Part 10 - Laura is the one (SPOILERS)

[SpookySculder]

Did anyone else get the impression Laura was somehow asking Cole for help? That scene of her crying just makes me feel like the real Laura is still a trapped and tortured soul looking for a friend.

[vawriter]

That´s weird. When I watched the episode I just thought: Oh look, it´s Hastings and he shaved his head for some reason.

Its Moby! he was in the ep two times

here's the same image with a little exposure/shadow/highlight work in photoshop. definitely a trenchcoat, definitely a third person (arm and side of head) behind the older guy. we might even have enough visual info here to identify him from the cast members wh have not yet had a role in the first ten parts.

I'm getting a strong David Bowie vibe off the person behind the bald man. The hairstyle and slender frame read Bowie to me.

[DeepBlueSeed]

I am concerned for the Gordon/Tamara/Albert trio. If they make it to those coordinates, will Ray and Phillip Jeffries have something hellish waiting for them?

Not to mention DoppelCoop, who is going to be following them there via DIane, assuming that the FBI agents don't shake her successfully.

I had wondered if she'd been dropped off at home but, assuming Albert was dating the coroner somewhere local (and the fact that a lot of things that happened this episode seemed to happen the same day as events in the previous episode) I guess that's not necessarily the case.

[The Gazebo]

I'll start with the Becky/Stephen/Carl scene. First, to address your point, I don't think Carl was "annoyed." I think he was resigned. My guess is that he hears Stephen and Becky fighting a lot (they live right near the management office) and he may very well have even spoken to Becky about it in the past. He feels like there's nothing he can do. He might not know how violent Stephen gets, but even if he does, this is sadly a common reaction to this kind of situation. I feel like what we got from Carl in this scene was that sad helplessness that we've seen a lot of in Twin Peaks--people knowing about awful truths but feeling like they can't do anything to stop it is one of the major themes of the entire series (especially FWWM).

I agree. Our own default attitude of intervening in cases of domestic violence is a relatively modern one, and indeed easier said than done. There are plenty of reasons why someone wouldn't stick their hands into the wasps' nest. If Carl has done this in past, he might have seen a token visit from the local police telling the couple to "calm down", a Becky in denial, or been the target of some physically intimidating backlash from Stephen. In addition, the trailer park is probably not the kind of socioeconomic area where egalitarian ideas are well manifested.

[future's past]

It's soon frustrating. I love it, but I'm so frustrated every episode we get closer to the end without seeing good stories involving the characters I love so much. Especially the Palmers, though obvs it's coming to a certain extent.

Here's my prediction. Richard is the offspring of a negative doppelgänger to good Cooper. He will end up in the lodge and meet his doppelgänger - which will be a polarity of him and good. The doppleganger will come out of the lodge in exchange for him, leaving the world with the good Richard. Live a reversal of the Cooper episode 29 story

[DeepBlueSeed]

The violence against women was off the charts in this episode. I know that has been a criticism of Lynch's work, and being a fan of Twin Peaks and some of Lynch's other work, that's always been something difficult for me to reconcile. I realize this is just a tv show, but even the characters we care about seem to not care - Ben more concerned about having to give his wife (or ex-wife) more money than the fact she was just ruthlessly assaulted by their grandson, Carl Rodd not being too alarmed by the attack on Becky in the trailer - yes, he's old and it isn't likely he can jump in and intervene, but he seemed more irritated by his song getting interrupted than being alarmed by what was happening. And the whole Candy depiction . . . geez . . . is this really how DKL envisions women? I understand that as viewers, we're asked to suspend ourselves from reality and "just go with it," but I didn't find any humor in the Candy scenes - it just seemed abrasively sexist.

I think in regards to the two scenes of violence you mention there's a big difference between what we're aware of and what the other characters are aware of. Carl Rodd hears an argument and sees a red mug thrown through a window. I can't recall exactly what Ben hears but I think he's somewhat in shock and trying to respond to a barrage of information at once.

I don't think DKL envisions women to be like Candy. I think he envisions one woman to be like Candy. There are weird female characters in Twin Peaks and, simultaneously, female characters that seem perfectly normal.

[DeepBlueSeed]

Just before the roadhouse stage singing etc scene at the end, the exterior is shown at night and while it was dark I thought I saw a motorcyle pull up.
Did anyone else see this and wonder if it might be James Hurley again finally?

