A combination of following Twin Peaks fan insta pages and seeing Richard Horne on the Witcher the last week led me to revisit the Peaks. I was hesitant for a while but it felt right when I was running out of YouTube videos and didn't want to get into something new.
I won't go on about my love of this show too much, I have elsewhere, here mostly. And off and on, in various posts. I even forgot there was talk of the Return getting binned because Lynch wasn't going to be involved and if that were the case, nobody wanted a bar of it. Him deciding otherwise led to my last viewing, and honestly, I don't think I've seen this through more than ten times. I also decided how much others needed to see, so I'm the asshole who won't let you watch season 2 in its entirety because of a few pointless, irritating storylines. But I see now I've been kinda unfair about most of them. Save 2. So I'll just go over why I was wrong for each one.
James and Evelyn: This was the show at peak soap. James leaving town and getting embroiled with a dissatisfied rich housewife who needs someone to frame for her husband's murder, I always skipped over this because I thought it was painfully cheesy. It's not. It gets a bit dull and stupid with the "brother" accomplice of Evelyn's, and I thought Donna coming in to save James was over-dramatic. It wasn't, it's not the worst thing, I watched it through again and I didn't hate it, James isn't awful, Evelyn isn't a total trope, just the "brother". James brings up Laura, since we're at the point where we're playing "hey, remember why we used to watch this show", most of James's actions are formed by Laura's death. But him leaving isn't a waste of time to watch. It's fine.
Audrey, Ben and the South: Ben's mental breakdown after being released from jail and losing Ghostwood to Catherine, it's hilarious and I thought it sucked, but it really doesn't, it's a good dose of comedic relief, you get a funny Wizard of Oz moment, Ben's great as General Lee. Bobby's bugle is funny, even if Bobby's being a dick by then. I had more fun watching it. Audrey plays Jerry (Yeah, Ben and Jerry is a funny thing) and she's making smart moves to protect Ben and the company. Bobby and Audrey have a good moment of chemistry, they definitely seem suited but it's obviously to make you believe Bobby might cheat on Shelley. It's worth sitting through. I had fun.
Nadine and Mike: Glossing over how unhealthy it is in reality they're letting Nadine go to high school and date Mike (as much as it is Jacoby letting Ben believe he's about to win the Civil War), Nadine's actually less obnoxious as a teenager, and her stuff with Mike is fucking hilarious. Again, it's good comic relief. She beats up Hank, who's kind of pointless by now, it just sucks by the end she regains her memory and splits up Norma and Ed. (Never mind about them crazy kids, they make it in the end). It makes me giggle.
Audrey and John Wheeler: Billy Zane. In his element. I love him with Audrey, I hate they don't make it. I hate what happens to Audrey in the end. She's such a strong character I don't know why Sherilyn Fenn got the raw end of the Return deal.
MT Wentz: Fuck that shit. I put up with it this time because it doesn't suck but it's also not good. Norma has nothing better to do so her mother has to come into town and needlessly shame her, bringing her crook husband whom Norma doesn't give a shit about despite him and Hank teaming up (some of the Coop drug bust stuff gets kinda boring but it's not skippable, plus Denise Bryson, I mean really. It's all good). But the conceit of the food reviewer coming to town is a lot of padding, and means we also have to suffer through Piper Laurie in yellow face a la Micky Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I sit through that but it's so fucking bad.
Bobby, Shelley and Leo: Most of that's funnier than I remember too. Bobby turning into a jerk kinda makes sense, Leo being a vegetable is a riot. He gets screwed later with Windom. I chuckle more watching it now. Also as a side note, I used to think Bobby's talk with Major Briggs about that dream was cheesy crap too but I appreciate it more. Bobby's a great character. I'm more bummed than ever about him and Shelley just not making it, and Shelley learning nothing in the long run. Oh, and they're the same age, she was a dropout. I just had it in my head she was older because she doesn't really look 18 and she was married. Her fighting with Bobby and running off with Leo kinda makes sense as it's detailed in the Dossier, but I don't believe it.
So what can't I abide?
