World of Blue

The title says it all. There's a lot of heated and interesting debate/discussion going on in the main Season 3 threads.

This thread isn't meant for that. It is, as the title suggests, a thread in which the small minority of us who are experiencing feelings of extreme disappointment and even disillusionment can band together and rant/moan/complain to our heart's content without being told that we're not getting it.

I stayed up to watch the first two episodes. It was difficult not to fall asleep before Twin Peaks started but I fully expected that ONCE it started, a truckload of Valium wouldn't be able to put me under. Man was I wrong. This has been called pure heroin Lynch. Well I certainly feel that Lynch may have been on heroin when he came up with this. I also feel that I'm going to need a lot of heroin to get through it. I'll get the ball rolling.

1. Angelo Badalamenti - what has he contributed so far? I get it, the guy is old and not exactly at the height of his powers. So the solution is to..... have little to no music. Ok that's one way of dealing with it.

2. Terrible Acting - A lot of the performances make Sofia Coppola's performance in Godfather III look like Al Pacino's performance in Godfather I. Oh, but it's all deliberate right? Therefore it's actually really GOOD acting.

3. The Red Room - Did Lynch dig out his old Commodore 64 to come up with this?

4. No emotional connection to any characters - Funnily enough this is pretty important to me. The original Pilot was utterly harrowing. By the end of it I cared about a bunch of people I had only 'met' 90 minutes or so before. At the end of the Return Pilot I had started to care less about characters I had loved for 25 years.

5. New bands at the end of each episode. I've been listening to the Chromatics for a good while. But their appearance in TP just felt utterly wrong and out of place.

6. A lot of Twin Peaks is no longer in Twin Peaks. Yeah, I want to spend time in my favourite fictional place in the universe. Not in some terrible Vegas casino.

7. Pacing. Lynch likes playing with audience patience, we know. And isn't he clever to literally watch paint dry, with Jacobi and the shovels. In small doses this is fine but so far it seems to be about half of the material.

I could go on but am not trying to provide an exhaustive list, just a few reasons as to why so far the Return hasn't exactly lit my F-I-R-E.

Let's face it, we're probably all going to watch to the end (maybe by which time we'll have been converted) so we may as well keep each other company.

Oh and in case I didn't make it clear, this isn't the place for those of you besotted with the Return to come in and tell us why we're wrong. It's a safe space, so please show some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

I am currently incredibly disappointed with the show and it's complete disconnect from the original shows. I have decided to continue watching but pretend it is just a new show I've decided to give a go at watching with some thinly veiled plotlines that connects the original show to this but pretend it's not Twin Peaks. Because it really isn't. No disrespect at all to Mr Lynch as I was not privy to seeing him and Mark Frost work together, but it really does feel all Lynch and like MF never got a look in and I really liked what MF brought to the party before and can't see his influence here at all. I miss the music terribly and did not want a repeat of the first two seasons and didn't mind it was set outside of TP a lot. I just wanted the warmth and humour to balance up everything else and it felt like it did not have those things - it didn't feel in any way like Twin Peaks and I didn't care about the characters. Plus I think I would have found bad Coop scarier if he had still been 'Coop', the Coop we knew but like Leland, he looked like himself, acted like himself, sounded like himself but was really not himself because he was Bob. That to me is more sinister than a bad wig, snakeskin shirt and a spray tan. I didn't mind the CGI so much and liked the look of the red room (but am watching on a laptop so maybe can't see everything) though the bit with Laura being sucked up into the air reminded me of The Adventure Game graphics, a show that used to air in the UK in the late 70's (maybe someone will remember it!) I wonder when Lynch/Frost will redress the balance of the gratuitous shots of nude women with nude men?

LOL, what a good idea for a thread! I'll be seeing if I'm gonna join you once I make it past these initial eps/parts - only seen half an hour of the first one and, as things stand now, it has a looong way to go to make me warm up to what they've concocted. So, I may well end up being one of the prominent members of your "club"

Also, for starters, not a fan of new opening credits... The immortal music and Laura's picture are nice, but I expected new shots of some familiar TP paysages/sites to pop up. Well, I guess it does kinda make sense the latter aren't included (sans aerial shot of the waterfall), as the new series has plenty of places to visit that are not our favorite town.

mlsstwrt wrote:3. The Red Room - Did Lynch dig out his old Commodore 64 to come up with this?

Hi there :^) I suspect it's deliberately pixellated around the edges. The place is falling apart, maybe they need to make Earth their permanent home rather than the storefront that Twin Peaks / the green forest has traditionally been?

Who is f-ing up their show? Somebody that's come into their house?

mlsstwrt wrote:5. New bands at the end of each episode. I've been listening to the Chromatics for a good while. But their appearance in TP just felt utterly wrong and out of place.

