LostInTheMovies

I think it's part normal preproduction stuff and part Lynch being his usual cryptic/somewhat-frustrating self haha. He said he wasn't going to talk Twin Peaks until 2016 and yet people still keep asking him questions about it (and who can blame them of course!). This is sort of his classic way of nonchalantly dropping a bomb that may not be a bomb at all, changing the subject while keeping people talking and not really saying anything revealing. I don't see any way in which this doesn't happen, most likely as the proposed 9-episode Showtime series next year. Certainly Showtime will ultimately bend over backwards to keep it going as this is a huge boon for them, a major media coup, and if they somehow lose it they will have massive egg on their face. And Lynch always follows through when he truly invests in a project - see Mulholland Drive TV pilot-to-film etc. The ball has begun rolling, and it won't stop rolling until it's reached its destination...which will probably surprise us, regardless.

Yeah, this podcast is a blast. And thanks for the flattering shout-out. I may use that as a pullquote someday, preferably completely out of context, like at a job interview... In addition to the Peyton quote I mentioned, he also commented on the writers, actors, etc getting tired of the show and starting to just change things up for the sake of changing things up. He says something to the effect of "usually that doesn't happen until the third or fourth season but on Twin Peaks everything happened faster!" Completely agreed with your takes on this episode. The observation about the Nadine gym scene playing like a sitcom with the laugh track removed is brilliant and so true. In some weird, perverse, meta way (I almost feel bad typing this) I am glad this episode exists because it's just such a strange, strange, fascinating phenomenon. Just realized we are at the halfway point of season 2. You can really tell Twin Peaks wasn't meant to carry a 22-episode-per-season load. Weird to think that the audience and critics abandoned the show way back at the really good early season 2 episodes, almost as if they knew what was coming.

Not too much comment on this one but I get a kick out of the opening. It's admittedly pretty cheesy and totally out-of-tune with the way supernatural stuff is depicted earlier in the show but it's fun especially after a stretch frustratingly low on otherworldly phenomena. You also get Maj. Briggs touching the wood table and mumbling, "Is this for the soul? My soul?" which This episode was directed by Todd Holland, who also directed episode 12 - the one which begins with the zoom out of the ceiling tile. So he definitely seems to like dramatic openings. Overall, not a great episode by any means but Holland does bring some visual interest to the table, and some familiarity with the Twin Peaks universe. On the other hand, three of the next four episodes are directed by first- (and only-)timers - the only exception being Lesli Linka Glatter returning to wrap up some (semi-)important matters for her fourth and final outing. Some of these guest directors are more notorious than others (and one of them directs what, to my eyes, is the beginning of the comeback) but I'll leave that for new viewers to suss out for themselves. On a bright note, we are now more than halfway through the really rough mid-season stretch! ...Yay? Also, that's Kyle MacLachlan's brother playing the dead guy in the last shot.

While we're waiting for the podcast to return, I recommend these Q&As with cast and crew: Lots of illuminating stories and perspectives although at times they seem to contradict one another (I think there are four different versions given of how Lynch cast Frank Silva!). Avoid Part 7 if you haven't seen the finale yet.

I'll count my blessings: it's sunny and warm in southern California. But I am a East Coaster by birth so I feel your pain.

You guys have me worried...Wednesday is my laundry day - am I not going to have any podcast to listen to while I wait for my clothes to finish washing/drying? :/ Don't make me watch soap operas on the laundromat TV to keep myself entertained... Although by doing so last week I discovered (I kid you not) Dick Tremayne in a goatee, making a guest appearance on General Hospital.

Forgot to post it when the episode was current, but this blog post really captures the misfires of the wake scene, especially in the captions for the pictures: http://entertainmentguidefilmtv.blogspot.com/2014/04/twin-peaks-days-20-26.html

Great points. It's also interesting to see how the characterization changes so much after the first season, in which he initially DOES seem to be a bit more of the "gritty stoicism" type (albeit not the "macho aggressiveness" - except I guess when he slaps Bobby).

Believe it or not, there was recently a YouTube video which compiled all of the James scenes into a supercut "pilot" for a James-only show. It has, tragically, since been taken down.

