(2020). The dangers of getting what you asked for: double time in Twin Peaks: The Return. Open Screens, 3(1).

The third season of Twin Peaks is chock full of uncanny, disturbing – and disturbingly humorous – doubles, most notably of its central character, played by Kyle McLachlan. This article argues that the series itself is also a kind of double, because it takes advantage of the almost unique situation in which a beloved show is continued after a quarter-century absence to superimpose itself on the new versions of Twin Peaks its fans have fantasized in the interim. Through close readings, I critically examine the ways that The Return does this and explore the different – and often mutually incompatible – interpretive strategies that it thereby encourages. I argue that the series ultimately achieves a paradoxical fidelity to its predecessor precisely through the liberties and calculated risks that it takes with its own heritage.

As well as containing an abundance of doubles, Twin Peaks: The Return can itself usefully be seen as a kind of double. It extensively exploits the almost unique situation in which a beloved show is continued after a quarter-century hiatus by superimposing itself on the new versions of Twin Peaks its fans have fantasized, consciously or unconsciously, in the interim. The focus of this article is interpretive, and its object of interpretation is Twin Peaks: The Return. I will, however, argue that it is impossible to accomplish such an interpretation without taking heed of the expectations of viewers. After critically examining the ways that The Return negotiates this superimposition and exploring the different -and often mutually incompatible -interpretive strategies that it thereby encourages, I will conclude that, ultimately, the series achieves a paradoxical fidelity to its predecessor precisely through the liberties and calculated risks that it takes with its own heritage.
The structure of this article is as follows. After laying out some of the specific ways in which The Return is permeated with different kinds of doubles and doublings, I move to consider the role of audience expectations, given the quarter-century that fans had to build them up, and how these contribute to yet another kind of doubling: a layering of the "new Twin Peaks" that fans wanted -or thought they wanted -on top of the new season that we (for I number myself among the fans) in fact gotor thought we got. After this, I pursue further the role of time in interpretations of The Return, tackling the season's anti-nostalgic aspects as well as its -perhaps surprising -insistence on the inexorability of time's passage. This will lead me to consider the important role of confusion in interpretive responses to The Return, taking confusion in two senses (appropriately enough, given my focus on doubles). Finally, all my major themes -doubling, superimposition, expectation, confusion, and misrecognition -will intersect in an analysis of the extraordinary fact that the conclusion to The Return gives rise to (at least) two equally plausible but radically incompatible interpretations.

An abundance of doubles
Doubling has, of course, been there right from the beginning, in the very title of the show. And not just doubling, but a doubling that hints at the uncanny: the series is not called Two Peaks, after all, but Twin Peaks, alluding to a venerable tradition that Cooper and a Bad Cooper (see Figure 1), it further subdivides the Good Cooper into his familiar self and a man called Dougie Jones, who was created by Bad Cooper in an elaborate ruse and whom the Good Cooper -bewildered and damaged by his exit from the Black Lodge, unable properly to "return" to himself -is taken for, for sixteen of the show's eighteen episodes. But there is still more: the story keeps presenting its viewers with double after double, including various "tulpas" (artificial people, like the original Dougie Jones), eventually culminating in someone who may be Laura Palmer in a parallel reality, or may -just possibly -be an entirely unconnected woman called Carrie Page (who just happens to share an actor with Laura Palmer).
All of this is bewildering, exhilarating and exasperating enough, but there is also a sense in which The Return is itself a kind of double. It will, I think, be clear to In the eighth episode, the doppelgänger is shot in a failed attempt on his life, and lies supine on the ground as blood pours from a gaping wound in his abdomen. This scene is reminiscent of the sequence that opens Twin Peaks Season 2, in which Cooper… is likewise seen lying on his back, blood flowing from his abdomen and accumulating beneath him. (Dumas 2019: 330) Very few television shows have developed quite the following that the original Twin Peaks attracted, and still fewer have returned to our screens after a twentyfive year hiatus. That cliffhanger ending had twenty-five years to gestate and ferment in the brains of its viewers; The Return is, inescapably, overlaid on a quarter-century of fantasy, expectation, and prediction. Its creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, make no attempt to escape or to ameliorate this condition. There is, for example, barely the slightest nod towards catching up any viewers who might be unfamiliar with the original (a scene discussing Laura's diary in episode seven solemnly recaps essential plot details in comically insufficient fashion).