Yep l specifically told Dave (via this forum) no modern electro pop, and he goes and does this.
I watched the end credits with a glower, l wanted to murder the Chromatics and play their torsos as guitars Dawn to Dusk style.

mlsstwrt wrote:7. Pacing. Lynch likes playing with audience patience, we know. And isn't he clever to literally watch paint dry, with Jacobi and the shovels. In small doses this is fine but so far it seems to be about half of the material.

Agree, FWWM was like staring into a warming gas fire on a winter evening, it gave me a cosy golden feel. The pacing in the new series feels cold. Of course, (a) this is how it should be, Lynch and Frost know best and (b) I don't mind too much as long as Lynch and Frost keep on giving.

Welcome to the thread friends!

Will be interesting to see where we are at the end of part 18. Hopefully in a better place than we are now.

Venus - it's the warmth that I miss too. The tone of the the Return is so aloof and detached. It feels devoid of hope. And I absolutely loved FWWM even though it didn't have a great deal of humour and was often terrifyingly bleak. Still it had heart and soul to spare as well as massive empathy for its chief protagonist. Empathy is entirely lacking so far. I guess the scenes with Margaret are the closest we've come to it. Possibly the Bobby scene as well but I had a horrible feeling that Bobby was being mocked. I could be wrong about that but it seemed to be a kind of pastiche of the scene in the first season of TP where Bobby cries in Jacobi's office.

Maybe this is going a step too far, i don't know, but this feels so cynical so far, cruel even.

Agent Earle - I'm disappointed with the opening credits as well. They have added nothing to the original credits and it feels like a lot is missing.

The characters also seem to be lacking any kind of real motivation, like they're all just going through the motion. Very little joy or enthusiasm is evident. In the original series I get the feeling the actors intuited that they were part of something special and the energy really shone through. Now they all seem so jaded to me, like they know they're at or near the end of their careers and this isn't make or break time. Again maybe this lack of energy or life force is deliberate, I don't know, but I don't like it one bit.

I hate the music cameos. They feel so tacked on. Lynch has clearly got a lot of young, hip fans. He seems to have befriended a fair few of them and seems to be using Twin Peaks to showcase their talent.

We'll all get through this together

I too belong to this group of people. Practically nothing is the same, they could just go ahead and change the title of the show to something else. I didn't want a direct rehash of the original one, but this is definitely not what I wanted either. I also feel that there seems to be some anti-TP sentiment floating around - for some odd reason now everything associated with the old show is seen as "mawkish" or "embarrassing" by a group of people. I for one loved the scene with Bobby and Laura, it hit me right in the feels and not in a forced way like the new Star Wars did, for example.

I know that things could still change, but for now I'm just left disappointed. Well, at least we'll always have the original show to lean on, guys.

Pöllö wrote:I too belong to this group of people. Practically nothing is the same, they could just go ahead and change the title of the show to something else. I didn't want a direct rehash of the original one, but this is definitely not what I wanted either. I also feel that there seems to be some anti-TP sentiment floating around - for some odd reason now everything associated with the old show is seen as "mawkish" or "embarrassing" by a group of people. I for one loved the scene with Bobby and Laura, it hit me right in the feels and not in a forced way like the new Star Wars did, for example.

I know that things could still change, but for now I'm just left disappointed. Well, at least we'll always have the original show to lean on, guys.

Welcome Pollo!

That's a very interesting point about the anti-TP sentiment. Well this 'new' Twin Peaks is arguably a lot cooler (if cooler means cynical, lacking in empathy and downright cold). I can't make up my mind about the Bobby scene. It hit me in the feels too but I couldn't help this feeling that Bobby was being mocked and that it was something of a send-up of the scene where Bobby cries in Jacobi's office. I hope not.

Totally agree that nothing is the same and that they could have called it something else. Don't know if anyone will have seen both but it reminds me a bit of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Waking Life. The Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (Jesse and Celine) appear in one scene in Waking Life but they're animated characters, not the flesh and blood of Before Sunrise.

I hope I'll always have the original show to lean on. I hope that I will be able to partition the original show in my mind from this. I've managed to crop the Evelyn/Pine Weasel/Little Nicky stuff from latter half of Season 2 from my memory and hope that this isn't going to taint the original. If anything I hope it will be like going home again. A large part of the appeal of Twin Peaks for me was the escapism aspect. I couldn't wait to be whisked into that beautiful, magical world. So far I wouldn't want to spend a single second in any of the locations in this new Twin Peaks, not even the town itself.

Count me in.

So sad I am here but this new season is just badly produced.