Yeah, I'm with the consensus on the Teen Witch rap thing. I was almost falling out of my chair... Man, I was not expecting that lol.

Interesting, for some reason I had always thought that Yul Brynner was mixed-race so I wiki'd it. He is apparently part-Eurasian (he's Russian but of course a large chunk of Russia is geographically closer to Asia than the rest of Europe) but during his life he also exaggerated the Mongol connection, claiming even to be born a Khan. So, from a public perception standpoint in particular, it wouldn't have quite have been in the Piper Laurie (or Mickey Rooney) category... I don't know if he wore specific skin-tone changing makeup though (in fact, typing this I'm realizing I've never actually sat down and watched the whole movie!).

I think the crowd here mostly skews younger, but I'd love to hear from anyone who watched the show when it originally aired: was the shift away from serialized mystery, into episodic comedy/melodrama, startling or expected for you? I ask because I think a lot of our expectations now are shaped by shows like Lost and maybe even earlier stuff like The X-Files, so that we assume "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" is not simply a hook to get viewers into the show, but the core engine of the show itself. From that, you'd think that when the question is answered it would only lead to a new, bigger question that keeps the series going in a certain direction. Certainly when I first watched the show (on DVD in 2008) I was SHOCKED that it suddenly went from being an extended-film-in-TV-form to a straight-up Andy Griffith type of show. But I'm wondering if in 1990, it felt more natural/inevitable (if also disappointing) to ease into a conventional TV approach. An "Ok, we've gotten through the device meant to lure viewers into this world, and now it's time to just luxuriate in this world and check in with our friends week-to-week" sort of thing.

Also, one other thing that's interesting about Frost's imported mythology - I think it's actually closer to Lynch's sensibility (though he didn't import it) than first glance suggests. Because Theosophy emerged in 19th-century Europe, a lot of it sounds really dualistic but it's basically building on Eastern nondualist concepts that really ran against the grain of Victorian Christianity. So, for example, the "dweller on the threshold" is not actually an external opponent one must face, but one's own shadow. And - though this is often obscured later in the series - the Black and White Lodge as presented by Hawk are not so much two completely binary opposed realms but steps along a path: one has to pass through the Black Lodge to attain the White. These are, at their core, very Lynchian ideas because even in the more black/white moral universe of his early films there is a sense that the characters' primary struggle is with themselves (something that gets realized more fully in the second half of his career to the point where it becomes THE defining thematic trait of his work). This is another reason I feel like the specificity of this ethos helped Lynch grow as an artist.

Great points. I certainly prefer Lynch's inexplicable plunges into the uncanny to all the speechifying and I agree with you inasmuch as these moments threaten to dilute the mystery of the first and early second season. Yet part of what fascinates me about Twin Peaks is the way it manages to include both approaches. I think without Lynch's last-minute interventions in the finale and Fire Walk With Me, all the Hawk speeches in the world wouldn't amount to much. In fact, I might actually reverse your last statement. I think as an empty phrase "perfect courage" (and the Lodge/dweller lore that goes with it) comes off like a cliche, but when applied to reality - that is to say, when Lynch shows in visceral terms rather than describing it abstractly - it becomes deeply meaningful and much more complex than that phrase would suggest. And here's the thing: I suspect (and some cases, am certain) that Lynch never would have had the opportunity to create these scenarios without the framework Frost began establishing in the second season. Certainly Lynch was, understandably in many cases, not a fan of specifying Laura's killer (and his link to Bob), creating a larger spiritual framework for the show, or And yet, forced in these directions (and determined to reconcile them with his own sensibility), he produced the best moments of the show, created some of his strongest work to date, and (in my opinion at least) opened the door to the bulk of his future work. Without those turning points forcing Lynch to evolve his approach, I doubt we'd have Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire - let alone Fire Walk With Me. "Mostly because it is happening so late in the show and feels very disconnected from a lot of the stuff that preceded it." I think that's a key observation. It wasn't until I read an old alt.tv.twin-peaks post (coincidentally under discussion in another thread right now) that I realized how fundamentally the Bob/one-armed man/Red Room imagery of the first half was disconnected from the Lodge lore of the second half of the series. I tended to lump them together and mentally bridge the gap, like most viewers. Google the many discussions of "Black Lodge" + "Fire Walk With Me," consider that in fact Lynch never actually uses that phrase in the film, and you'll see what I mean! It's easy to forget that Lynch and Frost had really different visions of what a supernatural mythos should look/feel like - in fact I'm not sure Lynch would ever even want to use the world "supernatural." And yet somehow (for me at least) these differences come together in the end and make the messiness of the show's growing pains worthwhile. At any rate the show's schizoid presentation of its mythos essentially results from the Lynch/Frost divergence/miscommunication, which makes me really curious to see how Lynch and Frost actually collaborate in 2016.

