Jake

Twin Peaks Rewatch 30: Beyond Life and Death

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Man, I remember liking this episode when I first watched it but now, watching it again, I found it profoundly disappointing. So much goes on in this episode, but so much of it is either confusing or of little consequence.

 

Ben Horne gets hurt/killed, yet the doctor is in the next scene and hasn't been arrested (and I don't think he's the sort to try and cover it up) so I guess he's fine? There's some sort of conclusion that Donna comes to that Horne isn't in-fact her father, but I don't know where that came from as very little actual information was given in that scene.

 

It was nice to see all these old characters returning, but each scene that they were in was fairly pointless. What does Laura's mother's comment to Major Briggs really accomplish? Why do we need to cause trauma flashbacks to Ronette when there are several others that have reported the smell, if it was even necessary to talk about the smell at all. I guess the scene in the diner with the waitress from back in the first episode was there to establish that Bobby and Shelly don't hate each other anymore, but once again no real information in that scene.

 

Finally, where I remember finding the lodge scenes really creepy the first time around, this time they just felt like mud getting in the way of figuring out exactly what was going on. I've always scoffed at people that complain about Lynch's tendency of being weird for weird's sake, but once you already know the end and there's no tension in the last episode, that's what this feels like.

 

I'm kinda bummed because I was really looking forward to this episode, and even spent the time to race to catch-up so I could watch it along with the podcast.

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I can only think of two scenes in which Donna's father appears in this episode, the Nadine self-realization scene and the Hayward familiy drama scene. Am I forgetting a third one?

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The scene in the Black Lodge with Laura and the flickering lights was terrifying.

Also WIndom Earle's backwards voice sounds like Jake's Dr. Sbaitso impression.

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I can only think of two scenes in which Donna's father appears in this episode, the Nadine self-realization scene and the Hayward familiy drama scene. Am I forgetting a third one?

 

He's there in the final scene when Coop wakes up.

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Also, kudos for staying mostly on-schedule. There is another Twin Peaks podcast which shall remain nameless (yes, I have been listening to two - more actually, haha) that started several months before you guys...and still hasn't reached the final episode. The worst part is they managed to get most of the episodes out at least every couple weeks but after reviewing the second-to-last episode they went on indefinite hiatus - two months and counting, and still no coverage of the finale & FWWM (which is really the only reason I stuck with them for the second half of the series). Sheesh.

 

Anyway, I looked forward to downloading your podcast each week and you did not disappoint. Even though I didn't rewatch the series along with you, the week-by-week discussion offered me a new perspective on a show I have binged on pretty much every viewing.

 

Great work, and I look forward to catching some more of your podcasts in the future. I am not a gamer but the Mad Men one at least looks promising. I plan on finally watching the series soon and when I get to the last season I will definitely be downloading your episodes.

Oh, I know the podcast you speak of, and it is very frustrating.

I'd like to challenge the notion that this finale "burned it to the ground" or was even seen as a finale. The idea of creator control on how a series ends was completely foreign in 1991. IMHO, they were fighting for a 3rd season (Lynch appeared on Letterman to drum up interest) and this was the type of cliffhanger that could force it.

I also don't read the red room as a lodge. I believe it is a waiting area or connective tissue between the lodges as some evidence seems to imply. And my interpretation of what happens to coop in the red room stems from two quotes:

 

Major Briggs (episode 17): "There are powerful forces of evil in the world. It is some men's fate to face great darkness. We each choose how to react. If the choice is

fear, then we become vulnerable to darkness. There are ways to resist. You, sir, were blessed with certain gifts. In this respect, you are not alone. Have you ever heard of the

White Lodge?"

Hawk (episode 18): "But it is said, if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul."

 

Cooper's imperfect courage stems from his relationship to women. He goes in to rescue Annie and everything is basically going OK until he shows fear at the site of Caroline/Annie. All the failures with Caroline (please read The Autobiography of Dale Cooper for more) come roaring back and he divides into polarized halves or doppelgängers. There actually is a direct quote from Lynch on all this:

http://www.amazon.com/Lynch-Revised-Chris-Rodley/dp/0571220185/ 

Interviewer: So, was Cooper occupied by Bob in the script before you changed it?

Lynch: No, but Coop wasn't occupied by Bob. Part of him was. There are two Coops in there, and the one that came out was, you know, with Bob.

