The way I look at the low key stuff is that, just because we have a feeling of urgency and that everything is about to hit the fan based on what we know... the characters don't necessarily know that. Why shouldn't Norma be procrastinating about the RR franchise? She doesn't know woodsmen are crushing heads and Bob is trying to get into the White Lodge (or whatever he is trying to do) - life goes on. It's frustrating to watch because we know so much. And that makes it kinda cool to me.Rudagger wrote:I see some debate about the time jumping in this episode.
I'm pretty sure it was just some difficult editing decision made when cutting it into 18 parts. Sometimes thematic stuff is more important, sometimes you want very eventful stuff to all happen in the same episode (ala Part 11). I imagine that was the most difficult aspect of cutting this thing down. And so, that's how you get stuff like Bobby/Ed that chronologically would've been a few parts ago, but, for whatever reason just didn't fit. I think if there's one thing this show would've especially benefitted from being on say Netflix, rather than Showtime, is the ability to have highly various runtime lengths for each part, so, it would've given the freedom to have a 40 minute part, and a 1 hour ten minute part, with various frequency (obviously cable shows are able to do this on the high end, but, not usually on the low end, I'm not sure I've ever seen a premium cable series that is billed as hour-long drop below the fifty minute mark). I do find it a bit odd that they didn't just ADR Bobby's "today" into "yesterday", or something. But, Lynch probably just didn't care that much and figured it unimportant (since we're able to suss it out anyway).
I've enjoyed both of these past two parts on rewatch when I know the cadence and am not stressing about how much time is left, but, they did make for some underwhelming initial viewing, in my opinion, if just because we're in the home stretch and it feels a bit odd to just now be seeing low-key Ed/Norma stuff (which while great, I think would've played better 10 parts ago, when there was a bit less urgency). I think that's also an aspect that would've played better with the binge model, as each hour becomes a bit less precious. I mean, I do love being able to chew on each episode for a week, don't get me wrong, but there are obviously pros/cons to each release style.
It's like driving down a road and seeing pigeons in the street. They all see the danger and fly off... but there's usually one nonchalant pigeon who's thinking, "Where did the guys go? This food's all mine now..."
Generally, I slow the car down and swerve a little if I can. Maybe Bob won't be that nice