General Discussion on Season 3 (All Opinions Welcome)

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NormoftheAndes
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by NormoftheAndes »

Robin Davies wrote:
NormoftheAndes wrote:
Robin Davies wrote:How is the publicity more relevant than the content of the actual series?
In which episode did he say the exact phrase "damn fine coffee"?
I would suggest the two most memorable quotes are "This is-- excuse me--a damn fine cup of coffee" and "Damn good coffee - and hot!" So that's a draw.
I think your complaint that S3 uses "good" rather than "fine" rests on very shaky ground.
Coop says damn fine coffee in the first episode.
When? I don't remember him ever using that exact phrase.
Your quote was right, I omitted 'cup of' - the exact phrasing is not the point I was making though, I just believe 'damn good coffee' was a considered choice for season 3. The reasoning as simple as Dougie wants to return to his 'Good Cooper' self. I don't think its an unreasonable viewpoint.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by LateReg »

If you want to be a total hardass about it, then technically a lot of what we see in The Return is less than radical because Lynch has done it before. However, too few people do what he does, or are able to do it in the same way, or were given the funds to do it on such a scale, so I think to deem The Return anything less than radical is simply incorrect. Yes, Lynch has been there/done that in film, but there are many ways I believe The Return is even radical for Lynch and film. In blowing up the structure of something like Mulholland Drive to an 18 hour film/series that perhaps goes some way in fulfilling the original idea behind Mulholland Drive I consider very radical. Lynch returning to the pacing of Eraserhead and plastering it throughout all 18 hours of The Return is very radical. In crafting a narrative structure that disobeys just about every narrative rule (introducing characters and not returning to them, introducing plot points and not returning to them, returning to characters way later than we'd expect, dismantling the notion of Chekhov's gun (so refreshing that not every moment has to directly contribute to the plot like in nearly every other mainstream movie/show out there), crafting a narrative around rhymes and themes rather than focusing on plot (Inland Empire style), developing narratives that spill off the screen to give the constant illusion of life and other mysteries going on beyond the frame, etc.) is very radical. The way death is treated as an extremely real thing (Log Lady's death is the realest death I think I will ever feel on film) and how the dead are treated and interwoven in to the narrative I saw as also extremely radical (who else would have used the beloved Major Briggs as a headless corpse featured throughout the series?). And since this aired on TV, most of this and a lot that hasn't been mentioned are at the very least radical for TV. The Return felt like nothing else on TV, it brought genuinely experimental filmmaking into TV, it challenged notions of what constitutes "good" CGI or the purpose of it (this challenge is radical for any current big-budget drama, be it TV or film), through its narrative devices and untethered approach to genre and its use of duration and pacing it broke the now common and I'd say stale mold of prestige TV, being mostly immune to the horseshit of plot-based recap culture, all of which makes it radical. It's also a reboot or whatever you want to call it that operates unlike any other of the dozens of reboots in our reboot culture and approaches its 25 years later narrative in a more practical fashion (by simply checking in on certain characters rather than unrealistically interweaving them into the main plot), which is another way of thinking about how radical it is. And the way it actually investigates nostalgia rather than nurtures it is a totally radical foundation to build on in this culture, as is a work this vast that is left wildly open to interpretation. That may be old hat for Lynch, but it's still radical in mainstream media, especially at this scale.

