S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

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

Which subplot left you most frustrated, wanting more?

Poll ended at Tue Sep 12, 2017 7:33 am

Audrey
49
42%
Sarah Palmer
32
28%
Red/Shelly/Bobby
17
15%
Becky/Steven/Gersten
2
2%
Ben/Beverly
2
2%
Other (please specify)
14
12%
 
Total votes: 116
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mtwentz
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by mtwentz »

krishnanspace wrote:What did Hawk not tell anyone about what he saw at Glastonbury Grove? That's been tingling me since the beginning of the season
I saw that scene as the equivalent of Cooper not telling anyone about seeing the Giant in Episode 14 and Episode 27 of the Original Series. You might be called crazy if you mentioned it :-).

For us the viewer, I think it was a way of letting us know the Lodge was open again, and it brought us back into the Red Room gradually.
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Ashok
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by Ashok »

I'm mostly happy with the trajectory of the whole season and I don't think Part 1-16 are "unimportant". Our world was unstable and it was critical that Coop and Freddie kill BOB. I just wish we knew more about the Fireman. I felt like if we knew more of his endgame regarding WHY he gave Coop the clues about Richard/Linda i.e. does he want Carrie Page to set Coop back on the right path and defeat The Experiment from the Glass Box etc., the final part might have flowed a bit more seamlessly with the rest of the season.
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OneandtheSame
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by OneandtheSame »

Biggest disappointment: Will James EVER find love?
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by Cipher »

Ashok wrote:I'm mostly happy with the trajectory of the whole season and I don't think Part 1-16 are "unimportant". Our world was unstable and it was critical that Coop and Freddie kill BOB. I just wish we knew more about the Fireman. I felt like if we knew more of his endgame regarding WHY he gave Coop the clues about Richard/Linda i.e. does he want Carrie Page to set Coop back on the right path and defeat The Experiment from the Glass Box etc., the final part might have flowed a bit more seamlessly with the rest of the season.
I'm comfortable with the idea that we oughtn't put too much stock in the back-and-forth of The Fireman and Judy. They're god-like characters, but as they're both forces that depend on each other, it all comes down to a kind of hilariously inscrutable and endless squabble. They're more important in terms of what they reveal about Laura and Coop.
Biggest disappointment: Will James EVER find love?
Oh, wait! I legitimately am disappointed we didn't get a reflective moment with James after the events at the sheriff's station (even though reality was basically falling apart at that point, so fair enough). He was one of the few characters to be genuinely compassionate toward Laura during her life, and she did love him in some way, so it would have been nice to know that he knew he played some sort of role in solving the events that spiderwebbed out from her life.
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by Ashok »

NewtoTwinPeaks wrote:- What was Bad Cooper's goal? He was looking for coordinates but what was he trying to do?
I'm not sure about this either but I think it was either to enter the White Lodge or find The Experiment. The coordinates seem to be connected to The Fireman so it would make sense Mr. C would want to go there to try to "break" into heaven. Or maybe Mr. C expected the coordinates to lead him to Sarah Palmer and the Mother inside of her, but the Fireman set him up. I wish we had a more concrete explanation but I think either answer makes sense.
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by IcedOver »

IF Sarah is "Judy," it's definitely a black mark on the show that she got nothing past the revelation that she has this monster inside her. It's just so sloppy and neglectful.
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by FlyingSquirrel »

Audrey and Bobby were probably the two characters who seemed to have changed the most since the original series, so for that reason I'd have liked to see a little more of both of them. Even if all of Audrey's scenes were dreams or hallucinations, I'd like to know more about why she was imagining the things she was imagining - she didn't show much vulnerability to anyone other than Cooper or John Wheeler in the original series, and even when she did, she was far less outwardly emotional and uncontrolled. Has she been this way ever since the bank explosion and/or being raped by DoppelCooper or is this a more recent development? Does her "dance" mean anything to her other than something she once did at the Double-R? Does "Billy" bear any relation to any real person or is he completely a product of Audrey's mind?

