Urthman

As much as I hate hate hate the idea of rape being part of Diane's story and Audrey's story, I feel like that die was cast as soon as they decided the premise of Season Three is Bad Coop has been on the loose for 25 years. Because the whole entire reason the cliff hanger at the end of Season Two is so horrible is the implication that Cooper has become what Leland Palmer was, that he's going to go hurt Annie and any other women that Cooper cares about. (Which was, I hope, originally an--unless Sheriff Truman & his crew can somehow stop him and/or the Real Cooper escapes--scenario.) I've always been repelled by that part of Twin Peaks (I couldn't even bring myself to watch all of Fire Walk With Me). I usually avoid movies or TV that use rape as a plot device. Lynch has done all sorts of fascinating, beautiful, sublime, silly things with Twin Peaks, but I really wish it didn't have this element at its core.

Wow, the smile on Audrey's face when she was dancing was worth a lot, maybe my favorite part of the whole episode.

This amused me very much.

I really liked the ideas Jake and Chris were trying to describe about how the sense of scale has changed, how the woods around Twin Peaks seem bigger, the Road House seems bigger, etc. The moment that really captured that feeling for me was when we first see the other side of the Sheriff's office where the dispatcher and the other deputies sit. At first I had this shocked feeling of, "What?! Is this new? Was it here the whole time and we never saw it before?" But what it really reminded me of was the feeling of going back to the town where I grew up after being away for several years. Everything seems familiar and then suddenly there's a new gas station on the corner or houses where there used to be a cornfield or the high school has a whole new wing on it. The juxtaposition of "Nothing has changed" with Lucy and "Everything has changed!" with the dispatcher's office feels really potent to me and like something I've definitely felt before.

Am I the only one who was really turned off by Nadine cheerfully acknowledging that Ed hasn't really loved her and has been moping about Norma for 30 years, but this is Nadine's fault and she's sorry so go run along and forget about her? Or that Norma has just been sitting around pining for a married guy for 30 years (or have they been having an affair all this time?) ready to fall into his arms whenever he's finally ready? I loved Ed & Norma in the original show, but the idea of them remaining stuck in the same situation for all that time just seems gross and wrong.

I know they couldn't film it this way because of Catherine Coulson's health, but I sure wish there were a line confirming that Hawk rushed out to spend the evening at her deathbed before coming back to inform the rest of the Sheriff's department instead of just hanging up on her.

Regarding the discussion of Freddie's and Dick Tremayne's accents and how the actors are both doing exaggerated versions of accents from where they grew up: It seems to me that one of the hardest accents to do is a parody of your own accent as other people hear you. That seems like exactly the sort of thing David Lynch would be interested in as another way to push actors into the uncanny valley. It's much less drastic, but seems similar in kind to the idea of having people speak backwards and then reversing the film.

And even this is nothing compared to Sheriff Truman's horrible game of telephone passing on the note from Laura's diary to Gordon. He just summarizes it as alluding to "two Coopers"?! He doesn't bother to mention the bit about the Good Cooper being trapped in the Lodge and can't leave?!?!

I think I've got the best way to think about the Moon illusion. Imagine a plane directly overhead. Put your hand over your head at arm's length and pretend to measure the plane between your fingers. Now imagine the plane flying to the horizon and keeping it framed between your fingers. Your fingers will get closer together as it gets further away, right? Now imagine the moon overhead. Do the same thing, frame it between your fingers and imagine following it as it moves across the sky to the horizon. It doesn't get any smaller! So what's going on? It must not be going away like the plane did. It must be "closer" at the horizon. Since we expect clouds or planes to look smaller at the horizon because they are further away, when the moon doesn't get smaller on the horizon it seems too big or too close. Another way of thinking about it is that clouds and birds and planes in the sky are on a hemisphere the center of which is far below us at the center of the earth. Looking straight up we are right up against the edge of the circle and things at the horizon are far away. But the hemisphere of the moon and the stars is so far away we're basically at the center of the hemisphere and things at the horizon are essentially the same distance as things overhead. But if our brains imagine the moon and stars on the same hemisphere as the clouds, everything at the horizon ought to be much farther away and therefore smaller. But it's not smaller, so it seems either too big or too close.

I've been seeing Dougie as a sort of caricature of Special Agent Dale Cooper - he wanders around, sort of off in his own world (thinking about the beautiful outdoors, carving a whistle), enthusiastically drinking coffee and eating pie, solving crimes by magic (dreams, Tibetan Rock throwing) and everyone just going right along with all his eccentricities as if there's nothing all that weird about him.

Thanks for posting that. I really loved that weird music at the beginning and it's cool to hear it that way too. (I also noticed re-watching that scene that one of the presents--the diamond cuff links--comes in a box way too big for them -- like the life-saving cherry pie did)

And yeah, "The Roadhouse is proud to welcome...James Hurley" has to be one of my favorite moments in the whole series so far.

Also, the change in lighting or cinematography for Audrey's scene would, in any other movie, be shorthand for, "This is something the characters are seeing on TV." (But given the content, it seems much more like Audrey's in some kind of supernatural trouble rather than working as an actor on a TV show.)