1) The Milford brothers bullshit and that redhead. It's insufferable, it's set up at Leland's wake, but it's just absolutely pointless. It really exists as filler and you can skip it all without any consequence as to what's going on, aside from the redhead demanding she win Miss Twin Peaks (I tend to skip the chunks she's in during that section as well), she's really just absolute background noise, and any scene she's in where all the men fawn over her isn't funny enough to give this shit a pass. The Mitchem Brothers were at least somewhat entertaining. So, you can actually safely ignore/skip all that and be fine.
2) The Lucy, Dick and Andy show with Little Nicky. Jesus, this is absolutely the fucking worst thing. The guy from Quantum Leap (Dick) is easily the worst character in the show. You can't remotely give a shit about him and he sticks around way past his welcome to get involved in Miss Twin Peaks too. Prior to all this, Lucy's sister Gwen is basically the shark the show jumps because she comes in right when things go bad for season 2. Soon as she's on screen I reach for the remote, and I keep it close by as soon as Dick comes on screen. Basically once the kid shows up I have no interest in that shit. By all means if you want to endure this bollocks for the sake of Lucy learning who her baby daddy should be and Andy being a "whole damn town", go ahead. But if you're watching with me, you're missing me with that shit.
Stuff like Josie and Andrew isn't that terrible. I like Josie more than I used to. I don't think Joan Chen gets enough credit. She and Harry smoulder on screen, I love them as a couple and I hate she dies. When it turns into the Andrew, Catherine and Pete show with that stupid key again it's tiresome but worth watching. Josie's great up until she has the heart attack then it's a bit overwrought, and we get reminded about Bob because that thread's gotten lost again even if Windom's linked to the Black Lodge. Running theories are Josie winds up there because she's trapped in the drawer handle, which may be linked to the Lodge. I don't know.
I used to think Harold's storyline was kinda crap (having a pretty Blu-ray also means you have to see the red paint on the garden hoe he scratches his face with, so there's something to be said for grainy shitty VHS and what it hides. Digitising all the shows is a nice idea in theory, Dan was right, people filming TV before DVDs never considered people actually ever wanting to watch this shit ever again). So much of what I thought was terrible really isn't. The pilot is fucking amazing, just watching it recently I forgot how much was set up and how effective it was. I don't think I've skipped more than half an hour's worth of show, really. I'm looking forward to rewatching the Return, which I've only seen two times I think. I wanted the Bluray player so I could keep watching Fire Walk With Me.
The thread with Ben and Donna getting completely dropped in the Return kinda annoys me. Ben doesn't even have a dent on his head, Doc Hayward shows up on a conference call with the new Sheriff. I don't appreciate that stuff's just ignored. James somehow has less to do. We never see Donna again but her sister suddenly matters (she affects Shelley's daughter's marriage to the dropkick Stephen, apparently she had a nervous breakdown). I might come back and go over what I can't deal with in the Return, because there is stuff I thought was bad. I have to remind myself a lot the show really is done in the style of a daytime soap despite it being a prime time show.
I'm well into the Return and it's better in some aspects than I remember, I think Donna's absence means there's little point to dealing with the fact Ben Horne's her dad and not Doc Hayward, and maybe Audrey kinda being persona nongrata is another way of saying, none of that mattered. It was probably supposed to matter in the theoretical third season of the original we never saw, but I genuinely hated what they did with Audrey, like there was some truth to the rumor Fenn wasn't a welcome inclusion on the show when Audrey's a memorable character in her own right, (and according to Fenn, Mulholland Drive is supposed to be about Audrey going to LA to pursue an acting career). The Return is really what Lynch wanted us to experience, what his vision for the show was when the network demanded it be more "normal" I guess. (Having said this, the four hour analysis I watched by one guy and his "God of Light" theory is actually pretentious and a bit over the top, I was following his threads to begin with but once it got to this point I couldn't stick around).
But I don't see much point in the flashbacks involving Bob and Cooper when avid fans of the show are well aware, and I never considered this to be a casual watcher's kind of show when the Return happened, it's very much for the fans. You get a chance to see some of the Missing Pieces from FWWM, but it seems like pointless filler. The streaming service I used did have the movie available with the original show, it's not impossible to find, and the Missing Pieces box set was a big release most avid fans would own.
