What was Dougie Coop fidgeting with next to the remote control while he was eating the cake? I couldn't tell what that was....

 

G-d, I love OG Cooper.

 

Hmm, starting to feel like old Twin Peaks. That theme music when Coop was driving. Just beautiful. What a fabulous hour of television.

So, remind me who the bald guy is who machine gunned the van.

 

ok , so Cooper has woken up finally , but did it really need 15 episodes ?

I just don't get why they didn't say : let's do 10 eps . Maybe Lynch started shooting and just couldn't stop .

 

Coopers "I am the FBI" is one of my favourite bits on TV this year.

Although, when it comes to dark stuff, Bob/Coop said "goodbye, my son" so I'm pretty sure that was Audrey and Bob/Coop's kid (that he visited her in the hospital after she got blown up). Ben Horn's brother blaming his bioculars when he saw the guy turn into nothing was darkly funny.

And Audrey doesn't seem to be in a "real" place considering after her dance (callback to when she did that same dance in Season 1, Episode 3) it cut to her in a white room with electricity noise (And I think facial scars). Is she maybe in the White Lodge or something considering she got blown up in a bank and all.

I will say, it is very odd to see Bobby as a steadfast cop in Twin Peaks considering how much of a degenerate he is in the first two seasons and FWWM. But he seems a lot nicer now!

Coop did say that Dougie Jones would be back so I'm thinking Cooper's return may not be as long as we hope. honestly, I just kinda hope we get to see if Annie makes it out of her "Please write this in your diary" coma. (you see her in the coma in FWWM: Missing Pieces and she pops up in Laura's room in FWWM).

 

I wonder if we'll get more on Laura Palmer's mom being one of those parasite / black lodge / alien persons. She seemed psychic in the first two seasons and we saw her remove her face and kill that guy in the bar, so like her husband and her daughter she's definitely caught up in all of this weirdness.

 

I don't know if this will be resolved in next week's double-episode finale, but the latest episode seemed to revive a very old theory regardind Diane - that she was always a figment of Agent Cooper's imagination, and recording his thoughts on tape for her was a sort of security blanket.

Her shocking appearance in this current series - played by such a veteran Lynch alumni as Laura Dern, no less - seemed to torpedo that theory. The latest episode, however, may have suggested something else.

If 'Diane' wasn't what she claimed to be, as she admitted before being shot, and then being extinguished in the Black Lodge, couldn't it be that Evil Coop never realised that Diane was just a fantasy of Agent Cooper's to begin with, and he created a doppelganger of someone who never existed to begin with?
And, in doing so, gave the FBI - Agents Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfield and Jiggles Tamara Preston - an unexpected lead towards him...?

 

I'm more inclined to think that the new figures we've seen in the parallel universe locations (which were described in the original series as the Black and White Lodges, but might be more complex) are either otherwordly beings, or Earthly beings who have been there for a very long time, i.e. decades or even centuries before the original series of TP.

The art deco setting with the opera-singer looking woman in THAT episode strikes me as something constructed by the mind of that same woman, who seems to have been the most significant vistor/abductee at the time those events occurred - so the setting retained the look that she was able to relate to without going insane, much as the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey had the astronaut Dave Bowman aging rapidly in a vaguely earthly (17-18th Century France) setting. Not entirely homely, but familiar enough to relate to - the idea being that the aliens who he's residing with have some pretty out-of-date information regarding human culture.
It'd be the same thing if any of us were abducted by aliens and constantly fed 1950s TV dinners and jugs of martinis for dinner, entertained with nothing but reruns of The Honeymooners and Dragnet on a TV the sixe of a lunchbox, and provided with an endless supply of cigarettes.
Huh. That doesn't sound that ba-..

Anyway, Dale Cooper found himself in a strange environment when he ventured into the Black Lodge - zig-zag floors, red curtains, some random statues - but nothing that his mind couldn't comprehend, like oceans of molten metal, clouds of toxic gas, gigantic planetwide storms, all in bright flourescent colours - which is probably what it all 'really' looks like.

The blind woman, however, strikes me as something that represents a person, or group of people, rather than a particular individual who may have escaped the Lodges. That said, if 'Diane' was a doppelganger of someone who never existed - this woman with no eyes may be the real Diane!

