Episode 17

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LostInTheMovies
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Episode 17

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Let's talk Leland's wake, the introduction of the Lodge mythology, the launch of the mid-season stretch, and whatever else you want to analyze, discuss, or criticize from this episode.
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Re: Episode 17

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I think this is my least favourite episode of the series, mainly because of how unemotional the wake is and how easily everyone has moved on from not only the mystery of who murdered Laura but also the revelation that Leland did it, and far worse as well. Such a terrible waste of material, especially when Leland being the killer and long-time abuser of his own daughter opens up the mystery of exactly who knew what (since Bobby mentioned at the funeral that all those gathered knew Laura was in trouble) and why they did nothing. That guilt was now free to be brought out into the open, yet they chose to ignore it in order to set up a new beginning with two elderly brothers fighting about a wedding. Jeez Louise.
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Re: Episode 17

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HoodedMatt wrote:I think this is my least favourite episode of the series, mainly because of how unemotional the wake is and how easily everyone has moved on from not only the mystery of who murdered Laura but also the revelation that Leland did it, and far worse as well. Such a terrible waste of material, especially when Leland being the killer and long-time abuser of his own daughter opens up the mystery of exactly who knew what (since Bobby mentioned at the funeral that all those gathered knew Laura was in trouble) and why they did nothing. That guilt was now free to be brought out into the open, yet they chose to ignore it in order to set up a new beginning with two elderly brothers fighting about a wedding. Jeez Louise.
I couldn't agree more with this. It was a stunning episode, in the worst possible way. Utterly bizarre for the reasons articulated above. Looking back, this is the point at which I should have taken an axe to my television.
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Re: Episode 17

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The wake scene - awful. Initially starts out promising, and I do like the Sarah Palmer bit, but the rest of it is complete and utter tosh. Such a shame, could have been so much better, especially with the whole town gathered there, it seems a waste they are not discussing the terrors that have been committed and that Bob is still out there. Donna has gone from practically becoming Bob's next intended victim one episode previously and realizing Leland killed Laura in a tearful scene - and now she's calm, composed, completely unconcerned that Maddy has just been killed or that her best friend's father murdered her best friend Laura! Same with all the rest of them. (In fact, I don't think Maddy is mentioned at all. And outside the Sarah bit, neither is Laura.)

This whole sequence could have had such great dialogue and conversation about Bob, Leland, Laura, Maddy. And from these opening moments, the episode just keeps getting worse and worse. Isn't this the one where Nadine and the wrestling crap begins too? Ugh. So awful. With this episode, Twin Peaks concretely enters into Twin-Peaks-The-Sitcom territory for a while. It feels like it was written for another show, or as an apology/retcon of the previously dark and supernatural show. Fascinating to watch, but frustrating, lamentable, and deeply shameful too. Oh, what could have been... I never skip and try to appreciate even these bad episodes but I can understand why some people stop at 16, or skip forward to 25 or just 29.
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Re: Episode 17

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It just occurred to me that - I'm pretty sure - Leland's name is never mentioned ONCE in the entire wake scene. I mean, I'd obviously thought and written a lot about how the whole town is ignoring/brushing over what happened but I don't think I'd ever realized that Leland is 100% ignored at HIS OWN WAKE. Yikes.
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Re: Episode 17

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Could be that the actors didn't know what the event was since the murder hadn't aired yet on tv. And they were still in the dark.
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Re: Episode 17

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Audrey Horne wrote:Could be that the actors didn't know what the event was since the murder hadn't aired yet on tv. And they were still in the dark.
Hm, good point. I've always wondered how they managed shooting that scene when the reveal hadn't even been aired yet. I wonder if there was a cover story given that Ray Wise was conspicuously absent. Would it have been feasible to keep him on call as a decoy? (Do you have any call sheets for this episode?)

Imagine if there was a deleted scene of Leland at his own wake. :lol:
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Re: Episode 17

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No, no call sheet. I think I posted everything I have.

And the actors' memories are so fuzzy about it, we never get concrete answers about when they found out. But notice Ben isn't there. Or Bobby, Shelly, Catherine, Pete, James, Josie. So I suppose the actors might have been paying attention to whose home they were shooting in, they were probably still confused. They might not even have known the murder was revealed yet.

So reviewing this episode. It's pretty much known in the fandom as being near the bottom... But that is when looking at it in retrospect. Maybe. I always go back to where I was when it aired. And I think I was just excited. I was fantasizing for months what was going to happen once the damn Laura mystery was wrapped up, what the next mystery would be. This might not have exactly set the town on fire, but I was still so riveted to see what the next week would bring.

