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Right, so I think I've figured out Twin Peaks: The Return. Here's a thread on my definitive theory, and one that has me just *loving* the show. Feel free to read it, share it, whatever - it's brought me a great deal of joy, this show, and this theory pretty neatly wraps it up.
The world of Twin Peaks, and in Lynch in general, is a collective unconscious, a shared dream being had by us all. The Fireman, and the lodges, exist outside that world. Both are real, both are malleable, both have good and evil in them. That's the basic framework of TP.
We dream up evil (Bob). The Fireman creates Laura, and pops her into the dream, but she gets destroyed. Coop and The Fireman have a plan: to go into her individual dream, give her a chance to dream of a world where she never got hurt. What if we could give her a chance at peace?
So Coop appears to her, triggering this dream for her. Laura begins to dream of a world where she never died. Judy, however, throws it off course. Much like in Mulholland Drive, an escapist dream slowly turns sour.
Until she finds herself not plagued by Leland, true, but living as someone else entirely (Carrie) in the middle of nowhere, beset by a different tragedy altogether. Cooper comes into this broken dream world of Carrie (a deeply disorienting process).
They head to the house, and are greeted by the woman who actually lives there in real life. The implication here? Our world, the one we're in right now, is the dream being had by Laura.
Then - and this is the real kicker - as Carrie is leaving, almost able to break free, she remembers. She screams - and is woken up by her mother at the beginning of her final week alive. The dream she talks about where Coop saves her was the one we see at the end of The Return.
Coop is basically dipping into her dream so is presumably OK, and the show continuity is intact, but you can't save Laura. The repeated figure 8 motif threaded through the show, even the name of the show (the return) speaks to this looping structure.
The collective dream, the collective unconscious, that Lynch repeatedly returns to in all his best works speaks to a shared universe (see the bar at the end of Inland Empire), with Laura as a magic bullet sent there to save it, sabotaged, and given a dream as a consolation.
The notion that Coop flits in and out of dreams, of worlds, and that Coop is a proxy for Lynch himself speaks of a storyteller who views his stories as real places, who tries to exert control over them and who stalks their halls, discovering them alongside us.
Coop's wish to return to the Twin Peaks continuity is Lynch's wish to return there someday. Whether he does or doesn't on camera, I'm confident Coop will drift back there.