Not only this, however: The Return exploits and manipulates its own status as the double of the return that its aficionados wanted -or thought they wanted. As Kate Rennebohm has written, referring to a phrase prominent in Lynch's earlier work INLAND EMPIRE: 'this new Peaks confronts its image-saturated audience with an unnerving question that hits at both our insatiable appetite for the familiar and our discomfort with the new: Look at me, and tell me if you've known me before.' (Rennebohm 2017: 64) It is worth noting how this phrase, like The Return itself, scrambles the familiar. We might ask whether we've seen someone before, or whether we know somebody ("Do I know you?"), but to ask "if you've known me before" has the flavour of the idiomatic but is also unsettlingly displaced. It also hints at the fact that to continue Twin Peaks is not just to add to it but, inevitably, to alter our relation to the original. As did Fire Walk with Me in 1991, The Return prompts viewers to question whether they really did "know" Twin Peaks in the way they thought they did.

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Expectations
Time, expectation, and (mis)recognition are, then, not only themes in The Return but are also part of the material out of which it -or the viewer's experience of it -is constructed. What might a typical Twin Peaks fan, if there is such a thing, have written, if asked to provide a list of what they wanted to see in a new season of the show? It can feel as if The Return is a response to such a list in the faithful-to-theletter-but-not-the-spirit style one sometimes encounters with regard to prophecies or magic wishes in fairy tales or myths. (The Return alludes to both, with its references to 'the story of the little girl who lives down the lane' and the Arthurian street names of the development where Dougie and his wife Janey-E [Naomi Watts] live.) Say, for example, that one such fan had been rash enough to wish for "a great deal of Kyle MacLachlan" in season three. They would be unable to complain that their wish hadn't been fulfilled, but they would also never have dreamt that, throughout his But what exactly would it take to count as such? Andreas Halskov has usefully discussed The Return in terms of a combination of familiarity and defamiliarization (Halskov 2017). One could, I would argue, almost read the season as a parody of the notion that it is even possible to define the nature of a thing by isolating and enumerating its elements, recalling Lynch's early explorations of the relation between part and whole in his "Lynch-kits" made of dissected animals (see the discussion in Chion 1995: 181-3). What makes Twin Peaks so great, beside extensive screen time for MacLachlan? Elements of soap opera, bizarre and mysterious scenes, daft comedy? It would be hard for even the most disappointed long-term fan to deny that all of these Lash: The Dangers of Getting What You Asked For Art. 1, page 6 of 26 are present in The Return. I agree, incidentally, with Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel when they write that, although Twin Peaks 'intensifies the juxtaposition of tones and conventions achieved through its generic heterogeneity, alternating between sadness and humor or humor and horror', it is best understood 'less as an example of postmodern media… than as a self-conscious extension of film and television's standard business of genre mixing, illustrating just how flexible and porous genres can be' (Grossman and Scheibel 2020: xxiii). We might say that the range of ingredients and the nature of their combination is relatively consistent between the original Peaks and The Return, but the manner of their combination is not.
Thomas Britt has pointed out that The Return includes a scene that explicitly plays with the paradoxes involved in trying to decide from the evidence of what is "here" whether something is "missing": In Part 3, 'Call for Help,' Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz), Lucy Brennan and Lucy's answer (another question) 'but if it is here, then it isn't missing?' (Britt 2019: 112) If something we loved in the old Twin Peaks is absent from The Return, how would we know it was missing (rather than, say, simply absent)? But by the same token how can it be that something seems to be missing even when all the necessary componentssoap opera, bizarre and mysterious scenes, daft comedy, to reprise the list I suggested above -are present? The Return can often feel somehow present but not correct.
