Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Discussion of each of the 18 parts of Twin Peaks the Return

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Saela
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Saela »

Not sure if this has been metioned before, but what do we make of the fact that the face of BOB came out of Evil Coop's stomach while the spirits where doing...whatever it was that they were doing? Does this mean the Doopelganger isn't with BOB anymore?

And holy crap what an episode. One of my favorite things ever.
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by EwanM »

I rewatched Episode 7, just before Ep8. A remarkable experience, taken as a 'whole', and a testament to how this artwork can only be evaluated as an integrated work (wish I'd had time to rewatch all seven preceding parts). As Lynch was telling us in the Manhattan prologue in Ep1, we must pay close attention not only to what we see, but what we've seen and what we are about to see. Not just Twin Peaks Seasons 1/2, FWWM and the Missing Pieces - nothing less than Lynch's entire oeuvre will do for context here.

The low ominous hum of Ep7 has been given flesh / stripped bare by the awesome beauty of Ep8; the consoling narrative thrust of the prior episode eviscerated by a nuclear blast.

Lynch was never going to settle for merely updating us on how the little town of Twin Peaks and its wacky inhabitants have changed in the last 25+ years. He's weaving all his past works together into a Lynchian multiverse, where characters, plots and time dilate and expand, gloriously and unpredictably. In Twin Peaks: The Return (as deceptive a title as there ever was), like Sam and Tracey, we're watching not just an experiment (The 'Manhattan Project'), but the unveiling of nothing less than Lynch's Grand Unified Theory of Evil.

I love how Lynch is folding in dialogue and reconfiguring scenes from his past work:
'At your house. Don't You Remember?' (Mystery Man, Lost Highway)
'At your house.' (DoppelCoop'); 'That's right. Do you remember that night?' (Diane)
'Who are you?' Laura Palmer to Bob/Leland (FWWM); 'Who are you?' Diane to DoppelCoop.
Cowboy, MD to Diane 'Wake up, pretty girl'; One-armed man to DougieCoop 'Wake up.'
Winkie's hobo from MD 'reincarnated' as the Buckhorn, South Dakota jail cell spirit, Convenience Store woodsmen both. Imprisoned Bill Hastings's bifurcated persona fuses with Fred Madison's; the sax solo from Trouble in Ep 5 echoing Madison's angsty sax in the early stages of Lost Highway.

Lynch is also echoing / mirroring scenes from previous episodes within the series itself, folding it upon itself.
Jimmy (about Janey-E): 'Tough dame'; Gordon Cole (about Diane): 'Tough cookie'; Jerry and DougieCoop both 'lost' their car; The Convenience Store and its wandering denizens from Ep8 eerily echoing the elusively shifting Double R clientele in Ep 7's outro.

I've always thought the Mystery Man from LH was a black lodge entity, the Cowboy from MD too. The box (a box to watch from, rather than a box to watch, or perhaps both) positioned high above the stage in Episode 8 strongly reminiscent of Silencio in Mulholland Dr.

Laura Palmer 'born' from the head of the giant as Athena was from the forehead of Zeus. The goddess not only of wisdom, but of war.

Not only is Lynch integrating aspects of past works into this Möbius strip of a magnum opus, he's recontextualising the past. It will be impossible to view the original series in the same way now. There will be those who complain of cultural vandalism, but it's Lynch and Frost's baby, they can throw it out with the bath water if they like. It's not as if Lynch didn't warn us with that axe through the TV set in FWWM. The 'innocent' flirtation between schoolgirl Audrey and FBI agent Cooper (as if there could be anything innocent in a series predicated upon the sexual abuse and murder of a child: the wonder of the original TP was surely that Lynch was able to sugar coat this perverts' paradise with such a seductive patina) has been retconned into something even creepier; Dale Cooper's breezily good-natured messages to Diane are starting to look like the perverse ramblings of an unreliable narrator, as unconvincing an act as 'Song and Dance Leland', even before/ after (Lynch has truly stripped us of our moorings here) the sinister adoption / subversion of the 'Good Dale's signature mannerisms by DoppelCoop in the prison interview scene from Ep4.

The uber-creepy conversation of J-M Renault on the phone at the Roadhouse and the bizarrely time-shifted closing scene of Ep7 in the Double R confirm that nothing really changes in Twin Peaks, even when everything does. There is no longer music in the air, but was that music ever real anyway? Was the 'old' Twin Peaks not every bit as off as the 'new', as bizarre and unsettling an abstraction as the Deer Meadow prologue to FWWM. Are both worlds not merely the flip sides of the same absurd coin ('tails I win, heads you lose'), spinning improbably in the air, like Red's dime? We're deep in the quantum realm here. The movements of the denizens of the convenience store, like those of the customers of the Double R, seem to defy the laws of time and space, both 'here' and 'there' simultaneously. The other-worldly oasis of Twin Peaks may be the product of the delusions of a serial killer, filtered through the fractured consciousness of schizophrenia and the romantic-hued retro idealisations of an innocent dreamer. In Lynchworld, it can be both.
Last edited by EwanM on Mon Jun 26, 2017 3:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Wonderful & Strange
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Wonderful & Strange »

Nope.
Last edited by Wonderful & Strange on Mon Jun 26, 2017 2:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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tresojos
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by tresojos »

lmao. wtf was that. #notmytwinpeaks #maketwinpeaksgreatagain
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Pinky
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Pinky »

Over the ocean in the Purple World, the size of that building. Then we get Lynch's 1950s atomic horror by way of Pontypool. And the score. Wow.
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Saela »

