25 years ago, Agent Dale Cooper was rolling into a sleepy logging town to investigate a murder:
“Diane, 11:30 a.m., February Twenty-fourth. Entering the town of Twin Peaks, five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line. I’ve never seen so many trees in my life. As W. C. Fields would say, I’d rather be here than Philadelphia.”
February 24th has long been considered ‘Twin Peaks Day’ by fans of the show, usually kicking off a rewatch of the iconic TV show. Until recently this was merely an exercise in nostalgia, just a way to relive the familiar old show that still makes an impact a quarter century after transmission. But with Showtime’s revival premiering on May 21 at 9 PM ET/PT, there’s excitement in the air.
Now, the network has marked the occasion with the following one sheets:
The first features the most iconic image of Twin Peaks, the beatific face of Laura Palmer. She’s the murder victim at the heart of the show, found wrapped in plastic on a lakeside in the pilot episode. This homecoming queen picture is found throughout the series and is central to pretty much every piece of promotional merchandise. The second poster, meanwhile, shows Agent Dale Cooper, with Kyle McLachan balefully staring out of the foggy trees of the forest that encircles the town.
Despite being partially decomposed, Palmer and Cooper meet each other in dreams, with Palmer telling Cooper “I’ll see you again in 25 years.” By 2017 those years will have passed and the question of quite what the characters will be doing now (especially as one is very dead) is interesting to ponder. Showtime President David Nevins has hinted to fans that this revival is “about Agent Dale Cooper’s odyssey to Twin Peaks.” It doesn’t give us much to work with, but any focus on McLachlan’s charismatic, intelligent and deeply bizarre coffee loving FBI Agent is a good omen.
Any other details are thin on the ground. The cast is under strict orders from creator/director David Lynch to keep their lips sealed, with him staying particularly tight-lipped as well, offering us the cryptic yet lyrical:
“In the beginning, many years ago, Mark and I were as if lost in the wilderness, as it always is in the beginning. Then we seemed to find a mountain and began to climb, and when we rounded the mountain, we entered a deep forest, and going through the forest for a time the trees began to thin, and then coming out of the forest we discovered a small town of Twin Peaks. We got to know the people of Twin Peaks and got to know this mystery… We discovered this world. And within this world there are other worlds. That’s how it started.”
Trying to second guess Lynch is a fool’s errand, so for now, these Twin Peaks one sheets are an atmospheric idea of what we might expect from the highly anticipated revival.