Season Two: A Retrospective

[Ygdrasel]

Thinking back to my first viewing, I remember enjoying season two well enough. Many disagreed. So I thought I'd revisit it after some time to see if I felt worse about it. And...It's not great.

The season started fine. The network forced their hand on the "Who Killed Laura" arc. And then things...Deflated. I remember reading somewhere (maybe incorrectly, mind) that Frost and Lynch had a disagreement about Laura: Frost viewed the mystery as the primary purpose of the show, and mysteries ultimately need to be solved. Lynch viewed the mystery as a plot device, a tool, an excuse to delve into this town and its people, how they react to it, their secrets, etcetera. The murder itself needn't ever be explicitly solved.


Turns out Lynch was right. Without that mystery, we have no reason to peek in on these people. Cooper - essentially the audience's "looking glass" into Twin Peaks - has no reason to stay there. By solving the murder, the network effectively tore down the entire framework of the series. And...It shows.

So, Laura's murder is solved. This raises three immediate problems, the last of which is seemingly caused by the previous two:

A) The characters need new preoccupations. The big scandal is done, moving on, what do they do?
B) Cooper needs to stay in Twin Peaks...Yet has no reason to do so.
C) Lynch lost interest. Without that framework, things crumbled and he lost his playground.


The solutions to these problems are...Lacking, at best. Cooper gets put on leave for some technically-illegal thing from earlier in the series so he doesn't have any need to return to the agency. Problem solved! Now...Coop getting booted by the agency isn't necessarily a bad idea for an arc. But it's born of a need for an excuse rather than being an organic story development. And it ultimately comes to no payoff: Nothing ever comes of his dismissal beyond its utility as an excuse to keep him there.

The problem of what to do with the characters...They all got their own self-contained, weird little stories. Bobby became a corporate kiss-ass for Ben Horne which, while it could have been interesting, was left with no great payoff...Largely due to Ben Horne's own story which while it began with him seemingly turning over a new leaf (in actuality just screwing Catherine over...Again) eventually took him through a ridiculously goofy bit where Catherine masqueraded (unconvincingly) as an Asian businessman and finally to unhinged Civil War re-enactments. Benjamin Horne driven off his rocker by grief or something...Not a terrible idea. Horrendous execution.

Pete and Shelley are just accessories for Catherine and Bobby so they're not given anything interesting to do.

Nadine...Good god, Nadine. Her drape runner fixation was a bizarre quirk. Her "I HAVE SUPER STRENGTH AND AMNESIA AND AM GETTING CREEPILY INVOLVED WITH THIS HIGH SCHOOL GUY!" thing...Every single solitary second of that was dreadful. I can't even remember what her husband was doing with Norma but it can't have been very worthwhile if it was so forgettable.

Audrey was doing her thing with Billy Zane. Cooper was doing his thing with Annie. Now, I liked the Windom Earle stuff, Bluebook, Major Briggs...But I would have liked it all a lot more if Audrey had been involved because I had time to care at all about Audrey. Annie, not so much. And John Justice Billy Zane was a bore.

And then...And this is where I originally hit the "Things are going downhill" mark: James and Donna. And Evelyn, eventually. James was always garbage. He never emoted, ever. And he was boring. All they had to do was love-story drivel. Then James left and met Evelyn and he could have gotten roped into Lodge stuff or something compelling but instead he bones a married woman or something.

At some point, the old mayor hooks up with a gold digger or whatever that asinine garbage was. Then eventually the finale happened, mercifully killing off a lot of these people. Thank god.


I still enjoyed quite a lot of this season at the time. I was interested in Bobby's corporate adventures, I was intrigued by Ben Horne's apparent loss of sanity, and I loved Windom's arc as much as anything from season one. It's only in retrospect that I recognize...None of it (Windom aside) had any payoff whatsoever. Even the potentially interesting arc of Coop being cut loose from his precious agency was never made into anything worthwhile.

And then you got stuff like those two old dudes and the gold digger, Nadine's nonsensical wastepile of a story arc, and John Justice Wheeler and Annie RUINING EVERYTHING.


So:

- Much of the good stuff never pays off and sometimes ventures too far into camp (Catherine masquerading is fine. That stupid fat Asian costume is not. Windom Earle's crazy chess game was fun. A "Miss Twin Peaks" contest is just outright parody of itself.)

- The bad stuff is really, stupidly bad.

- Too many forgettable people (Billy Zane, the old guys, Annie, Evelyn...) are introduced.

- A lot of characters are left to be forgotten among the garbage. (What were Pete, Norma, and those others doing again?)

