Drink full: The TWIN PEAKS 2017 spoiler thread, part 2

haha I wondered about this too cuz at what point were Cooper, the Major and Cole all together to hatch this plan - some point towards the end of season 2, I guess?

Or after season 2, and it was Mr C plotting with an unaware Briggs and Cole

I wonder how long Mr. C kept up appearances as a slick FBI agent. Like, when did he become greasy & weather-beaten?

The retcon about Cooper, Briggs and Cole hatching a plan for Judy is the thing that's been grating on me the most. I don't think it was Mr. C posing as Cooper, everyone consistently figures out quickly there's something very wrong with him.

Better than reddit (not saying much but...):

http://ew.com/recap/twin-peaks-season-3-finale/

I dreamt last night that some German channel was the first to broadcast a surprise Season 4, but it didn't involve Lynch or most of the main actors/characters; e.g. there was no Coop, though there were some returning minor characters from all three seasons. While it started out vaguely interesting if a bit generic, it went downhill fast, a bit like the weakest moments of Season 2 but even less defensible. I gave up once it turned out that the character of Diane featured in the series after all but was played by someone who wasn't Laura Dern.

We all know dreams are super important in Twin Peaks etc. etc.

Just brought Windham Hell up on the neoclassical metal thread but their first album had a Twin Peaks theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJ8VuLon4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c7rSsnDIAs

I don't think it was Mr. C posing as Cooper, everyone consistently figures out quickly there's something very wrong with him.

Very quickly = after 25 years of corruption. It's explicit in the show that he fooled people for (weeks? months? years?) before disappearing and taking up his Mr C. life.

I was under the impression he disappeared from TP pretty quickly, after being seen by Doc Hayward (who sensed something was wrong) at the hospital and the fire at Major Briggs' station, both of which I think happened very soon after the s2 finale.

I thought about this too! It's clear that Briggs was in contact with Cooper in the Lodge so they might also have formed their plan after the season 2 finale.

that's actually the stuff I would love to see; obviously they can never really film it, not in a realistic style, but I really want to know what happened right after season 2. maybe mark frost is going to blather about it in this dumb book I already paid for.

I kinda love when lynch has someone fire out a load of exposition, he makes sure to show his boredom with it most of the time, the reactions of the listening characters is always hilariously blank and polite and with that job done he can get on with the important imagery of the Bowie Hookah

don't forget mr c traveled back in time and fooled people before laura palmer was even murdered!

There's an elecrical pole outside Laura Palmers house in ep 18 which has the same numbers on it as a pole in Twin Peaks in episode 6, where Richard kills the kid, and apparently also on a pole in Fire Walk With Me. I don't think the lodge dwellers left Laura alone in the other world.

http://welcometotwinpeaks.com/wp-content/uploads/wpforo/default_attachments/1497301807-pole-6-fwwm.jpg

are the other numbers the same?

The 2 times that pole appeared before the finale it was in connection to Harry Dean Stanton's scenes. Don't know how that ties in.

I kinda love when lynch has someone fire out a load of exposition, he makes sure to show his boredom with it most of the time, the reactions of the listening characters is always hilariously blank and polite and with that job done he can get on with the important imagery of the Bowie Hookah

Will never not love cole's deliciously deadpan, slow, deliberate delivery of far too much information, especially when it's a massive 11th-hour retcon that they know will make nerds insane

I think it ties into Harry Dean Stanton because he is kinda tied into the spirits and especially Garmonbozia. He is a comforter among the downtrodden, the sorrowful, those in pain. Those that the spirits prey on.

Also he is upstairs at the palmer house

In the extended version of the ending he leans his face out of the bedroom window and whispers "2003"

Oh. Well I guess the show is solved, then.

That ew article is really long and has some interesting things but I disagree with like 80% of it. Hard to understand how someone can spend that much time writing about the show and come up with odd conclusions.

also it's terribly written

honestly, TP inspires so many hot takes, you get diminishing returns on even the ones you agree with pretty quickly

otm

the idea that janey-e is some sort of Laura analog...and no mention that maybe she's more of a Diane analog, you know, because they're SISTERS and they're both involved with a version of cooper? That seems like an odd thing to miss.

one thing i was thinking about is the whole "sarah palmer = judy" thing, which seems to be primarily based on the big face removal truck driver neck eating scene - other than that we get hints of something weird going on but nothing too detailed. what's weird to me about that is that "judy" is represented as this extreme evil/negative force, basically the source of everything bad in the world. and sarah killing a guy is bad, sure. but the guy she kills is also shown to be an extremely unpleasant, "bad" person, which kind of muddies the waters. if the whole idea is that sarah is judy, or judy inhabits sarah, or whatever, wouldn't it be clearer if she killed someone seen as good or even neutral? i mean, we are certainly put in the position of rooting for sarah in that scene, right?

personally, I don't think Sarah IS Judy. If Judy is an "extreme negative force", she could be an aspect of almost anyone at any given moment. Maybe Sarah, in that moment, had a lot of Judy in her -- I guess I look at that scene as more symbolic than anything.

xp I find "Judy" to be far and away the least fascinating construct of the new series and it's downright depressing how much theories about the show hinge around it/her

