Laura Palmer died before Twin Peaks even began: her body was found wrapped in plastic on the banks of a river, while a photograph of a smiling blonde homecoming queen appears on television. The entire town seems to know her, yet no one truly does — and that is how one of television’s most important characters enters the story: dead.
For much of the show, Laura exists through other people: in the memories of her classmates, the photographs scattered throughout town, and the secrets that emerge as the investigation unfolds. Agent Cooper sees her as a case, her friends mourn a loss, and the town is forced to confront a wound beneath its peaceful surface, leaving the viewer with the famous question David Lynch and Mark Frost set in motion: Who killed Laura Palmer?
More than three decades after the series premiered, the mystery worth solving might now be: who Laura was before she died? This seemingly small shift changes the place she occupies within the story. She is the center of the narrative, and yet, it is a story that is told primarily by others — that may be one of television’s most curious and persistent patterns. Laura is presented through the eyes of those around her as the perfect girl, the homecoming queen, the beloved student, the daughter, and the friend. But as the story progresses, that image begins to crack. She had secrets, lied, felt desire and fear, and had a life that no one around her completely knew. The girl in the photograph was not the same girl who existed when no one was watching.
In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, released in 1992, Laura stops being merely the mystery others are trying to solve. The film follows her final days and places her experience at the center of the narrative. The transformation is precise: Laura moves from being an object of investigation to becoming the subject of her own story. Perhaps that is one of the most important things a story can do when it decides to kill a character: not let her die twice. The first death is physical; the second happens when all that remains of her is the way other people see her.
And Then Come Other Girls
Girls die, and their deaths leave stories behind for the living. Television has a long history of female characters who disappear, are murdered, or experience some form of violence so that a plot can move forward. Critics have described this recurring structure as the dead girl trope, particularly in mystery and crime stories.
A girl’s death can be devastating for the characters, but it can also be extremely convenient for the narrative. That is why this discussion does not have to end with the question: Why do so many girls die in fiction? An earlier, perhaps even more uncomfortable question is: What does their death allow the story to tell?
Their deaths open the way to stories about violence, fear, trauma, coming of age, guilt, obsession, and, often, about men. That does not mean all of these stories are the same, Or that a female character cannot die without her existence being reduced to a narrative device. The question is rather who gets to continue existing after she dies?
In many stories, the girl continues to exist as a memory, but the memory belongs to someone else. The girl disappears from the story, while that person, often a man, is left with a narrative shaped by her absence.
The Past Also Belongs to Those Who Survive
This is where The Shards enters the conversation. The novel follows Bret, a teenager in 1980s Los Angeles, as his life is disrupted by the arrival of a new student, Robert Mallory, and by the presence of a serial killer known as The Trawler. The 2026 television adaptation, co-created by Ryan Murphy and the book’s author, Bret Easton Ellis, retains this basic premise, with Homer Gere playing Robert and Igby Rigney playing a fictionalized teenage version of Ellis. In its first episode, the atmosphere of terror takes shape around the body of a teenage girl found on a tennis court, and once again, the violence of a story unfolds from a dead girl.
Still, the series is not simply a story about discovering who the killer is; it is also about desire, paranoia, and the way someone reconstructs their own adolescence years later. The novel constantly plays with the narrator’s memory and with the possibility that what he is telling is not exactly the same as what happened. Violence becomes part of the way Bret understands who he was and who he became — the book’s retrospective, memory-driven perspective is central to its exploration of identity and the past.
On screen, that perspective remains important, even as the series expands beyond Bret’s point of view and gives more space to the other characters. The Trawler mystery becomes intertwined with Bret’s coming-of-age, and the threat surrounding the teenagers also becomes part of the memory he carries with him.It is a structure different from Twin Peaks, but there is a possible connection between the two works: violence against young people can become a story about those who survive it.
The Problem Is Not Simply Killing a Character
It would be easy to turn all of this into a simple rule and claim that girls should not die in fiction, but that is not what this is about. Characters die, and people die; stories about death are part of art because death is part of life. A female character can die and still have had an entire story of her own before that death.
The problem arises when a character’s death is given more attention than her life itself, when we know everything about what happened to her, but almost nothing about what she wanted; when we know who killed her, but not who she was. And sometimes, her death may even becomes the very thing that gives depth to a man who, before her, did not seem to have enough of a story to sustain the narrative. At that point, the question of representation stops being purely about women and becomes a question of perspective: Who are we watching?
Laura Palmer is remembered because she died, but she is also remembered because, eventually, Twin Peaks decided to look at her while she was still alive. Perhaps that is the difference between a character who is merely a victim and one who is allowed to remain a person. A narrative does not have to end a girl’s existence the moment her body is no longer present. She can have desires that serve no purpose to the investigation, relationships that do not help solve the mystery, contradictions that do not need to explain her death, and simply exist.
This is something many stories about dead girls still struggle with. The issue is not necessarily that they are killed, but whether they are allowed to be more than what happened to them. That is the question that should accompany every narrative built around a young female victim: When a girl has to die for a story to begin, whose story is it?
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The article above was edited by Samantha Coutto.
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