Twin Peaks and Sherlock Holmes: Will the Connections Continue in Season 3?

"March 30, 7 P. M.
     Have just finished reading about Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I believe Mr. Holmes is the smartest detective who has ever lived, and would very much like to live a life like he did.  It is the Friends School belief that the best thing one can do in life is to do good rather than do well.  I believe that in Mr. Holmes I see a way to accomplish this."

The above quote is taken from The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, one of several media tie-ins to the original run of Twin Peaks.  This particular quote comes from when our hero is still in grade school, learning who he is and forming his core Sherlockian passions for justice, deduction, and a need for a personal Boswell -- in this case, a brand-new tape recorder.

What I find fascinating about that quote is that Cooper is referring to Sherlock Holmes as an actual historical figure.  The book itself is written by Mark Frost's brother Scott Frost, who seems to share Mark's passion for the Great Detective.  Is it too much of a stretch to assume that the world of Twin Peaks is the same world where Holmes and Watson once solved their own mysteries a century earlier?

For those unfamiliar with the series, long before Benedict Cumberbatch took the mantle of the modern day Sherlock Holmes, there was another TV detective who was a very different modernization of the great detective. That man was Special Agent Dale Cooper who will return on May 21st in the third season of Twin Peaks, 26 years after the original series ended on a cliffhanger. Be forewarned that if you have not seen the first two seasons of Twin Peaks there are major spoilers ahead (and honestly, if you haven't, you should stop reading now and go watch them).

Twin Peaks is most often associated with famed director David Lynch; however, his series co-writer and producer Mark Frost is clearly behind the character of Dale Cooper and why he has so many characteristics of Sherlock Holmes. It is no secret that Frost is a Holmesian and Doylean. His novels The List of Seven and The Six Messiahs star Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he takes on the role of Watson working with a mysterious detective named Jack Sparks, a secret agent of the crown. In  these books, Sparks is the basis for Sherlock Holmes.

This brings us to Twin Peaks where Frost, like in his novels, uses Holmesian features and allusions in a mystery with links to the supernatural.

The show has connections such as a Mycroft-like Agent Cole played by Lynch himself and a well-meaning if bumbling Lestrade-like police officer in the form of Deputy Andy Brennan. We even have Mark Frost playing a news reporter nemed Cyril Pons in a nod to August Derleth's great pastiche detective Solar Pons. But the heart of the Holmesian connections are with Agent Dale Cooper.

Cooper is Holmes for the end of the twentieth century. Like Holmes, he observes with an almost inhuman sense of perception. Cooper can gain a crucial clue about a murder from seeing a suspect in the reflection of an eye. He uses unconventional methods of deduction like throwing rocks at glass bottles to see if they will shatter after naming certain suspects, and his dreams are direct gateways to his brain attic.

Sheriff Harry S. Truman is the Watson of this series acting as Cooper's faithful companion. Though, he does not record their adventures, that is taken care of by Cooper, making audio recordings of the cases to the mysterious "Diane".

In the latter part of season two, the main villain is Wyndham Earl, a Moriarty character who was a former FBI agent who has gone rogue. He lures Cooper into the mystical realm of the Black Lodge for their final battle which feels like an elemental Reichenbach Falls.

And like Holmes and Moriarty, both men seem to perish (perhaps not fully but at least in part). Will Cooper escape from his fate? Will we see the return of Agent Cooper much like we saw the return of Sherlock Holmes?  Could an incarnation of Holme himself be residing in the Black Lodge? We will begin to know the answer come May 21st.