 

More on that good Cooper in FWWM...

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Will Audrey appear in season 3? Sherilyn Fenn indicates that she will. That doesn't necessarily mean that Audrery survives the bank explosion. After all Leland and Laura Palmer appeared in the last episode and there we dead.

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I'd like to challenge the notion that this finale "burned it to the ground" or was even seen as a finale. The idea of creator control on how a series ends was completely foreign in 1991. IMHO, they were fighting for a 3rd season (Lynch appeared on Letterman to drum up interest) and this was the type of cliffhanger that could force it.

 

I think this is fair to a point but I also think the writing was on the wall and they kind of knew it. The big fight was to get the final 6 episodes aired. Obviously they hoped to use this as a springboard into a new season, but given the abysmal ratings and ABC's indifference at this point could they really have had much faith in that remote possibility? The writers were scripting a season-ending cliffhanger rather than a series finale, to be sure, but I think both Peyton and Engels have said (in the Secrets From Another Place documentary) that they were not expecting a renewal from the network.

 

Lynch is harder for me to read. You bring up the Lynch on Lynch quote, and obviously returning for this episode initiated an excitement which led to Fire Walk With Me (originally including many hints that TP would continue in film sequels, if not television) so it's probably safe to say Lynch was not consciously approaching this as a farewell to the world he'd helped invent. And yet...considering how much Lynch draws on his subconscious intuitions, and given how obvious it was at this point that the show was not going to continue, it seems like he was directing with one eye on the idea that "this was it."

 

Certainly much of the episode plays that way, and many of the changes he made (bringing back tons of forgotten characters, repeating Heidi's dialogue verbatim, giving Bobby & Shelly closure) don't really seem necessary for a season finale but make a ton of sense when concluding a series. In the book The Passion of David Lynch, Catherine Coulson claims that much of the cast was resentful about being written out of the final piece of Twin Peaks and that Lynch's inclusion of them was in part a gesture toward giving these actors a curtain call, so to speak. Even the fact that Lynch himself returned after such a long absence, when he hadn't directed the previous season finale, suggests that in his gut he was envisioning this as a conclusion, at least to the televised portion of Twin Peaks.

 

Also, I don't think Lynch approached the finale with a long game in mind - seeding a season 3 - because that doesn't seem to be how he works. He's a filmmaker but not a showrunner which is probably the biggest difference between him and Frost. I would be inclined to credit Frost for pretty much all of the plot development on the series (including most of season one) because while Lynch is way underrated as a screenwriter, the nuts-and-bolts of extended arcs and story beats are too alien to how he works. Taking a wide view of the series, it becomes apparent that Lynch mostly absented himself from both long-term planning and day-to-day management, roles which Frost eagerly assumed.

 

I honestly don't think Lynch really knew what he was biting off when he committed himself to a TV series, and that it was more than he was willing to chew. The evidence is anecdotal and fragmented, but suggestive: the fact that he mostly absented himself from season one to direct a feature film (which he has later misremembered as being shot during season two), that the decision was made to reveal the killer despite his objections (blamed on ABC although Frost was still stating this was necessary a few years after the show was cancelled), Lynch's disengagement during the show's second half despite having no real excuses for the distraction (a Japanese art show and a book about spark plugs, NOT Wild at Heart, were apparently the projects that kept him from keeping Twin Peaks on track).

 

Lynch is not much of a planner, and it seems like he thought he could execute a series the way he executes his films (supposedly part of the dispute with Showtime was Lynch's desire to shoot the new series "like a film"): following a muse without necessarily knowing the endpoint, incorporating new ideas as they strike him, gathering loads of material - much more than are needed - and crafting the shape afterwards, and perhaps most of all the cinematic tenet of sticking to a core central theme/image/concept, in this case the mystery of Laura Palmer. This created something of a power vacuum in the partnership and I think Frost quickly filled it (except when Lynch actually directed an episode).

 

Likewise I think Lynch stepped in to direct the finale without a desire to either "burn it to the ground" or set up effective cliffhangers for season 3. Instead, he was probably doing something he had never had to do before: taking something that no longer seemed to belong to him, and making it his once again.