Yet if my account thus far gives the impression that The Return feels like a giant practical joke, simply an attempt to troll its fans, it would be misleading. we need to expand our understanding of the concept, something for which McAvoy makes an interesting case, but one that I am not entirely convinced by because he seems to believe that the boredom The Return generates is a fact that is used as a tool, rather than a revisable description; that it remains boredom instead of turning into something else. 'Lynch', he argues, 'is a troll who forces everyone to pause, to be aware of the passage of time as they think through their own boredom' (ibid.: 99). But the slow pace of the season also gives the viewer plenty of opportunity to revisit and rethink not only their reactions but also their experiences. I cannot be the only viewer to have found Cooper-as-Dougie's attempts to negotiate an unfamiliar world, like a fully-grown newborn, initially hilarious, subsequently both frustrating, and, yes, a little boring, but ultimately genuinely endearing, such that I came to anticipate missing him when -as was obvious would eventually happen -the old Cooper managed to return. As Richard Martin puts it, the slowness of The Return is ' often infuriating, sometimes unbearable, frequently hilarious' (Martin 2020).
I would also argue that we should distinguish more finely between the different scenes that McAvoy labels as boring: the bar-sweeping scene seems to me best to fit his argument, whereas the box-watching scenes in the first episode -although he is quite right about their reflexive dimensions (ibid.: 91) -are also suffused with expectation and dread. What's going to happen, and will it be Twin Peaks?
(I find McAvoy's reading here not incorrect but incomplete.) Simon Hall also takes issue with McAvoy in his analysis of James Hurley (James Marshall) and the two performances of the song "Just You" (another double, in The Return, of an aspect of the original series). Rather than another instance of trolling, Hall sees the song's return as an exploration of 'miscommunication' that I would argue has affinities with the themes of misrecognition that I am highlighting here (Hall 2020 not sure I am wholly persuaded by his arguments that the song's "return" somehow corrects 'the song's original, artistically flawed presentation' -because I am unsure that the elements he points to are where its flaws lie -but the spirit of his analysis seems to me exactly right.) Finally, in places The Return teases but ultimately satisfies the viewer in gloriously indulgent but wholly unsarcastic fashion, most particularly when Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) and Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) finally get together, to the strains of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long", an event both they and the viewers have had to wait twenty-five years for (see Figure 2).

But this account, too, is becoming misleading, if it gives the impression that The
Return merely toys playfully with fans of Twin Peaks; hence the pertinence of the notion of trolling. To introduce Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), one of the original series' most popular characters, only in the twelfth episode, deny her any interaction with the rest of the old cast while also implying that between seasons two and three she was raped while in a coma by her beloved Agent Cooper (albeit in the form of his evil twin), and then to abandon her on a cliffhanger, never to be seen again, came very close to cruelty. This deliberate inconsistency between indulging and repelling the audience compounds the difficulty of recognising what it is that we are

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Art. 1, page 9 of 26 dealing with in The Return, or indeed how we would know whether or not we had successfully done so. Perhaps The Return is difficult to recognise because it is not a single consistent thing; as we shall see, such ideas return with a vengeance at the season's conclusion.

Nostalgia and the inexorability of time
The Return clearly has no wish simply to indulge viewer nostalgia, despite the fact that nostalgia is crucial to the "motherhood and cherry pie" aspects of the These are important but very difficult questions. I depart, however, from Ellis and Theus's emphasis on the artificiality, or the arbitrariness, of the relationship between past and present. For them, The Return 'suggests instead that any epistemological grounding based in some index of the past is mere construction' and that 'it is the past's own indeterminateness that determines the future' (ibid.: 34 & 35). I want to argue that, for all its inscrutable non-linearity, time in The Return proves both real and impossible to master; the diegetic 'lived time between the two scenes' is also crucial.
It is certainly true that 'The Return treats its original historical moment as something the meaning of which has to be continuously worked through in the present' (ibid.: 34), but the result of this stance is often that knowledge of the past and its relation to our present often comes to be seen as confusing, distressing, elusive, or misleading, rather than as a 'mere construction'. Ellis and Theus's reading risks undercutting the exploration of trauma that is one of The Return's strongest links both to the original Peaks and to Lynch's cinematic work in the intervening years. (Diane's narration of her rape by Cooper certainly does not indicate that her ' epistemological grounding' in her memory of that event is 'mere construction'.) It is the fact that time's very determinateness is often impossible to grasp, rather than any supposed discovery of its 'indeterminateness', that The Return so frequently and distressingly insists upon; Cooper, after all, announces in episode seventeen that 'the past dictates the future' (my emphasis).

