"Dear Twitter Friends… it is happening again". Next: "Dear Twitter Friends: That gum you like is going to come back in style!" With these two messages, followed by the hashtag#damngoodcoffee (an exclamation that calls Agent Dale Cooper to mind), David Lynch and Mark Frost chose to announce the sensational revival of Twin Peaks for a new season after twenty-five long years, courtesy of Showtime.
Broadcast on ABC in 1990-1991, the series that revolved around the murder of the homecoming queen Laura Palmer instantly became a cult phenomenon on a global scale. As early as its pilot episode, watched by over thirty-four million viewers, Twin Peaks was clearly different from the typical television fare of the time. It introduced a whole new way of conceiving TV series, and may have been the very first example of viral popularity, in a pre-Internet age long before the advent of social media!
Today the creative duo Lynch/Frost has reassembled many of the elements and the faces of the original series, such as actors Kyle MacLachlan - who promptly replied to the above tweets with his own: "Better fire up that percolator and find my black suit :-)" as well as Sheryl Lee and Michael Ontkean. Mindful of the passing of time, the narrative picks up the stories of the characters twenty-five years after they left off in the last episode aired (in which Laura Palmer prophetically remarked "I will see you again in twenty-five years"). While eagerly awaiting the episodes of the brand new season, the festival offers up the pilot episode of the original series, where it all began.
Northwest Passage
A body is found in a clear plastic bag on a riverbank: it’s the body of Laura Palmer, a local girl well-loved by one and all. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper arrives in the small town shaken up by the murder, only to learn, in the course of his investigation, that there is a dark side to Twin Peaks and its residents.