The fans’ collective breath can finally be let out. Has another series been more hotly anticipated on DVD? The time spent remastering pays off with a great image, but can’t gloss over the fact that this show jumped a whole mess of sharks.

Devoted followers finally got an answer to the cryptic central mystery, but by revealing Laura Palmer’s killer early in season two the show had nowhere to go. Trademark odd scenarios drifted from unsettling to silly in their pointless repetition. Characters once possessed by unbearable angst, doubt and rage became reduced to sight gags. The enigmatic starlets were forced into a humiliating beauty pageant. Most devastating of all, the smoking erotic tension between upstanding detective Dale Cooper and sultry high school bombshell Audrey Horne was thoroughly dowsed. After teasing audiences with an inevitable so-wrong-it’s-right hook-up, Cooper suddenly switches gears for an ex-nun! Stiff acting aside, unfortunate new cast member Heather Graham surely became a scapegoat for viewers’ wrath.

It wasn’t all disappointments though. For all the mis-steps, Twin Peaks continued to innovate in a prime time format. Other soap operas routinely dispatched of their characters for dramatic effect, but never had any imprisoned someone’s soul in a wooden drawer handle. Unexplained events tied to the town’s dark woods coalesced in a supernatural myth that The X-Files took and ran with. The unlucky citizens even seemed to be finding redemption as the series wound down.

In the very end, the season’s mediocre storylines only served to enhance the contrasting dark final installment, written and directed by co-creator David Lynch. Any long fought for happiness was quickly dashed. Lynch gave his beloved characters new miseries and flippant deaths, as if handing out bad fortune cookies. With the rest of the cast out of the way, Lynch spent the bulk of the episode breaking the purity and spirit of Agent Cooper, the show’s true hero. Trapped in a hellish dream world, Cooper stumbles around a mirror maze of backwards-talking freaks. He’s pursued by doppelgangers and ghouls shrieking in his face. The one source of good in Twin Peaks is corrupted by his own fears, leaving fans with knots in their guts. It didn’t entirely make up for a lackluster season, but the finale genuinely opened new possibilities for television.

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