Season One made me interested in everyone. By the middle of Season Two, I was waiting for Dale Cooper to come back on screen.
Spoiler warning: This article discusses both seasons of the original Twin Peaks television series (1990–1991), including its central mystery and finale.
I knew something had changed in my relationship with Twin Peaks when I realised I was waiting for Dale Cooper to appear.
Not because I'd stopped enjoying the programme, or because Cooper had suddenly become more interesting than everyone else. He'd been interesting from the beginning. But somewhere during the second season, I'd stopped paying quite so much attention to what everybody else was doing. The conversations, background characters and peculiar little interactions that had fascinated me during Season One were increasingly becoming things I sat through while waiting for the next development in the mystery.
It was a strange realisation because I'd originally expected Twin Peaks to be far more supernatural than it actually was. Having spent years playing games influenced by it, particularly Deadly Premonition, I thought I had a reasonably good idea of what I was getting into. I expected darkness, symbolism, unsettling encounters and a town populated by people who seemed to have wandered out of somebody else's dream.
What I hadn't expected was to become so interested in the ordinary lives of its inhabitants.
And what I certainly hadn't expected was for the programme to become more supernatural while somehow making those ordinary lives less interesting.
A town worth paying attention to
The first hour of Twin Peaks didn't immediately convince me. It was a slow beginning, and while I could appreciate the atmosphere, I wasn't entirely sure why the programme had acquired such an extraordinary reputation. Then a mounted deer head appeared on a table, having apparently fallen from the wall, and I began to suspect I was watching something rather different.
There was no great explanation for the deer head. Nobody delivered a monologue about its symbolic importance. It was simply there, an absurd detail occupying a perfectly ordinary scene, and the programme seemed content to let it remain absurd.
That became one of my favourite things about Season One.
Cooper's extraordinary enthusiasm for coffee, trees and the natural world was endlessly entertaining. Lucy had a way of making even routine administrative conversations feel faintly surreal. The Log Lady was eccentric enough to be amusing, yet the programme treated her with an odd degree of sincerity. There was a fish in the percolator, and I found myself spending more time thinking about that than was probably advisable.
But the appeal went beyond individual jokes.
The town felt inhabited. People seemed to possess lives that continued beyond the scenes in which we encountered them. Their relationships were complicated, their motivations sometimes contradictory, and their conversations often wandered into territory that had little obvious relevance to Laura Palmer's murder.
Ordinarily, I might have found that distracting. Instead, I became increasingly interested in everyone.
I watched characters standing in the background. I noticed peculiar gestures, awkward silences and strange little habits. I paid attention to conversations that appeared to be going nowhere because I wasn't entirely convinced they weren't going somewhere. The programme had established an atmosphere in which almost anything might matter, but it had also made the people themselves worth observing.
That distinction is important. I wasn't simply looking for clues. I was enjoying spending time in Twin Peaks.
The murder of Laura Palmer provided the mystery that drew everything together, but it was the experience of watching the town respond to her absence that kept me engaged. The affairs, secrets, business arrangements and occasional acts of spectacular stupidity revealed something about the community. Even when a storyline wasn't directly connected to the investigation, it contributed to the impression of a place whose respectable appearance concealed an extraordinary amount of human complication.
In retrospect, I think the programme's greatest achievement during that first season was making ordinary life feel mysterious without requiring ordinary life to become supernatural.
More supernatural, somehow less strange
One of the more unexpected conclusions I reached while watching Season Two was that Season One was more absurd, while Season Two was more supernatural.
They sound like similar qualities, but I don't think they are.
In Season One, the strangeness frequently emerged from behaviour. A character would say something peculiar, respond inappropriately or treat an absurd situation as perfectly normal. The world itself remained largely recognisable. People were eccentric, relationships were uncomfortable, and even the more mysterious experiences could sometimes be understood as dreams, intuition or unusual beliefs.
Season Two increasingly made the impossible part of the programme's reality.
Giants appeared with cryptic messages. Spirits seemed capable of inhabiting people. Owls acquired ominous significance, and mysterious lodges suggested an entire supernatural structure operating beyond the town. Major Briggs's military work introduced signals from space and unexplained disappearances. By the finale, Cooper was navigating a Red Room that appeared to exist somewhere outside conventional reality.
I found much of this fascinating. I developed theories about possession, time, parallel identities and the possibility of opposing supernatural forces manipulating the inhabitants of Twin Peaks. At one point, I even dreamed an explanation involving the two peaks representing competing cosmic powers. The programme was certainly giving me plenty to think about.
Yet the more explicitly supernatural it became, the less mysterious some of its everyday strangeness began to feel.
