The stars turn: the TWIN PEAKS 2017 spoiler thread

Well, shit.

And if some kind mod could change that to "stars" in the thread title so I look like less of an idiot in my haste that would be nice

welp

3+4 just went up, talk to you clowns in 3 hours

(1 extra for collecting myself, maybe)

same

God dammit, I won't be able to watch 3+4 until tomorrow so I'm steering clear until then. But man oh man the first two <3

Also the chromatics owe lunch at least $30

Oh fuck it we're watching 3 right now

God this day has been awesome

Lynch!

David

Love I

The evolution of the arm was genuinely unsettling and an elegant workaround given Michael J Anderson's instability of late, and the attempted passage out of the Lodge reminded me more strongly of the more abstract passages in Eraserhead than anything Lynch's done since. (I have to wait until tomorrow at least to watch episodes 3 and 4, so I'll be staying out of this thread until then.)

do I need to watch the original Twin Peaks before watching this

Yes

It won't make sense unless you've watched the series and Fire Walk with Me.

I mean, insofar as it makes sense so far.

Well sky are being slowcoaches about putting the next two up so I will just say

Loved what they did with the arm, I got huge eraserhead vibes too

The red room is as weird as ever but it feels a bit like some of the "good" lodge inhabitants are speaking a bit too plainly at times?

I guess they recast Jeffries & maybe maj Briggs too?!

?!?!?!?????!

James is cool

Oh & I was in bits @ log lady

Yes, very pleasantly surprised by how reminiscent of Eraserhead this was in places.

So...that was Jacques tending bar at the end, yes?

I think I laughed harder at "James is cool" than any other line in the first two episodes.

It definitely looked like Jacques!

Also, yes, the Log Lady scenes were heartbreaking.

I do appreciate that Lynch decided to not just maintain the continuity of having a bad Dale running free in the world but to completely upend any sense of fan service by making him irredeemably awful.

Matthew Lillard has aged worse than anyone who was on the show.

took me a minute to place it, but did the arm reminded me of the gamesters of triskelion

http://i.imgur.com/JvDohgA.jpg

Now tv still not coming through 😔 might have to go to bed!

The violence/horror in this was so upsetting tho I don't know that I want to sleep lol. The South Dakota & New York scenes are the stuff of nightmares

The palmer house is still a hellish place

A small part of me hopes Robert Forster's part in this is as large as his role in mulholland dr & we just get told he's gone fishin every week until the finale where he's in it for one minute

Btw Frank Silva was credited as BOB in pt 2, did I miss something?

i'm about to start 4. three was the best yet. this is....really something

xpost Just a brief repurposed scene of Bob and Doppelcooper in the Black Lodge from the final episode.

i guess the only grievance i have is the occasionally really artificial quality of the effects (and which is probably magnified for me by how this is filmed digitally) but even in this respect they remind me of lynch's animation

Ah god I have to bail if pt 3 chatter is starting up, fuckin rupert murdoch son of a bitch

Enjoy, those of you who can! :-)

I'm determined to wait on 3 and 4 until next week, so I'll probably be bowing out of here soon. I'm just still kinda reeling over this. It's actually happening, and so far it's actually exactly what I hoped for (a new Lynch project that actually feels like a natural progression from his recent work and that continues the story of Twin Peaks in ways that are completely unpredictable and that sears a number of unique and indelible moments onto my brain).

The thing that came out of the box, the other thing sitting on the prison bunk, the evolution of the arm, the various distortions within the Red Room...they're all already enshrined among the pantheon of unshakable Lynch imagery. And I'm only two effing hours in.

Oh, and MacLachlan squishing the old dude's face. Momentarily hilarious until you realize what ultimately occurred. That's our Lynch

Only watched up to episode 3 but shit, this is really good!

Straight up near cried during the Log Lady scenes...

What about goddamn Jerry Horne, btw! So much stuff I've already almost forgotten. I may need the week of downtime to rewatch.

hahahahahaha holy fucking shit @ cera

i just came here to say the same thing

Okay, yes, I'm out. You guys have fun and we can all talk about Cera next week.

my initial feeling is that it's like if you took every aspect of TP (except, notably, for the soapiness) and amplified it tenfold - the banal parts are more banal, the goofy bits are goofier, the infuriating bits are more infuriating, the surreal bits are much more intensely surreal.

i wanna celebrate a specific thing about episode three but i think i'll wait until tomorrow when more ppl have seen it

needless to say this is everything i could hope for

there's even a minor soapy moment wrt the principal and his wife! i loved it

yes that is true, felt like a brief resurrection of catherine

14 more hours of this doesn't seem like enough lol

14 more hours of mr. jackpots

brad can you give me a hint about the particular thing in ep 3

well now i can't remember if it was ep 3 or 4, but it's when bobby sees a picture

Critical scene: delivering shovels to Dr. Jacobi

I appreciated how disconnected and nearly unintellible the first episode was. But by the end of the second, it felt like all the strands were coming together. This show is truly uncompromising. Love it.

