Avis des critiques

Moved to the core of my being as I was by the 18 episodes of Twin Peaks that appeared between May and September of last year—as uncompromised and demanding as anything that Lynch has made for cinemas—I kept finding the mark of the series cropping up in the strangest places in the months after.

The Return" portion cinches what threatened to be a Fleetwood Mac reunion show. Tantamount is the fact dropped that Lynch and Frost worked on the script for four or five years. Cooper, every one of him, gets Icarusized, as Lynch broke new ground in his quest to "show" doppelgängers.

It started by slowing everything down, and then it went way, way out, inch by inch, week by week. Absolutely nothing like the original 1990s series, The Return was a deep meditation on … returning, precisely: the difficulty of returning, through time, in one's body, to any kind of origin, whether that origin is a town, or one's self. However you slice it, it's a grand, momentous achievement, including some of the finest work Lynch has ever done.

The Return made most other TV series look small by comparison. It was smarter than most shows, funnier, stranger (obviously), sadder, more terrifying and – during a five-minute scene of a man sweeping a bar-room floor – more boring than most shows. It contained multitudes … and Michael Cera doing a Marlon Brando impression. It was pure televisual maximalism.

The return of Twin Peaks in 2017 came like a Taser shock to the "golden age of television," overturning audience expectations for what Twin Peaks—and TV—could encompass, both in narrative and form. . . . With its narrative fissures and variety of abstract mise en scène, The Return has blown established forms of television wide open and generated some of the most sublime digital artwork of all time.

The temporality of the new series is unbound to stadial satisfactions. Over the first half dozen episodes, the series seemed — to many — achingly slow. But then we would have sudden bursts of exposition, as if to say, "You know, we can explain things in a minute. We can just tell you." Those sudden, lurching, Lynchian moments might be just right or slightly off or way out, but in their manipulation they are reminders that in The Return, time, space, and tone are in constant flux.

Those wanting answers, or in the very least closure, might understandably feel a little adrift right now, but it can't be denied that Peaks came back as a true artistic force that challenged just about every storytelling convention we know.

I have some conflicted feelings about the finale, and I think that's probably appropriate... But with something like this? Or any other singular piece of art? A movie, a book, a painting, a play … I can think of so many examples in all of these where the artist broke all of the conventional rules. And that's WHY the art was so good. And no, not everyone would love it. But not everyone loves everything

Even though I was sure the end result would be closer to Inland Empire than the original show, I thought Frost's presence as well as the sheer task of shaping 18 hours of material would require some sort of narrative arc simply to serve as an organizing principle. And it certainly seemed that way until the elliptical and incredibly desolate final episode, which I found viscerally disturbing like nothing else in Lynch's oeuvre.

Do I wish there were more answers? Kinda... [But] Twin Peaks will be one of the main memories laid down for me by summer 2017. It actually slowed time down — a precious thing when one is nearing fifty. Both by durational tricks (take a bow, floor-sweeping guy!) and by making the weeks stretch out like Cooper's face as it nears that big power socket, as we waited for the next exciting installment.

Everything Lynch does of late is heavily influenced by his practice of transcendental meditation and what seems to be an interest in the teachings of Buddhism. That feels especially true of Twin Peaks: The Return, with its slow descent into darkness and chaos, then equally slow ascent toward light and meaning.

There's little that's delicate about the conclusion to the Twin Peaks revival, which aired its final two episodes this past Sunday on Showtime in a two-hour block. Back in my first recap, I noted that there was "no netherworld of nonexistence in which I'd rather spend a summer," though I couldn't have conceived that my comment would so accurately describe the harrowing, horrifying endpoint of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper's (Kyle MacLachlan) years- and worlds-traversing odyssey.