Control Freak TV

I literally just finished re-watchng Twin Peaks yesterday with Fire Walk With Me so it felt so good to be able to be able to watch new episodes straight away. I can’t imagine how people who have actually waited 25 years feel.

So poor Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) has been trapped in the Black Lodge this entire time? Not unexpected, but because Twin Peaks is the sort of series that would ever explicitly discuss its mythology through a character monologue or the like it’s always been hard to clarify the rules. And you can bet a damn fine cup of coffee that it still is. While I like the synchronicity of Laura’s ‘25 years later’ line I still find it hard to believe that access to the Lodges’ only occurs when Jupiter and Saturn meet (apparently the great conjunction could not actually happen at the time depicted in the series). I mean surely The One Armed Man has a way he can get in and out that doesn’t take a quarter of a century? 

Obviously there is another way, as these episodes showed us, with The Arm (at this point I’ve read conflicting stories that it’s a manifestation of The One Armed Man’s missing arm or Lynch’s way of replacing Michael J Anderson’s The Man From Another Place), telling Cooper that he cannot leave the Black Lodge until his doppleganger returns, only for The Arm’s own doppleganger to scream ‘Non-existent!’ at Cooper before he falls through the Lodge’s zig zag floor and into a glass cube being watched by Sam Colby (Ben Rosenfield) in New York. Sam’s top secret duty and Tracey’s (Madeline Zima) flirtatious interest provided the episode(s) most original and intriguing scenes. Too bad there were brutally slashed to death by whatever was following Cooper out of the Black Lodge.

Elsewhere, in Buckhorn, South Dakota (looks like Twin Peaks is doing a lot of travelling this  season!) a high school librarian, Ruth Davenport has also been brutally murdered, her head decapitated and placed with another body in her bed. Forensics (where was this stuff twenty five years ago, Cooper?) places the high school’s principal Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard) at the scene of the crime and he is arrested. His wife Phyllis goes to visit him in jail where she tells him she knows about his affair with Ruth, and he knows about hers with George. She returns home to find doppleganger Cooper in her house, whom she recognises, before he shoots and kills her (with George’s gun). The significance of these characters is yet to be determined, but one assumes we’ll be seeing more of Hastings. You got the sense that he was possessed to kill Ruth, much like Leland was in the original series with Laura, but something much more is going on in Phyllis knew Cooper.

Later on Cooper talks with someone be believes to be named Phillip Jeffries, who tells him he missed him in New York and that he’s ringing to say goodbye before Cooper has to return to the Lodge. Cooper suspects it’s not who he thinks it is and suddenly this hardened killer doppleganger becomes more interesting - he scared of going back to the Lodge and will do anything to stay out of it.

There was the return of several original cast members throughout the episode(s) but one can’t help but feel that their roles are no longer pivotal to the series (if they ever were, because lets be honest, Twin Peaks has had many a character and plot) and I worry the rest of the series will be peppered with instances like Benjamin (Richard Beymer) and Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelley) talking about drugged banana bread, or Shelley (Madchen Amick) and James (James Marshall) noticing each other across the room at the Bang Bang Bar while they are failing miserably at recapturing their youth. I did love the scenes between Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) and Margaret ‘The Log Lady’ (Catherine E. Coulson) though. I don’t know how much more episodes she’ll be in since she passed in 2015, but I always felt she was underused in the initial series run considering how much of an icon her character became. I’m going to find it hard to believe that Harry et al. haven’t trie dot find Cooper all these years, or that Michale Ontkean won’t be returning as Sheriff Harry Truman and we’re supposed to believe that he’s ‘sick’. Also I still want to know, ‘How’s Annie?’

Really got a kick out of seeing Ali Wong (American Housewife) and Ming-Na Wen (Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD) guest star on this week’s episode of Fresh Off The Boat ‘The Flush’ (3.17) While it’s cool that ABC would do something like this it does also raise awareness to the lack of representation on television. Keep it up, ABC!

Went and saw the Banksy Exhibition in Melbourne yesterday, these are some of the pieces I liked. My favourite, though, was a quote from him that I hadn’t heard before:

Been listening to Lady Gaga’s Joanne today. It’s definitely more vocal-focused than anything she’s done before. A daring and different album for her, I’m not sure how well it will be received.

I really enjoy the first half of the album, but after ‘Million Reasons’ the slower tone and lack of hooks make the second half blurry and bland. I’m disappointed in ‘Hey Girl’ since I absolutely love Florence and a duet between them should have been a big, sweeping, loud song, but in keeping with majority of the album it’s very subdued.

I was inspired to watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer the other day. Despite it being my favourite television series I haven’t watched it since high school (there’s just too much television to get through!) I’ve been feeling down lately about work, and on a particularly bad day a new woman casually called me reliable - which immediately made me recall Buffy’s season three episode, ‘Dopplegangland’.

I remember watching this episode when I was a teenager and not enjoying it that much, at least compared to the rest of Buffy’s fantastic third season. The reason it always stuck with me is because I thought Willow was being uncharacteristically angsty when Buffy calls her ‘old reliable’ and becomes very defensive. I agreed with Buffy at the time - that it’s good to be reliable - but I was also quite young. It was so much easier to be reliable back then, and I’m still adamant that it’s not hard to be a reliable person, but when you grow up you realise that if everyone sees you that way some people will take advantage of that. Like Willow, you want to say ‘I’m not just some doormat person’ but people’s perceptions are often difficult to change.

So I turned to this episode to see if Whedon and Co. had any advice for me. I was hoping Buffy’s themes had become more overt since watching it as a teenager, but alas it was as complex as ever and ‘Dopplegangband’ offers a multitude of interpretations. When Anya turns to Willow for help with a spell to retrieve her amulet, Willow, suddenly desperate to be bad, hopes that it’s dark magic. Anya tells her it’s not (but of course it is) and the spell accidentally conjures vampire Willow from the reality Cordelia wished for in ‘The Wish’. Throughout the episode Willow comes face to face with this extreme iteration of herself, who has no responsibilities or boundaries, and who is also extremely powerful. She even has to pretend to be her at one point in an attempt to trick her vampire henchman.

By the end of the episode Willow says ‘I see now where the path a vice leads’, signifying she’s more than happy to be ‘old reliable’. But then Percy, a jock Willow was pressured into doing homework for, gives her outlines for his paper he initially wanted her to write. The night before he had an unforunate encounter with vampire Willow, believing it to be her, and he now sees the error of his ways.