Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

[boske]

While we are waiting for the finale, we may as well have some fun speculating what the story would be about if it were to continue. Based on the zig-zag path it has traveled (pun intended), we are more likely to get another prequel: "Blue Desert Rose", telling the story of the original Dougie Jones' last seven days before he was beamed into the lodge:

• The first 30 minutes are about Dougie's accident and how he met Janey-E, and married her at the Elvis Wedding Chapel, then;
• How Dougie borrowed, bet, and lost money;
• How Janey-E was preparing for Sonny Jim's birthday;
• What those red balloons really mean;
• Some shady dealing Anthony had with those crooked cops;
• How Mitchum brothers helped Candie cope with personal past;
• Bushnell bending some iron rods in his office;
• Cameo by Steven and Becky in Vegas, where Steven lost all their money in a casino, and they go back to TP taking a bus ride, arguing all the way; They disorient the driver badly, who then veers off the road and crashes into the "Welcome to Twin Peaks" sign;
• A scene where 119 Mom finds the ring on her street which Janey-E gave Dougie (hey, remember that?!), and how she sells it for cash to a pretty woman called Betty from South Dakota;
• The scene where the elderly gambling lady has an argument with her son and is arraigned by the Fusco brothers; Bill Shaker and his wife are witnessing it all;
• A special musical appearance by Céline Dion;
• A short scene showing Gordon Cole in Philladelphia with a young attractive Scandinavian woman, buying a bottle of a very fine Bordeaux, tea pot, and an anti-dandruff shampoo;
• The movie ends with the climactic scene of Dougie and Jade getting into the car driving to the house across the street from 119 Mom who's playing solitaire in her room;

[Rialto]

About OAM/PG, yes, he does go around like a grumpy groundskeeper, but this "do you have a seed" line almost made him a Clippy-like character "It looks like you are generating a tulpa, I need a strand of hair from the back of your head". (for those who do not know I am talking of the old MS Office Clippy helper assistant).

Bwah hah hah!!

For some reason it won't let me quote the pic, bit that was the best bit

[Rialto]

My biggest fear now about the ending is that it will tie up all the loose ends and bring everything together. I can't imagine it ending up as anything other than another Episode 7-style superboring exposition dump.

I think I'd rather Cooper turned back into Dougie and spent the final two hours learning to go 'number two', than have all this mostly rambling nonsense 'explained'.

[mtwentz]

My biggest fear now about the ending is that it will tie up all the loose ends and bring everything together. I can't imagine it ending up as anything other than another Episode 7-style superboring exposition dump.

I think I'd rather Cooper turned back into Dougie and spent the final two hours learning to go 'number two', than have all this mostly rambling nonsense 'explained'.

You should post this in the Make Your Peace Now With The Ending You Dread thread . Gabriel posted some very funny scenarios there.

[judasbooth]

Well, here we are. Less than 24 hours away from the finale and I think most of the posters on this thread are approaching it with a mixture of sadness and relief. Relief because we are free of this bizarre purgatory in which we are compelled to stay with the show until the bitter end, and sadness because, despite what some may say, we never really got season 3 of Twin Peaks. An overlong and over-egged David Lynch-produced cable show with some old characters, but, sadly, not Twin Peaks. Although this is comfortably the longest thread on this board, and many posters, like myself, have written at length about their feelings, there is still no way to fully describe the sense of crushing disappointment I,and may others, feel about the whole affair. It's just a TV show, I know. But there have been loads of TV shows I've loved over the years and yet there was something ineffably special about Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks had more to spoil, and should have been left well alone.

Reboots of other classic shows I could take or leave - Twin Peaks was the only one I really wanted to come back. In retrospect, I should have known better. Tenuous link: when I was a teenager, I was positively obsessed with Pixies records (at the same time I was in a major Lynch phase - the Pixies covered the Lady in the Radiator song, and this made them even cooler in my eyes). They had long broken up at that point and all I wanted was for them to reform and make more music. Eventually they did, but despite my fandom (and I still love all those old records), I never went to see them and I made every effort to avoid hearing a note of any new music they made. Although I wanted them to come back, when they actually did I decided that they were better as a memory.