 

I also don't read the red room as a lodge. I believe it is a waiting area or connective tissue between the lodges as some evidence seems to imply. And my interpretation of what happens to coop in the red room stems from two quotes:

 

Major Briggs (episode 17): "There are powerful forces of evil in the world. It is some men's fate to face great darkness. We each choose how to react. If the choice is

fear, then we become vulnerable to darkness. There are ways to resist. You, sir, were blessed with certain gifts. In this respect, you are not alone. Have you ever heard of the

White Lodge?"

 

The first part of this exchange, which was scripted but cut from the episode, also seems to tie in really well to the final episode. Maj. Briggs talks about fear and love being opposites (setting up the idea that maybe the two Lodges correspond with these states of mind - confirmed later in the season when Briggs says "fear and love open the doors"). And Cooper name-drops Leland, asking if his failure to love himself opened him to Bob.

 

Hawk (episode 18): "But it is said, if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul."

 

Cooper's imperfect courage stems from his relationship to women. He goes in to rescue Annie and everything is basically going OK until he shows fear at the site of Caroline/Annie. All the failures with Caroline (please read The Autobiography of Dale Cooper for more) come roaring back and he divides into polarized halves or doppelgängers.

 

Yeah, I agree. What's amazing about Lynch's work in the finale is how well it actually dovetails with the Frost-guided and (mostly) Peyton/Engels-executed developments of the show's second half, for example the Theosophy-influenced polarities of the mythos, and Cooper's complex backstory. This despite the fact that he apparently had little to nothing to do with these developments, and may in some cases have been unaware of them (his own daughter believes he never read the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer that he commissioned her to write, so I have to imagine he completely ignored the Autobiography written by Frost's brother!). Yet his intuitive improvisations do a better job of following through on all these seeds than what was initially scripted. Go figure.

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So much fun to see you pop up in all the TP stuff online Joel  :clap:

Yea, I'm more referring to the other writers angling for a season three than Lynch. I agree Lynch is "making it his" again which is why I find it sad when people just dismiss the second season and say the show was just a miniseries flash in the pan. Joel has gone to great lengths to report on how meteoric the rise in popularity of this show was only to see it tumble in the matter of months. Those same people probably think this season 3 is just another reboot akin to Full House. When in actuality, it's something fans desperately wanted but never thought they'd see. I believe it was Keith Phipps at The Dissolve who championed the character of Cooper as (and I'm paraphrasing) the epitome of human decency and to see him cut down at the end is just so brutal. I believe Frost and Lynch had different takes on how fallible Cooper should be (that might be in Brad Dukes book?) And to not see his redemption in FWWM makes it even tougher. 

 

Joel's video on the theology Frost and Lynch are drawn to is amazing. That arthurian stuff in the script feels very much like a Frost addition.

 

Dale Cooper's autobiography written by Mark's brother is really underrated compared to the attention Laura's secret diary gets.

 

One thing to think about. As the host said, these two episodes aired as a Saturday night movie in June. Can you imaging someone randomly tuning over to the last 20 minutes?

Sherilyn is definitely in season three, I'd bet money on it. I think Heather Graham is pretty close to confirmed as well

 

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So much fun to see you pop up in all the TP stuff online Joel

 

Are you on dugpa too? (For some reason I thought our previous interactions were just on these boards - they are blurring together to me!) I know, I need a methadone clinic lol...

 

One thing to think about. As the host said, these two episodes aired as a Saturday night movie in June. Can you imaging someone randomly tuning over to the last 20 minutes?

 

Yeah, I think about that often - what a weird juxtaposition! Or also, imagine somebody flipping through the channels during a commercial break from a Northern Exposure rerun. Hmm, what's the Monday Movie-of-the-Week on ABC? And stumbling across this. Still amazes me that a piece of avant-garde cinema on par with Jean Cocteau and Maya Deren aired in that venue at that time. Wow Bob wow!

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I feel like the less I know about the Black Lodge, the Red Room, etc  the better. There may very well be lore answers to these questions, but I'd rather not see them. To me, the power of the world BOB came from and that Twin Peaks is closely attached to is that is unknowable in many ways. If it just exists as a series of weird things, that's fine by me. 

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Great episode, guys. One of the things I've loved about this podcast is your ability to pinpoint and describe the effect of the show's weird decisions - both with and without Lynch, how it actually feels to watch it as it unfolds and what elements make it feel that way. Really looking forward to your coverage of FWWM.

