Wow. Sorry about that last post. Somehow it got really screwed up, and the editing period timed out while I was trying to fix it. Hopefully I got my point across.
I just checked it myself, and I definitely think it’s Sarah’s voice from the pilot. It sounds like Lynch digitally stretched it—in the pilot, it’s just “Laura!” but in the final scene, it’s drawn out and sounds more like “Laaauraaa!” The pitch of the voice sounds the same to me in both cases.
The whole series was essentially a rumination on Lynch’s entire career and art. There were obvious parallels to his other films and paintings. He also was quite emphatic on the theme of dreamers who dream within dreams, but who is the dreamer? The show also became quite meta. The owner of Laura’s house was the real owner. The Log Lady and her fate was shared by Catherine Coulson. Audrey was constantly talking about her lover, Billy (could it be Zane from the original series? The clue might be Eddie Vedder performing under his real name and the mention of “Audrey’s Dance”, which is the actual name of the track). And it goes on.
But the ultimate clue was in Lynch’s information dump. He explained that Judy, or jiāodāi, was an experiment and an extreme negative force. It was the “ultimate evil” in Lynch’s world. Well, Lynch has been trolling us for years. “We are NOT going to talk about Judy,” says Phillip Jeffries. Why not? 交待 or jiāodāi is Chinese for “To Explain.” Lynch is notorious for not explaining his art so take it how you will. He purposefully filled this show with Lynchian Red Herrings which had us over-analyzing for weeks. WE were the ones watching the glass box and recording everything instead of just letting it wash over us. It turned out to be the biggest shaggy dog story of all time. Dreams are not meant to be explained.
I think, really, the big question at this point is: Would we want a fourth season?
It sounds like the show was a success for Showtime. Maybe not “phenomenon” level, but it’s not like you need to only fund enough shows to fill prime time anymore. If something has an audience and the showrunner can bring it in, on budget, and you can set the budget so that it’s a guaranteed profit, there’s really no reason not to give the green light.
I suspect that if we, the viewers, ask for more then it’s really just a question of whether Lynch and Frost want to do it. I imagine that Frost would want to, since I think he’s mostly a normal, profit-minded individual and guaranteed employment is a lovely thing in the creative industry. Lynch? Who knows? Probably not worth speculating on.
Now, personally, to answer the question, I’d like to see another season.
I’ll admit that there was no moment of magic in the new series for me. It was an interesting show and it seemed like it almost was going to do something great at some moments, but it didn’t compare to Lynch’s older works.
However, I feel like a large part of that is simply that he had too much ground to cover. The series tried to revisit everyone in the old series, but outside of getting Norma and Big Ed together by putting Jacobi and Nadine together, it didn’t really provide any story for them and (more importantly) didn’t provide any new characterization with them. Hawk was just Hawk. Andy was just Andy. Bobby was…well, just there.
There was nothing really to remind us that Big Ed and Norma were a 25 year passion. We just had to remember from the old show and still carry that desire over. Maybe because I didn’t rewatch the old show, it didn’t. I knew, intellectually, that it was a big thing for them to come together, but there wasn’t sufficient setup just within season 3 to make it pay off and the climax wasn’t done big enough to sell me on it either.
I have no idea who Janey-e is. She’s a beautiful woman who has a Latino kid and is married to an overweight mentally handicapped man with gambling and prostitution addictions and doesn’t seem to think there’s anything particularly alarming about any of his behavior. There’s no indication that he used to be lovable and great. No indication that she’s deeply religious and just believes she needs to stick by him no matter what. None of her actions in any scene make any sort of sense. She ends up just as much a mystery character as Candie, despite a decent amount of screen time and dialogue.
In the original series, they were often parodying Soap Operas. We understood that these were cut-out figure characters populating the show and it was sort of interesting to see them subjected to the weird events and mysteries of Laura Palmer’s death.
If they were trying to continue that in the new show, it didn’t really work. But I don’t much get the sense that they were. I think it’s more that they didn’t have anything new to say with the old characters but couldn’t spend time developing the new characters sufficiently because they wanted to go back to the old ones and let us know what they were up to.
Which all might sound quite negative, but I feel like the fact that the season 3 was as good as it is, despite this problem, leaves me hopeful that a Lynch show which didn’t have to lug along the weight of the old Twin Peaks, could still be really good. Having now resolved everything he wanted to resolve and trashed it also in a big dimensional buffer wipe, he’s gotten to a place where the next series could start fresh with new characters, new places, and be able to spend the time developing them.
