Pie, coffee and death: Lynch revisits 'Twin Peaks'

Twin Peaks went viral before going viral was cool.

When the pilot of iconic film director David Lynch's oddball murder-mystery TV drama aired on a Sunday night in April 1990, viewers were talking all about the death of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the kooky investigating FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) and the ubiquitous coffee and pie within days — years before Twitter, Facebook and iPhones existed, and just as the first web browser was being born.

"There was something that we caught, but it was surprising to us that we liked it so much," Lunch, 68, says now about that first Twin Peaks episode. "Ideas that come along are like gifts, and we just got lucky to get those ideas, I guess."

The soap opera, that creepy theme music and its cast of characters return with Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery, a Blu-ray set collecting the two seasons of the show, the 1992 follow-up feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and 90 minutes worth of never-before-seen deleted/extended scenes from the movie.

"It's a great opportunity to have the scenes seen by people but they don't have to go back into the film," says Lynch, who edited them himself.

"It always happens, at least with me, that there are scenes that don't work in the whole. For the sake of the whole, those scenes go — even though I love the scenes on their own."

While he remembers the story that he and Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost fashioned for the prequel movie that revisited the last days of Laura Palmer's life, "I don't remember shooting anything," Lynch says. "Isn't that strange? It's the world I remember. I'd see the people again, and it was a beautiful trip."

The Blu-ray set also includes a new segment where Lynch (as himself) interviews Laura, dad Leland Palmer and mom Sarah — two of whom are dead — and then talks out of character with the actors who played them, Lee, Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie.

The Twin Peaks saga was chock full of memorable roles, from the law-enforcement types played by McLachlan, Lynch, David Bowie, Kiefer Sutherland and David Duchovny to really weird characters such as BOB (Frank Silva), The Giant (Carel Struycken) and the reverse-speaking little dude in the Red Room, the Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson).

Catherine Coulson's Log Lady — aka Margaret Lanterman, literally a lady who carries and divines psychic visions from a log — also garnered a fandom all her own. (The new collection also contains remastered versions of her episode introductions created for Bravo's re-running of the series in 1993.)

The character came out of an idea he had for Coulson, Lynch's assistant director on his 1977 horror movie Eraserhead, where she would host a science show called I'll Test My Log With Every Branch of Knowledge.

"When Twin Peaks came along, I pictured her flipping the light switch in that town hall meeting and that was it," Lynch recalls. "I said, 'Catherine, can you come? We'll get you a log and you'll just flip these switches. But it started a thing, and that's how a lot of things grow. It's just some small thing but it fuels more and more ideas, and deeper characters.

"There's a lot of things that came out of Twin Peaks and that's another beauty of a continuing story. You have the opportunity to go deeper into a world that holds a lot of possibilities."

While Twin Peaks is the kind of thing that social-media lovers would livetweet regularly these days, Lynch recalls that the Internet was still just text only at the time, though someone showed him during the run of the TV series that there was Internet chats with folks talking about the various mysteries.

The show and film were ahead of their time in that way, as well as being a pioneer for serial TV storytelling and killing off main characters sooner than later.

"I still love them so much, and the world I love," Lynch says. "The next surprise was that people around the world loved the world and the characters (too). The happiest sort of surprises came out of Twin Peaks."