Author: Scott Ryan

   When Laura and Leland Palmer were chased down by a camper in FWWM and driven off the road to Mo’s Motors, Laura looked at her father and said, “Just, just sit here for a moment.” She was rocked and shocked to her core. That is how viewers felt when Part 8 finished its premiere showing on Showtime, June 25, 2017. Everyone needed to sit for just a moment and catch their breath. In the original run there were plenty of moments that shocked viewers, but in the ’90s there was no place to look, besides the person sitting next to you, to discuss what just happened. In 2017 there is a place we can turn to —  Twitter. Tweets are now a commodity that networks use to supplement ratings. They want trends, retweets and followers.

      For the first time in its run #TwinPeaks trended worldwide at 10:01 p.m. that night. In fact, it exploded. See the graph below, supplied by Joshua Minton from The Red Room Podcast, to see the spike. Tweets about Twin Peaks went from around 500 to 9,000 almost in a moment. The world watched, and then the world wanted to talk about it.

   This give and take between friends and strangers is the kind of interest that Showtime had to be looking for when they gave Lynch free reign. The increased traffic proved that fans were intrigued. Some blasted the episode, and some praised it. That is what fans do. But what about the critics? Here’s a handful of quotes about Part 8 from a few television critics.

“Part 8 aims for maximum weirdness and succeeds. Wherever you land on it, there’s one thing that can’t be argued: You’ve never seen this before on television.”

Liz Shannon Miller – IndieWire

“There’s nothing to point to in the history of television that helps describe exactly what this episode attempts. Considered that way — as something to see and hear, and to react to on a primal level — this hour was phenomenal.”

Noel Murray – The New York Times

“David Lynch just unleashed what’s arguably television’s WTF-weirdest and most ambitious hour ever.”

Sean T. Collins – Rolling Stone

“There should be no doubt: the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return will stand as one of the defining passages in David Lynch’s long career.”

Tom Huddleston – Sight and Sound

“The eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the greatest hours of television I’ve ever seen: horrifying, horrifyingly beautiful, thought-provoking and thought-annihilating; a work that owes as much to expressionistic and surreal painting, musical performance, and installation art as it does to narrative and experimental cinema.”

Matt Zoller Seitz – Vulture

   All of those quotes came out within 24 hours. Podcasts, tweets and Facebook reviews happen in a moment in our social media existence. There is so much to unlock in Part 8 and even more to feel and experience. I actually made sure not to re-watch the episode for a few days just so I couldn’t make sense of what I had watched. I was off kilter for at least a day after it aired. I wasn’t sure what I had seen, but I knew it affected me. That is my favorite thing about Lynch’s work. I don’t always know what it is, but I always feel it.

    I asked David Bushman, Television Curator at The Paley Center, about Part 8 and its place in history. He said, “At a time when so much programming is innovative and daring in its own way, David Lynch and Mark Frost created a transcendent hour of television that was visually stunning and narratively ingenious. The landscape has radically changed in the twenty-seven years since Twin Peaks premiered, but the show is as subversive as ever, and people will be pointing to Part 8 for decades to come as the epitome of its incandescence.”

    The following day there were many posts saying that television had been changed forever. The jury is still out on that one. One has to remember that Part 8 was not created from a television writer’s room. It wasn’t a script that was approved by a network chain of command. Lynch and Frost had a special deal where they could create what they wanted and it would be aired. Only Lynch could have created that mood and feeling. He is a singular artist and always has been. This was a moment where the deal they had with Showtime collided with a great idea and a brave artist. All these factors converged to create an avant-garde hour that caught even the most devoted Lynch student by surprise. No one was expecting that the story would detour into a 40-minute, black-and-white sequence with little dialogue. All anyone could do after experiencing it was to be just like Laura. To sit there and try to catch one’s breath for just a moment. Then pick up their phone and tweet, read and retweet. Anywhere from W.T.F. to L.O.L. to B.O.B. (Beware of Bob)  #TwinPeaks.

Written by Scott Ryan for The Blue Rose Issue #3 (Kindle version only)

Subscribe to the Blue Rose Magazine for coverage of Twin Peaks.