Yup!

[nick1218]

Still not convinced Evil Coop is actually a billionaire. But it looks like people were right to make the connection between Experiment/Mother/the playing card. "This is what I'm looking for." The box was meant to trap it? Or just capture it's image, for some reason.

I'm still wondering what happened to it after it killed the young couple.

Its a crime scene, probably infested with FBI. Since they dont know the owner and the security people seemed to have skipped its just them there. If something was happening further
Gordon would know, and we'd know

[Wonderful & Strange]

Miriam probably doesn't have the money to buy a gun to defend herself. The show's underscored her poverty a couple of times.

And when a psycho comes knocking on your door, you'll see how easy it is to tense up and say the wrong thing. It doesn't make you stupid.

Miriam is a heroine who was taking action against someone evil, and it led to her assault. We don't know if she's dead yet. Why wouldn't they have shown it?

So her representation is positive and human IMO.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Wish we had subtitles for the Albert/Constance scene. Anyone a lip reader (or able to separate out/pump up the volume of the dialogue)? She's been probably my favorite new character so far; this little scene was one of the most joyous we've gotten on the new show.

So happy to see Margaret again, and I loved her monologue overall...there's a real sense of finality there that doesn't bode well for those hoping for a "season 4." I loved the reference to the circle closing (echoes of Mike talking about his and Bob's "perfect circle"). However, the "true men" line was cringeworthy. (And Frost evidently liked it so much he reused it in TSHoTP.)

Miriam's last name is Flynn in the credits, but it's Hodges on the envelope Chad intercepts. Prop error?

Holy exposition, Duncan Todd! Thank goodness Patrick Fischler is as fun to watch as he is; he almost made it work. But that convoluted scheme was eye-rolling, and the line "You remember my business competitors and archnemeses the Mitchum brothers" (paraphrasing from memory) was like something out of an '80s weekday afternoon cartoon. I may end up loving this scene on rewatches as one of those ambiguously self-parodying Lynch moments, but it really pulled me out of the show on initial viewing (and I've been loving the Duncan Todd scenes til now). Particularly coming on the heels of exposition-heavy Part 9, it's really jarring to see a DKL-directed piece being this chatty.

While the first Jacoby tirade was one of my favorite moments in the show so far, revisiting Dr. Amp felt unnecessary, and this one was comparatively uninspired (although it was nice to see the Run Silent, Run Drapes exterior finally -- I think that set was the very first spoiler I saw for the show on the old spoiler thread!).

Re: Violence against women. I think people are vastly oversimplifying and misunderstanding the issue when they imply that that only problem with depicting violence against women is if it's glorified. There are (hopefully) very few working directors in 2017 who would portray violence against women as a good thing; that doesn't mean every instance of this behavior in a movie/show is tasteful. As someone else noted earlier in this thread, the real question is, does the female character have agency? Is the abuse explored in a meaningful way from her perspective? In the past, DKL has historically depicted violence against women in a very individualized way. BV showed Dorothy Vallens's personal struggle, FWWM Laura's, IE dealt with it through the identity crisis of Nikki/Sue/Lost Girl. TP:TR has so far been such a wide-ranging canvas that the abuse feels impersonal and colder, because we barely know the victims. Lorraine, Miriam, Darya, Becky (as of now) feel more like narrative devices than real characters, and so the unflinching violence perpetrated against them feels a lot less purposeful than that against Lula Fortune or Dorothy Vallens. I think this is overall a distinction that can be drawn between TP:TR and DKL's other works that goes far beyond any gender issues: DKL has often professed to love "neighborhood stories," and TP:TR is anything but. We're a long ways from Henry Spencer being trapped in his apartment with a baby, Jeffrey Beaumont finding a severed ear in a field, Diane Selwyn coping with a breakup, or even the body of a homecoming queen washing up on the shore. This is a BIG story with a lot happening, and so any depictions of violence against women may inevitably be more glancing and less meaningful than in his prior works. This makes them feel somewhat more stomach-churning and gratuitous to some viewers. Without passing any judgment on the scenes themselves as art or on DKL's gender politics, I don't think that's an unreasonable visceral reaction for viewers to have.

