TWIN PEAKS (David Lynch) - COMPLETE "ARCHIVES" BASE SET (72 cards) - issued by Rittenhouse in 2019

Twin Peaks is an American mystery horror drama television series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch that premiered on April 8, 1990, on ABC. It was one of the top-rated series of 1990. It gained a cult following and has been referenced in a wide variety of media. In subsequent years, Twin Peaks is often listed among the greatest television series of all time.

The series follows an investigation headed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the fictional suburban town of Twin Peaks, Washington. The show's narrative draws on elements of detective fiction, but its uncanny tone, supernatural elements, and campy, melodramatic portrayal of eccentric characters also draw on American soap opera and horror tropes. Like much of Lynch's work, it is distinguished by surrealism, offbeat humor, and distinctive cinematography. The acclaimed score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti with Lynch.

The success of the show sparked a media franchise, and the series was followed by a 1992 feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, that serves as a prequel to the series. Additional tie-in books were also released. Following a hiatus of over 25 years, the show returned in 2017 with a third season on Showtime, marketed as Twin Peaks: The Return. The season was directed by Lynch and written by Lynch and Frost, and starred many original cast members, including MacLachlan.

In 1989, the logger Pete Martell discovers a naked corpse wrapped in plastic on the bank of a river outside the town of Twin Peaks, Washington. When Sheriff Harry S. Truman, his deputies, and Dr. Will Hayward arrive, the body is identified as homecoming queen Laura Palmer. A badly injured second girl, Ronette Pulaski, is discovered in a fugue state.

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is called in to investigate. Cooper's initial examination of Laura's body reveals a tiny typed letter "R" inserted under her fingernail. Cooper informs the community that Laura's death matches the signature of a killer who murdered another girl in southwestern Washington the previous year, and that evidence indicates the killer lives in Twin Peaks.

The authorities discover through Laura's diary that she has been living a double life. She was cheating on her boyfriend, football captain Bobby Briggs, with biker James Hurley, and prostituting herself with the help of truck driver Leo Johnson and drug dealer Jacques Renault. Laura was also addicted to cocaine, which she obtained by coercing Bobby into doing business with Jacques.

Laura's father, attorney Leland Palmer, suffers a nervous breakdown. Her best friend, Donna Hayward, begins a relationship with James. With the help of Laura's cousin Maddy Ferguson, Donna and James discover that Laura's psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, was obsessed with Laura, but he is proven innocent of the murder.

Hotelier Ben Horne, the richest man in Twin Peaks, plans to destroy the town's lumber mill along with its owner Josie Packard, and murder his lover (Josie's sister-in-law), Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie), so that he can purchase the land at a reduced price and complete a development project, Ghostwood. Horne's sultry, troubled daughter, Audrey, becomes infatuated with Cooper and spies for clues in an effort to gain his affections.

Cooper has a dream in which he is approached by a one-armed otherworldly being who calls himself MIKE. MIKE says that Laura's murderer is a similar entity, Killer BOB, a feral, denim-clad man with long gray hair. Cooper finds himself decades older with Laura and a dwarf in a red business suit, who engages in coded dialogue with Cooper. The next morning, Cooper tells Truman that, if he can decipher the dream, he will know who killed Laura.

Cooper and the sheriff's department find the one-armed man from Cooper's dream, a traveling shoe salesman named Phillip Gerard. Gerard knows a Bob, the veterinarian who treats Renault's pet bird. Cooper interprets these events to mean that Renault is the murderer, and with Truman's help, tracks Renault to One-Eyed Jack's, a brothel owned by Horne across the border in Canada. He lures Jacques Renault back onto U.S. soil to arrest him, but Renault is shot while trying to escape and is hospitalized.

Leland, learning that Renault has been arrested, sneaks into the hospital and murders him. The same night, Horne orders Leo to burn down the lumber mill with Catherine trapped inside and has Leo gunned down by Hank Jennings to ensure Leo's silence. Cooper returns to his room following Jacques's arrest and is shot by a masked gunman.

Lying hurt in his hotel room, Cooper has a vision in which a giant appears and reveals three clues: "There is a man in a smiling bag"; "The owls are not what they seem"; and "Without chemicals, he points." He takes Cooper's gold ring and explains that when Cooper understands the three premonitions, his ring will be returned.

