A day in Twin Peaks

Months and months after it screened, I still feel totally fucking traumatised by the ending of the new Twin Peaks.

It was my own fault - I was genuinely expecting some kind of uplifting ending, that Lynch and Frost and crew were going to buck against the unprecedented level of fear and loathing in modern society and end with something hopeful. And when Cooper came out of his Dougie Jones coma and immediately took charge, it really felt like everything was going to be all right.

Then the last two episodes started to undermine that, with the big defeat of the evil Bob undercut by both the absurdity of the magic super-strong glove, and Cooper's blank face superimposed over the resolution.

And then Cooper over-reaches, and while he does do some good by stopping Bob and his doppelganger, he tries to save Laura and he's gone too far.

So in those last moments, with Cooper lost and befuddled, and Laura screaming, and the fucking house lights going out, it was a sharp dose of utter horror and futility that still scratches away at the back of the mind, and a breathtakingly ballsy way to end the story.

Some brave souls have attempted to explain those last few seconds as something good and pure, where ultimate evil is defeated by the detention of Laura's soul or something, but that's a reach. It's a perfectly valid way of interpreting the ending, but it's still wrong.

Because there is nothing good happening here. There is no hope, no optimism, no love, no redemption, no closure and no happy possibilities here, just the never-ending scream of a murdered woman trapped in an eternal, timeless nightmare.

It was always going to end this way, no matter how much it looked like things would work out. We were always going to this hell. If I'd faced up to this sooner, maybe that ending might not have been so gorgeously traumatising.