This is the best and most complete theory I've seen so far and really hits at the core ideas of what Lynch and Frost seem to be doing with The Return.

I think The Return has been an astounding success and gone far beyond any hopes I had for it before we started this journey. However, this theory opens up one of the major weaknesses of the entire season which was, namely, a willful avoidance on the part of Lynch and Frost to outright earn any of the emotional punch of the final episode. The Return was, in many ways, too preoccupied with the experimentation of removing tools from the tool kit. Lynch seems to constantly be tying one hand behind his back and seeing if he can still accomplish the scene, saying "sure, it would be the easy way out to use music to punctuate the scene, but what if it's played out silently?".

Narratively, it is much the same. Cooper is traveling into certain doom on a final mission with Diane, yet we have had little time to orient ourselves with Cooper and zero development of his relationship with Diane. Lynch and Frost would have needed to forgo some element of the Dougie plot, or extra scenes of Cole/Tammy/Albert, or extra scenes with Chantal and Hutch, or Ike The Spike, or The Mitchums or Anthony, etc. to move us along and have more time developing the pieces of the puzzle that will assemble in the final hour. Most of The Return was definitely casual about spending its time lingering on ultimately inconsequential elements while the major plot points play in the background or are quickly mentioned in a cryptic line of dialogue and never given precedence. Again, this is clearly intentional, clearly an experiment at a new structure in tv/filmmaking, clearly meant to highlight the hole at every opportunity while hinting at the doughnut and encouraging a new way of reading the material.

Bravo to Lynch and Frost for being bold enough to attempt this, ultimately they went a little too far and stopped to smell the roses for a few hours too many, then drove at 90mph in the last few hours to get us where we were going. The Return has done what I never thought it could and given Twin Peaks a satisfying conclusion that ties together FWWM and the original series into one whirlpool of dreams and nightmares. So glad it happened again.