Leo Johnson survives his shooting but is brain-damaged. Catherine Martell disappears, presumed killed in the mill fire. Leland Palmer, whose hair has turned white overnight, returns to work but behaves erratically. Cooper deduces that the "man in the smiling bag" is the corpse of Jacques Renault in a body bag.

MIKE is inhabiting the body of Phillip Gerard. His personality surfaces when Gerard forgoes the use of a certain drug. MIKE reveals that he and BOB once collaborated in killing humans and that BOB is similarly inhabiting a man in the town. Cooper and the sheriff's department use MIKE, in control of Gerard's body, to help find BOB ("without chemicals, he points".)

Donna befriends an agoraphobic orchid grower named Harold Smith whom Laura entrusted with a second, secret diary she kept. Harold catches Donna and Maddy attempting to steal the diary from him and hangs himself in despair. Cooper and the sheriff's department take possession of Laura's secret diary, and learn that BOB, a friend of her father's, had been sexually abusing her since childhood and she used drugs to cope. They initially suspect that the killer is Ben Horne and arrest him, but Leland Palmer is revealed to viewers to be BOB's host when he brutally kills Maddy.

Cooper begins to doubt Horne's guilt, so he gathers all of his suspects in the belief that he will receive a sign to help him identify the killer. The Giant appears and confirms that Leland is BOB's host and Laura's and Maddy's killer, giving Cooper back his ring. Cooper and Truman take Leland into custody. In control of Leland's body, BOB admits to a string of murders, before forcing Leland to commit suicide. Leland, as he dies, is freed of BOB's influence and begs for forgiveness. BOB's spirit disappears into the woods in the form of an owl and the lawmen wonder if he will reappear.

Cooper is set to leave Twin Peaks when he is framed for drug trafficking by Jean Renault and is suspended from the FBI. Renault holds Cooper responsible for the death of his brothers, Jacques and Bernard. Jean Renault is killed in a shootout with police, and Cooper is cleared of all charges.

Windom Earle, Cooper's former mentor and FBI partner, escapes from a mental institution and comes to Twin Peaks. Cooper had previously been having an affair with Earle's wife, Caroline, while she was under his protection as a witness to a federal crime. Earle murdered Caroline and wounded Cooper. He now engages Cooper in a twisted game of chess where Earle murders someone whenever a piece is captured.

Investigating BOB's origin and whereabouts with the help of Major Garland Briggs, Cooper learns of the existence of the White Lodge and the Black Lodge, two extra-dimensional realms whose entrances are somewhere in the woods surrounding Twin Peaks.

Catherine returns to town in yellowface, having survived the mill fire, and manipulates Ben Horne into signing the Ghostwood project over to her. Andrew Packard, Josie's husband, is revealed to be still alive. Josie Packard is revealed to be the person who shot Cooper at the end of the first season. Andrew forces Josie to confront his business rival and her tormentor from Hong Kong, the sinister Thomas Eckhardt. Josie kills Eckhardt but she mysteriously dies when Truman and Cooper try to apprehend her.

Cooper falls in love with a new arrival in town, Annie Blackburn. Earle captures the brain-damaged Leo for use as a henchman and abandons his chess game with Cooper. When Annie wins the Miss Twin Peaks contest, Earle kidnaps her and takes her to the entrance to the Black Lodge, whose power he seeks to use for himself.

Through a series of clues Cooper discovers the entrance to the Black Lodge, which turns out to be the strange, red-curtained room from his dream. He is greeted by the Man From Another Place, the Giant, and Laura Palmer, who each give Cooper cryptic messages. Searching for Annie and Earle, Cooper encounters doppelgängers of various people, including Maddy Ferguson and Leland Palmer. Cooper finds Earle, who demands Cooper's soul in exchange for Annie's life. Cooper agrees but BOB appears and takes Earle's soul for himself. BOB then turns to Cooper, who is chased through the lodge by a doppelgänger of himself.

Outside the lodge, Andrew Packard, Pete Martell and Audrey Horne are caught in an explosion at a bank vault, a trap laid by the dead Eckhardt.

Cooper and Annie reappear in the woods, both injured. Annie is taken to hospital but Cooper recovers in his room at the Great Northern Hotel. It becomes clear that the "Cooper" who emerged from the Lodge is in fact his doppelgänger, under BOB's control. He smashes his head into a bathroom mirror and laughs maniacally.

