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

hope someone out there can help parse the final Jeffries scene.. there's def some psychic mind meld, info upload thing going on.

Norma's going to carry on making cherry pie the way she thinks best, not to please some random suit no one's ever heard of.

having had 24 hours to parse all this, i've turned around completely. lynch and frost are monstrously clever. i thought they were a step ahead of us the whole way, but it turns out they were light years ahead. to be blindingly original and wrong-foot everyone in today's avalanche of prestige/peak tv is no small achievement.

i'm also grateful to have watched this as it went out, with good people like you all to discuss it with, and with no expectation of the outcome.

anyone who starts watching it now will be told things like "you're wasting your time" or "the ending is fucking stupid", which is an incredible shame for prospective viewers. in hindsight the ending is complete genius because it's completely unexpected, because it gives us a whole new reason to rewatch the entire thing (which i will definitely do), and most importantly because it puts us in dale's shoes as the detective who follows all the wrong clues but never gives up. in that very last scene he's as disappointed, deflated and paradoxically determined as we are: just as he realises he's spent all this time trying like hell to solve this unsolvable thing, so do we; but you can see in his face that he won't give up, and neither will we.

honestly, a neat and tidy conclusion would have been a crappy letdown compared to this.

I've started thinking (probably too deeply) that the title of the BluRay set as "The Entire Mystery" means something, especially since there was a second edition missing disc 10 (and therefore the Between Two Worlds interview/discussion between Lynch and the Palmers in/out of character) which was called "TP:TOS, FWWM and The Missing Pieces" implying that there is something in Between Two Worlds that completes the story. "Entire" suggests to me that all of what we might call "Twin Peaks" is in there and TP: The Return is something else entirely, or rather it's not at all about 'who killed Laura Palmer' or 'a town where everyone knows everyone and nothing is what it seems'. And because it's not part of the mystery, it's not there to be solved.

That said, my hot ("realistic") take:

Everything we see, and the source of the glitching and other visual inconsistencies (like the "Where's Billy?" diner scene) are a result of that reality breaking down. It is in superposition; it never existed because Cooper always stopped Laura going to the railcar in FWWM but he didn't always do it until he is given the route back there from the Lodge and at that point the alternate reality collapses. Laura does not die and therefore her death does not cause the massive outpouring of grief and suffering (and garmonbozia) throughout the town which was expected and part of The Mother's plan (assuming Sarah is The Mother - there's an interesting scene in S2 where it's possible to infer she knows what's going on in the house and willing consumes the drugged drink Leland brings her, as she starts crying in front of her mirror at bedtime before the drink is brought to her).

Laura is not murdered and escapes to Texas. Through regression therapy and other techniques (I'm not a trauma counsellor, I have no idea) Laura creates the Carrie Page persona as an alternate identity to cope with the horrors she was subjected to but doesn't cope with reality as a adult any better than she did as a teenager and so grabs "Richard's" offer to 'get outta Dodge' with both hands because it's better than whatever's coming to her. An imagined noise (Sarah shouting her name) causes the created narrative to collapse and she remembers everything.

Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home

Of course that's clearly bollocks. Superficially this is far more like MHD or IE or Lost Highway but I think it goes much deeper than that.

My hot (theoretical) take:

This is Lynch on Lynch: The Movie.

Lynch has said this is it, the end. And he is Laura/Dale at the conclusion, trapped in recursion of his own volition. To a degree, his career is about refinements of the same core ideas about identity expressed through dreams, duplicates and surrealism that he has worked on his entire life with varying degrees of public understanding. "What year is it?" transposes for "What film is it?" or "How far am I down my repeated message?"

And by explaining, he shows us his influences. We get scene replications from Wizard of Oz and Carnival of Souls, literally Sunset Boulevard on screen (which turns out to be the key to understanding) and heavy use of imagery from Magritte and Bacon. The 'plot', such as it is, is a tour through his cinematic career, his paintings, his music, his sculpture and the implicit why of his creation. It's a documentary posing as a narrative, like Tierra Sin Pan.

Post on the #TwinPeaks newsgroup from the day after the season 2 finale aired back in 1991. *Mike voice* Is it future... or is it past? pic.twitter.com/wOM8HPPCjt

— Andy Kelly (@ultrabrilliant) September 4, 2017

Quite a few scenes popping in my head, wondering why they were there, like Ashley Judd arguing with her ill husband. You could ask this about so many scenes of course but some seem more significant than others.

