Time, she is a cruel mistress. If you’ve been bingeing old “Twin Peaks” episodes like we have, trying to bang out all 30 episodes before the show’s very belated return on May 21, get ready for a shock: a new trailer consists of little but shots of Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), Deputies Andy (Harry Goaz) and Hawk (Michael Horse) and, of course, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). And everyone has aged a lot.
That might seem obvious — it’s been over 25 years since the show was unceremoniously canceled. But it’s one thing to go from seeing, say, early 30s MacLachlan, his face still babyish, to witnessing late 50s MacLachlan, who frankly still looks super handsome. Ditto Michael Horse, the rugged and laconic and soulful badass of the first two seasons, whose hair is now sparkly white. (And he still looks handsome, too.) Then there’s Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl Rodd, the only other person we see, who definitely looks an amazing 90 years old.
(Who’s Carl Rodd, you may ask? He’s actually only in the 1992 movie prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” And we agree with this article that the once widely-despised picture is actually truly fascinating.)
The only thing the trailer offers is faces — and mood, plus one single word of dialogue: Hawk uttering a cryptic “Really?” (Cut to Internet articles speculating madly about what that means!) That’s enough to make it seem like “Twin Peaks” will do more than bring back a beloved show. It will also allow us — especially those of us who remember watching the show when it first aired — to really feel the passage of time. It may wind up providing the same sock to the gut we get from Richard Linklater’s “Before” movies, or the “Up” documentary series, or even the 20-years-later sequel “T2: Trainspotting”: We catch up with characters and people (and actors) after enough time that we can feel it. Then we realize how short life really is and how infrequently we make the most of it.
But anyway! We can’t wait to see what Michael Cera looks like in the world of Twin Peaks.
Watch the trailer below:
