An old guy plays games

Look, Gypsy isn’t a bad show. It’s just unfortunately not a particularly good one.

There’s a lot there that I liked. Naomi Watts is great. Billy Crudup is good (why isn’t he in more things? Or am I just not noticing?) The premise clicked with me. And it’s kind of a surprise to a see a woman Watts’ age getting the opportunity to be sultry and sexy and control her own erotic destiny. In so many ways, this felt like a story that, written by anyone else, would have starred a man, and I think it’s great to see that flipped on its head. Naomi Watts is an attractive woman. No reason she can’t be fucking around.

So the show worked in its broad strokes. Where it faltered was in the details. When you actually get into specifics, you discovered that your lead character -- Watts’ Jean / Diane -- was kind of an idiot.

Jean is a therapist living a double life as Diane who is a journalist. Diane exists, in part, so she can interact with the lives of the people she sees in therapy in a kind of undercover way. For example, she’ll scope out (and eventually fall for) one of her patient’s sexy exes who he’s obsessed with, or the daughter of a woman who Jean suspects may not be telling her the whole truth in their therapy sessions.

Sometimes it seems like these lies are coming from a place of goodness -- as if she’s really trying to help these people -- but things very quickly get out of hand, and Diane digs herself deeper and deeper into her own grave. Worst of all, while some of these choices she makes could be seen as accidents if you’re being generous, most of them are just plain dumb, with consequences that should be obvious to someone smart enough to be a therapist.

We’re i the final stretch of Twin Peaks: The Return, though you wouldn’t know from watching the show. According to most rules of narrative structure, we would have just passed the second act mark and are now inside of the third act, but that’s only for narratives that follow those sorts of rules. And even though Lynch described the Peaks script as being a 400 page movie, this isn’t a move that appears to break down easily into “acts”.

I’ll be honest, I’ve enjoyed more of this ride than not. It hasn’t been perfect, though I’m reluctant to complain about any particular part until I’ve seen it all, on the off chance that moments to come might put earlier moments in a new light. I was both a huge fan of Twin Peaks specifically and David Lynch in general, so this return has been a pretty great opportunity to visit both of those things.

But with only five episodes left in front of us, I’m concerned about what might be to come. Concerned because I know I’d like to see certain storylines wrapped up, certain things resolved, and I also know that Lynch is a filmmaker who doesn’t give a damn what I, or anyone else, might want.

I recently read an article that sort of implies that we might not ever get good ol’ Dale Cooper back, but if there’s one thing I feel fairly confident about, it’s that that’ll happen. It might not happen until Episode 18, but I stand by my prediction from months ago that The Return is as much a reference to Dale Cooper as to the show itself, and if there is a central narrative in this season, it is his return.

I’m less sure we’ll be getting any answers about those mysterious woodsmen, what the woodsman’s poem was about, what the hell that was that Gordon Cole experienced in South Dakota, what was up with that vomiting person in the car, and what the hell that bugfrog thing was that crawled into a girls mouth in 1950-something.

Do we need those answers? Well, that’s a whole other question, and one that can’t be answered until we come to the end of The Return. Sure, we all survived 25 years all those unanswered questions left at the end of season two, but it’s different now. Season two was cut off abruptly. This is moving towards what, I assume, is a planned and very intentional ending, which will contain all the information that David Lynch wants us to have.

Will it be enough?

For now I’m confident that it will be. Confident if a little nervous.

Look, Hollywood, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job (haha, I’m kidding, that’s exactly what I want to do), but I’m pretty sure we’ve already had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel and it wasn’t very fucking good. I also feel fairly confident saying that the reason that previous Chainsaw movies were successful didn’t have much to do with the complex character of Leatherface or the rich mythology that character hinted at, just waiting to be uncovered.

So we’ve come from one of the most amazingly surreal episodes ever aired on TV (Episode 8) to one of the more straightforward infodumps that I’ve seen so far in this season of Twin Peaks, and I have to admit it’s a little bit of a jarring tonal shift. Not to say that this wasn’t a good episode, or that it wasn’t refreshing to get some answers to some questions, but holy cow did it almost feel like a whole different show.

In fact, there was so much info dropped -- much of it, in fact, stuff we already knew, refreshing viewers on certain plot points that hadn’t been in seen in weeks -- that I almost think there was originally going to be a longer break between the parts of this season. This episode feels very much like a way to get everyone back up to speed after a mid-season break, and it makes me think that when Lynch and Co. were originally negotiating for the longer season with Showtime, that there was the possibility for more than just a one week break mid-season.

