary Western The Searchers and that feels right: Cooper is John Wayne’s Ethan, who can never cross that threshold at the end to be part of the family, who is doomed to wander the liminal spaces of civilisation. But he has a doppelganger who can cross it.

Black Lodge inhabitants have their own, alternate version of this emotional connection: rather than love enabling them to fend off the meaninglessness of existence, they feed on the pain and suffering of humans (the Palmer house has become so full of suffering that it appears to have become a permanent residence for them). They form an alliance with, and provide extensive help to, Cooper throughout the season in order to force BOB back into the Black Lodge — not out of any sense of goodness, but because they want the “garmonbozia”, the pain and suffering, he has accumulated in a quarter century of havoc.

We started the season with the central question: how would good Coop defeat evil Coop. In the end, it seemed like the Coops were more like each other than we could have ever suspected — especially when they appear to merge into the joyless man who stalks Odessa looking for Laura (kudos again to Kyle MacLachlan, who provides, by my count, five separate roles throughout the season, each one fully rounded and nuanced). The Coops’ relentless questing can never defeat Judy, or bring satisfaction. Only love can.

In episode 17, after Diane is returned to earth, there’s a scene where she, Cooper and Cole all emerge from darkness before Cooper goes through a door to find his way to 1989. “See you at the curtain call,” he tells Diane. It’s hard to see the scene as making any sense except that Lynch is with his two favourite actors, Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan (his other favourite, Naomi Watts, plays Janey-E) and wanted to share a final moment with them on screen before we enter the deeply unsettling cinematic territory beyond the door, which may be the last film or TV content Lynch ever makes. Because the answer to Monica Bellucci’s question was in plain sight all along: Lynch was the dreamer, and he lived inside the dream. That we got to go along for the ride made for the most extraordinary 18 hours in television history.