With Bobby, his own development - in having reformed and become a responsible police officer and a concerned father - is pretty much complete, but he and Shelly must still be concerned about Becky, whose fate is left unresolved. Though, if she *had* been killed, one would expect Bobby to have heard about it by the time of the finale, so I guess his apparent calm demeanor would suggest that she's alive. I do wonder what exactly split him and Shelly up or what led her to Red, and whether any of the Twin Peaks cops had Red on their radar as a possible source of the local drug trade, though that's the sort of thing that probably needed to be resolved before the last episode if it was going to be resolved at all.

Steven and Gersten never interested me much, aside from wondering if the Hayward family completely fell apart after the Will/Ben confrontation, since we never see Eileen, Donna, or her other sister at all.

Under "Other," I was surprised how completely all the new Buckthorn characters were dropped after Hastings' death. I had thought we might follow that murder investigation in a little more detail and that we'd eventually find out if Hastings did in fact kill Ruth Davenport under Lodge influence, why DoppelCooper came to kill Mrs. Hastings, what the military knew about Blue Rose, and whether Briggs knew he was destined to die and have his body turn up with the Owl Cave ring in his stomach or if he was eventually just outmaneuvered by the Black Lodge forces.
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by KnewItsPa »

Other: How's Annie?
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

I went with Red. The Audrey and Sarah "resolutions" are rather jarring from a traditional narrative standpoint, but I actually kind of love how DKL left them. The ambiguity is clearly a conscious choice, and I far prefer it to the overexplaining of stuff like Judy and the Blue Rose. In a weird sense, the final Audrey shot in the white room is sort of the spiritual sibling to the monkey whispering "Judy" in FWWM -- a powerful wtf moment we can all debate and wonder over for the next 25 years.

But Red was introduced and then just tapered away. Becky's weird too. And while I've been an advocate of enjoying TR as a series of slice-of-life shorts/vignettes as opposed to demanding that every scene "mean something," I have to say that the soapy scene with Beverly and her husband wasn't strong enough to work on its own merits, and it led nowhere, so I really wonder why it was there. OTOH, the Ben/Beverly "listening" scenes have a romantic eerie mood, and for me, those scenes work on their own and don't need a "resolution."
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by JohnPalSki »

Hmmm....
I enjoy the debate and mystery, so I'm ok with most things as of now. However...
1: I was hoping for more juicy info about the Woodsmen. Who are they? What do they do? Origins.

2: I could've used another scene of Audrey. It seemed a little too "dropped flat."

3: Sarah Palmer. In general.


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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by Framed_Angel »

JohnPalSki wrote:1: I was hoping for more juicy info about the Woodsmen. Who are they? What do they do? Origins.
Good point! It's true, while I hadn't realized til you mentioned them: I had been expecting at some point what was their "origin" story.

I feel the Audrey storyline left the way it was is so difficult to reconcile mainly because many of us know how her character was at one time considered for developing into a new series about Audrey looking for a career in Hollywood or such. This sort of lends her a familiar figure with potential that I came away especially cheated seeing this same person cast about on a tide of uncertainty, confusion and longing with no resolution.

Ray's being transported to the red Room seemed to me like we'd see him again but I must've been wishful thinking we'd see a lot more Red Room and its inhabitants.

I guess I should revisit the Part 10 thread but in the photo of Mr C in the box with a coat/cloaked bald man in glasses I'd like to have known whether this might be Charlie. It would've made a neat twist as far as some connection between Cooper's predicament and Audrey's situation.
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David Locke
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by David Locke »

Mr. Reindeer wrote:I went with Red. The Audrey and Sarah "resolutions" are rather jarring from a traditional narrative standpoint, but I actually kind of love how DKL left them. The ambiguity is clearly a conscious choice, and I far prefer it to the overexplaining of stuff like Judy and the Blue Rose. In a weird sense, the final Audrey shot in the white room is sort of the spiritual sibling to the monkey whispering "Judy" in FWWM -- a powerful wtf moment we can all debate and wonder over for the next 25 years.

