Twin Peaks

[Hobo]

I'm going to be sad when this is over. It's impossible to speculate what might actually happen.

I think we're nailed on to see something from Laura Palmer. Potentially, Leland. Sarah Palmer obviously - she might end up in the jail with Naido, Chuck, James and Freddie following the whole biting a guys throat off thing.

There seem to be theories going around that the first scene between Cooper and The Fireman take place after what we've seen. If so, at what point will it happen? Is this before Cooper and his doppleganger square off?

We're going to have two Coopers running around Twin Peaks. Maybe Mr. C will arrive first and Andy will have something to do realizing it's not the good Cooper and capture him?

We're going to see Dale Cooper return to Twin Peaks and it's going to be great. Also the Mitchums are going to be there, maybe Candy too? Has she has some role in all of this?

I'm really looking forward to the prospect of Gordon Cole going back to Twin Peaks.

 

[Josh]

On 8/28/2017 at 14:33, Joshu Picchu said:

I am an absolute wreck. I want to hug David Lynch.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING TO ME DAVID?!?

[tristy]

Doc Brown warned us about time travel all those years ago. Cooper definitely Barry Allen'd his timeline in Part 17 when he saved Laura, and everything we saw in Part 18 was an alternative world where Dale Cooper is "Richard" and Diane is "Linda" and Carrie Page/Laura Palmer is a murderer. The owners of the house, Tremond and Chalfont, were lodge spirits that appeared in Fire Walk With Me.

A better question, rather than "What year is it?", would be - "What world is this?".

[jrhodes]

Really enjoyed the climax to the series at the Tremond/Chalfont house but wasn't a fan of the two hours leading up to it. Thought they were two of the weaker episodes of the season.

[Hobo]

I have no idea what just happened.

 

[tristy]

If 10 is the number of completion like Cooper told Bushnell Mullins in his note to Gordon... Four seasons of Twin Peaks equals the number 10.

/fanboy

[Hobo]

I feel really bad for Dale Cooper.

But I am incredibly happy that we got to see Sheryl Lee from Fire Walk With Me and then in the finale generally being amazing.

[Skummy]

Really not sure what to make of that. Went full Mulholland Drive at the end.

The Arm repeated a line spoken by Audrey. What?

[Hobo]

That must imply a connection between the two? I guess, they're two characters who've always had their own music that they like to dance to (only The Arm can't do that now what with it being a tree and all).

I feel like Cooper was trapped by Judy (who is what is inside Sarah Palmer - who I am convinced was the little girl from ep 8) when he tried to save Laura through time travel. Ends up in a different reality with Laura Palmer.

I can't tell if I am satisfied with the ending or not. This isn't a show that ever liked to provide satisfying resolutions. I'm not sure The Return has eclipsed Fire Walk With Me or The Pilot as being the best things about Twin Peaks, at least for me. I'm incredibly glad Sheryl Lee got a chance to do something in the last episode.

Also, shout out to David Lynch making a joke about still being able to get it up and the giant floating head of Don S. Davis.

 

[Josh]

Hobo hit on something worth pointing out. I got to watch this one with friends as it aired for once. One of them theorized that everything genuinely was resolved once Bob was destroyed. But then Cooper's hubris got the best of him. All the cheering and great feelings last week were for a man who - while entirely good - reaches beyond his grasp. He couldn't let well enough alone and had to try and save Laura - to do the impossible, to upset the order of things.

It becomes stranger when you consider Laura apparently DID see Cooper in the woods way back in Fire Walk with Me, which would imply this was all destined to happen.

First the boughs of innocence are gone, then all good. The angels disappear and we fall forever, faster and faster, on fire.

Perhaps, in the end, this has all been about the loss of innocence.

[Hobo]

It is Cooper's ultimate failing alright.  He wants so much to solve everything but he can't. 

Something that I just stumbled upon on a reaction YouTube video is a theory that Laura is the dreamer all along. Because "Laura is the one" and when she screamed at the end it's right after we hear Sarah Palmer calling her from the pilot. Maybe the end here is Laura walking up? I did think it interesting that Cassie had no recollection of Leland but seemed to recall Sarah. 