Whatever the reason for it, it’s nice to get some progress on stories that were started in the first handful of episodes and then not mentioned in the weeks since.

For example, we get more information about Bill Hastings, Ruth Davenport, and exactly how her head ended up sitting next to the body of Major Garland Briggs. It turns out that Bill and Ruth had a shared interest in other-dimensional travel, and on the night she died, managed to cross into another world (which we can assume is either the black lodge or the white lodge). There they found Major Briggs, who sent them to uncover certain coordinates for him.

We can also safely assume that those coordinates are the same ones that Dopple-Coop wanted to get from Hastings’ secretary.

Bill also talks about how at a certain point Briggs floated into the air, and then his head disappeared, which I assume is meant to explain the floating head that drifts through space and mutters the words, “Blue Rose” earlier in the season.

Speaking of coordinates, I wonder if they’re the same, or related to, the coordinates that Briggs left for his son Bobby. Because it turns out that on the night that Cooper met with Briggs 25 years ago, before Briggs supposedly died in the fire at his station, he told his wife that one day Hawk, Bobby, and Sheriff Truman would come to her to ask about Dale Cooper, and on that day she was to give them an object -- a mysterious metal cylinder that apparently only Bobby knew how to open. Specifically by tossing it on the ground and attempting to get the metal to ring at a particular frequency.

(Interestingly, Bill Hastings web site at http://thesearchforthezone.com/ seems to have some links to articles about how frequencies are the key to dimensional and time travel).

Anywhoo, inside the cylinder are a couple of small pieces of paper. One seems to have directions to a particular location, as well as specific dates and times, AS WELL AS A PICTURE THAT MATCHES THE SYMBOL ON DOPPLE-COOP’S CARD FROM THE FIRST EPISODE, which makes this all look pretty relevant. Also, there’s a clipping from Briggs’ of signals from the woods of Twin Peaks, the ones that contained the words “COOPER / COOPER” from way back in season two. Hawk takes this to mean he’s referencing two different Coopers, and from what we know of the season so far, that doesn’t seem to be too far from the truth.

And all of this without even talking about Dougie Cooper, the Horne brothers, Ike the Spike, or anything else that happens this episode. And while there’s a whole lot that happens in these other areas, there are two distinct things that stand out to me.

1. The three brother cops manage to snag a copy of Dougie Coop’s fingerprints after realizing that there is no record of him prior to 1997. The think he’s maybe in the witness protection plan, and one of the cop’s is going to check in with a friend he has in Justice to find out more. But I’m guessing, if they run those fingerprints, they’re going to end up flagging something in the FBI and Gordon Cole will soon be taking a trip to Las Vegas.

2. There’s a weird scene where Dougie is in the police station. For a moment, he becomes transfixed on the flag, he hears the star-spangled banner, and it’s clear that he’s beginning to remember, again, elements of the FBI. Then a woman in red heels walks by and grabs his attention. He follows the heels until they disappear behind a corner, at which point his gaze seems to drift back to an electrical outlet.

Now, in the couple of recaps I’ve read of this episode so far, most people seem to be pointing at the red shoes as an indicator of Audrey, who famously switched from her saddles shoes to a pair of bright red heels at her school locker during one of her first scenes in Twin Peaks. 

But because of the connection between the shoes and the electrical socket -- much like the electrical socket that Dale Cooper exited the lodge through, leaving his shoes behind -- I think this might actually be connected to another theory that I’ve been kind of dismissive of so far because it’s seemed to ... well, weird.

The theory is that the reason that Dale Cooper is acting like he is is because he isn’t whole, and the reason he isn’t whole is because he left his shoes behind in the lodge. Now at first I dismissed the idea as silly, that the shoes failing to travel through the socket was just a bit of a joke, but this scene, with his apparent attempt to link a pair of shoes to an electrical outlet makes me wonder.

If that is what it’s about, though, how the heck is he going to get the shoes back? Dougie Coop sure doesn’t seem to have enough wits about him to make it to, much less traverse, the Black Lodge. Is this maybe what Bobby, Hawk, and Truman need to discover at their coordinates? An access point to the lodge, and then an attempt to retrace Coops steps right to his shoes? Weirder things have happened, I guess.

Lastly, this has got to be one of the funniest episodes of Twin Peaks I’ve ever seen, with at least three scenes that made me laugh out loud for three entirely different reasons.

