Review of Twin Peaks: The Return 1.5

Well, I have no idea what last night's insane episode 1.5 of Twin Peaks is called, or even if it has a name, but I might entitle it, "The Mod Squad Meets Big Love in the Diner".

Because ... my favorite scene featured Mädchen Amick (original Twin Peaks) and Peggy Lipton (also original Twin Peaks, but I'll always think of her as Julie Barnes in The Mod Squad) as waitresses in that Twin Peaks diner, into which walks Amanda Seyfried (from Big Love). There's no Agent Cooper or cherry pie, but Amanda walks out, gets into a car, and the Paris Sisters' "I Love How You Love Me" starts playing as she goes into some kind of rapture. Call me crazy, but that's always been one of my favorite early Phil Spector productions, and one of the reasons this was my favorite scene.

As for Cooper, he's still not up to cherry pie, but he's drinking more coffee, and begins responding to "agent". Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid.

There were some other good scenes, but it's almost pointless to describe them, in any known or unknown language, because Twin Peaks is more than ever about the medium and not the content, in true David Lynch implementing Marshall McLuhan fashion. McLuhan famously tagged the electric light as all medium with no content -- or a medium without a message -- and this is as good as any description of Twin Peaks, even though the music breaks through in almost every episode as some mighty good acoustic pie.

But you could easily reverse that, and say that Twin Peaks has so much content that it's too much to watch and comprehend -- like trying to understand what you see when you look into an electric light -- so you might as well just let the max headroom info flow over you and enjoy the sensory massage.

See you all on the other side of the bulb next week.

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