Also, the owner of the Palmer house at the end is the real owner of the house as it turns out.

[Skummy]

I got chills at Julee Cruise, and at MIKE reciting the "Fire Walk With Me" mantra.

I figured we'd get some kind of time loop story to end this, what with the nature of the Black Lodge, and "is it future, or is it past?", but the last two episodes - the last one especially - just seemed to have so little bearing on what preceded them.

That said, the clues are all there. There's something - or some things - going on that are probably right there on the surface that we're overlooking. I've still not grasped the significance of all the numbers, we still don't seem to know what's going on with Audrey and Charlie - except that there still seems to be some kind of connection between Audrey and the Red Room, via The Arm, now.

Way early on we were warned of the significance of Richard and Linda - and those were the names on the note left by Cooper's bedside. But if Cooper changed the timeline by saving Laura Palmer, that wouldn't be enough to mess with his timeline to the extent that he would be an entirely different person, surely? Dale Cooper was already an FBI agent at the time Laura was murdered. Could Richard and Linda be another Dougie Jones? Tulpas created by someone else who, once they had served their purpose, effectively became vessels to hold the spirit of the real Cooper and Diane? If so, why?

 

Speaking of MIKE...I don't think he is what he seems, he's not a benign guide for Cooper/Dougie.

When Cooper awoke from his coma, he asked MIKE if he had another seed, and gave him a lock of his hair to create "another one" - what we assumed was the "new" Dougie Jones that woke up and returned to Vegas. But it looked to me that MIKE didn't use that seed, he used the one taken from Mr. C.

When "Cooper" left the Lodge to speak with Diane, it looked to me like he had the black eyes of Mr C, and Diane may have had them too. The "is it really you?" exchange made me think that this wasn't Cooper successfully emerging from the Lodge, this was the meeting of Mr C and Diane we'd already been told about. Was the "real" Cooper once again sent back into the world as Dougie Jones? How many Coopers are there?

[Skummy]

So far, I think the only prediction for the finale I actually got right was that Naido was Diane...and I'll admit that I hated the scene with Freddie and BOB. Freddie might be my least favourite thing in this series.

I kind of like that we never got a big showdown between Cooper and Mr C; it would almost feel too forced, too gimmicky. There's something very telling about how evil characters in this series are killed off with very little pomp and circumstance; Richard Horne goes out with a whimper, and Mr C's goons are taken out by a character so inconsequential as to not even have a name. The shady businessman pulling the strings is picked off in an instant. Death is random and unexpected, and villains don't get a dramatic last stand - it's almost as if Lynch is telling us that these characters don't deserve such a thing. There's something lovely about Mr C, the most evil character in the series, being killed by the most wholly innocent character in all of Twin Peaks, too.

 

Other things I'm still unsure of;

• Is Judy, the evil entity mentioned by Cole (apparently told to him by Major Briggs) the same thing as "Mother", the Experiment, BOB? Or is BOB closer to something like the Woodsmen? Or is Judy inhabiting Sarah Palmer, and manifested in the cockroach thing from Episode 8, that grew into the entity inside her? If that thing has been there all along - perhaps explaining Sarah's psychic sensitivity - does that mean BOB was destined to come to the Palmer family, or drawn to them? But he went to Leland first, not Sarah...I don't really want the relationship between all of these things fully explained, as the Lodges and Blue Rose stuff should be unknowable, but it feels like there's still a lot I don't get at all here.
• What's the relationship between BOB/Mr C and the Woodsmen? The last time they scavenged from his body, it seemed to bring him back to life, this time it brought BOB out of him - would Mr C have returned to life had Cooper not placed the ring on his finger?
• What actually happened to Major Briggs?
• Where or what is Audrey? Who is Charlie, or Billy?
• What's the significance of the scene in the Sherriff's Dept. taking place with an overlay of Cooper's face before he mentioned the Dreamer? Was the superimposed Cooper dreaming, or was what we're witnessing the dream? Was the "Richard" Cooper who awoke in a world with no Laura Palmer the "real" Dale Cooper, dreaming this whole thing? Note that I don't think it's as simple as a Dallas "it was all a dream twist", I think in Twin Peaks world, something being a dream clearly doesn't mean it's necessarily any less real than something that happens in "real life", and that the two feed each other.
  It was less a "awakening from a dream" and more the changing of roles that came with the unlocking of the box in Mulholland Drive - a change in reality connected to the red curtained Club Silencio. The real Club Silencio was the filming location for The Fireman's domain (White Lodge?) in Episode 8. The box/key in Mulholland Drive was connected to a very Woodsman-like figure (the first appearance of a Woodsman in The Return immediately put me in mind of Mulholland Drive's supernatural hobo), who we first encounter after being told by another character that they saw him in a dream.
   
