Twin Peaks: Audrey's Return

Among the original-series characters who returned in Twin Peaks: The Return, one of the last to appear was Audrey Horne, who wasn't seen onscreen until well into the second half of the season. Despite this late reintroduction, Audrey's four scenes stood out prominently in a number of ways, being strange, then increasingly strange, and finally abruptly ending the season's second-to-last broadcast. The Audrey scenes are hard to decipher in any sensible way and because of – not "despite" – this, may be among the most important of the season.

First, I offer a quick overview of the four scenes with Audrey. More details of these scenes and related ones will follow later:

Audrey's four scenes occur near or at the end of episodes 12, 13, 15, and 16. In each of them, she interacts with only one person: her husband Charlie, who has never been seen before and does not appear in any other scenes. In the first three, they are in what appears to be their home, discussing whether or not to go to the Roadhouse to look for a man named Billy. The conversations they have are remarkably bitter and hostile, frequently nonsensical, and include the information that Audrey is having an affair with Billy. They discuss other people, including Chuck and Tina, none of whom clearly links to any characters we can otherwise identify. In their fourth scene, Audrey and Charlie appear at the Roadhouse, where the M.C. introduces a song from Season One as "Audrey's Dance." Audrey dances alone to it, then a fight breaks out, and she suddenly seems to wake up disoriented in an all-white room.

There are many oddities, as stated above, and we must almost certainly conclude that the Roadhouse scene is a memory, dream, or delusion. However, the first three Audrey scenes also contain remarkable inconsistencies that make their reality suspect as well:

• Audrey and Charlie's conversation remains on a single topic, going in circles, while multiple days pass for the other characters in the show. Much is made of putting jackets on or not, and in the transitions between them, jackets are suddenly on or off, while all of the other clothing remains the same. It is hard to explain those scenes as taking place consecutively or on different days.

• The dialogue is very strange in tone and emotion. Charlie seems minimally hurt when Audrey makes exceptionally cruel comments. She seems like a young girl speaking with false confidence about things like contracts as though she is pretending to understand them. She is very aggressive in the first and third scenes, but whimpers defensively in the second.

• The dialogue is frequently illogical on a factual level. Charlie claims that they can't look for Billy because there is a New Moon. This is not only irrelevant to looking for someone indoors, but contradicted by a shot showing a crescent Moon. The third scene begins with Audrey saying almost exactly what she said to begin the first scene. Audrey says that they have already looked everywhere else for Billy, which certainly can't be true (e.g., he could be in another state). Charlie protests that he is too sleepy to look for Billy. Audrey sarcastically asks if Charlie has a crystal ball, and he answers her literally, not understanding the sarcasm. (Remarkably, he says that he does not have a crystal ball, but there is a crystal ball right there on his desk.) Audrey suddenly asks if "this" is Ghostwood. Charlie threatens to end Audrey's story "too." Audrey asks what story that is if it's "the story of the little girl who lives down the lane."

• Audrey's hair is quite different in the final "wake up." If her hair looks like that now, the scenes with Charlie are probably not happening close to the current time, if they ever happen(ed) at all.

• There are numerous references to someone being an unreliable narrator. Audrey says that she has details about Billy from her dream in which he is injured. Charlie suggests that Audrey is on "drugs." Audrey says that she's seeing Charlie as though he's a "different person" and doesn't feel like she is herself.

Suffice it to say, the first three scenes, no less than the Roadhouse scene, are difficult to explain as a real interaction between two married people, and we should suspect that all four of the scenes are unreal, with the final "wake up" showing Audrey's actual situation, which seems to be an institution.

We may also note that in several of Lynch's films since Twin Peaks last aired, main characters dream or imagine their lives to be very different than they are, and the viewers are shown extended scenes that are part of a delusional reality; the viewer, like the characters, face the challenge of realizing what is real and what was the delusion. This pattern holds true in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. There is also a prominent scene in which Gordon Cole says that in one of his dreams, he is told by Monica Bellucci that their lives are like a dream, but, the question is, who is the dreamer?

It is easy enough to adopt an interpretation, then, that Audrey is institutionalized and her vision of a very unhappy marriage with Charlie and a missing lover named Billy is just a delusion, and that the third scene repeats dialogue from the first because she repeats different versions of the delusion on multiple nights. We may also imagine that she has "Audrey's dance" in her dream because the original version of that scene, from 1990, was stirringly memorable, helping to give Sherilyn Fenn national fame and status as a sex symbol, and this is something that older Audrey may remember fondly as the best moment for her younger self. But then, the fantasy goes wrong and she wakes up. This explains the four scenes adequately.