The black and white shots are so detailed and deliberately disturbing, they seem more detailed and interesting for their lack of colour. I like the concept of the Black Lodge being a result of the atom bomb, where all evil truly begins, when you have to recall the world Lynch grew up in. By now, you wouldn't be on board if you didn't "get" Lynch, and he is not for everyone and never claimed to be. But I disliked the final showdown with Bob and Cooper so maybe this time around I'll appreciate it. Naomi Watts's character isn't so hammy, she's pretty great. Ashley Judd's character seems a touch pointless, unless she's here to prove Ben's a born womaniser. Pete and Catherine are gone, James kinda hangs out like a drifter (he's some delivery driver or something) and Shelley's suddenly defending him. I despise Shelley ends up dating another Leo and leaves Bobby, their daughter's husband is a dropkick (and another Leo) but their whole train wreck of a relationship illustrates the ill going on in Twin Peaks. Philip Jeffries is a tea kettle (RIP David Bowie). We get 1 giant and no dwarf (he's now just a neuron tree with a weird head and another doppleganger) We meet Diane but she's not really real. She's definitely not who I pictured her to be but I love she's played by Laura Dern, as a badmouthed, drunk, corrupted character who's a victim of Mr C and also an accomplice of his by way of being a manufactured doppleganger.
I reached the most intolerable scene, which I think is the only one, involving the random kid who shoots a gun in a car and causes the traffic jam. It's drawn out and irritating with the car horn and the woman with the vomiting zombie kid, the woman screaming at Bobby over shit that doesn't matter while the zombie kid pukes. I endured it until the last few moments and it's the final scene before the credits. There are scenes you can fast forward on rewatch since they have that classic Lynch style dragging out before the story can continue, I'm up to the scene with the French girl taking too long to leave the room and yeah, I'm too lazy to reach for the remote but it's tedious. Also, you have to put up with five minutes of some janitor sweeping peanut shells at the Road House before the remaining Renault brother answers the phone. Oh, I remembered Billy's ugly, bleeding face also makes me sick so I'll probably skip it too, that scene's kinda tedious as well. (I didn't skip it but it's annoying with the eyeless chick sounding like a monkey bird and Billy repeating the bad cop's insults. Also, why does anyone care where the fuck Billy is? He's an ugly-ass drunk with a bloody, weeping face). Then there's the matter of Charlie and Audrey's scenes playing out in a kind of nonsensical dialogue involving one way phone conversations to leave us and Audrey hanging. I don't know if Audrey's impatience is representative of the audience's impatience. Sarah watching the glitched out boxing match with the repetitive horn in the background gets grating too. Also the scene with Cole's hearing aid giving obnoxious feedback while a dog barks. Honestly, if you weren't prepared for this as a casual watcher, you'd be so confused/bored by all this.
Character wise, Tammy's probably the least likeable. I think the actress is a singer usually, very pretty but not good at acting at all. I think she has a certain look Lynch wanted. Cole's French woman's a little redundant too. You could say the same of the Mitcham Bros trio of Vegas showgirls but the one who speaks the most is actually not bad, and their scenes are kinda funny.
Sarah's finally succumbing to the madness, I kinda like she was this conduit to the Black Lodge but they don't take it anywhere really conclusive. She's basically the town kook on a bigger level, now she's ripping off people's faces in bars. Carl's back at the Fat Trout trailer park which seems closer to Twin Peaks than Wind River, and he's not so cantankerous, (RIP Harry Dean Stanton), I always liked his character in FWWM there was some heart to him. Albert's back (RIP Miguel Ferrer), still with the sarcasm but not a total prick. The most tragic scenes are with Margaret the Log Lady (RIP Catherine E. Coulson) who performs her nearly bald, on an oxygen tank, in a scene where she's saying her last goodbye to Dept. Hawk, and it's fucking sad as hell. Richard's a good antagonist, played by Eamon Farren, he makes really stupid decisions while tracking down Mr C. Jennifer Jason Lee and Tim Roth make for fun, goofy hired assassins/Mr C groupies.
The musical credits were pretty good, I like they were a platform for performers but they also felt like a way to pad out the episodes. The exception in terms of music choices really is "Audrey's Dance", which is the name of her song on the soundtrack, so it becomes a weird meta-narrative nod to the original series. And given what we see with Audrey might very well be another dream within a dream, it's a strange inclusion to me, and really where her whole arc falls down.
