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Post by Digi on Jun 27, 2017 0:21:13 GMT
If Luis Buñuel made a film about the evils of nuclear weaponry, it would be this weeks episode. One of the darkest, most disturbing things I've seen. The creation of BOB and the birth - or rebirth - of Laura Palmer being direct results of spirits responding to the nuclear testing on Earth is just...wow. The military aspect has been coming into play this year - we had Major Briggs in the original show of course - but it's all starting to tie together now in the most odd, fascinating ways possible. Is that how we're reading this one? I got to the end wonder what the hell I just watched... I'll admit to being a little bored through the 715 hours of explosion montage, but once we settled into the haunting purple-tinted sea, the island with its weird structure, B&W interior with The Giant and so on, I was fixated. I don't know what I watched, but I was fixated.
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Post by Digi on Jun 27, 2017 11:41:05 GMT
Some tweets about episode 8:
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Post by Digi on Jun 27, 2017 12:01:54 GMT
Morning thoughts: Is BOB just one part of the evil of the Black Lodge? Or is he the Black Lodge's evil/darkness distilled and squeezed out into our world? And contrarily: Having now seen Laura Palmer('s face) borne out of The Giant's head/realm as bright colour in the B&W, seemingly in reaction to the creation/emergence of BOB, is she perhaps the good 'yang' to BOB's 'yin'? Not that Lynch is ever simplistic. Just thinking out loud. Also been thinking ever since the first couple episodes of this season that maybe the White/Black Lodge idea (as outlined during the original run) is a bit too simplistic a dichotomy. It seems to be one completely other realm (or perhaps many), with the Waiting Room just the nexus point between our world and that one. If I remember right, the whole idea of White/Black Lodges was described as being aboriginal legend, so could be that the binary conception of 'the other place' as being either good or evil is just a human conceit, from people who didn't grasp what it was? (Not that we do either but you know what I mean)
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Post by agentten on Jun 27, 2017 19:48:36 GMT
Episode 8 . . . dear Lord. I already loved the way the mysteries of the show were building and coming together, but episode 8 stunned me. It is as daring, beautiful, and frightening as anything Lynch has put on a screen.
I'm going off of one viewing and I'll be watching again soon, but here are some thoughts:
- Based on what we know of the owl cave map and the Native American legends that the show has discussed, it seems that many of the other worldly entities that we've met on the show have been visiting Earth for long time, however Bob and certain other spirits are more recent, having spilled into our world when the 1945 nuclear blast ripped open a new corridor between worlds. This would tie in with Mike telling Cooper in the original series that Bob has been with them for nearly 40 years. - Laura seems to be some kind of counterpoint to Bob that The Giant sends to Earth. The story is ultimately the playing out of a cosmic war between good and evil, with Twin Peaks being the focal point. - The woodsmen who descend on the desert are shabbily dressed and burnt looking, as though they passed through the fire and are now homeless in their new dimension. - This episode is the third time that we've had our attention drawn to a coin. The penny that the girl in 1956 finds is clearly connected, at least symbolically, with the coin that leads Hawk to the missing diary pages and the coin that Red uses in his magic trick (and with the general theme of money this season). - I used to think of the white horse that Sarah Palmer would see as an hallucination that was the result of the drug she was unknowingly dosed with, but seeing the horse appear earlier this season in the red room and now the references to horses in this episode (particularly in the ritual chant from the end of the episode) makes me re-evaluate that assumption. - Bob (and Laura) have always been associated with fire, but now that fire takes on a whole additional level of meaning. Bob is literally born of man's dalliance with nuclear fire. - The creature from the glass box and the creature that expels Bob into our world seem to be the same. I'm thinking that it's the "mother" that is referenced in the third episode in the pink room. - The other elements that the spirits are often associated with, electricity, radio waves, and scorched engine oil, are, like the nuclear bomb, part of modernity, suggesting that humankind drew all of this evil by meddling with the primal forces of nature. - There is a large photo of a nuclear blast in Gordon Cole's office. Does he know even more about the blue rose cases than we thought?
What a rich and deepening tapestry the show is. I'm so impressed with how much Lynch and Frost have pushed the mythology of the show forward this season.
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Post by christmastrenzalore on Jun 27, 2017 21:39:47 GMT
So the Water Well mantra, is that about man consuming their surroundings while slowly dooming themselves?
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Post by elkawho on Jun 27, 2017 22:37:12 GMT
Thank you all for helping me start to make sense of this one. I watched it last night and have been thinking about it all day. I woke up this morning feeling completely torn and trying to find meaning in this episode and having difficulty fitting my thoughts together. This is how I was feeling a little while ago and sent it in a message to another forum member.