Confusions
We might say, then, that The Return both insists on the reality of death and exploits the resources of film for confusing the boundary between life and death. It is useful in this context to bear in mind two different senses of the word "confusion". There is both the familiar affective sense ("I'm confused!") but there is also an older sense that was employed, for example, by Alexander Baumgarten -who has cause to be considered the founder of aesthetics -in the eighteenth century. As Terry Eagleton explains, for Baumgarten confusion 'means not "muddle" but "fusion": in Lash: The Dangers of Getting What You Asked For Art. 1, page 12 of 26 their organic interpenetration, the elements of aesthetic representation resist that discrimination into discrete units which is characteristic of conceptual thought' (Eagleton 1990: 15) what would they not understand about the contemporary world? What specifically disturbs Lucy, however, is that cell phones seem to allow somebody to be in two places at once: she thinks Sheriff Truman is away fishing, so cannot understand how he can also be in the sheriff station. In episode seventeen, the Evil Cooper enters the station, only for the Good Cooper to phone Lucy shortly afterwards from the Mitchum brothers' car. Once she has seen both Coopers she exclaims to Andy "I understand cellular phones now!" People can indeed be in two places at once, she now realizes -though this implies that she thinks that, at the very least, everyone she has spoken to on a cell phone must have a doppelgänger! Lucy is not disturbed by non-mobile telephones, so she is clearly comfortable with two distant spaces being connected at a single time; what confuses and upsets her is when this fixed relationship becomes malleable. Having this explained by the presence of two Coopers is less distressing to her than the experience of talking to somebody and not knowing where they are; mobile phones seem alarmingly to suggest to Lucy that -to distort Ellis and Theus's formulation -her "epistemological grounding based

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Art. 1, page 13 of 26 in some index of the present is mere construction". Lucy needs the two meanings of "present" to be kept separate, not to become confused in our second sense: when speaking to somebody on the phone, she and her interlocutor occupy the same present moment, which she also treats as an index of the fact that they are notcannot be -both present in the same space.
If Lucy is upset by the need to pin down where somebody is, The Return builds to a similarly intense consternation about when they are, as expressed by Dale Cooper's final question, the last words of the entire season: "What year is this?" The Return hints at different possible ways of interpreting its temporality, bewildering in themselves as well as in conjunction. Mike, the one-armed man (Al Strobel) repeatedly asks "Is it future or is it past?" The possibility that "it" is in fact present is conspicuous by its absence, but one possible answer to Mike's question is that it is neither; "it" is a single moment which can, by definition, be neither future nor past. The ringing sound that intrigues a number of characters in The Return seems to be a stretched- In contrast to this singularity, another interpretive possibility is the idea that the series represents intersecting dreams. In episode fourteen, FBI director Gordon Cole (David Lynch) recounts a dream he had in which Monica Bellucci told him, echoing the Upanishads, that "we are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside the dream" (we might say that the dreamer becomes confused with the dream). She follows this statement up with the question, "but who is the dreamer?" (This sequence also confuses the real with the fictional, appropriately enough given its concern with dream and reality, as the real Monica Bellucci plays a fictionalized version of herself appearing in the dream of a fictional character who is played by the writer and director of this very scene…) Bellucci's question might send us searching for a singular answer: Laura Palmer? Dale Cooper? The mysterious "Richard" that Cooper seems to become, at least temporarily, in episode eighteen? But perhaps The Return's persistent doubles and echoes should instead cue us to look for multiple answers.
