World of Blue - Archived Forum 2007-2022

I would add 'the finale'. Also, 'Dougie'.

I voted 'dropped plotlines', though. Some ideas and characters were interesting. The Audrey thing got me completely hooked. But in the end everything felt half-baked and too vague; the lack of Audrey last Sunday left me speechless. I'm already starting to forget details.

It's a balance issue. It's not anything specifically but how it ties together. It's less than the sum of it's parts essentially.

The pacing alone didn't bother me. What bothered me about that was that it became repetitive very early. It too often ended up feeling pointless. I actually liked the mood the slow scenes conveyed in the finale (even the driving scenes) but what brought them down was that they had no appropriate context by the time it was all over.

Lack of character development wouldn't necessarily be an issue if it was a trade off of a strong mystery plot. Same applies to the dropped storylines. I don't think these things would be perceived as much of an issue if there was something to balance that out. One of the things viewers are most often alienated by when expecting a mystery in a show is when writers spend too much time on storylines that don't add up to anything and rush the plot at the last minute barely making sense out of it. The Return had a lot of stuff that looked interesting but never fulfilled its potential.
Cooper's purpose for most of the time was really just being out of the way. It feels like a cop out rather than an actual storyline because it was easier to have him debilitated than work him in something like The Return. Cooper was never someone who could stand still (non coincidentally this is very obvious from the minute he gets out of the coma) so there was no easy way of making him work within a narrative who's most recognizable trait is it's stillness and slowness. The scenes in isolation featuring the various versions of Cooper could be really good but again the lack of a decent narrative that would provide them with context they're not more than a cool way of keeping Cooper out of the way.

The to be continued ending for me brings everything down a few notches because it feels so uninspired. In retrospect it makes it harder to take the whole thing seriously.

@gabriel

Then again, I believe destinations are the priority, not journeys. Essentially, TPTR was four months of wasted time!

erm, what was your last 4 months like? You get to your destination? Was it all a waste of time? Now what?

I don't know about Gabriel but mine were shitty. And The Return didn't help at all. It showed the world as a hideous place and people as dispensable puppets who didn't matter and could be dropped at any place.

Therefore I voted "lack of character d." although I could as well go with dropped plotlines because it actually resulted in the same - the characters were undeveloped because Lynch & Frost didn't care about them, they didn't want to tell us anything about them, they showed us only shards of their lives, which in most cases were irrelevant and useless moments, so they dropped them wherever. It's one and the same. That's why the best one-word description of The Return that I've heard so far is: sociopathic.

Of course there were exceptions: Dougie and the people around him were nice (nice, huh? a pair of gangsters and three pink bunnies yet yes, they had more human touch to them than 80% of other characters), Hawk and Log Lady were treated as human beings, not puppets, and Frank Truman was great, I think due to the actor but what do I know. That's probably about it.

Deep Thought wrote:I thought the poll would maybe be looking at academic criticism (hmmm, how will that get put into a poll? I wondered), but this is more along the lines of a Jay Sherman review, "It Stinks!"

That would be tricky yes, but definitely an interesting approach for a later date. Polls are by their nature simplistic and I wanted to include more options but really didn't want to dilute it too much. I did consider having ' Dougie' as one of the options but decided most people's issues with Dougie would fall into one of the other answers. This poll is just one method of collating opinions for the article though, to try and get a quick indication of the main issue people had.

BOB1 wrote:I don't know about Gabriel but mine were shitty. And The Return didn't help at all. It showed the world as a hideous place and people as dispensable puppets who didn't matter and could be dropped at any place.

Therefore I voted "lack of character d." although I could as well go with dropped plotlines because it actually resulted in the same - the characters were undeveloped because Lynch & Frost didn't care about them, they didn't want to tell us anything about them, they showed us only shards of their lives, which in most cases were irrelevant and useless moments, so they dropped them wherever. It's one and the same. That's why the best one-word description of The Return that I've heard so far is: sociopathic.

Of course there were exceptions: Dougie and the people around him were nice (nice, huh? a pair of gangsters and three pink bunnies yet yes, they had more human touch to them than 80% of other characters), Hawk and Log Lady were treated as human beings, not puppets, and Frank Truman was great, I think due to the actor but what do I know. That's probably about it.

TPTR was like watching someone you know who has developed Alzheimer's. TPTR would have brief flashes of what made the original great, then go back to being confused and disjointed, constantly falling over itself.