The good season 3 is in the Lodge, and it can't leave. Write it in your diary.

"James has always been cool"

Alternate universe confirmed.


Another thought:

By Cera doing a pastiche of James Hurley he has become
As hated as him.

Chester Desmond wrote:The good season 3 is in the Lodge, and it can't leave. Write it in your diary.

Loool!

I don't even have words for the whole Cera thing.

I'll be upfront and say I don't do 'safe spaces:' they're for snowflakes.

However, I'll admit to disappointment that I'm not getting a continuation of the world of the old show and FWWM.

This new series has the same disconnect for me as Millennium seasons one and two or, more accurately, Arrested Development season four, which also felt like actors were being pulled in when they had a day off from other work and given a page of dialogue to perform, but didn't really have any idea how their lines fitted into a wider context. Sheriff's department scenes don't feel like they are set in any town at all, for example. It's like the actors are simply playing their lines at a filming location somewhere and there's no town outside.

I like the new show as a crazy Lynchian fantasy series – it'll be de rigeur cult viewing for eternity – but this isn't a continuation of the Twin Peaks of the 1990s show and FWWM, in my mind. This isn't episode 30 or FWWM 2. It's certainly not season three. The Coop of Twin Peaks was possessed by Bob in a great end-of season cliffhanger and that still stands.

This new show is David Lynch being given a ton of cash and being told to go wild, with the only requirement being that he use the Twin Peaks name and characters to sell it.

There's great stuff in the new show and I enjoy it for what it is. I'm glued to every scene, but it's a flabby, fascinating, self-indulgent mess. But this show is being made by an older David Lynch who has developed a love of the look of video, hence Inland Empire, where once he meticulously crafted images on film and is no longer interested in plot or structure.

The biggest difference is that the original Twin Peaks and even the movie felt like they were set in a tangible, textured 'real' world that had extraordinary things in it. Season three is set in a bizarro fantasy dream landscape where the 'real' world is every bit as strange and artificial as the Black Lodge. When the agents were driving to the prison to interrogate Evil Coop, the makers didn't even attempt to hide that they were using green screen. In that context, there's no need for any effects to look real.

On top of that, the creators' distaste for season two seems to mean that they aren't really interested in acknowledging it, beyond the fait accompli that Coop is in the Black Lodge at the start.

I feel like I'm looking at an artist's sketch pad or a writer's doodle pad; ideas that the creators have had all thrown on screen with little concern for their relevance. The biggest fear is that this is a nine-episode season stretched to 18 and that's the cause of the wonky pacing.

All this sounds more negative than I necessarily feel. I find myself flip-flopping a lot, enjoying the new show, but feeling it's not the show I wanted or needed.

Hello Gabriel. The 'safe space' was definitely meant to be a joke. Us Brits don't really do safe spaces. I think we find the concept very American and it's kind of funny to us.

Great post and so far your description of this season being like a charity telethon has been my favourite (that was you wasn't it?) I thought that was just brilliant.

So Showtime have given David Lynch all this money. What has he done with all of it? I don't claim to know anything about film whatsoever but this whole things just looks so unbelievably cheap. I thought the original Pilot looked amazing, so I'm confused when people say that Lynch's production valued are always low, so this is nothing new.

A lot of perfectly good points here, even though....just to plant a flag: Overall I'm excited by each new episode.

But I'll offer some support. It's hard to argue with much of what you say. Especially this:

mlsstwrt wrote:
7. Pacing. Lynch likes playing with audience patience, we know. And isn't he clever to literally watch paint dry, with Jacobi and the shovels. In small doses this is fine but so far it seems to be about half of the material.
.

The super slow pacing of scenes is a tough one. You have to sit through 18 hours of this style.
It also GREATLY affects re-watchabilty, when you know most scenes drag out, and nothing happens. How badly do you want to sit there and re-watch Jacoby painting shovels again, at a snail's pace in all it's digitally shot glory....

Even the biggest supporters along the lines of 'Anything Lynch is genius' would have to at least understand where people are coming from on the pacing issue, within the context of a whole season, an 18 hour movie.

mlsstwrt wrote:Let's face it, we're probably all going to watch to the end (maybe by which time we'll have been converted) so we may as well keep each other company.

Yeah, during it's run sheer probability dictates that there will be moments, story arcs that will get your attention and get you intrigued if you stick around.
One thing that is POSSIBLE, and could instill hope in those disillusioned so far, is Coop returning to his old self, the FBI agent somewhat in the ballpark of his former self doing his thing.
That combined with taking on a good case, perhaps directly tied to his own history could at least make a difference for a lot of people.

But of course, if the description is accurate, that this is all about "Cooper's journey back into Twin Peaks" it may not happen until quite late....