I wanna dream like Agent Dale Cooper. I wanna fall asleep tonight and be gifted the visions of a cryptic puzzle, from which I spend the next few weeks solving as I quest for its meaning, and presumably the greater meaning within. In the show Coop’s dream is treated like an eccentricity but still something valid. The local coppers have no real objection to chasing down leads proposed by this coffee-sculling Sherlock Holmes. A shrug and a sideways glance, perhaps, but they always go along with what the FBI bloke suggests.

The Red Room is the defining image of Twin Peaks. It’s a dazzling scene full of such weirdness that you cannot watch it without leaning in, agasp at the audacity that someone would commit such a thing to television. Then inarticulately thankful that someone would. There’s some trippy stuff that’s found its way into mainstream telly over the years, Game of Thrones has sure gotten away with plenty of wondrous brain melting, but I dunno there’s ever been anything quite on the level of the Red Room.

There’s a lot more that goes into the mythology of that place as the series progresses, particularly in the second season when the supernatural elements take hold. The first time you see the room, however, at the end of the third episode, there is no preparation. We’ve already seen Agent Cooper determine his next move with a chalkboard, a map of Tibet and with stones hurled at a bottle. Poor old Andy copped one on the noggin there. He’s always getting into mischief, that guy.

Anyway, Coops lays down to rest that night and a fitful dream begins, picking up where Mrs Palmer’s own psychotic visions had left off. Killer Bob between the bed rungs; a chilling scream; frantic static jumping in and out. The Man with One Arm is there and amidst the static he begins to speak…

“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see. One chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me”

Then he says some other stuff. About killing, about a tattoo, about seeing the ‘Face of God’ and changing his ways. Not Bob though, he swears to kill again. Twelve candles in a circle blow out at once and we’re back to Cooper in the Red Room, as shown only in flashes before. He’s sitting in an armchair, facing perpendicular to the camera. He looks old. His hair is grey and his face wrinkled. The dwarf in the corner turns with a shimmy and speaks in a strange, distorted voice. Let’s Rock, he says. Laura Palmer is there… at least it looks like Laura Palmer… and she’s tapping her nose. The room features three chairs, one for each of the characters, with two lamps and a statue of the Venus de Medici. The carpet is a zigzagging pattern of yellow and brown while the drapes hang a vivid red behind them, adorned occasionally with illogical shadows.

Every little Lynchian detail comes back later on in some way, from the birds that sing pretty songs to those red drapes. The gum still hasn’t come back in style but the cousin sure looks almost exactly like Laura Palmer.

“Where we’re from the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air”

via GIPHY

Ah yes, and then the dancing begins. Laura/Not Laura glides on over to Cooper, plants a kiss on him and whispers the killer’s name in his ear…

… which is right about when he wakes and, despite having a flawless recollection of the entire thing, he cannot remember that one critical detail: who was the killer? But oh well, the dream is a code waiting to be broken. Break the code, solve the crime. I wanna dream like Agent Dale Cooper.

The Red Room scene is a turning point in Twin Peaks. The characters use it as a catalyst but the show itself takes a turn with these six minutes and change of surrealist heurism. This is the point at which it truly breaks the mould, the scene that takes the winnings of the previous few hours and puts them all on red for the next spin. There are no more rules once you’ve seen a dancing dwarf speaking in tongues – and as a viewer there’s nothing else from that moment in time which you’d be silly enough to discount. A talking myna bird that might hold the key to the crime? A woman who carries around a log that apparently witnessed something important that night? A firing-range poetry recital from Hawk of a verse he wrote for his girlfriend? Nope, expect the unexpected… or better yet: cleanse your trained TV-watching brain and know not to expect at all.

Crazily enough, the dream was set 25 years in the future. Hence why Cooper had aged so much. But there’s a new season of this show coming, a reboot, and it’s been roughly a quarter of a century since it last aired. 27 years since the episode in question, technically. And the show was set in 1989 so that makes it 28 years since in TV land. But then they can always set the reboot in 2014, why not? After all the whole thing seems so goddamn… planned. How do these things line up so (almost) perfectly without being more than a mere coincidence? Was there always a plan for more Twin Peaks? Probably not, at least not on a level short of mystical prescience. But… yeah. Damn.

Raise one up for The Simpsons while we’re at it because they did the best Twin Peaks parody that there’s ever been. Burns’ suit! Burns’ suit!

Do you know how they did the backtracked voices for The Man from Another Place? It’s obviously played backwards but it’s a little more complicated than that. The actors learned the lines in reverse and read them out that way. So… “that gum you like” is read as “ekil uoy mug taht”, with the tricky part being getting the emphasis on the right syllables – starting with an inflection if it’s a question, etc. They play the reverse speak in reverse and that’s where the rest comes from. They then filmed it lip synching to the reversed reverse speak. Bloody difficult stuff, you’d imagine, but apparently the dude who plays TMFAP used to play that game as a kid, by some kind of providence, so Lynch made his lines more complicated.

He ain’t gonna be in the new series though. The actor kinda lost his mind on facebook last year and threw some rather unforgivable accusations Lynch’s way so maybe don’t expect the uncredited cameo. Sheriff Truman isn’t coming back either, the actor Michael Ontkean is retired and living in Hawaii. Lara Flynn Boyle, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie and Heather Graham also aren’t reprising. But Miguel Ferrer and Catherine E. Coulson both shot scenes prior to their recent passings. Gotta wonder who wasn’t invited back and who declined because almost everyone else is coming to the party and there’s a whole truckload of new faces too.

This is getting quite exciting, I have to say.

That show you like is coming back in style and that website you read these things on (this one) wouldn’t half mind if you gave a whack on one of them ads, you know, like throwing designated stones at a bottle.