James

I've never used Bitcoin myself, but cryptocurrencies are pretty interesting, so here's my half-remembered summary of how it all works: The whole idea behind Bitcoin is that it's decentralised and anonymous. The technical details of how this is achieved are a bit complicated, but broadly speaking it's an ongoing ledger of transactions (a "blockchain"), and it relies on consensus to ensure nobody fiddles the system (you would have to manipulate over 50% of the devices running it in order to give yourself more bitcoins than you have, which would essentially be impossible). It all uses a similar encryption scheme to how you connect to secure (https://) websites, hence "cryptocurrency". New bitcoins are introduced into the system by "mining", which is basically making computers look for special numbers ("hashes"). The return on this diminishes over time, so it's gotten to the point where miners form pools and divide their earnings, and you have to be careful that you're not spending more on the electricity and hardware required to mine bitcoins than those bitcoins are actually worth. It's very computationally intensive, and has no value other than being an arbitrary way of introducing money into the system, which I think is pretty wasteful and feel a bit weird about. EDIT: I'm refreshing my memory by re-watching the videos I posted, and I should point out that the work done isn't pointless; it's required for how one block in the blockchain connects to the next. Nevertheless, it still doesn't seem very efficient, particularly given that it's competitive. I don't know if there's any way around that – whether perhaps it could piggyback on some other more useful distributed computing effort. Due to the nature of hashes, probably not. Still, hopefully cleverer minds than mine are thinking about it. You don't have a Bitcoin account as such. You have a wallet, which despite its name isn't exactly a container for your money. Instead, it's more like your credentials. It allows you to point to certain transactions in the blockchain and say "that was me", and from there work out how much money you have. But, if I'm not mistaken, the wallet itself doesn't actually change. It's just a public key/private key pair: people use the public key when transferring you money, and you use the private key to prove you are who you are and the money you've been transferred is yours to spend. If you lose your private key, you lose access to your money. There's no authority to turn to who can retrieve it for you; the key is the identity. In fact, if you lose your private key, not only is the money lost to you; it's lost to the whole system. There's no way of ever getting it back. So it's important to have it secure, both from loss and from theft. So I guess you should have it in several places, but all of them encrypted. (There is wallet software that I believe will manage a lot of this stuff for you.) As for the social stigma, I think there's probably at least a couple of reasons. Firstly, the anonymity aspect is obviously attractive to criminals. There's an impression that it's only really used to buy drugs and worse. That's not accurate – it's used for legitimate transactions, too – but I believe a disproportionate amount of cryptocurrency transactions are illicit. Secondly, the anonymity and decentralisation is also appealing to libertarians, and they're pretty insufferable. Thirdly, the technological aspect is appealing to Silicon Valley technology-utopian blue-sky-thinking disruptors or whatever you want to call them, who are also pretty insufferable. And maybe fourthly it might be associated with a certain amount of paranoia – if you're worried about the government spying on your spending habits, cryptocurrencies are an obvious way to go. Perhaps some people look down on those kinds of fears. Oh, and the value can be kind of all over the place. I think it did gain an awful lot of value a few years ago, which I don't think it's complete lost, but if I'm not mistaken it's kind of volatile. Here are some videos that explain it better than I can: An interesting detail about bitcoin mining is that it's the kind of operation that benefits from matrix operations. That's the kind of processing that graphics cards specialise in, so mining rigs often use a lot of graphics cards, running 24/7, to try to find the hashes. I understand this wears the graphics cards out fairly quickly, contributing another expense besides the electricity. Also it's apparently led to shortages of graphics cards, although this problem may subside now that they're starting to introduce cards specifically designed for cryptocurrency mining. Also, the anonymity angle is a bit complicated. If you're able to associate a public key with a person (which I guess you would be able to do if you ever knowingly transferred them money), I think you can go back through the blockchain and find all the transactions involving that person. So maybe it's less anonymous than traditional money? I'm not sure.

I highly approve. My most prominent Dr. Sbaitso memory is a boy at school telling me that if you were a bit flirty with him (Dr. Sbaitso, not the boy) eventually he would say something along the lines of "Ooh, my chips are melting!" I think I remember that because at the time I didn't understand it.

I assumed he developed his comedy chops in that Podburglars podcast, though I've not listened to more than a couple of minutes of it. Nick Robinson is on that thing too, and they seem to have fairly similar cultivated-awkwardness comic sensibilities.

Jesus fucking Christ!

