Twin Peaks Catch All

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Finally got to see this episode! Holy smokes. I'm so glad for the Cooper deferment now, it really made this episode feel good. The whole thing was jam packed and then that Roadhouse scene. Wow.

Aristophan wrote:

I'm really worried that the season will end on a cliffhanger. Cooper has not fared well in season fanalues.

It's probably the last two hours of Twin Peaks ever, so I doubt they leave anything major hanging.

The first hour was pretty damn awesome. Even my wife watched, and she's been long done with Twin Peaks.

I loved Part 17.

Part 18 was either a really exciting preview for a Season 4, or a middle finger delivered from David Lynch to me. Fingers crossed that was the former!

I would be super shocked if there was another season. Coop f*cked with the spacetime continuum and the Twin Peaks as we knew it never even f*cking happened in the new timeline he made (Yet the Evil remains). Talk about a way to bring back and then completely destroy an old show.

Genius. A middle finger at nostalgia. You wanted more Twin Peaks? Eat this! We live inside a dream motherf*ckers!

AcidCat wrote:

Genius. A middle finger at nostalgia. You wanted more Twin Peaks? Eat this! We live inside a dream motherf*ckers!

I wonder if this was part of the plan all along? I remember thinking during Part 1 that the guy staring at an empty box waiting for something to happen, only to die as soon as something does, was some kind of metaphor for Twin Peaks fans waiting for new episodes. And Dougie felt at times like a caricature how a large part of the fanbase portrays Coop i.e. awkward and coffee-obsessed.

Or I'm reading too much into only a few little things.

TheCounselor wrote:
Aristophan wrote:

I'm really worried that the season will end on a cliffhanger. Cooper has not fared well in season finales.

It's probably the last two hours of Twin Peaks ever, so I doubt they leave anything major hanging.

Well ...

AcidCat wrote:

I would be super shocked if there was another season. Coop f*cked with the spacetime continuum and the Twin Peaks as we knew it never even f*cking happened in the new timeline he made (Yet the Evil remains). Talk about a way to bring back and then completely destroy an old show.

Genius. A middle finger at nostalgia. You wanted more Twin Peaks? Eat this! We live inside a dream motherf*ckers!

Yeah that's my read on it. Coop literally tried to go back to Twin Peaks in 1989 and now the whole thing never happened, Laura is Carrie, Coop is Richard, the entirety of Twin Peaks never happened. You can't go back. Nostalgia isn't real. f*ck you I'm David Lynch.

Ha ha oh man, I loved that ending.

I guess the show hasn't done well, ratings-wise, but someone from Showtime said the door is open for Lynch if he wants to do more, and many of the actors have expressed interest as well. The ball is in his court but it ended on such a perfect metaphor that I can't imagine he'd want to continue.

Another 25 years, maybe?

I have no idea what to make of that ending. It's tough to know how much of it is Cooper's "dream", how much of it is literal, how much of it is flashback, how much is vision...

It seems like Coop is trying to quantum leap everything to a better ending, but even ignoring the extra unraveling done in the final episode Audrey was left completely hanging with no resolution. I did feel like Laura's scream at the very end of 18 was reminiscent of Audrey's at the end of 16.

Cooper's "see you at the final curtain" quote also really reminded me of Charley threatening to "end Audrey's story."

Maybe Lynch is just trolling us.

gore wrote:

I have no idea what to make of that ending. It's tough to know how much of it is Cooper's "dream", how much of it is literal, how much of it is flashback, how much is vision...

And that's exactly what you're supposed to make of the ending.

gore wrote:

Maybe Lynch is just trolling us.

(Dougie): "Figure it out...."

I reject the idea that choosing a button focused on something other than plot / narrative is trolling, or extending a middle finger. It's just a different choice, the type of which prestige TV rarely gets to indulge in.

There's a lot to process in these final two hours, but I love it all. It fits emotionally and does this amazing thing where it both solves the mystery and vigorously reasserts mystery.

Big applause to Showtime for getting out of the way and providing a platform. Hats off to Frost and Lynch and co. for making this beautiful, hilarious, terrifying, and challenging thing.

I think this is Lynch's masterpiece. It's flawed for sure. I remain troubled by the way the show handles race, and by the moments where male gaze gets in the way of storytelling. Those are huge issues, and important to talk about IMHO. But I also give Lynch a lot of credit for what he accomplished. This series is going to stick in my brain for a long, long time.