Ok, so here's what I think. It was beautiful, fascinating, powerful and horrific. It's a piece of art that is rarely seen on TV. But as part of a narrative? I'm not so sure. Maybe my mind is too focused on story-driven characters and situations, I don't know. I think to fully put this particular episode in context I will have to wait until the entire thing is over. Or maybe trying to put it in context is the wrong way to go about it. This is why I said that I'm torn. I do understand that Lynch is focused around the style, atmosphere and visual nature of his work, that at times it eclipses the narrative. So I'm waiting to see how this pans out.
But you folks are helping me find the narrative hook in an immensely stunning piece of work. I need to watch it again on a better TV as well. I watched it on an old vacuum tube television and I actually think I missed some things because of it. And I still think we won't truly understand this episode until we see where Lynch and Frost decide to take us from here.
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Post by elkawho on Jun 27, 2017 22:37:42 GMT
If Luis Buñuel made a film about the evils of nuclear weaponry, it would be this weeks episode. One of the darkest, most disturbing things I've seen. The creation of BOB and the birth - or rebirth - of Laura Palmer being direct results of spirits responding to the nuclear testing on Earth is just...wow. The military aspect has been coming into play this year - we had Major Briggs in the original show of course - but it's all starting to tie together now in the most odd, fascinating ways possible. Is that how we're reading this one? I got to the end wonder what the hell I just watched... I'll admit to being a little bored through the 715 hours of explosion montage, but once we settled into the haunting purple-tinted sea, the island with its weird structure, B&W interior with The Giant and so on, I was fixated. I don't know what I watched, but I was fixated. I felt exactly the same.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2017 23:00:17 GMT
Lynch had to fight Showtime for 18 eps, they wanted a lot less. It's easy to imagine it's ones like this week that had some suits panicking. He did walk away for a few months so not only is it a miracle that the show came back, it's a miracle the prouction didn't collapse. A few of the cast were on social media saying is Lynch left, so woudl they. Thank God that all got resolved! Kyle Mac says that the script he was given was one huge tome rather than 18 scripts so if Lynch and Frost wrote this as a piece it's easy to see why Lynch was unwilling to compromise on it. As Elka says, the events that unfold will help us to translate it more and more as time goes by. This episode is a series of keys but we don't know what for yet. Being Twin Peaks and being directed by Lynch we'll get answers, we won't get them all and we may not understand all of them. But we'll get them. We'll also get more questions. FWIW, a LOT of the context of this season is from the Secret History of Twin Peaks novel Frost wrote last year - it's heavy-going in places but teeming with mythology. It's informing quite a bit of this run. The audiobook is read by most of the regular cast. I'd have said it's good for fans but increasingly it's essential! Also the deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me - the Missing Pieces as they're known on the bluray - they're playing a role too.
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Post by kimalysong on Jun 28, 2017 2:22:46 GMT
I just started the episode but the scene when all those "spirits" come out and dance around the Evil!Coop's body reminded me of a Silent German expressionism film
It also scared the bejeesus out of me so now I'll probably have nightmares.
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Post by elkawho on Jun 28, 2017 11:34:27 GMT
I'm now listening to The Secret History Of Twin Peaks. To be honest, I'm glad I'm listening to the audiobook. As @davygallagher says, it really heavy-going at times and I don't think I'd be able to get through it if I was just reading it.
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Post by Digi on Jun 28, 2017 12:01:41 GMT
Well, thanks to this thread, I've just bought the audiobooks of "The Secret History of Twin Peaks," "The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer," and "'Diane...': The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper." Thanks a lot, jerks
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Post by Deleted on Jun 28, 2017 15:54:29 GMT
Well.
That was a thing that I just watched.
I'm not sure what, but definitely a thing.
Ehhm
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Post by kimalysong on Jun 28, 2017 21:48:49 GMT
I loved this episode couldn't keep my eyes away from it. That being said I couldn't sit through a whole series of this.
And this is exactly why I don't sleep with my windows open lol.
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melkur
Chancellery Guard
Likes: 3,964
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Post by melkur on Jun 29, 2017 1:18:04 GMT
Huh, looks like I'm going to have to give this week's episode a rewatch as most of that seems to have gone right past me!
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Post by christmastrenzalore on Jun 29, 2017 21:38:58 GMT
This was quite amusing:
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Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2017 21:43:05 GMT
Yeah, that's on a few of the boxsets too - great stuff. All about Phil Hartman as Leland for me.
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Post by agentten on Jun 30, 2017 1:55:45 GMT
Mike Myers as the Little Man From Another Place makes me laugh out loud every time. Funny to see a really young Conan O'Brien pop up in the skit, too. Classic skit from a classic era of SNL.
