Review: Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier by Mark Frost
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m new to the world of Twin Peaks, but as someone who holds advanced nerd degrees I’m familiar with a lot of franchises that have decades of continuity, intricate histories, and scores of characters who have gone through extreme story arcs. Yet, I think Twin Peaks is the only one that could release a short tie-in book that seems like it’s just filling in some story gaps until the very end when it drops a couple of revelations that made me reexamine what I assumed I knew about the story all over again.

Damn, and when I started watching the old show on Netflix last summer I thought it was about solving the mystery of who killed one girl...

OK, just to recap. The series ran for only two seasons back in the early ‘90s. A prequel movie was done after that, and then 25 years later the show returned with 18 episodes that seem not just about a surreal battle between epic forces of good and evil, but also what I thought to be a slyly brilliant meta-commentary on TV as well as the nostalgia driving the resurrection of old shows. The previous tie-in book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, was released before its return and functioned as a set-up for it. The Final Dossier is about wrapping up some of the loose ends and acts as a kind of afterword to the series.

Following the style of Secret History the story is told in a series of FBI reports from Special Agent Tammy Preston to Deputy Director Gordon Cole that recaps and sorta explains what happened. (Or at least as much explanation as we’re likely to officially get.) It also fills in the gaps about what happened to many of the original characters as well as what occurred after the events of the last of the new episodes.

What’s interesting is that a Twin Peaks viewer sometimes knows more than Agent Preston so when she has a question we often know the answer. So it’s like even though the FBI has some pieces of the puzzle only someone who watched Twin Peaks, not any of its characters, is in a position to see the whole picture. Understanding that picture is a whole different story. Probably only David Lynch and Mark Frost could do that, and it sounds like they’ve said all they have to say on the subject.

I was slightly disappointed in this until the ending. Secret History did similar things but was also telling us a story we didn’t know at all as well as having its own central mystery to solve. This seemed only to exist as a way to tell us all the things the show didn’t have time to get into. There’s also a depressing similarity to many of the characters’ fates. What happened on the show 25 years ago seemed to have tainted almost everyone, and there’s damn few happy endings. The best that many of them managed was to maintain the status quo with their lives not getting any worse.

It also seems to go out of its way to correct a mistake in Secret History with a weird and unlikely story about how that book said that Norma’s mother had died before the show started even though there’s a whole sub-plot with her and her living mother in the original series. However, it’s odd that Frost goes to such links to correct that gaffe here when there are several other continuity errors and contradictions that aren’t addressed. (e.g. The story of how Big Ed and Nadine came to be married is nothing like how Big Ed describes it on the show.)

So it seemed like this was simply a bit of extra material to answer the questions of hard core fans, but that it hadn’t even been particularly well-researched or thought out. That’s when the last few chapters kicked me in the head with a very important bit of follow-up on the impact of one of the last big events in the return episodes, and then came a revelation that pretty much blew my mind and changed my perception about a whole facet of the entire series. (It’s possible that a more dedicated Twin Peaks fan may have twigged to this before I did, but it certainly doesn’t seem like information that the series gave us.)

I’m not entirely sure that I like the idea of dropping something that seems so crucial in a follow-up book rather than putting it in the series itself, but nothing is easy or straight-forward when it comes to Twin Peaks. The entire show is begging to be picked apart and analyzed with layer after layer of themes and meaning examined so it doesn’t seem like that much of a cheat that one nugget was held back and tossed out later.

This would have exactly zero appeal to anyone who hasn’t the show, and it’d be pretty confusing if you haven’t read Secret History either. But for those who have it does provide a lot of interesting extras to think about.

Fair warning: Any untagged spoilers about the show in the comments will be deleted.

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