Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

It's really awful and offensive too iirc.

"what he needs now is both your understanding, and a confederate victory."

"The bad news is your father's crazy. The good news is he's about to win the civil war."

When the original series was out, I was 13 years old, and a friend and I joined a Twin Peaks discussion group which met in a now-nonexistent bookstore on Southport Ave. in Chicago. We passed around cherry pie and doughnuts and tossed about theories regarding owls, UFOs, the Black Lodge, etc. One day someone in the group (everyone save for Katie and I were over 30) announced that they had the new Playboy with Sherilyn Fenn and proceeded to pass it around. That was my first exposure to pornography, broadly defined.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Monday, January 13, 2003 2:45 PM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is like the dream adolescence I never had

yeah, no kidding! when the original series was out, i was 8 years old. i remember seeing a bit of it, once, just before i went to bed. i was heading to the kitchen to get a glass of milk and paused behind the couch that my parents were sitting on. i don't remember which season or episode or the scene. i just remember hiding there for a while, watching, and then my dad saying "i don't get it" and changing the channel.

I was a freshman in college and thus at the perfect age and marijuana intake level to have thoroughly enjoyed Twin Peaks when it first came out but I don't even think it was on my radar. One of my life's great tragedies.

I was in middle school when it originally aired and there was a group of us in my homeroom who would discuss each new episode every week. Did TP originally air on Thursday nights? I feel like this was a Friday morning homeroom kinda thing.

Oh man, the first time I saw eps of this was when I was first dating my now wife, pretty sure it was winter and we'd just hole up together and watch a few eps in a row. It was VHS tapes - we borrowed from a friend and he only had the first season so I didn't find out who killed Laura Palmer until years later!

i was heading to the kitchen to get a glass of milk and paused behind the couch that my parents were sitting on.

I am so sorry Karl, but I read this as "the couch that my parents were getting it on."

I was in middle school when it originally aired and there was a group of us in my homeroom who would discuss each new episode every week

yeah similarly I was in high school when this aired and it was def a topic of discussion in next morning's AP english class. I remember there were a few episodes where several of us made the effort to get together and watch at someone's house

I was Karl Malone's age and yet while my family watched a ton of ABC at the time (China Beach, Roseanne, and Civil Wars were big at my house), I don't think we actually saw Twin Peaks. My only memory of seeing it was a 30 minute recap special the network stuck at the end of the TGIF lineup one slow week. Watching a little of that after Family Matters was strange to say the least.

Isn't it a CBS show?

it was aired on ABC, but it's on CBS/Paramount home video. video rights have nothing to do with broadcast rights, generally speaking.

I see. Thank you.

I was 10/11 when TP originally aired in here, and my parents were following it, but they didn't allow me to watch it... I was so jealous of this friend of mine who was a year older, who was allowed to watch it, and who was always talking about how cool the series was. Though by sheer accident I managed to catch a bit of a second season episode when it was on telly, and that bit just happened to be the infamous scene where Bob kills Maddy, it left a permanent mark in my memory.

Then, a couple of years later, they reran the whole series on Finnish TV, the episodes were shown everyday weekday night for a few weeks... By now I was old enough to watch it, and I remember a lot of the kids my high school class were watching it too, most of them were just like me, that their parents had forbidden it when it originally aired, so it was all new too us. And back then kids weren't yet using the internet, so none of us were spoiled with the plot twists, and I remember on every school at the first recess of the morning there were some intense discussions on the previous night's episode, and speculation on what might happen next.

When Twin Peaks first aired, I was 25, in college, and sharing a house with three other college friends. Was already a Lynch fan since first seeing Eraserhead at a disreputable midnight movie. Of course the first season of TP was the greatest thing ever. There was no way I could help it - like some sort of mimetic stuxnet designed specifically the break the brains of everyone in the Telecom household.

I love the Ben Horne/civil war storyline. Just got through those episodes this weekend. So good.

Really? I thought that storyline was pretty much the nadir of a show that in that, in that 5-6 episode section had dropped off several times over.

Yeah I hated that bit. I hated huge swaths of the second season.

They say revealing the killer did it for the show but I've just been rewatching and man it got boring before then. All the Josie/Ben/Catherine crossing and double crossing, Bobby and Shelly, Donna farting around, Harold Smith, little asides like the restaurant critic - couldn't care about any of them. Even the music gets irritating, interminably long scenes with a few bars of that "cool" jazz motif repeating endlessly. Admittedly it gets even worse afterwards, the Nadine and James stories the absolute nadir for me. I might just try and skip to any black lodge related stuff from now and ignore all the rest.

Actually the music isn't that great from the beginning, theme tune aside. You get the overly romantic Laura's theme swelling up three times in the first episode: when they find her body, when they tell her parents, and when they tell the school - but then later they play it when Donna and James get together. Confusing.

A good poll would be worst storyline in the third quarter of the series.

Nah, James/Evelyn is surely a foregone conclusion in any such poll.

pretty much did it already - whole second season polled but nothing from early on got a vote.
Worst ongoing plotline in the second season of Twin Peaks (SPOILERS)

Oh I don't know, there are a few contenders. The thing with the receptionist/dispatcher lady's kid and the dad was soooooo terrible. And yeah the restaurant critic too. But Evelyn and James is up there.

This still gets updated regularly
http://twinpeaksgifs.tumblr.com/

Still think the Nadine plotline got robbed in that poll.

http://38.media.tumblr.com/13d6f440a5b9ad163ce5ba3a49d2f7a7/tumblr_nfk5z26lv91qc58cto5_r1_250.gif

*romantic crescendo*

Major Briggs' vision of his son is best part of season 2

it's definitely up there. i've watched it several times in a row before.

"Still think the Nadine plotline got robbed in that poll."