Boy, that Sylvia/Richard scene was something (with the bear as a perfect Lynchian touch). Jan D'Arcy had so little to do on the original series that I think many viewers forgot Ben even had a wife. It's nice to see her finally get some incredible material to play. She killed it.

[sylvia_north]

Spoilered for the sensitive

Spoiler:

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.

Yes. One women doesn't stand for all women, but he can't deny that the cumulative effect of a drop of water on top of many more drops of water doesn't fill a bucket.

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.

As a woman, thank you for deferring to women's opinions on the matter Like all of the world, I've been inoculated against violence against women, and rewarded socially for accepting it, even while it helped shape my external fears, expectations and self-perception. Sure it's realistic, and it's also a shortcut for greater darkness in more ways than one. Do you know how many women my age I’ve talked to who told me that Laura Palmer normalized the idea of sex work/teen promiscuity, hard drugs, and romanticized a tragic fate at the hands of wickedness? Bringing incest-rape to the light in mainstream television was huge, what we’re seeing in Return is just the same old generalized, mind-numbing violence we see everywhere in all media.

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.

re:WonderfulandStrange- Yes! You can have great storytelling that's sexist!
That's most of Western literature and cinema- women have not come that far in the battle not to be hated in real life and hated for entertainment. Which fuels the normalization of which? Certainly you can agree it’s not healthy for women to see themselves victimized onscreen over and over etc. And if it reflects reality, reality's the problem. If you think the problem is social justice, you're a butt.

You can also be a woman and hold misogynist views, because you've internalized sexist portrayals of women as a means of distancing yourself from *those* victims and aligning yourself with the men who are seemingly unaffected by seeing themselves as violent and horrible, because it's a worldview that only reasserts/reflects male dominance and entitlement to bodies and lives. (The manosphere only has a problem with the dumb, fat henpecked husband trope. Evil violent narcissists can be cool antiheroes- or at least, in charge, and that's not offensive.)

re: Cipher Exactly. He is showing us nothing new. He is however selling the violence as entertainment and making money off of it. Commercialization of realistic violence is a thing worth talking about. It would be totally absurd to argue hear that anyone identifies with the abusers, but you just know there are some dudes out there high-fiving and calling it 'sick!' because that's what misogynists do in packs, or antisocial loners living out their vicarious desires to kill and batter. It's sending waves of fear and hostility into the world to see these things ad infinitum, normalizing the worst of human nature. Meanwhile, it's confirming to women the worst attitudes about men, and their actual realities.
That we are largely numb to this, as we would be numb to watching lynchings in another century, and prohibited from talking about it, says a lot about the world we live in. Not saying Lynch needs to change his pet theme! But we're still going to talk about it.

It doesn't matter that you are a guy. A woman would not be able to speak for other women either. That's not how it works...
People are individuals.

People are also composed up of classes that get to determine how they feel they should be represented, and their experience of their place in the world. And yes, women can be anti-feminist, and the attitude is socially rewarded, like it was in the 1950's. Male feminist allies understand this. So yeah, it does matter and it's appreciated when women are centered in women's issues. No individual is socialized in a vacuum. If you believe something is so, it's because of how you were socialized as a member of your class. "The personal *is* political" - as the feminists of DL's day say.

Watching the episode, I knew this topic would come up once again.
Guys are physically stronger than women. It's not politically correct to point out such facts, but it happens to be a fact. It makes perfect sense in the world we happen to live, that they would be the ones in physical control, but Lynch goes a step further, and in every case Lynch paints the men unflatteringly as the guilty party, abusing this physical advantage.

If you insist on looking at it through the lens of gender grouping, it can only be seen as an attack on men, and the constant abuse of the physical powers.

The fact that this then, over and over again is turned into something that is problematic for women, or might be problematic, says a lot about modern feminism and social justice based criticism.

It's a reflection of reality, yes. Does that mean the criticism of it is off-limits? Like Cipher said, it's nothing new. Does that make it above reproach? HECK, NO! Also, women were not always physically weaker than men. In hunter gatherer societies women and men did all the same work, and were only slowed down by babies on our backs during the hunt (except in frozen climates where mother/child stayed in shelter.) Women have been domesticated under patriarchy, like farm animals, to be weak and vulnerable through gender socialization- something we’d like to do away with. This starts by talking about it.