(Perhaps every viewer of Twin Peaks dreams their own version, then lives inside that dream. But note also that Bellucci does not say that we are the dreamer, but that we are like the dreamer.) Are the sequences featuring Audrey her dream (from which she perhaps wakes up in the final shot of her in an empty white room)? Perhaps the interpretations. There are far too many details for me to be able to go into this in real depth, so I will be highly selective. happened. (After Laura vanishes in the woods we cut directly to Cooper with Mike in the Red Room, who again asks, as he did in episode two, "Is it future or is it past?" Cooper then leaves the Red Room and is met by Diane. Was the rest of The Return -between the two instances of Mike's question, which is perhaps actually one instance repeated, or doubled -simply the dream of a still-trapped Cooper? Or, given that after sleeping with Diane he wakes up in a different motel to that in which he went to sleep and finds a note to "Richard" telling him that "Linda" is leaving him, perhaps it has all been Richard's dream? The Return engages with the most derided of all serial television devices -"it was all a dream" -by pushing it so far that it empties itself out. What exactly would it explain if we were to learn that the events of Twin Peaks "never really happened"? Did we think that they did?) Cooper then tracks down the woman known as Carrie Page, whom -he tells her -he believes to be Laura Palmer, and takes her to what he thinks is her house in Twin Peaks. The trip awakens no memories in Carrie, however, and the owners of the house profess no knowledge of Laura's mother, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie)who we have learnt earlier in the season to be possessed by some kind of violent demon, which may or may not be an ancient evil known as Judy. Mactaggart puts it well, highlighting a number of the "confusions" and misrecognitions that intersect, confusingly, at this point: Initially, indeed, the "Palmer" household looks as it has always done from the outside in this season. But, upon finding that it is owned and occupied by Alice Tremond (Mary Reber, the current owner of the actual house) and bought from a Mrs. Chalfont, Cooper and Carrie (and the audience) are at a loss. Compounding and confusing names from the previous seasons with no explanation, we are left here in a decidedly unsettled state.
(Mactaggart 2020) Perplexed, confused, and crestfallen, Cooper asks what year it is. We faintly hear Sarah's voice (from the first season) calling "Laura!" and Carrie -or Laura, or whoever she is -begins to scream; simultaneously, the lights in the house suddenly go out.

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The sheer desolation of the way the final episode builds to this conclusion strikes me as at least as radical as The Return's much-discussed eighth episode; it also undercuts what may now seem the rather too neat "explanation" that the earlier episode, for all its obscurities, offers by providing what Mark Frost has called ' an origin story for the evil that we had been depicting' (Frost 2018, 19'55'' -20'03''). One of the most obvious questions it raises is, of course, who has won (see Figure 4)? Has Judy been defeated or not? This cannot simply be written off as a case of "it can mean whatever you want" because the alternatives are so starkly differentiated and not something any viewer invested in the series could possibly be ambivalent about. If Cooper has succeeded, Sarah's cries of "Laura" may -if Sarah is now Judy -be cries of frustration (recall her attacking the photograph of Laura in episode seventeen), and Carrie's scream might be a response to Laura's memories flooding back in now that she is, in fact, safe. Cooper's consternation might reflect the fact that he himself, having saved Laura, is now trapped in a world that is not his own; perhaps the forces of what seems to be the White Lodge, such as the mysterious Fireman (Carel Struycken), are not as straightforwardly benevolent as they may seem, and not be above sacrificing Cooper to a higher cause. (This, broadly, is David Auerbach's conclusion in Auerbach  Whether or not the plan has in fact played into Judy's hands, the distressing conclusion seems to be that Cooper -like the audience -was sure what he (we) wanted but turns out merely to have been yet one more man certain of what was best for a woman. Jones seems to me entirely correct to argue that in The Return 'the desire for certain knowledge and meaning is problematized by its connection to a masculinized desire for mastery' (Jones 2020). That Cooper's entire plan could be misguided is a possibility that is masked by our desperate desire for him to "wake up" from his "Dougie-state", a desire that is excruciatingly sustained over sixteen out a denouement is by no means an entirely arbitrary imposition by Lynch and Frost.
On the contrary, it explores another side of features of Cooper that are central to the character; his determination and bravery have always been allied to a stiffness that, in the first season, was deployed to endearing effect, such as when he gently turns down Audrey in episode six, telling her: "When a man joins the Bureau he takes an oath to uphold certain values. Values that he's sworn to live by. This is wrong, Audrey. We both know it." Jean-Philippe Tessé articulates this interpretation of the conclusion to The Return very well: Why did Cooper not sense the complete absurdity of such a project? It is because this agent's chivalric spirit -driven to delirium by the inflexibility of his oaths (to the FBI in the first place) -tends spontaneously towards the ultimate romantic gesture, romanticism being the continuation of the chivalric novel, and then becomes Don Quixotism: his quest, his commitment turns into a remake that is catastrophic, tragic, even pathetic, of the finale of The Searchers, leaving him hunched, impotent, stupid, condemned to wander endlessly in the limbo of time, Ulysses lost forever, without destiny.
