Agreed. Seemed like she was about to become an integral part of the plot. That said, her final “What?!” scene was a great parallel to the final scene of the series. In fact her entire plot line seems very relevant to what happens in the final ep.
Also agree that I would be open to a 4th season. Just keep giving Frost/Lynch money to do whatever they want, imo.
this essay has helped me thread things in my head and come up with a rough interpretation
Scrolled down 45 posts to say 17 annihilated me. Keeping going but I feel raw, my whole skin’s come off raw. Aaaaaaaaaa
dumbland supports this
i basically said this exact thing to my partner as we watched this
she doesn’t play video games and never really has, but she tries to appreciate such commentary :B
Nooooooooooooooo
Still buzzing. There’s this part of me that wants to shut myself in an empty room by myself, stay awake, stare at my hands as little grains of Pure Experience slip through my fingers and scatter across the ground, and pick each one up and try to rebuild what the hell that was in a way that I can actually conceive of and rebuild and take with me
Instead, I’ll sleep. Or read… and it’ll get farther away.
[My digression about hearing shaman Patti Smith’s “Land” in 2012 goes here, a capsule of trauma and frisson on demand, each time I press play my goosebumps are less bumpy than last time, if I keep pressing play I won’t even shiver, better stop]
[Companion digression: this song does nothing, I’m nothing, I’m a dry gulch, years pass, my life changes, then without warning here I am rupturing all over at “Do ya know how to pony? Like bony maroney?”]
[Replacement digression: “Let’s Rock!”]
But in the same way that FWWM lives, squirming inside me years later and rolls over every now and then to show me a new side of itself, I can only hope that 17 and 18 (along with the rest) have already woodwormed themselves through my brain, that I have a devastating mental mandala to trace over decade from now, that the physical reaction (shivering, pulse racing, fevery head) will be a functional touchstone like what must be in those there-in-1991 dugpa forums types, who are immune to fading memories and episode analyses and not at all ludicrous creamed corn planets. Is this with me forever? Can the formula be diluted, if I even wanted?
Sorry, I’ve had a few
Just gathering sand and posting it.
Zzz
this also helped me wrap my head around some things, thank you
i have to say, the build up across the past few weeks, towards the end of this season has really been some of my most treasured time watching television in a long while. besides my partner, i do not know a single person in real life who watched any of this season, so SB is really the only place i’ve had to help get a grasp and react to episodes as they air. and we’re not nearly as perceptive as y’all seem to be.
this feels like how a show like Lost always tried to advertise itself as, just a puddle pretending to be an ocean. it sounds corny and somewhat pretentious to say, but i appreciate how open ended the whole thing was to leave some room for me to really ruminate on broad, metaphorical concepts, as opposed to just the usual “prestige tv fan theories”.
this also feels like a crash course on Lynch himself. i’m really glad i watched & rewatched Lost Highway and Mullholland Drive before this and going from there really showed how much of a “greatest hits” of his filmography this seems to be (and a fuck you to anyone who didn’t seem to care for FWWM)
a really great season of tv
FWWM was pretty great IMO, I like to watch that Bowie/convenience store scene on its own sometimes.
I got the impression from the scene in ep17 where Cooper saves Laura in the past was more like she was trapped in an endless cycle of reliving the bad memories over and over, and Cooper was essentially trying to help her break the cycle. But then after that, it seems he maybe did in fact alter the past? Maybe it is all of that at the same time
more than anything, this is what’s really sticking with me right now in that gnawing, lynchian way. a really superb hour of acting from kyle maclachlan. 18 doesn’t come anywhere close to working without his insight into the role
Some more interpretations
Mine is far more depressing, hah.
did they though?
before cooper electro-possessed him, dougie jones was a real person. or a fake person with no discernible differences from a real person, at any rate. by all accounts, he was a pretty shitty real person. mundane in his inadequacies and predictable in his failures. more or less the opposite of the do no wrong dougie cooper. isn’t it kind of…horrifying that he was simply recloned, packaged up and shipped back to his family? at first it was a farce that janey e didn’t much notice or care that dougie wasn’t at all dougie anymore. in the end, it’s just kind of sad. when he returns home, is he the old dougie or the cooper dougie? …does it matter?
some characters in this show, like ed and norma, got happy endings. some, like becky and steve, got horrible endings. some, like audrey and diane, may or may not even exist. but even when it’s good we just don’t know, really, do we? ed lived in a twin peaks that appeared to glitch out before his happy ending. is it even a real twin peaks? for all we know it’s not even the same twin peaks the more central characters inhabit, and even if it is we’re not sure what kind of existential state that twin peaks occupies. everything is in doubt, which is kind of a lynch thing. he reminds me of beckett in that sense. a little more cheaply earned, I think, but that’s more a comment on beckett’s genius than anything else
what bothers me about the finale, I think, is what it takes away from cooper. he’s the moral force behind things. he’s The Good Guy. he’s also assured. he may not always be right, but he always knows exactly what he thinks he should be doing. in 18 both of those things fall under serious doubt. we don’t know what cooper we’re looking at, really, and the last line of the show features him utterly lost, questioning the most basic concept of existence. we don’t know why laura screams, but what we do know is that cooper also doesn’t know why laura screams.
I’m probably just going to keep posting random shit in this thread btw
My understanding is that it’s the cooper dougie, because he was manufactured with good coops hair, whereas I assume the other one was manufactured with bad coops hair
Time and the losses that rack up with its passage have been such a big theme of the season. In the final episode Diane saw herself from a far, which I took more as a disassociative thing than an evil tulpa switcharoo. Up to the Naido reveal, she’s a bitter and broken person. Suddenly and briefly she’s the happy Diane we wished for. That all falls away during that sex scene. Not long after she leaves a letter under a different name about how she doesn’t recognize Richard/Cooper any more. And about the same time we realize don’t recognize Cooper anymore either (which is especially shocking since we waited so long for him to become himself again). When he finds Laura she’s even someone new.
All of this is contrasted with finding the other residents of Twin Peaks almost exactly as we left them. Just like the happy ending of Blue Velvet rings hollow with the robins returning and making everything suddenly right after a story about the viral nature of psychological trauma, The Return gave us the feel good nostalgia false ending. The epilogue in the final episode gives a very non cliched take on that old cliche about “you can never go home again.” To me, the only sure answer for Cooper’s final question is “not 1991.”
So many takes, so little time
There seems to be a lot of variation in the two Tulpas we’ve seen. Dougie most likely had no memories of being Cooper or Dooper, and didn’t seem to have any sort of ulterior plot besides “not that good of a husband.” Meanwhle, Diane has her memories of pre-cloning, and also seems “programmed” with some sort of instructions that she’s compelled to perform or something. Plus, the peculiar term “manufactured” suggests a lot, to me.
What I’m getting at is, I think the person who manufactures a tulpa can “design” them how they want. They don’t explain this, but I like to assume that Mike manufactured Dougie to be, perhaps, a better husband. My proof is that this is absolutely what Dale could have wanted him to do, and Mike just sorta knows everything all the time. Who knows, maybe Dougie even has some vague memories of his time as Cooper, so he knows what it’s like to be a good person and love your wife?
