by Joel Bocko
On April 8, 1990, a new David Lynch work premiered to by far the biggest audience he’d ever receive: thirty-three million viewers on that day alone. The pilot of the new surreal mystery show Twin Peaks, a collaboration with writer Mark Frost, introduced Laura Palmer as a murdered teenager whose death might implicate the whole offbeat small town, launching a storyline that would continue over many episodes (and eventually a prequel feature film even after the mystery was resolved). Yet many elements that would come to define Twin Peaks – especially its supernatural, mythological iconography – weren’t present yet in that pilot. Or were they? Well, it depends which version of the pilot you saw. For TV viewers, and most who’ve caught up with Twin Peaks in the years since on streaming or digital boxsets, the pilot ends when Laura’s mother experiences a vision of a hand picking up a necklace in the woods. But for years on VHS and DVD – due to odd rights issues – the only available version of the pilot went in a different direction entirely: one which, while not canon would introduce numerous characters and images essential to later Twin Peaks (including the third season which followed after a quarter-century interval – the timing itself rhyming with something in this alternate ending). And most of this was inspired by momentary flashes of whimsy and inspiration on Lynch’s part, using actors and sets he had immediately onhand before constructing a whole new world which formed the heart of the show’s visual language, turning up on the series itself as a dream sequence several episodes later.
In this fifteen-minute podcast, an excerpt from my much longer Lost in Twin Peaks series covering every episode in deep detail, I explain not just what happens in this version of the pilot, but why it was shot at all, and how Lynch came up with many of these details.
(You can also listen on Spotify, Pinecast, or most other podcast platforms – unfortunately WordPress makes it very difficult to embed podcast players so I can’t actually make it playable on this page.)
This was originally part of my coverage of S1E3 (aka “episode 2), the episode which first made the “dream sequence” public. You can read/see/listen to more about that episode here, and follow Lost in Twin Peaks on various podcast platforms, including those linked above.
And you can watch the full alternate ending yourself right now:
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