(Tessé 2017: 13; my translation) The connection to John Ford's The Searchers -in which Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) sets out to find his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who has been abducted and raped by Native Americans, rescues her and returns her to her family, but is left with no option for himself other than departure, retreating to wander endlessly in the wilderness -is intriguing. Edwards actually plans to kill Debbie, not to rescue her as he in fact ends up doing; does The Return darkly reverse this structure? In Robert Pippin's interpretation of The Searchers we eventually 'learn how extraordinarily difficult it is to provide the proper act description of just what it was that was done, to describe properly the quest in the first place and its unexpected ending' (Pippin 2010: 131); the same is true of the conclusion to The Return. A further possibility, however, is that Cooper is attempting a ' catastrophic, tragic, even pathetic' remake not of The Searchers but of Twin Peaks itself -an impossible remake in which Laura Palmer did not die. On To sum up: I have argued that The Return combines a diegetic and thematic preoccupation with doubles and doubling with a reflexive awareness of itself as a double. It is not, however, a double of the original Twin Peaks. Rather, it deliberately resists this status, playing instead with the way its reception is shaped by the ways it is doubled by the "new Peaks" that its audience wanted, or at least thought they wanted. These features play out throughout the series in themes of confusion, recognition, and misrecognition that are, once again, operative both diegetically and in the relation between series and viewer. The confusions that The Return works with are both affective and, we might say, structural, involving the blurring or inextricable intertwining of states that cannot pertain simultaneously, such as life and death ("I am dead, yet I live", says Laura in Part 1), or past and present. This tendency reaches an intense culmination at the very end of the series, when Cooper and viewer are utterly confused about where they are, when they are, and whether Laura has or has not been rescued. Martha Nochimson sees the conclusion as prompting us to dissociate ourselves from Cooper, arguing that 'the 2017 series can be seen as a call to reclaim the human in the universe he has depicted by distancing ourselves from recipes for action summed up by the formulaic hero that can only lead to nonexistence. The epic hero as a liberating negative example!' (Nochimson 2019: 267) There is something attractive and plausible in such an interpretation, and yet it also risks avoiding, rather than confronting, the confusions and contradictions of The Return by explaining them away as therapeutic. To use a Freudian term: if they are to prove therapeutic, there will be a great deal of "working through" required for us to reach that point. Jones argues that the conclusion ' encourages viewers to renounce the quest for closure, to interrogate their complicity with and renegotiate the terms of their investment in its violence, by shifting focus -and thus, potentially, identification -to Laura' (Jones 2020). This seems to me right, as long as we recognise the possibility of different ways of 'shifting focus'. To shift too abruptly and readily might, once again, be to avoid truly 'interrogat[ing] [our] complicity'. The disorientation that Cooper's final situation provokes need not merely indicate that we were too aligned with Cooper but might also prompt us to probe not only why we were so aligned, but what exactly we were aligned with.
For Hills, The Return ultimately marks the defeat, not only of Cooper, but of Twin Peaks, its absorption into something alien to the original: 'Marked by generational seriality, and its differentiations between then/now, Twin Peaks: The Return is not what it seems: rather than a return, it absorbs David Lynch and Mark Frost's 1990s "cult classic" into the more recent Lynchverse' (Hills 2018: 323). Hills's article was written only six episodes into The Return, but the season's subsequent development is, I would suggest, unlikely to have altered his view (note that Halskov also points out how many elements of non-Peaks Lynchiana are referenced in The Return). As convincing as this account is, however, it seems to me to underestimate the extent to which The Return can be what it is only by means both of the original Twin Peaks and the quarter-century gap separating the two. This is not simply because it is a case of "fan disservice" (ibid.: 317) or trolling; to see it as such would be to assume a static account of fan desire and a binary understanding of what would count as its fulfilment. It is in fact precisely the unflinching way that The Return explores the futility of an attempt at a "return", its willingness to demonstrate how selfdeluded this would be, despite -or perhaps even because of -the fact that nostalgia is central to the very texture of Twin Peaks, that makes the season into something much greater than just such a doomed remake. The delicious paradox is that it is by destroying the possibility of a return to Twin Peaks, or of successfully constructing its doppelgänger, that The Return ends up faithful to what was really so remarkable about the original series: its capacity to remain at one and the same time utterly distinctive and perpetually elusive.