First off, Albert’s line, “What happens in season two?” after hearing all the pertinent details surround the Bill Hastings / Ruth Davenport / Major Briggs situation. It’s funny on the surface, obviously, but it’s also an incredibly funny callback to Twin Peaks’ own season one finale and season two opener, which featured a shitload of bordering-on-crazy cliff-hangers.

Second, Jerry Horne’s apparent drugged-out delusion that his foot was talking to him, and declaring that it wasn’t his foot (I didn’t take notes, so if memory serves, he said, “I am not your foot.”) made me laugh out loud at its absurdity before I realized that its voice sounded eerily familiar to the baby evolution-of-the-arm that commanded Dougie Coop to squeeze Ike The Spike’s hand off. Maybe Jerry is experiencing more than he realizes?

Lastly, the amazingly awkward scene between Diane, Gordon, and Tammy, as Diane finishes a cigarette, and Gordon and Tammy almost entirely fail to comfortably hang out with her while Albert is indisposed. Tammy’s attempt to seen perfectly casual in any number of incredibly non-casual positions was maybe the highlight, but Gordon silently waiting for Diane to acknowledge was a close second.

I’m not sure why it is that I’m having such a hard time bringing myself to write about these new episodes of Twin Peaks. It’s not that I don’t want to. I do want to, and quite often, I find myself thinking about all the things that I want to say. And maybe that’s the problem -- either I’ve already thought it out all out in my head, so writing it down seems redundant, or maybe it’s just that there’s so much that I want to say that the thought of sitting down to write it seems kind of overwhelming.

Whatever the reason, I promised myself that I was going to write something about this episode, because at six hours into this series, we should not be at about the end of the first act. And while it’s hard to say for sure if that’s the case until we can actually see the overall shape of the story, I have to admit it does kind of feel that way.

Particularly in the sense that all the balls of the story seem to be in the air at this point. And while it’s still difficult to see how everything might fit together, at least there’s the sense that we can see everything.

And in seeing everything, it seems that there are three primary storylines playing out here -- Dougie Cooper, Bad Cooper, and the town of Twin Peaks. So let’s break those down.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Twin Peaks return’s first few episodes hit the screen, so I guess it’s about time I said something about them. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to put my thoughts together, or why, even now, I’m still somewhat reluctant to write. Part of it might be that it returned somewhat explosively, with four hours of material thrown at us all at once. Those four hours involved a lot of balls being thrown into the air, a lot of different and apparently disconnected plots being introduced. In a lot of ways those first four hours really felt like a single, over-long premiere. And if I had to guess, that’s part of why they were all released together.

But if I tried to write about those first four hours in one article, I’m not sure I could. There’s so much going on. Even though so much of it, as per David Lynch’s style, is slow and subtle. And even with only two episodes to write about here, I’m still a bit nervous that it’s going to get long, and I suppose that’s another reason I’ve been putting this off.

But we’re here now. So let’s do this.

I’ve been really struggling with the question of whether I was going to write up my thoughts on the new season of Twin Peaks.

Part of the reason I’ve been struggling is that I really want to. That was part of why I had been writing my commentary on my rewatch of the original series, to eventually segue into commentary on this new season. But I’m also afraid, especially now that I’ve been watching the new season, that I might not be able to write about it quite as well as I did the earlier episodes. Those hopefully insightful comments that I made were built on the fact that this was the third time I’d watched the series, and had had more or less 25 years of reflecting on the show itself and on David Lynch as a director.

I’ve had no such time to do the same thing with this new season. And even a few days after watching these new episodes, I’m still feeling almost as baffled as I did last Sunday night. Not to mention that there are probably hundreds of other writers who are doing the same thing, with hotter takes, and quicker commentary turnarounds than I can manage. What place does some goober like me have in that mass of TV critique.

But then I had two kind of epiphanies.

The first one, maybe the most important one, was that I still wanted to write about Twin Peaks. And I realized that it didn’t matter if I didn’t have anything insightful to say, or if I was just some goober in the ocean of commentary. I’m doing this for me first. If other people happen to enjoy it along the way, that’s great, but first and foremost this is for me.

The second epiphany was the realization that, even as I read a bunch of different reviews and critiques, there were certain subjects that I just didn’t see being discussed. Things, for example, like Darya’s toes (which maybe seems like a weird thing to want to discuss, but trust me, when I get to actually writing my thoughts on the first two parts of The Return, it’ll make sense) or the lamps in that apartment in New York. Observations that I’ve made that maybe mean something, or maybe don’t, but do inspire me to want to talk about them.

So I’m going to.