Awful Josie plotline almost as bad as crappy James plotline too.

the civil war plot is by no means the worst in the 2nd season. but i wouldn't defend it, either.

yeah, it is entertaining at least

I love the civil war plotline

It's a great idea but it gets too much screentime, like an SNL skit that just keeps going.

speaking of an a snl skit that just keeps going i just watched the snl parody from before the season 2 open and fuck me what a cast in that

(SPOILERS if you haven't got around to watched the show in the past two and a half decades. I hadn't until recently.)

This show is a mix of the ridiculous and the sublime! I was 11 and didn't watch it when it came out. My partner and I are halfway through s2 right now. We were really hooked through the Laura Palmer storyline but after they decided to resolve the central mystery seven episodes into s2, it is hard to maintain the same enthusiasm. None of the remaining storylines seem very compelling. (I'm hoping for an epic man vs. owl battle, though.)

The creativity and craft were amazing at times, and it managed to have some really powerful suspenseful moments at times. We wanted to binge-watch all of s1 really fast, even 24 years after it came out. At the same time, the show's failings are almost spectacular. Using the same actress to play Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson, on the 'Tale of Two Cities' premise that two people who are not identical twins could look so much like each other as to fool someone who was close to one of them, was pretty hard to swallow. Similarly, it was pretty obvious that 'Mr. Tojamura' was a woman disguised as a Japanese man. The French Canadians from BC who speak with what sound like awkward imitations of Parisian accents are pretty ridiculous (see also: the Mountie who wears ceremonial garb on the job).

More fundamentally, it was fairly obvious to us who killed Laura a few episodes before it was revealed on-screen. I suspected him from early on because his behaviour was so odd but the whole 'Bob' thing was an effective misdirect for a while. Was it harder to tell in 1990/91, when people waited a week for each episode?? It was a little unsatisfying that the answer was basically just revealed to Cooper by various visions (but I'm a big Sherlock Holmes fan). I'm not really sure what to make of his character: they started out by really emphasizing his masterful deductive skills (with his deducing people's backstories just by observing their body language etc) but these seemed to become much less significant as the series went on, with Cooper relying more and more on dreams, messages from outer space, visions of giants. I'm not sure I get what the 'mythology' of the show is yet, how the fantastical elements are all supposed to work. Maybe it comes together eventually.

Judging by what I've read, Frost and Lynch didn't decide who the killer was until ABC told them they had to solve the mystery... so, after s1?

Ah, interesting. Like I said, I just thought he was suspicious early on but we thought it was obvious that he was the killer a couple of episodes before it was revealed (in s2).

And I mean, a lot of people were suspicious early on. We wondered if Donna had an angle.

This gets at something about the show, though, at least the Laura Palmer storyline: it doesn't work like a 'good' mystery should, where clues are presented and the viewer is given enough information to deduce the killer but in such a subtle way that hardly anyone will be able to. (As soon as they start giving real clues, we could figure it out right away.) What was interesting was that it managed to be compelling viewing despite this.

The plotting doesn't aim to be remotely plausible in a real-world way; not his style. (Much like Vertigo and its lookalike-females-of-mystery trope.) It's a dreamscape, not a policier. I don't know if Lynch has ever said anything about AC Doyle-type mysteries, but he wouldn't make one.

I believe they knew in season 1 that her father was at least sexually abusing her. Consider Audrey's season cliffhanger where after following Laura's footsteps she ends up in bed with her own father.

WHAT IS GOING ON IN THIS HOUSE?

At the same time, the show's failings are almost spectacular. Using the same actress to play Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson, on the 'Tale of Two Cities' premise that two people who are not identical twins could look so much like each other as to fool someone who was close to one of them, was pretty hard to swallow. Similarly, it was pretty obvious that 'Mr. Tojamura' was a woman disguised as a Japanese man.

neither of these rly strike me as failures, for reasons morbs gets at. the mr. tojamura thing is not exactly the show at its best (tho ben kissing mr. tojamura's toes is quite an image) but the dissonance between the disguise's fakeness and its success feels as deliberate as all the other dissonances. laura/maddy meanwhile is classic uncanny, to me, plus it teems with signs. may remember wrong but also i don't think it ever fools anyone except dr. jacobi, from a distance, with a wig.

otm that coop does v little actual detective work, obtains all his breakthroughs through portents, etc.. (i like when he gathers everyone together in the roadhouse and ben horne says "would you like us to hum?") he also fails to prevent pretty much everything you might consider it his job to prevent. he is not really a detective tho because yeah it is not really a mystery. he is more like an angel.

show def has spectacular failings.

Maybe Lynch is a fan of Jeremy Brett's The Master Blackmailer, where Sherlock Holmes solves a crime by having nightmares and visions.

closest doyle's sherlock comes to visions is probably "the devil's foot", where he doses himself with a fear-stimulating hallucinogenic drug to... check if it's a fear-stimulating hallucinogenic drug or not. visions confirm.

never saw that brett movie but did see the last vampyre. that series went in weird directions at the end. faithful in a way.

Yeah, it was Jacobi that I was thinking of. (Other people were strongly reminded of Laura but did not exactly mistake one for the other.) I guess he was at a bit of a distance.

I think at the time I first watched I went through phases of suspecting and not suspecting the correct killer - it seemed like a good explanation but there was so much weirdness going on in the show that I just didn't know whether I should expect the logical answer to be the correct one. Now that I think back on it though, the way the show misdirects you fits perfectly with the themes -- the idea that there's some grand evil conspiracy plot coming from somewhere outside (all the stuff with Leo and One Eyed Jacks and the vague sense that there's something "bigger" going on) is almost a critique of our failure to apprehend that the evil could have been right there in her home, like what I was saying upthread about it being so unfathomable for many people that a father was doing this that supernatural explanations become preferable.