Twin Peaks Rewatch 52/53: The Return, Parts 17 and 18

[Emily]

I think I like FilmCriticHulk's interpretation of Judy best, when he says: 

"There’s an image from the finale that’s burned into my brain. It’s when Teapot Phillip Jeffries takes the Owl Cave Ring sign and turns it into the infinity symbol as the small ball curls through it. I already mentioned how it reflects the changing scope of the narrative, but it also reflects the cycle of getting trapped in abuse. We travel along the infinity symbol, treated to the unending layers and layers of obfuscation, never realizing we are carving the same path again and again. To me, this is “Judy,” our negative force. It traps us in the belief that all this will go on and on, ad infinitum, forever and ever. It is to look at all of the despair and abuse in the world and see hell unending. There is no entity more dark"

 

From his Episode 17/18 recap - http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/twin-peaks-the-return-finale-recap.html

 

If you care about all the different numbers being thrown around in the show, fatecolossal has a really interesting twitter thread in which they break down what Cooper might mean when he says "What year is this?" at the end. 

 

 

Between these two theories, I think what Cooper might have intended by bringing Laura home was for her to face the trauma that she experienced all those years ago. To come to terms with it and bring an end to her suffering. He did, after all, think he was taking her to Sarah Palmer, who seems to have a strong connection to the malevolent force of "Judy". But Cooper is baffled when they don't meet Sarah and instead find someone else. "What year is this?" The numbers don't add up. There is a glimmer of hope when it seems that Carrie Page has awoken the memories of Laura but that is all we get to see. And perhaps that is all we are meant to see. There is always an element of uncertainty when Twin Peaks reaches a conclusion, and maybe that is simply the state Twin Peaks exists in. FilmCriticHulk's analysis is worth reading in full but I'll quote it again once more: 

"This is the forever state of Twin Peaks. Whether it’s waiting a week or 25 years, the cycles of plots and cliffhangers and expectations meet at the nexus of ad infinitum, the same way forever, over and over again. It’s frustrating because we may never get “out” of it through resolution or definitive ending. But like life itself, there is only that which may come to be, and that which is cut down before its time. We are the trapped magicians, longing to see between two worlds, to see through time and what the future of a show may bring. We are the ones who risk being burned by the fire itself."

[Crunchnoisy]

Freddy!  Not James! 

I love it.

 

My favorite thing at the moment is Freddy.

 

James could have been The Hero in a conventional narrative. All the pieces are in place across the corpus of the show.  It would have been an excellent arc.  Everything Freddy did could have been written for James (they were literally standing next to each other for all of Freddy's scenes). 

 

But Frost and Lynch were having none, none of that.  All of the heroes, all possible tidy arcs, are subverted.  And in these final two eps, we were instead given much needed additional emotional resonance.

 

Very happy.

 

Also, maybe Freddy is James' Tulpa.  Or what James dreams of being.

 

[SkullKid]

7 hours ago, The Great Went said:

 

Yeah, it seemed kinda like Episode 17 was Mark Frost's finale and 18 was Lynch's. 

I don't know about that. Frost said in an interview that it took Lynch and him a full year to write the first two hours of the show. Those first two hours are FULL of clues that don't pay off until part 18. So I think the actual interlocking mystery parts of this season are totally Frost. I do think it's safe to say that he didn't anticipate 10 cumulative minutes of just driving, though. 

[Crunchnoisy]

34 minutes ago, SkullKid said:

 I do think it's safe to say that he didn't anticipate 10 cumulative minutes of just driving, though. 

 

So one might say that Coop was the driving force behind the finale. 

[Gamebeast23456]

Can't wait for the equal length Twin Peaks: The Return: The Missing Pieces that includes all the footage that explains all the plot arcs that totally disappear. 

[prangman]

10 hours ago, Nordelnob said:

 But the entire tone of the that last episode was deliberately empty and maybe there's a better adjective... down, depressing. Coop is now no longer the happy vibrant person he was. Diane is having rape trauma and leaves him.