Yeah the responses to that one are great lol. I spent a lot of time exploring those archives this past fall, and ended up rounding up 100 or so of my favorite and/or the most interesting alt.tv.twin-peaks posts from the show's and film's original run here: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2014/11/twin-peaks-on-internetin-1990-alttvtwin.html. To avoid spoilers, don't read past 1/7/91 (the podcast has already gone past that point, but you don't want to stumble across a description of the next episode, so I'd stop there). Also, I use the "official" episode numbering so IdleThumbs' "episode 20" is listed in my descriptions as episode 19. Highlights include a 1992 prediction that Twin Peaks will return in 2014, reports from the Fire Walk With Me set, and a hoax in which various commentators made up an episode of Twin Peaks for viewers who thought they'd missed one. On a more serious note, there are some really great psychological/thematic analyses of the characters and stories while they were unfolding. Maybe it's just me, but I found the conversations endlessly fascinating. Less of a time capsule than you'd think, although occasionally there are jolting reminders.

This is a pretty bad episode, yet I find it curiously watchable. It's mostly bad in that goofy/campy way where you can sort of enjoy laughing/groaning along with it (whereas some later episodes just start to really drag - around #21-23 I find myself straining to push through on a rewatch). Just to think that we are only a few episodes away from Leland dying and even Maddy being murdered, yet the tone and style of the show has changed in such a startling, disorienting way. Which has a lurid, train-wreck fascination for me; to paraphrase Seinfeld, "It is a loathsome, offensive episode...yet I can't look away!" How is that record player going while Sheryl Lee enters the Palmer living room separated by about 3 1/2 hours of broadcast time from the Little Nicky thought balloon? The mind reels. This episode also reveals that the show is really suffering, and isn't just in a temporary post-mystery slump. Why? Because the episode is written by Harley Peyton & Bob Engels, the head writers of the show (basically the mini-Frost and Lynch, in that order) and yet it's STILL totally off-track. These two wrote some of the best episodes of the first half of the series but here you get the sense that the teacher had left the classroom and the kids had just begun to goof off in their absence. Peyton later admitted that they fell too much in love with the absurdist comedy of the show, and you can tell. It feels more like a parody of Twin Peaks. What's more, the episode is directed by Caleb Deschanel, who directed the extremely memorable/stylish ep. 7 with Audrey's cherry stem, Coop's gentle rebuff of her in bed, Waldo's shooting, Maddy in Laura drag, etc. (maybe the best non-Lynch episode of the first season, or even the entire series). His last episode was the one with Leland driving Maddy around in the car, which, while flawed, is arguably as good as the post-mystery episodes get until the finale Here he seems totally lost. The idea that the tasteful, lush lighting, color palette and compositions of his season 1 episode could give way to the thought balloon and Lucy wandering down the hallway...man. So many pure cheese moments. The aforementioned thought balloon (or the preceding scene with Dick & Nicky in matching shorts, jackets, and...ascots, right?). Hawk falling through the door - what a lame moment for that character. The characters ogling Robin Lively while the sappy music plays, reciting Shakespeare. And speaking of music, this episode is really guilty of hijacking memorable Twin Peaks music cues and misusing them in an attempt to regain legitimacy. The Man From Another Place's theme when Cooper flips the coin. The Laura theme when the case worker (hello, Molly Shannon!) discusses Little Nicky. And most shamelessly, Harold's theme - maybe my favorite bit of music on the show - played over Dougie's 50 Shades of Grey deathbed sequence. If the mid-season hadn't already jumped the shark when Nadine threw the jock 50 feet in the air, I'd say this episode does it. But there are some straight-up good bits too. Audrey's scene with Coop & Denise is wonderful, and indeed she's on fire throughout this episode. Much more so than we've seen her since the early second season, before she became a drugged-up hostage at One Eyed Jack's (a development she never really recovered from). However, Other good moments... For some reason I really, really like Dead Dog Farm as a location. Its sleazy, rundown vibe has a very Lynchian feel to it, though I have no idea if he had anything to do with its conceptualization. He IS fascinated by dogs and dead animals in general and the place looks interestingly similar to the in Fire Walk With Me. And the final scene with Bobby and his parents is really nice, though I don't know about the Major materializing in WWI pilot gear. It's cool to see Mrs. Briggs get a chance to be an actual character for a moment or two (this and her early scene in the previous episode are really her only opportunities in the series) and I love the final shot of the blue stormy sky and the lightning. And then onto the credits, still featuring Laura Palmer's picture underneath. Interesting bit of trivia: this is the first time in the whole series that Laura is never once seen or even mentioned throughout an entire episode. Same goes for Leland.

