Part 10 - Laura is the one (SPOILERS)

[Wonderful & Strange]

The phrase "violence against women" is vague and doesn't help us to analyze whether this is good or bad storytelling.

For instance, is the show glorifying violence against women, or is it representing it as sick behavior perpetrated by unadmirable cretins? Definitely the latter.

While I hope we'll see justice at some point, and I think we will, I don't think it's necessary. We already see that these men are detestable. That's a sufficient narrative message. Happy endings are not requirements, even if we all want them to some degree.

[N. Needleman]

"I don't ask you to clean. And I know exactly what you did." Steven to Becky.

I think that dude's just on meth tbh.

[Calderon]

Loved Rebekah Del Rio and the last 15 minutes of this episode. Otherwise again much filler material. I liked every episode so far, but this is slightly disappointing after the very strong episodes 7 and 8 where so much was going on.

[Jerry Horne]

A friend of mine is convinced that Becky killed Leo. Closed captions helps in the Becky/Stephen scene.

Pardon my saying - we're all friends here, I hope - but nutty theories abound in this place: Hawk in the woods is a flash-forwards, Dougie's life is taking place in 2003, Bug-Frog is really Laura Palmer and now Becky killed Leo? Leo Johnson? Whom we last saw in a Windom Earle poison spider death trap 25 years ago? I'd like you to prevail upon your friend to elaborate on how he/she got this idea!

I hadn't heard about Laura as bug-frog! This changes everything!

I think what caught his attention was what Steven told Becky "I don't ask you to clean. And I know exactly what you did." Both of these could be references to her father. Becky is Shelly's daughter as we all know.

We do have many nutty theories around here about this rather nutty show. But that's part of the fun. No?

[Wonderful & Strange]

"I don't ask you to clean. And I know exactly what you did." Steven to Becky.

I think that dude's just on meth tbh.

Me too. I find it unlikely Shelly ever lived with Leo again.

She may have told lil Becky stories of what he did to her, but I doubt that's enough to make Becky seek bloody vengeance.

If Becky had killed Leo, why would she be putting up with Stephen? It makes little sense.

[Jasper]

Then he says her response about Hastings was heavily encrypted.

this was Albert being sarcastic as i take it as the text message seems to be exactly clear, direct and revealing - very much unlike the one sent by Bad Coop

Cryptic and encrypted aren't quite the same thing. Encrypted means that the electronic message looks like gobbledygook when it's in transit, so that only the intended recipient should be able to read it. Someone intercepting the message would need to break the encryption in order to read it. Albert's saying that the message was intentionally sent with high security, which implies very serious shenanigans are afoot.

[sewhite2000]

The Dougie thing has its moments of unexpected charm. I didn't expect it to last the entire series, or virtually the entire series, as it increasingly looks like it's going to. I'm trying to ride with it and enjoy it for what is as long as it's the only choice I have. Speaking of the obsession with violence against females, I've expected Janey-E to get killed at least three or four times now. Every episode that goes by, though, I get a little more sad that there's one less hour we will see of "real" Cooper, if we see him at all. Some people will say Lynch and Frost are inviting us on a very different journey with only a few trappings here and there of the show we remember, because they're forward-thinkers, not nostalgists. Others will accuse them of being overly manipulative and of metaphorically spitting in the face of fans who waited 25 years to see the beloved character the way they remembered him. I probably fall somewhere in the middle.

However, my patience is at an end with how everyone in Dougie's life is so accommodating of/oblivious to his "eccentricities", which really seems like too mild a word. I commented on this way back after DougieCoop's first full episode aired: "Doesn't anybody notice how weird he's acting? Shouldn't someone be taking him to a doctor or something?" And several people said, well, it's clearly implied that pre-Coop Dougie was pretty spacey. And I think Janey-E said last episode Dougie hadn't been the same since a car wreck or something. Can't believe I've forgotten that already. And finally in Ep 10, we get Dougie to a doctor, but still that doesn't get us anywhere but the doc marveling on DougieCoop's physical condition.