But yeah, how it's taken for granted in some corners that Sarah Palmer is Judy is beyond me. It's barely supported by the text (Sarah hardly had any screen time) and doesn't make a ton of sense. This massive, atomic bomb-sized root-of-all evil figure is camping out in... an old lady who lives alone and drinks a lot. Hmm.

i don't feel like sarah IS judy but I think she has Judy in her big-time tbh

yeah idk I don't think Judy is a single person, or could inhabit just one person BOB-style

it's mostly going off the assumption that sarah was the little girl in 1956, and her stabbing laura's picture. not a weird jump imo

given sarah's split personality freak out over the jerky I took the bar scene to be a somewhat lucid sarah deciding to unleash 'judy' in a moment of powerlessness

to an extent BOB is a part of Judy, a splinter of that negative force that doesn't even understand

there's another theory that the boy and girl in new mexico in ep 8 are richard and linda

yeah i was mostly surprised that people seemed to be suggesting that sarah is literally judy

people want to be so literal with something that so clearly is designed to not be so literal. It's fucking called ART, man.

what I love about Cole's "extreme negative force" description, is that it doesn't even have to mean "evil". It's really hard not to be sympathetic with Sarah -- her negativity could be completely a response to what happened to her family. (also like Sherriff Truman's wife as i recall)

oh man i totally forgot about his wife

Otm xp

Sarah is Judy is the experiment is the Mother is the frogbug girl is the source of all evil in the world - this is collapsing a lot of things that might be better untangled and making some big assumptive leaps that the show certainly isn't suggesting very strongly

yeah spot on

All that episode 8 stuff in particular, the theories only rob it of its impact. I don't want to know who that girl was or why that happened to her. It was so much more powerful watching it in the dark, just responding to it on an emotional level

Along these lines although much more minor, I don't see any good reason at all to think the drunk in the jail cell is billy

I mean, we only have two bits of information: Billy's missing, and he was bleeding or something from his mouth

I get the idea the only guy we see that fits that is the jail guy, but it's more of a red herring imo

Like the single reason everyone decided that was true forever and we can all stop thinking was the blood, and that doesn't even match the fucking description given twice by separate characters

drunk in jail is like the puking kid in the car, just another inexplicable casualty of whatever the hell is going on

"Bleeding from the nose and mouth" was the specific phrase given. Twice.

xp yep

We also don't know what timeline, or when, Andy's scene with the trucker takes place. The date on his Rolex (another odd detail) appears to be 10/10.

Mh = yes

I was caught up on both the sick girl and the jail guy. They both really freaked me out and I really wanted to know what the deal was, but I've come to accept that they are just symptoms of a town spinning out of control.

I haven't seen anybody bring this up, but it reminds me of what Reza Aslan kept going on about regarding The Leftovers (a show that would make a nice, if frustrating, double-feature with this one). He talked about the existence of Axis Mundi, or as wikipedia says, The axis mundi (also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar, center of the world, world tree), in certain beliefs and philosophies, is the world center, or the connection between Heaven and Earth. As the celestial pole and geographic pole, it expresses a point of connection between sky and earth where the four compass directions meet. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms.

Dr. Wikipedia goes on to mention A common shamanic concept, and a universally told story, is that of the healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world.

Twin Peaks, and everywhere the coordinates point to and everywhere that appears in the return, are axis mundi. Maybe some of them, like the northwest, predate electricity and have always been sacred. Maybe some like New Mexico or New York exist due to man's violence and the power of e-lec-tri-city. These are the passageways. For whatever reason, Twin Peaks has two clearly defined regions, entrance to the black lodge and to the white lodge. These touched areas are affected, or infected, by this energy, and the "town" of Twin Peaks is a total mess. The pain is symbiotic between the lodge denizens as much as we care to understand they exist, and people in the real world. I'm not sure Twin Peaks ever was the real world, considering how much more real it was in episode 18. It was a cartoonish place with cartoonish characters doing extreme things. It was an exaggeration. I don't think that pocket universe of 18 is some secret trap or invented domain care/of Judy or the Fireman (too literal anyway). I think it's reality and if anything the ending is Laura remembering the abuse she surely lived through in any universe but had perhaps blocked (watching the Keepers right now and thinking about the power of amnesia as a response to trauma), meanwhile Cooper is still playing the game, still trying to get back to a fantasy world so he can arrest the bad guy and save Laura, who obviously can't be saved, even if she's saved from her murder, she can't be saved from the horrific abuse she'd experienced for years before, Cooper, the shaman, the cowboy, wants to jump through the hoops, the universes and make everything right, but he doesn't even know what year it is.

sorry didn't expect that to turn into a rant.

there's definitely some commonalities between the Leftovers series finale and this one

"honestly, TP inspires so many hot takes, you get diminishing returns on even the ones you agree with pretty quickly"

yes, I've quit reading all of them, after this one:

https://thebaffler.com/latest/tears-of-a-crazy-clown-berman

This is my favorite article on the Return and it's importance; it contextualizes the show in the world of nostalgia and reboots; it doesn't try to 'explain' anything, and it's well written. I unsubbed from all the TP facebook groups I was on because I just couldn't take the endless recapitulation anymore.