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Twin Peaks Season 3 |OT2| It's Just A Change, Not An End

F

Fuu

Formerly Alaluef (not Aladuf)
Mogwai said:
I'm almost done with a rewatch of the original 30 episode of TP and was looking into other TP'esque shows. I see Carnivale mentioned in several articles, and was thinking to take a look when I'm done with TP in a bit.

Quick edit: Holy crap, Carnivale actually won 5 Emmys?!
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Give it a go, Carnivale is excellent and it does scratch that itch. Shame it was cancelled, but it’s still worth a watch for sure. There’s a show bible with what they had planned and the mythology that is great to read after you’re done with it too.
 
M

Minishdriveby

Member
I stopped watching while the show was being aired weekly around episode 9. Personally, the tonal shift between the original seasons' quaint quirky town soap opera with sprinklings of surrealism and The Return's veer into a dark global immersion of Lynch's more surrealist filmography was a huge turn-off. I enjoy Twin Peaks. I enjoy his surrealist films. The mixture of the two became something that was more the latter than the former in my eyes.

Now that the season has finished, and I've decided to come back from my hiatus, mainly to finish the series and cancel my Showtime subscription. I must say the last 5 episodes (10-14) have been very enjoyable. The focus continues to shift between a variety of settings, but it seems to be homing in on the town and characters of Twin Peaks. I still have issues with scenes involving women; there's something that really irks me about this season and its emphasis on violence towards women (seems even more pronounced this season even when considering the show's origin begins with the rape and death of Laura Palmer).

I think the key to enjoyment was to disassociate this with the original series. It's its own thing, a longer and unrestrained Lynch film.

10/8/2017 Edit: Finished watching episode 18. Enjoyed it from Episode 10 to the end. Finale is what I expected since the beginning, an abrupt end with threads hanging. It's fun going back through this thread watching everyone's shock and fury at the ending.
 
T

Triggerhappytel

Member
Minishdriveby said:
I stopped watching while the show was being aired weekly around episode 9. Personally, the tonal shift between the original seasons' quaint quirky town soap opera with sprinklings of surrealism and The Return's veer into a dark global immersion of Lynch's more surrealist filmography was a huge turn-off. I enjoy Twin Peaks. I enjoy his surrealist films. The mixture of the two became something that was more the latter than the former in my eyes.
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Yeah, I liked S1 best overall, and I agree about the tonal shift being off-putting. S1 was concise and well-paced with an interesting and dark central mystery with lots of moments of quirky levity, S2 was horribly bloated with numerous uninteresting side plots and characters (like the tedious nonsense with Andy, Dick, Lucy, Ben Horne losing his mind and then the beauty show at the end), and S3 was just surreal. Completely and utterly I-have-no-idea-what's-supposed-to-be-going-on batshit surreal. Like, episode 8 was visually incredible, but I felt ridiculously lost while watching it.

I want to repost comments I made elsewhere after having finished the whole season and ruminating on it for a day or so. The guy I was talking to cleared some of this up with his ideas (as he knows TP much better than I & has read all the books as well), but I still feel fairly confused when I think back to it. This was a month ago:

A preamble to any discussion about season 3; I thought season 1 was superb, with really strong characters, a good plot and was just the right length. Season 2 though is a mess. Once all the Laura/Leland Palmer stuff was done with it felt like they had lots of episodes to fill so that's when they wrote in Windham Earle and his chess game of life and death with Coop, which felt like it needed more setting up beforehand, and it also seemed like there was an awful lot of plotlines that didn't really go anywhere but were thrown in to extend the running time. I feel like the whole season would have worked better being cut down to 12 episodes but still keeping the Black Lodge stuff after the Palmer storyline ended. I also have not seen Fire Walk With Me.

