Your Complete Guide to Rewatching ‘Twin Peaks’

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“Twin Peaks” returns with new episodes on May 21 on Showtime, with much of the original cast returning, but the exact details of the story remain under wraps. The series still looms impossibly large in the TV imagination. Many modern murder mysteries — or quirky small-town shows, or oddball cop shows — still feel like pilgrimages toward the altar of David Lynch and Mark Frost, the show’s creators. Investigations into the murders of  teenage girls somehow become dream-trance voyages into the uncanny.

This guide is mostly for returning viewers, but it is still vague about certain plot points — spoiler-free is not quite right, but it is at least spoiler-light. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you might be more familiar with some of its plots and stories than you realize — a lot of “Twin Peaks” ideas are pervasive in pop culture.

If you’ve never seen the show, know that the pilot — while great — is not representative of the series on the whole, so it may take a few episodes to decide if you’re into it. If you watch through Season 1 and are still feeling it, watch Season 2 through Episode 7. Beyond that is only for the die-hards.

If you’re doing additional reading of recaps — including our own — please note that we’ve numbered the episodes the way they’re numbered on Netflix, which differs from how the episodes are numbered elsewhere: Historically, the feature-length pilot was not counted as Episode 1 but was more like Episode 0. Also note that the Netflix episodes do not include the “Log Lady intros,” which were added for the show’s off-network run and are on some DVD and Blu-ray sets.

‘Twin Peaks’

I Want to Rewatch Only One Episode of ‘Twin Peaks’

Season 1, Episode 3

Don’t just rewatch the pilot. Instead, watch Episode 3, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” which is a fuller representation of the show’s outlook. This is when the show’s more out-there ideas really emerge. The episode features Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) taking the Twin Peaks law enforcement officers out to the woods to try an unusual technique: throwing rocks at a glass bottle to determine which suspects to pursue for the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). He also delivers a mini-lecture on Tibetan Buddhism.

More important, the episode ends with the series’s most iconic scene: the first trip to the Black Lodge, a room with chevron carpet and red velvet curtains. It’s a room the show returns to several times, and the disoriented dream-state becomes one of the series go-to moods. It’s also just downright freaky and cool.

I’ll Rewatch Three Episodes

Season 1, Episodes 1 and 3

Season 2, Episode 7

But don’t skip the pilot completely. The episode (also known as “Northwest Passage”) is roughly 90 minutes long, so budget accordingly. For all the ways “Twin Peaks” breaks the mold, it starts the way a lot of shows start: with a newcomer introducing himself to everyone in town.

“Northwest Passage” is also where the show lays out its soapy style.

It even has its own soap: the show-within-a-show “Invitation to Love.” Sometimes the plot points on “Invitation to Love” — which we see in brief snippets on the characters’ television sets — mirror the goings-on in Twin Peaks. “Twin Peaks” embraces, and sometimes one-ups, the overtly ridiculous plotting and borderline Kabuki acting of daytime soaps (or “The Brady Bunch”). This gets underway immediately, particularly with Nadine (Wendy Robie), whose mania and frailty (and eye patch) feel ripped from a Scooby Doo villain.

Episode 7 from Season 2, “Lonely Souls,” effectively “solves” the Laura Palmer murder by replaying it through the murder of Laura’s dark-haired doppelgänger cousin, Maddy (also played by Sheryl Lee). It’s also a good reminder of the show’s appetite for horror but not gore. Some episodes of “Twin Peaks” are downright terrifying, even though the show is relatively chaste. We are our own demons!

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No, I’m More Committed Than That, I’ll Watch Seven Episodes

Season 1, Episodes 1, 3, 6 and 8

Season 2, Episodes 1, 7 and 22

Let’s add two more episodes from Season 1: “Cooper’s Dreams” (Episode 6) and “The Last Evenings” (Episode 8). “Cooper’s Dreams” includes perhaps the best exchange between Cooper and Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn). She tries desperately to flirt with him, and he’s just a tiny bit receptive. Then she asks to help out with the investigation that same day. “Wednesdays were traditionally a school day when I was your age,” he tells her.

“I can’t believe you were ever my age,” she replies.

“Twin Peaks” has a strange relationship with age. Not a single one of the teen characters seems particularly teenage — they’re too busy working as prostitutes and mechanics, getting married, having affairs, sitting at bars. The show also avoids, or maybe disregards, many of the things we might associate with shows set in high school. There’s vanishingly little talk of college, no prom, no meaningful classroom scenes. The most high-school- focused parts of the show come during the dead zone of Season 2, when a head injury has Nadine convinced she’s still a teenager.

“The Last Evening” is the Season 1 finale, and it ends on a few major cliffhangers, though oddly the Laura Palmer investigation has at this point become almost a sidebar to the other nefarious goings-on in town. Leo (Eric Da Re) ties up his wife, Shelly (Mädchen Amick), and attempts to kill Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), none of which ultimately has to do with what’s ostensibly the central crime of the show. That’s “Twin Peaks” for you!

