Welcome to the “Second-stage” Lynchverse: Twin Peaks: The Return and the Impossibility of Return Vs. Getting a Return

In this chapter, the author follows Nochimson and Fisher, considering how Twin Peaks: The Return can be explored as part of this "second-stage" Lynchverse. Indeed, Nochimson goes so far as to refer to a “Lynchverse”, arguing that multiple imaginary worlds can be explored as linked, not diegetically but rather “omnidiegetically” via authorial statements and strategies. And yet The Return does problematize the “coherent and quotidian” timespaces of Twin Peaks the town, both by suggesting that Laura Palmer was never murdered after all, and by returning an older, adult Laura —known as Carrie Page in what seems to be an alternative reality— to what had been the Palmer’s house. Rather than guaranteeing an auteurist sense of “ontological security”, reinforcing fans’ level of basic trust in the coherence and integrity of the imaginary world, Lynch’s “trickster” authorial identity instead consistently threatens to undermine any such certainty.