Happy 'Twin Peaks' Day to You

Welcome to Twin Peaks Day, the unofficial celebration of the day our favorite loquacious federal agent arrived in our favorite weirdo town to solve our (favorite) teenage demon murder.

We’re gigantic fans of the weirdest show to ever hit network TV, but we have our share of reservations about the 2017-ish reboot that is daring to pick up where one of TV’s greatest cliffhanger cancelations left off.

David Lynch is finally back in the driver’s seat and reportedly more than halfway through the season’s production schedule. The season run length is up in the air, as is the inclusion of the possible tie-in novels that bridge the decades we’ve spent away from our most beloved haunted ghost pines.

I’d guested on the Fire Talk With Me podcast on the Electric Shadow Network to discuss “The Condemned Woman” (Season 2 Episode 16) at some point last year, but my dissection of the episode had nothing on my experience booking a West Coast standup tour around the idea of visiting every single filming location in Twin Peaks.

Initially, this seemed like a fantastic idea because my early reading suggested that the show filmed from San Diego up to Seattle. Once I dived into the fan forums, I discovered that this was mostly Seattle adjacent tentpoles, offset by L.A. orbiting hyper-specific moments, including the dirt home of a certain necklace that fans spent a decade triangulating.

The Seattle adjacent locations were breathtaking. The hotel and the falls and the mill were all in excellent condition, but most everything else (including the final resting place of Laura Palmer’s body) had been claimed over the last decade by acts of arson. Who could have predicted that Twin Peaks would draw an unusual fandom?!

I ended my tour at the home of the best coffee and pie in all of fiction — which wound up being unreasonably bland. Serves me right for building my expectations too high over 1,000 miles of travel. Point being, the new show needs to be good, and hopefully Seattle’s entrepreneur class will see the potential in a pie dive in the haunted forrest outside town.