Back to the 9-hour debate. I'll try to approach it from a different place. The show was announced for 9 hours, and yes, it would have been tight and perhaps even perfect at 9 hours, and I can see what Norm is arguing here. But I dislike the argument for a few reasons, first because I thought we were done with that debate a long time ago, and second because the 400-page script was never only going to be 9-hours. The atomic bomb episode alone probably occupied less than 15 pages of the script, for example; all of the unnerving (depending on how your mood) driving scenes throughout would not have appeared as long on the page as they were in the finished product (and yes, I know the simple solution would have been to shorten them, but that's not what Lynch had in mind, and I'd hate to see a truncated version of Part 18). So it was never only going to be 9 hours, and Lynch and Sabrina Sutherland have both said as much. I can totally buy the argument that it would be best if it were between 9 and 18 hours, but the other thing to remember here is that Lynch didn't NEED to fill 18 hours...he chose to. If he wanted to trim anything and still have 18 Parts, he could have easily made every Part only 50 minutes rather than the average of 57. Or he could have simply submitted 16 Parts, according to interviews where he said that he didn't know the actual episode count until the editing process (and yes, I'm well aware that Fenn had heard there would be 18 episodes way back when things got back on track after Lynch returned to the project, so maybe he got the green light to have up to 18 episodes). So then it comes down to Lynch needing an editor to help him trim out the unnecessary bits and get the product down to a perfect length, which most certainly would not have been only 9 hours, imo. But I think the show, in rallying against the current modes of prestige TV, rallies against seeking the kind of perfection that Norm is suggesting; I think the special effects might even be a clue to that. What might we have lost if trimming were done? In a work this complex where anything can mean everything, how do we know that a fan edit wouldn't be cutting out the most crucial element of the show? I know you're not suggesting a fan edit, but rather that Lynch trimmed down his creation himself so that only the vital stuff would remain, but I'm just saying that maybe it's all in some way vital. Some fans, like Nick Pinkerton who wrote an excellent article on The Return and the state of movie culture, value the downtime, the leisurely pace, the non sequiturs, the check-ins at the Roadhouse as much as anything and cite them as the reason the show is so great. Which is all just rambling to say that I don't think it was ever going to be 9 hours, and to keep approaching from the angle of "what might have been" when that was never actually going to be the case is maybe not the best way to approach what we were given. All the "good" stuff is still there...the question that I've long seen The Return posing is why do we as viewers only want the most concise, "perfect" product when you can find so much worth in the in-between moments that generally make up life and get left behind in most films? Which is another way I find it to be radical, in that it has a narrative that I believe Counterpaul once described as both very loose and very structured at the same time, which is how I see it and how I see it differentiating from almost anything else I can think of. It's very planned out, but loose within that structure. Rivette's Out 1 is the only thing that comes to mind. And something that I keep circling back to when I hear complaints about how the show is not tight enough or it doesn't feel like it was properly budgeted, is that I wonder if you'd say the same thing about something like Godard's Alphaville, that it's too loose or too low budget to be a great sci-fi film. I think Lynch here is operating so far outside whatever norm we're used to applying to sci-fi/thriller/noir narratives that it needs to be recognized that the looseness is part of the style and the off the cuffness is part of the value.

And while I'm at it, I'll just say that I agree with Eyeboogers that the Green Glove scenario is primarily a deux ex machina that is meant to feel unsatisfactory, robbing us of true resolution at the moment of resolution. I think what Needleman said about it being earnest also applies, in that it was a very earnest idea from Lynch's own hat filled with earnest ideas. But I think he took that genuinely earnest idea and plopped it down into a totally unreal scenario. Let it be known again that I don't like the Green Glove in and of itself, but that I like the avant-garde audio-visual accomplishment of the scene itself, and that I do like the scene as I understand it: as a totally intentionally dissatisfying statement about typical resolution in stories, about the impossibility of defeating true evil, about Cooper's mental state, and possibly about the different ways that Cooper/Fireman have tried to combat Bob but have failed each and every time, the green glove being just the latest in a long line of outlandish and foolhardy attempts; hell, like Mulholland Drive's blue box, the green glove could even be the final straw in representing the crumbling of the dream, but I just thought of that now. My evidence for thinking this scene is unreal (rooted more in theme than in actual plot) and is supposed to feel unsatisfactory regardless of the original earnestness of Lynch's idea is that I believe The Return is built very strategically. Cooper comes back in Part 16 in glorious fashion, which some view as bittersweet and too good to be true. He quickly reaches his destination in Part 17, and after all the slow build up of the series, Lynch rushes for the first time, as though in a hurry to get something out of the way. But what that something is is what most people think of as the most important aspect of the series, the confrontation between Cooper and Bob. He gets it out of the way to fulfill a necessary plot point that is nonetheless unfulfillable so we can move on to the real meat of the story; he gets it out of the way because in reality there is no way to vanquish that kind of evil, so they show us the most preposterous way imaginable of defeating Bob. The entire series has been about questioning reality (who is the dreamer, we live inside a dream, has Cooper even left the red room, is the Roadhouse caught between two worlds, where is Audrey, etc.) and so I think we are naturally supposed to look at the green glove and question it; the entire series also has a meta-streak that is partially about parodying and subverting TV and other narrative tropes, and I don't think it's any coincidence that its would-be climax features a superpowered hero doing battle with a CGI creation, a now stereotypical conclusion to almost every big budget movie. And I believe some proof of the scene's unreality is even in Cooper's dialogue and performance: the way he says "Are you Freddy?" is quite hilarious to me, that he's entrusted the fate of the world to a kid he's never even seen before, and then after the deed is done, the childlike glow on Cooper's face as he says "You did it Freddy!!" It also ties in perfectly to all those who are saying "but Cooper never actually confronted his doppelganger or Bob!" I can't remember who pointed it out, but that is exactly the point of that scene. Freddy does Cooper's work for him, and so Cooper is still not confronting the darkness of his shadow self or atoning for his sins as he is on the single-minded path to once again save the damsel in distress.

And as for Lynch's remark in the BTS documentary that he had no clue what to do in the Glove climax, I think we could read a lot into it in a lot of different ways, but I don't think it actually means that he threw all of that together at the last minute, nor can we infer that he ended up displeased with what he came up with. He certainly had a hole with spouting fire drilled into the floor, which I imagine took planning. He could have been referring to a lot of things for that scene - maybe just the people standing around, since he mentions how many will be there. And it was Duwayne Dunham who later said that that scene was his favorite to work on. Maybe because it was the most complex (according to him, it was), maybe because it needed the most work, who knows, but from Dunham's comments it is evident that a lot of care went into it. I know, I know, you can't polish a turd. And yet I think there's a lot going on there that easily fits in with what is going on with the whole of The Return, and for me it works both intellectually and viscerally and is a cool light show as well.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by IcedOver »

LateReg wrote:In blowing up the structure of something like Mulholland Drive to an 18 hour film/series that perhaps goes some way in fulfilling the original idea behind Mulholland Drive I consider very radical. Lynch returning to the pacing of Eraserhead and plastering it throughout all 18 hours of The Return is very radical. In crafting a narrative structure that disobeys just about every narrative rule (introducing characters and not returning to them, introducing plot points and not returning to them, returning to characters way later than we'd expect, dismantling the notion of Chekhov's gun (so refreshing that not every moment has to directly contribute to the plot like in nearly every other mainstream movie/show out there), crafting a narrative around rhymes and themes rather than focusing on plot (Inland Empire style), developing narratives that spill off the screen to give the constant illusion of life and other mysteries going on beyond the frame, etc.) is very radical.
I agree that it's refreshing that not every moment has to contribute to the plot (which is why it's annoying when people try to shoehorn the Roadhouse conversations or even Ed sitting eating soup into some "dream" narrative). I get tired of PLOT sometimes. The length of the piece allowed Lynch to do more of these casual moments than ever before. However, you bring up Mulholland Drive, which I consider his worst film, as the template for the disconnected nature of some of the show, which is correct. Of course the ultimate structure of that film, the plots that go absolutely nowhere, characters who never come back, was not as originally intended. Was Lynch so giddy at the praise he received for that lazy, cobbled-together TV show/film hybrid that he felt he could break all plot and character threads and have it work, or is this a film/narrative idea he actually believes in . . . or was he completely out of control and losing interest in dealing with these plot elements, and decided to throw in what he had?
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N. Needleman
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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I'm glad I wasn't the only one reminded of Rivette and Out 1 in this discussion. I need to finish that.

I agree Season 3 is kind of the antithesis of the current prestige TV mode of studied perfection, down to many deliberately cheesy FX. It is perfected on many Lynchian levels, but his standards and priorities are not those of, say, the guys making GOT or Westworld (two shows I enjoy). And I'll agree the Freddie/BOB sequence has many levels, but at the same time it actually left me quite satisfied and I think on one level it is intended to do so - Mr. C is dead and BOB is vanquished, our heroes in Twin Peaks are safe. But I do agree that Cooper feels he's won the day there but failed to understand the deeper problem, which is himself, his fatal flaw and his master plan as the heroic male. Stopping Judy - the extreme negative force, the soul of trauma - would never end there.
AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:The Return is clearly guaranteed a future audience among stoners and other drug users.
baxter
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by baxter »

I have Out 1 sitting on my shelf (it was my Christmas present to myself), and I bought it precisely because I wanted to compare S3 to another great director having a go at a long format. To balance out the pretentious scale on my shelf, I bought the Police Academy boxset to go with it :-D (Rather unexpectedly, I found the latter provided increasingly bold experiments in non-linear story telling as you work through the series, though I suspect it wasn't intentional!).