- The characters that should have been left in the garbage - Donna, James, maybe Nadine... - are given extensive focus. And on the subject of James and Donna, I have to say: They should have left Twin Peaks and died somewhere after Laura's murder was solved. Bobby had his thing going with Shelley (and a potential conflict with Leo in time, never played out that way) but Donna and James literally only existed as accessories to Laura. Beyond Laura's murder, they were barely even (if at all) characters in their own right...Yet the writers kept trying to pretend that they were. (Indeed, I find Donna far more interesting in FWWM where they more or less embrace the fact that she only exists as an accessory to Laura.)

There's also the glaring issue of nobody has any ongoing grief or difficulty in light of one of their close neighbors being a raping murderer...But until anything canonical contradicts me, I still like to think that was the Lodge's influence placating its town. Because my sanity demands it.

The post-reveal episodes still aren't a complete waste but I can definitely see the flaws a lot more clearly now.
Thank goodness Lynch and Frost will be personally handling the revival.

[FauxOwl]

It's almost not even a matter for debate that the quality dropped after the murder story line reached an end. I have mixed feelings because as bad as it got, I still find the actual reveal episode to be easily, one of the strongest hours of television ever created. But yes, that stretch following is problematic.

When the revival was announced I spoke to many people about the show, most of whom had never seen it before or hadn't seen it for a long time. I always had to offer them the proviso about the second season. It sort of rolls back to that heated debate a bit ago about whether the 2nd season should be re-edited. Most, myself included, felt the 2nd season is on record and accept it for what it is, but that doesn't really address what is sure to be an influx of new viewers of the old show who might be motivated to watch in preparation for the revival. Is it reasonable to expect them to watch every minute of it and still maintain interest? Probably not. In that regards it might not be a bad thing to have something of a fan edit "summary" of episodes 17-23 with the idea that it is not intended as an official reedit, but just a way to get the key points of that stretch without having to spend 5-6 hours to do it. I'm sure it'll be argued that new viewers should be obligated to get through it, but I'm all for anything that would make it easier to develop a larger following for the revival, and if that involves an easier way to get through the bad stuff, so be it.

[LostInTheMovies]

Frost viewed the mystery as the primary purpose of the show, and mysteries ultimately need to be solved. Lynch viewed the mystery as a plot device, a tool, an excuse to delve into this town and its people, how they react to it, their secrets, etcetera. The murder itself needn't ever be explicitly solved.

In terms of whether the mystery should be solved, yes, this is correct - Frost wanted it solved, Lynch didn't. But in terms of the actual importance of the mystery, I would be inclined to say the exact opposite.

To Frost the mystery was a plot device, and an increasingly distracting one. He is often quoted as saying he wanted the TV audience to recognize there was more to the show than Laura Palmer, expressed surprise that her character had become so important to many viewers, and worried that the intensity surrounding the whodunit was destabilizing the long-term chances of the series. For Frost, Laura was just one story among many; a great gateway which should not be allowed to swallow everything up. He's since changed his mind, saying that he believes the reveal was a mistake, and the Laura mystery should have continued. But it's worth noting that even now, in 2015, he's eagerly set to release "The Secret Lives of Twin Peaks," a novel which once again posits Twin Peaks as a land of many stories, too big for a single central plot to encapsulate.

To Lynch on the other hand, it's a bit more complicated. He has been quoting as saying that the mystery would recede into the background as we get to know other characters and their stories, but this should not be taken to mean he considered it "just" a MacGuffin. Rather, for him the mystery was like the air we breathe, sometimes forgotten but absolutely necessary and present in every moment. In Lynch's conception the mystery of Laura Palmer was tantamount to the mystery of existence itself - solve that and you no longer have a story. As the Log Lady says, "Only when we are everywhere will there be just 'one.' And then the knowing is so full, there is no longer room for any questions." Or something to that effect! Also, his statements about not wanting to end the mystery...something about them always seems slightly off to me. That was obviously his conscious intention, yet on some level he must have been on board with the reveal since he throws himself into it with such gusto (and then makes an entire movie about what really happened). It's like there are two Lynchs - one who loves neverending mystery, the other who wants to experience the truth beneath it all. The network and Frost forced the former Lynch's hand, and the latter Lynch came to the fore.

