Twin Peaks gave birth to the best throwback website — and it may hide some secrets

The ninth episode of Twin Peaks was the first time in several weeks that the revival touched on the same campy charm of the original TV show. Case in point: A blog referenced during one of the episodes is real, and it’s as much of a cheesy throwback as you’d hope.

Quick warning: There are light spoilers for Twin Peaks episode nine below.

The blog belongs to Bill Hastings, the small-town principal-turned-possible murderer who’s spent the past seven episodes wasting away in jail. When Gordon Cole’s FBI squad gets a tip that Hastings may know something more about whatever happened to the deceased Major Briggs — which, as we know, involves parallel dimensions and Dale Cooper’s imprisonment in the Black Lodge, among other supernatural strangeness — they pay Hastings a visit.

Part of how Cole and the team caught on to the fact that Hastings is not quite what he seems is because of his blog, The Search for the Zone. The website goes deep into multidimensional conspiracy theories, a home for Hastings’ “fascination with multidimensional/time travel, dark matter, the afterlife, etc.”

To anyone who lives outside of the world of Twin Peaks, it sounds like a load of crackpot theories. (Heck, even within the show, Hastings is hard to take seriously.) The show’s creative team seems to be on our page, because The Search for the Zone is an actual website, and it looks exactly as you’d expect.

With numerous icons for free downloads of outdated internet browsers, an ad for the record label Rhino and validation from Yahoo, The Search for the Zone looks exactly like an old Geocities fan site. There’s multicolored text, a simplistic template and even an animated background; the site was “created with Notepad,” a button up top proclaims. There’s even a guestbook that you can actually sign.

It’s a hilarious peek into the mind of one of Twin Peaks’ best new characters. But the site may actually serve as a hint toward the season’s future story beats, too. There’s a single reference to a “partner” who collaborated on The Search for the Zone, a man named Heinrich Viegel. It’s not clear how Viegel contributed to the site, or in what capacity, but we imagine he’ll pop up again somehow in the next half-season.

Twin Peaks airs weekly on Showtime at 9 p.m. ET.