Sarah Palmer

[Cipher]

I'm still unsure why everyone is so convinced "frog-moth girl" needs to be a character we know, rather than representational, and have been confused on that since episode 8 aired. I mean, she certainly could be Sarah Palmer, but does she need to be? I thought she was just a rando until the internet got swept up in the idea of her being part of the main cast.

As for Sarah herself, I'm uncertain how to read all of the vague connections to the Jumping Man, and the Jumping Man's connection to the Tremond grandson, and the grandson's connection to the monkey who says "Judy," and, and, and ... It's enough for me that she's connected to Judy intuitively.

I love, for a number of reasons, that the show elected to give Laura the ultimate bad mom to match the ultimate bad dad. It's honest, it's a great way to project both her and Sarah's internality onto the series' cosmic events (Laura is now truly a totem of love and self-acceptance where it could have easily withered; the grief and rage of a parent complicit in her daughter's murder manifest viscerally), and it plays really satisfactorily into Cooper's insistence on getting Laura to her mother at the end, setting the stage for the series' haunting final scenes. It allows Cooper's (naive?) goal of ridding the world of its pain and sorrow and Laura's personal trauma/acceptance to dovetail wonderfully.

I couldn't be happier with the Judy reveal we got.

[powerleftist]

Sorry, the girl looked latin to me. She is not

Do you think they look similar?:

[Mr. Reindeer]

I'm still unsure why everyone is so convinced "frog-moth girl" needs to be a character we know, rather than representational, and have been confused on that since episode 8 aired. I mean, she certainly could be Sarah Palmer, but does she need to be? I thought she was just a rando until the internet got swept up in the idea of her being part of the main cast

I'm very happy with her both being Sarah and being a rando simultaneously in my mind. I think L/F deliberately left it ambiguous but clearly wanted us to make the connection (see the creepy superimposed freeze frame).

Sorry, the girl looked latin to me. She is not

Do you think they look similar?:

Actually, yeh, kinda. I've seen much much worse instances of movies casting a younger version of a character. Look at young Dick Whitman on Mad Men!

[Cappy]

One odd thing I noticed, or think I noticed, was during ep. 3 when Cooper slowly approached the big electrical outlet in the Purple Room. There was this ominous, slow pulsating noise, and it sounded kind of like a distorted version of Sarah calling "Laura, Laura..." from ep. 2 of the original series. It was during Cooper's original dream, and it used a slowed down version of Sarah calling for Laura from the pilot.

I'm not sure what the implications of this would be, but did anyone else notice this?

[Mr. Reindeer]

One odd thing I noticed, or think I noticed, was during ep. 3 when Cooper slowly approached the big electrical outlet in the Purple Room. There was this ominous, slow pulsating noise, and it sounded kind of like a distorted version of Sarah calling "Laura, Laura..." from ep. 2 of the original series. It was during Cooper's original dream, and it used a slowed down version of Sarah calling for Laura from the pilot.

I'm not sure what the implications of this would be, but did anyone else notice this?

No, but will check during rewatch. Very interesting if true...that audio also figures into the closing seconds of Part 18.

Also interesting to realize the thing that jars Carrie/Laura's memory is something she never heard in the real world, and which occurred after her death! Sarah seems to figure prominently in her dawning realization, for some reason.

[mtwentz]

I'm still unsure why everyone is so convinced "frog-moth girl" needs to be a character we know, rather than representational, and have been confused on that since episode 8 aired. I mean, she certainly could be Sarah Palmer, but does she need to be? I thought she was just a rando until the internet got swept up in the idea of her being part of the main cast.

That's my take, she's representational- until what time we hear otherwise.

[eyeboogers]

Seeing as the season is over & no other connection has been made of that girl that the frogmoth went into in 1956 id say everyone is going to agree it was Sarah Palmer.

Absolutely not. The 1956 girl is Sarah Palmer has been the most misguided - and yet most resilient, theory this season has generated. There is nothing at all that suggests that this girl might be Sarah Palmer. She doesn't look like Zabriskie, doesn't talk like Sarah, does not share any mannerisms. We know that Sarah Palmer grew up in the Twin Peaks area etc. The theory started with people thinking that she was impregnated with the Laura egg. Eventually more and more people realised that the chronology was way off, but somehow they keep finding other excuses to think that this girl was Sarah. I don't understand this at all.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Seeing as the season is over & no other connection has been made of that girl that the frogmoth went into in 1956 id say everyone is going to agree it was Sarah Palmer.

Absolutely not. The 1956 girl is Sarah Palmer has been the most misguided - and yet most resilient, theory this season has generated. There is nothing at all that suggests that this girl might be Sarah Palmer. She doesn't look like Zabriskie, doesn't talk like Sarah, does not share any mannerisms. We know that Sarah Palmer grew up in the Twin Peaks area etc. The theory started with people thinking that she was impregnated with the Laura egg. Eventually more and more people realised that the chronology was way off, but somehow they keep finding other excuses to think that this girl was Sarah. I don't understand this at all.

The chronology is fine. If the girl is around 13/14 in 1956, she'd be 46-47 in 1989, almost exactly Grace's age during the original production. And we know nothing about where Sarah grew up, from the original series or any of the books.

Not saying "Sarah as 1956 girl" is the definitive interpretation -- as I said, I love the ambiguity -- but these two arguments of yours don't hold water IMO.

[eyeboogers]

Seeing as the season is over & no other connection has been made of that girl that the frogmoth went into in 1956 id say everyone is going to agree it was Sarah Palmer.