Characters and plotlines came and went without purpose. Why were Shelly and her daughter in the show? Why were Norma, Ed, Jacobs and Nadine there? Why was Shelly's son-in-law hanging out with Gersten Hayward? In fact, I didn't realise it was Alicia Witt playing the girl and subsequently finding that out added nothing to the experience.

It just felt like a bunch of scenes thrown together and that there were meant to be lots of other scenes shot that simply didn't happen or were chopped.

I'd love it if they published an annotated original nine-hour screenplay; it would be a great companion piece to the other two books!!

''not quirky enough'' sure

.

Soolsma wrote:''not quirky enough'' sure

What? I was deadly serious when I voted.

Actually I think that there's more than one kind of quirky, beyond out-and-out absurdism. One thing I did miss was the walking-bass jazz accompaniment to one or two of the more off-beat, dippy, conversations. I think for example the exchanges between Andy and Lucy in the earlier parts could have been warmed a little by a touch of that.

Also there was not enough appreciation of coffee. While pie got its own sub-plot in the climactic struggle between Norma and the guy who wanted to use Monsanto GM cherries for her franchise, coffee was barely mentioned.

If there were "Other" I'd add:
- Too much David Lynch acting

I liked his acting, best I've seen. He's come a long way from the Sand Miner Supervisor days. But just too damn much of him. Also didn't like his character Gordon talking about his ability to obtain an erection. Whatever. Had enough.

Spacevessel wrote:Where's the "all of the above" option?

You beat me to it

wxray wrote:...talking about his ability to obtain an erection...

I also didn't appreciate that, or the way we had to see Tammy's blushful half-smile in response. It was a bit like a lecherous grandad preening himself when his grandson brings home a new girlfriend. Overfamiliar? Something like that; he crossed a line in any case.

Albert: You're going soft in your old age.
Cole: Not where it counts, buddy.

[Tammy stifles a smile uncomfortably]

I tried to think of a more charitable ways to look at this exchange, like maybe Cole was hinting that he had become something akin to the Vajra-sattvas ('diamond-souled') as talked about by Blavastsky in The Secret Doctrine (Vol 1, p. 52). Or, more simply, that he still had a firm mind, not flaccid with age. These alternatives felt to me like overstretching credibility, like I was basically making excuses for an irreducibly embarrassing moment. And even if the writers had intended it to be ambiguous, it was written in a way that the lowest common denominator still took precedence over other possibilities. We wouldn't have that suppressed smile from Tammy otherwise. It really didn't do much service to either character in this respect -- if it was an innocent statement, are we then supposed to think of Tammy as having a prurient mind? No-one comes out of this untarnished.

Seems like a minor gripe in retrospect, but there it is.

Novalis wrote:

wxray wrote:...talking about his ability to obtain an erection...

I also didn't appreciate that, or the way we had to see Tammy's blushful half-smile in response. It was a bit like a lecherous grandad preening himself when his grandson brings home a new girlfriend. Overfamiliar? Something like that; he crossed a line in any case.

Albert: You're going soft in your old age.
Cole: Not where it counts, buddy.

[Tammy stifles a smile uncomfortably]

I tried to think of a more charitable ways to look at this exchange, like maybe Cole was hinting that he had become something akin to the Vajra-sattvas ('diamond-souled') as talked about by Blavastsky in The Secret Doctrine (Vol 1, p. 52). Or, more simply, that he still had a firm mind, not flaccid with age. These alternatives felt to me like overstretching credibility, like I was basically making excuses for an irreducibly embarrassing moment. And even if the writers had intended it to be ambiguous, it was written in a way that the lowest common denominator still took precedence over other possibilities. We wouldn't have that suppressed smile from Tammy otherwise. It really didn't do much service to either character in this respect -- if it was an innocent statement, are we then supposed to think of Tammy as having a prurient mind? No-one comes out of this untarnished.

Seems like a minor gripe in retrospect, but there it is.

Why is Cole viewed as some saintly character? I voted none of the above, but I would have liked to see Cole get his just desserts, him being a scion of Bob, imo. Seems overt to me. "He's dead" brings to mind "Next!"

No option for positive criticism? Typical.

I vote none of the above.

AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:Of course, several respected artists, at least when asked by journalists, have said they like The Return. But how many high-profile artists said on release how poor they found The Godfather III or True Detective 2 or The Phantom Menace?

I'll give you the same response I gave you the first time you posted this exact same message: "Lots".