I definitely got the impression that Brad would be replaced next time (they made several conspicuous references to him being there the following week, suggesting he would very much not be), but now that you mention it I think maybe you're right and they'll swap out both people. Om an unrelated note, I, also, am a big fan of the new hires. Also, although it's gotten more heated than I'm comfortable with, I do appreciate the Dan discussion earlier in the thread. I come from a "broadly like the guy but get irritated by some of his bullshit and frustrated at his occasional refusal to distinguish what stuff actually matters" camp, but the discussion about the mental health stuff has been illuminating, partly because I haven't read the book, and partly because I have only limited personal experience in that area. That said, someone close to me is currently having a bit of a relapse of mental health and addiction issues, and I'm not sure whether or not they're actually taking their medication, so setting a careless example in that regard (be it explicit advice or not) hits closer to home than it might have otherwise.

I didn't hate this episode, but it might be my least favourite from The Return. No one scene was especially bad (though I was confused by all the names being thrown around, and a little concerned that new faces are still turning up when it feels like there's so much for the plot to get through), but when it ended I was fairly disappointed. I would have been absolutely fine with everything in there had there been something that felt like it moved things along more substantially. Not that I was especially surprised; this season (and, indeed, the whole series) has been characterised by seemingly haphazard changes of pace and mood and focus and tone. I much preferred the previous one, but I suppose art doesn't always have to satisfy. I'm a little fearful that my overall feeling once the season is over will be frustration, but I'm trying to prepare myself for that possibility. I also think that what interest and entertainment this episode did have was more towards the start than the end, which could have contributed to people coming away from it feeling a bit disappointed. You come away thinking more of where you ended up than where you started. I'm also quite suspicious of old respected artistes making a bunch of media about younger women who can't get enough of suave older guys. There's nothing wrong with that in isolation – I'm sure it's realistic enough – but it's so self-serving that I can't help but be distracted by it. Similarly, while I'm willing to give a lot of benefit of the doubt to the creators, the sheer proportion of women in the show who are either hyper-sexualised or relentlessly harassing men in a way the show seems to present as unreasonable, is getting no less troubling. In the moment I give it a pass because I want to enjoy the show, but then I feel pretty uneasy about doing so. I don't doubt that Frost and Lynch respect and care about their characters, but it's not a great look. Maybe they're careless. I don't know, I don't really feel equipped to speak particularly intelligently about it.

I'm also a fan of that.

It looks like archive.org didn't register any content for it until the day the episode aired. A small thing that really impressed me about that video that plays when you click the archive link is how well it simulates the intense brightness possible with CRT displays. I think it's because they include an after-inage of each of the flashes, but it was a totally convincing effect for my phone's screen producing flashes brighter than its actually capable of. A nice little detail that sells Lynch's weird analogue effects on digital technology thing. Which is something I'd find dumb and irritating in almost anything else, because it would be a mistake, but here it's magic. I always thought there was something really mysterious about the static between radio stations. A perfect place for modern magic.

Good find, @Bjorn!

Last night I did watch Mulholland Drive for a second time, over a decade since the first. I was able to make more sense of it than last time, in part because I remembered some of what was going to happen, and in part because I came pre-equipped with a rough ideas of some of the theories as to its meaning. My prevailing impression is much the same, though: it left me with a sad feeling that has stuck with me well into the following day. Lynch is pretty good at that. It made me contemplate how The Return might end. I have an intuition that there's a pretty good chance it'll be a massive downer. Which I expect would be good good, but I fear for my poor little sentimental heart.

It could be both.

Thanks. I thought it might be, but it's been so many years since I've seen that film, and my memory for these kinds of things is pretty bad. I should watch it again. Oh, on an unrelated note: the horse in the poem is the one that Sarah Palmer sees, right?

I'm afraid someone is going to have to tell me what the colour portions of those images are from.

Great post, @prangman. In the podcast they mention the casting of genuine teens for once. It might just be a matter of changing media sensibilities (do people not cast adults as adolescents as much any more? I'm not sure), but the impression I got was that it was that these kids are innocent in a way that their more modern counterparts were not when they were at the same age. In part, I think this is '50s nostalgia, and in part, I think this is a last glimpse at something about to be lost. The Bomb has been unleashed, Pandora's Box is open. Then there's the suggestion that the character is young Cole. That's not something that has occurred to me, but it adds an autobiographical angle for Lynch, which suggests a loss of his own innocence. Given how much his life's work has concerned itself with the dark, sordid and corrupt, its easy to see it as a mournful glance back at the last tile he could view the world through innocent eyes. Or maybe playing armchair therapist for David Lynch is a fool's errand. If anything, I think that works better. They're supernatural beings, so I'd they were literally hanging out in a straightforward physical room above an actual convenience store, that would be a little disappointing. I can think of at least a couple of other ways you could interpret it: perhaps "above" is closer to "superimposed", in the sense that it's a place in another world that intersects with our world at that location. Or perhaps they're in the mushroom cloud rising over it. I noticed that, too. It reminds me of when Doppeldale shoots Phyllis Hastings in episode one or two. For a couple of frames around the shot the screen distorts quite severely (I posted a screen grab in the relevant thread). It could just be an effect to unsettle the viewer, perhaps to shake us out of how blasé we've become about seeing people being shot on screen. Or perhaps guns are another piece of magical technology in the Twin Peaks world, like electricity. Or perhaps stuff's just weird around that guy. Oh, and nice spot on the Moonlight Sonata thing.

