The Good Dale Is In The Lodge And Can’t Leave

I’ve managed over three days to do a complete rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return, and all I can do is state again why I dislike the last one and a half hours of it.

The original series ended with Cooper having failed the fundamental existential test of being a live human being inside the Black Lodge: he ran from his shadow-self, the Dweller on the Threshold. He refused to face his failings and his failures; that’s how Bob is able to take him and leave the Lodge in his place.

The Return ignores all of this in its resolution to the doppelgänger’s 25-year reign of terror in favor of just shooting him with a gun and then some random guy we’ve never met before with a “piledriver” for a fist punches out Bob.

Cooper’s fall was all internal struggle made “flesh” inside the Lodge; his return was all goofy plot mechanics.

In the end, I don’t even especially care about what’s happening in the final episode of The Return because the penultimate one didn’t seem to care about what originally made Cooper’s fall resonate from a character perspective. Cooper in effect is allowed to cheat his way out of his self-made prison in the Lodge, which I’ll never be able to see as anything other than cheating him, and me, out of a resolution that actually mattered.