When you put it like that, it seems ridiculous to suggest it could have happened any other way. Whether Dale Cooper literally spent 25 years out of time and existence, or just came out of the black lodge and became a murderous criminal and rapist, what else could he be as he approaches his 60s other than empty, damaged and alone, and on a quixotic quest to right a wrong (laura's murder) which is irreversible and from which, like many trauma victims, he can never move on. It's the most psychologically true outcome.

[SkullKid]

The thing that's really stuck in my head is the image of Diane seeing herself at the motel after Cooper walked inside. Since this purgatorial place seems to take place outside of time, maybe multiple versions of oneself can exist. Maybe a Bad Cooper walked out of that motel and got in the car with that Diane, whereas a Good Cooper (though one still not entirely in control of his mental faculties) walked out and got in a different car with that *other* Diane. The sex scene we see features Bad Coop, whereas somewhere off screen, another Coop and Diane share a similar romantic moment. Basically, the Coop we see wake up in the morning and yell for Diane is not the same Coop that we saw in the sex scene. 

 

It's as if the same thing keeps happening in this same place over and over, in slightly different ways. 

 

But probably not. I feel like there's a simple answer to all this buried underneath Lynch's artistic flourishes. 

[LostInTheMovies]

tfw when you were carefully visiting one page at a time and/or not going past stuff you'd stopped at before and suddenly all threads are marked as "read" and you don't know why and know you've lost track of what you've read and where you were.

 

 

Anyway, been great keeping tabs on this forum. It was busy yet just contained enough for me to follow everything so I ended up spending a lot more time here than dugpa and reddit, which could get overwhelming. And can't wait to hear Chris and Jake on this two-parter. As I said on Twitter, I can't think of anything more in their wheelhouse than deep-diving into the wild juxtaposition between super-lore-y comic-book showdown and existential avant-garde road trip (and everything else in between).

[LostInTheMovies]

On 9/4/2017 at 8:54 AM, Emily said:

I don't normally go in on this kind of specific interpretation of the lore but is it possible that the Cooper we see at the end (Richard) is the "complete" Cooper? If you take the differences between Dale Cooper and Mr. C to be the literal embodiment of good vs evil, perhaps the Cooper that arrived at the beginning of the original show was already acting as one half of a whole person. Part of what draws us to that character in the original show is his eccentric warmth and overwhelming capacity for kindness. As I was trying to sleep after the finale last night I was thinking of all the times Phillip Jeffries encounters Coop and the doubts he has about whether he's speaking to the real Cooper, as far as back as FWWM when Cooper hasn't yet arrived in Twin Peaks.

 

I'm probably way off but it's something that my mind was mulling over as I was trying to take in everything that finale gave us. 

 

This is a good point, because when Cooper awoke in the hospital and was very apparently the full character we knew from s1/s2 I thought, "Well there goes the (more interesting to me) idea that good and evil Cooper are both parts of a singular whole." But maybe in a way the Cooper we're seeing in Pt. 18 is the "real" Coop to the extent "real" has meaning in a show that blurs so many boundaries? Only real counter to this idea is that in s2 they were already trying to show Coop as a flawed individual leading up to his downfall in the finale.

[Nordelnob]

1 hour ago, SkullKid said:

The thing that's really stuck in my head is the image of Diane seeing herself at the motel after Cooper walked inside. Since this purgatorial place seems to take place outside of time, maybe multiple versions of oneself can exist. Maybe a Bad Cooper walked out of that motel and got in the car with that Diane, whereas a Good Cooper (though one still not entirely in control of his mental faculties) walked out and got in a different car with that *other* Diane. The sex scene we see features Bad Coop, whereas somewhere off screen, another Coop and Diane share a similar romantic moment. Basically, the Coop we see wake up in the morning and yell for Diane is not the same Coop that we saw in the sex scene. 