Absolutely not. The 1956 girl is Sarah Palmer has been the most misguided - and yet most resilient, theory this season has generated. There is nothing at all that suggests that this girl might be Sarah Palmer. She doesn't look like Zabriskie, doesn't talk like Sarah, does not share any mannerisms. We know that Sarah Palmer grew up in the Twin Peaks area etc. The theory started with people thinking that she was impregnated with the Laura egg. Eventually more and more people realised that the chronology was way off, but somehow they keep finding other excuses to think that this girl was Sarah. I don't understand this at all.

The chronology is fine. If the girl is around 13/14 in 1956, she'd be 46-47 in 1989, almost exactly Grace's age during the original production. And we know nothing about where Sarah grew up, from the original series or any of the books.

Not saying "Sarah as 1956 girl" is the definitive interpretation -- as I said, I love the ambiguity -- but these two arguments of yours don't hold water IMO.

I meant the chronology about the bug being Laura's conception, which is what started that whole Sarah Palmer as the girl notion in the first place. In "The Return" Sarah is quite open about how the possession is something which has just happened to her now. As for the other argument, if the filmmakers wanted us to link those two characters, why would they cast someone looking and acting extremely different from the adult character we know well. That does not make sense. And it is stated in the old works that Sarah grew up in the Twin Peaks region.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I too thought the frogmoth being Laura was a pretty far out there theory (I always saw it as Jumping Man because of the beak), and I also didn't particularly buy Sarah as the girl. But the freeze frame Jumping Man/Sarah overlap sold me that there may be something to it. So much in TR was left ambiguous. I think L/F meant us to think about this possibility and wonder as we are now.

As to your other points: I don't interpret anything Sarah says in TR to explicitly say whatever is happening to her is a recent development. As I said before, lousy casting of younger versions of characters is pretty routine in Hollywood.'And I'm 99% sure nothing in any TP media states where Sarah grew up, because I did a rewatch/reread of everything before TR and took copious nerdy notes for a timeline (TOO copious, in fact...I need to whittle it down a LOT before I feel comfortable putting it out into the world). But if you have a specific moment you're thinking of, please share!

[Manwith]

In "The Return" Sarah is quite open about how the possession is something which has just happened to her now.

No she isn't. That's just your intepretation. Sarah never even says she is possessed, let alone that it just happened to her.

[Panapaok]

Yeah indeed. Sarah just says "something happened to me". The rest is left ambiguous and open to interpretation. I felt pretty certain about Sarah until I saw her face superimposed on the Jumping Man's face. Incredibly confusing. And besides that moment, we saw the Jumping Man only once more, in the convenience store stairway in Part 17. Still, I am confident that Judy 'possessed' Sarah after she came through the glass box. The timing of her eating Sam's and Tracy's faces while Sarah was watching similar animal documentaries is too specific to be random.

[RetconMetatron]

I think frogmouth-girl is the mother of Bob. (frogmouth is Bob in embryo-form)

Bob kinda looks as if he could be the child of the pair we've seen in episode 8. I admit that the timeline is off, given that Leland saw Bob when he was a child, but maybe "frogmouth"-children grow up almost instantly. In a world with talking teapots, why not.

[LL-FF-SS]

Understanding The Jumping Man is the key to figuring out what the deal with Sarah is.

There was never any question as to what BOB represented in the original series because the answer was explicitly or at least heavily suggested to the audience. He became "The evil that men do" that's one reading on it anyways. If Bob represents evil, then The Jumping Man represents grief/trauma. Every scene we've seen him in he's in constant turmoil, as if he's stuck in the state of the agony their stolen "garmonbozia" has left behind.

I believe the room above the convenience store is the Palmer house, a twisted version of it. It is the very same one that Laura stepped into in her dream. We see The Jumping Man running down a staircase in Part 17, this immediately recalled the shot of Sarah running down the stairs in the pilot, except the intensity of it has been heightened to such an extreme, as if the memory of it has only made it more dreadful and overtly horror-esque with time. This is where The Jumping Man lives, in an echo of Sarah's misery.

Clearly something has gone terribly wrong with her, she isn't "Good", but I don't believe she is the vessel to the ultimate evil of Twin Peaks. I can't figure out what other role The Jumping Man would play, why her face would be superimposed on him. We already know that Bob isn't just Bob when he attaches himself to somebody, they coalesce into one, I don't see why it would be different here.

[Cappy]

Understanding The Jumping Man is the key to figuring out what the deal with Sarah is.

There was never any question as to what BOB represented in the original series because the answer was explicitly or at least heavily suggested to the audience. He became "The evil that men do" that's one reading on it anyways. If Bob represents evil, then The Jumping Man represents grief/trauma. Every scene we've seen him in he's in constant turmoil, as if he's stuck in the state of the agony their stolen "garmonbozia" has left behind.

I believe the room above the convenience store is the Palmer house, a twisted version of it. It is the very same one that Laura stepped into in her dream. We see The Jumping Man running down a staircase in Part 17, this immediately recalled the shot of Sarah running down the stairs in the pilot, except the intensity of it has been heightened to such an extreme, as if the memory of it has only made it more dreadful and overtly horror-esque with time. This is where The Jumping Man lives, in an echo of Sarah's misery.

Clearly something has gone terribly wrong with her, she isn't "Good", but I don't believe she is the vessel to the ultimate evil of Twin Peaks. I can't figure out what other role The Jumping Man would play, why her face would be superimposed on him. We already know that Bob isn't just Bob when he attaches himself to somebody, they coalesce into one, I don't see why it would be different here.

Well said. That's a very interesting way of putting it -- each Lodge spirit represents something different, or has a different domain. If BOB is some kind of hyper-lust or sadism, the Jumping Man could very well be grief and despair. The Twin Peaks spirits could be viewed as sort of a pantheon of sort-of deities, which I guess would make Judy/The Experiment be a sort of older god in the style of the Greek Titans.