Season 3: The Return

Main article: Twin Peaks (season 3)

On October 6, 2014, it was announced that a limited series would air on Showtime. David Lynch and Mark Frost wrote all the episodes, and Lynch directed. Frost emphasized that the new episodes are not a remake or reboot but a continuation of the series. The episodes are set in the present day, and the passage of 25 years is an important element in the plot.

Most of the original cast returns, including Kyle MacLachlan, Mädchen Amick, Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, and several others. Additions include Jeremy Davies, Laura Dern, Robert Forster, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Amanda Seyfried, Matthew Lillard, and Naomi Watts.

The limited series began filming in September 2015 and was completed by April 2016. It was shot continuously from a single, long-shooting script before being edited into separate episodes. The series premiered on May 21, 2017, and consists of 18 episodes.

Main cast

Secondary cast

Recurring cast

Production

Development

In the 1980s, Mark Frost worked for three years as a writer for the television police drama Hill Street Blues, which featured a large cast and extended story lines. Following his success with The Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet in 1986, David Lynch was hired by a Warner Bros. executive to direct a film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the best-selling book Goddess. Lynch recalls being "sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story." Lynch and Frost first worked together on the Goddess screenplay and although the project was dropped by Warner Bros., they became good friends. They went on to work as writer and director for One Saliva Bubble, a film with Steve Martin attached to star, but it was never made either. Lynch's agent, Tony Krantz, encouraged him to do a television show. He took Lynch to Nibblers restaurant in Los Angeles and said, "You should do a show about real life in America—your vision of America the same way you demonstrated it in Blue Velvet." Lynch got an "idea of a small-town thing", and though he and Frost were not keen on it, they decided to humor Krantz. Frost wanted to tell "a sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go perpetually." Originally, the show was to be titled North Dakota and set in the Plains region of North Dakota.

After Frost, Krantz, and Lynch rented a screening room in Beverly Hills and screened Peyton Place, they decided to develop the town before its inhabitants. Due to the lack of forests and mountains in North Dakota, the title was changed from North Dakota to Northwest Passage (the title of the pilot episode), and the location to the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington. They then drew a map and decided that there would be a lumber mill in the town. Then they came up with an image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake. Lynch remembers, "We knew where everything was located and that helped us determine the prevailing atmosphere and what might happen there." Frost remembers that he and Lynch came up with the notion of the girl next door leading a "desperate double life" that would end in murder. The idea was inspired, in part, by the unsolved 1908 murder of Hazel Irene Drew in Sand Lake, New York.

Lynch and Frost pitched the idea to ABC during the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike in a ten-minute meeting with the network's drama head, Chad Hoffman, with nothing more than this image and a concept. According to the director, the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was initially going to be in the foreground, but would recede gradually as viewers got to know the other townsfolk and the problems they were having. Lynch and Frost wanted to mix a police investigation with a soap opera. ABC liked the idea and asked Lynch and Frost to write a screenplay for the pilot episode. They had been talking about the project for three months and wrote the screenplay in 10 days. Frost wrote more verbal characters, like Benjamin Horne, while Lynch was responsible for Agent Cooper. According to the director, "He says a lot of the things I say." ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard ordered the two-hour pilot for a possible fall 1989 series. He left the position in March 1989 as Lynch went into production. They filmed the pilot for $4 million with an agreement with ABC that they would shoot an additional "ending" to it so that it could be sold directly to video in Europe as a feature film if the TV show was not picked up. ABC's Robert Iger and his creative team took over, saw the dailies, and met with Frost and Lynch to get the arc of the stories and characters. Although Iger liked the pilot, he had difficulty persuading the rest of the network executives. Iger suggested showing it to a more diverse, younger group, who liked it, and the executive subsequently convinced ABC to buy seven episodes at $1.1 million apiece. Some executives figured that the show would never get on the air or that it might run as a seven-hour mini-series, but Iger planned to schedule it for the spring. The final showdown occurred during a bi-coastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives; Iger won, and Twin Peaks was on the air.

Each episode took a week to shoot and after directing the second episode, Lynch went off to complete Wild at Heart while Frost wrote the remaining segments. Standards and Practices had a problem with only one scene from the first season: an extreme close-up in the pilot of Cooper's hand as he slid tweezers under Laura's fingernail and removed a tiny "R". They wanted the scene to be shorter because it made them uncomfortable, but Frost and Lynch refused and the scene remained.