Jake

Twin Peaks Rewatch 41: The Return, Part 7

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11 hours ago, Frohike said:

Jerry Horne's scene at the beginning of this episode made it seem like he has somehow channeling other characters.  He almost sounds like a lost Dougie or some reverberation of Coop.

<snip>
He really doesn't seem or sound like himself.  It's like Dougie got into him somehow while he was perched up there in his tree. Owl, maybe, or he stumbled into the BL entrance in the woods?


Hmmm - I hope you're right!  I had just taken this whole bit as a slightly misinformed bit of 'weed humour', but now that I read through it again it seems a bit too specific in content, and a bit too unsophisticated as a gag.

I don't think I've ever had another series make me so concerned about the intention behind its construction, but then TP is unusual in how exacting the little clues can be, and in the engagement of its audience with those clues.  I really hope Tammy's treatment ends up with a decent narrative payoff, for example. 

It's funny - I really like a lot of Lynch's work, but I do not think he is beyond reproach, so there is still some element of tension about how some of that more 'problematic' stuff progresses (not so much because I am likely to be personally offended as because it simultaneously reveals a narrative mechanism which is being used, and reveals that mechanism to have its own ugly assumptions, and that combination never fails to snap me out of disbelief-suspension).  This, in combination with what I have read about his unusual methods of creation leave me mostly certain that I will like (or at least appreciate) his work, but with enough doubt to leave a soupcon of tension...  It is kind of like an amplification of the way his work makes me feel anyway, but taken into the field of critiquing the work too.

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8 hours ago, Argobot said:

Maybe it's because Twin Peaks: The Return is not doing Westworld or even True Detective numbers, but I haven't really noticed any feverish speculating with this show. Sure, we've played an innocent guessing game of "is Albert looking for Diane?" but that stuff is fairly tame in comparison to the frenzy that surrounded these other shows. I suspect that if this show was more of a mainstream hit, we'd be seeing a lot more of that. But also, there's no way the show in its current form would ever become a main stream hit, so there's no reason for it to become part of the Internet speculation machine.  

 

Absolutely no one in my Twitter feed talks about Twin Peaks, which is the opposite of what I was expecting. Pretty disappointing, really.

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On the podcast Chris mentioned that there's a one armed man that shows up in the Ike/Dougie segment, but the guy clearly has two arms earlier and later in the scene, his jacket being blown open by the wind just obscures his arm briefly at one point. I get that with a show like this, where basically absolutely anything is feasible, it can be easy to pick up on something someone somewhere on the internet says  and just take it as fact and assume you missed it because you weren't watching carefully enough, but some of the things getting thrown out there on the podcast are a little dubious. There's already so many insane plot holes that actually a part of the show that it's frustrating to have to go and sift through a whole additional layer of internet rumour mongering every week.

 

I don't mean that as a criticism aimed specifically at Chris and Jake, and it's not even something that's particular to Twin Peaks, but with other shows I at least feel that rumour mongering/theorycrafting takes place within a much more intentionally structured drip feed of information, whereas the plotting and pacing of this season are so all over the place, basically anything goes and is unlikely to ever be directly addressed or disproven within the show.

 

If you'll allow me to be histrionic for a moment, there's that Jonathan Swift quote that goes "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect", and I feel like a lot of my time discussing this season has been spent mopping up other people's suspect theories. Someone comes up with an interpretation but doesn't bother properly investigating it, and then sends it in to the podcast where it's read out and just assumed to be fact. We really do need Cooper and his investigative rigour back.

 

 

one arm 1.PNG

one arm 2.PNGone arm 4.PNGone arm 3.PNG

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Please tell me someone else noticed the extreme similarities between the wardens office and the original Harry S Trumans office in the original series.

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All right!  After the last episode, I'm very happy.  THIS is more like it!  

 

So much good stuff... it's going to take us all week to 100% this episode, if that's even possible.

 

the only thing that I wondered about was the dumbass way Andy seemed to be investigating the hit-and-run.  Who tells the police to go away with a promise to meet them later?  I get it... Andy's milquetoast.  But he's also a veteran cop in a not-small-town which has its share of murders & death.  He knows how to be a cop, I think.