Yesterday I rewatched episode 16, and the final shot brought this feeling into even sharper focus for me. Audrey Horne, in a white room, seeing her face in the mirror sans makeup illustrated just what a wasted opportunity this series was. We have two more hours to go, and in all honesty, it just isn't possible to come up with a conclusion that will justify the preceding 16 hours of red herrings, wild goose chases, and narrative dead ends. The 25-year gap between series 2 and 3 presented the creators with an opportunity to do something no TV show has ever done before - take up the story in real time after a quarter of a century had passed. It's possible to argue that our world has changed more in the past 25 years than it has changed in the preceding 100, yet this seems to have been virtually ignored. Like Audrey, the show should have reexamined itself, acknowledged the passing of time, and tried to make sense of the people we knew all those years ago. We, of course, had hints of this - Bobby as a Sheriff's deputy, James Hurley as a caretaker, Ben as an elderly divorcee, but it was never developed in any sort of meaningful way and was instead drowned out by all manner of silliness, nonsense and characters who did nothing much and then died or were never heard from again. Twin Peaks: the Return should have been a character-driven show about time and memory, but all we got was a bunch of stuff and David Lynch in self-parody mode, rehashing his greatest hits (and some that never were - large parts of Cooper's odyssey were lifted from Lynch's undeveloped Ronnie Rocket screenplay from about 1000 years ago).

Are we filled with anticipation for the finale because it has all been building up to this moment, or becuase we just want it to end in a way that isn't a total disaster? What purpose did any of the plot threads (and I use the term in the loosest possible sense) serve? They started nowhere and ended just where they started. Did any of the new characters mean anything at all? Nope, they were mostly forgettable. The attempts at building mystery and anticipation have failed dismally - I can honestly say that there is nothing that I am dying to see resolved due to complete absence of drama and conflict in the series. There is nothing to resolve, apart from the plot that carried over from series 2.

Anyone who has ever attended a school reunion, or foolishly attempted to rekindle an old relationship, or met up with an old friend they had lost contact with, or visited the neighbourhood they grew up in will understand the meaning of the saying "you can't go home again". Much the same as the old saying that states you cannot step in the same river twice, because you are not the same person and it is not the same river. If only Cooper had found his way back to Twin Peaks three months ago, we could have seen how he, and the rest of the characters, dealt with this. Instead, it is the viewers who have found that rather than revisiting their old home, or trying to step in the same river, they have been sent to the wrong place and a different river. The only thing worse that revisiting the past is visiting a facsimile of the past. I wasn't looking for nostalgia, I just wanted something that would involve me in the way the original show did. In the end, I got neither.

[N. Needleman]

The Otis and Buella scene really seemed like the start of something, didn't it

Of what?

Of seeing into Boop's milieu and finding out his motivations and the life he's been leading for 25 years.

I think we've seen/heard a lot about his criminal enterprise over the last 25 years. Going beyond what we have would IMO be overkill.

I do find it telling that certain contributors to this thread foam at the mouth at almost any criticism of TR, but also jump at anyone who praises the original series or says it's superior to TR, highlighting this flaw and that. As already said, it seems some of them have highly ambivalent feelings toward the original TP, probably because they don't consider it to be "pure Lynch".

As I have said many times, my feelings towards the original series could not be less ambivalent. I adore it beyond reason, and I love the new series just as much.

[Agent Earle]

You don't have to answer for every one of TP: TR's lovers... Not every comment here is directed at you personally.

[Agent Earle]

HEAR, HEAR, judasbooth, as always! Yeah, maybe the bitterest of all truths on this late date, as this tepid affair draws to its merciful conclusion, is that some things really are better left alone, in the past where they belong. Oddly enough, TP would've remained more vibrant and alive had it been so, than it's gonna be after TR whistles its deathly tune, efficiently making it a thing of the past once and for all. So so sad.

[N. Needleman]

You don't have to answer for every one of TP: TR's lovers... Not every comment here is directed at you personally.