Well he's not trolling per se but our relationship with the artist is very much on the table here and Lynch frequently takes a knowing and playful approach to that.

So, I waited until the whole season aired to start watching this because that's the kind of person I am.

Holy moly the first 4 episodes are amazing. Kind of bummed that some of the people didn't manage to come back, and a little shocking to see how old everyone has gotten, but already been blown away by how well-made it is. I always assumed I would never get a new David Lynch movie, so now I'm super pumped that it appears I actually did get a new David Lynch movie and it's 18 hours long.

Dougie Jones is the best.

And TheHarpoMarxist is right, the joy of this is that people always try to compare "prestige television" with film, but it's usually a false comparison. Film still gets to be unique and experimental in a way nothing on Showtime or HBO comes close to - the very nature of a television show forces them to be heavily invested in plot, talking heads, elevated drama, predictable camerawork, etc. Twin Peaks always was one of those shows that made that gap much slimmer.

So, I finished the rest of the series and I think the whole thing is brilliant, but I'm still processing everything.

- Boo to no more "Invitation to Love".

- Boo to the original Sheriff Truman not being there.

- Maybe it's because I binge-watched it after the whole series came out, meaning I always had a new episode to watch, but I thought the Dougie Jones stuff was amazing and I couldn't get enough of it.

- I wonder if that creepy, gross drunk guy in the cell was a doppleganger that went wrong. He was repeating everything being said, Dougie-style.

- With how much this tied into weird asides from the original series and FWWM, and even re-used footage so that they made more sense in this new context, I'm curious how much of this Lynch and Frost came up with now and how much of this was maybe a version of how they originally planned to end the series had it gone for multiple seasons, with the required changes due to time passing (i.e. The new season of Twin Peaks is like the new season of Gilmore Girls!). The fact that the new season needed a "Sheriff Truman" despite the actor not coming back and other significant attachments suggest this might have been Lynch's plan all along. But then again, it's just as plausible that Lynch had a new story and Twin Peaks was the vessel where he could get his 18-hour story funded.

- I always tried to argue that Lynch was going not only with dream logic or realities subverted into people's wishes, but with an interpretation that the universe is a mobius strip where the future can change the past just as much as the other way around, to no avail. I feel like the last two episodes vindicate my opinion on this.
- The only character that seemed out of place to me was the kid with the "power glove" shouting about his destiny. That felt like something out of a traditional sci-fi narrative, not a David Lynch one.

halfwaywrong wrote:
AcidCat wrote:

Genius. A middle finger at nostalgia. You wanted more Twin Peaks? Eat this! We live inside a dream motherf*ckers!

I wonder if this was part of the plan all along? I remember thinking during Part 1 that the guy staring at an empty box waiting for something to happen, only to die as soon as something does, was some kind of metaphor for Twin Peaks fans waiting for new episodes. And Dougie felt at times like a caricature how a large part of the fanbase portrays Coop i.e. awkward and coffee-obsessed.

Or I'm reading too much into only a few little things.

No, I fully agree with this and was thinking it all throughout the show even before the ending. The original stars of the show are now old and it's the younger generation telling their stories and replacing them with interesting drama. The bits about the original cast that are there - most of those characters have changed so much in time passing, they aren't recognizable as their current selves (Bobby is an understated police officer, Dr. Jacoby is a raving Alex Jones-style lunatic). The boss obsessed with his time as a young boxer, several instances of characters being stuck in a lobotomized state re-watching the same content over and over again, watching something we just saw in the context of the show, re-shown on a screen inside the show being watched by other characters. You get the gist.

Can we have a moment for Norma and Ed?

Maq wrote:

Can we have a moment for Norma and Ed?

Honestly, I was expecting a different outcome and didn't expect that to conclude the way it did. I thought it was going to be a(nother) huge spike through the hearts of fans who expected a traditional Twin Peaks revival. Ed finally gets the courage to be with Norma, but he's way too late and she moved on.

Mind you, I guess one could argue that the ending to the series means Norma and Ed might not even exist anymore, so it's not that hard to still find the bitter gut-punch in it all.