However, that explanation doesn't go quite far enough. Audrey's scenes can't be merely her internal delusion because other scenes during the season echo things from the four scenes with Charlie. This is most obvious concerning a scene in episode 14, in which young women named Megan and Sophie discuss a group of people with names and biographical details matching the people in Audrey and Charlie's scenes. To be specific, there is a Billy who is bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth, and a Tina and another man who, in Audrey and Charlie's telling, is named Chuck. The last detail provided is when Sophie asks the name of Megan's mother, and Megan answers portentously that her name is Tina, and both characters pause strangely in response to this. It should be noted that this scene occurs in the approximate time slot of the fourteenth episode that Charlie and Audrey's scenes occur in the two episodes before and two episodes after, with the time slot as well as the character names suggesting that this scene is part of the Audrey-verse. They also mention a "nut house," which could match the appearance of Audrey's actual location. So perhaps this fifth scene is also part of Audrey's delusion.

But this, too, doesn't go far enough. Episode 7 ends with a man rushing into the RR Diner and asking for Billy. The music accompanying this scene is the 1959 instrumental song, "Sleep Walk." Perhaps this, too, is a hint that this scene, and all the Audrey scenes, are a dream.

We might, alternately, conclude that the Sophie-Megan scene as well as the "Billy" scene are real and that Audrey, inside the institution, has somehow gathered details of the real world because Megan is, as Sophie suggests, spending time inside a "nut house" and could spread gossip that Audrey hears.

And yet this still doesn't go far enough. There is a fight in the Roadhouse involving a Chuck and this fight leads to Freddie punching someone, and possibly inducing a bleeding nose and mouth. There is also a drunk who is bleeding profusely from his nose and mouth in a jail cell, where he mockingly repeats everything he hears. Moreover, both Audrey and The Arm in the spirit world use the same curious phrase "Story of the little girl who lives down the lane." The Arm says this in Episode 18, after Audrey has said the phrase. Now we require one of several exceptional explanations:

• Audrey is dreaming as much as is needed to explain all of the connections.

• Audrey is dreaming everything. Maybe no part of this season "really" takes place and Audrey is "the dreamer" of every moment of every episode. Note that the bleeding man in the jail cell is present when Andy says that he needs to take everyone upstairs, but is not present when they arrive upstairs. If that very important scene is part of Audrey's dream, it's hard to draw a boundary around her dream and everything else. And if she knows there's a Bad Cooper, then maybe even the second and/or first season of Twin Peaks is a dream, too.

• There is a real world, a spirit world, as well as Audrey's delusion, and something or someone is communicating between all of them.

• The similarities between Audrey's dream and the real world exist but are simply unexplained. In the Twin Peaks reality, we've seen this before. In particular, recall that when Leo was shot, there was also a similar shooting on Invitation to Love. And remember when inhabiting spirits MIKE and BOB's names mirrored high school Mike and Bobby. Probably quite close to why the word "Twin" is in the title, Twin Peaks shows things that align in ways that almost make sense, but not quite.

• Maybe the Audrey scenes work on a metalevel. Note that Charlie threatens to end Audrey's story ("too") and one episode later, the series does indeed end Audrey's story! This isn't explainable as a meaningful connection if she is having a delusion and then her life goes on as before. It would mean that the Twin Peaks show as a piece of fiction is an object within the Audrey-verse. We may further wonder, then, if Charlie is a stand-in for the creative forces on the show, perhaps for David Lynch himself. This would be the first instance, then, of the show breaking the fourth wall and making Audrey not the dreamer of part/all of the show, but as a fictional character aware (even if deleriously so) of her fictional nature.

If the final possibility is indeed true, and the Audrey scenes work on a metalevel, then there is added significance to the two uses of the phrase, "story of the little girl who lives down the lane." This opens the discussion wider to a consideration of what the phrase means in Episode 18, and to what Episodes 17 and 18 mean overall… Here, I will conclude the portion of the discussion that focuses on Audrey and take up the topic again in another post. Suffice it to say, the scenes with Audrey seem deeply significant, far more than those of other characters and may encompass what the show's entire story in fact is.

Twin Peaks, Season Three, Episodes 1-8

The question is, "Where have you gone?" Waking up after a 26-year dream, Twin Peaks drops us, and at least some of its characters, into disorientingly unfamiliar situations.

