Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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RetconMetatron
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Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by RetconMetatron »

OK, let's recap:

At the end of FWWM, Laura Palmer seems to have found peace, basically ascended to heaven or whatever you might call it.

At the end of episode 9 of season 2, Leland has found forgiveness for his deeds, he has also visions of Laura as an angelic being (FWWM-ending) and joining her there. One must also keep in mind, that he also has been abused by Bob, it's heavily implied that he was molested by him as a child, not to mention the possession. So the redemption of both characters was well deserved.

Yet in Season 3 they are still in the black lodge. They are still tormented (Laura screaming, Leland having that stoned-out look).

Cooper was reduced to a retard for the whole season, including episodes 17 and 18 - the Cooper in those episodes still was whacked out of his mind.

And the ending: An alternative reality has been created by Cooper yanking out Laura from the timeline. That means, nothing we have seen in S1, S2 and maybe even S3 happened! GREAT!!! It's like the Star Trek reboots.

We all know it's a TV show, but these "none of it really happened/dream/time line reset" etc. devices are utterly terrible, because they render everything you saw meaningless on some subconscious level.

Also, doesn't it render the whole "Laura being the chosen one"-angle that episode 8 was nodding at completely pointless as well? Laura's death set Bob's downfall in motion, but without her being murdered, Bobified Leland killed maybe a dozen more people.

Anyway, season 3 was just mean-spirited. All the Twin Peaks we knew has been basically erased, it never existed. Dale Cooper reduced to a caricature, which he never truly recovered from, many of the former characters got humiliated as well, like Lucy not knowing how a cell phone works in 2017 or the retard son she has with Andy, come on!

I don't want always a happy-end, but humiliating beloved characters and deleting the entire timeline is a bit much.

The ending wasn't even a "mindf*ck" as such, "alternative dimension/it was a all a dream" plots are dime a dozen. The Lost ending was more of a mindf*ck actually, because I think no one expected that the LA scenes were purgatory/afterlife (didn't like that much, but it was actually more creative than this resolution).

No, that ending was more of a "F you". To the audience and Twin Peaks as a whole.
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BEARisonFord
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by BEARisonFord »

Not to completely demolish the foundation of your argument, but canonically, "Laura Palmer" (or whatever variation thereof) has always been in the Black Lodge since her death, same with Leland. I think there's some thematic elements of peace in those scenes you say, but physically it's clear there's more going on considering we see Laura 25 years later in season 1, episode 2. Same with Leland in the finale of season 2.

I didn't think The Return was mean spirited, I do think it told a very unconventional story that many weren't expecting though, and that's hard to grapple with.
RetconMetatron
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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BEARisonFord wrote:Not to completely demolish the foundation of your argument, but canonically, "Laura Palmer" (or whatever variation thereof) has always been in the Black Lodge since her death, same with Leland. I think there's some thematic elements of peace in those scenes you say, but physically it's clear there's more going on considering we see Laura 25 years later in season 1, episode 2. Same with Leland in the finale of season 2.
There's always ambuiguity about Laura and Leland in the Black Lodge scenes in S1 and S2 ("doesn't she look like Laura Palmer"). The Palmers in the S2 final also seemed to be doppelgängers, not the original ones. I think it was fair to assume that Laura's and Leland's angelic visions were their ultimate whereabouts.

While in S3 that's pretty much definitely squashed. And I said, that's just one thing. The implied erasure of all Twin Peaks episodes from the timeline except for the last two of S3 is the icing on the cake.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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I'm trying to ignore the possibility that the whole series was negated, as I said before the finale that shit like that would be the one thing I didn't want to happen. I'm hanging onto the fact that Laura was swept away from Cooper, so maybe he failed.
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RetconMetatron
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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BEARisonFord wrote:I didn't think The Return was mean spirited, I do think it told a very unconventional story that many weren't expecting though, and that's hard to grapple with.
What was its story though? Think about it: At first it seems about Cooper escaping the Black Lodge and stopping his evil counterpart, but, as we find out in E17, his main objective all along was apparently doing a time-travel trip to save Laura Palmer! And that's actually very mean spirited to the original two seasons, because, the return was in fact all about erasing the original Twin Peaks timeline (the original show!)

It's also not in character. By the end of S2, Cooper wasn't exactly obsessed with Laura Palmer. He went into the Black Lodge to save Annie. I don't think the original Dale Cooper would have annihilated the space/time continuum to save Laura, especially given the fact that he "saw" her ascension in the FWWM-ending and that removing Laura could have made things actually worse (like Bob/Leland not being caught and murdering more people).

S3's Cooper's quest to destroy all previous episodes of TP from existence was really bad taste. That's exactly what I mean with "mean-spirited".
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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RetconMetatron wrote: It's also not in character. By the end of S2, Cooper wasn't exactly obsessed with Laura Palmer. He went into the Black Lodge to save Annie. I don't think the original Dale Cooper would have annihilated the space/time continuum to save Laura, especially given the fact that he "saw" her ascension in the FWWM-ending and that removing Laura could have made things actually worse (like Bob/Leland not being caught and murdering more people).
I think in terms of saving someone from the Lodge, it could've been Laura, or Annie, or Audrey, or Diane, or Janey-E, or Maddy, or Caroline. Or the waitress in Judy's.

We were discussing this in the part 18 thread, but basically, Coop's biggest flaw is his hero complex and compulsive need to right wrongs and rescue people, especially women. That could be driven by many things: his need to be a knight in shining armor, or to avoid guilt for letting people down, especially women (that was the whole premise of his Black Lodge trial in the S2 finale).

Or, it could be driven by something else - the Fireman's instructions, perhaps. I don't think Cooper meant to annihilate time and space and all that. But it seemed that escaping the Lodge and defeating Bob and Mr. C once and for all wasn't good enough. He had to travel back in time to be the hero (again) and try (again) to redeem himself for failing to protect someone.

