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Twin Peaks Rewatch 48: The Return, Part 13

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Twin Peaks Rewatch 48:

Twin Peaks Rewatch 48


The Return, Part 13
Twin Peaks refuses to get stuck in a rut, but may be stuck in time. Or maybe time has lost all meaning? It's hard to tell right now. Sarah Palmer watches the same few seconds of television on loop, while Audrey loses herself in an existential conversational spiral, and Ed and Norma can't ever seem to get started at all. Also Cooper punches someone out of his chair. Just between you and I, this week's episode was a great one. Join us for a discussion of Twin Peaks The Return, Part 13.

Notes: Chris was remote this week, and Jake was sick, so it's a bit echoey and muted and downbeat... until we talk about James, of course. Also, next week's episode will be late due to traveling. Enjoy!

If you have a question for us or thoughts to share on the new season of Twin Peaks, write us at [email protected].

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

 

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As someone who unironically and fully enjoy the 'Just You and I' scene from season 2, I LOVED that roadhouse performance. Easily my favorite so far. That song's still cool . It's always been cool.

 

In other news, I'm sticking with my Audrey coma dream theory and see no reason to change my mind so far.

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7 minutes ago, ThatThomas said:

As someone who unironically and fully enjoy the 'Just You and I' scene from season 2, I LOVED that roadhouse performance. Easily my favorite so far. That song's still cool . It's always been cool.

 

According to the credits - in case anyone had any doubt - the song was written by Badalamenti and Lynch and performed by James Marshall (Hurley). Wiki says he's a musician.

 

The reveal of the two backup singers was pretty funny to me because I'm sure it's meant to duplicate Donna & Maddie from the original series. I thought their clothing a bit odd and wondered if it's the same as what the actors wore in the original scene but it's not: 

 

 

7 minutes ago, ThatThomas said:

In other news, I'm sticking with my Audrey coma dream theory and see no reason to change my mind so far.

 

The scene this episode seemed to make that much more explicit, or at least that she's living in some sort of dream state.

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17 minutes ago, Mike Danger said:

The timeline of this show seems to be truly insane if Bobby just opened the capsule "today".

 

Yeah, there are some huge discrepancies with the timeline. That scene with Bobby definitely confirms it, plus the opening with the Mitchums, the 'dies, and Dougie doing the party train / conga line (amazing) presumably after being out all night celebrating in part 11, when in #12 we last saw Dougie "playing catch" with Sonny Jim.

 

Also, what was up with the red floor in the lodge? And was that spotlight included with the gym set? Complete with a music box rendition of swan lake. So bizarre, but that's got nothing on the Roadhouse.

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I interpreted the Bobby scene as him and the sheriffs dept. having already visited the location directed in the capsule as scheduled that day and finding a bunch of other material his father had left for them. I figured nothing supernatural happened apart from finding the stuff, and that later episodes would have them digging through it. Not the most exciting interpretation I'll grant you.

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I'm thinking Charlie has been put in place to gaslight Audrey. By Mr. C? I figure the Billy connection means she is actually awake and functioning, but Charlie has to keep her confused and from the truth. That mention of a dream last episode also seems to point to Mike or something try to influence her, like with Belushi Mitchum.

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I think the wonky timeline stuff is nothing more than scenes being moved around in editing from the order in which they were written and not meant to imply anything supernatural. Like the Dougie scene last week - which now is clearly a continuity error - was probably just there because they feel like Kyle Maclachlan is the one actor who needs to appear in every episode.

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Yeah, I'm not saying there's anything like that going on, more that they don't seem overly concerned with the continuity at times. It's not really a big deal, just leads to some confusion. Most of the scenes still seem relatively sequential to some degree, but there's also plenty of compression in some threads and questions of when things are actually happening in relation to others.


 

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Damn. I really thought that Lynch and Frost just wanted to portray Audrey's life as a special kind of hell, but after this episode... maybe she is hallucinating or in a coma. Mulholland  Dr was supposed to be a script about Audrey, right? I don't wanna spoil that movie (as if I could), but an existential crisis seems in-line with that. I'm not even going to try to predict what that could mean, tho.

 

And That Sarah Palmer scene really brought home for me how they have done a stellar job this season representing substance abuse. The boredom in that scene paints alcoholism in a way that you rarely see. And while there have been a lot of hard-to-watch scenes this season, they have done an admirable job of representing substance abuse as something ugly that can be strongly tied to domestic violence, though I think it's important to remember that it doesn't always lead to that.

 

It's also clear to me now that, in the beginning, when we were all thinking of this as an 18hr movie, that it's far more than that in the sense that it's a tv show playing with different media conventions. This series has found it's pacing somewhere between a novel and a photograph, and I can't say that all other media will follow this example, but I'm glad that they are free to experiment. 

 

And the way that the Audrey puts so much dramatic weight on the Roadhouse performance... then we get what we got... some might say, the best scene Twin Peaks has ever produced.

 

I can't wait for the final scene of this season, when Norma's boyfriend drops in on the Renault cousin to tell him how "Renault's Roadhouse" is the most popular music venue in the Pacific Northwest and how he should change it's name to... "The Double R," after Norma gives in and changes her diner chain to just "Norma's." 

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I slowed down the music from the opening scene, just for sh#ts and giggles. It reveals nothing.

 

 

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Loved the first half but found the second half to be incredibly dull. I can't imagine the folks who didn't like last week's episode will have many nice things to say about any of the stuff set in Twin Peaks this week.
 