Someone on Reddit found this old article that was posted before the pilot of the original Twin Peaks even aired, and the quote David Lynch gives at the end is very telling about how his mindset was even at that point.

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When it is pointed out to Lynch that television shows almost always catch the bad guy at the end of each episode, that the audience likes its criminals behind bars before they go to bed, that it gives them a sense of "closure," his soft-spoken patter erupts in disgust.

"Closure. I keep hearing that word. It's the theater of the absurd. Everybody knows that on television they'll see the end of the story in the last 15 minutes of the thing. It's like a drug. To me, that's the beauty of 'Twin Peaks.' We throw in some curve balls. As soon as a show has a sense of closure, it gives you an excuse to forget you've seen the damn thing."

I signed up for a free trial week of Showtime last Saturday just to watch this in one go. Finished it last night, and still digesting it in my mind. Tagging into the thread so I can go back and see others thoughts on it and post my own when I have more time and they've settled into something more cohesive than "Whoa. Wait. What? Wow".

So a few things stick out after watching this.

1st. Cooper is told in the Lodge to remember 430, Richard and Linda- two birds with one stone. I kept waiting for this to pay off. In the final episode the note in the hotel room is to addressed to Richard and signed from Linda, but... what? where does 430 come into it? What does it have to do with "two birds with one stone?" No clue.

2nd. It looks like others called this one here as well. Audrey's scenes are in a dream world. Constantly wanting/needing to go someplace but never leaving. Probably still in a coma? Poor Audrey.

3rd. I put a lot of importance on Candie- the named showgirl of the 3 girls. She was often in her own world and had to be told multiple times to do things- just like Dougie (Cooper) is. I was convinced she was trapped in a similar state as Cooper- in somebody else's body waiting to be awakened. And who would be the person or spirit trapped in the same spot as Cooper by fate or design? Why, Laura Palmer, of course! I was so sure of this when I made this revelation that I was pretty disappointed that Candie turned out to be not that important at all.

4th. My theory on how things would end before I saw the end was, Lynch was going to break the 4th wall apart completely and reveal that Twin Peaks was a TV show. This was mostly based on the Monica Bellucci dream and the "who is the dreamer" question. You've got a character played by the real life director of the show, talking to a real life actress in his dream. So very meta.

So when Cooper leaves the Sheriff's Office and tells Diane "I'll see you at the curtain call" I was expecting an actual curtain call at the end with the full cast, past and present, with maybe a dreamlike deconstruction of "backstage" preceding it.

5th. The actual ending? It's David Lynch. I wouldn't have it any other way. I snorted. I actually said something like "Wait. What the hell was that?" out loud. I sat perplexed for bit.

After mulling it over, the entire last hour has the dream logic thing going for it. It's day, then suddenly it's night. You're with someone and suddenly they're gone. You accept things, like body with a gunshot through the head on the living room couch as a given and don't question it. Is it a dream, a vision, an alternate reality? Yes.

My takeaway is that while the main story of Laura Palmer's death has been finally resolved (Evil Cooper dead, Killer Bob destroyed) there's a part of Cooper (of David Lynch, of us?) that still wants to be able to save her. A wrong was committed in Twin Peaks 25 years ago, and Cooper still would go through whatever to try to right that wrong. But it's a doomed want of his. Like real life, if someone is killed, there may be justice found, but even then getting that justice won't/can't bring them back.

Tscott wrote:

1st. Cooper is told in the Lodge to remember 430, Richard and Linda- two birds with one stone. I kept waiting for this to pay off. In the final episode the note in the hotel room is to addressed to Richard and signed from Linda, but... what? where does 430 come into it? What does it have to do with "two birds with one stone?" No clue.

That was the number of miles Cooper read off the dashboard of the car with Diane Linda (?)

Tscott wrote:

4th. My theory on how things would end before I saw the end was, Lynch was going to break the 4th wall apart completely and reveal that Twin Peaks was a TV show. This was mostly based on the Monica Bellucci dream and the "who is the dreamer" question. You've got a character played by the real life director of the show, talking to a real life actress in his dream. So very meta.

There's a lot of that in the show. For instance, all the real bands who perform on stage at the end, with odd twists like Eddie Vedder being introduced as "Edward Louis Severson", his real birth name, and the fact that the woman who answered the door at the end is the real-life owner of the Palmer house.

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