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Twin Peaks Rewatch 33: Odds & Ends

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Twin Peaks Rewatch 33:

 

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Odds & Ends

It's the last episode of Twin Peaks Rewatch...for now! As we await Season 3 of Twin Peaks, we're capping off our rewatch of the original run and film by digging through the listener mailbag for observations and questions that take into account everything we've seen so far. Plus, we touch on some of the official and unofficial cultural artifacts inspired by Twin Peaks in the decades since it aired. Check out the list below for details.

Supplemental Material:

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Thanks guys for the podcast, it was way more interesting than the show near the end there and actually made me finish it this time. This weird fringe stuff surrounding pieces of media is also always fascinating to me too.

 

Oh and someone asked weeks ago about my Wario Land 3 e-mail, and since it didn't get read I will post it here:

I have been playing Wario Land 3 on Gameboy recently and I have noticed that the world map music sounds very similar to the Twin Peaks theme song.


 
I can't find anything on this in particular except another Youtube comment for the video saying the same thing a few of years back.
 

I think it's very possible that this song was intentionally a homage to the theme song.

To connect Wario Land 3 to Link's Awakening, the music composer for the Wario Land 3 is Kozue Ishikawa, who also did composition for Link's Awakening. I am not sure why a Twin Peaks homage would fit within Wario Land 3 though because the only thing different about it compared to other Wario games is that Wario is sucked inside a music box. Maybe I need to finish Season 2 to understand characters getting sucked into music boxes?

 

At the end there, I suppose Wario could have been sucked into a door knob.

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I never thought about Laura standing and screaming in the Pink Room as an echo of the Red Room in the finale. I really like that connection and it makes her earlier motion (where she snaps her fingers down) make more sense as a callback to me - whereas before it just seemed kind of arbitrary. It's as if in the Red Room, she (or her doppelganger anyway) is trying to communicate her dark experiences to Cooper but he can only process her as is terrifying, inexplicable banshee. One of Cooper's problems seems to be fully understanding the trauma of the people he is trying to help (Caroline is an earlier example of this) so these parallel actions actually makes sense, in a Lynchian way.

 

This also makes me think  differently about the "Let's Rock" scrawl on Desmond's car. What if, rather than the graffiti being a callback to the dream, the dream is actually the callback to the graffiti? Bear with me here, and recall that FWWM is after all a prequel so Cooper is seeing this before he has a Red Room dream. Lynch has made various comments suggesting that the Red Room reflects the subconscious of whoever enters into it so perhaps in Cooper's dream, faced with an eerie, inexplicable situation that echoed his colleague's disappearance a year earlier, "Let's Rock" came to mind? This is obviously similar to how actual dreams work, and it also seems to be how the Lodge creatures like to communicate with humans, using objects and motifs familiar to them (like rings and creamed corn).

 

As for the angels, I think Cooper "is Laura's angel" in the same sense that Laura is Ronette's angel (as discussed in last week's email): in both cases, I'd argue, the angels appear because one character cares about another and wants to help them. I think the angels are similar to the Lodge creatures that way, summoned by the subconscious desires of the characters - but in the angels' case characters can only manifest them for others, not for themselves. That's my read, anyway, on an extremely ambiguous presentation.

 

Glad to hear you'll be covering True Detective. Will you have a spoiler section on your season 1 rewatch for listeners who haven't watched season 2 yet? If so, it will be interesting to finally be in that category myself. :)

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Glad to hear you'll be covering True Detective. Will you have a spoiler section on your season 1 rewatch for listeners who haven't watched season 2 yet? If so, it will be interesting to finally be in that category myself. :)

Good question! My hope is that, based on how this show is structured—a new story each season—that spoilers of those kinds will be irrelevant.

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Good question! My hope is that, based on how this show is structured—a new story each season—that spoilers of those kinds will be irrelevant.

 

Given how

many threads were left dangling in season 1, I'm hoping they won't be! ;) But I suspect you're right and season 2 will just be a complete standalone series. Which, for the most part, I'm fine with...I'd just like there to be some subtle underlying links between the different entries in the anthology. I think that would be a cool angle to pursue, and would make the Yellow King stuff feel less like a non sequitur to me.

 

Either way, I look forward to hearing you guys' perspective on the show. I recently watched season one and was overall very impressed despite some frustrations.

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Given how

many threads were left dangling in season 1, I'm hoping they won't be! ;) But I suspect you're right and season 2 will just be a complete standalone series. Which, for the most part, I'm fine with...I'd just like there to be some subtle underlying links between the different entries in the anthology. I think that would be a cool angle to pursue, and would make the Yellow King stuff feel less like a non sequitur to me.

