Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces

The 23-year interval between 1991's Twin Peaks series finale and the 2014 release of Fire Walk With Me: The Missing Pieces set, probably, several records for requiring an audience to wait for the plot of a TV show to advance. But then the timing of the series was always subject to uncertainty. After the ABC network forced the show's creators to solve its central mystery ("Who killed Laura Palmer?") in the second season, ratings plummeted and the show began a death spiral that nearly killed it off before the artful, cliffhanger finale that ended its run on broadcast TV. That was followed the next year by a cinematic relase, Fire Walk With Me, primarily a prequel with significant time-jumping in the narration, which padded the backstory of the series but left its mysterious plots relatively untouched. The show itself made reference to a distant future, labeled "25 years later" and certain occurrences timed to conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn (which take place every 20 years), so there's something timely about a return to the series after 23 years with the release of archival material.

The show's success stemmed from one compelling general observation: That American life has a dark side that lurks in the woods, that lurks at night, where vices become secrets and secrets can become deadly. The central figure of this passion play was Laura Palmer. Outwardly, she was a small town's beautiful prom queen who volunteered to help the needy. Unknown to most, she was also a drug-addicted prostitute juggling eight or more sexual relationships and scars from a lifetime of abuse.

Twin Peaks gave this darkness a terrible reality beyond that of mere human urges. The show and its prequel portrayed a spirit world whose nature was gradually revealed to contain a demon, BOB, who committed rapes and murders on Earth, then fed on the emotions of fear and pain that his crimes caused. Possessing Laura's father, BOB was the real killer of Teresa Banks, Laura Palmer, and Maddy Ferguson, and in the show's final moments was shown to have possessed the show's hero, Agent Cooper, while Cooper's girlfriend Annie lay injured, perhaps dead.

And so the show was laid to rest until now. Lynch filmed about five hours of footage for Fire Walk With Me, but less than half of it made the 1992 release, leaving fans wondering what was left out and whether they would learn more about the mysteries that were left hanging. The 2014 release, Missing Pieces, is 91 minutes long, revealing much of the unused footage with a small amount of footage identical to the theatrical release, which allows certain scenes to play out in more complete fashion. It's not clear that that was necessary. Missing Pieces is not in any way a standalone film. It consists of shots and scenes that might have been inserted into a long, four-hour, cut of Fire Walk With Me, but on their own do not convey the central events of the story.

Missing Pieces is generally structured as follows: 84 minutes of moments from the week before Laura Palmer was killed, then less than 6 minutes of events that take place right after the end of the TV show, therefore extending the narrative just a bit into new territory.

Almost all of the first 84 minutes shows major characters and minor ones going about their lives in fairly ordinary ways. These scenes are entertaining and well-filmed, but just a few of those scenes pertain to the interaction between the spirit world and Laura Palmer or Agent Cooper, and that is limited to three short scenes which are re-cuts of scenes that were already in Fire Walk With Me.

It should be noted here that the release of Missing Pieces includes essentially nothing that was not leaked to the Internet in the Nineties in the form of the FWWM shooting script, which can still be found online. About 90% of Missing Pieces, including all of the 6 minutes that follow the television finale, were in the shooting script. There is, therefore, exceedingly little in MP which was not already known to the most devoted researchers of the series. MP adds just a few short lines by spirit world characters that were not in the shooting script. Meanwhile, the shooting script adds several lines that were not heard in FWWM or MP, so the shooting script is the most complete of the three.

What is added? FWWM has a scene in which Agent Jeffries, who disappeared in 1987, mysteriously appears in the Philadelphia FBI office in 1989, narrates something he witnessed while visiting the spirit world (it is referred to as being over a convenience store), and then disappears. MP adds to this that Jeffries disappears from a hotel in Buenos Aires, teleports to Philadelphia, and after giving his story, teleports back to Buenos Aires, terrifying two people who witness his reappearance. It is possible that time travel was also involved, because Jeffries is surprised by the calendar he sees in Philadelphia. It is unclear why Jeffries does not try to report to FBI Headquarters from Buenos Aires in a more conventional way. Everything that was added to this scene by MP was already contained in the shooting script.

The shooting script and MP also add a substantial amount of dialogue spoken by the spirit-like characters in the "convenience store." This scene is narrated by Agent Jeffries to the other FBI personnel, but we see it on camera. This scene probably a significant number of cryptic clues about the spirit world, but all three versions of the material have different dialogue, somewhat overlapping with the other versions. Below, I offer a guide to all of the dialogue in the three versions of the convenience store scene. The codes S, F, and M indicate which of the three versions – the shooting script, FWWM, and MP – contain each line. Several characters are involved, but who says which line changes in some cases from version to version.