With that said, I really didn't like season 3 all that much, mainly because it was so frigging weird and so many of the storylines seemed needless. I like that they got lots of the original characters back, but most of them felt like they had nothing to do:
- What was the purpose of Audrey's story? I also thought that she woke up in a mental hospital, but I don't understand the significance of that. They put quite a lot of emphasis on Billy, but we don’t even meet him, do we? And her husband hears that revelation on the phone from Tina; we don’t know what that was either, right?
- What was the purpose of Shelly's story? Or her daughter? Did that plot even go anywhere?
- What was the purpose of Dr. Jacobi's story? Did he even have a story, besides shouting into his webcam a lot about resisting Big Brother or whatever?
- What was the purpose of James' story? Besides hooking up with the London Tahn geezer I have no idea what James even did.
- I don't even know what to say about Sarah Palmer. First time in a TV show I've seen a woman in her 60s become a Void Face Murder Monster.
- The one story of returning characters I did enjoy was Ed & Norma finally hooking up. That one actually felt cathartic for me.
- I have no idea what the purpose of Jerry Horne was, unless it was just intended to be a silly sub-plot about being baked and lost in the forest.
- I didn’t really understand the point of Sherriff Frank Truman. I guess it’s because the actor who played Harry either passed away or didn’t want to come back and do it, but why not just make Hawk the Sherriff instead? Hawk was at least as involved in most of the investigative stuff as the Sherriff was anyway.

Okay, so new characters I have questions about:
- What was the point in Audrey's son Richard? He's a violent psycho who does a lot of awful stuff and then dies by lightning, I guess? Did Doppleganger use him to try to find another way into the Black Lodge, or something?
- Was there any point in the London geezer besides giving him a super punch so he could shatter the BOB orb?
- Why did it keep going back to Renee in the Roadhouse? Maybe I wasn't following their conversations closely enough, but did she/they serve any purpose at all except maybe as a lead-in to the music acts?
- I did not understand Tim Roth and his girlfriend at all. So they were a pair of assassins who worked for Doppleganger or something? Was there any significance to the guy who killed them, or was that just supposed to be random bad luck?
- What’s the deal with Shelly’s son-in-law Steven? So he’s a cokehead who’s having an affair and then is hiding in the woods in order to kill someone? Or was he going to kill himself and that man just happened to walk by and spook them?
- What was the deal with the couple in the very first episode who decide to have sex and then are killed by the Experiment? I thought whatever was going on there would serve a purpose to the season as a whole (maybe some kind of facility trying to observe or find a way into the Black Lodge?) but aside from Coop briefly passing through when he managed to escape the Black Lodge it didn’t seem to come back again at all?

Other general thoughts:
- I liked most of the Las Vegas characters, although I wasn't entirely sure why that businessman was threatening Dougie's friend in order to kill Dougie, or what purpose Tim Roth & his girlfriend served really. They worked for Doppleganger, but I suppose that brings up another point that I didn't really understand what Doppleganger's deal was - was he supposed to be a small time gang leader? Not really what I had expected BOB would do once he got out.
- I felt like the Dougie plotline went on a bit too long, but it was a good payoff when Coop finally woke up and immediately started taking control of the situation.
- I didn’t really understand Dougie – was he supposed to be a clone of Coop? Near the end Coop says to the one-armed man he needed to make another, so was that suggesting he created Dougie? Was that as an opposite to BOB-Cooper or something? One of the FBI guys said that there was no record of Dougie’s existence before 1991 or whatever, so he must have appeared around the time BOB took over Coop, which suggests maybe an accident or by-product or those events. Does that mean the real Dougie went back to the Black Lodge after Coop came out, or he was an empty vessel who disappeared when Coop came back?
-Episode 8 was a crazy, glorious mindflip. I didn’t honestly understand most of it, but I guess ‘The Experiment’ (which am I right in thinking was also Judy?) was either created by the first atomic blast, or made its way into our world/reality thanks to said blast, and it birthed BOB? Did it do the same for Mike the one-armed man too? As it says in either season 1 or 2 that Mike and BOB used to be partners and Mike was the only person BOB was afraid of. I have no idea of the significance of the frog-insect, the ghostly Woodsmen or the “Got a light” guy.
-The stuff in the Black Lodge was really great. As I said to you the other week on twitter, I would love to watch a full-on horror film directed by Lynch. I should really watch his other works as I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. The noise that Naido (the eyeless woman) made was really creepy, and the first time Coop meets her in episode 2 or 3 where it’s edited with missing frames was really weird and unsettling.
-What purpose did Hastings (Matthew Lillard) serve? I don’t even really understand the breadcrumb trail left by Major Briggs, so I may have missed something.
-I really liked the Mitchum brothers, although I don’t entirely understand what was going on with Candy. Was she just generally dim-witted, or somehow also a product of the Black Lodge?
-I really liked Diane too, although obviously she turns out to be a doppleganger of some kind as well.
-What was the deal with the bleeding guy in the police cells? He seemed like he was mid-way through transforming into a zombie.
-I quite liked the last two episodes. I understood that Coop saved Laura, but rewriting history upset things as it sent Sarah Palmer crazy. Maybe whatever he did didn’t affect her because she was some kind of cosmic entity so she was aware of Coop changing the course of history?

