“Twin Peaks” is famously a show that juggles a great number of increasingly outlandish plots. However, the glue that ties everything from small town pie-and-coffee shenanigans to bloodthirsty evil spirits together is one particular crime: the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).
For a show that’s at least partially a murder mystery, “Twin Peaks”took a famously long time to reveal who killed Laura. In fact, co-creator David Lynch has stated in interviews that he never really wanted to reveal it in the first place — which was actually a point of contention between him and co-creator Mark Frost.
“When we wrote ‘Twin Peaks,’ we never intended the murder of Laura Palmer to be solved,” Lynch said in a 1990 interview with Entertainment Weekly (via Our Town). “Maybe in the last episode.” Frost, on the other hand, had a more grounded take on the murder mystery. “I know David was always enamored of that notion, but I felt we had an obligation to the audience to give them some resolution,”he said.”That was a bit of a tension between him and me. … It took us about 17 episodes to finally reveal it, and by then people were getting a little antsy.”
Keeping Laura’s killer a secret was a deliberate tactic that eventually tired the audience
Like Lynch said, both he and Frost were fully on board with not revealing their cards when it came to the murder mystery that fueled much of “Twin Peaks.”In the interview, Frost even admitted that keeping the nature of the killer in the dark was an ace up their sleeve when it came to renewal negotiations. “It was sort of our clever little design,” he said. “They’ll pick us up for six, but we won’t tell them who killed Laura, then they’ll have to pick us up for a second season.”
Lynch, however, had another, more pressing reason to keep the murder mystery open ended. While he understood the realities of the viewers wanting answers, he couldn’t help but feel that revealing the killer would ring funeral bells for the show itself.”I think a lot of people put pressure on ABC to get it solved because they felt they were being strung along,”he said.”All I know is, I just felt it — that once that was solved, the murder of Laura Palmer, it was over. It was over.”
“Twin Peaks” was already losing viewers by the time the murder mystery was finally revealed, but Lynch was at least technically right about the reveal of the killer spelling doom for the show. The identity of Laura’s killer came midway through Season 2, and Season 3 didn’t come along until the 2017 Showtime revival “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
