TWIN PEAKS IS COMING BACK

[BomberPat]

I doubt we'll see Wally Brando again, sadly, but I have to agree he was the best, with Albert giving Gordon a photo of Mount Rushmore coming a close second.

[Merzbow]

Gordons anti transphobe speech is up there for best moment, that was Dave at his most sincere.

[WWFChilli]

Sooooo we are halfway through the return series. Any thoughts, is everyone enjoying it? Some of it has been downright bizarre.

[DJM]

1 hour ago, WWFChilli said:

Sooooo we are halfway through the return series. Any thoughts, is everyone enjoying it? Some of it has been downright bizarre.

I am still enjoying it on the whole, but I get the feeling that I would have been much better as the originally announced 9 episode run.

Lynch just seems to have been allowed to do whatever he wants with the series, rather than someone having a look at each episode and editing out some of the long drawn out scenes and sequences.

[Thunderplex]

I thought last nights was the most classic Twin Peaks style episode up to now.  Mind you, I could watch David Lynch as Gordon all night.

[BomberPat]

Yeah, I love Gordon Cole, big fan of how much he's in this series. I don't think the last episode was the strongest, but definitely one of the most "Twin Peaks", and the first time it's started to feel like all the different stories are starting to come together and reconvene somewhere. It took three or four episodes for me to really buy into it, and there's still a few aspects I'm unsure of, but there's enough brilliance in it that it's become "event viewing", which very few TV shows manage for me, and I still think it's probably the best thing on telly again.

[Merzbow]

Oh boy, talk an episode being more "Twin Peaks style". Lot's of time spent on the original cast with a split second return of a certain ginger piano player, that came out of nowhere and shocked me when I realised. I was grinning from ear to ear for most of the episode, it was at a blistering pace for a lot of it with big wtf and oh shit moments crashing all over the joint.

Carl and his magic whistle being one of the funniest TV moments of recent years. Speaking of Carl, was the area that Hastings saw Briggs his old trailer park from FWWM? I'm also assuming the the woodsmen on the stairs Cole saw there were from the convenience store, although that really oddly punched into your face by Lynch while he looked at the audience while repeating himself..

[DJM]

Good episode this week.

Some good moments, but I loved Gordon's reaction to seeing Hastings with half a head: "He's dead!"

How do we think Dougie is going become Dale Cooper again? What do we see as being the trigger?

[BomberPat]

12 hours ago, DJM said:

How do we think Dougie is going become Dale Cooper again? What do we see as being the trigger?

At this point I'm actually questioning whether he will! We've already gone more than half the series with Dougie, whereas I'm sure most of us assumed early on that it would be over and done with in an episode or two.

I assumed, at first, that when he won his fortune at the casino, and was incapable of telling the driver where he lived, that they would find the hotel key in his pocket and he would have won enough to afford a limo ride the entire length of the country to get back to Twin Peaks, and arriving there would be the trigger. But that was a red herring.
Then I assumed that his first taste of black coffee would do the trick. Nope.~
This week we got a cherry pie, and still no Dale Cooper. A week or two ago he was distracted by a woman in high heels - that made me think of Audrey, and how early in series 1 she'd almost always be introduced with a shot of her feet first. So maybe Audrey could be the trigger?

Now, I think it has to be one of three things - arriving in Twin Peaks, however that occurs, the Black Lodge being opened - either by Hawk and co finding the entrance, or the FBI following the coordinates on the dead body, which must be for Twin Peaks - or through the death of Bad Coop. But given that Bad Coop has seemingly come back from the dead once already, I would assume that only Good Coop is capable of truly killing him, but we've seen with Ike The Spike that Dougie is capable of handling himself.

Has there been any talk of a fourth series? If there is one, it would be one hell of a hook to have Dale Cooper only come back at the very end of this one. Almost a subversion of Bad Coop closing out series two. Hell, even if there isn't a series four, I still expect Lynch to end this season with a cliffhanger, just for old time's sake.

Part of me actually doesn't want Dougie to become Dale Cooper, just because it would be so unfair on Dougie's family!

