The title of this paper comes from the introduction given by the MC at the Roadhouse to the band which plays there in Twin Peaks: The Return episode 8. The band are also referred to as 'The' Nine Inch Nails in the episode's closing credits. In the real world a band exists called Nine Inch Nails, no definite article required. Addressing them with the definite article may simply be a joke at the folksy MC's expense but it can also be understood as an indication that the series takes place in a world similar to but significantly different from our own: an alternative earth where the group really is called The – or 'The' - Nine Inch Nails.

In one sense, all fictional worlds, no matter how 'realistic', are alternative earths, populated as they are with characters who either do not exist in the real world or are invented versions of people who do or have, as in the case of historical fiction. However, realist and historical fiction depend upon a fidelity to actual events for their efficacy. To an extent this is also true of alternative history fiction – which creates alternative earths – but this sub-genre also requires a point of divergence in order to ask 'what if?' questions, such as Steven Barnes's imagined consequences of Islamic African nations destroying the Roman Empire and subsequently colonising Europe and the Americas in his novel Lion’s Blood (2002) .

Twin Peaks has not, at the time of writing, explicitly addressed a point of divergence; however, the scenes set in 1945 and 1956, also in episode 8, provide a historical context previously absent from the series. The nuclear bomb test at the Trinity Site, New Mexico in 1945 is clearly of fundamental importance to the narrative as it results in the 'birth' of both BOB and Laura Palmer and their entrance to the earthly plane through a kind of dimensional 'tear' created by the blast. The 1956 scene, also set in New Mexico, shows other supernatural entities at work, implicitly as a result of the Trinity test. Fifties music, style and argot are prominent throughout Twin Peaks, persisting for much longer than has been the case in the real world. In this paper I will argue that the alternative earth in which Twin Peaks is set diverged from our own with the supernatural incursion created by the Trinity explosion. As in our world, the test resulted in not only the allied victory in World War II but subsequently the rise of '50s American consumerist-driven popular culture, which came to dominate first the West, then the globe. In actual history, fifties styles went out of fashion, which seems to be less so the case in the series. Which is not to say that a fifties aesthetic is dominant: the song by 'The' Nine Inch Nails draws from the 'industrial' music of the 1980s and '90s and other musical acts featured also have an eighties influence; some however do provide fifties pastiche. Such 'retromania' – music critic Simon Reynolds' term for current pop culture's fascination with its past – of course exists in the real world today (and is perhaps more prevalent now than in the 1990s when Twin Peaks was originally broadcast) but in the world of the series retro elements seem less exercises in nostalgia than signifiers of the milieu of an alternative earth, one which is similar to yet different enough from our own to, as I will show, make us consider the history of the real world anew.