UnpopularTrousers

The way Sonny Jim said "No! You're my Dad! You're my Dad!" after Coop let it slip that he isn't really Dougie reminded me a lot of the sample at the beginning of Motherless Bastard by The Books. The song always reminded me of The Straight Story, so I wonder if Lynch has heard it? It's admittedly a bit of a deep cut. Also, while Cooper telling them "I'll walk through that red door and be there for good" was in reference to Dougie's return, it felt like foreshadowing that Cooper will have to go back to the Lodge and will never be able to return to the real world again.

Sorry if anyone has already pointed this out, but when Diane says that Cooper leaned in to kiss her she holds up her hand to mime where his head was. Albert did almost the exact same thing after doing Laura's autopsy when he was explaining how her killer leaned in to kiss her.

I found it a little weird at first to hear Kyle Maclachlan's voice as Good Coop. His voice has obviously changed in the past 25 years, but I've been thinking about those changes as being part of his Bad Coop performance. So even though his acting was good and his performances was very different, he still at first sounded more like Bad Coop than the 1990 Good Coop to me. But then I got used to it and it was fine.

Did anyone catch those hints of the old coop when Dougie got out of bed, spoke to his family, and then said he was in the FBI? I know we say this every week, but I think next week Cooper is finally gonna wake up!!!1!!1!!

I dunno if I buy into any of these synced-up scenes that people have started doing. To make a Lynch-appropriate comparison, it's a lot like syncing up The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon and being dazzled by the bits where things happen to align. Don't get me wrong, the two scenes are almost certainty meant to be similar and the Roadhouse scene made me way more scared for Cooper than I was before. But I feel like that video just matched up the two endings and then let the viewer imagine whatever smaller alignments in timing that they want to see in the rest of the video.

Plus as much as I like to make fun of the blue monkey from FWWM, I think it is meant it remind us of the blue flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. So the fact that we have only heard the name Judy coming from Jefferies and a monkey member of the dream world is probably pretty significant. And Jefferies's voice coming from within the contraption this episode reminded me of the man behind the curtain at the end of The Wizard of Oz. It felt like there was some trickery afoot as to where his voice was actually coming from...

Yes, and it's honestly not even close to the craziest thing on the show. The world building is great in that it starts out as a normal wrestling show with some wacky characters and then slowly introduces all of this mythology with ancient Aztec gods and time travelers and a coming apocalypse. Since the seasons are pretaped and the behind the scenes segments are shot like a grindhouse movie rather than a fake documentary they're able to do a lot of slowburns where characters are introduced who you don't even see wrestle until a full season later. It's closer to a live action mortal combat than the WWE style of gigantic filmed stage play. If you want to get into it you should definitely start at the beginning of season 1. Some aspects of the show are a little rough to start but when it finally shows its hand on episode 19: GRAVE CONSEQUENCES it's all so so so worth it. The treatment of female characters is also sometimes pretty icky at first, but they get way better about that in the second half of the first season.

Concerned about the widening possibility space, huh? Spot the Firewatch developers. Sure, the jailhouse monkey sounds could just be a callback to Bobby and Mike howling at James in the pilot...OR THEY COULD BE COMMUNICATING WITH THE JUDY MONKEY FROM FIRE WALK WITH ME. Also: The only two shows I'm keeping up with right now are Twin Peaks and the Lucha Underground. Both are noir-tinged supernatural soap operas, and both currently have a plot threads involving men being given mystical gloves which grant them super-strength. It's not a place I expected either show to ever go but apparently they both decided to go there at roughly the same time time and I couldn't be happier about it.

