“It’s brewed. Rich. Tastes incredible!” — Agent Dale Cooper.

Think about your favorite books, movies, and even TV shows. Were you happy with the final page, or the final frame? What if they left you hanging? How did you feel then? For my twisted money, the last episode of Twin Peaks features the ultimate cliffhanger which has yet to be topped. Our hero, Agent Dale Cooper, gets trapped in a place called the Black Lodge and can’t get out.

What is the Black Lodge? It’s not of this world. You enter in through a strange portal located inside a circle of sycamore trees deep inside the Twin Peaks forest. Once you arrive at the Lodge, you step into the Red Room, home to the worst variety of mischievous spirits. More specifically, they are “doppelgangers”….distorted reflections of the people you once knew, who have since kicked the bucket.

None of these doppelgangers have irises. They also talk backwards (well, sort of). And if you fail to leave the Red Room at a brisk pace you meet your own doppelganger, who laughs wildly, and sets out to trap your soul. According to Twin Peaks’s resident Indian, you must face your doppelganger with “perfect courage” or he will get the best of you. The Black Lodge has been mentioned in the 1930 book Psychic Self Defense. The author, Dion Fortune, claims it is quite the real place (see what we have to look forward to when we die?).

It never seemed fair to me that the best detective in television history met with such a fate. Agent Cooper utterly lost his final battle. Now the Black Lodge is his new home, and I don’t like it one bit.

So much for perfect courage. But then again it was a lot to ask, don’t you think?

When the Twin Peaks movie came out in 1992, I was so hoping for an epic continuation of the last episode which would set Cooper free and restore him to his favorite habits: eating donuts, solving crimes, and drinking coffee. Instead the movie scoffed at my request and delivered a prequel. And, to add insult to damnation, Cooper would have a mere 4 scenes.

What???

I vowed that if I ever saw the director in person (anyone know his name?), I would do a thing or two to his soul.

So the years passed, and I crafted such demonic plans. However, before I could carry any of them out, Twin Peaks got a couple of DVD releases. The most recent release, called The Gold Box Edition, contains hours of additional material. The most valuable being a series of coffee commercials that save Cooper’s soul.

That’s right. In the end, it was coffee that did the trick.

These commercials were filmed a year or two after the show was canceled and the sets were destroyed. Happily, the director of the Twin Peaks movie was at the helm of these commercials, cementing them as official Twin Peaks canon (at least in my opinion).

The commercials open with Cooper back in town, and in charge of the Twin Peaks Sheriff Station. He is hot on the trail of a missing Japanese woman. Her boyfriend, Ken, assists Cooper in tracking her down. The only clues are some origami and a deer’s head.

However, finding this gal is a total side thought. Cooper and Ken are much more interested in taking as many breaks from this case as possible to try a new brand of Coffee called….Georgia Coffee.

Watch closely. Cooper looks like a cat in a bird store.

In the final installment, Cooper tracks the missing gal down to the Black Lodge. A final showdown is inevitable! Cooper lets us know that he is quite familiar with this place, implying that he has been here before. In five seconds, he jumps in, grabs the gal by the hands, and gets the hell out. When the boyfriend arrives on the scene he pats his long lost gal on the shoulder and…..turns to Cooper for more Georgia Coffee! Cooper is only too happy to oblige. The last shot is Cooper and friends standing outside the sycamore trees giving us the thumbs up.

So ends the greatest saga in television history.

What is the moral?

I leave that to you……

Yours in perfect courage,
Steven Kowal