How are we supposed to feel about DougieCoop and Janey-E's consummation? One poster found it beautiful, and DougieCoop's face afterward for this person reflected genuine love. I found it pretty rapey. If the genders were reversed, and it was Janey-E acting like a simpleton and Dougie taking advantage of her inability to resist, how would we all feel? I thought it was almost entirely played for laughs, and his facial expressions were strictly for comedy, not to show amazing revelations of love. I didn't hear anything special in DougieCoop's "love you" other than his usual parroting of what he's just heard. Sorry for being such a cynic, just my two cents.

[docLEXfisti]

Oh my god, I just stopped watching after the "I love you" scene - one of the best episodes so far, and I'm only 17:40 mins. in - my god how everything is taking off is truly amazing. Don't dare to watch the rest. BEST TV-SHOW EVER. So far it has triggered almost all of my possible emotions in this less than 20 minutes. David Lynch is a god.

[Agent Sam Stanley]

Oh boy, Richard! Somebody needs to slap that bitch.

Sylvia, how about using a little bit of your fortune to commit Johnny to a place where he'll be properly cared for? Jeez...

Congrats Becky, you just found yourself a nice Leo Johnson

What's up with Candie? She needs a battery charging?

And I'm glad Dougie is discovering some of life's pleasures

[Cipher]

I'm ... not sure how to feel about this one. Will probably have to revisit in context of the whole.

Unlike last-week, which managed to sneak at least one scene of real beauty into its plot-heavy hour, this part didn't have any emotional stand-outs for me. The sexual dynamics of the Dougie-Janey scene are a little ... ???, and I have to return to some of my reservations about the use of female characters raised during the initial hours of the show. Violence in Twin Peaks is refreshingly vile and unflinching, but in this world it seems to be visited exclusively upon women, at least when it comes to scenes of real horror.

I don't think that latter issue is one that characterizes Lynch's work (indeed; I think Inland Empire in particular is quite feminist), but I do wonder if he leans too heavily on the idea of women in trouble, without realizing how it colors a whole as a pattern.

I'm also a guy, so I don't want to speak for anyone else. If women are okay with the picture he's painting, and find that it's successful in presenting the real horror of predatory dynamics without turning exclusively to victimized women as a shortcut for greater darkness, far be it from me to pour fuel onto a fire that needn't exist.

Also potentially justified based on Peaks' narrative refracting outward from Laura and the fractures caused by her abuse, invoked in this episode in a major way. Could very much be justified as a whole.

I didn't hate this episode, but taken as a self-contained hour, it did leave me more conflicted than others.

The phrase "violence against women" is vague and doesn't help us to analyze whether this is good or bad storytelling.

For instance, is the show glorifying violence against women, or is it representing it as sick behavior perpetrated by unadmirable cretins? Definitely the latter.

While I hope we'll see justice at some point, and I think we will, I don't think it's necessary. We already see that these men are detestable. That's a sufficient narrative message. Happy endings are not requirements, even if we all want them to some degree.

My initial response would be that it depends on what we see from the women themselves, rather than whether the material identifies with the male abusers (which I think would be absurd to argue here, or expect of any production not intending to wear a sense of raging misogynism on its sleeve). In my mind, it's less where the material lands on an issue of abuse=good or bad, and more the issue of thoughtlessly presenting women only as passive tools in the illustration of the bleakness of abuse. That shows us nothing new, and invoked without proper pathos (as Lynch has absolutely nailed before in the infinitely affecting FWWM and Inland Empire), it runs the risk of feeling either manipulative or reductive, rather than honest about the internal lives of its characters regardless of their gender.

Again, the role this episode plays as part of a whole is going to determine greatly how I feel about its events, I think.

[GoodMorningAmerica]

The reactions to this show are almost as fascinating as the show itself.

