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?