Summary

• Twin Peaks: The Return provided a perfect ending, making the idea of a fourth season worrisome.
• The original show's revival was a big success, but it's tough to see how a new season could top it.
• While a fourth season could work, it would need to navigate the complex, ambiguous legacy of The Return.

Since Twin Peaks: The Return provided an ideal ending for David Lynch’s cult classic TV show, the news that the series might get a fourth season is surprisingly worrying. Most of the time, the news that a beloved TV series is due to receive a revival is cause for celebration. However, some shows are as self-contained as movies, and, as a result, the thought of them stretching their story out for another season is daunting. For example, it is tough to see how a sequel to Breaking Bad or The Sopranos could add to the original show’s self-contained plots.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Twin Peaks, the influential small-town mystery that helped inspire both of the classic shows mentioned above. Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are just two of the many TV shows that probably wouldn’t exist without Twin Peaks since Mark Frost and David Lynch’s ambitious, complex, offbeat series introduced a new level of narrative ambition to the medium. Twin Peaks changed TV forever, but its original run ended on a messy, unresolved note. Thus, the news of a 2017 revival entitled Twin Peaks: The Return was met with both excitement and trepidation.

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2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return ended the show's story perfectly, offering viewers a uniquely haunting, ambiguous coda to the show’s tangled plot. The 18-hour revival functioned more like a 17-hour movie than a traditional TV show, experimenting with the format as much as the original series did decades earlier. While the murder of Laura Palmer was solved in the original show, The Return went back in time to explain the source of the ageless evil that possessed her killer and cursed the titular town itself. A superb all-star cast elevated the self-contained season, which felt like a fitting end.

As such, it was a surprise when executive producer Sabrina S. Sutherland said that Twin Peaks could eventually get a fourth season after all. In a Q+A on the forum Tulpa, Sutherland said that director David Lynch has “more ideas for another season,” before adding that she was unsure whether Frost was interested in returning to the series. Ordinarily, this would be exciting news for fans of the original show, and there are certainly a lot of potential story strands for a fourth season to cover. However, it is still difficult to see Twin Peaks outdoing The Return’s perfect ending.

Twin Peaks: The Return Already Gave The Show A Perfect Ending

It’s Tough To Imagine Twin Peaks Outdoing The Return’s Finale

The Return was a bold, challenging piece of TV that played with the medium itself and repeatedly pushed the boundaries of its format. However, all the show’s trickiest provocations were justified in a knotty, complex story that proved endlessly rewarding. What made Twin Peaks: The Return a perfect revival was its combination of subversive mystery plotting, dense symbolism, offbeat humor, surreal horror, and human drama. The show told a dozen stories at once, but its conclusion ultimately offered a satisfying answer to all of them while retaining the ambiguity that makes Lynch’s work famous.

Twin Peaks: The Return’s ending has countless valid interpretations, and it is hard to see how a fourth season wouldn’t end up having to unpack some of its surreal impact. If viewers saw the story as a clear-eyed condemnation of colonialism, American exceptionalism, and militarism, the evidence was there to support this theory. If the show as a whole instead seemed to be a panegyric on how beauty can blossom from unimaginable trauma, that was also as valid. A fourth season would need to have some semblance of a plot, which means undoing this enigmatic aporia.

Why Twin Peaks Season 4 Could Still Work Despite The Return's Ending

Lynch And Frost Have Historically Made The Unwieldy Project Work

While The Return doesn't set up a comeback, nor did the flawed original ending of the series. Frost and Lynch have constructed a unique, mercurial vision of small-town Americana’s dark side with the Twin Peaks canon, and only a fool would bet against their ability to revisit this fertile terrain successfully. The Return worked even though Twin Peaks already revealed Laura Palmer’s killer long before the show came back, proving that the singular show doesn’t need a traditional cliffhanger to justify a fourth season.

It is impossible to see how a fourth season of the series would succeed, but it is important to remember that it was almost impossible to imagine a 17-hour Twin Peaks movie working in 2017. Since the series began, Twin Peaks has managed to surprise and stun viewers and critics alike. It was a murder mystery where the killer's identity was revealed early on, a horror series famous for its warm sense of humor, and a soap opera with frequent detours into dream logic. Twin Peaks has always defied the odds, meaning there's no reason to think a fourth season couldn’t succeed.