  M: The chrome reflects our image.

  M: Electricity.

S M: We have descended from pure air.

S M: Going up and down.  Intercourse between the two worlds.

  M: Animal life.

 FM: Garmonbozia.

S  : Light of new discoveries.

S  : Why not be composed of materials and combinations of atoms?

S  : This is no accident.

SFM: This is a formica table.  Green is its color.

S  : Our world.

S  : With chrome.  Any everything will proceed cyclically. Boneless.

S  : Yes, find the middle place.

S M: I HAVE THE FURY OF MY OWN MOMENTUM.

SFM: Fell a victim.

 FM: With this ring, I thee wed.

 F : Electricity.

S M: Fire Walk With Me...

S  : Fire Walk With Me.

This cryptic dialogue seems to focus on one central message: That the characters from this spirit world (BOB, Mike, the Man From Another Place, Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, and the woodsmen) can visit the material world and interact with it, and BOB's crimes serve a purpose for them, obtaining an abstract kind of food (shown as creamed corn) they call garmonbozia. This idea was already clear to fans simply from watching Twin Peaks and FWWM.

The other moment that MP adds consists of a conversation between The Man From Another Place and Agent Cooper that takes place in the red room seen in Laura's dream. The one line in MP and the shooting script that was not in FWWM is:

Man From Another Place: Is it future? Or is it past?

This reinforces the idea, abundantly demonstrated elsewhere in the show and movie, that time in the spirit world is not linear like time in the real world.

All told, the dialogue added to FFWM by MP's first 84 minutes is pretty thin stuff, and there is almost nothing in MP that was not in the shooting script. Then, in the final six minutes, we see scenes that were already recorded, rather faithfully, in the shooting script. In these two scenes, we learn that Annie survived her experience in the Black Lodge, and gives a warning that the good Dale is still in the lodge. Then a nurse steals from Annie's finger the cursed ring that previously led to the deaths of Teresa Banks and Laura Palmer and disappearance of Agent Desmond. (It should be noted that the theft of a ring by a nurse brings a curse down upon her in the classic 1963 horror film, Black Sabbath, so this crime by Annie's nurse may prove to be extremely unwise.) Finally, in a bathroom in the Great Northern Lodge, Agent Cooper, under the control of BOB, follows the smashing of his head into a mirror (as seen in the TV finale) by lying on the floor and acting very oddly when Harry and Doc Hayward break in to assist him, saying that he found his head injury funny and expressing undue concern that he didn't get to brush his teeth.

Fans who had not read the shooting script learn this: That Annie is still alive, and BOB's control of Cooper may be full of bizarre giveaways that could eventually lead to others detecting the problem, but we already knew that Major Briggs had been told explicitly that Dale is in the Black Lodge. Fans who had read the shooting script learned essentially nothing with Missing Pieces, although the cinematography is excellent, and there is an amusing and educational scene between Josie, Pete Martell, and an unsatisfied customer at the sawmill.

All told, we know at the end of MP just what we already knew: There is a spirit world that sends dark forces into the area of Twin Peaks. Annie is alive. A subsequent effort, led by Major Briggs, to liberate Agent Cooper from the Black Lodge may or may not succeed. And there it ends, with no further elaboration. Correspondence recorded online between Twin Peaks writer Harley Peyton and a fan indicate that the writing process on the show was to create cliffhangers, then figure out later how to handle them, and so there was no overarching plan beyond this point. So, it must be concluded, there simply is no future for Agent Cooper or BOB or the world of Twin Peaks. Agent Cooper will never escape from limbo and neither will the rest of the show. The spirit of Twin Peaks, however, has lived long past its swift demise.

It may be argued that David Lynch's Twin Peaks gave birth to Internet discussion of cult TV shows; in the early Nineties, before the World Wide Web, a forum on Usenet kept the fans talking in the months and years after the last episode had aired. The show was profound and bizarre in a way few shows before it had ever approached, and its influence on everything that came after is inestimable. No Twin Peaks, no X-Files. No X-Files, no Breaking Bad. The face of modern dramatic television was shaped in large portion by Lynch's brief foray from the cinema to the small screen. The show itself is gone, but its spirit lives on, which is much what the show told us about temptation and many of its characters, both evil and good.