Now, granted, I expect a lot of people would want a season 4 to explain the (many) mysteries of season 3. But personally I would rather accept the giant reset button and move forward.
I genuinely have no idea what a season 4 would involve. But it would be a stretch for it to continue on most of anything from season 3. And, personally, I think that leaves Lynch in the best possible place to work from.
But I have to know what happened to Wally!!?!:smack:
I have been a Lynch fan. Saw all of his stuff in the 90s, recruited new followers, even read Lynch on Lynch and maybe another book on his work. Watched Twin Peaks S1-2 probably three times start to finish.
So Twin Peaks Season 3. I was supposed to get it. It was mostly lost on me. My overall review is: “What episodes 5-15* are you talking about?”. (*OK #8 was there. for whatever it was.) I pretty much hated The Dougie Jones Show. Episodes 1-2 had me enthralled. Ep 3-4: “hmm. meh.”, by Ep 5 I was doing something else while it was on for almost the rest of the ride. There were some real gems, and there was also a lot of crap IMO (super glove kid? wtf. and not even the most wtf part).
I was majorly disappointed that “our” Cooper only actually got about 4 lines in the last 2 episodes. The whole end sequence had me thinking it was The Bad Dale. Still not sure. I clapped when Lucy shot Bad Dale. That was good TV.
One thing I took away from reading about him way back when… Uncanny. He kind of said his goal is to inspire the feeling of “uncanny” in his viewers. He and that word are bound in my head because of that book. Making people feel something different comes first. Sometimes a story that makes sense can help with that, sometimes it is just a matter of buzzing and whirring and blurry confused faces in the smoke. Or Laura’s scream, jesus. Or Grace Zabriskie:eek:
I liked it. I’m glad they made it. I felt uncanny. But I can’t help but wonder what if he had left TP alone and done 18 hours of some original who knows what instead…
We saw that. It was called Inland Empire. I didn’t mind the film in the theater as a captive audience but I have not been able to watch it at home. I know I could not watch 18 hours of Inland Empire.
I haven’t seen it, but I do note that Lynch has directed a wide variety of films (and TV). Eraserhead is not much like Blue Velvet and neither of those is much like Dune or the Straight Story nor The Elephant Man. Twin Peaks the original series is not much like Fire Walk With Me nor are either of them similar to the new series.
Since he has already made Inland Empire, I wouldn’t expect him to do it again as a show.
If you haven’t seen Inland Empire, then it’s kind of hard to understand my reference to it. You listed the anomalies in his career. There’s a definite progression in his films from Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire. Over time, he became less interested in coherent storylines and consistent characters in favor of dream-driven obfuscation and doppelgangers. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but Inland Empire is unfiltered Lynch where he succumbs to his worst instincts. 3 1/2 hours of pretty much every bad thing for which Lynch has ever been criticized. My point was more that with the restraints of a pre-existing world where we knew the characters we got a meandering story with red herring characters and situations with bare acknowledgement of the ones we knew.
Maybe he could attract interest with something else now but this one had to be TP.
A Lynch series that was not TP would not have had the years of excitement and speculation leading up to it, and it wouldn’t have led to a large amount of Showtime and streaming signups. Very few people would have even known who he is if it weren’t for TP.
I’ve enjoyed some of his other things. I liked Eraserhead, possibly his weirdest creation.
On the other hand. I’ve watched Mulholland Drive several times, trying to understand it. I know it’s a fan favorite, but honestly I just find it confusing.
I haven’t seen Inland Empire but I intend to check it out.
I really liked Elephant Man, but it’s a very mainstream non-Lynchian movie.
Getting back to TP, I found episode 8 to be mostly boring. I have mixed feelings about the ending. But I definitely enjoyed most of it.
I guess I waver between the man being a genius or just someone who creates confusing nonsense that people mistake for art.
Maybe he’s both, or maybe the idea of something being “mistaken for art” isn’t even a meaningful idea. If someone thinks something is art then to them it’s art.
Maybe I’m just rambling.
It’s over, I loved it.
I nearly fell out of my chair when Diane looked out of the car window at the motel and saw … another Diane. I think that was the moment that Diane knew that what she and Cooper were attempting wasn’t going to pan out.
