Twin Peaks sea­son 3 decoder: Judy

This arti­cle con­tains spoil­ers for Twin Peaks sea­son 3 parts 17 and 18. For max­i­mum enjoy­ment, we rec­om­mend read­ing after you’ve watched the show.

David Lynch rein­vent­ed the tele­vi­sion wheel not once but twice. The orig­i­nal Twin Peaks, which ran from 1990 – 1991, was his attempt at branch­ing out into a new cre­ative medi­um, intrigued by long-form sto­ry­telling. Things soured con­sid­er­ably, as the show went from cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non to ignominy in the space of a year. By the time the sea­son two finale aired in June 1991, nobody real­ly gave a damn. Once Lau­ra Palmer’s killer had been unmasked, the water cool­er con­ver­sa­tions quick­ly dried up.

Now sea­son three has come to an end, and it may just have altered the tele­vi­sion land­scape all over again. Ear­li­er this year Show­time CEO David Nevins described Twin Peaks: The Return as the, ​“pure hero­in ver­sion of David Lynch”. He wasn’t kid­ding. In part eight, Lynch treat­ed us to a 45-minute exper­i­men­tal short film involv­ing nuclear bombs, killer lum­ber­jacks and a sequence set inside an explo­sion which replaced 2001: A Space Odyssey​’s ​‘star gate’ sequence as the most far out thing we’ve ever expe­ri­enced. How did he get away with it? Well, because David Lynch is David Lynch, and his cul­tur­al stock was high enough again for the net­work to give he and Twin Peaks co-cre­ator Mark Frost cre­ative carte blanche.

If part 17 was the excit­ing show­down we’ve long expect­ed between Coop and Mr C – and it was very excit­ing – part 18 was the haunt­ing coda nobody saw com­ing. While the penul­ti­mate chap­ter prac­ti­cal­ly reboot­ed the mythol­o­gy – yes, even Lynch has joined the reboot craze – it did so in an unspeak­ably trag­ic way. The som­bre tone and pecu­liar mood of part 18 recalled 1962’s hor­ror gem, Car­ni­val of Souls (a sin­gu­lar work which itself feels pro­to-Lynchi­an), and one of the director’s favourite’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Agent Cooper/​Richard (Kyle MacLach­lan) sets off to find Lau­ra Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in Odessa, Texas and return her to the Pacif­ic North­west moun­tain town for a hap­py fam­i­ly reunion with Sarah and Leland. Although Coop woke up and revert­ed to his kick-ass for­mer self, in sav­ing Lau­ra in the woods moments before her ren­dezvous with Jacques Renault (Wal­ter Olkewicz) and Leo John­son (Eric DaRe), some­thing went very wrong. This was no Quan­tum Lea-style right­ing of past wrongs.

Philip Jef­fries’ line in Fire Walk with Me, ​“We live inside a dream,” reap­peared in the final parts, and it now looks like Lynch and Frost have con­demned Coop to exist­ing in a liv­ing night­mare. While every­one in the town thinks Dale is per­fect, his mis­takes tend to be big ones. Is he guilty of arro­gance or lack of guile? Hawk (Michael Horse) did warn him, back in sea­son two, cross­ing into the Black Lodge with­out per­fect courage would anni­hi­late his soul. Turns out Coop is a very flawed hero after all.

Frost and Lynch have been hint­ing at frac­tured time­lines and alter­nate dimen­sions through­out sea­son three. This goes some way to explain­ing curi­ous con­ti­nu­ity errors too delib­er­ate in design to be the prod­uct of slop­py direct­ing, two prime exam­ples being Big Ed’s reflec­tion in the Gas Farm win­dow front not match­ing his actions in the scene, and Nor­ma (Peg­gy Lip­ton) cor­rect­ing her suit­or and busi­ness part­ner about her not hav­ing any fam­i­ly. In one real­i­ty of Twin Peaks, Nor­ma does have a sis­ter named Annie (Heather Gra­ham) and a food crit­ic moth­er named Vivian (Jane Greer), but not nec­es­sar­i­ly in anoth­er. Frost set the stage for all this time-blur­ring mad­ness in his 2016 book ​‘The Secret His­to­ry of Twin Peaks’, where Norma’s lin­eage is total­ly at odds with the show’s.

It’s time – at long last – to talk about Judy. ​‘Judy’ began as a ref­er­ence to a per­son in Fire Walk with Me and in 2014’s The Miss­ing Pieces this per­son is referred to by Jef­fries as ​“Miss Judy”. But Gor­don Cole’s rev­e­la­to­ry expla­na­tion in part 17 turned Judy into a malev­o­lent force of evil, not nec­es­sar­i­ly a lit­er­al per­son. The scene also, hilar­i­ous­ly, fea­tures a dick joke. When Albert (Miguel Fer­rer) quips that his boss is going soft in his old age, Cole fires back, ​“Not where it counts, buddy.”

The FBI Deputy Direc­tor informed Albert and Tam­my (Chrys­ta Bell), Judy was in the ​“old­en times” known as ​“Jiāo dāi”, which is Man­darin for ​“to explain”. Con­tained with­in this bit of ret­conned mythol­o­gy from the spin-off pre­quel is a cod­ed mes­sage from Lynch to the fans. Jiāo dāi in Twin Peaks is a supreme neg­a­tive force and the ulti­mate neg­a­tive force (for Lynch) is explanation.

Mys­tery is a beau­ti­ful thing. If all has been explained, it takes away the plea­sures of thought and imag­i­na­tion, strip­ping away mul­ti­ple mean­ings and read­ings into one defin­i­tive con­cern. It’s no fun and even anti-intel­lec­tu­al. Lynch wants us to active­ly engage with his work and day­dream about it. Keep the mys­tery alive, let it be, be in awe of the unknown and the unknow­able. In a world of direc­tors con­stant­ly talk­ing about mak­ing films ​“for the fans”, Lynch and Frost have done the exact oppo­site. They love Peakies – as the fan base is affec­tion­ate­ly known – but the pair’s cre­ativ­i­ty is not in thrall to them, and they’re cer­tain­ly not inter­est­ed in cheap fan ser­vice. Lynch and Frost threw us more than a few bones along the way, but it was always on their terms.

Twin Peaks sea­son three is sure­ly Lynch’s mag­num opus. It feels like a sum­ma­ry state­ment of every­thing the direc­tor has achieved. From his inspi­ra­tions – the Holy Vedas (Hin­du texts), ani­ma­tion, abstract expres­sion­ism, 1950s Amer­i­cana, pop music, sur­re­al­ism, tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion and even quan­tum physics – Lynch has revealed that Twin Peaks exists and oper­ates like a dream, where forms, phys­i­cal­i­ty and phys­i­cal spaces are con­stant­ly in doubt, appear in dis­guise and can be pre­sent­ed in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. Sea­son three was nev­er going to end con­ven­tion­al­ly. Was any­one real­ly expect­ing to see Coop sit­ting in the Dou­ble R, munch­ing cher­ry pie and shoot­ing the breeze with all our favourite locals? That’s sim­ply not Lynch’s style, and we wouldn’t have it any oth­er way.