‘Twin Peaks The Return’: The 35 Best Scenes

8. “Big” Ed Hurley Proposes to Norma Jennings – Part 15 – There’s some fear in letting go
One of the big “will they, won’t they”s that stemmed from the melodrama of the original series run was the relationship between gas station owner Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) and RR Diner owner Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton). Ed’s wife — the neurotic, eyepatch-wearing Nadine (Wendy Robie) — has been watching Dr. Jacoby’s (Russ Tamblyn) pirate radio (or pirate Internet?) “Dr. Amp” program and is learning to “Dig herself out from the shit.” She approaches Ed at the beginning of the episode and tells him that she has been holding him back and that he should be with Norma. While Ed doesn’t believe it at first, Nadine insists that she is well and is working on herself (and is running a shop that sells the silent drape runners that she worked so hard on perfecting in the original series). After this encounter, Ed heads to the RR, where Norma is having a meeting with her business partner Walter (Grant Goodeve). She tells Walter that she wants him to buy her out of all the RR franchise stores they have opened and that she only wants to continue on the Twin Peaks location. When she sends him packing, her and Ed embrace – set to Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” – while Ed asks her to marry him. In the wrong hands, this moment could have come off as a total cheeseball affair, but given the storied history of these characters and the “frozen-in-time” aspect of the town itself, the dialogue, the music, the emotion, and the warmth all crystalize into a moment that is all-around beautiful. – RO

9. Tulpa Diane’s Confession Episode 16 – No knock, no doorbell
If “Twin Peaks” got a little baggy and started wandering a little bit in the middle, it found its footing in episode eight and then really started to take a chokehold in its last few episodes. One of the biggest moments is tulpa Diane’s confession. Yes, Diane has been a tulpa all along—a doppelgänger of the real Diane who essentially hasn’t been on the show (got it?). And she’s obviously been under the control of the evil Cooper/Mr. C (whatever you want to call him) receiving cryptic texts and coordinates and whatnot. Clearly, she’s reporting back to him while in the company of the FBI. So, Mr. C sends her the coded text that reads, “:) ALL,” and she suddenly loses her shit and breaks down, explaining that she was raped by (evil) Cooper and essentially trying to confess to the FBI trio that she’s betrayed them. You know how it ends, but it’s what Laura Dern brings to the scene that is so bewitching. The psychotic breakdown is heartbreakingly full of anguish and torment, Diane waking up to who she is: a manufactured fraud. It’s all too much for her to absorb and in Dern’s hands, it’s horrific and tragic—a tool of a being coming to terms with what she is, grappling for shards of identity before ultimately firing off into the nothing after she’s shot and “killed.” Awful and terrifying stuff to witness. – RP

10. Cooper’s Awakening – Episode 16 – No knock, no doorbell
It’s all happening again and of course, this episode is just loaded with key moments. Chief among them is the return of Agent Dale Cooper, finally! After 15 long episodes of Cooper as the catatonic Dougie, the Special FBI agent that you know and love finally awakens from his stupor. Electrocuted in the previous episode—possibly on purpose as electricity is a key, elemental component (and theme) that speaks to its transportive powers—Cooper is shocked into a coma. The FBI begins to call—having found out Dougie IS Cooper—and suddenly, MIKE, the one-armed man, returns and effectively wakes Cooper up. And when he’s back to himself it’s like an avalanche of pent-up emotion. We’ve finally got our hero back and his return even beams with a kind of heart-swelling joy. It’s a kind of defining heroic moment of relief even if Coop hasn’t done a thing yet (think Clark Kent, pulling his shirt open to reveal the S with John Williams’ score in the background only in Lynchian manner). Cooper removes his hospital tubes, bolts up like a rocket and his razor sharp poise, presence and speech returns. “I AM the FBI” he explains, while pretty much riding off on a horse to save the day.

10.1 Dougie’s Goodbye Episode 16 – No knock, no doorbell (continued)
Acting with momentous purpose, the long sequences takes another turn when Cooper realizes he has to leave Janey-E (Naomi Watts) and Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon). They believe Cooper is Dougie, Janey-E’s husband and Sonny Jim’s dad, respectively. But clearly this is an entirely different person. He has to say goodbye and it is just.utterly.fucking.heartbreaking. You see the horror and fear coming over Janey-E and Sonny Jim’s faces. Is she losing her husband for good? Is Sonny Jim seeing his father for the very last time? Mixed in the swirl of this emotional tornado is confusion. “You’ve made my heart so full” Cooper says preparing to say farewell for good, but realizes how they’re shattering emotionally and quickly backtracks. But Janey-E essentially figures it out in the heart aching final embrace, “Whoever you are,” she says, “Thank you.” I’m crying just writing this, it’s a beautiful, dolorous scene and the performances are astonishing, in particular Naomi Watts’. Thank Christ, we get relief in the following episode: Cooper recreates Dougie (because he’s a good tulpa) and he is emotionally reunited with his family. Whew. I would have died otherwise. This scene is crushingly sad and sentimental, perhaps the most melancholy moment in the history of “Twin Peaks.” – RP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2UveFrlnIE

