Ideas are like fish; you have to wait for them to come by, but you need to be ready when they do. This is the mentality David Lynch employed while creating art, as described in books like Room to Dream, Lynch on Lynch, and, of course, Catching the Big Fish. One idea (for example, having Philip Jeffries not talk about Judy in Fire Walk With Me) can lead to another idea (Jowday) further down the road, whether that was the initial intention or not.
In much the same way, David Lynch and Mark Frost never intended for Twin Peaks to impact video games, but it did. Much has been written over the years (and much more in the weeks since Lynch’s death) about the artist’s impact on the medium, from Deadly Premonition to Alan Wake to Link’s Awakening. Twin Peaks inspiring Zelda is something that has also been covered extensively — check out this excellent interview with Mark Frost by The Verge on the subject — but less has been written about how the ending of Season 3 of Twin Peaks could be eerily similar to the ending of Link’s Awakening. Let’s explore that.
The Monica Belluci Dream, Again
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, so you know where I’m coming from. There is no definitive answer to all of the mysteries of Twin Peaks, and the ending of Season 3 Episode 18 is open to interpretation. What we will talk about here is just one of many interlinking possibilities. I am not saying this is absolutely true, nor am I invalidating other ideas except for those which claim to actually be the “one, true explanation” of Twin Peaks. Good? Good.
As Gordon Cole recounts his dream of meeting Monica Belluci for coffee, she says, “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?” Many people have different thoughts on the answer to this question. Is it Cole, who is having the dream? Is it Lynch himself? Could it be us, the audience, and our dream of Twin Peaks? Is the dream simply television? Some of these seem plausible to me, while others seem to miss the point entirely. Later, in Twin Peaks Season 3 Episode 17, Dale Cooper’s superimposed transparent face states “We live inside a dream,” repeating both Cole’s dream and Jeffries’ words from Fire Walk With Me.
This theory supposes that the dreamer is Laura Palmer. While there is already ample evidence of this, I’d like to add one more fish to that particular percolator.
The Ballad of the Wind Fish
In The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, it becomes apparent over the course of Link’s journey that he is also living inside a dream. Specifically, he is inside the dream of the Wind Fish, a mythical being inside a giant egg that Link must awaken in order to return home. The island he’s been traveling across is just “a scene on the lid of a sleeper’s eye,” and Link learns that if he wakes the Wind Fish, “Koholint will vanish much like a bubble on a needle.”
This eventually comes to pass. Once Link defeats the Wind Fish’s evil nightmares and wakes him, the island (and everyone Link met on his adventure) vanishes. Link and the Wind Fish are back in the real world, but everyone else is gone. Let’s take that logic and apply it to the end of Season 3 of Twin Peaks. In this scenario, Laura Palmer is our Wind Fish. It is crucial to remember, however, that Cooper is not our Link.
Laura Palmer: The Dreamer Who Dreams
It’s an interesting feeling, being inside a dream and knowing you are dreaming. It’s one that’s hard to put into words, which is why Lynch put it into film, paintings, and music instead. Dreams are fleeting and malleable. The world you’re inhabiting, the people you are talking to, it can all shift and change at a moment’s notice. When you don’t know you are dreaming, this is normal. When you do, these shifts make it harder to hold the dream together.
Suppose that, once Cooper had his revelation at the end of Twin Peaks Season 3 Episode 17, he becomes obsessed with waking up Laura Palmer. First he tries to save her, causing her to disappear from this dream completely and move into another. He follows, with help from Diane, and enters the new dream. This is the new motel, the Richard and Linda, the dead husband in the waitress’ living room. This isn’t right either, so he takes her back to where he (a creation of her sleeping mind) thinks is home: the Palmer house.
The Twin Peaks Season 3 Episode 18 Ending
Cooper stumbles forward. He asks, “What year is this?” Sheryl Lee looks at the house, hears Leland call out for Laura, and screams. The house lights shut off, there’s a flash, and everything disappears.
When I was taught lucid dreaming, years ago, I was taught to look out for logical inconsistencies in specific places. In a dream, your brain tends to wipe out certain nonessential elements, such as the sky or a clock, unless they are directly needed for the dreaming experience. It’s similar to culling in video games, how only the things the player is currently looking at actually exist, and everything else is just waiting to be called up as needed. If you want to check to see whether you are in a dream or not, all you need to do is look at something that has a definite, logical process, and see if it follows it. This could mean looking at the clouds, it could mean seeing what time it is, or it could mean checking a calendar.
There is evidence Cooper doesn’t quite know what he’s doing here. In this version of our Twin Peaks theory, Cooper probably thought that just pulling Laura out of 1989 was enough. Maybe he thought the “dream” was just everything that had happened to him once he entered the lodge, and by saving Laura from being killed he was also saving himself (and everyone else who died) from ever entering Twin Peaks in the first place. That didn’t work, though, and so the parameters of the dream needed to be expanded. Like Inception, the last episode of Twin Peaks Season 3 shows us dreams within dreams within dreams.
What Happens After The Twin Peaks Season 3 Ending
When Cooper asks “What year is this,” he is truly asking the question earnestly, because he’s very confused. This is understandable. However, his asking causes Sheryl Lee to actually ponder the answer, and in her eyes it seems as if she does not know. If this was a dream, she likely wouldn’t know; that’s one of those tells. She looks at the house again for a long moment, and it’s unclear whether the voice we hear is actually coming from inside the house, or it’s just her remembering being Laura and hearing that voice in her head.
A combination, then, of Cooper asking a question that opens the locked door of her mind just a bit, and of the recollection of the sights and sounds of the dream she had been stuck in for 25 years, is what finally brings it all rushing back to the surface. She screams as the horrors flood back in, but she’s not in danger any more. The lights go off, there’s a flash of light, and then nothing but blackness.
When Link finally wakes the Wind Fish at the end of Link’s Awakening, he too wakes up. He is amid the wreckage of his ship, exactly where he was when he fell asleep. The Wind Fish flies overhead, now awake and happy. Everything else is gone. Link remains because he was never part of the dream, he just got sucked into it after it had already begun. Cooper, unfortunately, does seem to be part of Laura’s dream, as does everyone else we met over three seasons of Twin Peaks. The only one left is Laura.
According to Link’s Awakening, at the end of Twin Peaks Season 3 we watch the dream end. That means that, after the ending of Episode 18, what happens next is that Sheryl Lee wakes up. Is she Laura Palmer then, too? It’s impossible to know for sure. I would like to point out, though, that the Wind Fish was the Wind Fish in its dream and in reality both. It seems possible to me, then, that maybe Laura Palmer got a happy ending after all.
THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:
- While doing research for this week’s issue of Ludology Now! I stumbled across Twin Peaks: Into the Night on itch.io. It’s a demo for a fan-made Twin Peaks video game in the style of PS1-era Resident Evils and Silent Hills. I downloaded and played a short bit, it’s pretty neat. Callback-heavy, but fun if you like that sort of thing.
- Balatro developer localthunk has written a detailed timeline of the game’s development, from concept to launch. As my 2nd place pick for 2024’s Game of the Year, I absolutely recommend you read this timeline in full if you have any interest at all in game development.
- This speech from French senator Claude Malhuret is a must-read, no matter where you live.
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