Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

[DougieJones]

I'd say they probably just forgot about the pin during FWWM (some might dispute this as Lynch is known to pay attention to detail but it's possible). Otherwise, I'm not sure.

The only thing that stops me from believing that it was an error is that he’s wearing the pin in the Red Room at the start of The Return. He’s also not wearing it at the very start of the season with The Fireman’s plan so I really don’t know. That opening scene with The Fireman is so important and we don’t even know when it takes place. It can’t take place when he’s still in the Red Room because of the pin so it leaves us with two options. 1. When he is in the coma after he electrocuted himself because Dougie doesn’t wear the pin or 2. The Dougie Tulpa that Coop created for Janey-E and Sonny Jim was called to The Fireman after the real Coop was MIA at the end of TR

[baxter]

The superimposed face has baffled me too. I remember when I first watched the episode I skipped back to it again and thought "I must have missed something obvious there!".

I rationalised it as representing the Philip Jeffries scene in FWWM but from the inside. Philip Jeffries was teleported in and out again. Cooper in Part 17 also says "We live inside a dream", then we see him switch to the next bit. What is going on deeper than that I have no idea, but presumably Cooper is undergoing some sort of lodge trajectory.

[Jonah]

I'd say they probably just forgot about the pin during FWWM (some might dispute this as Lynch is known to pay attention to detail but it's possible). Otherwise, I'm not sure.

The only thing that stops me from believing that it was an error is that he’s wearing the pin in the Red Room at the start of The Return. He’s also not wearing it at the very start of the season with The Fireman’s plan so I really don’t know. That opening scene with The Fireman is so important and we don’t even know when it takes place. It can’t take place when he’s still in the Red Room because of the pin so it leaves us with two options. 1. When he is in the coma after he electrocuted himself because Dougie doesn’t wear the pin or 2. The Dougie Tulpa that Coop created for Janey-E and Sonny Jim was called to The Fireman after the real Coop was MIA at the end of TR

Is it possible Lynch forgot to or decided not to include it during FWWM but then remembered it/decided to use it during The Return?

[DougieJones]

I'd say they probably just forgot about the pin during FWWM (some might dispute this as Lynch is known to pay attention to detail but it's possible). Otherwise, I'm not sure.

The only thing that stops me from believing that it was an error is that he’s wearing the pin in the Red Room at the start of The Return. He’s also not wearing it at the very start of the season with The Fireman’s plan so I really don’t know. That opening scene with The Fireman is so important and we don’t even know when it takes place. It can’t take place when he’s still in the Red Room because of the pin so it leaves us with two options. 1. When he is in the coma after he electrocuted himself because Dougie doesn’t wear the pin or 2. The Dougie Tulpa that Coop created for Janey-E and Sonny Jim was called to The Fireman after the real Coop was MIA at the end of TR

Is it possible Lynch forgot to or decided not to include it during FWWM but then remembered it/decided to use it during The Return?

That’s 100% the most likely option. I just like having the tinfoil hat on sometimes when it comes to this show. But yeah it’s most likely that they went back to FWWM and saw that they forgot the pin, so maybe they did some retconning by leaving it ambiguous and a mystery in Season 3 with Dougie and all that jazz. I definitely think having Cooper not wear the pin with The Fireman though was intentional.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Coop doesn’t have the pin at all in the Pilot or in FWWM. Both had Patty Norris as costume designer.

Sara Markowitz was costume designer for Eps 1-29. The pin was probably her idea. Patty Norris either wasn’t aware of it or didn’t like it, and returned to the Pilot look for FWWM. I think it’s as simple as that.

Now, when we get into TR, the pin or absence thereof becomes much more clearly intentional.

[DougieJones]

Someone asked Twin Peaks Heidi (who posted the Wisteria flowers a while back) on Twitter “Should I stop searching for Peaks clues in your posts? ” and she responded “Follow your dreams, or ask to meet up with them later.”

https://twitter.com/twinpeaksheidi/stat ... 05730?s=21

Even if this isn’t really news I figured I would share anyway

[DougieJones]

Coop doesn’t have the pin at all in the Pilot or in FWWM. Both had Patty Norris as costume designer.

