Last night, David Lynch brought us back to Twin Peaks for the first time since we saw the Trinity nuclear test give birth to BOB a few weeks ago. It was a solid, if exposition-heavy, hour, and one of its highlights was the return of Matthew Lillard’s William Hastings, who we haven’t seen since the series’ first few hours. Here, we discover that he and his late mistress, Ruth, were maintaining a website that explored the paranormal, namely the concept of an alternate reality.
What we learned was vague, yet still revealing, with Hastings discussing how he and Ruth visited an alternate dimension where they encountered Maj. Garland Briggs, brought him “coordinates,” and watched “his head float up.” How Briggs’ headless body ended up in Ruth’s bed with her severed head is still murky, but there might be more answers to be found on Hastings’ website, The Search For The Zone, which is real.
A lo-fi masterpiece of early internet touchstones—an Angelfire aesthetic, flashing widgets, awkward stock photos—the site is filled to the brim with links to essays on alternate dimensions, time travel, and, tellingly, considering the show’s emphasis on Hawk’s culture this season, some Native American mysticism (“[A]fter all, this is the sacred lands of the Lakota,” Hastings notes of the Black Hills of South Dakota). It was also started in 1997, which, as last night’s episode revealed, was the same year in which Dougie first appeared.
Also of note is a link to Nikola Tesla’s speech on wireless electricity transfer—power sockets have played a major role this season, and the crackle and hum of power lines has also been featured prominently. Tied to this are three audio files, two of which are labeled “electrical interference.” There’s not much to be gleaned from them, but in the third file, “vortex,” a man’s voice can be heard through the crackle shouting what sounds like “help” or “no” roughly halfway through.
What most people are talking about, however, is a tiny blurb that says, “The Search for the Zone is primarily maintained by Bill Hastings, with occasional contributions from Heinrich Viegel.” Viegel has no precedent in the Twin Peaks canon, whether it be the series or its accompanying novels, such as Mark Frost’s The Secret History Of Twin Peaks, so fans are curious. That Heinrich is a German name and the site links to a German website discussing stock trading could cause some imaginative viewers to ponder whether Viegel might be the mysterious billionaire behind that glass box in New York.
All that said, numerous links simply take you to pages where you can purchase the show’s soundtrack, so maybe the whole thing is just an elaborate ad. It’s a really good soundtrack, if that helps.