 

It's as if the same thing keeps happening in this same place over and over, in slightly different ways. 

 

But probably not. I feel like there's a simple answer to all this buried underneath Lynch's artistic flourishes. 

I wouldn't dismiss it so fast. I've gotten the same or a very similar feeling. This entire season seems to have been about multiple or alternate realities/dimensions/planes of existence. And there seem to be little hints. Particularly whenever two shots dissolve and overlap and separate from each other (this happens quite often when there is some otherworldly force nearby or important cosmic events, etc.., for instance when Cooper asked Freddy if he was Freddy). When the minute hand on the clock in the Sheriff's station went both backwards and forwards and they did that dissolve where both shots are on top of each other. It seems to imply that the two realities that are supposed to by one are diverging. The literal world where things runs forwards, and the dream world where at least in the lodge, things seem to run backwards. And there have been a couple that I've noticed with Cooper.

 

12 minutes ago, LostInTheMovies said:

This is a good point, because when Cooper awoke in the hospital and was very apparently the full character we knew from s1/s2 I thought, "Well there goes the (more interesting to me) idea that good and evil Cooper are both parts of a singular whole." But maybe in a way the Cooper we're seeing in Pt. 18 is the "real" Coop to the extent "real" has meaning in a show that blurs so many boundaries? Only real counter to this idea is that in s2 they were already trying to show Coop as a flawed individual leading up to his downfall in the finale.

I doesn't quite wash literally. But thematically it kind of makes sense.

[plasticflesh]

 

The driving scenes remind me of the 1972 Solaris, where highway photography was used as the imagery for when the characters make their journey from earth to the Solaris planet.

 

 

 

[LostInTheMovies]

On 9/4/2017 at 9:06 AM, Hansel Bosch said:

 

If that's true, then Kyle MacLachlan played no less that six versions of Cooper this season!

 

1. Passive Cooper trapped in the red room

2. Mr. C

3. The "real" Dougie Jones

4. Cooper trapped in Dougie's body

5. The returned Dale Cooper

6. The Cooper/Mr. C amalgam you mentioned

 

If nothing else, MacLachlan has done a fantastic job this season differentiating between these characters.

 

(Personally, I hate the idea that the good Cooper, the boy scout Cooper from the first two seasons , was not the real one, and is replaced with the somewhat morose and confused Cooper we saw in Episode Eighteen. But the finale certainly implies that's what happened, at least in whatever alternate reality has ended up in.)

 

 

EDIT: Maybe there are actually seven versions of Cooper! The second tulpa greeted by Janey-E, created by "good" Cooper from his hair, may be different from the tulpa created from Dark Cooper.

 

 

 

 

Don't forget the second version of Dougie (who seems pretty different from the first) who returns to Janey-E and Sonny Jim at the beginning of pt18!

[LostInTheMovies]

9 minutes ago, plasticflesh said:

 

The driving scenes remind me of the 1972 Solaris, where highway photography was used as the imagery for when the characters make their journey from earth to the Solaris planet.

 

 

 

 

Interesting, Stalker has been coming up a lot on Twitter.

[Nordelnob]

3 minutes ago, LostInTheMovies said:

 

Don't forget the second version of Dougie (who seems pretty different from the first) who returns to Janey-E and Sonny Jim at the beginning of pt18!

Happy Coop! Or as I like to call him Dougie 2.0

He seems to be the part of Cooper that is his wonder and almost childlike curiosity about everything around him. The side of Cooper who asked Truman about the trees in the first episode.

[lethalenforcer]

 

12 hours ago, Jake said:

I don't know how or why, but it doesn't seem like he actually changed the past, but found himself in a wholly separate timeline? Presumably the Twin Peaks we know still exists somewhere but Cooper is, once again, not in it?

