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

I thought cicadas bred in 13 and 17 year cycles? (a very quick google seems to confirm this)

Yeah shakey's reaction is almost exactly mine but without the "were people really pissed off?" q at the start

xp take it up with whoever said that

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6y5dpt/s3e18_cooper_saves_the_day_once_and_for_all/

Someone on reddit has a happy ending theory.

When someone is possessed by Satan, nobody takes that to mean that Satan is entirely contained and represented by that person. Satan's still in hell, sitting on his throne, and also in the person, possessing them.

xp aldo - i like that analysis. i think there's definitely something to the lack of electricity sounds over the final "FROST/LYNCH" title card - Judy has been defeated. but we don't know if Cooper & Laura will ever escape from the 4th layer of alternate reality hell that they've sunk into. Things can't just pop nicely back into place.

At least one 'happy' aspect of the ending is that Coop was able to undo the actions of his doppelganger. In a way, wrapping the narrative in a tidy bow would've resulted in a much darker ending for him inasmuch as he'd be forced to reckon with the awful things done by some shadow aspect of himself over the course of twenty-five years.

I wonder if Lynch regrets the angel imagery in FWWM, since it doesn't reappear at all in TR iirc and maybe encourages a conventional quasi-Christian teleological interpretation that seems pretty far removed from his late work.

I was almost worried that it'd be literally him trying to put the genie back in the bottle when he checked into the motel, that he'd somehow traveled back to the time before the atomic bomb explosion, to try to keep Judy from gaining access to our world.

I thought he'd gone to the 1950s to keep the locust frog from getting into Sarah.

angels flank the golden Laura orb in part 8. xp

Until the morning-after goodbye note, anyway. xp to self

The same angel is in Andy's vision when he meets the Fireman.

I was similarly worried that that was where it was going (another futile attempt to undo the past, just as he'd just done in the forest in TP with Laura) but then it became clear they'd gone into some alternate reality with the hotel/doppelDiane, inexplicable bummer sex scene, "Richard and Linda" etc.

xp

the electricity finally goes out in the Palmer house.

yeah i think i said upthread that this seems fundamentally..."good," if not happy exactly

like how can you be possessed by an evil ceiling fan if your electricity's kaputt

yes. if nothing else, Cooper sacrificed himself in a noble effort to prevent the evil that killed Laura from ever manifesting again. "Electricity" - it's all gone at the end. but the credits roll over that terrifying closeup of Laura whispering into Cooper's ear - he looks horrified, and I imagine she's telling him about being stuck in a loop, trapped forever in an infinity of madness - this mitigates the very clear imagery & sound of the ending where we see all Electricity eliminated.

haha, i don't know, the electricity shorting out and laura palmer screaming her guts out doesn't seem like a happy ending to me

also, I said this upthread, but I take solace in the unambiguous happy ending for Dougie, Janey-E, and Sonny Jim. Cooper not only saved their lives, he improved them.

haha, i don't know, the electricity shorting out and laura palmer screaming her guts out doesn't seem like a happy ending to me

― Karl Malone, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 1:47 PM (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the electricity going out surely indicates a defeat of Judy though right? yes, Cooper & Laura are trapped, probably forever - but that elimination of electricity indicates they succeeded, if not for themselves, for others.

pleasantly surprised by Gordon providing a little exposition, finally dropping that he knows what Judy is, and that he somehow knows about Jeffries' fate

how did it put it, about Jeffries not really being a person?

xposts

also, remember that the electricity "going out" can also mean a surge of electricity, too much electricity. my first reaction when i saw it was to think that evil had come to this hitherto normal household.

how did it put it, about Jeffries not really being a person?

― mh, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 10:50 AM (twenty-nine seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in a traditional sense (i'm paraphrasing)

also the reverse shot, in the theater/lodge room, where you could see an entire room of what looked like power transformers or something in the background -- were they actually machines like Jeffries? was it a bunch of people who had become some sort of spirit battery things?

I'm thinking no, because Jeffries was more of a percolator

also, I said this upthread, but I take solace in the unambiguous happy ending for Dougie, Janey-E, and Sonny Jim. Cooper not only saved their lives, he improved them.

the flipside of this is that maybe cooper BROUGHT evil to the nu-palmer household in the final scene

angels flank the golden Laura orb in part 8. xp

I just rewatched the scene and this is not true.

