MatCult

Every episode of The Return left my mind reeling under an electrical storm of ideas, connections and questions. That’s part of what made watching this new incarnation of Twin Peaks such a unique and compelling experience. Nothing else on TV does this. As I watched Part 11, in which the FBI agents visit Bill Hasting’s entrance to The Zone, I was left with one thought that just wouldn’t go away: David Lynch’s Deputy Director Gordon Cole is equivalent to William Shakespeare’s ageing sorcerer Prospero. And, in many ways The Return is Lynch’s version of The Tempest . The seed of this idea was planted by the image of Cole, arms aloft, under the whirling vortex of the sky – looking like an archetypal sorcerer. That idea mushroomed into something quite different and took me to places both wonderful and strange. Now, fair warning, there are going to be some leaps and stretches in this essay, so please bear with me. Some of what you’re about to read may seem a little tenuous. But, wit

“I think I’m high.” Jerry Horne is lost in the woods, literally and metaphorically. For at least three of the ten episodes aired so far, Jerry has been confused and surrounded by dense woodland. With intermittent phone reception and a mind addled by high-grade cannabis, Jerry has got a heavy case of The Fear – a deep dish of creeping dread, served with sides of disorientation and paranoia. In The Return, David Lynch has seemingly taken great pleasure in wrong-footing viewers, subverting our expectations at every turn. So while it might be appealing to think that Jerry’s odyssey into the pines is an overture to an inevitable encounter with the Black Lodge, knowing how this new series has toyed with us, it is equally likely that he’s just high as hell. In seasons one and two of Twin Peaks, audiences were primed to expect spontaneous visits from Jerry – the charismatic, jet-setting, wheeler-dealing enfant-terrible of the Horne dynasty. And when he turned up, he was generally bear