Mr. Reindeer wrote:Haha, glad to be of service! The alternate timeline stuff is for sure confusing. (Tammy at one point says that Cooper was in town for a few months, which would be longer than the period he spent there in the original timeline, but certainly not for a full year.) Maybe once Laura was out of the picture, Bob got bored with Leland and saw more potential for mayhem with Cooper, and decided to pull the proverbial ripcord? It could also be that he knew Dale was the one who robbed him of Laura — his ultimate desired conquest whom he had been grooming for years — and set his sights on getting revenge on Dale.
That's the tricky thing about the Dossiers, it's hard to tell what are mistakes and what are small indications of potential import... also I'm in awe of your timeline! A few months ago I was attempting the exact same thing, though I was trying to beat the dates into something more like a cohesive timeline, got frustrated, and quit. Your approach is definitely the more wise.
Soolsma wrote:Or Frost simply forgot about Maddy at that point, and would probably attribute it to a mistake on Tammy's behalf if you'd ask him. seems more likely tbh..
On the other hand, BOB was still on the loose, trying to spell his name. Assuming he's got plenty of time to play with fire until Leland commits suicide on February 24th 1989, he might even have made some different kills by then!
But wait, wtf, that's actually impossible. Shouldn't BOB have joined the doppelgänger by then? Cooper entering the lodge should be in March '89! I thought the consensus was all of that stuff still happened. This also really begs the question, what would make BOB leave Leland, never been incarcerated nor caught? Could BOB have left Leland for a while already, giving him time to acknowledge the gaping hole where his conscience used to be, ultimately resulting in his suicide?
Hey now, that's just a thematic tool, memory is a tricky thing ... especially Mark's!
Yeah, the alternate timeline version of Leland's possession serves to compound how complicated it was already. Things like the ritualistic dirt mound w/ the Fire Walk With Me note in blood, and the whole idea of planting letters under the nails, fade from our awareness until brought up again in Leland's death scene. But at the same time that BOB spelling out his name is revealed, the serial pattern of BOB's killings and need for the spelled-out name is subverted, with Laura's death being elevated into a transference of hosts, with BOB trying to possess her ... and then by the time of Fire Walk With Me, the Theresa Banks murder is made out to be Leland's doing, less of a serial pattern and more something of a pragmatism.
So there was already the problem of figuring out what the end goal was with his fingernail streak, but all signs point to the reigns being taken up within Laura. I'm a fan of the John Thorne theory that Ronette was brought to the traincar as sacrifice, and as induction of Laura into full corruption and catalyst for continued homicides by killing her at her hand. And I think that, aside from a visual for the sake of it, to set a mood, there's a verisimilitude to the dirt mound and fingernails as function in the plot, because I think the easiest case is that BOB (perhaps like Lynch
) was setting these scenes as ways to instill fear. It seems most consistent with his character that anything he does is just to produce maximum terror, and merely suggests an insane, unfathomable occult purpose for which to better feed on the reaction.
So we already had BOB wanting to possess her--and in lieu of that, we get what happened in the series. Leland remains possessed, Laura's death is salvaged as fodder, and Cooper is used to launch a BOB posessed doppelganger into reality, who now (perhaps because of inhabiting a doppelganger for the first time) finds himself equipped with abilities to create and manage Tulpa. So now in the new timeline, with Laura missing entirely, the third outcome happens; in lieu of even her possession relegated to simple death, it seems BOB goes AWOL and leaves Leland alone with his guilty conscious. What I can't exactly pin down is why he wouldn't have just kept murdering ... perhaps Laura is what led him to the cabin, or perhaps Ronette alone, or anyone else near at hand, wasn't enough fuel. Laura had, for her entire life, been primed as a vat of sorrows after all.
Then that would mean all the Cooper stuff still happened ... because of Windom's volition, BOB didn't even need to remain in Leland for Cooper to be drawn into the lodge and taken advantage of, but that begs the next harrowing question: in the new timeline, what becomes of BOB? Does changing Laura's past keep intact the cockney lad who defeats BOB? The latter happens before the former, and the gravitas with which Cooper pardons himself almost makes it seem like it were the first necessary step to altering the timeline ... one almost gets the sense that killing BOB, a being outside of time, destroys him in every instance. But it's true that the first thing we see in the past is Leland's grimace.
So, it seems to me that only Laura's death were altered, and as result, BOB's killings stop before they even become a streak.