Introduction: “It is Happening Again”: New Reflections on Twin Peaks

In the final episode of the original run of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s ground-breaking TV drama, Twin Peaks (“Beyond Life and Death,” airdate June 10, 1991), FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) ventures intrepidly and bodily into the “waiting room” between worlds, the confusing red-draped space with zigzagged floor that he had visited in his dream in the famous second episode (“Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” April 19, 1990). Speaking strangely (the result of backward speech itself then played backward), The Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) informs Cooper that “Some of your friends are here” and then Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)—or, perhaps, her doppelganger—having greeted Cooper, tells him “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”