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

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.

that one bugs me but only bc i don't get the ulysses summary

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

Curious to hear what they are, b/c I don't really see any. The Leftovers finale was so down to earth and human and self-contained; you could almost understand it even if you hadn't seen the series, because it told a stand-alone story. The TP finale... did not.

I enjoyed The Return much more than the Leftovers, which I think is strangely overrated, but that Leftovers finale was an incredible hour of TV. Lynch went that exact opposite route with the TP finale, vastly expanding the scope of an already massive story instead of wrapping everything up

I guess there are some parallels between the finale Justin Theroux/Carrie Coon scenes and those final Cooper/Laura scenes, but the Leftovers finale really breathes and just gives these characters we've grown to know space to exist and be themselves. That's something The Return finale really denied us. We never got that final catchup/decompression time with Cooper as Cooper (or even Laura as Laura)

I guess I meant more in terms of the identity play, and having the "plot" elements mostly be wrapped up in the penultimate episode to make way for something more intimate

Thread isn't marked for leftovers spoilers lads

enh Leftovers is about as spoilable as TP is

Doubledown spoiler dude not cool

yeah can't tell what's sarcasm or not but I promise nothing in this thread has spoiled anything about Leftovers

Also yeah I can see that Simon. [Leftovers spoilers] That Leftovers finale worked so well and was so simple and pure I'm kinda amazed more shows don't try to do something like it[/end spoilers]

I wasn't making a direct comparison between the finales, but between the shows, for their mystery and mysticism and confusion and wackiness. They're oddly similar I think in certain ways, and totally opposite in other ways. FWIW, I didn't love the first two seasons, but the second two seasons I was totally obsessed with and think deserve the kind of following The Return gets.

also Lindelof is a massive TP fan

Has it already been noted that Coop/Dougie is in the same situation in The Return as Rita was in MH? Both stumble into Naomi Watts' home bearing mysterious bags of money.

I wonder if that whole plot line was originally intended for the MH TV series. I could easily see Rita's plot getting more tangled with the Castigliane brothers in a similar manner as Dougie's adventures with the Mitchum brothers.

Regarding the Sarah-Judy connection discussed and partially dismissed at times above: I don't think Judy is Sarah or even is in Sarah, but, as was also discussed earlier in this thread, Sarah's grief may have opened her up to some type of influence/connection. I remain very skeptical about the idea of the girl in New Mexico being Sarah; instead, what kind of sold me on the idea that there is a Sarah-Judy connection is the very fact that Cooper makes such a point of bringing Laura (?) to her mother, which in the context of the finale very much strikes me as an attempt to fulfill the somewhat mysterious plan to access Judy that Gordon hints at at the start of Part 17. "Saving" Laura and challenging Judy: two birds with one stone! It's all bound to remain speculation though, and it's not a hill I'd wanna die on, given the beautiful radical openness of the finale.

fwiw i just watched this rad thing and michael j anderson's part is "the woodsman (twin a)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0tPCEDr0x8

(Not exactly "news" but...)

"It's too early to talk [#TwinPeaks s4], if it were to happen, you wouldn't see anything in the next 2 or 3 years." – David Lynch last night

— Nikola Tamindzic (@NikolaTamindzic) September 14, 2017

What year is this?

I may want to revisit TP in 2-3 years but I feel like it's ended. I'd rather see a new Lynch project.

I really enjoyed the baffled thing that akm posted (thanks) but for now and for a long while, I'm out. Adios!

I may want to revisit TP in 2-3 years but I feel like it's ended. I'd rather see a new Lynch project.

^ i'm with matthewK on all of that

I'm kinda the opposite - never got the "I'm less interested in new twin peaks than new lynch" thing, the appeal was equally both to me. Now, though, it feels done. And a lot of the point of the return had to do with the quarter-century gap between sequel and antecedent.

I mean I'm not gonna pretend I wouldn't show up for this lol

yeah, i'm with you, i would show up for just about anything now! i feel like a dick but the return, inland empire, and mulholland drive are my three favorites of his.the original twin peaks, eraserhead, blue velvet, and lost highway aren't far behind. but that's really something, i think, to be able to convince at least one person that your last three major projects in a fairly long career and distinguished career are your best. and i bet that i'm not alone there.

Yeah totally!

It'd be really fanservicey but I dream of a Dougie spinoff that follows the joneses and the Mitchums and the andies and the fuscos and lucky 7. Dougie2 would have all OG dougie's memories but none of dale's so he wouldn't remember any of his interactions with the casino people, leading to much confusion and frustration.

haha, that would be really anti-fanservicey, or maybe servicing a totally different set of fans. he should do another 30 minute sitcom of Dougie's life.