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I believe it was Keith Phipps at The Dissolve who championed the character of Cooper as (and I'm paraphrasing) the epitome of human decency and to see him cut down at the end is just so brutal.

It really is. That crazy, mocking laughter from someone we've known as having worked to be especially caring and considerate is really rough. It works great, emotionally, but I'm really looking forward to (hopefully) a more positive resolution for such a fundamentally good and likable character.

 

 

I've just now listened to the episode and I have one dumb comment: I didn't interpret the contact lenses as giving them blue eyes, but dead eyes. They looked quite cloudy to me. My perception might be colored by Hannibal, which uses similar lenses to distinguish corpses, especially those exposed to the elements. (Like Laura? That seems a stretch...)

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Anyone who has ever watched a soap opera knew throughout Season 2 that the only possible direction for the Nadine plot was that once everyone's relationships were firmly re-arranged in response to her amnesia, she would get her memory back, throwing everyone into turmoil again.

 

I think that at an unconscious level, Nadine knows what's up, knows Ed doesn't really love her, and when her suicide attempt fails, she chooses this crazy attempt to escape back into the past.  I think her silly super-strength is a metaphor for the intensity of her denial, like a person trying SO HARD TO BE HAPPY AND SMILE ALL THE TIME AND NO THERE IS NOTHING WRONG I'M ABSOLUTELY FINE AND WE ARE VERY MUCH IN LOVE THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

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Hi everyone, this is my first post on these forums. I first watched Twin Peaks in it's entirety 15 years ago. I must've watched it a dozen or more times over the years, though there are many episodes that I often skip in part or in full. I've been listening to the podcast since the start and it's been great throughout.

 

This episode is my favorite of the series with only episode 14 (Maddy's death) coming close. I think it's one of the best things Lynch has ever done, as well as one of the scariest and most disturbing things I've ever seen on screen.

 

I'm just going to list the things that strike me about the episode, including ideas I've picked up from the web over the years, as well as some reactions to points raised in the podcast.

  • When Earle and Annie are approaching the entrance to the Lodge and Earle shines the torch in both his and Annie's faces, their eyes momentarily look a lot like the doppelganger eyes.
  • The circle of sycammore trees with the pool of oil in the middle is such a striking, unnatural image. The residue of white powder around the edge of the pool suggests something toxic and unhealthy.
  • I re-watched Cooper's entrance to the Lodge and couldn't find the part Chris talked about with our view of the Lodge momentarily becoming desaturated. Does anyone know what he was talking about?
  • Ben Horne is definitely unconscious on the ground with a severe head injury after hitting his head on the fireplace.
  • The Sycammore Trees song has such an air of finality to it. It really seems to be there to prepare Cooper (and us) for the final stage of his journey, perhaps even his "death", depending on your interpretation of what happens to him in the Lodge.
  • The strobe light set up during the song, with alternate sides of Coopers face being illuminated, is excellent. I'm assuming this was quite difficult to position and time correctly. It also provides a nice visual foreshadowing of the doppelgangers and Coopers doppelganger in particular.
  • The music that plays underneath the entire Lodge sequence is probably the most unsettling and eerie music I've ever heard.
  • The Giant's "One and the same" line can be interpreted in two ways. One, that the Giant and the old waiter are the same. Two, that the Giant, the waiter and the Little Man are one and the same. The fact that the Giant and the Little Man have almost exactly the same pose at this moment heavilly suggests to me that the second interpretation is intended.
  • I don't see any connection between the Giant's eyes and the doppelganger eyes. In fact, the Giant's eyes look completely normal to me, in this episode anyway.
  • Maddy wears the exact same dress as Laura does in ine Lodge. I couldn't really tell from my copy whether the Maddy we see has the white doppelganger eyes or not. Could anyone who has the bluray confirm?
  • The Little Man's doppelganger is interesting to me. I don't really like the idea of the native lodge spirits having doppelgangers, they seem to me to be more elemental than that. I prefer to think that the Little Man's doppelganger is there simply to demonstrate the concept to Cooper (and to us as well).
  • Doppel-Laura screaming into the camera is the first of several fourth wall breaks in the episode. As she moves up to the camera we're presumably seeing Cooper's point of view, but after Cooper runs away we return to the original POV and Doppel-Laura is still there, screaming. These 4th wall breaks greatly reduce the distance between what's happening and the audience, making them far more terrifying and unsettling. Certainly for me at least.
  • Cooper discovers he's injured immediately after running away from D-Laura (and the momentary flash of Earle we see). Seems that that was the moment of weakness (or perhaps one of the moments) that condems him.
  • The Cooper-Annie-D-Caroline seems to present Caroline as in some sense Annie's doppelganger, or perhaps vice-a-versa. Or it might be a representation of Cooper's confusion about his feelings towards the two women.
  • Earle's clothing in this whole episode is exactly the same as Cooper's, just dirtied up and shabby. Presenting another version of an inverted double of Cooper.
  • Cooper seems to act with complete selflessness when offering his soul to Earle in exchange for Annie's life. Either allowing BOB to destroy Earle, or leaving when BOB tells him to, or maybe both, seems to be the act that promps Doppel-Cooper to appear. Or the acts may not be causally related to D-Cooper's appearance, who knows?
  • With D-Coop's appearance we also get the next 4th wall break as he cackles madly into the camera.
  • D-Leland's statement that he didn't kill anybody is interesting. Is he telling the truth? If he is, does that imply some level of culpability on Real-Leland for his actions? I don't really know. Also interesting is that D-Leland has some traces of white in his hair (presumably the last traces of Ray Wise's hair from when he was last on the show, but still interesting).
  • This might be my favorite shot from the episode:
    post-35260-0-66535700-1432382229_thumb.jpg
    So unnerving, and so suggestive of what Cooper's fears about himself are.
  • The next, and most explicit, 4th wall break. Also the scariest, IMO.
    post-35260-0-93264400-1432382431_thumb.jpg
  • We get another 4th wall break as D-Coop is chasing Coop, where D-Coop runs up to the camera and momentarily stares into it with a crazy look on his face.
  • After D-Coop catches Coop we get the last 4th wall break as BOB laughs into the camera.