 

This is where I think I've landed, although still ambiguous and full of questions. I haven't had the benefit of rewatching 17/18 yet, but were all of the alt-TP scenes that showed Pete/Josie/Catherine in a reality where there was no Laura body on shore only present while Cooper had Laura's hand in the forest? Meaning, this reality was only going to occur if he never lost her grip? I also just realized that those flashbacks were fully saturated, perhaps symbolizing the "light" of that potential timeline if the darkness never ascended upon TP via Laura's death (although you can say it was still in fact there, a la Leyland, Sarah, etc).

 

 

12 hours ago, Mentalgongfu said:

This is perhaps a little off topic, but of the all the people who are feeling jaded at the finale, Julee Cruise is with you.

 

It sounds like she was miffed that they only showed a portion of her performance... sour grapes. Granted we don't know the full story, and perhaps Lynch did indeed treat her poorly, but I think I'm ok with Julee Cruise being "done with TP".

 

 

12 hours ago, Mentalgongfu said:

I'm still not sure where I'll land in my final evaluation, but Game of Thrones pissed me off a lot more this summer than Twin Peaks did, and I had a lot more enjoyment with the latter than the former. 

 

This struck a chord with me, as I just had a discussion with my wife the day before the TP finale about how I've felt disappointed in the direction/culmination of Game of Thrones. My feelings were that the convergence of threads in Thrones has been fairly predictable, void of many risks, not challenging, etc, which are things that pulled me into that story in the first place. I'm aware that when a story reaches its conclusion those things typically occur, but I just yearn(ed) for something a bit more difficult and rough around the edges.

 

The first half of The Return, episode 17 felt a bit like that. The neatly-wrapped season conclusion where all pieces fit so snugly together in a puzzle, even to the point where everyone in the room packed tightly into a shot just to make the moment even more artificially perfect. "And you were there, and you were there, and you were there!" If this had been the ending of the entire two-hour finale I imagine it would have left a pretty sour taste in my mouth after the dust settled.

 

 

5 hours ago, MechaTofuPirate said:

I assumed that Coop went to save Laura because the show mentioned at some point that she's the key to all of this and if the Fireman mentions Richard and Linda to Coop, then he knew that was going to happen and is part of the plan? 

 

But i I have no idea and I'm just guessing.

 

I'm glad I rewatched episodes 1 & 2 before the finale, as they reminded me of the importance of Laura. The "two birds with one stone" quote has had me thinking quite a bit (along with everything else). Are Richard and Linda the two birds, or are they grouped together as one of the birds (the other being... Laura?)?

 

 

4 hours ago, Aether said:

The problem is that we had to wait through 16 hours of events that we now know to be largely pointless...and that intentionally set up expectations Lynch ultimately laughed off (Freddie/Bob) or simply discarded (Audrey).

 

I still don't buy any of this notion of Lynch trolling or "laughing off" expectations just because it didn't deliver something satisfying to you. In that case, you could say that Lynch (and whichever writers were responsible) laughed off every Twin Peaks fan's expectations during the numerous Season Two plot threads that were absolutely ridiculous. Freddie's fist is no more silly than Nadine's strength, Andy having thought-bubble revelations of a misbehaved kid, Dick getting his nose bit by a pine weasel, etc. Are you just taking this one to heart because it tied in directly to Bob and the typically dark/serious lore? As in, Bob deserved a better demise?

 

 

3 hours ago, dartmonkey said:

  I'm also gagging for the Final Dossier audiobook, although I think it will mainly concentrate on Twin Peaks characters between 1990 and 2015.

 

I'd imagine/hope this will also clarify the notion of the timeline(s) and if anything was truly altered by the events of the finale (I'm leaning *no* on that one). I wish the book was out this week!
 

 

1 hour ago, prangman said:

When you put it like that, it seems ridiculous to suggest it could have happened any other way. Whether Dale Cooper literally spent 25 years out of time and existence, or just came out of the black lodge and became a murderous criminal and rapist, what else could he be as he approaches his 60s other than empty, damaged and alone, and on a quixotic quest to right a wrong (laura's murder) which is irreversible and from which, like many trauma victims, he can never move on. It's the most psychologically true outcome.