Perhaps a lot of us fans are reading a lot into what might be purely aesthetic choices and scenes created just because they wanted to work with certain actors.

ha i completely forgot about ashley judd's ill husband, it feels like years ago

^otm. we are dreaming the dream with them. in the end it really doesn't matter the reason for any one scene because the meta reason is bringing the actors together again and creating new mysteries from there.

i took Ben/Ashley's storyline to be a resolution for his character sleeping w a married woman in the original series. now when he refuses Ashley Judd he is told "You're a good man". that scene from way back when we walks in with all the religious books, determined to be a good person, this is who he is now.

im seeing a lot of confusion (not itt just in general) about Cooper ending up with Diane rather than Annie but it makes sense to me. he has to do karmic penance for what his doppleganger did to Diane. early on he asks her "Do you remember everything?" so her crying and covering his face felt like working through that trauma.

it was good to see Shelly/Norma at the diner. but for real you can't expect every person to not go anywhere in 25 years and keep the same jobs. herein lies the false-ness of the dream Twin Peaks season 3 many people feel cheated out of (what they "Want, not need"). there is something almost Judy about wanting to keep people trapped in that cycle. for that reason Ed/Norma felt real and their resolution felt earned. at least it was as real as anything else this season.

dgaf about annie but her appearance in pt 17 was the only part I was iffy about - I know people emerging from the lodge have all this extra knowledge but jumping immediately into a makeout sesh with her rapist didn't seem to be doing right by the character at all. Part 18 and the (deeply upsetting and horrible) sex scene vindicated it in my eyes tho

It occurred to me in a dream last night (and so may have zero relevance/applicability or may be the absolute and unimpeachable truth) that the scenes which take place in the liminal spaces are the anchors to the entire narrative, and while I think the depictions of those spaces are merely loose interpretations of the phenomena taking place (e.g. I don't think the Fireman is literally a backwards-talking giant), the events taking place within the various Lodges and Rooms have perhaps the highest claim to some sort of objective (or at least relatively immutable) truth of anything that happened in the series. Once you've entered one of those spaces, you are linked to it timelessly. Your seeming departure from that space is simultaneous with your inevitable return because that space encompasses all times simultaneously, but every departure interferes with and alters the reality outside of that space.

Look, I'm still trying to piece this together, okay? It had a(n Owl Cave) ring of truth to it, though.

Did we see a single owl at any point in the entire season?

one flies overheard when Good Coop/Dougie gets home to the family for the first time iirc

thought i saw a few owls flying over dougie's (and only dougie's) house a few times, also over dale when he's first dropped off at dougie's house. maybe ONE ONE NINE was an owl too, fuck it who knows

oh god and now i'm remembering all those red herrings balloons

red herrings balloons

Everything we see, and the source of the glitching and other visual inconsistencies (like the "Where's Billy?" diner scene) are a result of that reality breaking down. It is in superposition; it never existed because Cooper always stopped Laura going to the railcar in FWWM but he didn't always do it until he is given the route back there from the Lodge and at that point the alternate reality collapses.

It's the most literal take, but at the same time we don't want this to happen, we don't want Cooper to have succeeded in his mission, because doing so would retcon literally everything that happens in the entire original series. And Lynch knows we don't want that, it's better to be Janey and Sonny Jim and live your life happily ever after with the fake Cooper in blissful ignorance.

Did we see a single owl at any point in the entire season?

There's a little ceramic owl on the counter behind Truman when he's talking to Cooper's doppelganger. (And maybe it's in other shots of Truman at his desk too, I just didn't notice it until 17.)

sorry if this was already discussed, but what did we think of cooper's face being overlaid over that entire scene in the sheriff's office? to me, it really created a feeling that the happy ending/resolution in twin peaks was not real. it was really disconcerting.

also i realized that the guy who plays chad reminds me of john ritter.

watching that snl sketch, phil hartman's leland palmer is amazing

Sarah stabbing the photo of Laura v reminiscent of opening shot of FWWM

― flappy bird, Monday, September 4, 2017 10:59 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I need to watch this part again, because I swear that after the glass broke and she kept stabbing, the picture itself wasn't showing any damage. As if attempting to destroy Laura, even in memory, wasn't possible.

Thoughts about this being Judy doing the stabbing?

The other thing that's occurred to me was that when Jeffries was showing Cooper a series of symbols, the final ambiguous eight/infinity had that dot that I was trying to unravel

It's a marker of where Cooper was on his journey. When he and Diane chose to travel through.. whatever.. on the road next to the power lines, they were crossing the middle of the infinity symbol into the other loop

sciatica almost had it a week ago with the Quantum Leap references, although no one predicted that Cooper would really pull a Quantum Leap

Xxxpost I think you're right about the Laura photo -- as I was watching I was like 'where are the holes and stab marks'? Sarah was not doing any damage to it.

prob bc time was stuttering back and forth

Rewatching the purple zone sequence from episode three Naido covers Cooper's face with her hands in a similar way that Diane does in 18.

Can anyone remind me why:

- people think Sarah is Judy?
- people think Naido is real Diane?