 

MJD

 

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2 hours ago, cgoc said:

On the podcast Chris mentioned that there's a one armed man that shows up in the Ike/Dougie segment, but the guy clearly has two arms earlier and later in the scene, his jacket being blown open by the wind just obscures his arm briefly at one point. I get that with a show like this, where basically absolutely anything is feasible, it can be easy to pick up on something someone somewhere on the internet says  and just take it as fact and assume you missed it because you weren't watching carefully enough, but some of the things getting thrown out there on the podcast are a little dubious. There's already so many insane plot holes that actually a part of the show that it's frustrating to have to go and sift through a whole additional layer of internet rumour mongering every week.

 

I don't mean that as a criticism aimed specifically at Chris and Jake, and it's not even something that's particular to Twin Peaks, but with other shows I at least feel that rumour mongering/theorycrafting takes place within a much more intentionally structured drip feed of information, whereas the plotting and pacing of this season are so all over the place, basically anything goes and is unlikely to ever be directly addressed or disproven within the show.

 

If you'll allow me to be histrionic for a moment, there's that Jonathan Swift quote that goes "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect", and I feel like a lot of my time discussing this season has been spent mopping up other people's suspect theories. Someone comes up with an interpretation but doesn't bother properly investigating it, and then sends it in to the podcast where it's read out and just assumed to be fact. We really do need Cooper and his investigative rigour back.

 

You're right, that's my bad. I should have vetted!

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I actually think Andy might have his most professional seeming moments in this episode. Like, yeah, agreeing to go meet a suspect in the woods when he's right in front of you is goofy, but it also kind of plays into the problems of being a cop in a small town that got gutted by industry and then restocked by randos and drug dealers. Back in the day, a sensitive investigation in the small lumber town of Twin Peaks might allow for questionable, weirdly unassertive meeting planning. Andy is only really mistaken in thinking that time is still going. There's something that struck me as really sad in those scenes, but I can't put my finger on it, beyond the surface "bygone era" thing. 

 

The morgue scene, especially the hallway hobo, was great, although the mortician didn't get any sick quips. 

 

CQC Coop snapping back in was marvelous. 

 

I did not expect we would get this much time with Janey and Dougie, but I'm weirdly getting settled in this domestic/workplace drama. Even though I obviously want Coop back. 

 

I think the original mystique of Bad Coop has gotten burned off through inaction, I'm ready to see what ill shit he's up to next. 

 

I can't tell if the version of this story where Bad Coop is literally just all the bad in old Coop is worse than the one where it's just BOB. I think the question of Leland Vs. Demonic possession was more powerful for the specificity of a single act, where Bad Coop seems to be raping and killing everyone to an absurd degree. 

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It was interesting what Chris said about recap culture and how this set of podcasts is different from the last. Related to that, might it be a better fit to delay the podcast to the end of the week, or maybe the next week? Of course you've got busy schedules so that might not be an option, but an extra 48-72 hours to digest might be useful. I'm in Europe so I'm watching on Monday morning and I feel like I'm tripping over my hot takes just to try and contribute something semi-interesting in time. But it's tough to filter through everything - it must be a nightmare doing the podcast! If being part of the recap zeitgeist isn't vitally important to you guys, would a delay not be helpful?

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9 hours ago, BonusWavePilot said:

It's funny - I really like a lot of Lynch's work, but I do not think he is beyond reproach, so there is still some element of tension about how some of that more 'problematic' stuff progresses (not so much because I am likely to be personally offended as because it simultaneously reveals a narrative mechanism which is being used, and reveals that mechanism to have its own ugly assumptions, and that combination never fails to snap me out of disbelief-suspension).  This, in combination with what I have read about his unusual methods of creation leave me mostly certain that I will like (or at least appreciate) his work, but with enough doubt to leave a soupcon of tension...  It is kind of like an amplification of the way his work makes me feel anyway, but taken into the field of critiquing the work too.