I think it's often (mistakenly) stated that Lynch saw the murder mystery as an "excuse," which implies he was more concerned with the town than Laura. In fact, as soon as Laura was gone he lost interest in the town completely and when he returned to this world in Fire Walk With Me, his halfhearted attempts to incorporate them quickly fell by the wayside as he feverishly devoted the film to Laura herself. And when he returned to Twin Peaks in the Log Lady intros he immediately has her state that "it is a story of many, but it begins with one...the one that leads to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one." And ten years after this, he puts up an "easter egg" video on his website consisting of a 4-minute zoom on a production still of Sheryl Lee as Laura with the questions "What does she see? What does she hear?" imprinted on the video. Lynch is a big believer in the unified field beneath the chaos of reality, and I think for him in Twin Peaks the mystery of Laura Palmer was that unified field.

[LostInTheMovies]

Without that mystery, we have no reason to peek in on these people. Cooper - essentially the audience's "looking glass" into Twin Peaks - has no reason to stay there. By solving the murder, the network effectively tore down the entire framework of the series. And...It shows. ...

Definitely. Agreed with your other points as well. I think, maybe there could have been a way to continue the sense of mystery, if they had used the Leland/Bob reveal as a springboard to explore the darkness of the woods and somehow keep Laura as a kind of beyond-the-grave oracle into this universe. But instead, the show goes in the complete opposite direction - dropping the Palmers (Sarah's last line until the finale is - how's this for tipping your hand - "I want to remember everything"), forgetting about Bob for about seven episodes, barely slipping in occasional references to Laura (despite continuing to end on her portrait), and doubling down on suspense-free sitcom material probably on the assumption that the audience needed a break from the intensity. But the intensity was what lured everyone into town in the first place.

Nothing ever comes of his dismissal beyond its utility as an excuse to keep him there.

Yes, and this is true of so many of the mid-season subplots. They spin their wheels and just end with a whimper. I remember the first time I saw the show, I expected everything to add up. There would be some unforeseen twist to James & Evelyn. There was more to Little Nicky than a lame comic subplot. Etc etc. Nope. The writers were honestly just dragging in the lamest, most pointless stories they could think up.

Benjamin Horne driven off his rocker by grief or something...Not a terrible idea. Horrendous execution.

Interesting point. I learned from Brad Dukes' book that Ben-as-Civil-War-figure was actually Mark Frost's idea (unlike a lot of s2 subplots). And you can actually see a lot of his hallmarks there, similar to Windom Earle. But as you say, horrendous execution - like everything else, it just goes nowhere. Harley Peyton has said that he loved writing dialogue and character (and he was very good at both) but was not that keen on plot. It shows. The period where he was left in charge of the show is basically a series of sketch comedy scenes that seldom add up to anything bigger or contribute to anything ongoing. The late season 2, despite its flaws, has a restored sense of narrative momentum and things "adding up" and "coming together," presumably because Frost was paying better attention (he even co-wrote one of the last episodes for the only time between Leland's capture and the finale).

There's also the glaring issue of nobody has any ongoing grief or difficulty in light of one of their close neighbors being a raping murderer...But until anything canonical contradicts me, I still like to think that was the Lodge's influence placating its town. Because my sanity demands it.

LOL, yes this is the most patently ridiculous and wince-inducing aspect of the mid-season. Especially for a show which set as its premise the almost over-the-top grief of the community at the death of their beloved Laura. In a perverse, totally unintentional "meta" way it works as a statement on repression/denial (maybe another way of saying "the Lodge's influence placating the town") but that does little to help it out as drama.

[LostInTheMovies]

Also one last note (man, I love this subject - thanks for starting this thread!)...

As I've discovered lately (I was too young to watch it at the time), recent media accounts - of the reveal killing the show - are revisionist. There was a spike and dropoff around the reveal, to be sure, but the overall trend started much, much earlier. In fact, the BIG turnaround occurred right at the start of the second season. This was for several reasons (the schedule changed to Saturday, the premiere episode was slow-paced, dark, and bizarre) but one of the big ones was that people didn't seem to believe the killer would ever be revealed.

So, while dramatically-speaking it would have been wise to postpone the reveal, the show was probably doomed either way in terms of popularity. At heart, I think the public reception to Twin Peaks treated it as a miniseries and wasn't prepared to endure its antagonizing pleasures for the long haul. Had Lynch/Frost held off on revealing the killer, they might have been cancelled even quicker!

[Jasper]

Ygdrasel (why only one g?), I agree with the vast majority of what you've written. I know the pain of the season two nosedive all too well. If that were the style of the show from the start I never would have watched it. It's a touchy subject. A few out there like it all, and I fully respect their right to enjoy it.