 
Agreed - absolutely love this post.
 
After spending 25 years where he did, I think Dale emerging, extinguishing BadCoop and then attempting to return to normal and live a happy life would have been a bit forced, especially considering the things that Coop experienced in the lodge and "Find Laura" being reiterated to him as a mission. It's his life's main drive since stepping foot into TP, especially now, and I love that Cooper never stopped.
 
I had many great discussions with friends that were displeased with the direction that S3 took, mainly because they wanted chipper old Dale Cooper back and a show loaded with fan service that tried to recapture the feeling of old TP. Obviously these "friends" of mine weren't familiar enough with David Lynch and also failed to realize that anything attempting to recapture that magic (for longer than several scenes) could have very well missed the mark and felt forced. A new "Dale on the case" season may have still turned out okay, but I'm just really glad we got this version of TP. I mean, look at these great discussions! We're forever doomed to be in our own little lodge of analysis.

[SkullKid]

My absolute biggest question through this entire thing is, why did the season open with a strobed shot of the screaming girl at Twin Peaks High, and why did Andy see that girl in his vision in the white lodge? 

 

It feels hugely important. 

[utilityfrog]

I think the Coop we see in ep 18 in definitely an amalgam of all the previous versions of Cooper we've seen. Interestingly, I think the change occurs not after Coop and Diane drive into the alternate dimension, but when Coop initially exits the red room to meet Diane in Glastonbury Grove. He seems subtly changed from that point on, to the extent that I thought that he might be Mr C at first.

 

When he's walking down the last stretch of corridor before exiting the red room, Coop makes that weird hand gesture, that seems to cause the curtains to undulate and allow him to exit. His walk during that scene was very strange and even seemed Dougie-esque to me.

[lethalenforcer]

2 minutes ago, SkullKid said:

My absolute biggest question through this entire thing is, why did the season open with a strobed shot of the screaming girl at Twin Peaks High, and why did Andy see that girl in his vision in the white lodge? 

 

It feels hugely important. 

 

To me, that shot symbolizes the dark cloud that Laura's death hung over the town. A moment of pure terror, and everyone else seemed to share a similar reaction (even if they didn't literally scream and run as she did). Perhaps there's something specific about it that's important, but those were my initial thoughts since the first episode of s3.

[lethalenforcer]

3 minutes ago, utilityfrog said:

I think the Coop we see in ep 18 in definitely an amalgam of all the previous versions of Cooper we've seen. Interestingly, I think the change occurs not after Coop and Diane drive into the alternate dimension, but when Coop initially exits the red room to meet Diane in Glastonbury Grove. He seems subtly changed from that point on, to the extent that I thought that he might be Mr C at first.

 

When he's walking down the last stretch of corridor before exiting the red room, Coop makes that weird hand gesture, that seems to cause the curtains to undulate and allow him to exit. His walk during that scene was very strange and even seemed Dougie-esque to me.

 

The way he acted outside of the lodge seemed to be similar to the way he acted in it. Quiet, only speaking when absolutely necessary, a bit blank-faced but also looking determined to push forward.

[utilityfrog]

I've just finished listening to the latest episode of A Twin Peaks Podcast, on these last two episodes, and I wholly recommend it. They go into quite a bit of detail looking at these episodes, and I found their interpretations and theories to be fascinating.

 

https://art19.com/shows/twin-peaks-podcast/episodes/b945b7f0-a864-47c4-a44d-67627dcdc8c4

[SkullKid]

I feel pretty confident that "the story of the little girl who lived down the lane" is a timeline. Specifically, the timeline in which the bug crawls into the girl's mouth--the little girl who lived down the lane. I think that girl is Judy, and that insane event of the Woodsmen traveling there, wreaking havoc and finding a host for that creature, created this world outside of time. So when the Arm Tree asks, "Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane? Is it?" he's asking Cooper which timeline he's in, similar to the "is it future or is it past?" question. Plus, the song on the radio that played in E8 is the same song that played during the love scene in E18. 