 

Outside of Dougie's story, this was a tense episode. Absolutely everything going on felt, much as the last episode did, like all these loose threads are finally starting to come together, and draw the stories inexorably together, and back to Twin Peaks, but this episode just felt so full of dread. I find it heartbreaking every time the Log Lady shows up, but this episode was maybe her most intense appearance yet - her warning seemed genuinely terrifying. It's all going to kick off.

 

Beyond the obvious Black Lodge stuff, Becky is the character I think we need to be paying more attention to. I said when she first showed up that she's a young, blonde girl in trouble, in a David Lynch project, let alone in Twin Peaks, so things aren't going to end well for her. She's going to be this season's Laura Palmer, and this is her Fire Walk With Me - the only reason I'd doubt that is that she doesn't really have the "fall from grace" that Laura had.

Years ago, David Lynch said in an interview that Twin Peaks never stopped, he just stopped filming it, everyone's lives carried on. And it really felt like it in this episode; we haven't had the 25 years of character development hammered home to us, it's just revealed through conversations between characters, so we only now find out that Bobby is Becky's father. But Shelly's smitten with another bad boy, so while Bobby might have learned his lesson and straightened out, Shelly's still repeating the same old mistakes, and so's her daughter. Disappointed we didn't get any of Bobby's classic over-emoting in this scene, though.

Is anything going on with the - seemingly very young - vomiting passenger, almost zombie-like, outside the diner, or was it just a bit of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness' sake? I'm reluctant to write off anything in this series as not significant, but I was wracking my brains on this one, wondering if it was someone reacting to the Black Lodge - but it's not Garmonbozia they were throwing up, so I'd write that one out. This morning, I remembered way back in one of the first episodes, there was a conversation around dangerous drugs in Twin Peaks' schools - and given that Lynch's storytelling isn't generally as simple as "B follows A" and tends to rely a lot more on free association, I'm going to say that because we've just had a conversation about Becky's boyfriend, and caught a glimpse of a criminal he's involved with, the vomiting kid is connected to that arc.

 

 

Another theory I've seen posited elsewhere about Dougie is that we've effectively seen his development in fast-forward; when we first met Dougie, he was infantilised, he literally needed potty-training. With Sonny Jim, he learned play, and rudimentary social skills. He entered into "adolescence" when he was given homework to do, and later discovered sex, moving into this week, where he seems to have earned the respect of his "peers", and entered into adulthood. So it may not be that there is any single "trigger" to turn him into Cooper, but that we simply need to wait for him to "grow up".

 

Edited July 25, 2017 by BomberPat

[Merzbow]

David Lynch is nothing but a dirty old man.

[BomberPat]

14 hours ago, Merzbow said:

David Lynch is nothing but a dirty old man.

Gordon Cole being a mad old perv is brilliant, though.

Another class episode, though maybe a little weaker than the last couple. It's almost like The Shining now, where rather than constantly building tension until something bad happens, it feels like we've been running at maximum tension for ages, just waiting for the inevitable nastiness, which is completely unavoidable. We're still moving at a snail's pace, but everything is starting to come together.

[Merzbow]

Just how creepy was everything surrounding Sarah this episode? The way her personality changes to the shot of Lauras window and how she pulls a very Bob like face, I fear the checkout lad's about to be fucked. The music and sound direction was just perfect there, watching it again with headphones and I'm a little spooked.

And oh, Tim Roth the sniper was golden.

Edited August 1, 2017 by Merzbow

[BomberPat]

10 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

Just how creepy was everything surrounding Sarah this episode? The way her personality changes to the shot of Lauras window and how she pulls a very Bob like face, I fear the checkout lad's about to be fucked. The music and sound direction was just perfect there, watching it again with headphones and I'm a little spooked.

And oh, Tim Roth the sniper was golden.

I wrote after the last episode that Twin Peaks lends itself to free association, rather than trying to make sense of the plot in a "B follows A" linear sense, you just have to grab for the first things that come to mind, logic be damned. The rambling thoughts I settled on with Sarah;

She had her breakdown in a convenience store. Woodsmen have been seen congregating in convenience stores.

