Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier
by Mark Frost
It’s such a wonderful thing that we’re still talking about Twin Peaks 25 years after its release. The Return has certainly been a phenomenal affair for viewers, where theories are being exchanged as everyone is still trying to figure what things meant during this 18 hour special. Not to mention that haunting final hour. Of course, there are even those who are debating whether Twin Peaks the Return is a movie or TV series.
If there’s never another Twin Peaks we are bound to live in a stage of uncertainty forever. Maybe David Lynch and Mark Frost wanted it that way. But, what people forget is that the Twin Peaks return was sandwiched by the release of two books, penned by Frost himself, which, to be precise, put things slightly into better perspective.
The first book was the Secret History of Twin Peaks, organized as a dossier of sorts by the character of Tammy Preston (of notorious “Fuck you, Tammy” fame) where she goes into elements of Twin Peaks’ past which become relevant to the show in general. We learned for example that the nuclear blast in Los Alamos and Lieutenant Briggs had a larger role than we had anticipated.
This second book’s role is a bit more mysterious. The Final Dossier serves more as a recap in a “what have we learned” kind of way. It’s also helpful because it solidifies that what we saw really happened. But instead of just a summary of the series the Final Dossier puts more pieces together in the larger puzzle that is Twin Peaks. We learn about Sarah Palmer and her involvement in the Los Alamos incident, who the body and the severed head came to be, and what happened to Audrey Horn after the hospital incident.
The Final Dossier isn’t meant to be some grand masterwork, but more of a fun spooky detective story, which intrigues, answers some questions, and honestly is pretty funny. We’ll never uncover the entire mystery of Twin Peaks and it doesn’t look like anyone ever will.
Maybe that’s how David Lynch and Mark Frost wanted it.
Get it here.
