If you're having trouble with The Secret History of Twin Peaks:

If you've been having trouble with The Secret History of Twin Peaks, if you think it diverges so far from the Twin Peaks you know that you don't know how to analyze the book, or even call it Twin Peaks, what I have to say to you is this: This is exactly how I reacted to Fire Walk With Me. You can get through this.

And even better, I think Secret History has actually created a framework where the TV show, movie, and books can coexist. Seriously.

As Joel Bocko said in the Sparkwood & 21 Podcast's Fire Walk With Me Feedback Episode (and I'm paraphrasing him here rather than direct quoting), it's easier to embrace Fire Walk With Me if you weren't a fan of the TV show because there was too much new/contradictory Twin Peaks mythology for us TV show fans to accept easily. Secret History's intentional branching from (and "disregard" of) what has come before seems like quite the familiar echo. In so many ways, Fire Walk With Me finally found its missing sock and completes a much desired pairing.

Here's my advice:

Don’t try to make Fire Walk With Me and Secret History meet at some mythical ever-shifting middle point so they can be part of one thing. All that leads to is aggravation. Instead, put TV Twin Peaks, FWWM and Secret History near each other and triangulate.

I spent years unsuccessfully trying to make a super-planet out of TV Twin Peaks and Movie Twin Peaks, but it took Secret History to make me realize I’ve been using the wrong metaphor.

We’re not working with a super-planet. We have a Solar System.

Secret History is its own thing.

FWWM is its own thing.

TV Twin Peaks is its own thing.

Their gravities influence each other but all three are equally their own thing with their own related-but-individual orbits. And Showtime Twin Peaks will be as well.

The thing that makes them all Twin Peaks is found in the feelings they have in common.

I think.

The only Andrew Packard joke you'll ever need

My goofball idea for how that fish showed up in the percolator in Season One:

 

It was Andrew Packard, sneaking around behind the scenes like Leslie Linka Glatter's hunchback seamstress character. As he puts the fish in the percolator he mutters quietly and gleefully to no one "I'm aliiiiiiive".

When the two ledgers turn into one ledger and the other goes missing, it was Andrew in the middle of the night.

Mink oil on Catherine’s bed?  After that argument we see between Pete and Catherine, every time since it’s been Andrew doing it. He dips his fingers in Pete’s bottle and flicks it gleefully all over her bed every time Catherine is on a rendezvous with Ben.

Oh—and that mysterious man in the woods who Leo tells Mike and Bobby not to worry about?  That was Andrew, too.  Listen closely and you can hear it muffled by the ski mask: "I'm aliiiiiive"