It's a sad story - it's twin peaks - and Dale Cooper's tragedy is that he doesn't understand that he doesn't to make it anything else. The ending of fire walk with me is always in play, though: that rapturous, radical ending that could only be achieved by ignoring dolt coop's "don't take the ring, Laura". His stunt in part 17, trying yet again to prevent her death (but notably not the years of trauma that preceded it), is a whole other level of "you don't fucking get it, do you?" The ending is a kind of "happy" one for Laura because it's a return to the status quo of fwwm, i.e. Laura owns her story (which, yes, involves screaming). Remember that Laura, the whisperer, is the one who holds all the knowledge that coop can't grasp, and she kisses him and smiles before whispering into his ear.

Obviously it isn't a happy ending for Dale but I don't think it's necessarily that bleak; Dale is lost but lynch has only given him, oh I dunno INFINITY chances to get it right. How long was Philip Jeffries bumbling between dimensions/times/stories/dreams, screaming and babbling like an idiot, before he stopped existing and learned to chill the fuck out? I think Cooper will eventually make his way home to join Laura and the angels.

xxp karl - good point. ha, actually Cooper & Laura fucked up the reality of that family & that Twin Peaks. but the lack of the electricity sound over the final "FROST/LYNCH" card is important - it overloaded, it was too much, and now it's gone.

He doesn't *get* to xp to me

The strongest argument for a non-teleological reading of The Return btw is that the open-endedness means I can never end my Showtime subscription.

So to circle back to the glass box, was it made more or less clear that Mr. C was the funder of that whole thing? At this point I don't even remember.

how fucking cool was it to hear "fire, walk with me" from MIKE

god, I need to rewatch

"the open-endedness means I can never end my Showtime subscription"

oh, I did this yesterday. torrenting the series for rewatches for now.

Through the darkness of future's past,
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds...
"Fire... walk with me."

how fucking cool was it to hear "fire, walk with me" from MIKE

I'm glad al strobel got to speak forward in this

New revelations for me: Jack Nance is the star of Eraserhead! Mark Frost written Hill Street Blues and two Fantastic Four films!

he should get an award for his delivery of the fwwm lines imo

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).

This is where I'm still at two days later. Still weighed down by that abyssal sadness.

The first thing that happened at work this morning was me and the two other major twin peaks fans in the office had breakfast and talked about the finale. When I started talking about that slow motion end credits sequence I felt myself almost tearing up.

He's a fucking great actor, such presence xp

I don't want to do the thing where every beautiful, magical piece of this series is a literal reference

but the little voice in the back of my head is mumbling "Cooper... is the magician"

he should get an award for his delivery of the fwwm lines imo

― mh, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 11:07 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

total chills

the future's past!

or is it "futures past"

wins is suuuuuper-OTM re: Coop's cluelessness in attempting to 'save' Laura at the very point in time where she's been ground all the way down and is ready and willing to sacrifice herself in order to resist BOB's influence. Thwarting that moment of self-sacrifice seems not only beside the point but almost thoughtlessly cruel. It robs her of her most powerful expression of agency through the course of that horror, and it probably wouldn't have done much more than hinder BOB's activities. There's always another Teresa/Laura/Ronette/Maddy around the corner.

Yeah bad coop has this absurdly complicated master plan spanning years and involving umpteen failsafes, umpteen accomplices, and early in part 17 it's shown once and for all how futile and point-missing his whole quest was.

Also early in part 17 we find out that good coop has had this absurdly complicated master plan all along, involving &c &c!

Should be obvious how that's gonna go and the story of Richard (a kind of synthesis of the two coops) confirms it

The narrow somewhat solipsistic drive to "save" the victim by solving their crime is very true to cop psychology in true crime and crime fiction, maybe in real life too.

the saddest thing to me is that Cooper explicitly chooses his fate (Diane asking him "are you sure you want to go through with this?")

Great posts wins

Sorry if this is obvious to everybody else, but what was Dark Cooper after? I never really had a clear sense of what his end game was supposed to be, beyond chasing coordinates

annihilating everyone and everything that good Cooper loved?

Main takeaway from today's breakfast discussion that I wanted to post here: the part of the giant-coop conversation at the very beginning of The Return where he tells him (warns him) to 'remember' Richard and Linda, 430, 2 birds with one stone -- that exchange could be the last thing chronologically in the whole show. Cooper patently does not remember Richard and Linda when he reads the motel note - they take care to have him mutter 'Richard and Linda?' - but the giant could be cautioning him, 'afterward', against repeating the folly we see him commit throughout episode 18.

Great point about the surge, Karl

I've never read Pope, much less quote him, but came across this today and it stuck out:

Like following life through creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect