The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Moderators: Brad D, Annie, Jonah, BookhouseBoyBob, Ross, Jerry Horne

Post Reply
missoulamt
RR Diner Member
Posts: 132
Joined: Thu Nov 26, 2009 8:01 am

The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by missoulamt »

Although it's disappointing that the warmth and small town feel of the original has been all but absent in the Return (Lynch being too unfiltered?), I think this is still a lesser problem. The Return's biggest flaw is that it could probably have been cut down in half without losing much of its impact, which is pretty crazy. There are just too many redundant storylines. Frankly, who cares about the Mitchum brothers + girlfriends or Chantal and Hutch? They feel like the kind of stereotypical characters Lynch could create in his sleep. And what do they add to TP? With the real Dale only appearing just now it feels like we haven't really been back to TP at all. The fact that there are so many crucial characters missing doesn't help.

It also struck me in the last episode, when evil Cooper was reconnecting with Phillip Jeffries. This is the kind of scene that is supposed to be frightening and haunting. Instead, the end result was closer to cartoon. It's been up to Grace Zabriskie to provide the fear. She's been one of the highlights, despite not having much more than a cameo role.

Has DL lost his mojo?

Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
Last edited by missoulamt on Sat Sep 02, 2017 4:45 am, edited 2 times in total.
Rik Renault
Roadhouse Member
Posts: 86
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 6:41 am

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by Rik Renault »

I'm wary of commenting before all is said and done but quite a few storylines could have had quite a lot more depth IMO AND I've ended up not caring much about them as a result.

Stephen/Becky

Red - was so intrigues by this character but now it seems he's just a side player

Even Richard's arc seems a bit shallow now. Though I'm not expecting to see him again his impact will likely still be felt in the finale so I'm hoping for more satisfaction from this.

Ed and Norma's reunion felt meh to me because of how little we've seen.

Others i'm sure i'll think of once I've clicked send.


Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk
User avatar
DoppelBocker
Roadhouse Member
Posts: 95
Joined: Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:14 pm

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by DoppelBocker »

I think the cinematography on the series is brilliant. Narrative flow I think is slowed down as much of possible to just dwell in the world from a visual standpoint without not a lot happening until boom there's catch-up with simple line or whatever then moving onwards not tying up all loose ends (maybe sort of showing off how many loose ends can leave until very last moment?). It's an art piece visual wise and I think this sort of narrative format would be harder to do without 1 director doing the whole thing.

Still, definitely some stuff after season's over I think people are endlessly going to speculate about. I think perhaps the book coming out in October will hopefully help with some of the backstory and provide bit fill-in explanations to some extent.

If a season 4, I think some mystery is good but perhaps not need to be looking at every new scene wondering who this is or what they're doing or really what happening entirely could be lessened a bit. Not that anything wrong with doing for Season 3 but just sort of always switching things up I don't think is a bad thing if tone is consistent and story is genuine with great ideas behind it.
User avatar
Deep Thought
RR Diner Member
Posts: 303
Joined: Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:05 pm
Location: Florida

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by Deep Thought »

missoulamt wrote: Has DL lost his mojo?

Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
DL can create "realistic" scenes (as in artificially dramatic, artificially tense, artificially scarey, etc). See the audition scene in MD for an example. Thank God there is little of that in The Return. I just watched a dash cam video, with perfect audio and video, of a police officer shooting and killing an armed suspect after a traffic stop. This happened 4 days ago! In this era of video "reality," I applaud Lynch for giving us something beyond this. Realism is a dime a dozen on You-Tube. Because of this, watching scripted TV is nearly impossible for me unless it brings ideas and relationships to the fore. I saw S1 E8 of The Wire today, and even that great complex show has too much "realism" for my taste. (By realism here, I ironically mean phony-baloney writerly gimmicks). Even the wonderfully acted Fargo can be reduced to a "this happens and then this happens" progression in this light, and I often went weeks before feeling the need to catch up with "what happened" on that show.

TPTR is disposing of some of these conventional gimmicks, exposing others, and presenting something fresh. MF/DL are at the top of the mojo heap, at the moment. My thought is that this is a singular achievement the like of which I don't expect to be seen again for many years
There's your roast beef and cheese.
User avatar
BigEd
RR Diner Member
Posts: 346
Joined: Sat May 27, 2017 9:50 pm

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by BigEd »

OP seems to be asking for less TP's and less David Lynch. I'm in the opposite camp. I wish Showtime had given him 36 hours so that he could have come up with twice as many storylines (none of which need to have anything to do with anything). 8)
User avatar
sylvia_north
RR Diner Member
Posts: 451
Joined: Tue Oct 25, 2016 1:41 pm

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by sylvia_north »

Too many storylines for what? It's a lot like a pilot where seeds are dropped to be picked up later. You can pick up these threads at any time, even if just in your imagination. I think that's what DL said attracted him to the medium of TV- it's like a movie that keeps going and going. Whether or not the stories do it for you is so personal.

I find something interesting about how every scene is handled, familiar themes, self-reflexive storytelling, even if I'm underwhelmed overall. TR probably won't suck in anyone who is turned off by distant tone and abstractions but there's still pretty colors and sounds and blood to enjoy, and with repetition, everything seems to belong. You can shut your mind off and enjoy the excess, or work for it.

The metaphor trimming the fat, or not, applies here. Fat is good for flavoring and keeping things moist, but it means mentally eating around it for the potentially worthwhile nuggets. Original TP made us work for it. Season 2 we had to work really hard, but it was worth it. Hopefully TR will make it worth it, too. I'll take the Hutchens over Lucy-Andy-Dick any day.
Too Old to Die Young > TP S03
User avatar
Novalis
RR Diner Member
Posts: 431
Joined: Sat Jun 10, 2017 3:18 pm

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by Novalis »

missoulamt wrote:Although it's disappointing that the warmth and small town feel of the original has been all but absent in the Return (Lynch being too unfiltered?), I think this is still a lesser problem. The Return's biggest flaw is that it could probably have been cut down in half without losing much of its impact, which is pretty crazy. There are just too many redundant storylines. Frankly, who cares about the Mitchum brothers + girlfriends or Chantal and Hutch? They feel like the kind of stereotypical characters Lynch could create in his sleep. And what do they add to TP? With the real Dale only appearing just now it feels like we haven't really been back to TP at all. The fact that there are so many crucial characters missing doesn't help.

It also struck me in the last episode, when evil Cooper was reconnecting with Phillip Jeffries. This is the kind of scene that is supposed to be frightening and haunting. Instead, the end result was closer to cartoon. It's been up to Grace Zabriskie to provide the fear. She's been one of the highlights, despite not having much more than a cameo role.

Has DL lost his mojo?

Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
Just from a purely quantitative and selfish point of view, if there had been only 9 episodes rather than 18 then we'd all have been sitting here TP-less for several weeks now; at least we've had a much longer time to spend on the show.

From the point of quality/mojo, like the last poster I don't think you can simply remove the 'padding' and extract your favourite bits. When you try to do that you generally find it's padding all the way down and the treasure evaporates.

In fact, I'd have been OK with these bundles of unfinished stories stretching even longer, accumulating more and more loose ends.
As a matter of fact, 'Chalfont' was the name of the people that rented this space before. Two Chalfonts. Weird, huh?
User avatar
referendum
RR Diner Member
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Jul 02, 2017 2:29 am

Re: The Return - too many redudant storylines?

Post by referendum »

I think that this was set up as a sort of loose structure to generate stories within, to explore a world. But also to do something like ' the twilight zone' where the tone stayed the same but you had a different story every episode. But instead of chopping this into neat narrative chunks ( episodes) it has been presented in an organic way that bits of story criss-crossed each other over weeks or months.

This fits into Lynch's idea of a continuing series with ever changing stories inside it, all linked to aspects of a central ongoing saga, which he describes as a 'beautiful thing', and which is how he saw the original twin peaks ( he wanted to make at least 2 more series at the time as well as the mulholland drive spin off).

Sure, some of these stories have worked better than others, and it has been abit hit and miss in places, butIf it had been shorter, I suspect we would have lost as much of the good stuff as the stuff that works less well.

I hope he is given the $$$ allowed to continue - and more to the point, wants to carry on.
''let's not overthink this opportunity''
Post Reply