Well, that was a bit longer than I initially intended.

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D-Leland's statement that he didn't kill anybody is interesting. Is he telling the truth? If he is, does that imply some level of culpability on Real-Leland for his actions? I don't really know. Also interesting is that D-Leland has some traces of white in his hair (presumably the last traces of Ray Wise's hair from when he was last on the show, but still interesting).

 

Have you seen Fire Walk With Me? I do feel like that supports the response about it being real Leland that's culpable. I think DoppeLeland's delight with the line does reinforce it too.

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Have you seen Fire Walk With Me? I do feel like that supports the response about it being real Leland that's culpable. I think DoppeLeland's delight with the line does reinforce it too.

 

Yeah I've seen FWWM, and I agree that it supports Real-Lelands culpability. Of course that opens the question of "what is a doppelganger?". If real Leland is being held culpable, to the extent that Doppel-Leland isn't, then what exactly is Doppel-Leland? Because it doesn't seem like a clean good/evil split, at least in Leland's case.

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  • The Giant's "One and the same" line can be interpreted in two ways. One, that the Giant and the old waiter are the same. Two, that the Giant, the waiter and the Little Man are one and the same. The fact that the Giant and the Little Man have almost exactly the same pose at this moment heavilly suggests to me that the second interpretation is intended.

 

I'm not sure what's intended, but I love this idea. Especially as I tend to see Mike and Bob as the two fundamental forces in conflict

(given that FWWM folds Mike and the Little Man together).

Although that still kind of leaves the Tremonds unaccounted for.

 

  • Maddy wears the exact same dress as Laura does in ine Lodge. I couldn't really tell from my copy whether the Maddy we see has the white doppelganger eyes or not. Could anyone who has the bluray confirm?

 

She does seem to have doppelganger eyes. I've also seen a photo in which she has them (although of course this could theoretically be from another shot that was cut - but fwiw I don't think I've seen any photos of her as Maddy without the lenses).