 

This is the best description I've ever read of my own nervousness approaching Lynch's work too. Because he places himself as a conduit as well as creator, one always worries he'll pick up bad signals and not block them. There's a degree of faith (and consequently, doubt) involved.

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I would really like to open the topic up to what people think of the implication that Diane was raped by the doppelganger. While the show could still go in another direction, it really seems like that's what's being suggested.

 

It bothered me on first viewing in a way I'm not usually bothered by the way Twin Peaks deals with sexual violence and/or violence against women. But I can't decide if that feeling is a good thing - we *should* be made uncomfortable by these revelations - or a bad thing - in this case, the development feels inappropriate. Yes, partly it's just that icky realization that now whenever we watch Cooper's recordings on the old show it will come with a pretty heavy asterisk. Yet it also feels gratuitous to me: couldn't this have just been a strong female character who hadn't been victimized by a man she trusted? And yet again, I ask myself if there isn't something judgmental in that very framing, as if her identity is somehow compromised by an experience in which she was helpless? And yet isn't the show *itself* defining her primarily by this trope, if we can limit it to being a trope? This is all reasoning backwards, starting just from the gut feeling. Really seeking other perspectives here.

 

EDIT: I should also note that part of the problem is the identity of the doppelganger. If he has nothing to do with Cooper, isn't part of the discussion surrounding Diane's experience compromised (not her part, to be fair). Shades of the Leland/Bob conundrum here, although I think FWWM handles that well - but the idea of a split rather than possession opens up a whole new question.

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1 hour ago, LostInTheMovies said:

I would really like to open the topic up to what people think of the implication that Diane was raped by the doppelganger. While the show could still go in another direction, it really seems like that's what's being suggested.

 

It bothered me on first viewing in a way I'm not usually bothered by the way Twin Peaks deals with sexual violence and/or violence against women. But I can't decide if that feeling is a good thing - we *should* be made uncomfortable by these revelations - or a bad thing - in this case, the development feels inappropriate. Yes, partly it's just that icky realization that now whenever we watch Cooper's recordings on the old show it will come with a pretty heavy asterisk. Yet it also feels gratuitous to me: couldn't this have just been a strong female character who hadn't been victimized by a man she trusted? And yet again, I ask myself if there isn't something judgmental in that very framing, as if her identity is somehow compromised by an experience in which she was helpless? And yet isn't the show *itself* defining her primarily by this trope, if we can limit it to being a trope? This is all reasoning backwards, starting just from the gut feeling. Really seeking other perspectives here.

 

EDIT: I should also note that part of the problem is the identity of the doppelganger. If he has nothing to do with Cooper, isn't part of the discussion surrounding Diane's experience compromised (not her part, to be fair). Shades of the Leland/Bob conundrum here, although I think FWWM handles that well - but the idea of a split rather than possession opens up a whole new question.

 

Bad Coop just leaving a trail of abused women feels like it is exactly where we are going, and it really gets frustrating. The one way that I think this Revival is really doing a disservice is how much worse it treats female bodies. The original object of the first run is an abused, desecrated body and the specific circumstances of how it ended up in this state are given gravity. In this show, women get stabbed by little people three times in a scene that is bisected by a weird physical comedy gag, female characters are introduced solely to show how bad a male character is, it's all so heavily overplaying a theme that was originally so central and specific. Like, yes, we understand that in this world men are abusive, but you are choosing how these characters act, David. 

 

If Diane is talking about being raped or physically assaulted in some way, it will again be Lynch just wantonly throwing his toys around again in an approximation of something that he once delivered powefully. But, at the same time, Lynch is not the sort of reflective writer who gets tired of his favorite tropes, and it seems like he's really dialing down on this one, without much to back it up. 

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A few not-quite-connected thoughts:

 

That there's been no real attempt made to define who or what the Cooper doppelganger is has made it almost impossible for me to assess any of the rape/assault implications in the story. I don't mean that I would have trouble believing that the writers are writing it into the story (it seems like they are), or to imply that I would for some reason not believe the characters if they say that it happens or something dumb like that, but right now I have no sense at all of who Bad Coop/Mr. C actually is, or what he wants in any concrete way, so what it means for the story is just a mess for me right now. The show is being cagey with every single aspect of this story arc right now but seems like it may be trying to have it both ways, by also expecting us to contextualize and have emotional reactions to the fallout, even though it hasn't given us the tools to do so.

