The Gap Between Seasons

The two main characters of Twin Peaks were the murdered Laura Palmer and the police force out to catch her killer, so naturally audiences assumed that Twin Peaks would be a detective story. I argue that Twin Peaks did not follow the normal narrative structure of a detective story, becoming a continuous serial that did not have a planned end. In Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity, Marc Dolan postulates that "a detective story therefore achieves closure when the detective(s) has filled in the story leading up to the plot's beginning." The plot literally began with Laura's murder, so the logical conclusion to Twin Peaks would be resolving the crime and coming to a solid conclusion where all plot threads are tied up and accounted for. Instead, Twin Peaks went on to exhaust all its major plot hooks and crime clues too early, and was eventually replaced by the supernatural. The plot threads involving Leo Johnson, the Renault brothers, the Roadhouse and One-Eyed-Jacks were all closed by the end of the first season, and, as Dolan puts it, "the investigation into Laura Palmer's murder was no farther along than it had been back when Cooper addressed the town meeting in the pilot." With every possible clue having been used by the end of the first with the investigation team no closer to catching Laura's killer, Twin Peaks had not progressed anywhere, and was forced to go from an episodic serial, where plots go on for episodes but are ultimately addressed and concluded, to a continuous serial, where plots are exhausted and new plots are introduced to prolong the series. This gave the second season a much more infinite feel to it, with no central plot or direction.

Andrew R.