I’m not going to claim to have any answers, and I’m not sure I’ll be wandering down the path of fan theories. I feel like mostly I’ll be asking questions and flailing about for answers, which is why I plan on calling this series Questions in a World of Blue, which I’m sure someone else is already using, but if he, or they, can’t share, then maybe they should go back to the playground to learn some manners.

There are two very different components in this, the second season finale of Twin Peaks. The first is a fairly normal television episode -- or at least as normal as Twin Peaks could ever be -- which is mostly working to set up the cliffhanger moments that will bring you back for the third season that never happened.

This includes storylines like Doc Hayward’s attack on Ben Horne, who has now revealed that he is actually Donna’s father, which leaves Ben bloodied (in a way very similar to Leland’s death, actually) and at least unconscious on the ground. It also includes storylines like Nadine waking up from her brief fantasy of being a high school student, which of course throws Big Ed and Norma’s hope at a happy life into the shitter. Then there’s the bank explosion, which may have killed Audrey, Pete, and Andrew.

These are all fairly standard cliffhanger stories, and come from a pretty traditional place in TV storytelling.

The other part of this finale is a decent into full-on Lynchian nightmare fuel the likes had never been seen on TV before. Or, really, since.

After last episode’s return to form, this episode, I have to say, is kind of a disappointment, In fact, I’d go so far to say that it was actually kind of dumb. None of the usual names appear on the writing credits for this episode, so I feel safe in blaming that fact on giving the creative reigns to someone not quite up to the task of getting all the show’s proverbial ducks in a row before the finale.

There are moments in this episode which are literally cringe-worthy. Cooper’s attempt to explain his sudden understanding of Major Briggs’ mumbling is dismissed as something that just came to him, and that’s not just lazy writing, but also insulting. Sure, Coop has always had a unique way of doing things, and willingness to throw conventional techniques to the wind, but this sort of “Gee, I dunno, I just came to me,” moment is incredibly painful.

It’s followed by the equally painful moment of Andy trying to desperately to chase Coop down to tell him that he’s figured out the petroglyph is, in fact, a map. Except Coop somehow ignores Andy as he pursues him and Truman down the hall of the Sheriff’s station. A few moments later at the Miss Twin Peaks pageant, Andy seems perversely unable or unwilling to find Coop in the small space and tell him whatever it is he needs to tell him until the very end of the episode. This delay accomplishes nothing except to postpone the reveal until it could be used as the episode’s cliffhanger ending.

I’ll admit, I’ve been kind of hard on these last few episodes -- maybe even harder than I was on the dreadful midseason ones. That’s partly because so many of the plots that are going on as the series draws to its season to close pertain to things that really won’t mean anything to the upcoming return of Twin Peaks, which can make sitting through some of it kind of a pain in the ass.

But I’ve got to give it to this episode. More than anything since maybe Maddie’s death, this episode feels like a real episode of Twin Peaks. Even though Lynch himself isn’t behind the camera, it sure feels like this was an episode that was touched by him. 

There’s a fantastic scene about halfway through where Cooper and Annie talk at the diner. It’s general flirtatious chitchat, but the way it’s shot, and the way it’s scored, gives it such a a feeling of dread. It’s such a simple scene, and based on the dialogue, it should be light and cheery, but it’s not. Instead, it’s doing some hella foreshadowing, and it’s great.

This is’t the only dark moment the two share. Later in the episode, Coop takes Annie dancing, and while the elderly Mayor Milford struggles endlessly with his microphone (old people taking way too long to accomplish simple tasks being another favorite image of Lynch’s), Coop suddenly has a vision of the giant, waving his arms and shaking his head, sending a very strong message to Coop: No.

What could this message be about? Well, maybe the fact that only moments before Cooper had suggested Annie should enter the Miss Twin Peaks contest. I get the feeling from both those scenes that something very bad may be about to happen to Miss Annie Blackburn.

And while we’re talking about Lynchian moments, how about that shaking hand?

I’ve only got three episode left after this one, and if there’s a single overwhelming sense I have at this point, it’s that I want to just get past all the bullshit and get into the Black Lodge.

Pieces continues to fall into place. Windom Earle’s messing around with the Owl Cave petroglyph last episode revealed a much larger picture, that Cooper tasks Andy with making a record of. When Major Briggs sees the image, he recognizes it, but can’t say from where -- maybe from a dream? Yeah, probably from a dream.

Cooper asks Briggs to help him by digging up any information he can on Windom Earle’s time working on Project Bluebook, the same military project that Briggs has been involved in, and the same project that was attempting to make contact with the White and / or Black Lodges. Because at this point, everything is converging on that one point.

Well, almost everything.