utilityfrog

I think the idea, at least as I understand it, is that Annie was/is a tulpa, not that she didn't exist. I also quite like the idea that Maddie was in some sense a tulpa, especially given that she almost never comes up again after her death.

Just listened to the podcasts and enjoyed them greatly! One small nitpick: Jake mentioned several times that doppelgangers in the red room have blue eyes. The eyes have always looked definitively white to me, both in ep 29 and in Mr C's brief scene in ep 18 of The Return. This also potentially ties in with the line in the Woodsman's poem about the "white of the eyes".

I actually thought the dead guy looked a bit like Leo. And Carrie's situation seemed generally similar to Shelly's circa season 1.

@MabaseSlums Yep, I agree with what you're saying here. This ending is I think the most bleakly, horrifyingly depressing thing Lynch has ever created. I think any kind of continuation would undermine it, though I don't really expect there will be one. Coop's misguided actions have doomed both himself and Laura to an eternity of uncertain dream horror, terrible revelations always on the edge of their minds, sometimes spilling over into consciousness and shattering their world, only for their journey to begin again.

Huh? In what way are they not the same person? Everything from Dougie2's creation to his arrival at the Jones house all but states that he's the same person. The music that plays over Dougie2's "birth" continues unbroken as he arrives at the house, and the swooping camera move into the Jones' front door implies a lodge-related method of arrival. He responds to Janey-E's and Sonny-Jim's hugs immediately, which is something Coop-as-Dougie was incapable of.

I've just finished listening to the latest episode of A Twin Peaks Podcast, on these last two episodes, and I wholly recommend it. They go into quite a bit of detail looking at these episodes, and I found their interpretations and theories to be fascinating. https://art19.com/shows/twin-peaks-podcast/episodes/b945b7f0-a864-47c4-a44d-67627dcdc8c4

I think the Coop we see in ep 18 in definitely an amalgam of all the previous versions of Cooper we've seen. Interestingly, I think the change occurs not after Coop and Diane drive into the alternate dimension, but when Coop initially exits the red room to meet Diane in Glastonbury Grove. He seems subtly changed from that point on, to the extent that I thought that he might be Mr C at first. When he's walking down the last stretch of corridor before exiting the red room, Coop makes that weird hand gesture, that seems to cause the curtains to undulate and allow him to exit. His walk during that scene was very strange and even seemed Dougie-esque to me.

On the specific issue of the newly introduced "Judy" mythology: I can't help but view this as an explicit criticism of the idea of imposing concrete lore on things that should be mysterious, ethereal and unknowable. It's a blatant retcon seemingly tossed in at the last moment. So, sometime during late season 2 (presumably?), Cooper, Briggs and Gordon Cole met up and hatched this plan to go after Judy? Okay then. Thing is, I don't if Lynch and Frost intended it to be perceived this way. I know that people have found that the "Judy" phrase may mean something like "explanation", and that certainly seems like something Lynch would regard as negative. I guess it's specifically the last-minute placement of this revelation in the story and it's blatant retcon nature that seems so mocking to me. Perhaps if this information was revealed earlier in the season and worked into the story more it would seem quite different, even if the specific information revealed was the same.

Something I just realised: the Rancho Rosa logo at the beginning had a blue background. Blue -> blue rose -> Tulpa -> Diane.

Loved this episode. Scattered thoughts: I'm not sure if I buy the "Diane is Naido" theory yet, though I do agree the idea is pretty tempting. But remember in part 3 Cooper met Naido in the mauve zone and didn't seem to recognise her at all. And the other tulpas and doppelgangers we know of look identical to their progenitors (baring differences in hair colour and body weight as with Dougie). So I think the real Diane looks like Laura Dern as well. Interesting that Mr C seems to have been using certain code words not only to compel TulpaDiane to take certain actions but also to cause her to remember events that she had previously forgotten. After she receives Mr C's text in this episode she remembers something that disturbs her greatly. This may be the events of the night when Mr C visited her or maybe her true nature as a Tulpa. I think it's up in the air at this point if Diane and Janey-E are actually sisters. That may have just been a ruse to get Cole and co. to go to Vegas. Although I also suppose it's possible that they are sisters and Mr C used that existing relationship as a means to find an appropriate location to plant Dougie. Mr C seems to really not give a shit about the fate of Richard LOL. Given Jerry's location, Mr C is now within several days walking distance from Twin Peaks. RealCoop seems to know all sorts of lodge lore, including the function of The Ring and the use of seeds to create Tulpas. So he doesn't seem to have been staring vacantly into space for 25 years. On Audrey's situation, I don't think we can say definitively what's going on at this point. I don't think she's in a mental asylum; the brief glimpse we get of her looking at the mirror doesn't at all look like a naturalistic depiction of a normal place, it's completely white-ed out. More importantly, we hear electrical crackling on the soundtrack, which strongly suggests lodgey stuff.

Not only that but (The Evolution of) Phillip Jeffries is a Dalek! (no, but seriously, look at his silhouette)

Not sure when you last listened to C&C but they seemed to have improved their audio equipment sometime last year (I think). It's much better than it used to be. They're still primarily a PC focussed podcast though.

To my eyes it's definitely the thing from the glass box. And the sequence of images, first showing the glass box thing and then immediately afterwards showing the BOB-vomiting entity from pt. 8 connects them very strongly, to the point where we are supposed to infer that they are one and the same.

This belongs in a museum.

