Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

[Jonah]

I remember the proposed comic - there was a thread or two on here about it - and all the images they released, but I forget what the premise was? I have a vague memory that some of it was built around ideas that had been proposed for Season 3 back in the day.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I remember the proposed comic - there was a thread or two on here about it - and all the images they released, but I forget what the premise was? I have a vague memory that some of it was built around ideas that had been proposed for Season 3 back in the day.

http://twinpeaksarchive.blogspot.com/20 ... w.html?m=1

“Bob told me they really wanted to get away from the high school setting, so after the resolution of the Cooper-BOB-possession plot point, they would have cut to something like "Ten Years Later", and then shown us a Twin Peaks where Cooper had quit the FBI and had become the town pharmacist, Sheriff Truman had become a recluse, etc. He also mentioned they were going to have Sheryl Lee come back yet again, this time as a redhead, and probably have her character killed by BOB again. There were also some vague ideas about BOB and Mike being from a planet made of creamed corn, something about Truman driving Mike backwards through the portal into the Black Lodge (which I think would have been a really nice cinematic scene).”

Basically, all the planned S3 ideas I’m personally glad never materialized. Resolving the doppelganger arc way too quickly as opposed to really engaging with the duality, Sheryl wearing more wigs, creamed corn planet, etc. I don’t know why they hated the HS stuff so much. That was some of the best stuff in the Pilot and the first few episodes, and then they just completely abandoned it.

[Jonah]

I think it was more that they kept forgetting the put the kids in school - or didn't like feeling the characters were tied to having to go to school, graduate, etc. - and just wanted to do other things with them without feeling constrained to a high school setting. I think it was even supposed to be a college town instead early on.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I think it was more that they kept forgetting the put the kids in school - or didn't like feeling the characters were tied to having to go to school, graduate, etc. - and just wanted to do other things with them without feeling constrained to a high school setting. I think it was even supposed to be a college town instead early on.

The show just feels so much more real and rich when Audrey and Donna are smoking in the restroom, Bobby is being chided for being late, etc., as opposed to the later episodes where Donna is having all kinds of adventures every day. Even when the show was still really good in early S2, it starts to feel much more like a conventional TV show due to writing shortcuts like this.

[JackwithOneEye]

i'm kinda glad the comic didnt work out. I think the Return made the right narrative move changing the scope with Bad Cooper free as a bird
out in the world,
Bad Cooper staying within the town and fooling everybody he was the good Cooper while plotting, mighta just been WIndom Earle redux.

[Mr. Reindeer]

i'm kinda glad the comic didnt work out. I think the Return made the right narrative move changing the scope with Bad Cooper free as a bird
out in the world,
Bad Cooper staying within the town and fooling everybody he was the good Cooper while plotting, mighta just been WIndom Earle redux.

Yeah I was always afraid it would end up being a Star Trek “Mirror Mirror” kind of thing, which it sounds like was the original plan.

[JackwithOneEye]

It makes more sense if Bad cooper is pure evil or pure inner Id, he'd want to have freedom to be dirty and disgusting and transient rather than having to contain it all in private while masquerading daily as a pharmacist, maintaining a business and paying bills.

[Mr. Reindeer]

It makes more sense if Bad cooper is pure evil or pure inner Id, he'd want to have freedom to be dirty and disgusting and transient rather than having to contain it all in private while masquerading daily as a pharmacist, maintaining a business and paying bills.

From what I can remember reading, the doppel storyline would have been wrapped up in 2-3 episodes. Just treated as a standard cliffhanger, easily resolved at the beginning of the next season. Then the show would have skipped forward ten years. “Pharmacist Cooper” was never the doppel, that was the real Coop after retiring from the FBI.

I’m so glad we got a season that actually engaged with the doppel/duality as opposed to burying it quickly and moving on.

[Jonah]

I agree that seeing them in high school gave the show some more richness. What they did after with Audrey - making her a businesswoman - wasn't entirely successful, though some of it worked, just felt too quick and rushed.