Yeah, that's kind of part of what u was trying to get at when I was babbling on about Lynch embracing different eras of filmmaking "technology". I guess technology was too narrow a term. Technique, perhaps? Aesthetic? The point is that he takes his obvious interest in the form of motion pictures, and incorporates that as a kind of mythic force. It reminds me a bit of Peter Greenaway, who comes from a fine art background. His films are obsessively concerned with form, to the point of sometimes feeling quite alienating. I suppose it's only a selective sample of two, but perhaps there's something about a painter's training that leads them to bring the form to the forefront like that. I don't suppose that's much of a groundbreaking insight. I was kind of toying with the idea that the wonky 2D compositing effects were the Black Lodge kind of intruding in our world in an incomplete way, where the more convincing ones were either the Black Lodge itself, where there is no intrusion, or when something from the Lodge is more concretely inhabiting our world. I don't know, though. I'm increasingly wary of trying to pin down anything definitively like that. Perhaps it's just down to whether or not Lynch thinks it matters whether it looks "real". EDIT: Oh, and thank you @Gailbraithe for the firearms insight. There's still the matter of when the guy (Ray? I'm so terrible with character names...) had the chance to tamper with it, but I guess you can assume there was some kind of stop earlier. I don't know. Or maybe Jeffries somehow planted it for him and communicated that fact. Who knows. The point is that it's conceivable that even hyper-competent Doppeldale would be caught out by it.

Yeah, I had the exact same thought.

I don't know much about guns, but he flips the drum thing open and the chambers appear to have bullets in them. Should he have checked whether they were spent rounds or something? (I'm posting on mobile and can't for the life of me figure out how to remove the spoiler section at the end of that quote. Ignore it.) In its own right, I loved this episode. It was the strangest sustained sequence of television I've ever seen, and I really appreciated it for that. Even beyond that, it was a remarkable experience. Initially, my reaction to the Laura orb thing was similar to JP's; the woman seemed to be showing compassion or live for Laura's spirit or something, I'm not sure exactly what. But in retrospect, it's hard not to think that the fears of it being more of a cosmic struggle deal are right, and I'm really not keen on what that means for the series as a whole. But even if Laura isn't some sort of agent of the heavens or whatever, and even while enjoying the episode, I wasn't and am not entirely happy with the relatively small but powerful story of Laura Palmer and Twin Peaks being dragged into this larger context. Sure, the Lodges added a certain aspect of grandiosity, but that was fine if I saw them as some strange place we glimpse at the extremes of human experience, or whatever. But the idea that Laura was in some sense picked out or even just known about before hand is somehow dissatisfying to me. Twin Peaks is at its most horrifying in domestic settings. It employs the supernatural to convey an unfathomable horror, but that horror is made all the more terrible by the knowledge that it exists in private in ordinary neighbourhoods, maybe just around the corner from me or you. Too many stories are about the destruction of the world, when the destruction of a single life is so much more relatable and relevant to everyday life. Laura's story resonates because it's human. To me, putting it on this larger stage just makes it more abstract. I'm short, the TurboPubx quote above puts it better than I could. I felt pretty gross writing that out, though. Like human suffering is a resource to be mined for drama. Garmonbozia indeed. Oh, and I agree about the tower room being the same as from the very start of the season. It has the same floor, and of course was also in black and white, which I believe are the only times Twin Peaks has ever done that. Speaking of which, cheesy though it is to use B&W to signify the past, it totally works here. In fact, I really enjoy Lynch's use of technology in general, particularly film-making technology. He seems to be embracing all eras, and finding both lore symbolism and emotional resonance in it all, from the flickering light of the early cinema screen in this episode, to the high-tech glitch aesthetic of the digital video scrubbing effect (in this episode the audio from that sequence even sounded like a corrupted video file). He's able to harness all this stuff in a very natural way to create a kind of modern mythology. I'm not speaking in terms of pedantic lore; I'm speaking in terms of the Lodges being coherent places and beings that suggest their own internal logic. I'm sometimes distracted by the pairing of supposedly timeless beings with contemporary objects, but he really makes it work. He seems to have a good sense of the "spirit" of the thing, if that makes any sense at all. I'm still enjoying the show, and still optimistic for its future. I'm starting to steel myself for the prospect of it not resolving things in the way people think they want it to, though, because who the hell knows with this damn season. But I'm 100% along for the ride. Oh, and am I understanding everyone right that there's no episode next week? God, what a drag. But I suppose it makes complete sense for this to be a mid-season break bookend episode. It's almost like some sort of nightmare overture.

