The following contains real, canonical spoilers for Twin Peaks: The Return and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both in the sense that it describes what happened in the revival and in the sense that it will also explain what happened. Like, for real. If you’d rather be Dougie Jones and remain blissfully unaware of what’s really going on, turn back now. Otherwise, prepare to have at least one interpretation totally dashed or totally confirmed.
This comes from Vulture, which shares some big reveals from Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, a new tie-in book that seeks to clean up some loose ends from the show, much like The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer and The Secret History Of Twin Peaks. Like the latter book, which was also written by series co-creator Frost, The Final Dossier is told as a series of FBI reports, this time presented from the perspective of Agent Tammy Preston—Chrysta Bell’s character from the revival. The book picks up right after the events of the finale of The Return, and it involves Preston making a pretty huge discovery about something that happened.
As viewers surely recall, after Dale Cooper had finally returned to full consciousness and (seemingly) done away with Killer Bob once and for all, he tried to do something truly audacious: He went back in time to save Laura Palmer from getting murdered. For a moment, it actually worked and we saw a glimpse of life in Twin Peaks without her body turning up wrapped in plastic, but then Laura disappeared and it seemed like Cooper had failed, leaving him to try and rescue her by—apparently—crossing into an alternate universe where it turned out that the Palmer family never lived in Twin Peaks at all.
Frost doesn’t reveal exactly what that was about, but he does confirm that Cooper was partially successful. As Agent Preston discovers in The Final Dossier, Laura Palmer’s body was never found. Nobody was ever arrested for her murder because there was no murder—just a missing person who was never found. Eventually, though, Leland Palmer did kill himself “out of grief.” Presumably, the woman that Cooper found in the alternate universe is Laura, then, and she simply got pulled into an alternate world (possibly our world?) instead of being killed. It’s not exactly happy ending, but it is a Twin Peaks ending.
The book is available now on Amazon.