Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

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.

I distinctly remember deciding (correctly) that I knew the killer, and then thinking "no, that's too dark for a network TV show in the early 90s, it must be someone else."

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.

IIRC there's a scene pretty early on where Leland dances with a photo of Laura, breaks the glass and cuts his hand, and then stains Laura's image with his blood... The second time I watched TP this definitely felt like foreshadowing, but if they really hadn't decided who the killer is until later on, then that was quite a fortuitous scene to include!

But yeah, it wasn't really a mystery you could solve by paying attention to clues, the show was surreal for that, plus there was a bunch of red herrings that ultimately meant nothing. For example, early on it's hinted there's something sinister with Mike and Bobby, because they share their names with Bob the evil spirit and Mike the one-armed man, but turns out they had nothing to with Laura's death, and the name connection is never explained.

he has murdered innocents. he has engaged us in subterfuge and red herring-- a fish i don't particularly care for.

I was super convinced it was Andy for a while

lol

Walks into the station the next day with "FIRE WALK WITH ME" stuck to his forehead.

IIRC there's a scene pretty early on where Leland dances with a photo of Laura, breaks the glass and cuts his hand, and then stains Laura's image with his blood... The second time I watched TP this definitely felt like foreshadowing, but if they really hadn't decided who the killer is until later on, then that was quite a fortuitous scene to include!

Yeah, this was one of the things that made him seem suspicious. Hurting 2 OTM about the 'conspiracy' misdirect. Tuomas also OTM about Mike/Bobby.

With all the red herrings, unexplained supernatural shit, competing storylines, and bizarro twists (Andrew Packard has been alive this whole time??), what this show makes me think of most at this point is a predecessor to Lost. (I could see the obvious influence on Veronica Mars at first but that show was comparatively way more of a tightly crafted mystery series in the traditional sense.) I feel like it has some similar strengths and weaknesses, although at least this doesn't drag on for six seasons of bullshit. Easy to forget now how gripping Lost used to be!

If I've never seen Lost, would it make sense to go back and start now, or is it a "you had to be there" thing? I know the ending was famously disappointing. Not that I'm looking for a show to take over my life, mind you, just people were such evangelists at the time but I feel like that's evaporated since the finale, whereas other big shows of that period still have people going "Oh, no, you have to watch that."

(and I would say Twin Peaks stands that test, even with the always-difficult problem of recommending a show where you have to explain "You'll probably want to give up somewhere in Season Two, everyone does, but stick it out til the ending, it's worth it!")

My stock recommendation for anyone curious about L O S T: watch just the first five seasons and pretend that it ends really bleakly.

If you want this experience, then, yes, definitely: http://www.theonion.com/articles/poor-bastard-who-just-started-watching-lost-in-for,30378/

2xpost

stick it out til the ending, it's worth it

OK, I needed to hear this.

We just started watching the Bluray set weekend before last. I've seen the first season probably dozens of times, and then up through the revelation of Laura's murderer maybe twice. Having only seen the latter half of season two once before, I'm curious to see how it holds up. But I definitely remember that last episode being a keeper.

Sund4r: Yeah, this is the way it happens. If you're finding at least a few things in each episode to be interested in/charmed by then I'd say stick it out as the finale (with Lynch back at the helm) is really fucking classic. But there's definitely a moment where it's more like "fuck, I've sunk this much in, it'd be stupid to stop now!"

re: Lost: lol, OK, I think the Onion has cleared this one up for me