Mr. Strawberry wrote:I'm with you on that and think she played it really well. Man, if only they'd focused on that more and dropped J.J. Wheeler.
I just happened to be envisioning the season filmed a decade or so earlier, and pictured her roped into the Gordon and Albert outing. Audrey is who first came to mind back when I watched the show and Cole inquired about where "she" lives. Another thing that spurred it on was recalling her brief scene with Denise, and the wonder she seemed to display at the prospect.
In that sudden thought I had kind of pictured her role absorbing the Diane elements.
Those are interesting scenarios to consider, especially had this been filmed way back when.
But you inadvertently bring up something that I still find very interesting, and something that could serve as a prime example of where most audience's heads are at concerning a property that they know and love, as well as how audiences view a property as trapped in amber (Audrey is OUR connection to Cooper, but she's merely a drop in the ocean as far as Cooper's life before and since the original series is concerned), as well as an example of The Return's modus operandi and how it often subverted such audience expectations by simply sticking to a more realistic approach to a 25 years later storyline (which says a lot about how we process entertainment, as well as the usual methods of making said entertainment). We've gone over this ad nauseum - that is, Audrey's role in this vs. Diane's - but I still can't believe that anyone would have thought that anyone other than Diane is who Cole/Albert were talking about in that moment. I know a lot of people did, of course. Anecdotally, a lot of my own friends thought it was either Audrey or Sarah Palmer due to the former's love for Cooper and the latter's psychic abilities (and fondness for drink). And I know that it was intentionally open to speculation, and that as soon as it's said - at the end of an episode, no less - one is expected to envision different possible scenarios. I'm not saying you truly expected it to be Audrey, but there were a lot of people who did and...well, that never made a lick of sense to me. But, I admit it would have made a lot of sense in almost any other revival, which is why I think it's a really great example of how audiences generally think about films/series as self-contained and how they form attachments to certain characters, how plot is generally expected to revolve around a defined set of characters regardless of how important they were or how much time those characters actually spent together (in the case of Cooper and Audrey - not much!), and how Lynch/Frost approached the narrative as well as teased audience expectations.