I'm really tempted to try S3 all in one day soon. I have a friend who hasn't seen it, and he doesn't get much free time nowadays. I think it would make the perfect rewatch.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by baxter »

Regarding the comment about Lynch being drunk on the critical success of Mulholland Drive, and stretching that out to 18 hours, I think that is the wrong way round. I think Mulholland Drive would have basically been Twin Peaks S3 (without the Twin Peaks characters). In fact, the Vegas parts of the series feel like they actually were Mulholland Drive to me.

Weirdly, I watched Mulholland Drive again recently, and found it way more tame and accessible than S3 (and also much better than I remembered). Maybe this tells us that a Twin Peaks S4 would please no-one, but make everyone love S3.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by N. Needleman »

I've made it about halfway or more than halfway through Out 1. Lost track around December due to the holidays. I need to dive back in and finish it. Should've done it quickly but fortunately there are some detailed recaps out there - I am not starting from the top again, I've had to do that once before and I remember everything.

And yes, I tend to always have palate cleanse after an episode of that with, say, Predator or Parks and Recreation. :D
AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:The Return is clearly guaranteed a future audience among stoners and other drug users.
LateReg
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by LateReg »

IcedOver wrote:I agree that it's refreshing that not every moment has to contribute to the plot (which is why it's annoying when people try to shoehorn the Roadhouse conversations or even Ed sitting eating soup into some "dream" narrative). I get tired of PLOT sometimes. The length of the piece allowed Lynch to do more of these casual moments than ever before. However, you bring up Mulholland Drive, which I consider his worst film, as the template for the disconnected nature of some of the show, which is correct. Of course the ultimate structure of that film, the plots that go absolutely nowhere, characters who never come back, was not as originally intended. Was Lynch so giddy at the praise he received for that lazy, cobbled-together TV show/film hybrid that he felt he could break all plot and character threads and have it work, or is this a film/narrative idea he actually believes in . . . or was he completely out of control and losing interest in dealing with these plot elements, and decided to throw in what he had?
baxter wrote:Regarding the comment about Lynch being drunk on the critical success of Mulholland Drive, and stretching that out to 18 hours, I think that is the wrong way round. I think Mulholland Drive would have basically been Twin Peaks S3 (without the Twin Peaks characters). In fact, the Vegas parts of the series feel like they actually were Mulholland Drive to me.

Weirdly, I watched Mulholland Drive again recently, and found it way more tame and accessible than S3 (and also much better than I remembered). Maybe this tells us that a Twin Peaks S4 would please no-one, but make everyone love S3.
I believe what IcedOver was referring to was that Mulholland Drive only became what we know it as because Lynch had to find an ending for it later, and that ending left so many loose strands that might have gone so many other places if the thing were allowed to be a TV show, but that they were never intended to be left that loose. Where I disagree with Iced here is only about Mulholland's quality; specifically, I believe the final 30 or 40 minutes constitutes one of the most brilliant of all film endings. That's neither here nor there as it applies to this conversation. But what I was saying about Mulholland Drive and The Return is not only that it follows the structure of the Mulholland Drive film, but also that I do believe, as Baxter says, that The Return shares the same ideas that Lynch originally had for the Mulholland Drive TV series. Which is to say I think he was probably planning on spilling a whole ton of mysteries and tangents such as those from the pilot all over the screen and following them down their individual rabbit holes into deeper unsolved mysteries, which is how I think he treated The Return.

For what it's worth, on the bonus features for Mulholland Drive Lynch states (and I'm paraphrasing) that the 10-minute meditative brainstorm he had while conjuring the ending to Mulholland Drive was the most beautiful creative moment of his life. I can totally see that, as that is how brilliantly I believe the end of Mulholland Drive ties everything prior together. And knowing that, I think that it's for that reason that Lynch likes this particular style of narrative nowadays, rather than because of the praise that was heaped on the finished film.