When I was directly referenced in the prior quote I like to make myself doubly clear. I'll do me, you do you.

[AhmedKhalifa]

Well, here we are. Less than 24 hours away from the finale and I think most of the posters on this thread are approaching it with a mixture of sadness and relief. Relief because we are free of this bizarre purgatory in which we are compelled to stay with the show until the bitter end, and sadness because, despite what some may say, we never really got season 3 of Twin Peaks. An overlong and over-egged David Lynch-produced cable show with some old characters, but, sadly, not Twin Peaks. Although this is comfortably the longest thread on this board, and many posters, like myself, have written at length about their feelings, there is still no way to fully describe the sense of crushing disappointment I,and may others, feel about the whole affair. It's just a TV show, I know. But there have been loads of TV shows I've loved over the years and yet there was something ineffably special about Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks had more to spoil, and should have been left well alone.

Reboots of other classic shows I could take or leave - Twin Peaks was the only one I really wanted to come back. In retrospect, I should have known better. Tenuous link: when I was a teenager, I was positively obsessed with Pixies records (at the same time I was in a major Lynch phase - the Pixies covered the Lady in the Radiator song, and this made them even cooler in my eyes). They had long broken up at that point and all I wanted was for them to reform and make more music. Eventually they did, but despite my fandom (and I still love all those old records), I never went to see them and I made every effort to avoid hearing a note of any new music they made. Although I wanted them to come back, when they actually did I decided that they were better as a memory.

Yesterday I rewatched episode 16, and the final shot brought this feeling into even sharper focus for me. Audrey Horne, in a white room, seeing her face in the mirror sans makeup illustrated just what a wasted opportunity this series was. We have two more hours to go, and in all honesty, it just isn't possible to come up with a conclusion that will justify the preceding 16 hours of red herrings, wild goose chases, and narrative dead ends. The 25-year gap between series 2 and 3 presented the creators with an opportunity to do something no TV show has ever done before - take up the story in real time after a quarter of a century had passed. It's possible to argue that our world has changed more in the past 25 years than it has changed in the preceding 100, yet this seems to have been virtually ignored. Like Audrey, the show should have reexamined itself, acknowledged the passing of time, and tried to make sense of the people we knew all those years ago. We, of course, had hints of this - Bobby as a Sheriff's deputy, James Hurley as a caretaker, Ben as an elderly divorcee, but it was never developed in any sort of meaningful way and was instead drowned out by all manner of silliness, nonsense and characters who did nothing much and then died or were never heard from again. Twin Peaks: the Return should have been a character-driven show about time and memory, but all we got was a bunch of stuff and David Lynch in self-parody mode, rehashing his greatest hits (and some that never were - large parts of Cooper's odyssey were lifted from Lynch's undeveloped Ronnie Rocket screenplay from about 1000 years ago).

Are we filled with anticipation for the finale because it has all been building up to this moment, or becuase we just want it to end in a way that isn't a total disaster? What purpose did any of the plot threads (and I use the term in the loosest possible sense) serve? They started nowhere and ended just where they started. Did any of the new characters mean anything at all? Nope, they were mostly forgettable. The attempts at building mystery and anticipation have failed dismally - I can honestly say that there is nothing that I am dying to see resolved due to complete absence of drama and conflict in the series. There is nothing to resolve, apart from the plot that carried over from series 2.

Anyone who has ever attended a school reunion, or foolishly attempted to rekindle an old relationship, or met up with an old friend they had lost contact with, or visited the neighbourhood they grew up in will understand the meaning of the saying "you can't go home again". Much the same as the old saying that states you cannot step in the same river twice, because you are not the same person and it is not the same river. If only Cooper had found his way back to Twin Peaks three months ago, we could have seen how he, and the rest of the characters, dealt with this. Instead, it is the viewers who have found that rather than revisiting their old home, or trying to step in the same river, they have been sent to the wrong place and a different river. The only thing worse that revisiting the past is visiting a facsimile of the past. I wasn't looking for nostalgia, I just wanted something that would involve me in the way the original show did. In the end, I got neither.