I'm not entirely convinced a 1991 Season 3 would have played out like that, but if it did it might have been okay to wrap that up in two or three episodes. It depends really what they had planned after that for the rest of the season, once they flashed ahead. Was it another murder mystery? Is that the ultimate direction they were going? Sheryl Lee would return as a redhead, Coop might be a pharmacist - and then what? It must have involved another murder, possibly the lodges again, but if the whole Bad Coop thing had been wrapped up and presumably things had been quiet in the town for five or ten years or however long the flashforward would be, then what? I'd be interested in knowing if they had a couple of major arcs - and if so what they were.

But mostly it just sounds like stuff they were shooting around if they got picked without a clear plan. Just vague ideas. And I think Frost and Lynch would have been more on board with a third season, for awhile anyway, Lynch maybe for less time than Frost, though I don't think Frost would have risked letting it go down again. They both seemed pretty regretful of stepping away and confident they'd come back to it in a big way in their Coop interview, which was an appeal to ABC to renew them. So they might very well have kept Bad Coop going longer than what we heard, but even if they didn't I'm not necessarily sure that would have been a bad thing, depends what else they had planned.

In terms of The Return, I'm not entirely sure the Bad Coop/Dougie arc was successful - it was very stretched out. Bad Coop was creepy in the end of Episode 4 but some of the stuff - the greasy hair, the outfit, the arm wrestling stuff - was a bit meh to me. The creepiest he was was in the end of Part 4 and at the sheriff's station. I didn't necessarily need to see all of that over the course of a whole season spread out all over the US though - it was okay and sometimes brilliant, but I think I would have preferred more mysteries in the town itself, not necessarily another murder, but exploring the lodges more, the woods, the residents, the hotel, etc.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Whatever your feelings on the strength of the Mr. C scenes in TR, I think what works best about it is the very real sense of loss, that the doppelganger has been living Cooper’s life for 25 whole years, that Cooper has been lost in the Red Room for all that time, the rapes of Audrey and Diane, and Cooper having to live with the repercussions of that (that on some level, his desires and his personality caused these events even if he wasn’t directly responsible). The weight of all that gives so much more meaning to the season 2 cliffhanger, as opposed to if it had just been wrapped up quickly as a standard TV thing in 1991.

[Jonah]

It just always felt like too harsh a punishment to me (for Coop), even moreso with the possible punishment he continued to face leading up to the ending. While powerful in its own way, I feel switching to Richard and having such a devastating ending didn't fully work for me after waiting so long to see Dougie "wake up" as Coop. I know it was meant to be a tragic ending and show how Coop kept failing, but it didn't feel fully earned to me. That and other reasons leave me less convinced than some people that Season 3 is THE ending. I preferred the ending to FWWM which, while far from happy, offered a sense of transcendence. I suppose you could read some of that into the ending of The Return too, maybe it's even a happy ending as unlikely as it seems, with Laura escaping the nightmare and waking up as a teenager who's not about to get murdered. Or maybe she and Coop are trapped in Judy's lair forever, or doomed to repeat cycles of this for eternity, or maybe the whole universe imploded. It's a cool ending and leaves lots of things to speculate on and lots of various readings to mull over, but it doesn't feel truly definitive to me. I realise I've wandered a bit away from Bad Coop, but was just touching on the ending you mentioned earlier and how you felt when Season 3 was announced. Like you, I don't need a Season 4, but I'm not sure I'm entirely satisfied with the ending to The Return. Maybe that's the point, I know, but personally I would like more, even if it only focused on Coop, Laura, and Audrey. I don't necessarily need to see any of the other characters (though I'd like to see all the ones who didn't appear in The Return and I think more could be done with Annie and especially Josie, maybe Catherine too, maybe something involving Annie, Audrey, and Josie, who all seem to be lost women now, marooned in different worlds).