Part of the problem was that the supernatural elements were gradually becoming a recognisable category of their own. A bizarre event might now belong to the mythology of BOB, the lodges or the woods. It was extraordinary, certainly, but it increasingly came with the suggestion that some larger explanation existed.
The fish in the percolator had required no such explanation. Nor had Cooper's delight in a particularly fine cup of coffee. Those moments were strange because of how they disrupted ordinary expectations, not because they pointed towards another dimension.
Perhaps Season One was better at leaving things alone.
The other Twin Peaks
The trouble wasn't simply that Season Two had become more supernatural. It was that the programme increasingly felt as though it contained two different shows.
One involved Cooper, Major Briggs, Windom Earle and a developing mystery concerning the nature of reality itself. The other involved complicated romantic arrangements, elaborate financial schemes, improbable disguises and an astonishing number of people who weren't quite as dead as everyone had believed.
The two had always existed together, of course. Twin Peaks was conceived partly as a soap opera, and Season One was hardly short of business intrigues or people behaving badly behind one another's backs. But there had been a sense that the various stories belonged to the same community, with Laura's death providing a shared point of reference.
As the second season continued, that connection became harder for me to feel.
The Packard family's financial manoeuvring grew increasingly complicated. Catherine returned disguised as a Japanese businessman, which I genuinely hadn't anticipated. Andrew Packard subsequently reappeared after years of being presumed dead, apparently expecting everyone to accept that his elaborate plan had been unfolding exactly as intended. By the time we reached the mysterious box and its increasingly convoluted contents, I was beginning to wonder whether the programme had confused complexity with intrigue.
To be fair, the eventual bomb in the safety deposit box was an effective payoff. I enjoyed that revelation considerably more than I'd expected. But a satisfying conclusion doesn't necessarily make every preceding complication worthwhile, particularly when the journey has involved several hours of wealthy people deceiving one another over the ownership of a sawmill.
Elsewhere, Nadine suffered a remarkable regression to adolescence, developed extraordinary strength and became perhaps the only character in Twin Peaks who regularly attended high school. Ben Horne's psychological difficulties led Dr Jacoby to adopt a Civil War-themed therapeutic intervention that seemed unlikely to survive an especially casual ethics review. And James Hurley continued to be the wettest leather-jacketed motorcyclist I'd ever encountered.
James deserves particular mention because his appearance promises an entirely different character. He has the motorcycle, the rebellious styling and the brooding demeanour. Unfortunately, he spends so much of his time being romantically overwhelmed that it's difficult to imagine him starting a motorcycle gang without first arranging a meeting to discuss everyone's feelings.
Individually, some of these storylines were entertaining. Nadine's high-school adventures could be genuinely funny, Catherine's disguise was an unexpected delight, and Ben's increasingly peculiar behaviour occasionally produced moments of great absurdity. My frustration wasn't that the programme had become ridiculous. I'd enjoyed its ridiculousness from the beginning.
The problem was that I was becoming less interested in what happened next.
A new twist in the business conspiracy didn't necessarily make me reconsider what I knew about the characters. Another romantic complication rarely seemed likely to reveal something substantial about the town. The storylines continued to generate events, but I increasingly struggled to find a reason to care about those events beyond the immediate question of how they would be resolved.
And while all this was happening, Cooper was investigating a mystery I found considerably more compelling.
Learning what to ignore
There's an interesting psychological aspect to this shift, although I don't think it requires an elaborate explanation.
Attention is selective. We cannot examine every detail of everything we encounter, so we gradually learn where to direct our resources. When an environment repeatedly rewards our curiosity, we become more willing to explore it. When certain kinds of information seem less likely to offer anything worthwhile, we become more selective.
That's broadly what happened to me while watching Twin Peaks.
During Season One, the programme had rewarded my interest in seemingly insignificant details often enough that I was willing to pay attention to almost anything. The characters were interesting even when nothing especially important was happening. Their small interactions made the town feel more convincing, while the possibility of hidden connections gave ordinary scenes an additional layer of intrigue.
During Season Two, I gradually learned that certain storylines were less likely to deliver what I wanted from the programme. I wasn't making a conscious decision to disregard them. I simply found my attention drifting until Cooper, Briggs or the supernatural mystery returned.
The irony is that the programme hadn't necessarily become less complicated. If anything, it was asking me to follow more characters, more schemes and more interconnected developments than before. But complexity alone wasn't sufficient to maintain my interest.
I began to wonder whether the real loss wasn't mystery, but curiosity.
Mystery gives us something we want to know. Curiosity can make us interested in things we hadn't previously considered worth knowing. The first season excelled at both, while the second increasingly relied on the former.
I still wanted answers about BOB and the lodges. I wanted to understand Cooper's dreams, Windom Earle's motivations and Major Briggs's experiences. But I was no longer especially invested in the wider community, or at least not in the way I had been.
