But What About Twin Peaks Season 3's Story?

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I'm glad you asked.

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Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, to quote at least one familiar song. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and Twin Peaks Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer have figured out how to do them both at once. It's a lesson repeated by many Twin Peaks characters over three seasons.

Dale Cooper woke up after strange sex with Diane to find a note written to someone else, signed with someone else's name. He left the motel, but it was not the motel they had entered. Was it even Diane who had left him, really? This was, to me, partly about getting what you had always wanted - Cooper and Diane had wanted each other for a while, but their professional roles likely forbade realizing it until after his and her release from their strange captivities. Now that they had the opportunity to consummate their relationship, it was, of course, tainted - for Diane, by having been raped by the doppelganger; for Cooper, it was perhaps having had his doppelganger *be* Bob. There was some sort of shared experience between a person and someone created from his/her "seed." Ultimately, only the "genuine article" that was Cooper survived, but not without strange changes, which he solemnly presaged at the Sheriff's Station. The Curtain Call at Glastonbury Grove, where he and Diane reunited for their 430-mile vision quest to "cross over," turned the dream in which they, all the characters, lived into a different dream. Or was it?

In my dreams, whenever I examine whether something is one thing or another, the state of it seens to fluctuate between three, maybe four, states: It's the one thing/It's the other thing/It's both things ... and possibly It's neither thing. The "thing" in question can be a person's identity, a building's purpose, or a geographic location. By being one, the other, both, and neither, this creates a dramatic ambiguity. This is particularly scary when one entity, or location, or object, is very suitable for a certain purpose, and the other is entirely unsuited for it.

It would be as if we have, in waking life, a multivariate state space in which everything that exists corresponds to a single point in the state space. If it is a matter of probability curves, the multi-dimensional curve has a single peak: This is what it most likely is. This is how it will behave when you observe it. This is its identity.

But in dream life, there is that nagging other thing it could be, that it in fact is, but in a strange juxtaposition of states. The state vector is not just one probable high point on the graph. It is two, with indication of connection between them. It can be represented or thought of as Twin Peaks.

Dream life presents this strange dichotomy in, strangely, a literal fashion: One object is another is neither is both. In life, we see it more metaphorically - A statement is true from one viewpoint, false from another, true-and-false from a more holistic view, and neither true nor false and therefore meaningless when yet another microscope is applied.

Dreams turn metaphors like this into literal symbols, in a person or a place or an object, at least in my experience. And they use literal objects to be metaphors. The mirrored pair figures here, the yin-yang, the two halves of a heart necklace, the ring the Giant took from Cooper's finger during his first vision of him and the Owl Cave Ring associated with the Black Lodge. One and the same.

Oh, and look at this:

Season One: Multiple writers and directors, multiple levels of explanation/resolution, considered high quality.
Season Two: Multiple writers and directors, higher levels of explanation/resolution, lower quality.
Season Three: Two writers, one director, more obscure explanations/resolutions[*], possibly highest quality. [*] - when they weren't resolved in an almost trivial or Disney-fied fashion

Words have run out for now, I'll possibly type some more about it later.