Sara Markowitz was costume designer for Eps 1-29. The pin was probably her idea. Patty Norris either wasn’t aware of it or didn’t like it, and returned to the Pilot look for FWWM. I think it’s as simple as that.

Now, when we get into TR, the pin or absence thereof becomes much more clearly intentional.

That’s really interesting about the costume designer. I wonder if she kept his suit from the pilot and they just reused it for FWWM and that’s why he doesn’t have the pin. Great find Mr. Reindeer.

[boske]

There is more to the pin. The FBI logo/seal features a ring too, and so does Mr. C's hair clip. Remember the LMFAP/Cooper scene from FWWM that we saw two iterations of: "Do you know who I am?" Cooper to LMFAP (in the second scene): "Where is the ring?" LMFAP: "Someone else has it now!" Something has been incarnated into time. Therefore the FBI pin could also be correlated with incarnation, but for Cooper personally. Whichever Cooper is out there has the pin, be it on his jacket or in his hair.

Related to that, based on the Fireman's place set and music, it always looked to me like that scene takes place in 1920s-1940s, and the song is actually called "Slow 30s room". So if you iterate by 25 years into the past, you have 1989->1964->1939, etc. As Fireman would say "You are far away", fire away in the past. "Is it future? Or is it past?"

[Histeria]

Personally, whether the pin's presence/absence is intentional doesn't matter a single jot.

If someone has an interpretation that involved the pin, would it become any more or less valid if Lynch confirmed it was intentional or unintentional?

I feel a lot of effort is expended on whether literary interpretation and analysis is based on "intended meaning" or just coincidence and production error.

It's part of the text, the author's encoding of it shouldn't have any relevance imo.

Same with whether the orb fight at the end was "intentionally" or "unintentionally" cheesy and kitsch. Same for the diner's wayward patrons.

I was once witness to a testy debate on Briggs's Christian faith where any reference to it was dismissed on the basis that the early expression of religiosity was "inconsistent writing that was later retconned and must therefore be ignored."

Imo, that's such a reductive way of reading art. What does it matter if they "retconned" Briggs? In the text he's shown to express religious belief. That's something to ponder and grapple with, not conveniently sweep under the rug.

If a classic novel that has sudden changes to its protagonists midway was discovered to be written by two seperate people who sabotaged each other's story out of spite, would its status as literary classic suddenly be diminished?

This is also why I despair at the trend towards "explanations" of art that claim to prove the intent of the author, especially on YouTube. It's an abuse of the epistemological distinction between explanation and understanding. I would say this distinction is one both Frost and Lynch have very passionately defended in asking people to understand the show on a personal level without needing or seeking an explanation of it, but then I'd be undermining my own thesis

Anyway, this post is barely relevant to the pin discussion preceeding it. I do very much enjoy reading the ethnographic details like how crew members changed between entries, I just try not to let them colour my decoding of the text itself.

But it's been a stray observation for a while that has finally been presented with a hint of pretext.

[Stavrogyn]

Related to that, based on the Fireman's place set and music, it always looked to me like that scene takes place in 1920s-1940s, and the song is actually called "Slow 30s room". So if you iterate by 25 years into the past, you have 1989->1964->1939, etc. As Fireman would say "You are far away", fire away in the past. "Is it future? Or is it past?"

And that's when / where season 4 takes place, at least partially, because that scene with the Fireman is chronologically the last we have seen so far (if that is really the case)... Wouldn't that be nice?

[boske]

Related to that, based on the Fireman's place set and music, it always looked to me like that scene takes place in 1920s-1940s, and the song is actually called "Slow 30s room". So if you iterate by 25 years into the past, you have 1989->1964->1939, etc. As Fireman would say "You are far away", fire away in the past. "Is it future? Or is it past?"