It's funny that you mention how a season 4 might make season 3 seem better. In my experience that's how every Lynch film works. The subsequent one teaches you something about the prior one. I love INLAND EMPIRE and have seen it about 19 times, but I started to rank it toward the back half of his canon in recent years...until I revisited it again in a Lynch marathon after seeing The Return. INLAND EMPIRE seemed better than it had ever been to me after interpreting The Return on a mostly thematic (rather than narrative) level. That said, I was only able to let go and do that during The Return's airing because INLAND EMPIRE taught me to do so after countless futile attempts at "solving" it. In the same way I think Mulholland Drive helps you to understand Lost Highway, while it at the same time prepares you to take in INLAND EMPIRE.

Also on that note, to add to what I find radical about The Return - and this is a purely subjective conjecture - is how it seems to be operating at multiple levels of realities at once without ever delineating between them (outside of the lodges, which, however, appear to be treated as equally real as everything else), which fits into the philosophical rhetorical question of "Who is the dreamer?", as the point is that we can never truly know. So if Lost Highway takes place in the head, and if Mulholland Drive is split to differentiate dream and reality, and INLAND EMPIRE was more of a cyclical chain of thematically linked events over time combined with an actress falling deeper into her role, then I think The Return is the culmination of all those things at once, without ever clearly telling you which school it belongs to or ever showing you someone waking up from a dream or even making clear if someone has ever left the lodge. Furthermore, in all of those films, or at least Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, it appears that someone is trying to relive/change the past and failing. What I find so fascinating, terrifying and progressive about The Return is that Lynch allowed his protagonist to finally succeed to change the past, and the results, judging by the wrong-feeling atmosphere and the final moments of Part 18, appear to be worse than the failure to change the past in the previous films.
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Great post, LateReg, although I’m still not convinced that Cooper actually changes the past — at least, not for more than a few seconds (however one temporally measures such a thing!). Yes, I know TFD seems to support the inference that he created some new timeline where Laura disappeared instead of being killed...but we’re talking about DKL’s ouevre here, not the book, and as he said of TSHoTP, “That is Mark’s book. I have never read it and I don’t want to. He has his own ideas of the history and I have my own.” Going by simply what they chose to show us in the series, Laura vanishes from Cooper’s grasp and screams, and afterward we don’t know what-all happens to the world that we knew and loved...in fact, it seems quite possible that we never see the established TP world again after that moment. All we know is Cooper’s plan to bring Laura to the Fireman’s fails because she literally disappears from his grasp, he ends up repeating a (nearly-identical) version of his earlier Red Room scenes, with Laura AGAIN being whisked away screaming, and when he finally manages to find Laura again, it’s not in an altered version of the old reality. Instead, it seems to be an entirely different world where someone who looks like Laura has been dropped into an entirely different life/identity, a phenomenon akin in some ways to the “Betty” world in MD or the “Blue Tomorrows” world in IE — which doesn’t fit cozily into the traditional definition of “changing the past.”

I certainly agree that Cooper’s EFFORTS to change the past lead to some bad mojo, but I don’t see much evidence that any part of what he was attempting went according to plan.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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I used to think Carrie Page was not Laura but some twisted reflection of her, just as Cooper is irrevocably altered upon crossing over and Diane becomes Linda. I also thought Cooper and Diane quite clearly cross over into another, WKLP-less timeline on the road after going those many miles and reaching the marker they sought. I still kind of think that, looking back at it, though the Final Dossier says the original timeline was changed - I'm not sure that is what the scene in Part 18 conveys. As Lynch says, he and Frost have their own versions of the history. Most of it intersects, some parts maybe less so.