I like the show acknowledges other people live in Twin Peaks and have problems like gnarly rashes and addiction, and boyfriends named Billy who hurl themselves drunkenly into fences and shit but seem to be utterly irresistible people worthy of obsession. Plus you got the crooked cop working at the station stealing letters for Richard Horne.
All the stuff in Vegas is pretty entertaining overall. I'm not a Dougie hater FYI. The wife makes awful coffee, I get that now. I like Cooper leaves a New Dougie behind to keep her happy, it's bittersweet to see some version of him living a normal life he accepts he himself cannot. Except the FBI in Vegas that's all weird. And I have trouble tracking all the threads relating to Dougie's gambling and the insurance fraud, Tupla Dougie is really stupid himself, he's somehow managed to get himself in hot water despite his imbecilic nature, so any threat to him is a threat to Coop.
Okay, so my issue with the showdown is really the Brit with the green glove punching the Bob Ball more or less into hell, twice. It's not as comical as I remember, it's an odd way to introduce an unrelated character to the town, you can never say if Lynch planned this from the start or what, you'd assume so. But Freddy's the hero. Least in terms of defeating Bob. We haven't definitively defeated the evil, that's Laura's job. Cooper's on an odyssey at this point, Laura being the key to all this. Again we get some of the missing pieces with a ret con: What did Laura scream at in the woods that night? It was Coop all along. But in essence, would you call this padding? It has to be a ret con, Laura's scream had to have a trigger, whatever was in Lynch's mind 25 odd years ago might not be what's there in 2017. The scream's not in the shooting script, maybe it was something done on set. But seeing Cooper try to free Laura really got to me. That it doesn't fix everything is a tragedy. Basically the ending makes much more sense if you accept Laura had to die, Sarah's clearly still fucked up, Coop's assumption's wrong, he's somehow ended up in the wrong timeline/dimension. If there's supposed to be more (I can't say if there will be, it's doubtful everything's speculative), maybe we would see what happens to the woman Coop's taken "home". It feels more conclusive to say Cooper was wrong. The fact he's left the Lodge is satisfying but this notion his job's not done because Laura is meant to be saved, it's like saying the audience is naive for loving her enough to want her to live. Bob didn't claim her, he took Coop but they beat him anyway, Coop got free, which is what we've all wanted since that final frame from the original series. On third inspection, I'm pretty happy with the whole Return. Some characters grew and changed, some didn't, such is life. Maybe the most disappointing is we don't really discover Annie's fate beyond Judy taking the ring. According to the wiki (which is basically from the books released later, as far as I can tell) that Milford tart gets the title now Annie's not well. Of course I missed that what she said to Laura in her dream to write about her and Dale in the diary is in the pages found later in the Return, Heather Graham expressed interest but wasn't asked to come back, which I'd take to suggest Lynch didn't have a long term plan for her beyond FWWM, which kinda sucks considering who she was to Coop. The dossier's said to be compiled by Tammy, honestly I would like to sit down and go through it properly, it's actually pretty dense and involved, it's easier to use as a reference guide than an actual narrative work.
About Cooper and Diane, I wound up looking for info on what their sex scene was supposed to represent, aside from it being a throwback/reference to the moment Laura discovers who Bob is. Given Diane's traumatised by Mr C raping her, having to sleep with Coop seems overly traumatic too. Lynch made the suggestion they'd been romantic in the past and only Cole knew about it, and Lynch has claimed Diane is an older version of the character from Blue Velvet. Maybe he's romanticised that one relationship between those characters and wanted to revive it, Dern had a say in how she was portrayed overall, which I like. I always pictured Diane to be a mousier version of Tammy, with less suggestive pencil skirts and business jackets, beige hosiery, sensible shoes. So I like she's not who I imagined, and Dern seemed right for the part. (I've seen one person assume Diane was Coop's tape recorder, which cracked me up and infuriated me).
I think the Return is what we deserved out of season 2 and what we should've gotten. I agree while it's broken down into episodes, it plays more like a movie. I don't think we have a right to complain about what we got anymore. We're done, I think to ask for more right now is kind of selfish on the part of the fans, you can hope all you want but seriously, if the one person you trust to a series says it's run its course, you have to trust the story's been told. He treats each project the same despite the format, so we were extremely lucky to receive the Return presented the way it was considering it may have become a disaster. I'm happy for it to be put to bed as is.