I imagine the room with the glass box is probably some wing in Lynch's house where he conducts his experiments with time and space.

only two episodes in, far far better than i was expecting. the cinematography in particular is staggering (except the weirdly conspicuous effects as bradnelson mentioned upthread). biggest distraction/downside so far is this is the whitest thing i've seen since the last australian thing i saw.

He saw those "frog moths" in the desert when he was young. I have wondered if the mechanical chickens in Eraserhead also draw on them. It's perhaps one of those things from his own early-life experience, like the naked woman in the bushes, that never seems too far from his thoughts.

Sorry, I misremembered: he saw them not in the desert but in the former Yugoslavia, travelling with Jack Nance.

Back in 2017/18 I found a likely candidate for the species he saw but I can't find it now

Ah yes, the mole cricket

https://i.imgur.com/MvCCJu6.jpeg

Sorry, as in 2021 that's not quite the right species, based on the Yugoslavia geography. Should be this one, the Gryllotalpa stepposa:

https://www.biodiversity4all.org/observations/53407465

https://i.imgur.com/0GOwqtQ.jpeg

Does look very likely. We have mole crickets in Tasmania, they’re wonderful. The Yugoslavia story is the one told in Quinoa.

I really like this, which turns up a few times (tied to the Patrick Fischler/Ike subplot):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4nAvDXpvHk

A bit of nitpicky puzzlement, plus some praise.

When Hawk and Bobby lock up James and the guy with the green glove, there is no interaction whatsoever between Bobby and James--no words, not even a glance. They kind of have a history, so that seemed odd.

The death of Margaret is moving, in context but especially knowing that it mirrored real life. Didn't realize till reading up that Catherine Coulson died two years before the show aired. Hawk--Michael Horse--is one of the best things for me throughout S3.

why do i feel like Lynch actually had a first person story related to what ended up happening to Matthew Lillard's character?

Alternate title: 24 Hours to Tulpa. Just noticed tonight that Special Agent Randall Headley is played by Jay R. Ferguson--Stan from Mad Men!

(I used to like him in Spirit, too.)

I love that line;
"Wilson, how many times have I told *yoooou*! This is what we do in the FBI!"

Third time through, and that's enough. Same as before: liked about half, 1,001 complaints and questions, what an ending. As Cooper and Laura walked up the staircase to the old house, I felt it so viscerally this time. And the expression on Laura's face is beyond description.

Watching this for the first time. I'm on e5 and I am looooving it. Seriously one of my favourite Lynch things I can think of. If I were to nitpick (which is a complaint I had with s1 and 2) is that it can be a little "okay, come on I get it, make the plot move on a bit please", but that would be to quibble with Lynchianism itself, and who am I to do that?

That is an ongoing complaint of mine, and I guess I'm less forgiving. It's part and parcel of who he is, I know. But me complaining is part and parcel of who I am!

Anyway, watching something this long three time is a compliment in and of itself. I did find the fabled E8 less impressive this time--I think that's one where the confoundment and shock the first time through really counts.

xxp Well i hope you can maintain that feeling!

i love The Return.. will have to rewatch sometime

Feels like Lynch’s love of TM and the meditative longeurs in The Return are faces of the same coin. It’s deeply concerned with time, age and mortality.

I love the whole thing. Sure there are indulgences and dead ends and incoherence, but if you give any director 18 hours to work with, I think you’re going to get a lot of that. There’s not a single episode that doesn’t have at least a few moments of magic, And overall I just found it immersive and kind of astounding. It’s so unlikely that it ever got made, I’m grateful that it did.

(xpost) I love meditative longeurs, even a whole film like that (The Straight Story is a great example); for me, it's more the one-joke scenes that go on well past the point where you've gotten the joke.

lol well the Dougie storyline is pretty much except stretched to 12 episodes or whatever it is. But to me the endless delay in the return of Cooper just became funnier the longer it went on.

pretty much that, I mean.

I get it--Dougie will elicit a very subjective response. I did have some fun this time trying to guess whether he'd repeat the last word or the last two words of the previous speaker. The wiseguy in me wants to put on my best David Spade voice and say "I liked Dougie Jones better the first time...when he was named Chauncey Gardiner." Except truthfully, Chauncey was also a case of a little-goes-a-long-way for me.

I liked The Straight Story and Being There, but I thought that the Dougie storyline was much more enigmatic.

I think, in regard to The Return, that:

The jokes that are extended to the point of being painful, the focus on the dullness of old age and dementia, the awkward acting and sudden moments of melodrama and violence, the lavish setting of the Red Room/Black Lodge, the presence of iconic actors freaking out, the jarring tonal shifts, the almost creepy jauntiness of some of it (although I guess that that could describe the first two seasons even better), the adjacent deaths of so many of the actors...