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Post by Digi on Jul 11, 2017 13:05:56 GMT
So, bit of a return to 'normal' this week then. But finally starting to see some of the threads drawn together! A reason for the story in Buckhorn, some explanation of the headless body (and by extension, the floating Don S Davis head in the void outside the steel box that Cooper saw), and perhaps nicest of all: some lovely character moments revisiting Bobby and his mum, and Andy and Lucy One thing (ha) I'm still having trouble figuring out the significance of are these random scenes in the Roadhouse we keep getting, like this week's conversation between the blonde meth head and her friend (dealer?), or the previous ones with the aggressive smoker guy, or Shelly lthere looking across the bar at James, and the others I'm not remembering offhand. Are these adding up to something, or are they just meant as 'slices of life' in Twin Peaks?
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Post by agentten on Jul 12, 2017 3:44:47 GMT
So, bit of a return to 'normal' this week then. But finally starting to see some of the threads drawn together! A reason for the story in Buckhorn, some explanation of the headless body (and by extension, the floating Don S Davis head in the void outside the steel box that Cooper saw), and perhaps nicest of all: some lovely character moments revisiting Bobby and his mum, and Andy and Lucy One thing (ha) I'm still having trouble figuring out the significance of are these random scenes in the Roadhouse we keep getting, like this week's conversation between the blonde meth head and her friend (dealer?), or the previous ones with the aggressive smoker guy, or Shelly lthere looking across the bar at James, and the others I'm not remembering offhand. Are these adding up to something, or are they just meant as 'slices of life' in Twin Peaks? It's so hard to say with this season what is going to add up to something. As we saw in this episode, a lot of things are coming together and there are several things such as the floating head you mention, that might just seem odd on first pass, but which are now coming together in meaningful ways. It's a show to watch carefully, without a doubt. I read an article on Vulture recently that named The Return as the best show of the season and one of the points the writer made about the show is how it's teaching you how to watch it as you watch it. I think that's a really good way to put it. No detail is unimportant. Are Jerry Horne's misadventures in the woods comic relief, or are they adding up to something? I don't know, but I do know that you can't rule anything out with this show. That said, I do think there are many slices of life to be enjoyed this season. There's certainly a lot of scenes such as the diner scene at the end of episode seven or the Andy and Lucy chair scene in this week's episode which seem to not apply to the central mysteries of the show, but then you start to notice little things about those scenes that make you pause such as all the talk about temporal discontinuity in the diner scene or the mirroring of Andy and Lucy's chair with the Briggs chair. On the subject of the Roadhouse scene with the drug enthusiast girls: this is just a wild theory, but the rash is probably the central take away from that scene and it had me thinking about what kinds of potential effects the town might be feeling. We know from Brigg's note that was found this week that the doorway to the Black Lodge is about to open again. Could it be affecting the town in peculiar ways? The last time it opened, 25 years ago, we saw people getting the shakes. The other thing that occurs to me is that it might be a symptom of the new designer drug that Red is bringing into Twin Peaks. One other thought about this week: Lucy thought the Log Lady's prophesy to Hawk was about the bunny she ate. After some consideration, Hawk decided that it wasn't about the bunny. One of the funniest scenes of the season so far, but you know what? Brigg's note instructs Bobby to go to Jack Rabbit's Palace where presumably a major key to the mystery will be discovered. In other words, it *IS* about the bunny. Lucy solved the mystery of Agent Cooper's return.
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Post by Digi on Jul 21, 2017 23:53:07 GMT
So, more pieces coming together.
Richard, Mr Anger Management who ran over the kid a couple episodes back, is the grandchild of Benjamin and Sylvia Horne. And as Johnny is mentally challenged, it stands to reason that Richard is Audrey's son.
Tom Sizemore's character appears to be in the employ of that Fredo-looking guy (I can't remember his name) who works in the corner office in Vegas. Fredo works for Evil Cooper/BOB, so it's really a very short degrees-of-separation between Evil Cooper/BOB and still-derpy Good Cooper.
Couple things that I've only put together by poking around online:
A few episodes back, when we had one end with a Roadhouse scene where some brat is smoking in the booth and refuses to put it out, then he gives a cigarette pack full of money to some guy who joins him? Yeah, smoker was Richard. And the guy who joined him was Chad, the crooked cop with the beard.
And the woman that Richard beat the hell out of and left to die in a gas explosion, Miriam? She was the heavyset lady at the Double R a few episodes back, the one who Heidi and Audrey know as a regular and who left behind a generous tip that they commented she can't afford.
I seem to recall (I can't remember if it was mentioned in an episode or if it was in the Secret History book) that Cooper visited Audrey in the hospital after she was hurt in the bank bombing in the finale of the original series. Not outside the realm of possibility, then, that Richard may be the child of Audrey and Evil Cooper/BOB.
I can't wait to get this show on Blu and spend a weekend watching it all in one go.
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