I was so happy that Catherine was back, and also Josie in a surprise revealing. Leo stirring. The Nadine corkscrew threw me, and that hooded figure. Those two effects along with the owl flying in the last one made me pause to the aesthetics, but it overlooked it because there was so much good Audrey, Cooper setup going on. At the time, I loved Cooper was kicked off the force, I loved that Jean Renault was coming after him, I loved the Audrey, Cooper, Windom windup. So at the time, I was just still really hooked. The next one I was disappointed.
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Re: Episode 17

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Audrey Horne wrote:No, no call sheet. I think I posted everything I have.

And the actors' memories are so fuzzy about it, we never get concrete answers about when they found out. But notice Ben isn't there. Or Bobby, Shelly, Catherine, Pete, James, Josie. So I suppose the actors might have been paying attention to whose home they were shooting in, they were probably still confused. They might not even have known the murder was revealed yet.
Ooh, great point. Especially Ben, since he was their biggest decoy, On the other hand, they go out of their way to bring Jacoby back after a 6-episode absence so I guess he was really off their decoy list by then.

It also makes me kinda annoyed they rushed ahead 3 days just so they could get this scene out of the way without actually doing something with it. Thinking that maybe they shot it without anyone knowing what it was for makes it seem like even more of a non sequitur. Why not have 3 episodes in between so that by the time it's shot the whole cast knows what happened? Of course at the time their purpose was get past that storyline as quickly as possible. But then why not just exclude the wake altogether? It just seems such a half-assed dramatic decision that couldn't come down on either side of the equation. In a perverse way I'm thankful it's there though as it gives us so much to talk about haha.
So reviewing this episode. It's pretty much known in the fandom as being near the bottom... But that is when looking at it in retrospect. Maybe. I always go back to where I was when it aired. And I think I was just excited. I was fantasizing for months what was going to happen once the damn Laura mystery was wrapped up, what the next mystery would be. This might not have exactly set the town on fire, but I was still so riveted to see what the next week would bring.

I was so happy that Catherine was back, and also Josie in a surprise revealing. Leo stirring. The Nadine corkscrew threw me, and that hooded figure. Those two effects along with the owl flying in the last one made me pause to the aesthetics, but it overlooked it because there was so much good Audrey, Cooper setup going on. At the time, I loved Cooper was kicked off the force, I loved that Jean Renault was coming after him, I loved the Audrey, Cooper, Windom windup. So at the time, I was just still really hooked. The next one I was disappointed.
This is an interesting point, because right now I'm rewatching the show from my least to most favorite episode (and writing a bit about it along the way). I've more or less decided that episode 17 will be next, that is to say 3rd-from-the-bottom, but it was kind of a tough call. Is the show better or worse when seen outside of its surrounding context? I could see it both ways...

Better: because when it isn't immediately following the much more dramatic ep. 16, the dropoff seems less precipitous + when we aren't thinking of just how bad things are going to get in later episodes

Worse: because at least that dropoff provides a "fascinating trainwreck" meta-interest, whereas without that bigger picture it's just a kinda lame episode of television; also, watching ep. 14 - 16 provides some momentum so that even if the episode is disappointing

Watching it after 22, so we'll see how it plays this time...

On another note, I've become weirdly amenable to ep. 18. It has at least 3 moments I really, really like (Hawk's goofy but really pertinent dweller speech, Denise's entrance, and Ben's home movies) which is more than I can say for most of mid-season 2. I've also grown softer on ep. 19, which I used to consider the worst episode. It has that cool final scene at the Briggs house and all the goofy stuff is as meta-fascinating as ep. 17 and less disappointing in a way because it isn't so much dropping the ball as racing after it and accidentally kicking it even further away. Ep. 20 is also somewhat redeemed for me by the beginning and the end. As cheesy as it is, I really dig Todd Holland's flamboyant space opening - the closest thing we get to a supernatural sequence between Leland's and Josie's death. And while the drug standoff is silly I've grown to quite like Dead Dog Farm as a location.

I now consider ep. 21 & 22 my personal low points. 23 & 28, while advancing the story much more than the mid-season, also tend to drag & frustrate me. I'm boosting them above 17 & 19, and probably 20 & 18 too, but not by much. They fall into the episode 16 category (though 16 is much, much better than both) of "failing to deliver on a big moment," and is that worse than not trying to deliver a big moment at all?
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Twin Peaks Out of Order #27: Episode 17

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Re-watching Twin Peaks from my least favorite to favorite episode...