[prangman]

22 minutes ago, lethalenforcer said:

Agreed - absolutely love this post.
 

Thank you! Just to take it a bit further, what really satisfied me about this ending was that it restored ambiguity to the supernatural/black lodge elements of the show, especially with regards to personal culpability, which I was worried were becoming overly literal in the sometimes lore-heavy plotting of TP:TR (which i have mostly enjoyed). Just as FWWM and to some extent the finale of S2 were a clear challenge to the easy, dualistic 'Leland is not responsible, it was all BOB', which I think is effectively Cooper's achilles heel, his totally inability to believe that a man could really rape and murder his own daughter, S3 led us to believe that there really was 'a good Dale' and 'a bad Dale' and that the good Dale was completely innocent of all the crimes committed by the bad Dale- and then in the last episode we suddenly have a Dale who is neither.

 

I guess it's worth recalling that, presumably, between S2E22 and FWWM, it was impossible to tell if the mirror-smashing Dale was the same Dale we saw enter the red curtains, only possessed by BOB, or the doppelganger imposter with BOB 'riding' him. The latter theory is more or less confirmed by Annie telling Laura that 'the good Dale is in the lodge and he can't leave'. But what if the biggest denouement of what we've just seen is that there is no doppelganger, only Dale Cooper, who, BOB or no BOB, was a  forever changed man the moment he left Twin Peaks.

[Woodfella]

Wow, holy shit. I absolutely loved it. My heart is so full. I cried at the end of episode 17 and took a break, thought okay no more crying now... 5 minutes in to ep 18 "Home"

 

"Gosh darn it!"

 

I felt really weird when it was finished, sad that it was all over, delighted at how brilliant this series has been, shocked by the utterly crushing ending. I just sat for a while thinking about all of it, felt on the verge of tears. I don't have anything interesting to add to the discussion of what it means or anything I just want to thank Chris and Jake for a really enjoyable podcast. The discussion her every week has been great to read. 

 

One of my favourite moments was Evil Coop running in to Andy in the car park. The representation of true evil and the darkness in TP bumping up against the goofiest comic relief character. So tense so frightning. Perfect. 

[tomance]

Does the new seed created Dougie alter the real world cooper in anyway? I was wondering if that’s why coop shifted his personality? The only other “Cooper moment” seemed to be when he asked if the coffee was on. He then started seeming like a hybrid of good coop in his mission with some bad coop tendencies (as evident in the diner) but non of the cooper attitude. If Janey-e and Sunny Jim get that aspect of coop in their Dougie that’s almost the happiest ending we could ask for. 

 

 

Also, will you guys be doing some stuff when The Final Dossier comes out?

[Mentalgongfu]

33 minutes ago, SkullKid said:

I feel pretty confident that "the story of the little girl who lived down the lane" is a timeline. Specifically, the timeline in which the bug crawls into the girl's mouth--the little girl who lived down the lane. I think that girl is Judy, and that insane event of the Woodsmen traveling there, wreaking havoc and finding a host for that creature, created this world outside of time. So when the Arm Tree asks, "Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane? Is it?" he's asking Cooper which timeline he's in, similar to the "is it future or is it past?" question. Plus, the song on the radio that played in E8 is the same song that played during the love scene in E18. 

 

Interesting observation.

 

You are aware, aren't you, that that is also the title of a novel and a movie staring Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen? Considering the character name "Gordon Cole" is directly lifted from Sunset Boulevard, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a deliberate reference to the film. I haven't seen The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, but from the wikipedia description it does seem to relate thematically in that it has uncomfortable sexuality, death, murder, a magician, conspiracy, suicide, potassium cyanide, a body in the cellar and a coma. It is going on my watch list, as is Sunset Boulevard (which I have seen, but I was around 12 years old).