But Red was introduced and then just tapered away. Becky's weird too. And while I've been an advocate of enjoying TR as a series of slice-of-life shorts/vignettes as opposed to demanding that every scene "mean something," I have to say that the soapy scene with Beverly and her husband wasn't strong enough to work on its own merits, and it led nowhere, so I really wonder why it was there. OTOH, the Ben/Beverly "listening" scenes have a romantic eerie mood, and for me, those scenes work on their own and don't need a "resolution."
Agreed completely. I think Beverly's character does feel unresolved without another scene - mostly just because the scene with her husband, as you say, wasn't very interesting by itself and seemed to be planting a seed for further development of Beverly whether at the GN or at home... I mean, it wasn't a self-contained little vignette that you could watch on its own and gain satisfaction. Her story seemed to be left hanging mid-air, though I agree at least we got the great scenes with Ben... But it still seems an odd choice.

And also, even her relationship with Ben could've been followed up on. What did happen with them? Did Ben give into her flirting and his temptations? After all, in Part 10, after taking Sylvia's call Ben suddenly calls out to ostensibly Beverly - even though we neither see nor hear her - and very directly asks if she'd like to get dinner. I actually have always seen this as ambiguous and likely a rhetorical question / Ben talking to himself. Not only do we not know if she was there, but we don't know if they did go to dinner, if there was an affair. I don't think it can be assumed just from that utterance, which has an almost theatrical, very self-conscious ring to it, making me doubt he's talking to anyone else - it sounds like a man entertaining subconscious desires very consciously, but not actually going all the way. As if his solitary calling out to Beverly was, after the stress of Sylvia's call, really a kind of "acting-out" out loud of what he'd like to do at that moment - but which he may be too morally upright to actually do in reality. So I don't think he was necessarily literally asking her because she was actually in earshot. It reads to me as a self-depreciating bit of desperation/self-pity on Ben's part, like "Ahh, okay, I give up - might as well do dinner, Beverly!" before putting his head in his hands in frustration. I think if L/F meant for us to think that dinner actually happened, that line isn't enough to go on.

But ANYWAY, Red. Absolutely do think it's odd he wasn't touched on again, wasn't seen. Even if he wasn't some big important source of all this magical or Lodge-infused drugs coming into TP, he had some kind of supernatural ability, and beyond that was simply an odd, fascinating character who you'd think we'd see again at least because of 2 factors - him dating Shelly, and simply the length and seeming importance of his first scene (which technically speaking causes the hit-and-run to occur). I really enjoyed Getty's scene in Part 6 and would have loved to have seen more. Honestly, he seems like a more intriguing villain than Mr. C was revealed to be, IMO, though admittedly that's partly because we only have a small glimpse of him.
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by Mystery Roach »

Something just occurred to me about Annie. If Mr C. made a point of finding and raping Diane and Audrey then how did Annie escape his attention?

Actually you could replace Diane with Annie in this story and aside from a bit of FBI business it would arguably make more sense.

Anyway I ultimately decided that the one plotline that still feels annoyingly unresolved to me is Shelly and Red. I don't need to see her and Bobby end up together, but one more scene of that story could have gone a long way.
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by waferwhitemilk »

Mystery Roach wrote:Actually you could replace Diane with Annie in this story and aside from a bit of FBI business it would arguably make more sense.
Well, excatly! If Naido had become Annie/Heather Graham some of it at least sorta would have made sense/resolved, but Lynch obviously has a hardon for Laura Dern (sry) so that's why..
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Re: S3: Biggest Disappointment About Unresolved Subplots?

Post by powerleftist »

I voted Audrey. Her plot arc was like an inside joke that only Lynch understands. It could literally mean anything. She could be dead, in a coma, dreaming, crazy, trapped in the Lodge, a tulpa, a doppleganger, an alternate dimension, a different timeline. Literally anything.

So not only her plot arc didn't resolve... it didn't even start!
Last edited by powerleftist on Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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