That was a peculiar feeling when I'd originally become attached to the programme precisely because it made the town itself so compelling.
Perhaps Laura was holding everything together
I suspect Laura Palmer's absence played a larger role in this change than I initially appreciated.
Throughout Season One, Laura's murder provided a reason to examine the people of Twin Peaks. Every relationship might reveal something about her life, every secret might complicate the investigation, and every apparently respectable inhabitant might possess information they weren't particularly eager to share.
More importantly, Laura's absence gave the town an emotional centre.
People grieved, lied, idealised, concealed their behaviour and reconstructed different versions of the young woman they believed they'd known. The investigation gradually exposed the distance between the public image of Laura Palmer and the private experiences of the person herself.
As I argued in an earlier article, Laura wasn't simply absent from the programme. She was present through the beliefs other people held about her.
Once her murder was resolved, the series faced a difficult problem. It needed to find another reason for the audience to remain equally interested in the town.
The supernatural mythology certainly provided one reason to continue watching. But I don't think it entirely replaced the emotional connection established by Laura's story. The investigation had encouraged us to examine the town as a whole, whereas the later mysteries often encouraged us to concentrate on particular characters and locations.
Perhaps that was inevitable. A story cannot keep its central murder unresolved indefinitely without encountering problems of its own. And it would be unfair to expect every subsequent storyline to reproduce the emotional impact of Laura's death.
Still, I think the change helps explain why the programme began feeling fragmented. It wasn't merely that the plots were increasingly disconnected. The shared reason for paying attention to them had become less obvious.
We were spending more time in Twin Peaks, but I felt as though I was learning less about the place.
And then the finale reminded me why I was watching
Despite my frustrations, the end of Season Two was compelling.
The Red Room returned, the mythology became increasingly unsettling, and Cooper's confrontation with forces he barely understood gave the programme a sense of danger that had sometimes been missing from its more conventional storylines.
What made the finale particularly effective wasn't simply the supernatural imagery. It was the way that imagery threatened someone I'd come to care about.
Cooper had been the programme's most consistently engaging presence. His curiosity, compassion and occasional absurdity had made him appealing long before the lodges became central to the story. Watching him enter the Red Room was disturbing because the mystery now threatened the qualities that had made him recognisably himself.
And when someone who looked like Cooper emerged, the programme left us with a question considerably more unsettling than the ownership of a sawmill.
Was this still the same person?
It was a reminder of something Twin Peaks had understood exceptionally well during its first season: the most compelling mysteries aren't necessarily those with the most complicated explanations. They're the ones that change how we understand people.
Cooper's apparent transformation was frightening because it mattered who he had been. The supernatural explanation was secondary to the possibility that the person we'd followed for two seasons might no longer be the person standing in front of us.
For all the bizarre imagery and elaborate mythology, the finale's emotional power depended on something recognisably human.
Simply Put
I don't regret watching Season Two. Its best moments were extraordinary, and I'm glad I encountered the original series without skipping the storylines that frustrated me. There were surprises I genuinely enjoyed, characters who became more interesting than I'd anticipated, and several mysteries that kept me thinking long after an episode had ended.
But I do think something changed.
Season One encouraged me to inhabit Twin Peaks. I was interested in the town, the people, their peculiar routines and the strange relationships that connected them. By the middle of Season Two, I was increasingly interested in what was happening to Twin Peaks, while becoming less invested in the lives unfolding within it.
That's not quite the same as saying the first season was better and the second worse, although I certainly preferred the former. Nor is it a rejection of the soap-opera format, which was fundamental to the programme's original appeal. I enjoyed the ordinary dramas when they gave the characters depth, and I enjoyed the absurdity when it made familiar situations feel unexpectedly strange.
What I began to lose patience with were the complications that seemed to exist mainly to produce further complications.
And perhaps my own expectations changed too. Once I'd invested so much attention in the supernatural mythology, it became harder to give the competing storylines a fair hearing. Some of the later scenes might have seemed more entertaining had I not been impatiently waiting for Cooper to return.
But that impatience was itself part of my experience of the programme, and I don't think there's much value in pretending otherwise.
When I first started watching Twin Peaks, I was surprised that the series wasn't nearly as supernatural as I'd expected. By the time I finished it, I was surprised that all the supernatural developments in the world couldn't quite recreate the fascination I'd felt watching a small American town go about its peculiar business.
I came for the mystery, stayed for the people, and eventually found myself waiting for the mystery again.
And somehow, despite the demons, dimensions, prophetic dreams and apparent cosmic struggles, I still think one of the strangest moments in the entire programme involved a fish in a percolator.
For my reflective musings on the first season of Twin Peaks head on over to the Daisy Chain
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