Let’s also add the Season 2 premiere, “May the Giant Be With You,” and the series finale, “Beyond Life and Death.” “May the Giant Be With You” directly explains the show’s laid-back attitude toward mysteries: “Don’t search for all the answers at once,” the Giant (Carel Struycken) tells Cooper, again in a dream. You got it, Giant.

In the series finale, “Beyond Life and Death” (Episode 22), Laura Palmer tells Agent Cooper that she’ll see him in 25 years. And look at that — here we are! (Although technically it’s been 26.) The episode also sets up another major cliffhanger, but one can’t help but wonder if this, too, will ultimately not be part of the central story of the new season. Who knows!

I’m Pretty Into It: I’ll Watch, Oh, 13 Episodes

Season 1, Episodes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8

Season 2, Episodes 1, 2, 6, 7, 9 and 22

Now that you’re watching almost all of Season 1, it’s time to notice the show’s obsession with mouths, and its odd focus on … mouth acting. More subtle performance choices tend to rely on one’s eyes, but there are no subtle performance choices in “Twin Peaks.” In Season 1, Episode 4, “Rest in Pain,” for example, there’s a whole scene between Bobby and his father in which only their mouths change expression. “Twin Peaks” is happy to obscure characters’ eyes, with eye patches, kooky glasses, or blindfolds — but everyone, men and women alike, is applying lip balm, lip stick, licking his or her lips, staring off slack-jawed, pouting perfectly while puffing on a cigarette. This show loves lips. Lips, lips, lips.

Episodes 5 and 7 from Season 1, “The One-Armed Man” and “Realization Time,” flesh out Norma (Peggy Lipton), perhaps the most normal person on the show, and give us glimpses into the budding love triangle between James (James Marshall), Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Maddy, as the three listen to tapes Laura made for Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn).

Season 2 of “Twin Peaks” gets a bad rap, but the first half is just as good as Season 1. It’s the second half that ruins everything. So! Episode 2, “Coma,” has the best Bob scene of the series, but it comes on the heels of the truly terrible song James, Donna, and Maddy sing together. (Notice how Boyle acts this whole singing scene with just her mouth!)

“Demons,” Episode 6, shows Bobby and Shelly humiliating a comatose Leo — yeah, he’s an abusive monster, but humiliation is humiliation — and provides the clearest explanation for the origins of Bob thus far. Finally, “Arbitrary Law” (Episode 9) gives whatever final clarity there might be regarding who killed Laura Palmer, thanks to a full confession.

Honestly, I Want to Watch a Lot, I Just Want to Skip the Really Bad Ones

Skip Season 2, Episodes 12-20.

Episode 11, “Masked Ball,” isn’t very good, but it introduces David Duchovny as Denise, a character who appears to be in the revival. Episode 21, “Miss Twin Peaks,” is when the mechanics of the finale get underway, and has a few fun moments.

But seriously, skip those other nine episodes. Nadine gets amnesia and goes back to high school, where she has bizarre super-strength (it’s ... extremely bad); James runs away and falls in love with a woman who almost frames him for murder; Agent Cooper’s evil former partner, Windom Earle, shows up in several disguises. Also, Billy Zane joins the cast in some of the worst sweaters ever broadcast on television.

I’m a Completist and Want to See Everything in the ‘Twin Peaks’ Universe

Watch “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.”

Despite the fact that “Twin Peaks” is best known as a show about the murder of a small-town prom queen, it frequently had moments of light silliness, thanks to characters like Lucy, Deputy Andy and Jerry Horne. When David Lynch directed this 1992 prequel film, he jettisoned all that and made what is possibly his darkest film.

Set in the week before the death of Laura Palmer, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” features almost none of the show’s original cast. After Lara Flynn Boyle decided not to participate, Donna was simply recast for the film. And here, Lynch single-mindedly depicts Laura as a teenager so broken by years of sexual abuse that she turns to drugs, alcohol and prostitution. In “Fire Walk With Me,” the town of Twin Peaks is all dark underbelly.

Read Our Retro Recaps

In anticipation of the new season of “Twin Peaks,” we’re running recaps of the first two. Come back and read them here.

Season 1, Episode 1: Wrapped in Plastic

Season 1, Episodes 2–7: ‘Isn’t It Too Dreamy?’

Season 1, Episode 8: Bite the Bullet, Baby

Season 2, Episode 1: Would You Like to Play With Fire?

Season 2, Episodes 2-7: There Will Be Bob

Season 2, Episodes 8-21: The Mumbo Jumbo

Season 2, Episode 22: When You See Me Again, It Won’t Be Me

Correction: May 3, 2017 An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the name of the actress who played the Log Lady. The actress was Catherine Coulson, not Margaret Lanterman, which is the Log Lady’s proper name.