It is very sad, but I think it's also important to try not to put your own standards of what it means to have a good life onto other people, as the changes that you see are at times only sad from your perspective. For example, near the end of my grandfather's life he was no longer able to recognize himself in the mirror. However, he really enjoyed seeing 'that nice man' in the bathroom mirror every morning. The stranger in the mirror was perhaps a net positive in his life, even if it was oftentimes hard for me to see it that way. Of course he would have preferred to be his old sharp-witted self and I'm not romanticizing things and saying that his life as a whole was better than it was before, because it certainly wasn't. However, that doesn't mean that the joy that he experienced as a result of his condition was entirely empty or meaningless, either. These things only becomes tragic when overlaid with comparisons to a previous person who is sadly long gone. So, despite all the intense tragedy of who Cooper/Dougie is now...he does still seem to be experiencing plenty of joy. When we see him gulping back coffee and shoveling pie into his face, he does seem to be experiencing real and genuine joy. It's sad to remember that the old Coop is locked away in there somewhere, and Dougie is oftentimes overcome with a melancholy which he probably couldn't articulate. But, he still seems to be taking pleasure in a lot of the simple things in life, which old Coop did too. So, he still has that. (Sorry if that was too much of sad elegy for a goofy Twin Peaks character who is both fictional and actually a lot of fun to watch bumble around. But these personal connections do at times pop up for me while watching the show)

Right after asking that question I looked it up and posted a link that thread as well as another link that auto-syncs the two videos. Sorry for asking that question in the first place instead of just googling things to begin with.

Reddit user Wicked Jazz posted a handy link in this reddit thread which syncs up the two clips: https://viewsync.net/watch?v=Ir8s6IGq2Hs&t=0&v=_8bGQbQm-Gs&t=1.25&mode=solo “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within." Sarah is certainly drinking full, and we have seen white horses in her house before. I'm not sure if it means anything, but it sure is spooky!

For those having trouble figuring out what to look for here, Ed's reflection appears to be looping and is not the same as what's happening in the scene. Perhaps similar to Sarah Palmer's TV and the when Coop watches surveillance camera before Jeffries arrives in FWWM. Crazy. Also: I recall that Albert confessed that he was at one point in contact with Jeffries behind Cole's back. It seems that this might also be the case with Diane, so perhaps she is also acting with the best of intentions.

But the catch game is such an incredibly short scene that you'd think the could have just fit it into just about any previous episode instead. It doesn't really matter in the end, but it's still an odd choice.

Ah, thanks for the detective work! I imagine any other director would have covered it with make-up to avoid confusion with the co-ordinates written on the other girl's arm...but Lynch does things his own way. Thanks for posting that music, Markhoog! Hearing it again, I'm doubling down on my interpretation of it being Badalamenti slot machine music.

Loved the first half but found the second half to be incredibly dull. I can't imagine the folks who didn't like last week's episode will have many nice things to say about any of the stuff set in Twin Peaks this week. -The cha-cha line into Lucky Seven Insurance coupled with Anthony's pathetic hiding was such a fun way to start the episode. I think the music was meant to replicate the sound of a room full of slot machines. Here's a field recording I really like as a reference: -The Mitchum's interpreting Dougie's "My wife?" as a joke was pretty funny -Sonny Jim's gym set was great as well, especially with the giant spotlight and archway. Kinda absurd that The Silver Mustang has its own delivery men with branded jumpsuits, but whatever. -The arm wrestling contest is definitely a great example of how some segments of the series are basically independent short films. Twin Peak's weird use of technology continues to be my favourite aspect of the show, so I loved the big security camera screen. The sequence really reminded me of a weird aside from a John Carpenter film, like the sort of thing Snake Plisskin would wander into in Escape from New York. Was great. I kinda hoped that he would go 'over the top', but we cant have everything -God, I LOVED LOVED LOVED the way the cops got the info on the fingerprints and just tossed it in the garbage. Exactly the kind of absurd fuck-you plotting that both delights and frustrates us all. -After that, the the episode took a huge nose dive for me. I don't think Tom Sizemore's acting was any good when he was asked to be emotional, I don't care about The RR's franchise potential and don't understand why Bobby was even in that scene, the one saving grace about the Nadine Jacoby scene was the potato anecdote, and while I was fine with Audrey's scene last week it became a bit much this time around....BUT OH MY GOSH JAMES HURLEY AT THE ROADHOUSE. ALL IS FORGIVEN. JAMES WAS ALWAYS COOL, YOU GUYS! -Did the crying girl in the booth's tattoos stand out to anyone else? She had numbers (7662?) on one arm, and a flower (dandelion?) on the other. -I don't know what to make of the boxing loop on Sarah Palmer's TV screen. Does anyone know if that was Battlin' Bud? I also noticed that there were ceramic Easter bunnies on both sides of her television. It all comes back to bunnies. But yeah. First half was some of the best Twin Peaks we've gotten, and the second half was the absolute worst.

