Twin Peaks Rewatch 36: The Return, Part 2

[Jake]

Twin Peaks Rewatch 36:

The Return, Part 2
Is it future or is it past? Storylines converge, and events fold in on themselves as Twin Peaks' return concludes its second episode. What will happen to Cooper now that he's left the red room? What is his doppelganger's plan and what could it mean? Was that Jacques Renault in the Roadhouse? Has James always been cool? Join us for a deeper look at Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 2.

If you have a question for us or thoughts to share on the new season of Twin Peaks, write us at twinpeaks@idlethumbs.net.

Looking for a place to discuss the season with fellow viewers? We recommend the Twin Peaks Rewatch forum.

 

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Original thread:

 

 

Let's talk about the second part of tonight's two part premiere! (not counting the streaming-only episodes which make it a four part premiere... Twin Peaks can't not be numbered and released weirdly, it seems!)

 

We'll be releasing a podcast discussing this episode sometime in the middle of this week (probably Wednesday). So if you have thoughts on the complete premiere including episodes one and two, drop them here! 

 

It's okay to be spoilery in here btw, but please use spoiler tags for any content past episode 2!

 

As always, you can reach us at twinpeaks@idlethumbs.net too!

[Gattman]

Having just watched EPs 1 & 2

One thing I am curious about is

Where does Ep 1 end and Ep 2 begin?

[ihavefivehat]

just watched episode 4... and no spoilers but... what? there were some odd moments in that one. excited to hear chris and jake talk about it.

[utilityfrog]

(Speaking of eps 1 and 2 here, haven't seen further yet)

 

Well that was the weirdest thing I've seen since... Inland Empire, I guess. Everything pointed to the new series being something very different to the original show, and I'm glad it delivered on that. Scattered thoughts/observations below:

• KM is excellent as DoppelCoop. So is his wig. Seriously, I found it very convincing.
• DoppelCoop seems to be able to use his old tape recorder as an all-purpose, magical recording / surveillance device?
• Carel Struycken is credited not as "The Giant" but as "???????". Hmm.
• Number stuff. Both from The Giant and the new Arm (and note the contradiction between the number the Arm said and it's subtitle). I'm not sure how I feel about this. Hopefully the numbers end up meaning something.

Everything about the look and feel of the lodge seemed very different from how it looked/felt in the finale and FWWM. Some of this is inevitable I guess just from the passage of time, but I think some of the changes could  be deliberate as well. I'm just not sure which is which. Some of the changes I noticed:

• The curtains seemed much lighter and silkier than before, and I think the shade of red is different as well, richer.
• I don't think there was music in any of the lodge scenes.
• The floor seems really clean, and starkly black and white. In FWWM the white parts of the floor seemed almost cream/off-white.
• In general the lodge felt a whole lot less oppressive and dangerous to me, especially compared to the scenes in the finale.

[Mike Danger]

I haven't seen episodes 3/4 yet but I'm pretty sure the recorder that the doppelgänger has is not Cooper's old tape recorder. The old recorder had a ton of buttons on it wifh text labels that you see in close up shots all the time. The new recorder seems to be more of a nondescript box. I was assuming it came with whatever the thing he takes out of the (Blockbuster) black case is. 

 

Im typing this on my iPad shortly after waking up so my thoughts haven't really coalesced but I liked all of this a lot and I can't wait for next week. The match cut (I think that's what it's called?) in the opening credits from the waterfall to the curtains is Very Good. 

Edited May 22, 2017 by Mike Danger
Autocorrect

[Golden Calf]

what

 

the

 

fuck

 

is this television show

[Woodfella]

"James has has always been cool"

...

...😐

Fully on board with this. Loved how it wasn't a complete call back fest but enjoyed the little appearances of Andy, Lucy, Ben and Jerry.  Didn't really like the weird science experiment with the black mist from lost but.  A lot of the scenes from the black lodge were really good!

 

Seeing Catherine Coulson as Margaret was really sad, that was a really great bit between her and old man hawk. Anyone else start blubbing when he said "Goodnight Margaret" ?

 

Resisting the temptation to watch all 4 available immediately.

[osohista]

is 253 the new 0451?
the first immersive sim to have 0253 code in it should receive a hug from DoppleCoop in a motel bed

[purps]

I have a sneaking suspicion that the "James has has always been cool" line is Lynch or more likely Frost giving a little jab at the audience who hated that character. Like he really loved that character and was frustrated or disappointed that he had become sort of a joke among the fanbase.

[Scylo]

I hope James role throughout the show is to just be in the background, staring at people

[marginalgloss]

Right up until I was actually watching it, I had  a lot of doubts as to whether this was going to be any good. My concerns were that Lynch would either phone it in, or deliver something brutally impenetrable and irrelevant to the original. He never seemed particularly interested in where the second series ended up, so I half-expected this to be an entirely fresh start. But I think the first two episodes strike a fine balance between being a totally new David Lynch production, and being a sequel which maintains links to the lore of the original. There's no sense in which it tries to mimic the conventional TV drama mise-en-scene of the original - and I think I'm grateful for that.