When the revival was announced I spoke to many people about the show, most of whom had never seen it before or hadn't seen it for a long time. I always had to offer them the proviso about the second season. It sort of rolls back to that heated debate a bit ago about whether the 2nd season should be re-edited. Most, myself included, felt the 2nd season is on record and accept it for what it is, but that doesn't really address what is sure to be an influx of new viewers of the old show who might be motivated to watch in preparation for the revival. Is it reasonable to expect them to watch every minute of it and still maintain interest? Probably not. In that regards it might not be a bad thing to have something of a fan edit "summary" of episodes 17-23 with the idea that it is not intended as an official reedit, but just a way to get the key points of that stretch without having to spend 5-6 hours to do it. I'm sure it'll be argued that new viewers should be obligated to get through it, but I'm all for anything that would make it easier to develop a larger following for the revival, and if that involves an easier way to get through the bad stuff, so be it.

I think a lot of people give up, and I don't blame them, though perhaps I should stress that Twin Peaks is my favorite show. Now, I can't honestly say I think it's the BEST show (I'd pick The Sopranos or something), but as an individual it speaks to me the most, and the brilliance of the good stuff lets me live with the rubbish, if uncomfortably.

I'd prefer people watch it all, at least once, and hopefully even twice (to reach a better understanding of things). After that I don't know if people need to suffer through the bad stretch again. Personally I can't watch it without watching all of it, and that sort of prevents me from watching it more often. That's why I'm strongly in favor of a fanedit by the fans for the fans, meant for those who already know it inside and out (and own the whole thing), encompassing episode 17 (funeral episode) through at least episode 23. It doesn't matter to me whether it's presented as a long film or as a handful of episodes. It wouldn't be to replace the original episodes or alter the historical record. It wouldn't be an official thing. It would just be an option for fans, just as any other fanedit. I'd really like to experience it this way, provided the editing choices are sensible and tasteful. Though I have no editing knowledge or equipment (aside from imovie), the next time I watch the whole enchilada, I'm going to make notes regarding what scenes happen when during the quality dive, and then I can at least arrange it all on paper to imagine what an edit might be like.

Naturally it's been discussed a lot. For example:
http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2755

In this thread, a poster even describes making such an edit (probably from the Gold Box):
http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2128

[Ygdrasel]

Also one last note (man, I love this subject - thanks for starting this thread!)...

As I've discovered lately (I was too young to watch it at the time), recent media accounts - of the reveal killing the show - are revisionist. There was a spike and dropoff around the reveal, to be sure, but the overall trend started much, much earlier. In fact, the BIG turnaround occurred right at the start of the second season. This was for several reasons (the schedule changed to Saturday, the premiere episode was slow-paced, dark, and bizarre) but one of the big ones was that people didn't seem to believe the killer would ever be revealed.

So, while dramatically-speaking it would have been wise to postpone the reveal, the show was probably doomed either way in terms of popularity. At heart, I think the public reception to Twin Peaks treated it as a miniseries and wasn't prepared to endure its antagonizing pleasures for the long haul. Had Lynch/Frost held off on revealing the killer, they might have been cancelled even quicker!

People dropped off from How I Met Your Mother for the same reason but they had a better excuse: It had been on for over five seasons already. (Note: Love the show, finale haters are jerks, still watch reruns)

People are just impatient. And I'm exactly Ghandi-tier patient myself over here so that's saying something.

Schedule changes can easily damn ANY show, true enough. There are even certain slots where shows are put to die. But hey: Simpsons has gone on twenty-something seasons. The original Star Trek was nearly canceled after just one until mountains of fanmail poured in to save it and make it a still-ongoing icon. Whether they endured unbroken all this time or were just spared from doom by sudden fan outpouring, those are great accomplishments for any show...But getting cancelled, still getting a movie even a year after the fact, retaining interest and discussion and fandom (however hidden, niche, soft-spoken or cultish) through all the years of nothingness and then being revived TWENTY-FIVE YEARS later to applause and joy and excitement...That is a crazy accomplishment.

Any show can stay on through the years by just not being canceled - Look at Family Guy. Twin Peaks got shot, resuscitated, lynched (movie reception) burnt into remnants that smoldered away for nearly three decades then burst miraculously back into a roaring fire...Out of which it rose restored. Put that in your coffee and sip it, network. Hope it burns your mouth.



I notice the movie got a lot of its negative reception because it was "dark" and "bizarre" too...But look at today, what some have called the new "golden age" of television. Breaking Bad, Dexter and Sons of Anarchy are things of adoration and those are all dark dark dark DARK. Twin Peaks was before its time in just so many ways... (I also love all of those shows. And again, finale haters are JERKS because Dexter was great.)