As for the ending of FWWM, yeah, I dunno. One could argue why Laura appeared in the Red Room at all 25 years later if she really had seen the angel and ascended to the White Lodge or whatever.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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In the final analysis, I think the cruel and nasty tone of this show is exactly what bothered me the most. I absolutely do NOT want to re-ignite the part 10 gender debate, but that's exactly what I (and others) were bothered by. And now that it turns out that those scenes were meaningless and pointless, I really struggle with why they were shown to us.

It never really occurred to me before this season that Cooper had a raging hero complex -- he certainly always wanted to help, and he clearly had his flaws, but I still feel that there's nothing in the character's past that would motivate taking such a drastic move. And honestly, we don't even know IF that's the reason he does it -- the motivation is never really even hinted at, and all we can do is speculate. Which makes the wiping-out of all that came before even worse -- we can only hazard a guess as to WHY it's even done in the first place!

I find it ironic that FWWM had one of the most beautiful, peaceful endings of any Lynch film (heck, so did Inland Empire!) and now we get this. What in the world happened to him in that decade between IE and now?
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by Manwith »

I don't think Leland is in the lodge. I think that's his doppelgänger, the one who buddies around with Bob in the end of season 2 and says "I didn't kill anyone.' I figure he's manic depressive and coop found him in a depressive mood in season 3.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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blue_tomorrows wrote:In the final analysis, I think the cruel and nasty tone of this show is exactly what bothered me the most. I absolutely do NOT want to re-ignite the part 10 gender debate, but that's exactly what I (and others) were bothered by. And now that it turns out that those scenes were meaningless and pointless, I really struggle with why they were shown to us.

It never really occurred to me before this season that Cooper had a raging hero complex -- he certainly always wanted to help, and he clearly had his flaws, but I still feel that there's nothing in the character's past that would motivate taking such a drastic move. And honestly, we don't even know IF that's the reason he does it -- the motivation is never really even hinted at, and all we can do is speculate. Which makes the wiping-out of all that came before even worse -- we can only hazard a guess as to WHY it's even done in the first place!

I find it ironic that FWWM had one of the most beautiful, peaceful endings of any Lynch film (heck, so did Inland Empire!) and now we get this. What in the world happened to him in that decade between IE and now?
Yes. Agree with you 100% here. We could endlessly go in the circle jerk of people saying, "Well it's just not what you expected or wanted, so you're upset."

But that's just not it. It's the overall tone that this sets, that suffering and all that thrives upon it, whether mundane or divine, is in the end the victor and any character that could have represented transcendence of suffering is now left in a kind of limbo again.

Every character:

Sarah, Leland, Dale, Laura, Hawk, The Log Lady, Harry, Audrey, Becky, Shelley, Bobby.

The only character that seemingly transcends it all is Major Briggs.

Yet he is even relegated to a disembodied head that doesn't even blink.

To leave it on the note that the Tremonds/Chalfonts/Jumping Man/Judy appear victorious???

What is Lynch saying?

It's not a question of whether it was masterfully done, it was, but the emotional impact and intent seems to be despair.

And that's fucking utterly depressing.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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Mean-spirited? I think you're forgetting the first Twin Peaks.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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blue_tomorrows wrote:What in the world happened to him in that decade between IE and now?
He started reading the daily newspaper.


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blue_tomorrows
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by blue_tomorrows »

yaxomoxay wrote:
blue_tomorrows wrote:What in the world happened to him in that decade between IE and now?
He started reading the daily newspaper.


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RetconMetatron
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by RetconMetatron »

blue_tomorrows wrote:
And honestly, we don't even know IF that's the reason he does it -- the motivation is never really even hinted at, and all we can do is speculate. Which makes the wiping-out of all that came before even worse -- we can only hazard a guess as to WHY it's even done in the first place!
It's not even clear why the team behind the show decided to go with such a cliched ending. I know that giving a defnite closure was considered as "fanservice" by some, but come on! What kind of a cliched ending is "timeline reset"/"it was all a dream"? Especially nowadays after Matrix, eXistenZ, Inception, dozens of Star Trek episodes/movies dealing with time travel etc.

Lazy. The original Twin Peaks mythology, the blend of spirituality and Native American legends, was far more interesting than this bland standard "fooled ya!" resolution. That's really far from clever today.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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Hockey Mask wrote:Mean-spirited? I think you're forgetting the first Twin Peaks.
What do you find mean-spirited about the original series? It's difficult for me to think of any such example. The only thing that comes to mind is Lynch's explosive handling of Episode 29, except I really do think he cared about and loved those characters even if they were left hanging in such dire situations or possibly killed. His anger was simply at the network/cancellation, and resulted in him being more aggressively avant-garde than he had since Eraserhead, but in terms of mean-spirited attitude/treating the characters cruelly, I don't see it. The original series was exceptionally warm and empathetic. Albert may have been snickering at Ed's story in Episode 8, but the viewer was never expected to.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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RetconMetatron wrote:We all know it's a TV show, but these "none of it really happened/dream/time line reset" etc. devices are utterly terrible, because they render everything you saw meaningless on some subconscious level.
I don't think anything in the original series or FWWM was meaningless. I think everything that happened in the show still happened, time just isn't flowing in a straight line. It's branching between multiple possibilities. There is still a world out there where Gordon Cole is waiting for Good Coop to return from the basement in the Great Northern and Janey-E and Dougie Jones both ride off into the sunset.

And in parallel, our Cooper is now on a new journey as Richard to defeat Judy with Laura. It's a dark ending but I think there's a flicker of light in the darkness in the fact that Laura lives. The show as we know it isn't erased, it's just different.
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