 

Some thoughts - cut more for length than for spoilers, not that there's much to 'spoil' in these episodes -

 

 

'James has always been cool' is entirely indisputable. You may not like him: but he has always been 'cool'. And yeah, there was a pleasant sense of defiance to that line; in a sense, Twin Peaks was always about that sense of empty-eyed swagger that he personified.

I love the moment where Dr Jacoby steps out of his home and lifts his clip-on shades to reveal the coloured lenses beneath. It's so good - the perfect 'we're back!' moment - and it's even better because the sequence that follows (him receiving a delivery of shovels?) is probably the most inexplicable thing in the first two episodes. 

Lucy's insistent question to the insurance guy who asks for Sheriff Truman - '…which one?' - isn't really explained, but the suggestion that there's two of them about somewhere is a neat parallel to the good/bad Cooper thing. Presumably there's a Truman Jr now? I know Michael Ontkean didn't want to be part of this season so I'll be curious to see how that is addressed.

I really didn't expect to see Ben and Jerry back again, doing their thing. Jerry has the most incredible beard and is growing hydroponic weed and is apparently a million years old. I love it.

I really liked the way that technology is depicted throughout. I love the strange sequence where Bad Coop is accessing the FBI database on a tablet - typing gibberish into a user interface (glitching wildly for no apparent reason) is straight out of a late 90s crime show. And then there's his weird tape recorder gadget which seems to do other things as well, and the black speakerphone thing through which he talks to Philip Jeffries (!!!) - none of it seems to bear any serious relation to a technological reality. It's refreshing.

As soon as the words 'NEW YORK CITY' appeared on screen, with that sultry skyscraper fly-by, I wanted to shriek. Twin Peaks never went anywhere other than Twin Peaks - and sometimes Canada, I suppose - but now we're suddenly hopping between NYC, Vegas and Montana. I don't know how I feel about this yet.

But for me, all the stuff in New York was by far the most compelling part of the first two episodes. The situation of the man sitting alone watching an empty glass chamber seems quintessentially late-period Lynch. It's very similar to that sequence in the diner in Mulholland Drive ('…there's a man, in the back of this place…'). You know that something strange and awful is going to happen - and so does the young man - but the escalation is deeply unconventional, and when the awful thing happens it's so different to what you could have imagined that it's somehow shocking and absurd at the same time.

It's all very deliberate, and very staged. You feel like Lynch is trying to explain something to the audience, but you aren't entirely sure what it is. It's an artful deconstruction of the old movie trope where bad things happen to young amorous couples. It's a metaphor for the way that media works on the psychosexual imagination - what else are we all doing but sitting silently in our rooms, staring at our own glass dream-boxes? It's a version of that analogy which Stephen King (I think) once used to explain the difference between horror writers who seek to explain every nuance of a monstrous apparition, and those who - like H.P. Lovecraft - keep a door closed between the thing and the reader. Lynch here is inviting us to stare at the door - and nothing will happen while you're looking at the door - but when you dare to turn your attention aside for a moment... 

The face on that thing.

 

 

[Alex P]

Shelly: James was in a motorcycle accident.

Shelly's Friend: So was that before Season 1 or...because that would explain a lot actually.

[purps]

Quote

Lucy's insistent question to the insurance guy who asks for Sheriff Truman - '…which one?' - isn't really explained, but the suggestion that there's two of them about somewhere is a neat parallel to the good/bad Cooper thing. Presumably there's a Truman Jr now? I know Michael Ontkean didn't want to be part of this season so I'll be curious to see how that is addressed.
 

This is actually set up in the Secret History book. I'll put it in spoilers if you would rather just see it introduced in the show, but it's a pretty benign thing.

Spoiler

Truman has a brother. The two of them were both Deputies until the old Sheriff retired. Harry became the new Sheriff and his brother moved out to Seattle to become a cop there.  

 

 

 

Speaking of the book, am I the only one who noticed the parallels between the stuff with the glass box and the sequence in the book where Milford and Nixon visit Area 51?

Unless I am misremembering, there also was a glass box with what they say is an alien related to the Roswell incident inside. The final part of the book pretty much says that all these things the government thought were aliens/ufos are actually things from the black lodge. I'm curious how much stuff from the book actually ends up being a part of the show.

[Salacious Snake]

It's so slow.

[Argobot]

We else noticed Jacques Renault in the background at the Bang Bang Bar and got super confused?

[Salacious Snake]

I thought that was him, too!

[Ash_NR]

16 minutes ago, Argobot said:

We else noticed Jacques Renault in the background at the Bang Bang Bar and got super confused?

My partner and I were like, "is that Jacque??"