- all of that on top of a very deep sense of arcana and mystery pervading so much of the story and so many of the scenes, even the live music scenes, even when dissecting it down to a microscopic level - those are all things I loved about it

As a fan of regular Cooper, one of the real highlights for me was his reappearance on the hospital bed and immediately taking charge--and the joke of everyone barely noticing ("more assertive" and such) was good.

immersive

The best word for it. I gave into it and went under its spell and in return I got to live in a strange world for 18 hours.

https://i.imgur.com/lDDvAoL.jpeg

This scene could've been an entire episode, and I would've been fine with it.

My wife and I started rewatching this tonight. I'm turning into more of a binge-er, would watch this in three or four big sessions, but she wants to stick with two episodes at a time, twice a week.

Regardless of the character's place in the overall structure of The Return (and I've read some interesting speculations on that) I think MacLachlan's choices in playing Dougie were very much informed by dementia. Specifically the experience of family members knowing who that person is, but only rarely seeing flashes, and hoping for a return which never comes. I have deep respect for the pathos and dignity he brings to the character, who could have just been goofy, but instead is always empathetic, serious, and focused on what's happening, and trying to understand. The sequence with the case files is comical at first, but becomes transcendent as Bushnell realises what's going on. On first viewing it seemed like a shared hallucination but it became more about someone with important things to say working tooth and nail to overcome a huge communication barrier.
I think the best thing about The Return is the overwhelming empathy Lynch has for his characters and humanity in general - obviously there are terrible acts and awful people and evil in this world, but the empathy is what stays with me.

Yeah Dougie is a complex character, not just a joke. He is funny, but he's also warm and strange and disconcerting. McLachlan plays all of those scenes so well — thinking right now of when he tries to drink coffee and burns himself, the face he makes.

MacLachlan, oops

There is so much going on, literally so so much, that you get away with the lack of Dale Cooper. Although when Cooper did finally appear, I admit I may have punched the air and rewound it about eight times. A scene I had literally been waiting a lifetime for!

I haven’t seen it since the first showing, but one thing that really sticks out for me is the scene between Albert and Lynch and Diane at the restaurant – just one of the tensest scenes I’ve ever seen.

I liked the eighth episode but I preferred is regular groove.

*its

it's a secondary point i suppose -- technique more than content strictly speaking -- but as someone who in the 80s tended to (mis?)see maclachlan as a disappointingly limited actor who in the 90s found a strong one-note bit as coop*, i was struck by the calm ease with which he creates and inhabits and sustains two further convincing and very different characters here?

*ok and a second as ray manzarek working out beloved keyb riffs for the doors

idk he’s an excellent villain in showgirls AND the flinstones movie

showgirls is flintstones extended universe QED

Did someone say showgirls?

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/ddd/df3/149bb77108ff05b8eabfeb1356f852cfde-19-amy-shiels-2.jpg

Amy Shiels is the secret star of the Return

that meme of him in the flintstones asking "what year is this?" is perfection

Can anyone point me to a good explanation of the ending? I love it, but (sometimes, not always) I'm one of those stodgy literal types who thinks "But Laura was murdered...".

Hid that for the two people watching for the first time--not for the statement itself, which everyone knows.

Mark Frost made it tidy in his novelization, apparently:

https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/twin-peaks-the-return-finale-ending-explained-by-mark-frost.html

Which tracks, but for the me the real implied horror of that scene isn't just that Laura Palmer can't escape "Judy," it's that all of this is now happening in our reality, they went to the real house and the real homeowner answered the door. What year is it? It's 2017, and it's all happening again.

I'll read that, thanks--found another site, too, that worked off the premise that Cooper rescued Laura in the previous episode and got her to the White Lodge; I didn't pick up on that, because she separates from Cooper and then we hear her scream, but...I'm sure I'm missing stuff left and right. Really, I love the ending just for the awfulness of walking up those stairs to the old Palmer house; the explanation ultimately doesn't much matter to me.

i was struck by the calm ease with which he creates and inhabits and sustains two further convincing and very different characters here?

Yeah, amazing performances. Depending on how you think about it, you could argue he plays at least 5 different characters in The Return.

I do!

gonna echo the love for mclachlans dougie and i mean watch it any way you want but describing long running, meditative, repetitive things in the return as "the joke", even allowing for shorthand, i mean ..... consider not using shorthand i think? the rush to get to the criticism jars so much with how i watched and enjoyed this and hiw id think lynch enjoyed making it and what he wanted to do with it

you're watching it *all wrong* imo

too harsh, that

you have written about it in your posting *all wrong* but im sure it was just the shorthand

I mean, Dougie is lots of things, but he is definitely also funny and meant to be. But by "joke" in this instance I think it's more specifically the playing with audience expectations ("Cooper's back!") and deliberately thwarting them over and over, dragging it out. It's a conceptual joke, like a lot of Lynch's playing with forms and tropes etc.

Sonny Jim’s Super Deluxe Playground was so good

The only part I wasn’t sold on was the green glove guy. I wish an established character had the green glove and did what he did.