Kyle MacLachlan discussed the cliffhanger ending to Twin Peaks’ third season in a new GoldDerby interview. Alternative Nation transcribed his response.
“It was definitely a different tone. For the longest time I felt like, as we were approaching, because we shot that sort of towards the end of filming anyways, apart from the very very final scene at the house, which was shot very early on in Seattle. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’s Cooper now, and he’s going back. He’s decided to see if he can pull Laura back.’ And then we got into the filming of it and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s exactly Cooper.’
So it was more of a feeling, and David [Lynch] of course said, ‘It’s a little different.’ That’s about as far as he went, that there’s something slightly different. I think it was in the script, particularly the scene in the diner, where Cooper has an edge to him, a hardness, not a Mr. C edge, but it’s maybe kind of in that palette somewhere. The way he handles the gun, the efficiency in which he goes through things, there’s a slight hardness to him. So I thought, this is a little different.
We just let it be that, and I just said this is kind of another – we’ve turned a corner almost, we’re starting another journey now, meaning who knows where? We all want to know what year is this. That was the kind of ending that I felt, even in filming it, reading it, but certainly in filming it that it was going to have a similar impact to the pilot.
I don’t know if you recall back in the pilot when there’s a moment where a gloved hand reaches in to pick up the half gold heart from the mound of dirt, and you hear Grace [Zabriskie] screaming, and it cuts back. The hair in the back of your neck just goes up, and I said, this is going to be exactly the same way. There’s going to be a lot of questions, and people are going to be like, ‘what did I just see?’ We knew that was how we were going to end it, that’s how it goes, we’re following David’s lead.”
Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost recently released a book titled Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, which addressed some of the storyline surrounding the finale. Obnoxious and Anonymous have analyzed some of the chapters, which you can see in videos below the MacLachlan interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5xH9RDNl3I&t=1032s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QldjC2c67co
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXPdI2H_ugc