I dunno, man. There’s a lot of stuff going on and a lot of characters, but I mostly felt like it was random things happening to characters with no development and no arcs, and some of those things happened to coalesce into the actual story towards the end with Coop, Doppleganger, Gordon, etc. Although I’m fully open to accept that I may have missed key information, either by not paying attention closely enough or having not known key backstory due to not being a particularly big fan. I dunno. I’m glad I watched it but honestly I’d hoped it would get a neater conclusion than that. Maybe I just don’t know David Lynch well enough given that I expected something clearer and easier to follow.
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3

3rdman

Member
Thought I'd share...Just got this in the mail. One of 100 prints and it was done to raise money for Puerto Rico.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/twin-peaks-meets-scott-pilgrim-puerto-rico-relief-1045360

506015_img20171011114608_460x613.jpg
 
M

mittelos

Member
Did the Twin Peaks community make the jump? Think I saw a few folks from the thread already over at the new site, can anyone get me an invite?
 
L

Linkin112

Member
mittelos said:
Did the Twin Peaks community make the jump? Think I saw a few folks from the thread already over at the new site, can anyone get me an invite?
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There is a Twin Peaks thread on the new forum, but it wasn't a community that got a code. Public registration will happen soon.
 
I

Intheflorsh

Banned
mittelos said:
Did the Twin Peaks community make the jump? Think I saw a few folks from the thread already over at the new site, can anyone get me an invite?
Click to expand...

I don't know if there will be any more invites, but regular registration goes live later tonight. Hope to see you on the new site.
 
chekhonte

chekhonte

Member
Minishdriveby said:
I stopped watching while the show was being aired weekly around episode 9. Personally, the tonal shift between the original seasons' quaint quirky town soap opera with sprinklings of surrealism and The Return's veer into a dark global immersion of Lynch's more surrealist filmography was a huge turn-off. I enjoy Twin Peaks. I enjoy his surrealist films. The mixture of the two became something that was more the latter than the former in my eyes.

Now that the season has finished, and I've decided to come back from my hiatus, mainly to finish the series and cancel my Showtime subscription. I must say the last 5 episodes (10-14) have been very enjoyable. The focus continues to shift between a variety of settings, but it seems to be homing in on the town and characters of Twin Peaks. I still have issues with scenes involving women; there's something that really irks me about this season and its emphasis on violence towards women (seems even more pronounced this season even when considering the show's origin begins with the rape and death of Laura Palmer).

I think the key to enjoyment was to disassociate this with the original series. It's its own thing, a longer and unrestrained Lynch film.

10/8/2017 Edit: Finished watching episode 18. Enjoyed it from Episode 10 to the end. Finale is what I expected since the beginning, an abrupt end with threads hanging. It's fun going back through this thread watching everyone's shock and fury at the ending.
Click to expand...
It's cool to see somebody struggle with this season but start to come around to it. I usually just see people dismiss difficult experiences.
 
Kadayi

Kadayi

Banned
ResurrectedContrarian said:
Any interest in starting up a new Twin Peaks OT?
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Is there much to discuss now that the series has concluded and the final Dossier was released? I know that there are loose rumours of Lynch and Frost maybe doing more but in truth, I'm kind of ok with how it ended and albeit I enjoyed the return, I'm happy to just put the characters to rest. In all honesty, I'd love to see Lynch just go all out on a new TV series without necessarily any baggage tying him down.
 
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