Perhaps we'll get The Evolution of Phillip Jefferies? As far as I've read, all signs point to Bowie not being able to / being inclined to appear in The Return, given that shooting started around the time he was finishing Blackstar, and he would presumably want to ensure that was completed before he died. But I suppose it's possible he spent a day or two shooting something. As for Earle not being in the Blue Rose Gang, maybe Cole never trusted him? IIRC his crazy Dugpa video dates to the late sixties, a few years before Cole started up Blue Rose in the early seventies. Perhaps Cole had somehow seen that video or otherwise gotten wind of Earle's mania with regard to lodge stuff?

I just re-checked the episode and BadCoop tells them that they have to kill the warden and then that they have a double-header in Vegas. So, they definitely have two targets in Vegas (assuming that that's what "double-header" means, anyway).

Speculation on my part, but I think Janey-E and (especially) Sonny Jim are not long for this world. I think they're the "double header" Chantal and Hutch have been sent to Vegas to kill. After all, BadCoop has entrusted the assassination of DougieCoop to Duncan Todd (who in turn assigned it to Anthony Sinclair) not Chantal and Hutch. I can't think of any other likely targets. The Mitchum brothers may be a possibility, but that seems far more of a stretch to me, as well as being not that interesting. The particular thing this episode that made me fear for Sonny Jim was the spotlight moving over him as he played on his gym set. This spotlight has always been used to depict supernatural forces breaking through to our world, but it particularly evokes Maddy's murder.

Liked this weeks episode far more than last week. The timeline stuff seemed pretty consistent to me this episode. Everything we see in Twin Peaks itself works as a prequel to scenes we've seen in previous episodes. Examples: Becky calling Shelly regarding Stephen being missing for two days. This seems to happen on the same day that Bobby discovers his fathers capsule. Becky would then discover Stephen's infidelity and go on her rampage the next day. Sarah runs out of vodka, prompting her trip to the grocery store the next day. Really liked the BadCoop stuff at the beginning of the episode. Though I'm not sure how much I like the idea of him being so physically capable. Really liked how there was a wide variety of people in that group, they weren't all stereotypical thugs. I guess they had all at one point challenged head bald guy at arm-wrestling and lost. Given what happens to Ray, it seems that one function of the owl cave ring is to send anyone who dies wearing it to the lodge. Also interesting that Ray's body(?)/soul(?) ends up in the lodge but is still dead. Given the obvious look of recognition/something on Richards face when he sees BadCoop, I think it's more or less confirmed that BadCoop is his father, and Audrey his mother. As of last week I still wasn't convinced that Audrey was Richards mother, or that there was anything unreal about her situation. This weeks scene with her has completely flipped me on that. She seems far more vulnerable and unsure of herself than last week. It seems like she's suffered some enormous trauma. I'm now convinced that the nature of Audrey's situation is one of coma dream / weird-ass therapy session / lodge shenanigans (distant third on that one).

Okay, overall didn't really like this one, apart from certain scenes. The stiltedness in certain scenes (I'm thinking mainly of the scene with Cole's "friend", but all of them really) seemed almost like a parody of Lynch's usual style and not really the real thing. I did enjoy the scenes with Sarah Palmer and Ben Horne, and I found Audrey's scene hilarious, apart from the fact that it seemed to have nothing to do with anything. I also think the "1 episode = 1 day" timeline of the series is completely out the window. Bobby opened the cylinder with the message from Maj. Briggs in episode 9. The message contained 2 consecutive dates, 10/1 and 10/2, the earlier of which was said by Truman to be "two days from now". They were supposed to go to Jack Rabbits Palace on (I assume) the earlier date. Being generous and letting "two days from now" mean "two full days after today and then the day after that" would place 10/1 in this episode, episode 12, which showed Truman and Hawk otherwise occupied and not heading up into the woods.

On the nature of the insurance fraud, I think the act of fraud was in denying a payout to the Mitchums over a legitimate fire. This being orchestrated by Sizemore at the behest of behind-the-winkies-guy, who describes the Mitchums as his "mortal enemies" or some such.

It seems clear (to me anyway) at this point that that's exactly what DoppelCoop is and what doppelgangers in general are. That is, a doppelganger is not the result of a splitting of a persons soul into good and evil halves a la Captain Kirk in that episode of Star Trek. A doppelganger is a mirror reflection of the original person and a complete entity in it's own right. So both Coop and DoppelCoop are complete entities, neither is "missing" anything, and it would be nonsensical for them to "merge" at some point (as I've seen some viewers speculate will happen).

I also preferred JW1 to JW2. Something about JW1's fight scenes just seemed more impactful than in the sequel, particularly the hand-to-hand stuff.

So, was Chad eating creamed corn? If so, seems appropriate.

Just listened to the ep 2 podcast (yay, I was mentioned!) and wanted to make a point about the current relationship between DoppelCoop and Bob, at least based on what we've seen up to ep 4. Jake and Chris, and several others in other podcasts and comments I've seen online seem to be taking the default stance that DoppelCoop is currently inhabited by Bob or is "with" Bob in the same manner as we saw at the end of the season 2 finale. There's one piece of evidence that makes me think this is no longer the case. In ep 2, after killing Daria, DoppelCoop contacts NotPhillipJeffries who has the line "You are going back in tomorrow, and I will be with Bob again." I.e. NotPhillipJeffries speaks as if he's not currently addressing Bob, that Bob is not a part of this conversation.

Yeah, DoppelCoop during the interrogation was very different than what we had seen of him previously. Before, he was a straight up brutal psychopath, but he was still convincing as a functional human being. In the interrogation it seemed like he was having trouble even speaking like a person (I'm sure they processed his voice somehow), let alone being convincing as Coop. Vomiting up his garmonbozia (and oil?!?!) seems to have done a number on him.