 

I wonder if this was partly Lynch's subconscious acknowledging that Maddy was most important to him as Laura's real-world doppelganger rather than an individual character who happened to look like Laura. It's worth noting that he was not involved with the episodes in which Maddy is customed to look really different from Laura and that when he directed Sheryl Lee as Maddy for the first time (in the season 2 premiere) he had hair straightened and made a point of her breaking her glasses and declaring she'd never wear them again. He seems to have wanted to de-emphasize her distinction from Laura. He also cut a scene from the following episode in which she talks with Leland and gives more of a sense of her background as a distinct character (revealing that her father has recently died; Leland also invites her to stay with the Palmers indefinitely which would have been a good set-up for episode 14). On the other hand, of course Maddy can't simply be Laura's doppelganger in the Lodge because we also see doppelganger-Laura.

 

I agree that although the doppelgangers are all really creepy, suggesting that they represent the "evil" side, something a bit more complicated seems to be going on with the way they are used.

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I'm not sure what's intended, but I love this idea. Especially as I tend to see Mike and Bob as the two fundamental forces in conflict

(given that FWWM folds Mike and the Little Man together).

Although that still kind of leaves the Tremonds unaccounted for.

 

Yeah, perhaps "intended" is wrong, maybe "heavily suggested"? It's really their identical poses as the Giant says the line that does it for me. As far as the nature of the Tremonds, I'm not really sure that all the forces of the Lodge need to work by the same rules, or fit into a neat taxonomy. It's part of the reason I don't like the idea of the Little Man having a doppelganger.

 

She does seem to have doppelganger eyes. I've also seen a photo in which she has them (although of course this could theoretically be from another shot that was cut - but fwiw I don't think I've seen any photos of her as Maddy without the lenses).

 

I wonder if this was partly Lynch's subconscious acknowledging that Maddy was most important to him as Laura's real-world doppelganger rather than an individual character who happened to look like Laura. It's worth noting that he was not involved with the episodes in which Maddy is customed to look really different from Laura and that when he directed Sheryl Lee as Maddy for the first time (in the season 2 premiere) he had hair straightened and made a point of her breaking her glasses and declaring she'd never wear them again. He seems to have wanted to de-emphasize her distinction from Laura. He also cut a scene from the following episode in which she talks with Leland and gives more of a sense of her background as a distinct character (revealing that her father has recently died; Leland also invites her to stay with the Palmers indefinitely which would have been a good set-up for episode 14). On the other hand, of course Maddy can't simply be Laura's doppelganger in the Lodge because we also see doppelganger-Laura.

 

I agree that although the doppelgangers are all really creepy, suggesting that they represent the "evil" side, something a bit more complicated seems to be going on with the way they are used.

 

I've seen those photos of Maddy as well. It's interesting that there are two human characters who we only see their doppelgangers of, those being Maddy (assuming she is in fact a doppelganger) and Caroline. It seems to me that, in some sense, and perhaps only from Cooper's point of view, Maddy is Laura's doppelganger, and Caroline is Annie's.

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The Sycammore Trees song has such an air of finality to it. It really seems to be there to prepare Cooper (and us) for the final stage of his journey, perhaps even his "death", depending on your interpretation of what happens to him in the Lodge.[..]The strobe light set up during the song, with alternate sides of Coopers face being illuminated, is excellent. It also provides a nice visual foreshadowing of the doppelgangers and Coopers doppelganger in particular.

Yeah, I thought that whole initial introduction to the Lodge set the mood perfectly. It helps the viewer transition from the concrete feel of the "real world" plot and into the dreamy weirdness of the Lodge/waiting room/whatever.

 

When Earle and Annie are approaching the entrance to the Lodge and Earle shines the torch in both his and Annie's faces, their eyes momentarily look a lot like the doppelganger eyes.

Neat observation! You also reminded me about the moment Annie sits up like some bloody, creepy doll from the floor next to Cooper. That really freaked me out and almost justified casting Heather Graham.

 

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My impression of Cooper's entrance also had him being desaturated in a couple places, so I knew exactly what Chris meant. But on review, it seems those moments are the main light fading out, leaving only strobe lights to illuminate his face. During the close ups when he's staring at the singer, the transition from orange light to only strobe lights happens a few times.

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[*]D-Leland's statement that he didn't kill anybody is interesting. Is he telling the truth? If he is, does that imply some level of culpability on Real-Leland for his actions? I don't really know. Also interesting is that D-Leland has some traces of white in his hair (presumably the last traces of Ray Wise's hair from when he was last on the show, but still interesting).