The first two seasons of Twin Peaks (1990-1991) presented the viewer with sharp contrasts in tone, unapologetically strange personalities, and intervention on Earth from a bizarre spirit plane while keeping one thing almost totally constant: The setting of the town of Twin Peaks. This geographical constraint was dropped in the prequel film Fire Walk With Me, and it is totally blown away in the new, third season. In its first eight episodes, Twin Peaks: The Return takes us to the fictional and somewhat Twin-Peaks-like rural town, Buckhorn, South Dakota, and also to Yankton Federal Prison on the other side of that state, a long days' drive south from there to Las Vegas and to East Coast metropolises Philadelphia and New York City, with a short stop in Buenos Aires. And yes, there is some action in the town of Twin Peaks, but far less than the opening seasons would lead one to expect. What this all signifies is that the third season is not about a town or even small, American towns in general but about a phenomenon that happened to affect powerfully the town of Twin Peaks but is broad and far-ranging in its extent. Season 3 has focused so far by following the threads of one specific (but very complicated) story, and then panning back – way back – to something general.

The specific story is that of three Dale Coopers – two more than we started the series with and one more than we had in 1991. Way back in Season 2, Episode 11, Deputy Hawk told us:

There is also a legend of a place called the Black Lodge. The shadow self of the White Lodge. Legend says that every spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection. There, you will meet your own shadow self. My people call it The Dweller on the Threshold. … But it is said that if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul.

Been there, done that. Cooper has met his shadow self, or doppelganger, and survived, but their meeting resulted in a switcheroo – Evil Cooper has been on the loose for 26 years now, while Good Cooper has sat cooling his heels in the Black Lodge, having at least a few conversations with friends such as The Giant and MIKE. But this situation has a time limit, and it has just expired. Good Cooper is free to leave the Black Lodge if he can get Evil Cooper back in. Evil Cooper knows this and has backup plans. First, he created a third, fake Cooper named Dougie Jones who is sucked into the Black Lodge when Good Cooper appears. That kept Evil Cooper on Earth, but he was incapacitated and taken into a Federal prison. Good Cooper has to kill Evil Cooper in order to remain on Earth, but Good Cooper has returned with his mental capacities reduced to that of a toddler, stumbling – in a successful Forrest Gump style – through the life of Dougie Jones while he struggles to regain his memory and/or be found by his friends in law enforcement. Evil Cooper, as shrewd as he is immoral, has backup plans behind backup plans, escaping prison and even death to remain free and fighting for his evil life to continue.

As they prepare for an inevitable showdown, both Good Cooper and Evil Cooper have some supernatural assistance. Good Cooper is being given hints and cues from some unstated source – probably MIKE and The Arm (the Man From Another Place, now "evolved" into a walking human nervous system that resembles the baby in Eraserhead). These clues enable him to win big in love and business and even in a Las Vegas casino. Meanwhile, Evil Cooper knew in advance of his incarceration how to (and the need to) hack the prison security system and blackmail the warden into allowing his release. Good Cooper is gradually regaining his memories and skills, best seen when he rapidly disarmed ruthless assassin Ike The Spike. His allies Deputy Chief Hawk and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and FBI personnel Cole, Bryson, and Rosenfield are perhaps on his trail and will perhaps accelerate his recovery if they find him before Evil Cooper does. Along the way, Season 3 has picked up some very loose threads, showing us Diane (played by Lynch regular Laura Dern) and surfacing the missing pages (except one) from Laura Palmer's diary. For reasons that are not yet completely clear, Evil Cooper needs some numbers and in the season's first scene, The Giant gives some numbers to Good Cooper; there's a decent chance that those are the same numbers.

Those are the facts of the season's first seven episodes; then Episode 8 drops the bomb, literally. After Evil Cooper is revived from death by dark, horrible-looking men from nowhere, we jump back to July 1945, and witness in psychedelic detail the first atomic bomb explosion in the desert of New Mexico. Inside the fireball, we, The Giant, and a new character named Señorita Dido witness the emergence (and possible origin, or passage to our world) of BOB. Eleven years later, in 1956, a horrible winged bug-lizard hatches from an egg while the horrible dark men (according to the credits, Woodsmen a la FWWM) stagger like zombies away from a Convenience Store (again, a la FWWM) and begin to terrorize some nearby people. A Woodsman kills a couple of people and sends a hypnotic message over the radio, "This is the water and the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within." Then, a girl who has left an idyllic Fifties date opens her lips and allows the horrible bug-lizard to super horribly crawl inside her. It seems quite probable that we have thus witnessed the origin or transition of the entire Twin Peaks spirit world.