Previously: Episode 28 (http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=42140#p42140)

This was a very hard episode to place. On the one hand, this is where everything begins to irreversibly head south. The show's most compelling and troubling bits of drama are cavalierly swept under the rug, the human tragedy and supernatural flourishes of the previous episode are barely followed up on, and many of the worst comic subplots are initiated. The entire wake scene is an absolute train wreck, just a disaster start to finish, goosed by the chaotic score, which can't decide if it wants to be sad or funny. And what’s with the cheerful demeanor of the townspeople attending a serial killer's memorial? On this very thread, it's been suggested that the actors may not have even known whose wake they were supposed to be attending, which is entirely plausible when you recall that the killer's identity was still a public secret at the time of production. This only hammers home how rushed the writers were in prematurely wrapping up the mystery that had provided their premise. Incidentally, Sarah Palmer's last scripted line on the show - before being dropped from the cast completely (until Lynch improvised her return in the finale) - is "I need to remember all of this..." Right before they cut away from Laura's tragedy one last time to reveal the mayor and his brother fighting at the buffet table! You can't make this stuff up. When I first watched the series 7 years ago, that moment with the two brothers made my heart sink. Suddenly and helplessly, I could see exactly where this show was going. Apparently director Tina Rathborne felt the same, admitting later that the scene represented an unfortunate turning point for the series and that this episode stood in stark contrast to her previous Twin Peaks venture, Laura's funeral. Indeed, Rathborne seems as confused as the viewer by this material. Similarly to her first episode, she indulges a lot of bizarre character traits (in particular, Hank and Ernie’s aggressive wrestling at One-Eyed Jack's is a wtf? moment). But this time, unmoored in the town's sense of grief and eccentricity, few of these gestures land. She also uses a LOT more music than in episode 3, one of the quietest in the score-heavy series. The wake is not the only scene to descends into a cacophony of distracting cues, adding to the sense that we are trapped on a carousel gone out of control. With all that in mind, it's quite logical for the episode to place so low. On the other hand, this is a really watchable hour of television! Sometimes it's so bad it's good - the moment when Nadine throws the jock twenty feet in the air is worthy of a grade-Z kids' show, even more surreal when you realize that we are only thirty-five minutes of screentime away from Leland's death. In other scenes, the pathos and humor actually connect; watching it without the distraction of the previous stretch of episodes I was able to enjoy many character moments more than I ever had before. In light of today's unfortunate Twin Peaks news, Cooper's fond goodbye to the sheriff's station crew, especially Truman (with whom he swoons over a Green Butt Skunk fishing tackle) is enough to give the most jaded viewers a lump in their throat. I was also surprisingly on board with the conclusion to the lame M.T. Wentz storyline, silently cheering Norma as she tells off her mother after a lifetime of belittlement. Catherine's appearance at the sheriff's station is also weirdly compelling and layered, a clear lie given unexpected poignancy by Rathborne’s musical choice and the realization that her talk of a guardian angel prefigures Fire Walk With Me. And while the episode’s and arguably the mid-season’s most thought-provoking dialogue was unfortunately cut out (it linked fear and love as opposites, and implied that Leland's self-hatred played some role in his possession), the campfire scene with Cooper and Maj. Briggs remains an intriguing teaser for the mysteries and mythology to come. It's amazing to realize, given how much fans conflate all the mythology in their heads, that there are no Lodges on the show until this conversation. All in all, this is a strangely essential episode to understanding Twin Peaks as a whole, but that doesn't mean it deserves to be ranked highly. If I was judging it purely on meta-fascination, it would be in my top ten. Judging it for what it did for the show's narrative, it deserves to be dead last. Instead I'll place it here, fourth from the bottom (although in the future I'd probably rank it slightly higher for those enjoyable character moments). And I'll paraphrase Seinfeld: "It's a loathsome, offensive brute...yet I can't look away."

P.S. Make sure to check out Michael Warren's brilliant takedown of the wake scene: http://entertainmentguidefilmtv.blogspo ... 20-26.html. His image captions are as hilarious as they are heartbreaking.

Next: Episode 19 (http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=42549#p42549)
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Re: Episode 17

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God, that wake scene... *shudders* But the damage is done, I think, even before that, in fact: just as the episode begins. The end of Episode 16, concluding as it did the Palmer story, was like a fork in the road at which the show could have gone two ways -- either continue the show's fascination with mystery and explore the dark woods and BOB and what he might do next; or swerve in a totally different direction and try to do a totally new, possibly less ominous story. The show, of course, did the latter but in the worst way possible.