Oh boy did I scoff when Shelley said that about James. Why does she even an opinion about him? Kid below her in high school.... Oh no Lynch, you can't convince me that he's cool.

[Tirranek]

Ever tried tequila with a worm in it? It feels like if TV is the tequila, and 90s Peaks was the worm first being dropped in, then we're now taking out and eating the worm after 25 years of it suffusing and soaking at the bottom of the bottle. 

[KLind]

1 hour ago, Argobot said:

We else noticed Jacques Renault in the background at the Bang Bang Bar and got super confused?

Noticed that too. He's credited as Jean-Michel Renault though, so I assume they just have a never ending network of expendable brothers.

[Vegas]

2 hours ago, Argobot said:

We else noticed Jacques Renault in the background at the Bang Bang Bar and got super confused?

 

YES. I figured it was Lynch just giving him a part for old times' sake, and I was so stoked.

 

It's hard to know what to say about this ep. All the stuff I want to talk about was in 3 and 4.

 

Kyle McLaughlin's range in this show is kind of incredible. That scene with Doppleganger Cooper and Darya was awesome. It gave me goosebumps like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

 

And then PHILLIP JEFFRIES? 

Spoiler

That stuff comes back just a bit in episode 4, but

just hearing his name in the show made me happy that they didn't abandon that character despite the death of David Bowie (rest in peace). I heard David Lynch said Fire Walk With Me was crucial for understanding this show, but in a lot of ways it kind of feels like it was, retroactively, the beginning of this new thing that Twin Peaks is.

 

One more thing: the fact that they wrote one script, shot it all, and then figured out the episodes in editing is SO apparent. Not that that's a bad thing, but it really feels like the longest movie David Lynch has ever made. There is no formula here. Genre be damned. It makes for weird viewing because Twin Peaks was so much of a mash-up of a police procedural murder mystery, a soap opera, and even a sitcom at times. A lot of the flavor of the show came from the conscious interplay of those elements. I know some people will be disappointed, but I feel about that the way that I did about FWWM: it feels purer. This show is no less quirky or funny (and it can be fucking hilarious) than it was when it was a lot more formulaic.

[lethalenforcer]

1 hour ago, Argobot said:

We else noticed Jacques Renault in the background at the Bang Bang Bar and got super confused?

 

Leading up to the series I was getting increasingly worried that the new story would be about multiple timelines and somebody needing to "course correct" things. Like we've seen that so many times before. The "a time presents itself" quote and whatnot made my suspicions even stronger.

 

I was feeling relieved... until Jacques showed up! Hopefully it's just a long-forgotten brother. I was half-expecting a grown-up, un-dead Laura Palmer to show up as a cliffhanger. But no, just still-cool James thankfully.

[Argobot]

42 minutes ago, Vegas said:

 

YES. I figured it was Lynch just giving him a part for old times' sake, and I was so stoked.

 

 

Might want to spoiler this stuff, I'm pretty sure a lot of it happens in the third and fourth episodes.

[Vegas]

5 minutes ago, Argobot said:

 

Might want to spoiler this stuff, I'm pretty sure a lot of it happens in the third and fourth episodes.

 

Whoops, took out the one thing. Got confused between 2 and 3. The rest is kosher.

 

The conversation with 'Jeffries':

"you're going back in tomorrow. And I will be with Bob again."

 

WHO COULD IT BE?

[Ozzie]

I haven't read the posts in the thread yet, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts here. I'm glad that my favorite forum on the Webs allows me to indulge in my Twin Peaks fandom. The Dugpa forums are too crowded for my taste, and I actually don't want to be confronted with tooo many opinions. It's nice to have a few here.

I had more thoughts this morning, now they thinned out. Maybe more will come later.

 

One prominent thought was that as a viewer I didn't ask myself so much if this is good or bad than if it is compelling or not. Because I felt there were scenes and moments that were pretty bad, yet they didn't necessarily stop me from being compelled to watch further. I felt that the original run often made me question what is good or not, with its soap opera leanings and subplots of varying quality. I guess with Twin Peaks you learned to take the good with the bad, and when the central compelling mystery was burning in the background, then M.T. Wentz didn't stop you from wanting to watch any further. You learned to take the good with the bad. And this hasn't changed with the new run.

Some extraordinarily bad CGI was shown, I thought. Maybe this was to be expected considering Lynch's choice of digital and the cheap effects he always liked to employ (like Leeland's face overlayered with Bob's in the killer reveal episode). The pan up the outer wall of the building in NY...that was rough! Some of the digital effects looked cheap, not well crafted. Then, on the contrary, I thought The Tree from Another Place (as someone else proposed to call it) looked great! There are many very beautiful shots, too. I'm just astounded by the huge difference in craftsmanship from scene to scene.

 

I think I'll write more when the mood strikes me. Just now the words don't come out. We'll have time to ponder this!

[KLind]

It's exciting to see that Lynch is credited as the sound designer too. That's helping the whole feeling, considerably.