I read D-Leland's line as a way of establishing to the audience that doppelgängers are entirely separate from their real world counterparts. Bob occupied Leland, not D-Leland who's been chilling out in the Red Room with freaky eyes. Therefore D-Cooper (or D-Dale) at the end is established as a separate being from real Dale, who remains trapped in the Lodge.

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Hey! So I've been listening along all the way through (and enjoying it a lot, thanks guys!), and just wanted to jump in and say how legitimately freaky I find the 25 years later thing on an existential level. It doesn't really matter to me what Lynch was thinking at the time, or even if he's had it in mind over the past 20 years and he's been trying to orchestrate the comeback to occur in 2016. Even if you just look at it from the perspective of: now is a great time for Twin Peaks to come back because there's a growing interest in it because of deeper cultural interest in weird things, and tumblr gifs, and communities being able to be built around cult media through the internet, and Netflix, and... I mean. It's crazy, right?

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Good call. When she said the '25 years' line my wife and I jumped up and looked at each other with massive grins. Completely unexpected. Regardless of what it meant/means, it was a great moment.

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Got kind of behind with the podcast for various boring reasons, but I finally got caught up.
 
Jake - my wife and I recently played the Puzzle Agent games. Any chance you could talk about the influence of Twin Peaks on the writing for that game in one of the Q&A podcast episodes?
 
When this podcast started I made a proclamation that I thought Season 2 was actually better, and I was struct by how much stuff happened in the final episode that I had mistakenly thought was parsed out at earlier points in the season. I guess I just really like the final episode!
 
This is kind of an aside, but I love the bank explosion. The glasses on the tree and the money raining down is just such a funny visual image to me. I like that Lynch is more interested in seeking out novel visual expressions than in narrative cohesiveness. I'm a big fan of that Werner Herzog quote about how, "We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones." David Lynch's work is an important antidote in that sense (and I love the movie My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? that both directors collaborated on, you get both their eccentricities bundled up in one film).
 
I think my interpretation of the black lodge/red room sequence of events is somewhat against the grain. I agree with Chris' comment early in the podcast that David Lynch's approach to the story is almost sort of anti-lore. When Cooper enters the Black Lodge, he enters a space that is divine/mad, and therefore beyond the limits of human comprehension, and the way events play out involve images that are rich with symbols, but they are symbols that resist interpretation, and therefore it is really difficult to talk about what actually is happening! But here are a couple of stray observations:

 

-Jake points out that there is a reveal that the waiter and the giant are one and the same. There's even a line of dialog saying as such! I haven't seen the actual script, which perhaps makes this point more explicitly, but I think it is worth appreciating that in the presentation in the show the situation is slightly ambiguous. At one point you see the waiter, and then it cuts to the cup of coffee, and then there is the giant standing by the dwarf. Does the line about being one and the same refer to the giant and the waiter, or does it refer to the giant and the dwarf? Is it all 3? Does it even matter? This sort of playfulness repeatedly happens with most of the characters in the red room/black lodge.

 

-A lot of people get hung up on the doppleganger thing, but I'm not even sure if that's a real thing. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but when the doppleganger for Cooper appears, you have one Cooper run off into the hallway, and then the other Cooper follows him, and neither of them have the clouded eyes that we see with the other dopplegangers. To me that's Lynch's way of signaling to the audience to not read too much into this stuff.

 

-I think there is also probably a pretty good psychoanalytic interpretation you could make with the shifting characters/dopplegangers being a sort of reflection of the way desire shifts from one object to the next. That's kind of above my pay grade in terms of trying to lay it out, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it is there to make.

 

Consequently I don't see the ending as Cooper being possessed by Bob, or that a doppleganger emerged and the "real" Cooper is still trapped in the Lodge. I see it as Cooper has this experience where this world of duality like good and evil that grounds his character is confronted by a more confusing reality where that duality appears to not exist because two objects and people can be one and the same, and this experience shatters him.

 

On the other hand, Jake seemed to hint at some stuff from Fire Walk With Me fleshing out the doppleganger concept more, and I don't have any recollection of that, so I look forward to reevaluating all of this stuff!

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Oh, one other final stray observation. I find it super interesting the way Bob's lines are delivered. Most people seem to be speaking backwards, but there are a couple of speaking lines without that effect. Bob's delivery sounds almost as if it is somewhere in between the two. No idea if that's intentional or not!

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