And that's when / where season 4 takes place, at least partially, because that scene with the Fireman is chronologically the last we have seen so far (if that is really the case)... Wouldn't that be nice?

Yes, that is my hunch too, and I think that would work, it would work very, very well. It feels to me like Lynch wanted to tell more about the 50s, so if whatever we get in the future (and there is nothing tangible yet really), is about that, I would be very, very interested.

[Histeria]

I wonder if that means we’re close to an announcement or sadly time is running out on the project. I really hope whatever this is hasn’t fizzled out. Was just looking at Production Weekly and there’s something there called “UNTITLED LAS VEGAS/NEW MEXICO PROJECT”. I’ll take it as a nice coincidence

UFOs are real

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[LateReg]

Thank you for the great analysis of this scene. I probably should have clarified that the reason I haven’t tried interpreting it as much as other scenes isn’t because I didn’t care for it that much, but more because of the complexity of any potential meaning behind it which your post touched on.

It seems that even among fans that enjoyed The Return, that scene elicits different reactions. When I first viewed it, it was a bit of a let down and I couldn’t make sense of it, but that may have been the intent. It feels like Coop is trying to cheat the system, whatever that system is. I’m not sure I view it with so much a sense of finality as I do more of a setup for Part 18 where there is a definite feeling that something has gone wrong and Coop screwed up.

So, of all the new characters in The Return, Freddy seems the most out of place and context. He’s like a character from a super hero movie that got plucked out of one storyline and dropped in the middle of another where he didn’t really belong. This got me thinking of Coop’s goal which is basically rewriting the story of Twin Peaks. By keeping Laura from being murdered, that’s essentially what he’s doing. It’s like he and the Fireman are taking characters from different stories and inserting them into Twin Peaks to accomplish their mission. There’s a lot of this in Audrey’s question of Is this the story of the little girl who lived down the lane and the Arm’s repetition of the line later as the story we’re watching is changing. The Road House seems like the hub for all of these stories and characters getting exchanged into other stories and characters - all the random people having conversations that are sometimes similar and then Audrey’s final scene where she gets transitioned potentially into a different storyline altogether.

That's some great brainstorming there! I hadn't ever thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. For some reason I find the capper to your train of thought, about Audrey transitioning into another story altogether, haunting as I think back on the scene and how she is ripped into whatever consciousness she has arrived at.

[LateReg]

Coop doesn’t have the pin at all in the Pilot or in FWWM. Both had Patty Norris as costume designer.

Sara Markowitz was costume designer for Eps 1-29. The pin was probably her idea. Patty Norris either wasn’t aware of it or didn’t like it, and returned to the Pilot look for FWWM. I think it’s as simple as that.

Now, when we get into TR, the pin or absence thereof becomes much more clearly intentional.

Thanks for that.

But presuming intentionality a little earlier, I wonder what it might mean in a unified interpretation of the series that they chose to leave Cooper without the pin in FWWM, seeing as the chronology lines up with the pilot. Especially considering that Lynch considers the pilot, FWWM and The Return (with its strategic placement of the pin) to be the definitive Twin Peaks. He doesn't have the pin before he gets to Twin Peaks or as he enters it, but then does after spending a day there. And then sometimes does and doesn't in The Return.

Also, boske, very interesting observations about the ring and the pin.

[JackwithOneEye]

I dunno if it's already been posted here or not, but I think the pin could be related to the exchange with Major Briggs and the Log Lady, wearing symbols 'you have shiny objects on your chest. are you proud ?'... and his reply, achievement is it's own reward, pride obscures it.

could be some symbolism whether Cooper gets his self esteem based on his value to society as a sanctioned detective or not.

there's also the scene with Dougie attracted to the cop's shiny star, which has an early childhood development tinge to it.

Lynch has a fascination with language going back to The Alphabet, and how we use symbols to communicate/signify raw thought,
everything we say and do is decoded into symbols.