I think it's just in the nature of how the character appears (or doesn't appear) throughout the various series/movie that there may not ultimately be a "real" Diane. But fwiw (and I think I alluded to this at the time) the tulpa Diane was constantly smoking (gotta light? etc) whereas I don't think redhead real Diane ever did.

NA and mh - that was my take on both of this scenes as well. The entire BOB resolution in the sheriff's dept was very dreamlike, from the group of characters observing it to the all-powerful garden glove to the face of Cooper superimposed on it. It was one of the least "real" scenes in the entire finale.

And the dot approaching the crossroads of the 8/infinity symbol has to refer to time folding in on itself, or overlapping planes, or opportunities to switch between timelines, or something

I guess if we assume Naido is the "real" Diane, then all earthly manifestations of Diane are tulpas, and Cooper's taped messages about his investigation into the murder of Laura Palmer were potentially being transmitted to the purple room/white Lodge, for the beings there to monitor his progress.

Or when Mr. C created the evil Diane tulpa the real Diane was transported to the purple room in the form of Naido, and became trapped there.

good morning everybody!

The latter is what's strongly implied xp

for a variety of reasons, I found the finale, especially the final sequence in the alternate reality (or whatever we're calling it) to be almost unbearably sad. Poor Cooper (and Laura).

Definite 'Final Boss' moment to Freddie vs Bob.

i can understand sarah = judy from a superficial level, it kind of explains the face-removal stuff, suggests an option for what happened with the bug crawling into the girl's mouth, and creates a neater package in the sense that "judy" is an actual person who can be located, but it doesn't feel right to me. "judy" is a big evil force, maybe the weird cloud-angel thing we see create bob and the other orbs in episode 8, not something that's contained in one person. and i think someone said this, but sarah being judy muddles the meaning of laura's life even further. i guess maybe sarah could be controlled or influenced by "judy" but even that seems too straightforward at this point.

Or when Mr. C created the evil Diane tulpa the real Diane was transported to the purple room

i think mr. c took her to the room above the convenience store and deliberately left her there. somehow she matriculated to the purple room

"judy" is a big evil force, maybe the weird cloud-angel thing we see create bob and the other orbs in episode

I feel like Cole's speech about Judy made this abundantly clear

still disappointed that freddie and evil cooper never arm-wrestled

xpost I found it sad as well. A slow, overwhelming feeling of hopelessness as soon as Carrie answered her door. You knew it wasn't going to tie up neatly. There's no way.

btw early Sunday morning before the finale I received a series of bizarre texts from an unknown number asking among other things "Are you excited for the PEAKING" and "Will this be the END OF BOB?" The latter one I received several times. I had a good 10 min freak out before I learned it was my father-in-law texting from a non-network connected device because his phone broke.

The woodsmen brought Mr C back to life when Ray shot him dead. They turned up and were doing the same at the Sheriff's, but Mr C stayed dead. Does that suggest that they weren't actually bringing Mr C back to life (either time), but looking after BOB? And so it was BOB that caused Mr C to come back to life the first time, but couldn't this time because he got punched with a green glove?

(post in response to Shakey)

/ Or when Mr. C created the evil Diane tulpa the real Diane was transported to the purple room/

i think mr. c took her to the room above the convenience store and deliberately left her there. somehow she matriculated to the purple room

Yeah it's this, the tulpa (who I wouldn't call evil btw) related the original Diane's memory of being raped & taken to the convenience store. She's been stuck between world since, like Dale

i think it's interesting how the tulpas look like and retain the memories of the original people (at least to some degree) but are not necessarily exactly like the originals in any other way. makes me think of like separated twin development studies.

Brad that sounds right, I forgot about that part of Diane's speech.

I agree wins, "evil" was just a quick shorthand

Yeah, and I think the tulpa's disturbed telling of that story, just before being shot, kind of illustrates how it's possible for the different versions of these characters to briefly tap into each other's experiences

RE: Diane being in the purple room, Jeffries is also in one of those rooms (judging by the look of it), which was also accessible via the convenience store.

I think the Diane tulpa wasn't completely aware she was fake, and was doing things for Mr. C without full knowledge or understanding of her actions, until she got that text message that unlocked all of her memories. And it was way too much, which is why she was really glitching.

As ridiculous as my guessing about all of the players being gathered at the sheriff's station, I'm glad we got to see it play out!

Kinda feel like there's an argument to be made that any 'real-world' manifestation of a person who's entered a Lodge or Waiting Room is something like a tulpa. Or at least no longer the person they were before entering that liminal space. Perhaps MIKE and the Fireman and Srs. Dido were originally actual people who are still able to manifest in the real world but have become something completely other (e.g. Phillip Jeffries). BOB seems to be a definite exception, as he's apparently just Judy spawn.