That's a good way of putting it. It's generally good practice to pursue what feels correct rather than what is measurably so; lighting, for example, is often highly artificial, but manipulated to both produce a look and at least roughly correspond with real sources. As you say, this is true of almost all film-makers, but Lynch in particular seems to place the creation of an emotional landscape far above all else, even plot. In light of that, it would be surprising to me if he were to be so pedantic in the specifics of this match. But I don't think it hurts the editing of either scene, so who knows. Thanks for the insight on Frost's role in production, also.

It's implied that Dougie was a pretty crummy husband, so I can forgive a less than perfect response to Cooper's condition. It seems like Janey-E is just barely holding things together while her husband is off racking up dangerous gambling debts and visiting sex workers, so she might well not have the energy to be as sympathetic as one would hope. Besides, who hasn't reacted poorly to a situation out of a feeling that it's unfair? Maybe I'm reading too much into the details we've seen - they have a nice house and a seemingly well-adjusted son - but that's the impression I've been given.

People seem to be getting a bit hung up on the timing of the creation of Dougie, and the implications that has regarding his nature. That's certainly a potential avenue, but to me it seems just as plausible that time doesn't work the same way for the Black Lodge and its denizens. If nothing else, its entities seem capable of some degree of precognition, so he could have been "planted" in advance. That said, a recently-formed Dougie being something of an empty vessel would be quite compatible with the social critique reading that @LostInTheMovies quoted from Reddit. If a person's psychological absence goes unnoticed in their everyday life, is that the life of an incomplete person?

It's a different scene, towards the end of the episode, where Gordon and Albert discuss their concerns about Cooper after meeting him. It's the scene where Cole turns his hearing aid all the way up. It takes place outside and is intensely blue. Like the blue curtains in Doppeldale's room, it made me think of the letter read out on the pre-season podcast concerning Lynch's prohibition of blue props. But the colour pallette of this season has been so different that I suspect I'm reading far too much into that. That said, even precluding any mystical or otherwise symbolic meaning, it's an effective if blunt method for setting a sombre mood for the scene. They are blue, both figuratively and literally.

That's a good point, but my point about the timing of the precision wasn't that it's difficult, it's that it doesn't conform to my conception of what Lynch is interested in. I could be entirely wrong, of course, but getting things to line up frame-by-frame in a way that can only be seen if people edit together the videos and watch them on their computers just doesn't seem like it would come from the same guy who is happy to just put an owl over Bob's face and so on. I could be entirely wrong, of course, and as Jake says, Lynch would probably never elaborate on that. I don't mean to be discount the careful and deliberate work that Lynch puts into his art - it's clearly very intentional, even when it's improvised - this just doesn't seem like the kind effort he makes. It seems too neat. But I could have him wrong on that. Is it possible that Mark Frost might have suggested it? It seems more like his sort of thing - in a way it's a kind of game to play with the viewer, and it feels more concrete, like the stuff in the cave. Secret codes and maps and all that. Things that line up just so. I don't know, that's just the impression I get. I noticed that, too. I don't know if I'd say that makes it a coincidence, though. Perhaps the sex is what attracted the motion blur monster, but in coming to get them, it also found Cooper, or the pink room, or whatever.

To the extent that that is deliberate, I wonder who is behind it. I didn't take Lynch to be into that kind of precision and game-playing, but perhaps I've misapprehended his nature. Or perhaps the intention is not for people to actually watch them side-by-side, but for it to have some kind of subconscious resonance. Then again, I wonder how much licence has been taken by the person who compiled that video, given that Cooper's perspective is split over two episodes. Did that lead to there being some leeway in the timing? Not that I don't think that there's something there; I'm just wondering. Some of the similarities are definitely striking.

I could have sworn someone mentions a doppelganger shortly before that scene, and it definitely looks different; I certainly took it to be a different entity (or a different aspect of the same entity, or however the doppelganger thing actually works). It seemed pretty deliberate that there was an ominous shot of the classical statue with a missing arm (different than the one in the standard Red Room scene) at the end of a curtainy corridor shortly before that. Does that represent Mike, or Mike's double, or some other ring-bearer with the associated arm numbness (Dougie, for example), or the Arm's former status as part of Mike's whole body?

I love the freight train speeding through the level crossing. It evokes the stop light, but also suggests passage, maybe between worlds, big and heavy and fast and dangerous, all the while the horn blasting out an incessant ominous warning. I wonder if it'll be back. It's too substantial to make the same kind of use as they did for the stop light. Maybe it's better as a one off. Edit: Also, Chris and Jake were unsure as to whether James' friend was British. He's definitely a Londoner; his only line is to describe Bang Bang Bar as "the dog's bollocks".