How David Lynch Prepared Us for His Death With ‘Twin Peaks’

In the wake of the tragic passing of David Lynch—a beloved director, painter, musician, and weatherman—it’s worth looking back to his final major project, Twin Peaks: The Return.

There was a lot to love about that surreal, ambitious final chapter of Twin Peaks, but the most affecting part is its constant meditation on aging and death. The actors in The Return were old at the time of filming; several of them (like Harry Dean Stanton and Miguel Ferrer) died not long after production.

Whereas other revival series try to gloss over the ravages of time, David Lynch leaned into it with The Return, an approach that paid off most clearly with the Log Lady’s final scene. The actress who played the Log Lady, Catherine E. Coulson, was dying of complications from cancer at the time of filming. Four days before she passed, she filmed a phone call scene with Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse).

“Hawk, I’m dying,” the Log Lady says, sad but calm. “You know about death, that it’s just a change, not an end.”

The scene isn’t just poignant; it feels private. The real-world circumstances are bleeding almost too much into this fictional scene. It’s impossible to ignore that we’re watching a real-life person talking about their real-life death, that the oxygen tank she’s breathing into isn’t merely a TV prop.

The next scene shows the other Peaks characters learning that Log Lady passed away, but it’s also about the actors reacting to the death of someone they’ve known for decades. The mundane tragedy is real in a way that TV’s rarely capable of depicting.

But if The Return has a lesson, it’s that death itself isn’t a tragedy. Lynch made that point before with his ’92 prequel film Fire Walk With Me, which ends with the recently murdered Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the Red Room. She sees a floating angel, understands the angel’s there for her, and she breaks into laughter and tears.

The scene is, to me, the most emotional, cathartic one in the whole series. After an entire movie’s worth of suffering, Laura gets not only a relief from pain, but confirmation from a higher being that she’s worth saving. Like a lot of survivors of sexual assault, Laura struggled with the belief that she herself was evil or unworthy of kindness. “The angels wouldn’t help you because they’ve all gone away,” Laura says about herself earlier in the film, but now here’s an angel right in front of her.

In other words, the Log Lady was right: death isn’t the end, it’s a change. In Laura’s heartbreaking case, it was a change preferable to the life she was stuck in.

If Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) makes one mistake in The Return, it’s that he doesn’t quite heed the Log Lady’s advice. In the two-part finale, he seemingly travels through time to the night Laura died and tells her he’s taking her home. It’s a beautiful, triumphant moment, until it all slips away from him. Undoing Laura’s death isn’t possible; Cooper needs to move on and stop trying to fix the unfixable.

Instead, “Part 18” sees Cooper heading into an apparent alternate dimension where he finds another version of Laura Palmer. There are plenty of popular interpretations of what exactly happens in this episode, but for me it feels like a meditation on a symptom of grief where you start seeing the deceased person in the faces of strangers passing by.

This happened to me in college shortly before watching The Return; a friend had died suddenly, and for weeks I’d see people who looked (if only from a distance) a lot like him. For a second I’d wonder if there’d been some misunderstanding, if that really was him still alive and well somehow, but on closer look that idea would come crashing down.

This sensation would typically last a second or two, but “Part 18” stretches it out for 30 minutes. The audience is given plenty of time to wonder if Cooper’s trip through time meaningfully changed things, that Laura’s still got a shot at a long, happy life after all. But once again, Twin Peaks rips that hope away in those final haunting moments outside what was once the Palmer family’s house.

It’s hardly the first time the show’s denied Laura the chance to cheat death. The first season of Twin Peaks introduced Laura’s doppelgänger Maddie, a character who was technically her cousin but who served as her spiritual successor. Maddie seemed like the show’s way of letting Laura live on past her death, except Maddie too was killed by the same man.

Fire Walk With Me pulled a similar trick, taking viewers back in time to when Laurie was still alive and letting us see all the moments where someone could’ve stepped in and saved her. No such scene occurs, however; Laura’s death barrels towards her all the same.

Plenty of viewers have interpreted “Part 18″ as a dark ending—and yes, it is dark—but it’s not a nihilistic one. It’s an ending with a lesson about letting go, of moving on with your life and choosing to embrace the good coffee and cherry pie. As Lynch wrote in his memoir, Catching the Big Fish, and as his family noted in their announcement of his death, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.” When dealing with the passing of my favorite director, I’ll be keeping those words in mind.

As for poor Dale Cooper, who remains trapped in a perpetual loop of his own making, trying and failing to undo Laura’s death: he’d benefit from hearing the words that Lynch himself has said on the topic, after his friend and composer Angelo Badalamenti passed in 2022:

“I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we’ll all meet again, like the song says. It’s sad but it’s not devastating if you think like that... It’s a continuum, and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”