The second season of Twin Peaks is quite a thing. I'm not just talking about how it's supposed to be uneven and hard to love, but also how the tone and plot of season two completely subsumes all the discussion of the show's plot and approach as a whole. This isn't unfair – the first season only has 8 episodes, and the second season has 22, meaning that 73% of the show's content is in season two, after David Lynch, one of its principal creative forces, had left, and with Mark Frost, its other co-creator, having a much more hands-off position. Therefore – and I'm entirely going off a few disconnected plot elements here, because I haven't watched any of season two yet – as I understand it, the second season of Twin Peaks becomes something significantly different from its first season, as much concerned with mysterious supernatural phenomena as it is with the ongoing plots of its rural townsfolk.
Without the supernatural elements to discuss, one thing becomes clear about the show's approach – it's really just a soap opera. I do not mean that in a remotely degrading way, for the record, because soap operas in general are far too put-upon despite the fact that soap-opera plotting is a considerable influence in how many modern shows serialize their character arcs. When I say the first season of Twin Peaks is a soap opera I mean that, like a soap opera, it has a diffuse cast of characters, all with their own plotlines, and advances everyone's plotlines just a little bit every week. Seriously, if you cut out the part's of Cooper's dream that hinted towards the supernatural masterplot, and handed the show to some directors more mundane than David Lynch, this would be a straightforward, pure soap opera.
But of course I've always hated that “if X took away Y it would just be Z!” kind of criticism, because it's removing not only vital context but also important pieces of the work itself. Lynch's directing work (and the tight influence he exerted over the series's other directors) is, in fact, the vital piece that makes this show unique. What you have here is a series that manages to have it both ways – it both focuses on the mundane lives of its citizens and the ongoing murder investigation of Laura Palmer. It has an eye on the supernatural and uncanny enough to justify its cracked, often creepy take on small-town drama. But... see, here's the thing. The unresolvable tension that fuels this season can't last forever. Twin Peaks almost has to get worse from here.
There are many, many ways in which the show is already conceptually doomed – that it's traversing a tightrope act that it can't possibly walk forever. Lynch and Frost wanted the show to gradually transition away from Laura Palmer's murder and just focus on the townsfolk, which, fair enough, the townsfolk are in fact the more interesting part of the show, but at some point you have to either justify why Dale Cooper is still there despite the murder investigation plot being dropped, or you have to solve the murder. This is a challenge that could only work for maybe two or three seasons before you have to pull the trigger on one of those things happening. And of course, once you introduce supernatural elements like BOB and MIKE, you have to eventually explain them in some capacity, and once you do that, you've introduced something necessarily bigger and more important than the everyday goings-on of a bunch of people in Wisconsin or Michigan or wherever this actually is set, which undercuts the whole point of the show. You can do your best to introduce this aspect extremely slowly so as to preserve the mystery and tension for as long as possible, but how long can you do that before viewers get frustrated at a non-advancing plotline? Four seasons?
So much of what makes this season special is just the fact that it's in a place where it benefits the most from all these contradictory impulses – this early on is the only time when a show with this attitude and premise can have its cake and eat it too: invest us in the supernatural by placing it amongst compelling characters, and enliven the characters by having one foot in the supernatural. It's a good hat trick, but at some point the show has to pull the trigger and show its hand – the issue, just from what I've heard, is that it didn't need to show its hand as quickly and clumsily as it ultimately ended up doing. But that's a discussion for season two.
I don't mean to put this season down just by implying that its ingredients are an unstable mixture that must eventually explode – they sure are, but for now they add some real, palpable fire and elevate what would be, even without them, a show of really compelling characters and dramatic events. This is probably the best season of television I've watched so far this year, and it's no wonder that it was such a huge smash and big talking point among people. As much as I've talked about the unsustainable blend of things that went into making this season great, they undeniably did make it great, and however season two turns out – maybe it's secretly brilliant, maybe it crashes and burns in the most fascinating way – I'm super on-board to dissect it, and that's in no small part due to the quality of this season.
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