A common complaint about this episode is that it had a lot of scenes where two characters sit around and talk about a long list of characters who aren't there. I remember a lot of people having the same complaint about Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice which is my probably my favorite movie of his. Even if it's not his best movie, I think it's far away his most entertaining. I'm pretty much alone in that opinion, just like how I'm pretty much alone in thinking that this episode was top 3 most entertaining so far. So perhaps I just really enjoy a style of scene that most people aren't too keen on.

Some fun and absolutely baseless speculation: What do people think the odds are that we find out who Judy is? She was the focus of Phillip Jeffries's rambling in FWWM and then that monkey whispered her name at the end of the movie. So Lynch obviously had some kind of plan for her at the time, and The Return has taken a lot pleasure in picking up loose threads and half-forgotten names. I think at most we'll get an offhanded namedrop, but I'm open to any insane theories you folks have. Like, what if she was the girl that the frog moth crawled into? It probably wouldn't mean much, but my brain would enjoy the Frostian dot-connecting.

We enjoy the show, we enjoy talking about the show, we enjoying listening to a podcasts where thoughtful individuals talk about the show, and we enjoy coming up with theories that probably aren't true but are fun to consider and test out. You don't enjoy the show, you don't enjoy the way that we're talking about the show, you don't enjoy the podcast, and you don't enjoy reading our admittedly absurdly unlikely theories. You're not even complaining about the show anymore, you're complaining about how you don't like that we like and that you don't like the conversations that we're having about it. So, what exactly are you getting out of this? Do you just really enjoy interrupting other people's fun? Do you run onto playgrounds to tell the kids that the ground isn't really made of lava and then walk away smugly knowing that you're right? Oh, and it's little person, not midget. We don't say midget anymore. EDIT: Oh jeez, I didn't click to the next page and see that like five other people said the same thing, making this comment rather excessive and gratuitous. Whoops. Sorry folks. Did you know that it was just a band-aid? Let's go back to fun things.

In regards to what was going with Sarah Palmer's freakout, let's no forget that she experienced some sort of direct link with the black lodge in the season 2 finale and has been living with that experience as well.

I think this expectation partially comes from us being told before the show started that it would primarily be about Cooper's return to Twin Peaks. Thinking about that now, I wonder if that means his personality will come back or if he will just physically wind up in the town of Twin Peaks? But I totally agree that suddenly having Cooper come back would likely be more unsatisfying than having him remain in his current state forever. It's not as though he is simply a man with amnesia who has forgotten who he is and simply needs to be reminded of his past identity...he hasn't even formed a coherent thought, yet. A friend of my father's who had Alzheimer's died of a stroke last week, at age 68. He was no longer able to form new sentences and just would say "I went on a lot of bike trips" or point at random objects and say "these are my bike trips". He didn't even really know who his wife was anymore, but if my Dad walked in carrying a bike helmet he would light up with joy. They did, in fact, go on a lot of bike trips. Not much of his previous personality came through, but he still had these glimmers of recognition and happiness from things that linked him to his past. Cooper's current state reminds me more of my father's friend than an amnesiac character who only needs to find the right key to jog their memory. I think to get the old Cooper back we would require a larger event triggered by some lodge-related phenomenon, and not just another reminder of his past self. Philip Jefferies was gone for the same amount of time before he returned in FWWM. Twin Peaks isn't very internally consistent with this kind of stuff, but I wonder if his appearance could provide any clues to what Cooper would be like if it hadn't been for Bad Coop's Dougie-vessel meddling?

Remember when a monkey whispered "Judy" in FWWM? I think all of the technology in The Return has been deliberately all-over-the place and anachronistic. We've seen just about every era of phone imaginable, the skype call was performed with a wood-panel monitor raised via a giant lever, and let's not forget the insanity that is Dr. Jacoby's streaming set-up. As for 'feeling like a dream', I didn't think Audrey's scene was anywhere near as dream-like as Dougie's dinner with the Mitchums last week.