Either way, I do now think Carrie is Laura. Like it's described in the Final Dossier, the new Laura disappeared - ran away, forgot, became someone else. Killed other men who tried to victimize her, yet lived a life of quiet, secret violence and desperation. Cooper changed the past and with it fundamentally altered/mutated many people, including Laura, Diane and himself, lost in a world warped by Judy and/or BOB (I think BOB is subservient to Judy, her spawn and/or mate). At the end, staring at the house and hearing her mother's voice, Carrie remembers, becomes Laura, relives her past, maybe even remembers dying, and the circle is complete. Do I think that means the problem is solved or the spell is broken or the universe will right itself - no. Not without help.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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I agree that Carrie is a version of Laura that has been mutated/warped by Cooper’s actions. But her transition from the FWWM-era Laura who disappears in the woods to Carrie Page seems to be filtered through the Red Room, indicating to me that there is more going on here than a straightforward “Cooper alters the timeline so that Laura ran away instead of being killed and ended up in Odessa having forgotten her name/past for some reason.” Carrie is definitely Laura’s spirit/essence/orb, having been corrupted into something else due to Dale’s meddling. But I just can’t see it as a straightforward “Dale altered the past,” based on what we’re given onscreen. I don’t believe that Carrie Page grew up in that house in Twin Peaks with Leland and Sarah as her parents, sharing Laura’s backstory up until the moment she met a weirdo in a suit in the woods on the early morning of 2/24/89. There’s something else going on, more akin to the onion-peel layers of reality in IE.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by LateReg »

Mr. Reindeer wrote:I agree that Carrie is a version of Laura that has been mutated/warped by Cooper’s actions. But her transition from the FWWM-era Laura who disappears in the woods to Carrie Page seems to be filtered through the Red Room, indicating to me that there is more going on here than a straightforward “Cooper alters the timeline so that Laura ran away instead of being killed and ended up in Odessa having forgotten her name/past for some reason.” Carrie is definitely Laura’s spirit/essence/orb, having been corrupted into something else due to Dale’s meddling. But I just can’t see it as a straightforward “Dale altered the past,” based on what we’re given onscreen. I don’t believe that Carrie Page grew up in that house in Twin Peaks with Leland and Sarah as her parents, sharing Laura’s backstory up until the moment she met a weirdo in a suit in the woods on the early morning of 2/24/89. There’s something else going on, more akin to the onion-peel layers of reality in IE.
Yeah, it's definitely an odd thing going on. The way I see it, he definitely altered the past in some way, or has continually been trying to do so, and time is basically permanently off its axis, which we see hints of throughout the show and could be why so many plotlines go nowhere. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. In the end, I think that Cooper meddles with time and the feeling is that something has gone wrong. To me it's more about how it feels rather than any concrete judgment on what actually happened. But I think I'm on board with him both altering the past (whether temporarily, permanently or over and over again) and also, as you suggest, ending up in some sort of mangled beyond recognition alternate world/timeline in part 18. Whatever's happening there, in terms of concrete plot, seems to be the result of more than just Laura running away and blocking out her past; it seems to be tied to Judy or other malevolent forces somehow, a universe where everyone's identity is in danger of slipping.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by mtwentz »

It's a fascinating tipic could trauma run so deep in someone's mind that they assume a new identity and erase past memories of an entire 17 years?
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by krishnanspace »

My god,its been a whole year since the return aired.I miss that show!
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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The concept of Dale altering the past “over and over again,” as LateReg puts it, is fascinating. I’ve always assumed that Cooper is stuck in a loop repeating his attempt to save Laura (“time and time again”)...but what if this means that time itself is stuck, with the record-skipping sound representing reality endlessly frozen in the moment of Laura’s death/disappearance, jumping back and forth from one version to the other, unable to proceed forward until one or the other becomes the “official version”? Laura as Schrödinger’s cat — “I am dead, yet I live.”

In this supposition, what would Carrie and her pocket universe represent? Crazy idea I just had: Laura/Carrie has to confront her past trauma (represented by Sarah’s call) and decide for herself which version is real, thus regaining the autonomy Dale stole from her with his misguided chivalry/tampering. Maybe the ending is a happy one after all, then...one way or the other, Dale accomplishes his goal of fixing the timeline he broke, and the end credits are Laura telling Dale which version she chose.

Related but probably belongs in a different topic: isn’t it interesting that both Mr. C and original-recipe Dale seem to walk into a trap while approaching the “gold pool”? Mr. C gets caged then shanghaied to the sheriff’s station and his death (seemingly the Fireman & Garland’s plan), whereas Dale seems to walk Laura straight into a trap set by someone (most people seem to be assuming Judy). You really have to wonder what the Fireman is up to....
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