Regardless, if Diane was Dale Cooper's imaginary friend, the person played by Laura Dern we've seen so far - who also played young Coop's sidekick in Blue Velvet, and Lynch has admitted that Jeffrey was Agent Cooper's prototype - was probably created inadvertently as a warped and separate extension of Evil Coop, and Evil Coop doesn't even realise it.

 

have you seen lost highway

or inland empire

 

I think i quoted the wrong post, but here we go...

Gordon and Albert knew Diane, so she wasn't a figment of Cooper's imagination. They knew exactly where to find her and, to the best of my knowledge, didn't say anything such as "so nice to finally meet you"...they already recognized her.

If i had to make a guess, Evil Cooper killed Diane after he raped her, but Naido Diane may not have known that.

In another question, any guesses regarding whether Audrey is in a mental institution or in "another realm" (black/white lodge, red room, etc).? I'm willing to guess that the humming at the hotel and wherever she is are connected, as that plot point never got cleaned up...

 

I personally think Audrey got snatched off this plane of existence, also giving birth to Bob/Cooper's kid (it WAS their kid, I can't see Bob/Coop saying "Goodbye, my son." to some random guy. Unless Audrey and Cooper hooked up off screen in the run of the original series - which seems unlikely - and Bob/Coop went to see her in the hospital after being blown up at the bank so it was Bob/Coop's kid).

Also for it taking so many episodes, well, I think Lynch wanted to show basically how a dopey nobody could actually climb a corporate ladder and find success and save himself from death while doing pretty much NOTHING but having people literally push him in the right direction along the way. And it was a way to sideline Cooper to make him Doguie for the other plot lines to do their things. There are a couple of roundabout dead ends , eventually pointless stuff that Agent Cooper and Sherrif Truman run into in S1/S2 so basically here we only have Agent Cooper do his thing when it's needed.

Season 1 & Season 2 almost jumped to EVERY plot line in the course of a single episode, it can get a bit wonky and having the plot run in place for some of them and updating on that particular plot for no reason that episode. Like I don't think we really need Andy and Lucy every episode, just every few episodes. So Season 3 takes a bit of "These characters are in Twin Peaks but they're only in every other episode" instead of every single episode. Also I think if Cooper came back as full on Agent Cooper, he'd wrap the damn thing up with a bow in five minutes. Or two episodes. Which he's totally going to do. Also it gave Kyle MacLachlan a chance to play multiple characters this year, which he's been great at. Scratch that, amazing at.

As for the empty blank staring, well, that is very much a Lynch / Twin Peaks style move. May have been a tad more pronounced in Season 3, I'll admit

 

Major Briggs has a rather touching moment towards the end of Season Two that pointed to Bobby's redemption.

Take a very close look at the blind woman's name again...

 

Part 17 was THE BEST. But 18 is Meh!

 

So much for my theory regarding Diane, although that finale could flush the whole lot down the turlet. The 'real Diane' we saw could easily be another figment of Cooper's imagination - the scenes with them driving in the car smacked of Jeffrey and Sandy in Blue Velvet, i.e. a very idealised vision of how he wants things to be.

So, Cooper manages to 'save' Laura from being murdered by BOB/Leland, leading to a parallel timeline in which she ends up a twisted criminal in some Texas backwater, with her mother cursing her memory (stabbing her picture to pieces). He didn't save her at all.
Reminds me of my favourite film of all time, the 1974 classic Chinatown, the theme of which is generally agreed to be 'the futility of good intentions'.
Forget it Coop, it's Twin Peaks.

Ridiculously frustrating ending, but for the most part, that was a thoroughly magnificent 18 episodes of TV, and even the ending is already starting to make a certain grim sense on a visceral level. I loved that late-night road trip to TP, it really evoked the genuine experience of driving through small, seemingly insignificant towns at night, right down to the somewhat anticlimactic finish outside the Palmer family home.

The only real disappointment is that certain reports indicated that Lynch had another series in mind - which might have been expected to explain a few things - but very rapidly declining ratings put a quick end to it ever happening. So...



Here's to Twin Peaks, Season 4 - in 2042.