When I first watched the show I got a sinking feeling at the very start of 17 because of the dreaded "3 DAYS LATER" title, accompanied by a saccharine slow pan around the Palmer mantelpiece with its pictures of the once-happy family -- in context of the preceding few episodes, an insipid aesthetic choice. If, as LITM has written, the opening of 15 is like a repression of the brutality and darkness of the previous episode (screams and ominous music as we see the house from the outside, shying away from actual representation)... well, then the opening of 17 makes the end of 16 with its light broaching of the topic of incest and BOB and evil appear positively Lynchian. Because that first scene in the Palmer household, followed by the wake, is just the most repressed, Disney-fied thing, as if they're taking a black paintbrush to the disturbing canvas of the show and blocking it all out. Though the opening scene with Cooper, Doc and Sarah Palmer is positively classic compared to what comes next, it's still an atrocious re-writing of the show's mythos and morality and themes. Leland, we're told, was completely innocent -- see, he confronted his bad deeds before he died, so it's all fine and dandy. Coop and Sarah's demarcation between Leland the loving innocent father unwillingly possessed by Evil, and the "disgusting" "long-haired" man who "actually" committed the crimes totally leaves Leland off the hook, puts blame onto some Other, some malicious, implicitly non-white murderer. Thus the show denies the whole mystical, supernatural and collaborative element of BOB as possessive entity, boiling it all down to banal commonsense, where it might as well have been a totally separate person from Leland who killed Laura and Maddy, all blame conveniently pinned on the unsavory Other, the greasy minority criminal who doesn't look like he's from 'round these parts. Needless to say Lynch, thankfully, turns all this on its head in FWWM.

It's as if Rathborne really had no clue what she was supposed to do, what she was directing. The next scene, a languorous overhead pan of food being graciously laid out on the table as we hear uplifting synth music and muted laughter and chatter on the soundtrack, is hard to judge as anything but a failed attempt at depicting the head-strong community of TP which gets through these things with aplomb -- you know, just an ostensibly normal family man being possessed by an evil spirit to rape and murder his daughter and her cousin, nothing these people can't handle! (even though the mere thought of Laura being dead caused shockwaves of grief and tears and incredulity in the Pilot. I suppose the 3-day skip is partially an attempt at side-stepping that, but maybe they should have gone for 3 months or 3 years if they wanted to give a realistic picture of a town that's gotten fairly back to normal. Really, this is not a wake scene; all mention of Leland, Laura, BOB and what happened is cast aside after the very first scene with Sarah. It's more of a laying-out of the ways in which the show will proceed, with the Palmer household as symbolic location, empty as it is of any trace of the Palmers (especially once the show cuts away from Sarah and to the brothers fighting). This surely wasn't intentional, but it's as if the show is announcing its nosedive into banal daytime-soap kitsch, and its move away from confronting darkness and mystery, by staging these increasingly absurd shenanigans in the very space in which a girl was brutally murdered less than a week before by the man who they've supposedly gathered there to mourn. It's all so topsy-turvy, so afraid of the vaguest grain of truth, that it becomes almost surreal in its denial and escapism. Adding to this is the schizophrenic score -- both mournful-yet-optimistic synth tones and that percussive jazz-shuffle which always accompanies the comedic scenes of the series. The many shots of food and various objects in the Palmer household are telling, as if the show is focusing on objects because it doesn't know how to deal with the emotions of the people there (or at least the emotions they should have). This is the most maddening part of the show. (Also note how there's virtually no discussion of Maddie's death in/after Ep 15, no real impact on the townspeople outside of a select few; the polar opposite of Laura in the pilot). Just the way the show whitewashes one if its most compelling aspects, which separated it from so much other normal TV: the realistic focus on grief and humanistic insistence on lingering on such, on not cutting away from tragedy and trauma, on not saying everything's going to be alright when God knows it's not. FWWM is like the polar opposite of Ep 17 on the scale of honesty and confronting trauma... the show may have gotten even "lighter" and more frivolous in the next several episodes, but the explicit denial of any kind of reaction to what happened in 17 makes it the episode that is most opposed to what Twin Peaks, at its essence and at its best, was all about. Seriously, who thought the mayor-and-his-brother story was a good idea? How could the writers so thoroughly squander what they had -- such a rich cast of characters, so many of them so interesting and ripe for development, and it's like they purposefully made the worst possible choices about what to do (or not do) with every single one of them.