Thank you for this. Elegantly put, and I couldn't agree more. When I imagined a season 3 of TP, not in my wildest nightmares could I've come up with what we ended up with. I imagined a series that was filled with loss, beauty, meditation on age, horror, stunning scenes inside the Red Room that would rival ep 29. Never, ever would I've imagined this cold, meandering, egotistical, lazy, Gordon Cole show, with the majority of the 18 hours spent outside TWIN PEAKS. I'm still thankful that we got any sort of continuation, though, even if it was just to see Cooper get any kind of closure.

[rugerblackhawk357]

Today i was going through some old issues of Wrapped in Plastic (particularly one with Audrey on the cover). I saw an advert for a FWWM footage campaign. This was the one where people would write and get the supposedly 3 hour unreleased footage released to the public. I can only imagine that the same people that started that campaign were ecstatic about The Missing Pieces (and so was I). It was like there was this incomplete storyline that that footage would make right. So after The Return was announced, that same feeling came over me. We were going to see all those stories from Twin Peaks elaborated on for 18 episodes. They would be explored and characters would be explored in depth 25 years after Coop went into the lodge and came out backwards. I so desperately wanted that. I so desperately wanted Coop and Bad Coop to have a Sherlock/Moriarty storyline that was cat and mouse ending in Dale Cooper making all the bad things his shadow had done right. But that will not be. ever. I've read comments that "What's your name" is a reference to Audrey after she wakes up from a coma and this whole thing was her dream. If that's the case, that's salt in the wound. Bob Newhart did that because it was quirky. If this happens, it will be a creative cop-out. All the character stories, weirdness, and three seasons were just a dream. So it all didn't matter anyway.

[Rialto]

My biggest fear now about the ending is that it will tie up all the loose ends and bring everything together. I can't imagine it ending up as anything other than another Episode 7-style superboring exposition dump.

I think I'd rather Cooper turned back into Dougie and spent the final two hours learning to go 'number two', than have all this mostly rambling nonsense 'explained'.

You should post this in the Make Your Peace Now With The Ending You Dread thread . Gabriel posted some very funny scenarios there.

Thanks, I might do that

[boske]

Agree with everything judasbooth said, it simply sums it up perfectly, I'll just highlight two very important facts:

Twin Peaks: the Return should have been a character-driven show about time and memory, but all we got was a bunch of stuff and David Lynch in self-parody mode, rehashing his greatest hits (and some that never were - large parts of Cooper's odyssey were lifted from Lynch's undeveloped Ronnie Rocket screenplay from about 1000 years ago).

How many shows would be or have been given an opportunity such as this? None. They had this glorious opportunity to really delve into these aspects of time and its passage, and they royally blew it. I am obviously not talking about a movie where they age everybody 25 years, but where the actual 25 years have passed.

There is nothing to resolve, apart from the plot that carried over from series 2.

What an epitaph to this season, I dread thinking they will not resolve it tonight either. Yes, that really sums it up perfectly.

I have not been emotionally attached to this show for a while now. But, just for the sake of good old times I hope it goes out with a bang. This may very well be the last of TP that we see, let us hope they do not pull some cheap tricks and ruin it even further.

[Rialto]

How many shows would be or have been given an opportunity such as this? None. They had this glorious opportunity to really delve into these aspects of time and its passage, and they royally blew it. I am obviously not talking about a movie where they age everybody 25 years, but where the actual 25 years have passed.

Well, only Dallas

And they blew it in their own way. There's a revival that really should have gone full camp pastiche, but instead became a bland shadow of the original.

[boske]

How many shows would be or have been given an opportunity such as this? None. They had this glorious opportunity to really delve into these aspects of time and its passage, and they royally blew it. I am obviously not talking about a movie where they age everybody 25 years, but where the actual 25 years have passed.

Well, only Dallas

And they blew it in their own way. There's a revival that really should have gone full camp pastiche, but instead became a bland shadow of the original.

Yeah, I missed that one, you're right. Here though most of the core cast was available, with the exception of Frank Silva. Even Michael Ontkean was seemingly into it at one point early on. Strange.