• "I'll see you at the curtain call" - the next time Cooper meets Diane after that is when he emerges from behind the curtains of the Red Room. So, somewhere, Cooper had a plan, so what went wrong? Again, I'm not sure it was the same Cooper who walked out of the Red Room - I think it was Mr C, or at least, the Cooper that would become Mr C. But did the Diane he spoke to here know something that the real Diane didn't? Was this Diane somehow aware that, the first time this encounter happened, something horrific occurred? Was Diane smothering Cooper during sex somehow playing into her eliminating Mr C, stopping him from going further into the world, and forcing him to awake as the "real" Dale Cooper? But then how does that explain what happened next? The song that played as Diane and Cooper had sex was playing on the radio in episode 8, before the Woodsmen arrived...that must be significant.
   
• Laura, presumably, never died. Her body wrapped in plastic disappeared, and Pete Martell just went fishing. But after Laura had vanished, Sarah Palmer broke down, attacking her photograph of Laura? Was this the breakdown of a grief-stricken woman cursing Laura for all that has happened to her, or was it that whatever's in Sarah Palmer recognised a significant shift in reality, centred around Laura, and lashed out? Is that "Judy", inhabiting Sarah Palmer, angry that its plans to remove what we think of as Laura Palmer from the world, were thwarted?
   
• How did Cooper know that Laura Palmer/Carrie Page was a waitress at Judy's?  Is Carrie Page actually even Laura Palmer? They got two separate credits at the end of the episode. In a series all about doppelgangers and mirror images (indeed, of "Twin" Peaks), is it that simple? Is Cooper working his way through countless alternate universes until he can find and stop "Judy", until he can save Laura Palmer? Leland told him to "Find Laura", Laura told him something, and Cooper has clearly left the Lodge with a far deeper knowledge of its inner workings than he went in with...so between that, and the knowledge imparted to him by the Lodge's version of Laura, does he know what Laura really is, and what saving her will achieve?

 

"Laura's the one" still plays on me...in what sense? Hobo may be right that Laura is the dreamer, and it's her waking up that changes things...her scream effectively book-ends the series, and is triggered by Sarah calling for her way back in the first episode.

What did Laura tell Cooper in the Red Room? It's the closing image of the whole series so it must be important, perhaps the single most important moment of the series. Why was Cooper so fixated on saving Laura Palmer, decades after her death, given how many other deaths and weird events he's witnessed? How significant could Laura's death possibly be that potentially changing all of reality - or flinging himself into another time - be preferable than just letting the past lie?

If the names of the previous (or future?) owners of the Palmer house share the names of Lodge spirits...is that the Lodge manifesting itself on Earth through Laura (or the Palmer family), or is the Lodge itself shaped by Laura? Do Lodge spirits begin as ordinary people, and become something else?

At least the Joneses got a happy ending.

 

Gordon Cole got another great line, possibly even topping "...he's dead", with "Philip Jeffries, who doesn't really exist any more."

 

While they somehow managed a cliffhanger even more infuriating than Season 2, surely this is the end? As much as I'd love a Season 4 to surface...everything seemed to come together so perfectly this time, how can you possibly follow it?

 

Perhaps the whole thing was about loss of identity? Or is it a never-ending battle of good and evil? Laura Palmer as an agent of good, created by the Fireman, that Dale Cooper is trying to save from Judy, from BOB, from the Black Lodge? Are they just pawns of the White and Black Lodge? My interpretation, as of now, is that the Lodges can't just move through time, but across dimensions. Cooper failed to save Laura Palmer by going back in time, so he's now searching - whether he knows it or not, I'm not sure - for a world in which Laura Palmer is still alive. Foreshadowed by the infinity symbol shown to him by Jeffries. With Chalmont and Tremond inhabiting the Palmer house, it seems that even in another universe, the Black Lodge are constantly fighting for Laura Palmer's soul, and Dale Cooper is always going to turn up and try to save her. It's just a matter of figuring when he'll eventually succeed. "FIND LAURA".