 

The show this season seems to have few qualms with doing someone bodily/emotional harm or killing them or playing them as one note simply for plot reasons and, at its worst, seems like expects us to sort those encounters and moments into a different pile than the ones the show deems emotionally and thematically interesting. I don't like the unequal footing different events are getting. I fear that it may be a negative fallout from the somewhat disconnected writing/directing process.

 

Last week we had a kid run over by a truck and a woman brutally stabbed, both in full on screen, and this week we learn through the margins (but still pretty clearly communicated) that two women were raped, and none of it feels actually connected to anything yet. It doesn't feel like it has a purpose, at least not one that anyone can divine at this point. I find it really frustrating. Maybe I'm meant to be frustrated? It's another reason I wish this wasn't weekly at this point. It's easy to take these incredibly shocking drops of content and extrapolate out from there in infinite directions (or even, if youre a dick, use them as tools to bludgeon people who are seeing the show differently than you) and that all feels moot given that each episode is adding onto what came before. In a lot of ways this show is structured backwards from most television, which sets up a premise and context and then marinates in it.

 

I doubt Lynch was aiming for some sort of contextless shock culture content, because he himself has said e considers the season three a singular work that was cut up, but watching it weekly gives it that effect for me, regardless of its intentions. 

 

Twin Peaks is giving us a ton of detail without purpose, and slowly backing into the reasons. That doesn't forgive any of its choices for being bad once we get there, nor does it make it easy to watch haha.

 

 

All of these thoughts co-exist with me very much enjoying the show. It's complicated.

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My biggest worry - and I'll still *like*, hell probably love, the show if it's the case, but it will feel like it undercut FWWM's power as the final statement on Twin Peaks - is that Lynch's greatest work was created in particular circumstances and now he's without those. Namely, the challenging circumstances of the original TP process (the 3 high points, to me, are the exact moments where he was most attempting to reconcile stuff beyond his control with his vision - ep. 14, ep. 29, FWWM), and also his blossoming collaboration with Mary Sweeney whom I suspect had an underreported (very humanist, very r/Romantic) effect on his sensibility.

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25 minutes ago, Gamebeast23456 said:

Yet it also feels gratuitous to me: couldn't this have just been a strong female character who hadn't been victimized by a man she trusted?

 

Strong women are raped and assaulted hourly in the United States. Being a victim of violence doesn't make you less 'strong' or interesting. I understand the impulse to reject the gratuitous and exploitative, but my feeling is always going to be: if it happens in real life, it better show up on the screen. Writing a victim can be lazy when it dehumanizes the victim only to emphasize how evil another character is. But at least so far, Diane's victimization seems more important to establish her character than to establish Mr. C's. 

 

Having said that, my fervent wish right now is that the incident Diane refers to happened before the events of the original series, and that Dale's tapes were recorded by a blithely oblivious Dale Cooper who didn't realize how much he had hurt Diane. The fact that Diane seems shocked in part VII about Cooper's lack of heart indicates to me that the traumatic event at her house happened at least prior to the Dale switcheroo. Why not even earlier?

 

I think we tend to forget that Dale Cooper is not without his own darkness. My parents just started watching the original series for the first time, and, without any exposure to outside media on the series, are convinced that that creepily overeager Kyle McLachlan dude ("You know, from Blue Velvet? In this one he's playing the same guy, but as an out-of-town cop.") is complicit in the murder of Laura Palmer. Just the other day they watched him flirt with an underage high school student (Audrey) and feel vindicated in their prediction.

