Scan barcode
A review by neilrcoulter
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier by Mark Frost
1.0
This is just really bad fan fiction. Yes, it’s written by the co-creator of the series, but it only shows that Mark Frost doesn’t understand the story he co-created. At least, he doesn’t understand it the way David Lynch and most of its fans do. Twin Peaks is not about connecting all the dots and answering all the questions (though there are many moments, especially in season three, when answers to certain questions would be most welcome). Rather, it’s more of a narrative doorway to many different possibilities and musings. This is particularly true throughout the brilliant, dark, infuriating third season, when the possible interpretations crash in on one another in sometimes frustrating ways. The final episode seems almost disconnected from the rest of the story, and rather than answering any questions, or even leaving a cliff-hanger that makes any sense, it suggests that maybe every story we think we know is always in motion, always ready to yank us into a parallel story. I don’t know if this explains why our own stories seem so fractured and complex, or if it just makes everything feel more that way, regardless of the logic we think we see around us. Can there ever be a world in which Laura Palmer is happy? Is there a lesson Cooper needs to learn, or is he stuck with his misguided self-confident arrogance, which will keep throwing him into story after story but will never give him a resolution?
These are interesting questions. Wondering what Dr. Jacoby was up to in the 25 years between the original series and the third season is not. At least, it’s not worth a chapter of a book. The Final Dossier is different from the also-bad Secret History book in that it’s not “archivist” documents but instead is all memos written by Tammy Preston to Gordon Cole, trying to tie up loose ends from the investigation. This is a problem, because in the show, Agent Preston is a boring minor character who says about 15 words total. Now we read a book written by her in which she is over-the-top chatty and sarcastic. Where did this come from? The voice is also inconsistent, and some of what she reports from historical documents (Albert used the phrase “trigger warning” in 1989?) is odd.
A lot of the book seems to want to retcon details that don’t obviously fit in anywhere. Some of it is trying to fix things that Frost got wrong in the previous book. One entire chapter is an enormously convoluted retcon that tries to cover up the fact that in the earlier book Frost forgot that Norma’s mother didn’t die in the 1980s. What Frost comes up with is so much worse than just admitting that the previous book was wrong (as any fan of the series could have told him). More embarrassing is that this book refers to the Log Lady as “Margaret Coulson,” mixing up the name of the actress (Catherine Coulson) with the name of the character (clearly given as Margaret Lanterman in the series). Nobody caught this before the book was published?
There are no answers to more pressing plot-related questions, such as when, how, and why Ray Monroe started working for Philip Jeffries, why Jeffries is now inside a large tea kettle in an old motel room, why the Arm now looks like a cheap plastic tree instead of a small man in a red suit, the origins of Janey-E and Sonny Jim, whether Miriam recovers in the hospital (okay, that’s not so pressing; but I’m still curious). Sadly, there’s no further background on the Mitchum brothers and Candie, Sandie, and Mandie. Not urgent, but I love those characters and would actually like to read more about them.
There’s quite a bit about Audrey, but that’s a huge area where Frost’s retconning is unneeded. At the end of the original series, Audrey (much as I love her) is obviously dead. The fact that she reappears in season three is problematic, but Lynch leaves it relatively open for us to assume that she is, in fact, dead and either in the Black Lodge or hell. At the very least, she’s in a mental institution, locked in her own imagination. (The difficulty here is Richard; I don’t know any good way of explaining him.) So when Frost comes up with a backstory where Audrey opened a hair salon in Twin Peaks . . . please, no. That is not the way it happened.
There’s some explanation of where Annie is now, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Omitting her from the third season was a very strange choice.
The series, though I love it, certainly has its continuity problems, but Frost’s books are so off the mark (ha ha), it’s really disappointing. This is a case where the TV series just is a TV series, and it doesn’t translate well to any other medium.
These are interesting questions. Wondering what Dr. Jacoby was up to in the 25 years between the original series and the third season is not. At least, it’s not worth a chapter of a book. The Final Dossier is different from the also-bad Secret History book in that it’s not “archivist” documents but instead is all memos written by Tammy Preston to Gordon Cole, trying to tie up loose ends from the investigation. This is a problem, because in the show, Agent Preston is a boring minor character who says about 15 words total. Now we read a book written by her in which she is over-the-top chatty and sarcastic. Where did this come from? The voice is also inconsistent, and some of what she reports from historical documents (Albert used the phrase “trigger warning” in 1989?) is odd.
A lot of the book seems to want to retcon details that don’t obviously fit in anywhere. Some of it is trying to fix things that Frost got wrong in the previous book. One entire chapter is an enormously convoluted retcon that tries to cover up the fact that in the earlier book Frost forgot that Norma’s mother didn’t die in the 1980s. What Frost comes up with is so much worse than just admitting that the previous book was wrong (as any fan of the series could have told him). More embarrassing is that this book refers to the Log Lady as “Margaret Coulson,” mixing up the name of the actress (Catherine Coulson) with the name of the character (clearly given as Margaret Lanterman in the series). Nobody caught this before the book was published?
There are no answers to more pressing plot-related questions, such as when, how, and why Ray Monroe started working for Philip Jeffries, why Jeffries is now inside a large tea kettle in an old motel room, why the Arm now looks like a cheap plastic tree instead of a small man in a red suit, the origins of Janey-E and Sonny Jim, whether Miriam recovers in the hospital (okay, that’s not so pressing; but I’m still curious). Sadly, there’s no further background on the Mitchum brothers and Candie, Sandie, and Mandie. Not urgent, but I love those characters and would actually like to read more about them.
There’s quite a bit about Audrey, but that’s a huge area where Frost’s retconning is unneeded. At the end of the original series, Audrey (much as I love her) is obviously dead. The fact that she reappears in season three is problematic, but Lynch leaves it relatively open for us to assume that she is, in fact, dead and either in the Black Lodge or hell. At the very least, she’s in a mental institution, locked in her own imagination. (The difficulty here is Richard; I don’t know any good way of explaining him.) So when Frost comes up with a backstory where Audrey opened a hair salon in Twin Peaks . . . please, no. That is not the way it happened.
There’s some explanation of where Annie is now, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Omitting her from the third season was a very strange choice.
The series, though I love it, certainly has its continuity problems, but Frost’s books are so off the mark (ha ha), it’s really disappointing. This is a case where the TV series just is a TV series, and it doesn’t translate well to any other medium.