I think the point of the scene with the franchise man trying to get Norma to compromise on her pie ingredients is that all this time Doogie has been eating cherry pie, but he still hasn't had any Cherry Pie.

Going back to watch it again, I wondered if that was why he lit that paper on fire - to more clearly see whether he was imagining that his reflection was spookily out of sync.

All this time I thought they were just being cool by abbreviating segue as 'seg.' Like referring to your vacuum cleaner as the 'vac.'

Are the episode titles even from Lynch/Frost? or from Showtime?

Hearing Chris and Jake talk about the scene with Ben Horn and Sheriff Truman made me realize something I liked about it and a few other scenes in this season of Twin Peaks. One of my biggest pet peeves is when a movie or TV show skips over a critical conversation because the topic is something the viewer already knows. This sort of thing: Bob: How dare you show your face here, Alice! Alice: I've got something you want to hear. [CUT to next scene because the "something" is what happened in the previous scene] Me: NOOOOOO! You're skipping the most important part! It's not the mediocre action scene that revealed Bob's mother is still alive, it's Bob's reaction to that news I want to see. Whether it involves a character learning he's been wrong about something or that a cherished thing or person thought lost has been found, that's (potentially) so interesting! Or getting to hear how Alice tells the story to Bob. And yes, I know those kinds of scenes are hard to write well, but that's what I'm paying you for, writers! So many movies and TV shows are just plot plot plot plot plot and it's somehow anathema to have characters recount part of the plot the viewer already saw, even in situations where it would be very dramatically satisfying to see that conversation. But there have been several Twin Peaks scenes where characters discuss explicitly plot points that we had already been able to infer, and (maybe trained by all the other TV shows) I was a bit disappointed to have something spelled out that was already pretty clear. With the Ben Horn scene, Lynch was giving me what I wanted, caring more about how characters receive news than just advancing the plot another notch.

Am I the only one who felt like the look Sarah was giving Hawk said, "What, help me like you helped Laura?"

I doubt it's true, but I really want to find out next episode that Audrey is an actress on a soap opera and that was an Invitation To Love type scene from it.

"That lady said her husband was going to come by and pick this up. Could you please box it up for me?" "We're all out of pie boxes. Did she already pay for it?" "Yeah, it's ready to go. Just use one of the big ones." "Oh, hey, are you here for the pie?" "here for pie"

I think the weirdest thing in the whole episode is Diane's insane comment in the police station. They're out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody around. Suddenly Hastings is violently killed. What happened? Who did that? Did anyone see what happened? Everyone fan out and look around! Is there someone else here? (At lease I assume they made some attempt after the scene ended to figure out what happened?) Hours later, back at the police station, Diane says. "Oh yeah, I think I saw someone get out of the police car." What?! How is that possibly an acceptable thing to say at that point? Why isn't anyone demanding to know why she didn't mention that earlier? Even if Gordon, Albert, and Tammy are being extremely cagey about Diane and assuming the murder was inexplicably supernatural, surely the local cop would have exploded with outraged incomprehension at her dropping this bomb? The only sense I can make of it is that maybe people aren't seeing the dirty hobos as clearly as we are? Or maybe they're incapable of remembering them? So maybe Diane didn't actually see the hobo creeping up to the car the way we did, but rather just had some uncanny feeling of some kind of presence that she didn't credit until she heard other people talking about seeing glimpses of hobos?

Anyone else feel like Belushi's happy dance with the check was much more of a "We got away with it! We're rich!" than a "They're covering our catastrophic loss after all! We're not ruined!"

Did I understand Hawk to say that his map is some kind of magic that changes and keeps it up to date with what's really out there? If so, maybe his refusal to talk about the black spot makes sense if he's seeing it there for the first time and he's quietly completely freaked out about it and the horrors it implies. Even so, it seemed like Truman reaction to all the stuff Hawk was saying should be, "So, what? You're saying we definitely should not go out there?" And like others, I'm growing impatient with watching Sheriff Truman sit around talking about this stuff while Richard is running around on a deadly crime spree. I keep wanting ??? to appear to him in a vision and say, "It. Is. Happening. Again."

When Chris and Jake were talking about Hawk's relationship with the Log Lady, I was thinking that it doesn't seem so much that Hawk takes her seriously because he believes in crazy supernatural Twin Peaks stuff but rather because he has a relationship with Margaret and he respects her. And in fact one of the things I've always liked about Twin Peaks was how the sometimes oddly-causal way people would entertain supernatural ideas seemed rooted not so much in being blasé about the bizarre as in an attitude of respect, a habit of believing people and taking them seriously unless you have a good reason not to. But then I think of Special Agent Dale Cooper, and it's like he has a special gift for inspiring that kind of respect. No matter what crazy thing he says or does (I'm looking at you, Tibetan Rock Throwing) people go along with it, not because it seems normal, but because obviously this guy knows what he's doing. Which brings us to Dougie. Is the way everyone reacts to his odd behavior any different from the way they've always treated Special Agent Dale Cooper? People were occasionally puzzled by Cooper, but no matter what he did, they pretty much just went along with it, shrugging their shoulders with an air of, Well, I guess this is normal?