Just listened to the cast and yeah, generally agreed. Weak episode for sure but lots of enjoyable bits. Re: Hawk's speech, the funny thing about them presenting this as Native American lore, is that it's antecedents are almost entirely late 19th century/early 20th century British/American Theosophy and Theosophy-flavored mystical writing. The "dweller on the threshold" comes from a British novel of the 1840s (Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lighton) by way of Madame Blavatsky & her disciple Alice Bailey, whom Frost has cited as a big influence on Twin Peaks. The Black/White Lodge stuff is harder to pin down, but seems to have something to do with Blavatsky's concept of the Great White Brotherhood (which sounds super-Aryan but was not supposed to be a racial thing...I think), as well as Aleister Crowley and the Order of the Golden Dawn. The literary antecedents seem to be the adventure book The Devil's Guard - which also prominently features dugpas (who will appear later) and (according to Frost) the book Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune (also a Blavatsky acolyte). So yeah, indigenous North America...not so much. I agree the delivery and presentation is hokey BUT I really love the concepts in play so I'm a sucker for this scene. Plus I just find it so fascinating how this little throwaway bit of dialogue, tossed off to a minor scene written by a freelancer deep in the second season, turns out to hold be so key to the show's themes (even when you reflect back on some of the stuff that's already happened). That's a big info dump but I did attempt to present it in a succinct and visually appealing way a few months ago, with this video - "The Twin Peaks Mythology." Warning - it includes spoilers for the rest of the season: Yeah, and unsurprisingly the ratings were the worst they'd ever been when the show returned in January, down to a 10.3 - sadly that too was a higher rating then the show would ever receive again until the finale, which barely beat it with a 10.4. By comparison the pilot earned a 34.6. The ratings are all on wiki and it's pretty interesting to look at just how steady the show's decline was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Twin_Peaks_episodes. I think the only real bounce came with the killer's reveal and the season 2 premiere. Otherwise, from the pilot onward it was down and down and down and down. The pilot was the highest-ranked TV movie of its entire season, the finale - also aired as a 2-hour TV movie (by combining what were intended to be the last two episodes of the season) - was beaten in its own timeslot by reruns of Northern Exposure... Anyway, back to this episode's "cliffhanger," the podcast's mockery of Catherine/Andrew's "this was planned all along" conceit had me in stitches.

There are much worse 90s haircuts to contemplate. I'm looking at you mushroom cut (bowl with the head shaved below). I can't be proud of too much of my teenage fashion but I can thankfully say I never fell for that one...

What kills me about the James plotline is that - does this even need a spoiler tag? - On the plus side (if you can call it that), the character that the other Twin Peaks podcast calls "Exposition Malcolm" is hilariously awful. He basically walks into a room, James says something like "can I help you?" and he launches into an odd, rambling, unprompted info-dump loaded with non sequiturs. This happens several times and it only gets unintentionally funnier each time.