I wasn’t really expecting a happy ending, but was maybe a little surprised it was so sad. Not even so much the actual events, but that the show let us think for a while (and we had a while to think on it during the drive) that there was a possibly that Sarah would get some sort of reunion, if even a supernatural one, with Laura.
As always, I think Lynch is terrific at what he does. His meticulous technical work – the cinematography and the sound, is the invisible hook. I know sometimes people, including his fans, are frustrated by the lack of clear explanations, but I think the reason viewers are so emotionally invested in the first place is due to his hyperreal style that you really just don’t find in a lot of other places, especially on TV. It’s so visceral. The feeling of discomfort that you get from watching two people drive in a car in the dark without speaking FOR A LONG TIME is what Lynch delivers like no one else, and it is his primary goal. Not that other people would be incapable of it – but I think Lynch is pretty distinguished in that this element of his filmmaking has been his interest from the beginning of his career, and he has successfully stuck to it, despite financial and critical incentive to do less driving silently in the dark, and more explaining what is going on.
Lynch says that there could be a fourth season but if there is it would take years to make.
He doesn’t have another 25 years. Neither do many of his fans, nor his actors.
If he doesn’t do it soon he should just leave well enough alone.
In the article, when asked about Audrey, he said that each of us have to decide for ourselves what her fate was. Thats pretty much what I thought his intention was.
While I’ll grant that there’s something to be said for having a single author to a work, I don’t know that it’s worth spending 4.5 years just to write 18 hours worth of film script. I’m sure that I could track down a couple of screenwriters who could do a good job of helping to develop the scripts (and probably help to punch it up just a bit for the audience as well).
E.g.:
Nathan Parker - Screenwriter for Moon
Mark Romanek - Writer/director of One Hour Photo
We unfortunately saw what other writers did to it in season 2. Granted, they may just have been the wrong writers.
I wonder if maybe there is a fourth season planned and we’re just being teased. Lynch does know how to stir up public interest and discussion.
If there is another season, It seems like it might be even less like TP than the third season was, and more like Sliders, or Back to The Future; with Dale and Laura jumping around in time and space trying to set things right or save the universe or something.
The entire original story has been wiped clean.
Or maybe it will be a sitcom starring Dougie, Janey-E, Sonny Jim, Bushnell Mullins, the Mitchum brothers, and Candie, Mandie, and Sandie. Maybe with Ike the Spike as their evil nemesis who is constantly foiled by Dougie. Instead of “honey, I’m home!” Dougie would come in and say “hellloooooooo”. 
In fact, Lynch and Frost’s immediate follow up to the original Twin Peaks was a sitcom, a rather peculiar little number called On The Air about a wacky TV station in the 50s. It was not well-received.
You may judge for yourself if critical reappraisement is likely.
Myself, I love the Hurry-up Twins.
Bumped.
Twin Peaks cocreator Mark Frost will be interviewed on PBS’s On Story on June 10 - check local listings: https://www.kued.org/whatson/story/conversation-with-mark-frost
Thanks! Should be interesting.
Bumped.
It’ll air again on PBS on March 3.
No kidding! I missed seeing this in the listings.
PBS…there must be an interesting story there. I can’t think of any other Showtime series that ended up on PBS (though maybe I’m just poorly informed).
I am very glad this series was made. Episode eight was transcendent. But I also loved a lot of other parts of the series, even the extended time with Dougie and especially some of the other weird new characters like the crime boss brothers and their girls in pink, the Tarantinoesque hitmen couple, the accountant with the submachine gun, Jeffries as giant teakettle, and on and on. And Kyle McLachlan was robbed of a much-deserved Emmy for the genius acting work with different doppelgänger characters.
I also loved the last few seconds of the finale, which gave me literal goosebumps, and appreciated the long cut to black, reminiscent of the end of the Sopranos (another ending I really liked even as many others were frustrated by it).
But most of the rest of that two hour finale was just not very watchable. I’m not so much bothered by the lack of answers in most cases (although you do have to wonder why we wasted time with Audrey having annoying and pointless arguments with her husband), but the finale was just mostly boring and felt like a lot of filler.
I will go back and rewatch many parts of this but not the last part.
I’m with you on that one. ‘TP The Return’ is a great achievement, but the way Lynch chose to end it is a stain on the work as a whole.