[Mr. Reindeer]

I get it. P18 feels like a very Lynchian ending to me, but I think people have trouble with it because this isn’t Eraserhead or Lost Highway—it’s Dale Cooper, a character we all have deep decades-long personal feelings toward. We don’t like being asked to reimagine the way we think about him. And I think that’s honestly a big part of what Lynch was going for, whether or not you feel like he was successful. He was interested in challenging those notions of long-form storytelling and the relationships we build with these characters.

This is the second thing I ever posted to these boards, and the first that was TP-related: http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 845#p42845

I was grappling with these very issues—how can Lynch possibly deal with the ramifications of E29 in a truthful way while still honoring the character we know and love? I think the way he navigated it was pretty great, but I can certainly see why it would be frustrating to you.

[Jonah]

I just quickly glanced through the post. I'll read it (and the others you linked) tomorrow when I can focus better as it's very very late here, but just a few quick thoughts - Bad Coop was always Cooper's doppleganger and I never saw them as connected at all, even in the dark mirror way, so I never felt he should have paid for his or Bob's crimes. Also, I don't think Good Coop was as naive or as reckless as he's portrayed, sure he tried to save Laura from the past, but it wasn't such a foolish errand that it deserved punishment. Unless he wasn't punished for trying to save her, just shown that Judy is a bigger force than he knows. But at the same time Judy howled in rage and seemed to think Coop had won, so maybe she didn't wrestle Laura away to Odessa, maybe Laura put herself there to infiltrate that world, maybe even knowing it would cause her to "wake up", maybe even as a teenager again and Judy was defeated in the explosion we saw at the end, only able to thrive in nightmares. In terms of Coop, I felt he had suffered enough being trapped in the lodge for 25 years. A bad ending for him didn't feel earned - not just that it was deeply unfair, but narratively it just didn't full connect for me, even as a downbeat endings go. Though, again, I think there's an argument to be made for it being a happy ending disguised as a downbeat one.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I just quickly glanced through the post. I'll read it (and the others you linked) tomorrow when I can focus better as it's very very late here, but just a few quick thoughts - Bad Coop was always Cooper's doppleganger and I never saw them as connected at all, even in the dark mirror way, so I never felt he should have paid for his or Bob's crimes.

We’ll have to fundamentally disagree here. This comes back to the discussion we were having about Leland/Bob a few days ago. For me, if you’re going to do a story about incest and statutory rape, there are no half measures. Leland doesn’t get to blame Bob—if you take that approach (as the show admittedly did at times, but FWWM largely rectified this), it cheapens and demeans the whole thing and just makes it an exercise in exploitation and sensationalism. By extrapolation, then, if Bob then “inhabits” Cooper—or his doppel—there have to be consequences. It’s a little different from the Leland situation, granted, because it’s his doppel and not himself. But it’s not a clone or something. Hawk’s monologue sets up that the “dweller on the threshold” is a shadow-self of the person. The doppel represents all of our own worst tendencies, the ones we try to suppress (as demonstrated by Mr. C raping the two women Cooper is most attracted to). I just don’t find anything interesting in the standard genre “evil clone”/mistaken identity storyline. If you’re going to do a story about doubles, there should be real stakes and a personal reckoning. Otherwise it’s just cheap. And almost all of Lynch’s works since TP have dealt with duality, often through doubling. I think if the ending of E29 was ever going to be dealt with in a meaningful way, it inevitably HAD to be an exploration of Cooper’s dark side, and that’s what I was getting at in that post way before TR ever even aired.

[Jonah]

One last thing before I log off for the night - I just don't think The Return did explore Cooper's dark side. Bad Coop never felt like his shadow self, he was presented as an evil twin imo. All we got to see Cooper exploring was his Dougie side. Then at the very end he made a couple of decisions and we briefly saw him as a slightly hardened version, Richard. But I never felt Bad Coop was a true exploration of Cooper's dark side at all, it felt very much like the evil twin route to me, with the series more interested in exploring that and then Cooper's innocent side via Dougie, until whatever Richard is/was at the very end. Will be interested to hear your thoughts, but won't get back to this until tomorrow at the earliest.