-The cha-cha line into Lucky Seven Insurance coupled with Anthony's pathetic hiding was such a fun way to start the episode. I think the music was meant to replicate the sound of a room full of slot machines. Here's a field recording I really like as a reference:

-The Mitchum's interpreting Dougie's "My wife?" as a joke was pretty funny

-Sonny Jim's gym set was great as well, especially with the giant spotlight and archway. Kinda absurd that The Silver Mustang has its own delivery men with branded jumpsuits, but whatever.

-The arm wrestling contest is definitely a great example of how some segments of the series are basically independent short films. Twin Peak's weird use of technology continues to be my favourite aspect of the show, so I loved the big security camera screen. The sequence really reminded me of a weird aside from a John Carpenter film, like the sort of thing Snake Plisskin would wander into in Escape from New York. Was great. I kinda hoped that he would go 'over the top', but we cant have everything

-God, I LOVED LOVED LOVED the way the cops got the info on the fingerprints and just tossed it in the garbage. Exactly the kind of absurd fuck-you plotting that both delights and frustrates us all.

-After that, the the episode took a huge nose dive for me. I don't think Tom Sizemore's acting was any good when he was asked to be emotional, I don't care about The RR's franchise potential and don't understand why Bobby was even in that scene, the one saving grace about the Nadine Jacoby scene was the potato anecdote, and while I was fine with Audrey's scene last week it became a bit much this time around....BUT OH MY GOSH JAMES HURLEY AT THE ROADHOUSE. ALL IS FORGIVEN. JAMES WAS ALWAYS COOL, YOU GUYS!

-Did the crying girl in the booth's tattoos stand out to anyone else? She had numbers (7662?) on one arm, and a flower (dandelion?) on the other.

Untitled.thumb.png.839401b6a572f25af5e76ed07422a58d.png

Untitled3.thumb.png.fdbf68c4163e972e1c0786bed04d42f4.png

 

-I don't know what to make of the boxing loop on Sarah Palmer's TV screen. Does anyone know if that was Battlin' Bud? I also noticed that there were ceramic Easter bunnies on both sides of her television. It all comes back to bunnies. 


But yeah. First half was some of the best Twin Peaks we've gotten, and the second half was the absolute worst. 

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Loved the episode. That James song - amazing.

Word of warning - Sky Germany messed up and showed Part 14 so avoiding spoilers is going to be tough for a whole week.

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Not that it really matters much but unless my memory is totally crapping out, I think the wacky slot machine conga line music was the Nutcracker, not Swan Lake?

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I don't know what the conga line music was (thought it was an original Badalementi?), the piece from swan lake was recognizable during the Sonny Jim playing on the spotlit gym set, in music box style. And with the big spotlight and elaborate lighting it had, I wasn't sure if the music was part of the gym set or just part of the scene. It was all so ridiculous.

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I might be mixing up even more things in my head than I remember!

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14 minutes ago, UnpopularTrousers said:



-Did the crying girl in the booth's tattoos stand out to anyone else? She had numbers (7662?) on one arm, and a flower (dandelion?) on the other.

Untitled.thumb.png.839401b6a572f25af5e76ed07422a58d.png

Untitled3.thumb.png.fdbf68c4163e972e1c0786bed04d42f4.png

 

It's 7-6-63, just a tattoo that the actress has (http://www.zimbio.com/The+Hottest+Celebrity+Tattoos/articles/C7GdDZuB8kf/Jessica+Szohr)

Edited by sleepybrett
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8 minutes ago, Chris said:

Not that it really matters much but unless my memory is totally crapping out, I think the wacky slot machine conga line music was the Nutcracker, not Swan Lake?

 I just posted a slowed down version of that conga line stuff, a couple of posts above. It kinda sounds like the brushes from The Bookhouse Boys from the Original Soundtrack, with some strangely cut piano stuff over it.

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Just now, MarkHoog said:

 I just posted a slowed down version of that conga line stuff, a couple of posts above. It kinda sounds like the brushes from The Bookhouse Boys from the Original Soundtrack, with some strangely cut piano stuff over it.

Okay I have no idea where my head is. Thanks!

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6 minutes ago, sleepybrett said:

Ah, thanks for the detective work! I imagine any other director would have covered it with make-up to avoid confusion with the co-ordinates written on the other girl's arm...but Lynch does things his own way.

Thanks for posting that music, Markhoog! Hearing it again, I'm doubling down on my interpretation of it being Badalamenti slot machine music. 

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Almost three hours since the episode ended PDT, and I've yet to see much focus in any podcasts or posts (apologize if I missed something obvious) about the line referenced by the title:

 

What story is that, Charlie? What story, exactly, can he end? I've heard the theories that he's a therapist playing along, etc. But would a therapist indulging his patient engage in so existential a threat as that? Just what are the implications here? Is Charlie a stand-in for the writers? Is he a godlike being from the world of the lodges?  "I'll end your story" is a terrifying line. 

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1 hour ago, UnpopularTrousers said:

 


-Did the crying girl in the booth's tattoos stand out to anyone else? She had numbers (7662?) on one arm, and a flower (dandelion?) on the other.

Untitled.thumb.png.839401b6a572f25af5e76ed07422a58d.png

Untitled3.thumb.png.fdbf68c4163e972e1c0786bed04d42f4.png

 

 

 

I think this is the woman who James is staring at in episode 2. She's sitting with Shelley and two other women, and they're all excited that James has a thing for her. 

 

I went back and compared them but I'm on mobile at the moment and can't tell for sure. 

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2 hours ago, pyide said:

Dougie doing the party train / conga line (amazing) presumably after being out all night celebrating in part 11, when in #12 we last saw Dougie "playing catch" with Sonny Jim.

 

Since Sonny Jim gets his gym set that takes up the whole backyard this episode, last episode was the absolute last time they could use that catch game. They definitely found that one in the editing room!

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