I think I should partially amend my comment regarding the pacing. It wasn't always that the scenes were always that much shorter (although some certainly were), but rather that the individual shots didn't linger and they were always dense with dialogue where the actors were going back and forth rather than letting things hang as if speaking to an empty room. They had a cadence that more closely resembled old Twin Peaks than the rest of The Return where things have been more contemplative and minimalistic. While the lack of Dougie was a factor in this (as his character is define by his unresponsiveness), I think the shift carried into the structure of the scenes with all the other characters as well. Like, it was closer to Blue Velvet's approach to noir and old Hollywood convention than Mulholland Drive's approach to noir and old Hollywood convention which had previously been more present. Is anyone else with me on this? No? Like I said, kinda shocked that no one else thought this was episode was one of the best thus far.

I believe it was officially confirmed that the subtitles were incorrect.

I'm shocked that people weren't into this one. It was totally different from last week's, but I thought it was equally great. Probably the two most entertaining episodes in the series, so far. Part of what made last week feel more like Mulholland Drive than old Twin Peaks was that the melodrama captured an exaggerated hopefulness rather than a depressive melancholy and was shot with the bright lighting we've seen since the Take Five Breakfast. This week almost everything took place at night or with very warm lighting, and the drama was more about looming problems between characters mixed with hints of something scary coming from beyond this world. The pacing was totally different too. I wanna say that this episode had the fastest editing we've seen and the least empty space surrounding dialogue. Last week we spent over twenty uninterrupted minutes on the Mitchum dream and meeting with Dougie, whereas this episode MOVED. -The opening talk with Tammy was so sweet and there was so a lot of genuine warmth between all of the FBI crew. Was lovely. Although none of them took real sips from their wine which always bothers me, even though I know that continuity with drinks is hard. -I'm not sure what kind of real world room has red curtains like that, but I totally dug it stylistically, and Diane saying LET'S ROCK was super creepy and didn't feel forced in the way that lines like that often do. -Sarah Palmer was great as always. Loved her going to the store just to buy three bottles of vodka and a carton of cigarettes. The turkey jerky brought to mind the "Long gone, like a turkey in the corn..." scene in FWWM. It was a subtle connection that brought her lost daughter into her otherworldly freak-out -I love how Harry Dean Stanton is always annoyed and curmudgeonly, but how his frustrations come from him genuinely caring about people and wanting to help them -Sonny Jim taking out Dougie for a game of catch was hilarious. It was one of the shortest scenes in the whole show, and was such a quick visual set up and punch line. Really showed the difference in pacing versus last week -CEILING FAN! So many creepy hints that bad shit is about to go down -I liked how Ben Horn's conversation with Truman about Richard directly paralleled the conversation he had with his ex-wife after Richard attacked her. He acted very compassionately concerning Miriam and agreed to pay for all of her medical expenses, but showed no compassion for his family and refused to give them any money under similar circumstances. It made his actions this week seem shallow and ingenuine -I usually furrow my brow whenever an older director hires a pretty young actress to be super sexually attracted to them, but his scene with that woman totally worked for me. Although I'm not sure if Denise's concerns about Gordon being a lecherous old man made this better, or if that was just a convenient excuse...and come to think of it Shelly kissing him in season two was a bit odd...Actually, I liked the scene at the time but now I'm second guessing myself. I need to rewatch it. -I thought Sherilyn Fenn was great and I enjoyed her scene...but I totally lost track of what Audrey and her husband were even talking about it. Her being in shitty marriage but still totally being a strong and in control woman totally tracks but who is fucking who and who is Billy and why is he missing and what exactly is going on with that phone call and stuff? Can anyone give me a cliffnotes summary? Similar deal with the final roadhouse scene.

The Cheetos in Chantal's back pocket really stood out to me, seeing as they're just about the last thing anyone would ever store in their back pocket. I thought it was a really funny Lynchian white trash move. It's probably nothing.