To connect a few dots (or plots), here, in 1956, Leland Palmer was about nine years old (at least, the actor, Ray Wise, who plays him was). This allows for the bomb, egg, creature, and Woodsmen to be on the scene when Leland, as a boy, met BOB and allowed him inside. Gordon Cole has a photo of an atomic explosion on his office wall, indicating that he may know about the relevance of nukes and the great menace out there facing his world. Dido is (from the Aeneid), the name of a woman whom a man meets on his way to a greater destiny, and this is the name of the woman who witnesses the origin of BOB. And the horse in the Woodsman's verse may be the one we have seen twice now (just before Maddy dies and when Good Cooper leaves the Black Lodge), when the spirit world is interfacing with our own.

Twin Peaks is as much about tone as it is about plots and details, and the tone of Season 3 is unmistakably more like David Lynch's theatrical films than the television show that Twin Peaks started out as. Lynch has peppered the cast with actors such as Naomi Watts, Patrick Fischler, and Laura Dern who were prominent in his films. He has also brought, from his films to Season 3, visual and thematic motifs such as a woman listening to a record player, menacing and unnaturally dark men, and a world of big, bad criminality. Twin Peaks: The Return may provide a unifying glue to Lynch's entire career and it seems not impossible that he could even link one or more of his fictional worlds to the Twin Peaks universe before it is over.

It is also noteworthy how much Season 3 shares with comic books, particularly the works of Alan Moore, whether Lynch is a fan who has drawn upon this material deliberately, or if they simply share the same influences. A bug infecting someone with an evil spirit by crawling into their mouth was done long ago in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. The idea of a profoundly violent event changing the world for the worse as if by synchronicity was also seen in Alan Moore's From Hell: Moore's story had the crimes of Jack the Ripper directly triggering the conception of Hitler while Lynch gives us the atomic bomb as the trigger that allows the evils of BOB and his spirit companions into our world. Of course, the idea of a scientific event producing beings with special powers is an older comic book trope, going back to the Flash in 1940 and Superman in 1938 as well as Jerry Siegel's evil "Super-Man" of 1933.

Now, preceding Episode Nine, we are truly at a crossroads. Evil Cooper is somewhere in the countryside, evil, enraged, and possibly immortal. Good Cooper is in Las Vegas, on the path towards regaining his capabilities. Good Cooper's allies are trying to work out the mystery before them. And now that we know that the evil in Twin Peaks began in 1945/1956, where are we poised in 2017? In the past, numbers (such as the time between Jupiter–Saturn conjunctions, and "I'll see you in 25 years") have been important. Is there some numerology with years about to unfold, so that what started in 1945 will end sometime soon, based on a magical number of years or alignment in the skies? Is there predestination guiding us to an inevitable conclusion? Or does Good Cooper have to rise up and win this as an act of will?

A key to the nature of the Twin Peaks story was perhaps spelled out way back in the second episode, "Zen, Or The Skill To Catch A Killer." Agent Cooper, beginning to work on the Laura Palmer case, memorably positioned a bottle on a log and threw rocks at it from 60 feet and 6 inches away (the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate in baseball). Cooper, using an idea that came to him "in a dream," seeks clues in the way his subconscious mind and/or luck affect his throws. The "Tibetan method," he calls it. The episode was titled, "Zen, or, The Skill to Catch a Killer." Less than one episode later, Cooper tells Harry and Lucy that his dream (which ended the second episode) is the key to the case. "Break the code, solve the crime." This created the juicy prospect that the viewer, too, could break the code and solve the crime. Ultimately, however, this was not true. Many of the clues in the dream matched nothing at all. Others were hopelessly vague (e.g., that BOB's hair color matched Leland's, which it did only loosely). Still others were absolutely impossible to apply until the viewer already knew the solution (e.g., "that gum you like is going to come back in style," but the gum was linked to Leland after we already knew that he was the killer). In fact, Twin Peaks has never been built upon cleverness and logic and puzzles. It's full of dreamy obfuscation and wildly spiralling complexity without end. It sometimes makes sense after the fact, but it is not laid out according to conventional logic, and Lynch's comments on his own artistic process explain why:

Certain things are just beautiful to me, and I don't know why. Certain

things make so much sense, and it's hard to explain. I felt Eraserhead, I didn't think it.

Twin Peaks is driven more than anything else by David Lynch's visions from nowhere. It's how he works and it is, naturally, how his hero, Agent Cooper, works. Now Cooper – Good Cooper – is once again in the driver's seat, and Lynch will ask him, as Albert did twenty six years ago:

Cooper. In observation, I don't know where this is headed. But the only one of us with the coordinates for this destination and its hardware is you. Go on whatever vision quest you require. Stand on the rim of a volcano, stand alone and do your dance. Just find this beast before he takes another bite.