So we're supposed to object to the depictions of violence against women (which are clearly central to the GREAT EVIL in the universe we're all supposed to be rooting against), and we're also supposed to object to Janey-E being sexually attracted to her husband? That reminds me, are we still supposed to hate Tammy? How about Doris? Wait...isn't Laura the one? Who? Who is this Laura person anyway?

In all seriousness, I thought this Part was phenomenal. Phenomenal. Easily my favorite of the Retun so far, and maybe of the entire series. But what do I know, I'm just a woman.

Also, I have a HUGE soft spot for Harry Dean Stanton's singing.

[claaa7]

No, it wasn't that -- it was the fact that she FINALLY takes him to the doctor and then doesn't seem to want to talk about any of the incredibly strange behavior he's been exhibiting.

It's clear that Janey-E is sensing that her husband has become or is becoming a different man, though she couldn't possibly ever guess that Dougie was some kind of a clone of Cooper, and that an amnesiac Cooper has now switched places with her husband. The goodness and joy of good Cooper—his spirit or Atman,—are there in abundance, and in the Ike the Spike scene, he shows unexpected ability and bravery. The greater function of the sex is to show two souls coming close together, falling back in love, or more accurately, unknowingly falling in love for the first time. Janey-E says "Dougie, I love you", and Coop, looking blissful and like he's had an epiphany, repeats "Love you." I think that the repeated words are less like Dougie-Coop mimicking, and more like when he says to Bushnell Mullins, "Figure it out." It's not simply sex, it is, in fact, love.

What will become of it, we don't know, but I'm team Janey-E.

postcoital_bliss.jpg

well put, this is pretty much what i took from it as well.. love is definitely in the air from both parties, and there's only one thing that can trump all this evil, hate and fear we see and that is love. i hope Janey-E will not get killed by the Mitchum Brothers but everything points towards a conflict between them and Cooper in episode 11 or 12.

in that episode you mention ("Make sense of it") there's another interesting sentence turned around by DougieCoop which doesn't seem like simple mimicing to me and that is when Bushnell says "I think we might need to get you some professional help Dougie" and Coop says "Help... Dougie".

[Cooperscoffeecup]

A friend of mine is convinced that Becky killed Leo. Closed captions helps in the Becky/Stephen scene.

Pardon my saying - we're all friends here, I hope - but nutty theories abound in this place: Hawk in the woods is a flash-forwards, Dougie's life is taking place in 2003, Bug-Frog is really Laura Palmer and now Becky killed Leo? Leo Johnson? Whom we last saw in a Windom Earle poison spider death trap 25 years ago? I'd like you to prevail upon your friend to elaborate on how he/she got this idea!

You have me in stitches.

[claaa7]

I was complaining earlier about not experiencing the real suspence of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Here it was for a very brief moment. The scene when Cole opens the door and sees Laura. For me this was the scariest scene so far.

this might be THE scene that got me the most out of the entire season so far too.. the sudden intense music when Gordon opened the door (which let us know that something scary was about to happen before we saw it) and the super unexpected cut to Laura crying her eyes out, cut with Sarah's slowed down screams of Lauuura from her dream in the pilot. very scary and effective!

[LateReg]

Im surprised by the people saying that nothing happened in Part 10. It moved fast and checked in with so many characters in so many states, joining together so many plotlines and setting up a massive showdown in Vegas. At the same time, I'm also surprised that many haven't talked about how much Cooper has progressed in the very little screentime he's had since part 7. He's speaking differently now and has discovered love; theres not much more for him to discover. Given the Vegas showdown coming up plus the fact that the next part will take place two days from the events of Part 9 and may contain Hawk and Bobbys journey to Jack Rabbits Palace, it seems to me that Cooper's faculties will probably return in Part 12. Not happy lucky Coop, but older wiser though still disoriented Coop. I see no reason to be discouraged.