I thought the sound-design during that Spirits/Evil Coop/Ray scene was incredible and felt very different and new. It created a mood that I don't think I can compare to anything else in Lynch's filmography. I just can't get rid of that feeling this scene gave me and I love it.
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Panapaok
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Panapaok »

One of the best hours of TV...ever. We basically got backstory/world building/mythology expansion in pure visual storytelling and no exposition! Lynch always was and still is a genius artist, period. This is bound to be the most polarizing episode by far, though. I can see people being furious and throwing their TVs out of the window. :lol:

My understanding is pretty much echoing what has been already said in this thread. Nuclear explosion opens a gate and bridges the two worlds. The Giant (?????) sends Laura's spirit to our world in order to save it, somehow. I guess the doppelgänger is no longer with BOB. I wonder how this will affect Cooper, or not. As someone who is seriously disturbed by insects, you can imagine that this got under my skin in a very horrific way. I think that neither the girl is Sara nor the bug is Laura. This is connected to something bad, the 'Experiment' (Mother?) vomited many eggs, along with the one that included BOB.

Anyway, that was probably the most intense hour of TV ever. Glad that we have 2 weeks to relax and contemplate.
This is - excuse me - a damn fine cup of coffee.
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by TheAlien »

HOLY FUCK!!!! David Lynch just made a music video for Penderecki's Threnody, :shock: featured Nine Inch Nails :shock: and completely fucking floored me to the point of now knowing nothing whatsoever, through more world-building, all in the same episode :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by dronerstone »

Didn't like the episode at first and found it kinda hard to sit through at times (wanted to go check my phone, which has been a STRICT no-go for me during S3 so far, so I'm glad I didn't give in), but the more I reflect upon it, think about it and read about the episode online, the more it grows on me.

It still feels weird to go into a 14-day break like THIS.

And, that said, I gotta admit I don't like NIN at all. Never did, although I usually have quite a soft spot for most things dark wave / industrial / goth (as long as it's not the medieval kind).


So, as many have stated - What did I learn:?

The nuclear explosion opened a portal which can be accessed by both GOOD and EVIL, therefore BOB is created and, to counter that, Laura is "planted".
This is pretty much the "big bang" of the core TP mythology, besides the fact that there's been evil spirits in those woods for AGES.


Regarding "Mr. C" or "EvilCoop":

-> BOB doesn't seem to be "with" him anymore - does that at least make the Doppelgänger more VULNERABLE to others?
Does it weaken him to the point where the GOOD Dale, in his right mind, could stand up to him if they met in a fight?

He seemed to have supernatural powerrs before that, therefore I wonder if he's "just" a run-of-the-mill doppelgänger now.
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Rhodes »

Very curious about how Showtime feels about The Return.

I hope they are excited about The Return as I am (and welcome it, because they see it as an upgrade/prestige thing for their network). But I could also imagine that they are somewhat disspointed and maybe even feel a little bit duped.

Thank God this season ever saw the light. I can't imagine that Showtime would have gone through with this, if they would have known from the start that they were buyung this.
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thefifthlizard
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by thefifthlizard »

I was expecting to see some 'Secret History' references in 1945/56. Oh well.
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Bob_Dobbs_Blue_Bob »

Skip Bittman wrote:are they selling tickets? Do they have permission? If so, why isn't this happening in LA? If it is happening in LA, why can't someone tell me where?
Why is this not happening everywhere with the theaters to do it? Is this 1945 or 2017? Someone missed the boat in the marketing department...How many of us would GLADLY pay to see each episode on the big screen, with big sound in our home towns? I think many, many of us would! Come on, theater owners/Showtime, get with it! There's still 10 episodes to go, then you can run them all in a big marathon again, when the first run is over! Sheesh!
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by dronerstone »

Bob_Dobbs_Blue_Bob wrote:
Skip Bittman wrote:are they selling tickets? Do they have permission? If so, why isn't this happening in LA? If it is happening in LA, why can't someone tell me where?
Why is this not happening everywhere with the theaters to do it? Is this 1945 or 2017? Someone missed the boat in the marketing department...How many of us would GLADLY pay to see each episode on the big screen, with big sound in our home towns? I think many, many of us would! Come on, theater owners/Showtime, get with it! There's still 10 episodes to go, then you can run them all in a big marathon again, when the first run is over! Sheesh!
please stay on topic. thx a bunch
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by Skip Bittman »

Bob_Dobbs_Blue_Bob wrote:
Skip Bittman wrote:are they selling tickets? Do they have permission? If so, why isn't this happening in LA? If it is happening in LA, why can't someone tell me where?
Why is this not happening everywhere with the theaters to do it? Is this 1945 or 2017? Someone missed the boat in the marketing department...How many of us would GLADLY pay to see each episode on the big screen, with big sound in our home towns? I think many, many of us would! Come on, theater owners/Showtime, get with it! There's still 10 episodes to go, then you can run them all in a big marathon again, when the first run is over! Sheesh!
Great idea for the 2 hour finale, simulcast it like the Doctor Who 50th that did very well.

My god this was incredible, I still can't sleep. 3:33AM and obsessed with eggs, frogbugs, and sooty woodsmen.
Last edited by Skip Bittman on Mon Jun 26, 2017 3:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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krishnanspace
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Re: Part 8 - Gotta light? (SPOILERS)

Post by krishnanspace »

Will they show Mike's too? Seems the giant is not a human being. He is like an alien or some higher power who is watching over earth maybe even our creator. So when his opposite, the mother sends Bob to our dimension, The Giant sends Laura(an angel) to stop Bob from killing the giant's creations(us humans). Cooper maybe is like a Guardian like figure to Laura.
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