Either way, I look forward to hearing you guys' perspective on the show. I recently watched season one and was overall very impressed despite some frustrations.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the second season is set in a completely different location with different characters, since that was announced well before the first season ended. As much as I love the first season - despite its flaws, it really hits the perfect balance of mystery and occult horror that I love - I really hope the second season has nothing to do with that stuff. I'm sure this will get discussed on the cast, but there really aren't any major threads left to continue from the first season. Giving more information to the story will just dilute its effect. I have similar hopes for new Twin Peaks. They have to pick up the Cooper threads, but I hope that additional Black Lodge lore gets left behind. I'd even be happy if Laura Palmer wasn't a major character, but I guess we already know what happens when you take Laura Palmer out of Twin Peaks.

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I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the second season is set in a completely different location with different characters, since that was announced well before the first season ended. As much as I love the first season - despite its flaws, it really hits the perfect balance of mystery and occult horror that I love - I really hope the second season has nothing to do with that stuff. I'm sure this will get discussed on the cast, but there really aren't any major threads left to continue from the first season. Giving more information to the story will just dilute its effect. I have similar hopes for new Twin Peaks. They have to pick up the Cooper threads, but I hope that additional Black Lodge lore gets left behind. I'd even be happy if Laura Palmer wasn't a major character, but I guess we already know what happens when you take Laura Palmer out of Twin Peaks.

 

re: season 1 threads

 

I guess for me, it's just more that if that's all there was to the Yellow King stuff, I wish they had left it out of the first season altogether. The limited way it was used, I don't feel it really added much to the story they were telling and just comes off as a spooky but meaningless tease (perhaps that's the point but if so, eh). I wasn't looking for/expecting a supernatural twist, but it did seem like there was some sort of spiritual/mystical experience going on for the people involved and I would have liked to know more about what that felt like from the inside (the way that Lynch likes to plunge into subconscious sensations and almost emphasize them as MORE real than external physical reality). Rather than the outside perspective of "oh, this was just used to manipulate the masses" which seems to have been what Pizzolatto was going for. That's personal taste, I guess, and unfair to impose on the work but I wouldn't have if I hadn't initially thought it was gonna go in that direction. Maybe going back, knowing what to expect this time, I might feel differently.

 

I also didn't feel the mystery was just about who killed Dora Lange and when they ended up just honing in on that aspect by going after Errol, I assumed that the Tuttles or whatever cult/web of power they were involved with somehow play a role in future seasons (then I read interviews which suggested this would not be the case). I wasn't looking for a happy ending per se, just more of a sense of what went on even if everyone got away with it. I guess that was the purpose of that scene in ep. 7 when Cohle takes Hart into his storage shed. It was apparently meant to tie up all those other aspects, so they could move on to focus on the single killer, but I mistook it as the opening of a climax in which either all these threads would be addressed or left open for future seasons to pursue (with other main characters, of course). Again, maybe just my bad.

 

I also had some issues with the characterization, but ultimately that's not something that would be resolved by continuing with the character and location (their story is finished, for better or worse) so for the most part I'm looking forward to a whole new story.

 

It was interesting watching it closely after Twin Peaks because I felt many of the things it did right, Twin Peaks did wrong and many of the things it did wrong, Twin Peaks did right. They are interesting companions in that sense and I'm really psyched to see how this community feels about True Detective so hopefully there's a fair amount of overlap in the forum activity!

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I'd really like to have threads going through all of Lynch's work. We could go through his ouevre chronologically maybe on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule. I don't know if there's a lot of interest when it doesn't coincide with a scheduled podcast, but I'd be willing to do some leg work if people were interested in the idea. Thoughts!

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Wow, I feel like a fool for not knowing Jake and Sean worked on Puzzle Agent. I absolutely love that game. For my money, it captures the Twin Peaks vibe more than Deadly Premonition and Alan Wake.  

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I'm going to be really sad to see this go! Thanks guys for sticking with it for these past few months!

 

To talk more about the copy cat Twin Peaks shows, none of them seem to understand how to use the Pacific NW. Shows like The Killing and Wayward Pines, which are ostensibly set in Seattle/Idaho, but are so clearly shot on a studio lot somewhere. You don't need to spend a lot of time in the PNW to tell when a show is faked or not, and I think the faked shows really ruin the moody atmosphere that they're trying to ape from Twin Peaks. The only other show I can think of that did it right was the X-Files. Most of their shooting locations (at least for the first 5 seasons) were in the woods of Vancouver, and therefore they have a very Twin Peaks-feel. It wasn't an intentional rip-off, since The X-Files is not isolated to the PNW like Twin Peaks was, and that's probably way The X-Files largely succeeds as being a good successor to Twin Peaks. If you haven't, I really suggest going back and watching the pilot episode of The X-Files. It takes place in a small Oregon town, and has a lot of visual callbacks for Twin Peaks watchers.

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