Argobot

It's true though! Unless that's undone in the sequel Chris talked about...

Rendell meticulously sealed us into her story without us realizing it was happening.

The family is called Brex in the American edition! What an odd change.

I guess, except we've never seen Mr. C assault anyone else. He clearly has sexual relationships with women, and his killing of Daria was sexually-charged in part because of how she was dressed, but so far his interactions with women have not screamed 'rapist.' The way Diane's scenes played out before and after meeting Cooper, it felt more like she went from being angry to being afraid once she spoke with Mr. C and saw how he clearly is missing something essentially human. It's not until after seeing him that she gets really upset, whereas if she'd been assaulted, you'd think she would have displayed more trepidation/fear beforehand. The way that scene played out, it made me feel that she'd never even met Mr. C and was referring to the last time she and the real Cooper met face-to-face, and was frightened when Mr. C couldn't remember that meeting.

Wow, gotta say, I'm still not really picking up the assault subtext. Maybe I see it with Diane, but definitely not with Audrey. I probably will be proved wrong in the next few episodes, but here's hoping that I'm right.

Maybe it's because Twin Peaks: The Return is not doing Westworld or even True Detective numbers, but I haven't really noticed any feverish speculating with this show. Sure, we've played an innocent guessing game of "is Albert looking for Diane?" but that stuff is fairly tame in comparison to the frenzy that surrounded these other shows. I suspect that if this show was more of a mainstream hit, we'd be seeing a lot more of that. But also, there's no way the show in its current form would ever become a main stream hit, so there's no reason for it to become part of the Internet speculation machine.

Ahhh, they're close enough, although the FWWM man's beard is obviously a lot longer. Also, someone on twitter pointed out that Laura gives her diary to Harold before she has the dream about Annie. Does anyone remember if that's true or not?

Creepy hobo is up there with the monster behind the diner from Mulholland Drive. Both are so viscerally scary. Does anyone else think he might be the long bearded man from this scene of Fire Walk With Me? (sorry for low quality)

It was the song playing when his first victim was introduced in the previous episode. And then it played again when he killed her.

DIANE!!!!!!! Gotta say, it's really nice to hear Albert say "fuck."

Did anyone take it to literally mean that the bar creep actually raped that girl? I assumed not, but the way some people are referring to that scene makes it sound like we're meant to believe that her and her friend's inability to do anything kept going even after the scene cut.

Interesting! Seems that Mr. C also has powers of prediction, but I initially attributed that to BOB's influence. Maybe it's BOB taking advantage of something in Cooper though.

Was he empathizing? I read that scene as a part of the real Cooper realizing what it means to have missed the past 25 years of his life. It was truly heartbreaking.

Jacoby scene is the new Invitation to Love. Makes total sense that the paranoid Youtube ravings of an aging baby boomer would become the new show everyone in town watches. Amazing. I'm so on edge for real Cooper returning. It makes me actively nervous while watching the show, which is why I'm so glad they exploded that Chekov's car bomb sooner rather than later.

Diane would be a good person to help Cooper remember himself though... What if they made a big deal out of casting Laura Dern and then it turns out we never see her? Maybe we'll only get her voice as Diane on the other end of a recorder. Would people be annoyed if the woman who Albert/Gordon are looking for turns out to be a completely new character? It has to be someone who was significant to the real Cooper 25 years ago, so presumably she'd be a none character. And since Albert and Cole know her, it makes sense that she'd be tied to the FBI. Guys, I really want a new episode

I'm the dumb one who posted that Laura Dern comment minutes before it was mentioned on the podcast.

Does anyone think that Laura Dern is going to play Diane?

I have to admit, I kind of disagree with what you're saying. I almost didn't want to admit that for fear of people taking two women disagreeing with each other out of context, so I'm going to try and really carefully explain what I mean. Our society prizes attractiveness in all genders, but you can make the excellent case that it is most prized for women. Of course, any woman who is even remotely attractive is in danger of being accused of trading on the attractiveness, which is just one of the many paradoxes that makes living in a patriarchal society so impossible to navigate. Your both blessed and damned for meeting the arbitrary beauty standard. A lot of women confront that paradox and try to just opt out as much as they can. Unfortunately, since we do live in a sexist society, you can never really opt out of it unless you find a way to fully insulate yourself from said society. However, some women choose to opt into that dynamic and try to receive as much benefit from a terrible situation as possible. And that means using the "power" (false power, but it's still something) that comes with being considered attractive to their benefit. Now I don't really feel comfortable saying definitively if women using attractiveness is a good or bad thing, and I also don't feel comfortable assuming a woman's intention and saying that she definitely is trading on her looks for some kind of reward. But that's something that does happen in real life. It also happens a lot of TV/movies, especially when a man is writing the woman. It happens a lot on the old Twin Peaks show; many of the women who earlier were praised for their interiority can also be cited as directly/indirectly benefiting from their beauty. Does that make them bad? No. Does the fact that it's a male writer creating these female characters make this whole mess even more complicated? Hell yes. So those are my thoughts. I still think the show could be a little better about women and that it's currently underserved by the fact that none of the women introduced so far have had any time for development. I really believe that will improve as the season goes on though.

I'm fairly confident that we'll be seeing more women with agency as the show goes one, who are not already established Twin Peaks characters. There's the female forensics cop in South Dakota who is being set up as an important character, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, Tammy Preston... The original show was so much more of an ensemble, so it had a lot of space right from the beginning to flesh out all the women. The Return so far has been heavily Cooper focused, so there hasn't been a lot of time to develop new characters. That is clearly shifting though, but right now the balance of the show as far as women is more towards the disposable.

The original series treated women in a very similar way though. Josie, Audrey, the whole One-eyed Jack's plot, it's all there. It's less obvious because you can't show nudity on network TV and because of the fashion of the time, but the original series was far from perfect in that regard. It's complicated conversation because where do you draw the line between parody (Tammy Preston) and a questionable choice (Jade being completely topless in her first scene). I would find Tammy less frustrating if the Jade scene had been directed better. Or the Daria scene. I don't want to be frustrated by these things, because I genuinely believe that Lynch has no ill will towards women. As long as he's not using his authority to take advantage of anyone, this stuff shouldn't really matter. But it does matter because society is so tipped towards this kind of portrayal of women's bodies. That's not really something you can blame on Lynch nor is it something you could reasonably expect him to fix by eliminating female nudity (except maybe Jade's nudity, I really did not like that scene), but it will always stand out until we start seeing more diverse depictions of sex and sexuality in mainstream pop culture.

Someone on Twitter described Tammy as being straight out of an X-Files porn parody and its kind of true. I like the character and her interactions with Gordon/Albert, but given the way other young, attractive women have been used on the show (they are naked or murdered, sometimes both!), I'm starting to feel a little bit on edge.

I thought so too! Has this been confirmed at at all? Edit: Yes, this has been confirmed by every other response in this thread, haha.

I feel like such a jerk for being worried that Michael Cera was cast in this show, because that scene was amazing. So hilarious and just spot on for all those actors. Damn.

Speaking of revealing stuff, the Showtime app is really bad with spoilers. I am rewatching old Twin Peaks episodes on the app, and before some of the episodes play, they run an add for Twin Peaks: The Return. That ad is usually just a shot of the Laura Palmer picture or of older Cooper, but occasionally the ad that runs has the a image of the season 2 BOB in the mirror with Cooper scene. Seems like a pretty huge spoiler to run in your ad for people watching season 1 and season 2.

I'm having a really hard time keeping the episodes straight, haha.