Feminist criticism isn't "modern feminism" by the way, it comes straight out of the second wave of the 60's and 70's before it got co-opted by Playboy and sold back to us by the beauty industry. Calling this criticism "modern/mainstream feminism" (ie the kind that says 'just change your attitude about oppression and make sure no men's feelings are hurt') also dismisses and silences the real, well thought-out tenets of radical feminism. It's been around before 'social justice' was every a pejorative and it's not going away because it's irrelevant to people who don't have a problem with social injustices. 'This doesn't matter to me as a man and is therefore meaningless' is derailing.

It reminds me of the podcasts, in all seriousness complaining about how the only black woman happened to be a hooker. Not realizing that she was perhaps the most sympathetic, normal, likable character of the entire show. And even if that hadn't been the case, more importantly, Lynch is not making a commentary on black people as a group!

Wow, ok. Mentioning the underrepresentation of other ethnicities in Twin Peaks is just stating the glaringly obvious. Here's another very white show, with Jade, a black female hooker, (also a potentially interesting character, but she's been discarded having served her purpose.) How does this commentary bother anyone? It's not an attack on Lynch, his concerns don't lie with creating a multiethnic or progressive world, he depicts the status quo. White is the default race in movies/TV, aaaand the world at large. It has to be discussed.

As for the scenes in this latest episode, Lynch is not showing you any of this for anyone to get pleasure out of the abuse. If you think that is the case, the criticism would be understandable. Otherwise, the criticism or questioning of Lynch's motives/presentation makes absolutely no sense.

No, his motives don't matter. Even if we know Hitchcock was a sadist, we talk about the text through a historical and feminist lens. What a director says (usually insincerely or without total self-awareness) is irrelevant. He doesn't get the last word and didn't make his artistic decisions in a vacuum and that's for us to unpack.

Your feeling that it COULD be a case of "pour fuel onto a fire that needn't exist." is spot on. It's searching for a problem because we want to be seen as virtuous, and all it does is ending up creating division and promoting the idea of ''group think'.

You just contradicted yourself. You said that if we have differences of opinion, we are divided. If we all think the same way, it's group think, those annoying White Lodge people with their virtue. Unless we all think your way, then it's perfectly rational and reasonable and totally taboo to open to criticism-- even though we can criticize every other minute unimportant detail. Our opinions are valid, too. Sick of denying/dismissing/derailing. Not sorry this is long and alienating to some of you. Some of us actually do want to live in a world where men aren't groomed to be sh*t and women aren't groomed to be shat on.

[DeepBlueSeed]

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.

It's a weird one. The whole scene is played for laughs, and clearly Dougie enjoys himself - although, yes, it's unclear if Dougie is just repeating something as he always does. I found the build up a little uncomfortable. Janey-E has been a headstrong smart lady all this time, and suddenly she's distracted by his abs. And okay, maybe she's just horny and he IS her husband (as far as she is concerned). But he's more interested in his cake than he is her, he doesn't even say the word "attractive" to her when it looked like it was perfectly cued up for him to do so, when she asks him is she finds him attractive. I suppose there might've been some sort of build up to the bedroom scene that we just don't see, but the editing suggested to me that she was so aroused by him that she pretty much dragged him upstairs as soon as he'd finished his cake.

There seems to be an obvious blurred line there. On the plus side I'm glad to see people discussing it.

[TheGum]

I thought the episode itself was good, but definitely not my favorite. All the violence against women is really starting to wear on me. But that song at the end? TRASH. The pitch correction was completely hamfisted, embarrassingly obvious, and borderline unforgivable. I'm pretty disappointed in Lynch for letting that in.

[Rami Airola]

Looks like it's going to be a storm around six or seven episodes from now.
(sorry if this has already been mentioned here - I haven't had the time to check out the thread completely yet)

[thefifthlizard]

Ok I rewatched the hotel room scene.


And, it appears there's someone else in the room in that pic. Standing behind the bald floating monk (hahaha)

Good find

Did Kyle MacLachlan hit the gym or something before filming this? Or did they spent a chunk of Showtime's money to give Cooper CGI abs? I don't remember Cooper looking like that in his shirtless scenes 25 years ago.

CGI abs