Urthman

I hope they can make creating tiny low-fi black & white videos compelling. That little black & white clip at the end seems like a disappointing version of that glorious wide-screen, full-color sunrise. Maybe if they lean into getting the player to learn the difference between what looks good in color and what makes a good-looking black & white film, that could be very cool.

I was confused about the discussion of R2D2 not speaking English but then remembered that in America they bleeped out his hilariously over-the-top swearing to get a PG rating when they decided Star Wars should be a kids' movie.

My future holds alot including you And online shopping sounds fantastic too I won a chocolate bar in school today Mistakes were clearly made along the way. My sister thinks miami is a state im gonna take her on a ice-cream date.. ::) Real music isn't on the radio. Who doesn't like a ballerina though? I'm cut and weeping like a rubber tree your twitter drama doesn't interest me My new obsession after ruby red food, shower, cellphone search, assignment, bed. I'm getting back into the gym today DELAY DELAY DELAY DELAY DELAY... Our thoughts determine our reality. The person you were kissing wasn't me. I'm tired of pretending I'm okay I wanna be a mermaid for a day

Here's the main sequence from around Christmas, in case anyone else wants to see it.

Thanks RubixsQube! My wife is teaching Whitman tomorrow and I thought this might be a fun anecdote she could use.

Could I please get a link to those NYT articles about the allegedly imminent death of Walt Whitman?

You are a bad person and you should feel bad about your life choices. (In other words, you got me.)

infamous space turtle, I've listened to your robo-Thumbs a bunch of times it still cracks me up. Such good comic timing, like pushing the "I'm Loving It" enough times that it's doubly funny. Great work and totally deserved to get quoted on the following week's podcast.

A meeting between Idle Thumbs and their ad agency: AD GUY: So tell me about your audience. Chris: They are the kind of people who would probably enjoy eating more canned sardines. But watching a StarCraft video would be too weird for them. Jake: Um... AD GUY: So old man food, but no nerd stuff? Jake: Uh...

I'm pretty sure that's Delilah in the tower you can see in the background of the video preview, drawing a sketch of the shirtless dude.

In retrospect, EvilCoop at the end of Season 2 seems to have been saying, "How's Annie? As if. Like Twin Peaks is ever gonna spend even 30 seconds caring about how Annie is doing? Ha."

Also, since Jake endorsed Shitty Mario, I'm gonna link to my post about the Shitty Mario (I can call it that since I did the very-off-brand sculpting) board game I made with my kids a bunch of years ago when they were little.

Nick is definitely not the only athlete who thinks PB&Js are his secret weapon The NBA's Secret Addiction ESPN exclusive! How one performance-enhancing sandwich has spread through the NBA. http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/presents18931717/the-nba-secret-addiction

It could even be One chants out between two worlds, "Fire!" Walk with me. (line breaks changed for emphasis; there are plenty of poems where the first word of a line is the last word of the previous sentence)

While much of that seems to go too far into writing his own story that fits with what we saw, I really like the idea that Coop and Dianne are having sex in an attempt to summon the creature that killed the young couple having sex in Episode 1 (which must have been captured on film and seen by--Bad Coop? the FBI?) It explains a lot of how they interact in that scene and provides significance to what otherwise seems like a gratuitous horror trope in the first episode. Also huge slap to the forehead for the observation that Naido flipping the switch from 15 to 3 corresponds with Cooper fully coming to himself back outside the Lodge in Episode 15 rather than when he attempted to leave in Episode 3. I hate/love/hate/love it.

Well, I for one found Twin Peaks the Return packed with weird, arresting, compelling, funny scenes the likes of which I've never seen in any other TV show. And a solid majority of TV shows committed to narrative closure have disappointing endings anyway.

I wonder if that was meant to be Diane's perspective? No matter how glad Diane was to be with the real Cooper, it seems hard to believe she could kiss him or have sex with him without having traumatic thoughts about Bad Coop. Cooper could have been grinning like Dougie when they were having sex, and she might still see Bad Coop's face. It was frightening the way she was completely covering his face with her hands.

I think that Lynch/Frost did not have a lot of great ideas for Twin Peaks plots; they had a lot of great ideas for Twin Peaks scenes, and decided those were worth filming even if they had nowhere to go with them. For instance, if Lynch came to me and described the scenes he had planned for Audrey Horn and said, "But I have no good ideas where to go with that; whether she's in a coma or a dream or a spirit realm--none of those ideas seem to lead anywhere interesting." I would say, just go ahead and film what you've got, because that final scene at the road house is sublime. That scene of Steven and Gersten nestled in the roots of a gigantic tree, cowering on the edge of violent death, was incredible and shouldn't be cut out just because Lynch doesn't have a great idea to answer the question of what exactly Steven did that got them there. The resolution to Bad Coop can be seen as Lynch saying, "Look, I could try to resolve everything left dangling, but it wouldn't be very good. Wouldn't you rather I just move on to the ideas I have for scenes that I think will be good?" And that's the nature of soap operas. They never end. They're always dangling new plots, so no matter where you stop, you're always left with lots of things unresolved. If you don't enjoy the journey for its own sake, you might as well skip it.

The genius of ending each episode with "Starring Kyle MacLachlan" is that Lynch never has to name the character(s) MacLachlan is playing.

If you had told me before the show started that Lynch was put Sherilyn Fenn out on the dance floor and have her do Audrey's Dance again, I would have thought for sure it was going to be the worst sort of lazy "Hey remember this thing? Here it is again!" approach to reviving/revisiting old TV shows. But instead it was one of the most beautiful and eerie moments in the whole series. For one thing, when was the last time you got to see a woman of Fenn's age and build dance on TV and she's not an object of ridicule and she's not dancing to seduce some dude, just because she's caught up in a song? And that song/dance always seemed like Audrey's way of escaping Twin Peaks, dreaming of being elsewhere, dreaming of being with Cooper -- for it to be the means of escaping whatever purgatory she's been trapped in (and maybe also some awareness that Cooper is back?), and seeing her finally smile for the first time (as well as that uncanny introduction and the swaying of the crowd) was all so good. This series has been full of moments that would have sounded like a total disaster on paper but that Lynch has really made work. It's amazing.

I think the reason Hutch and Chantel's fate doesn't seem like a cheat is that they had already lost. The FBI is there, the mobsters are there with their guns, Dougie isn't even coming back to the house--there's no possible way they can carry out their hit. So having them die picking a fight with a random stranger rather than being ambushed by the FBI and/or the mob ends up giving them more agency rather than less.

I guess Albert's commitment to nonviolence doesn't include Tulpas?

Yikes. Maybe I'm completely off base here? What evil things did you imagine a Coop/BOB entity would do?

I don't know what else you could think was meant by Cooper/BOB cackling about "Annie? Annie?!" I agree with you that they could have contrived some reason that Bad Coop wasn't able to do those things, but Twin Peaks has, I hate to say, always been about women getting assaulted. Cooper and the agents in Fire Walk With Me are investigating a string of these crimes (are we to think Leland killed all the women with letters under their nails?). I wish it weren't. I also agree with you that if this is where Lynch wanted to go with the plot he ought to have done much more to make women subjects rather than objects, which I think was why the treatment of this subject in Fire Walk With Me is better.

Being raped is probably worse than having an evil doppelganger do those things. Being raped is definitely worse than people thinking you are a rapist.