And even besides the wake sequence, which only takes up about 10 minutes of the episode, there's almost nothing in the other plots to recommend. The only truly intriguing or "good" scene is probably the closing with Briggs and Coop, but the show fucks up what should be major scenes, like Audrey/Coop (A: "What happened, did she die?" C: "As a matter of fact, she did." *groan*) which just doesn't work -- besides the awful writing, Coop seems stiff in a way that doesn't work for the scene, to say nothing of the fact that it not only puts out all the sparks between those two but is practically the last scene they share in the whole series. And I really can't think of any plot in here that works... the OEJ scene, Nadine Goes Back to School, Norma's troubles, Coop getting booted, Audrey and Bobby's "chemistry," replete with gag-inducing attempts at clever, flirty dialogue... they're all adrift in a sea of who-cares and why-are-you-showing-me-this. Okay, one scene besides Briggs and Coop camping works, and that's Coop's farewell to Truman and company... but it's a small consolation indeed for the drudgery of the rest of the episode.

So for me this is the worst episode of the series. There may be two or three hours in the S2 slump that are less entertaining or less interesting, but I actually prefer the other post-Leland episodes to 17 because they at least don't even attempt to broach the subject of Laura/Leland/BOB, and are thus, though mediocre compared to the show at its best, enjoyable as a kind of narcotized daytime-soap: best watched on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But 17 has a lot more baggage to deal with, and it fumbles it all; it's the show indulging its worst and most reactionary, childish impulses. A complete and utter failure, a cowardly refutation of the existence of the heart of darkness that the show previously had acknowledged so bravely. No matter what factors led to this surreal debacle of an episode, whether it was mostly accidental or totally on purpose, it remains a sad debacle and the nadir of the series.
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Re: Episode 17

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I always chose to take Cooper's monologue to Sarah as being something meant to empower her, rather than a wholesale pardon of Leland - I thought the show was trying to give her character some sort of positive grace note, and that meant a lot to me the first few times I watched the show, I really liked the scene. I think they were trying to show Sarah rising out of the dark and becoming stronger and more whole. And I can understand and appreciate that impulse and I still have a bit of a soft spot for it, but looking at it today I do think a lot of it's too pat - especially when we don't see her again until the finale, when she's clearly still as addled as ever. If they'd found a way to involve a Sarah who is trying to get stronger in a new story, maybe missing girls or something, that might have been a stronger arc.

I found Sarah's appearance in "Between Two Worlds" to be absolutely spellbinding and heartbreaking - it instantly brought all of TP back after some years away. It was also a pretty realistic interpretation of where and who she'd be, sad but true. And FWWM, of course, subverts Sarah's victimization and somewhat implicates her, as it should. I expect to see more of that tough treatment of Sarah in the new show, but I won't lie; I am hoping Lynch finds a way to give her the kind of salvation and grace note that this episode sort of fumbles.
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Re: Episode 17

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David Locke:

This is one of the most articulate and brilliant takedowns of these scenes that I've read (btw, I highly recommend that link to Michael Warren's post - the captions he uses to contrast reactions in the pilot vs. ep. 17 are more sarcastic in flavor but have the same vicious bite to them as your own observations).

Regarding Sarah's scene, by way of a digression...I have been cross-posting these episode capsules on Tumblr along with a screen-cap of my favorite scene from the episode. Going in I thought that scene would probably the opening. Despite feeling weirded out by Cooper's explaining-away of Bob, I've recently flirted with the idea that the show wants us to distrust Cooper's rationalization: after all, it also has him report that Bob is gone "forever" which we know the writers can't have intended. Well, maybe so, but nonetheless it just doesn't play. Grace Zabriskie seems viscerally uncomfortable underneath her professional surface and the placidity of the sequence has a kind of dread to it that doesn't feel purposeful. I'm inclined to give Rathborne more leeway than you, given her direction of ep. 3 - I think she probably wanted to go for a kind of off-kilter, discomforting dissonance with her juxtapositions of tone and mood but the material wasn't there and she herself wasn't really clear on what the episode was even trying to convey so instead of coming off as a knowing subversive touch it just adds to the feeling of the whole first 10 minutes of the show being an unconscious Freudian slip.

The Sarach sequence in particular is like the perfect visualization/verbalization of how repression, denial, and rationalization of abuse takes place. That's why I consider this episode as valuable as it is horrible (kind of like Birth of a Nation, despite the difference in scale): it offers a sneak peek into just how this sort of terrible but all-too-common phenomenon occurs. But that doesn't redeem the material itself. I ended up going with a picture of Truman handing Coop the green butt skunk instead.