 

The Fireman said to Cooper; “Remember 430. Richard and Linda. Two birds, one stone.”

Richard and Linda turned out to be, somehow, Cooper and Diane. 430 was the number of miles Cooper and Diane travelled to a specific location, which - somehow - led to them becoming Richard and Linda. "Two birds, one stone", was the last thing Cooper said to Cole before he disappeared. So I think everything Cooper was told in the Lodge effectively lays out the entire series - we just haven't figured it out yet. The Fireman dictated Freddie's destiny to him, so was he not so much advising Cooper as straight up telling him what was going to happen?

What were the two birds with one stone? Defeating Judy and saving Laura?

[Hobo]

I'm inclined to believe Judy is inside Sarah Palmer and that her smashing the picture was tied to Laura vanishing as Cooper tried to rescue her.  The noise the cockroach thing made can be heard just before it happens.

Similarly that's the noise the Fireman plays to Cooper when he says "it is in our house now". Which leads me to think the Palmer House is the house the Fireman was referring to.

My but reaction was the Copper who exited the lodge and met Diane was Dale, but something was missing. Maybe whatever he gave up to create Dougie? I don't think he was Mr. C. It felt like a midpoint between the two.

I feel like Cassie felt a connection to  the Laura Palmer story Cooper told her. She seems to react to being told her mothers name. In the final scene we hear Sarah say "Laura" before Cassie screams. That seemed like an awakening of sorts. Especially when Cooper appears to be breaking down himself.

I think it was some kind of punishment from Judy for trying to meddle that got Laura and Cooper where they ended up. I still don't know if Diane ever existed.

As for Audrey and Charlie. I think they might be connected to the Arm. Possibly to Mike by extension.

I'm not sure of Mikes intentions. I would like to think he's always been trying to help. He tried to help Cooper and he tried to help Laura but he's not as powerful as some of the other spirits. The Fireman and Judy. 

Is this all just the dream of Laura Palmer and she's waking up on the morning of the pilot? 

[Skummy]

Ahh, so "Judy"/Sarah smashing the picture was a conscious act that pulled Laura out of that timeline, preventing Dale from saving her? So do you think that Laura being seemingly pulled out of the Red Room may have occurred at the same time? Laura, wherever she was, being hidden somewhere by Judy?

I'd love to know the spelling of Cole's explanation of Judy - Jou-Dei or whatever he said - in case that holds any further clues. As much as I disliked the Secret History... book, I may have to re-read it now in light of the Return, and I'm very excited for the follow-up.

[Hobo]

I think so. I think whatever reality Cooper/Richard encounters Cassie/Laura in is where they both ended up after trying to mess with Judy's intentions.

 

[Hobo]

I keep periodically checking the Twin Peaks reddit and something interesting popped up about Judy.

Jiao Dai is Mandarin for "to explain" and also recording tape.

 

 

[Josh]

Would that mean the protagonists were going up against Explanation all along? That would be incredibly meta.

[Hobo]

I'm not gonna explain in fact, we're not gonna explain at all

 

[Hobo]

Rewatching it on Sky Atlantic now and noticed a couple of things, I think.

Cooper seems to be expecting literally everything except Naido. That seems to throw him off.

The Arm isn't speaking with the same voice as it did in the first episode... And I don't think it's backward.

And Laura/Bobby scene from FWWM is a heartbreaker every damn time.

The only other thing I noticed is that despite acting a bit Mr C-like, there are moments of clarity with Cooper and just before he asks what the year is his stance was very similar to Phillip Jefferies in FWWM.

On second viewing, I found the ending heartbreaking.

I think it was the film critic/writer Jeremy Smith who said that he considered the end of Fire Walk With Me to be the true end of Twin Peaks. This was before the Return came out. It still feels like the most satisfactory conclusion Twin Peaks has offered.