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1 hour ago, ddennism said:

 

Strong women are raped and assaulted hourly in the United States. Being a victim of violence doesn't make you less 'strong' or interesting. I understand the impulse to reject the gratuitous and exploitative, but my feeling is always going to be: if it happens in real life, it better show up on the screen. Writing a victim can be lazy when it dehumanizes the victim only to emphasize how evil another character is. But at least so far, Diane's victimization seems more important to establish her character than to establish Mr. C's. 

 

 

I think excusing or contextualizing gratuitousness by it's basis in reality is usually a losing game. Yes, women are raped and assaulted in other major and minor ways every day, but David Lynch and co. are not documentarians setting up cameras to see what slices of life they can catch. There's a long writing, directing and editing process that goes into something popping onto your TV set or a theater projector, and it's inherently important/notable/interpretable that decisions are made to show women being assaulted and abused as opposed to women being shown as cashiers at grocery stores or having problems in the health industry, which are also very common occurrences for women in America. Many things occur in life that have not appeared on the screen. 

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Wow, gotta say, I'm still not really picking up the assault subtext. Maybe I see it with Diane, but definitely not with Audrey. I probably will be proved wrong in the next few episodes, but here's hoping that I'm right. 

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Re: the sweeping scene, that felt like a semi-rare case of Lynch going with an extremely explicit visual metaphor. "We spent a lot of time throwing a bunch of seemingly disparate plot dust around, and no we are piling it all up for you." There was something about the straightforwardness of it that, had it occured in a film, would be on the fast track to explaining visual-thematic metaphors in Intro To Film courses, right next to Hitchcock and trains.

 

Little did we know, actually this is vaporized garmonbosia and the Renault's have been visiting the Black Lodge for centuries and are the true key to the mysteries of Twin Peaks. 

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I think most of the implication comes from what we know about BOB. I agree that Audrey is a stretch on current evidence, but BOB alone with a woman in her home strongly suggests terrible things.

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I guess, except we've never seen Mr. C assault anyone else. He clearly has sexual relationships with women, and his killing of Daria was sexually-charged in part because of how she was dressed, but so far his interactions with women have not screamed 'rapist.'

 

The way Diane's scenes played out before and after meeting Cooper, it felt more like she went from being angry to being afraid once she spoke with Mr. C and saw how he clearly is missing something essentially human. It's not until after seeing him that she gets really upset, whereas if she'd been assaulted, you'd think she would have displayed more trepidation/fear beforehand. The way that scene played out, it made me feel that she'd never even met Mr. C and was referring to the last time she and the real Cooper met face-to-face, and was frightened when Mr. C couldn't remember that meeting.

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32 minutes ago, Argobot said:

Wow, gotta say, I'm still not really picking up the assault subtext. Maybe I see it with Diane, but definitely not with Audrey. I probably will be proved wrong in the next few episodes, but here's hoping that I'm right. 


As for Diane, that seemed like her first encounter with Bad Coop to me. And Bad Coop does have real Cooper's memories so maybe Good Coop parted on bad terms with her before he went to Twin Peaks. But then most of his recordings to her seemed upbeat and positive, but then again that is just how he is most of the time. I don't know.

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1 hour ago, ddennism said:

Having said that, my fervent wish right now is that the incident Diane refers to happened before the events of the original series, and that Dale's tapes were recorded by a blithely oblivious Dale Cooper who didn't realize how much he had hurt Diane. The fact that Diane seems shocked in part VII about Cooper's lack of heart indicates to me that the traumatic event at her house happened at least prior to the Dale switcheroo. Why not even earlier?

 

Someone else suggested this to me earlier. I don't really think this is where it's heading but it would be an interesting twist and would also go a long way toward addressing what remains the hole at the show's center: what the good/bad Dale split actually reveals to us about his character and larger themes/questions. The way the show handles Diane's response, however, makes me think they are setting up something extremely violent/forceful - which wouldn't match up with the Cooper we knew before, however much we've ironed over his inherent complexities.

 

The nature of Coop's dark side seems to be more subtle/repressed urges than actual hidden actions (as with Leland). I continue to be unsure if they put themselves between a rock and hard place with the climax of ep. 29.