Twin Peaks: 25 Years Later

On June 10, 1991, a long, crazy dream came to an end… or to a pause. The relentlessly innovative, relentlessly weird series Twin Peaks sputtered to an early demise after something less than one and a half standard television seasons. During its brief run, Twin Peaks made an impression on virtually everyone in America and generated a cult following that lasted long past its series finale. So did the series' influence: the strange mixture of occult and soap opera, mystery and comedy, slapstick and horror caught on. Series directly inspired by Twin Peaks were many and outlived it by years and decades – Picket Fences, X-Files, True Detective and dozens of other shows borrowed something or other from Twin Peaks, whether that be cast, plot, directorial style, or tone.

Early in Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper says of his breakfast that there's nothing like the taste sensation when ham and maple syrup collide. That is an apt and possibly very deliberate metaphor for what Twin Peaks is. The snide, relentless competence of Albert Rosenfield and the calm, confident folksy charm of Sheriff Harry Truman are one of many collisions the show portrayed between people whose ethos – whose very way of being – were so different that it was hard to believe that the planet could contain both of them. Consider the outrageously eccentric household home to humble outdoorsman Pete Martell, his shrewish wife Catherine, and her mysterious sister-in-law from Hong Kong, Josie. Even unto themselves, these characters were full of contradictions – simpleminded Pete turning out to be a chess master, Josie hiding a romance with Sheriff Truman and a life of criminal intrigue, and Catherine posing for weeks as a Japanese businessman. Sometimes, these contradictions were developed at length, but they were found even in throwaway lines as when the Native American Deputy Hawk's refers to his former lover Diane Shapiro (PhD, Brandeis) and when Agent Cooper throws stones in a mystic ceremony for a distance of 60 feet and 6 inches (the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate in baseball). And the very idea that a supernatural demon would be named, of all things, Bob (by convention, spelled BOB).

Twin Peaks ­– the name tells you that duality is an important theme – was ruled by these clashes between opposites, and more than any other, there were two particularly ubiquitous dualities: ordinariness vs. strangeness and purity vs. corruption. And more than in any other person, these dualities both coexisted in the central but deceased character Laura Palmer. The beautiful homecoming queen who volunteered for charity was also a drug dealing, drug addicted, prostitute – something we found out in a series of shocking revelations throughout the first season. Even more shocking, we found out in the second season (and the series' print companion – The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer – that she had long been tormented by a disembodied spirit, a demonic predatory who has possessed her own father, and who had used his body to assault and rape her until she accepted death as her only way out.

The Twin Peaks story thus far, could be broken into the following parts:

• The Pilot, a decent standalone David Lynch film in its own right, except for its pointed lack of an ending, which was supplied for the so-called European Ending (aired on European TV and available as an extra on VHS and DVD) that sped through an unsettling resolution to Laura Palmer's death in a matter of minutes. Footage from the European Ending was used in Cooper's dream sequence at the end of Episode Three.

• The rest of the first season, in which the town and Laura's murder were explored, leading to an explosive finale with numerous deaths, assaults, and destruction. At this point, the writers had not agreed upon a resolution to the murder mystery, whose query, "Who killed Laura Palmer?" became a nationally-known catchphrase.

• The book, "The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer," by Jennifer Lynch, which was published during the offseason and provided major developments/lookaheads regarding the plot, including the supernatural nature of Laura's killer, BOB.

• The first half of the second season, leading to the identity of Leland Palmer as the human host of BOB, and thus the physical body that killed Laura. This was filled with clues and red herrings, but led inexorably to a "twin peaked" conclusion in which the viewers learn first who killed Laura, and then later Cooper and the other authorities catch Leland.

• The second half of the second season, which meanders considerably, with a few mundane soap opera-ish plots as distractions from the central contest between Agent Cooper and his evil former partner, Windom Earle. The show itself battled ambiguous levels of support from its network, ABC, until its cancellation became certain and the series was given a memorable ending in which Agent Cooper returned from the Black Lodge possessed by BOB.

• A theatrical film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that served as a prequel to the series, showing the final days of Laura Palmer's life, the FBI's unsuccessful interactions with the spirit world from which BOB hails. Some truly bizarre scenes set in the spirit world showed that its residents visit our world to feed on the emotions of pain and suffering, presented as creamed corn and dubbed garmonbozia.

Now, after 26 years, the series resumes a few hours from now, in the future time frame indicated "25 years later" in the European Ending, Cooper's dream, and some scenes in FWWM. What will the series cover? It's certain that the "ending" of the second season will be addressed somehow, which would seem to require either that Cooper was somehow exorcised of BOB at some point in the past, or perhaps he still has the demon inside him, decades later.

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.