EDIT: Woops! This thread exploded while I was gone and reading it again I skipped over 2 newer pages... sorry to bring up old posts but they gave me some thoughts.
missoulamt wrote:There was nothing about Freddie, the Mitchum bros and their girlfriends and Hutch and Chantal that made me particularly care about them...
I can't say I agree. I always liked Nadine, but I've never seen her referred to as a universally beloved character--many disliked her, especially her High School plot.
And yet compared to Nadine in the original, I like the Mitchums, Hutch & Chantal even more. Not to browbeat you, I'm just sharing my snap reaction, but; it actually throws me off guard anyone could find fault in anything about them, the acting and writing are amazing to me for those new characters in particular. I was invested in them despite my surprise (I initially disliked both) but by the time Hutch & Chantal died, I was actually sad they were gone, and by the time the Mitchums dined with Dougie, I was hoping they would remain until the end.
As for Freddy being like if Nadine walked up to BOB in the original ... I expect something like that would have happened; long ago when discussing how the original could have been resolved had it continued, I remember joking, actually, that the logical conclusion for how everything would end is that side characters, previously unconnected to the main plot, would lock into place. Including Nadine's super-strength being of plot use. And that did happen, in more ways than Freddy. Lucy shoots the doppelgänger, and Andy literally visits the lodge. Both of which, because they were previously safeguarded in the 'secular' sideplot world, their safety an unconscious thing to us out of familiarity that they never advance beyond the normal reality, were SHOCKING moments to me. So I don't think they did this willy-nilly, rather they did it for effect. The only parallel I can think of is when Josie descended into the knob, and her body gave way to BOB. Which, back then, was a despised moment too.
EDIT 2:
AgentEcho wrote:I do think that Freddie being a completely a completely unrelated character from halfway around the world makes it quite a bit more absurd than a having a Twin Peaks character do it, absolutely. The idea that it would have been more acceptable for a Twin Peaks character to put on a magical green garden glove and super punch out a bouncing found footage BOB ball still seems to me to be seeking something more comfortingly conventional to an absurd idea.
I think this is on the ball, but I think there's an equally good 'answer' in a more simple line of thought. Given that we take gods and demons (or, if you prefer, positive and negative entities) as existing, why exactly would they follow our ideas of conventional physics, including conventional beats in storytelling? I mean, that's always been an aspect of Twin Peaks theorizing, and the dialogue between Freddy & James where the green glove is introduced allude to this idea specifically. Freddy asks, Why me? And the response he gets is, Why not you? This is, just like the over-the-top reactions in grief stricken characters, or the myriad quirks in behavior, a kind of dramatic paradox; what we see as unnatural on screen, seemingly based on our conditioning to what is presented on other TV shows or plot vehicles, is actually natural in reality. That someone would launch themselves into a dangerous scenario because they believe, but don't fully understand, that it has importance, happens on a daily level. The uncanny is ordinary, the extraordinary is often more commonplace than we might realize, etc. Life often does not adhere to our desire for narrative coherence. The workings of a contrived powerful entity has even less reason to do so.
Whether the scene works in terms of feeling, I think it does; my initial time, and my second time around after I pondered it over, there is a specific and visceral feeling. I get overwhelmed and exhausted by its execution; how I feel seems intentional, as it's reflected in the reactions (somewhat mockingly? but that uncertainty is also part of the feeling) in the Mitchums' reaction. I can't quite grasp how sincere or insincere it is, but I feel something and at that intensely, and that's pretty much how I would describe most of the franchise.
As for Freddie as a character, I didn't feel he was made intentionally unrelatable or out of place; to the contrary, his scene with James, René and the punch down was put in, I think, to soften the audience to him; I liked the scene and by extension, became that much more okay with Freddy's presence in the series. I think the subversion that was intended was that, with that bar scene, you were supposed to ask, "Wait, is that what the glove's purpose was?" Then it moves the chess-pieces, and once you see James & Freddy in jail in proximity to Naido, again, you ask "Oh, wait, was that the end of the glove plot?" And again when he decks Chad with the cell door. With the distraction of keeping in mind that Lucy, too, is being slotted into an important place, by the time it comes into play against BOB, you're rightly baffled. You remain in that suspension of disbelief the whole time, and I think that was the onus of the play with expectation; the glove is red herring until it isn't. The overall meaning of a deux ex machina being what destroys BOB and everything involving Cooper as hero-archetype after easily lends to analysis, but I think all the stuff with Freddy on a character level, and on a suspense level, was actually fairly conventional.