Again, just can't say enough how perfectly you've nailed why this episode is such a catastrophe.
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Re: Episode 17

Post by David Locke »

Thanks Lost! The wake scene is so impossibly awful that I get a kick out of just exploring why and how such a thing could... happen. I almost think the slump episodes, this one especially, are just as fascinating (maybe even MORE fascinating) than the quality episodes, just because one wonders why and how and what the fuck? And even after reading Brad's book and watching several documentaries and hearing from many sources, the writers and actors and network people and all the rest... it still seems like some enduring mystery to me just how the show became so bad so quickly. I don't buy that the Audrey angle being axed and Palmer story wrapping up meant that we had to get this... I mean, it could have gone so many different ways, like oh I don't know, actually investigating a mystery of sorts... yet it's as if the show decides to be the worst it can possibly be. Anyway, yeah, I've read Michael Warren's post (and many of his others -- hope he finishes the recaps soon), and those captions absolutely hit the nail on the head. Hilarious yet sad.

You know, I did just re-watch the scene after writing my post and I was slightly wrong in that the first scene with Sarah does have that somber, darker quality to it -- the score as we pan across Leland and Laura's pictures on the mantelpiece is a minimal, ominous rendering of the LP theme, and there's nothing nearly as jarringly upbeat going on there as in the wake that follows. Yeah, I think it's definitely more the fault of the script than Rathborne, who probably does about as good a job as anyone could... I don't think even Lynch could do something great while sticking to that script. You're right, there's nothing wrong with showing Sarah Palmer rationalizing and repressing away the truth, so long as the show clearly takes a different stance. But yeah, there's no reason to believe we're meant to view Cooper as wrong, or just trying to calm Sarah down with some comforting untruths, in that scene. So, for the first time (at least to this extent) the show seems to totally embrace such toxic denial and subsequent escapism into irreverent fluff. There's no subversive edge, though I agree I can see how the contrasting sad music/food being served vs. kinky jazz music/everyone goofing around could've been intended as a comment on the townspeople's denial, or something. But the script leaves so little, if any, room at all to actually go that route, so Rathborne's stuck with awkwardly delivering this mutant baby that, if it were real, should've been killed by Henry Spencer ASAP. It sounds like hyperbole, but I really think that the show failing to give us any real reaction or follow-up to Leland's death and all that it entailed (plus the ensuing quality dive) is the single most disappointing turn that any good TV series has ever taken. To a lesser extent, this is also true for the curious lack of impact of Maddy's death; as I said in my other post, it's just totally unlike the show that once so painstakingly depicted the shock-waves of grief that the mere news of one death could cause in so many.

And this is unrelated, but what's with that dreary, de-saturated exterior transition shot that comes right before Coop and Audrey's farewell scene? It's like some run-down, rainy/cloudy, industrial part of town that I feel like we never have quite seen before on the show (or maybe not since the pilot). It jars with the soft, warm-colored earth-toned fluffiness of Twin Peaks circa Episode 17, and always has stuck out to me. I suppose you could say it fits the unnecessarily dour tone of the following scene quite well...
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Re: Episode 17

Post by LostInTheMovies »

There's a few of those weirdly drab establishing shots (which I really like on their own terms) and I suspect that's part of the contrast Rathborne was trying to achieve. Undortunately the two sides of Twin Peaks (the twin peaks themselves if you will) were racing in different directions and they were torn asunder.

The way I described this episode in my video is "swift, disorienting precision of a bloodless coup" and I'm still glad I hit upon those words because that's exactly how it feels to me. Waking up one morning to discover the entire world has been upended yet everyone is casually going about their business as usual.

The Tricia Brock thing is strange too. Why bring in a writer who has never worked in the show before, to set up all these new arcs and push the story in a new direction. According to IMDb, she was Harley Peyton's wife so she did have some experience with the production. And Brad says that she had an in-depth meeting with Frost where he broke everything down for her (so even if he was gone for much of the mid-season he seems to have set the cart in motion). She also says she never met with David Lynch at all. Back to the coup metaphor, it again feels like a puppet government wing installed or something haha. Which is not to say Frost was "overthrowing" Lynch necessarily...I'm not sure who was doing what for why. It's almost like the show had a mind of its own, a Frankenstein situation where various decisions had come together to push the story in the worst possible direction.
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