11. Audrey’s Dance/Dream State – Episode 16 – No knock, no doorbell
This is a tricky one. When we last see Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) in “Twin Peaks” season two she was in a coma. Sometime over that 25 year gap between seasons she gives birth to the evil, weasley Richard, fathered by Dale Cooper’s doppelgänger. In ‘The Return’ she’s married to the diminutive Charlie and has been carrying on a long, brazen affair with Billy (who is mentioned but never seen). Strangely enough, Audrey never interacts and is never seen with any other character in this season outside of Charlie and their long, dramatic and protracted bizzaro conversations and shouting matches.  Until they goes to the Roadhouse and suddenly, the bar’s MC announces “Audrey’s Dance.” The bar clears the space and she has her now instantly-iconic, slow, sensual dance by herself in the spotlight. It’s a movement of Lynchian rapture, drunk with woozy feeling and then, all of a sudden, she is gone. She instantly reappears trapped in a white room staring at her own reflection in a mirror. What happened to her exactly? The theory goes, Audrey’s story is all a dream state and she never awoke from the coma and or, it was all a dream and she’s stuck in some kind of mental institution. We’ll never know, “Twin Peaks” doesn’t close the loop on her story, but that dancing scene is another “Twin Peaks” all-timer for Lynch. – RP

12. Erasing Laura’s Death – Episode 17 – The past dictates the future.
Time is a flat, fluid circle on “Twin Peaks” and portals and dimensional hopping is pretty common given the Black Lodge, The White Lodge, the Purple Sea and all the other unearthly mysterious places in Lynch’s sprawling drama. “The past dictates the future,” they say, and indeed, in the final episode, temporality of “Twin Peaks” makes its most gigantic leap: Dale Cooper goes back in time and effectively unkills Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). The magnitude of this moment is beyond colossal. The FBI Agent HAS GONE BACK IN TIME AND RESCUED THE HEROINE OF THIS SERIES AFTER 27-ODD YEARS OF narrative. The tragic murder of a forgotten, pained school girl — the entire impetus of the original show!! — has been undone. But nothing is that simple in the world of David Lynch. Before this sequence is complete, Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) freaks out, smashing Laura Palmer’s picture afterwards. It’s like she’s in a hysterical rage that Laura’s been effectively resurrected by Cooper. Is she the evil entity known as Judy, and was she all along? Was she behind the initial murder in a way we don’t fully understand? We’ll never really know. Which leads us to…

13. The Final Scene (Episode 18) – What is your name?
How do you unpack this final moment? It’s the towering culmination of two network TV shows, one feature film (“Fire Walk With Me”), a half a dozen books and 18 episodes of Showtime’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

Let’s break it down slightly beat for beat to make it as clear as possible.

– As soon as he rescues her, Cooper loses Laura in the slipstream of time.

– Later on in the episode, Cooper and Diane pass the 430 mile coordinate threshold (something the Giant warned Cooper about in episode one) and…something changes. They are no longer themselves. Cooper is perhaps a half version of himself and Mr.C – half good/half bad.

– He finds out Laura Palmer’s whereabouts, comes to her home, but when he arrives, she says she is Carrie Paige and has no knowledge of who Laura Palmer is.

– Cooper drives her home to Twin Peaks, Washington hoping her family will be able to jog her memory.

Then it begins, the final moments. Cooper takes Laura/Carrie to her childhood home. Not only does Laura not recognize any of it., but her parents don’t live there, the owners of the house aren’t people we know (though apparently they are referenced briefly in “Fire Walk With Me”) and it’s as if the Palmers have never lived there. Or perhaps they never existed. Then there’s the key line, the terrifying, horrible line. “What year is this?” Cooper says in confusion and fear, almost bowled over by the realization that everything has gone so, so wrong. And that’s really it. The story of Laura Palmer will seemingly never end and Cooper will be the hero chasing her through time trying hopelessly to save her, but doomed to fail over and over again. Laura screams her earth-shattering scream one last time when she hears her name whispered in the wind, perhaps awakening from Carrie Paige and finally recognizing who she truly is. And we cut to black and it’s over, probably for good. Whatever Cooper did, he may have unintentionally changed history, time, or dropped himself and Laura into an alternate parallel timeline or… something else. As Cooper says earlier in the penultimate episode, “We live inside a dream. I hope I see all of you again. Every one of you.”

Honorable Mentions: There’s literally dozens of moments. We presented them mostly in video clips on the next page. All 22 of them.