 

EDIT:

The way that scene played out, it made me feel that she'd never even met Mr. C and was referring to the last time she and the real Cooper met face-to-face, and was frightened when Mr. C couldn't remember that meeting.

 

Didn't see Argobot's post ^ till now. So a lot of people seem to be going in this direction? I actually kind of hope you all are right even though I don't really see it yet. That would be much more interesting, all things considered (although again, I think the nature of the incident would probably be somewhat different than many of us are guessing if it really was the old Coop she's talking about - and the messages to Diane thing throughout the series does seem odd in this light).

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Perhaps he grabbed her face in that weird, kneady way he does. He could have exposed some secret she had previously confided to Cooper. It needn't have been sexual - I'd like it not to be - and I'm definitely open to it being something GoodCoop did unthinkingly. That would be more interesting than the obvious.

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1 hour ago, LostInTheMovies said:

Didn't see Argobot's post ^ till now. So a lot of people seem to be going in this direction? I actually kind of hope you all are right even though I don't really see it yet. That would be much more interesting, all things considered (although again, I think the nature of the incident would probably be somewhat different than many of us are guessing if it really was the old Coop she's talking about - and the messages to Diane thing throughout the series does seem odd in this light).

 

It also seems somewhat possible that before the return of Good Coop Mr. C was more dynamic and able to incorporate elements of full Cooper's personality. Maybe he did meet with Diane but did not reveal the extent of his change in that meeting, outside of whatever horrible thing occurred, so now Bad Coop is much more obviously a fake to her. It would seem weird (to me) to hinge Diane's character on something original Cooper did incidentally 25 years ago, after all he's now been through, just in terms of economy of storytelling. 

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38 minutes ago, Argobot said:

I guess, except we've never seen Mr. C assault anyone else. He clearly has sexual relationships with women, and his killing of Daria was sexually-charged in part because of how she was dressed, but so far his interactions with women have not screamed 'rapist.'

 

The way Diane's scenes played out before and after meeting Cooper, it felt more like she went from being angry to being afraid once she spoke with Mr. C and saw how he clearly is missing something essentially human. It's not until after seeing him that she gets really upset, whereas if she'd been assaulted, you'd think she would have displayed more trepidation/fear beforehand. The way that scene played out, it made me feel that she'd never even met Mr. C and was referring to the last time she and the real Cooper met face-to-face, and was frightened when Mr. C couldn't remember that meeting.

 

My read which is probably wrong is somewhere in between - that she had a run in with Mr. C and thought it was Cooper, maybe she made that mistake because it was within super tight proximity of the end of Season Two (like, at the same time as the audience was confused about what Cooper was) - and whatever that encounter was shook her but didn't make her brain jump all the way to "this is actually a different person," and landed instead on "wow I didnt know that's what Cooper was like." Mr. C was meeting with Briggs and Albert and a couple others as "Dale Cooper," and we know he managed Albert for a while as well earlier on. We're told that Albert doesn't know him as well as Diane does and Diane won't be fooled, but 25 years ago maybe she was fooled along with the rest of them, and this meeting with him 25 years later was her realizing what happened in full? 

 

I think that my theory is as flimsy as anyone else's and I hope that you are correct that something far less stupid is going on. The show has just been so fast and loose with damaging people and declaring people damaged (eg: "do you even know why she is this way? her son committed suicide!") that my ability to extend the benefit of the doubt is unfortunately really weak right now. 

 

I guess I should take my own advice and stop speculating wildly!

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I went back and watched the Diane + Bad Coop exchange again, and just from that it seems pretty ambiguous what happened during their last meeting.

On the one hand, it seems like if she'd been assaulted that night Diane would be more visibly upset to hear him talk about it now. On the other hand it's clear that Diane is very good at steeling herself and maybe she brought it up deliberately to test more than simply his identity. When Bad Coop says "I'll never forget that night" it seems more like he's repeating a sentiment left over from Good Coop's brain, than relishing a memory of something nasty he did. My money's on her last meeting being with Good Coop, just before he was sent to Twin Peaks, and maybe they connected emotionally but left it unresolved, and she's had 25+ years of zero closure.

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