• Woodsmen are from the Black Lodge, presumably. They seem to feed on Garmonbozia, or at least to collect it and prevent it returning to the Black Lodge - hence how/why they managed to keep Bad Coop "alive" when he should have been killed, perhaps. The Palmer house must be positively dripping in Garmonbozia, even without its existing connection to the Black Lodge.
• What did Sarah say in her convenience store breakdown? "There are men coming". Woodsmen?
• We've seen that Woodsmen were able to somehow reconstruct Bad Coop.
• I've been working under the assumption that Episode 8 was entirely set in the 1950s, with the sequence of the White (?) Lodge creating the essence Laura Palmer in response to the creation of BOB having taken place long before the first series of Twin Peaks. But perhaps that's not what we saw. Or perhaps it happened at a different time. Or, more significantly, we already know that time isn't linear in the Lodges anyway. Are Woodsmen, or a White Lodge equivalent, attempting to reconstruct Laura Palmer in the Palmer house to counteract the coming storm ("There's Fire where you're going!") from the Black Lodge? And is Sarah, still maddened by grief, complicit in this?

 

As for the sound direction - the music playing while she was at the convenience store was from Fire Walk With Me, which doesn't bode well at all.

The use of the ceiling fan to build dread/tension was perfectly done, too. Perfect example of Lynch using familiar iconography from the first series to make you feel like something horrible is coming, without really giving you anything to work with. Just pure dread.

 

How do you feel about the Audrey scene? There's a theory going round that Audrey is either institutionalised or still in a coma, and that what we saw yesterday was all in her head - hence them referring to characters we've never even heard of before, and her husband having a seemingly non-specific job (just paperwork and deadlines), and using an outdated rotary phone; that's out of place for modern America, but not for the imagination of someone who's been in a coma for 25 years. And the convoluted mess of relationships wouldn't be out of place - an over-imaginative girl like Audrey, growing up in a town full of secret lives and extramarital affairs, is hardly going to imagine herself a happy, sedate married life. It felt like a conscious parody of the more melodramatic, soap opera elements of Twin Peaks, that expects the viewer to keep track of an ever-growing list of characters and how they relate to one another.

I don't buy the theory myself, but I also don't think that Richard is going to turn out to be Audrey's daughter. That just doesn't add up for me yet.

[Merzbow]

I don't believe that at all about Audrey, the whole talk about the truck is much too close to what happened in "real life" with Richard stealing it. There's also the owner that Andy spoke to earlier in the series, was that Billy? (or Chuck, i forget who was who but nice name choices).

[BomberPat]

9 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

I don't believe that at all about Audrey, the whole talk about the truck is much too close to what happened in "real life" with Richard stealing it. There's also the owner that Andy spoke to earlier in the series, was that Billy? (or Chuck, i forget who was who but nice name choices).

Yeah, the talk of the truck being stolen ties in to well with what happened with Richard to make me believe it - chances are it's Lynch being incongruous for its own sake. A dream sequence in Lynch tends to be something pretty clearly delineated, too.

Maybe it's just that, even in a series that's ultimately about rape, murder and incest, I hate the idea that Richard is the result of BOB-Coop raping a comatose Audrey, but I'm reluctant to believe that Richard is Audrey's son, though.

Ben Horne said that Richard never really had a father - even though Sherriff Truman, who clearly knows Ben, mentioned his parents, plural, and Audrey appears to have been married for some time, so Richard presumably had at least a notional father figure at some point. That and the only interactions seemingly being with the grandparents - maybe Audrey's already cut him off, as she doesn't seem short of cash herself, but I think there's more going on there than just Lynch actively avoiding revealing his parentage.

Given Ben Horne's past, I wonder if there could be another Horne child out there, who's the parent of Richard. The result of one of Ben's affairs or dalliances with prostitutes, that's resulted in the grandparents effectively having to raise Richard themselves (hence, "no father"), which may have lead to their divorce. Hell, maybe Ben is Richard's father and they've Chinatown'd him by telling him that Ben is his grandfather to disguise his real parentage, who knows? All Truman said about the parents was that they reacted, "as you'd expect". That could turn out to mean just about anything.