I'm nearing the end of a full series rewatch and just wanted to share some words of encouragement with first-time viewers as often I'm down on the second half of the show, as are many. And certainly the first half (the Laura mystery) is more engrossing and appealing to watch, especially on first view (although I find the back half is more fun on return visits, once expectations are set lower). And even the late second season, when things improve, isn't quite in the same class. But if the first half of the series is better to watch, the second half may be better to think about. The gems are scattered throughout the dirt but they stick out in memory and the story starts to develop a thematic core and thrust that was more uncertain/obscured when it was purely a whodunit. Often this takes on-the-nose form, as characters enunciate ideas rather than just let them be played out in the action. And if it weren't for Lynch ending it with a bang - in the one-two masterstroke of the finale and film, all the preparation of the second season wouldn't matter for much. But he did, and it does. My advice is enjoy the good bits, roll your eyes and enjoy laughing at the bad bits, and - especially near the end - pay attention to what is going on with the mythology and the characters, especially Cooper. What seems pedestrian or incidental at first glance may turn out to be key. Lynch threw out much of the script for the final episode and wrote his own for Fire Walk With Me (before proceeding to improvise crucial moments in that too). And he made a point of abandoning many season 2 developments and returning to the show's roots in Laura Palmer, the emotional reality of the community, and the mysticism of Cooper's dream. But he also carried through on the dramatic momentum of the episodes he did not write or direct, in subtle and often surprising ways, fulfilling as well as subverting Twin Peaks. It can be difficult to see the clues and connections, but as Cooper shows us, they're there if we look for them.

I think to the extent they pull it off, it's largely Duchovney's doing. Another actor could have easily taken the same dialogue and really vamped it up so that Denise was just a cartoonish drag queen (it's unclear from the writing if Denise was intended to be a transvestite or transgender, or if the writers even know the difference). But his performance is so low-key and charming that we end up laughing with Denise rather than at her. One of the few true gems of the mid-season.

Been re-watching the mid-season and... Re: Cooper's approach to the one-armed man & general violation of FBI ethics one also has to consider that within a few episodes (really lame spoiler for ep. 22) Coop gets away with murder on this show! (Figuratively speaking...) And boy, does season 2 get weird (not in a good way).

Just to clarify/specify what I'm talking about, in FWWM we learn Yeah, I look forward to the FWWM discussion on the podcast as well. And I'm sure that will be a really interesting thread, particularly as first-time viewers respond to the film.

Re: the letter in the spoiler section ("familiars"): another thing Mike says in ep. 14 is that the inhabiting spirits are parasites, which is a very different idea from the Leland's presentation of Bob as being in control. Parasites don't control hosts, they feed off what's already there. The following doesn't spoil FWWM per se but it is informed by the film's presentation of Leland/Bob so read with caution. A bit off-topic, but the discussion of what Leland "knows" had me thinking... I lean toward the idea that Leland lives with pretty severe denial/repression. I don't think it's a matter of being totally amnesiac/unconscious of what he's done as just forcing his mind not to go there. Although I think he may have experienced a complete break after the murder and forcibly blocked that specific memory because it was just too much for him to handle (the abuse probably got somewhat buried alongside it, but less deeply). The strain of this is what causes him to crack so quickly after her death. I don't think he's going to work that morning thinking "I just killed my daughter, I just killed my daughter" but the knowledge is there, flickering just beneath the surface. Sort of like a blackout and/or what probably happened with O.J. I think one of the things FWWM shows And then by the time we reach the show he's experiencing a more extreme form of repression - but one which is also a very short-term fix than the more superficial denial he used for years. So essentially, if we stretch from the Teresa flashbacks to Leland's death, we see his coping strategy/rationalization/repression of his own evil become exponentially more desperate, deep-rooted, and unstable over the course of about a year. This is a very Lynchian theme and, based on statements he's made, something Frost is interested in as well. It's a pity it does not come across more clearly in ep. 17. I'm typing this from my phone so hopefully it came out coherent.

Yeah, it's one of those thing you dot think about/take for granted until suddenly it registers and you're like, holy shit! Really, Coop treats Phillip like crap from their very first interaction (kicking in his motel room door, gun drawn, because...he had a dream?).