Rushy's Twin Peaks sperging

[Rushy]

I'm not talking about the plot. What I mean is that "Twin Peaks" is partly about a tone of mystery and things that will never be spelled out for you because David Lynch doesn't care for things like that. He loves his unanswered questions and his dream logic. People who love "Twin Peaks" love that while everything in your post is opposed to that.

No, no, I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. It's why I love shows like Lost and the Prisoner.

But there is a difference between artful ambiguity, and being unnecessarily obtuse. There is also the fact that those shows (and the original TP) worked hard to get me to love the characters and their journeys. Those were the anchor of the story. The Return spends so much time on the minutiae of its weird plotlines - without explaining them - that the actual emotional human aspect is next to nil. It is there in things like the Dougie storyline, the Log Lady, Harry Dean Stanton, but not nearly enough.

So a lot of it is just stuff happening, stuff without substance. And I know for a fact that a lot of that stuff is Mark Frost indulging in his love of convoluted American conspiracy theories, not David Lynch exploring the human condition. Because I've read Frost's book accompanying The Return. I can tell exactly what aspects of the show he contributed. But I'll get into more of that as I keep reviewing.

Okay, much like how the Evil Cooper has Bob, this Godlike force of evil, within him and helping him to do weird things with electricity (the police interrogation scene) and win arm wrestling matches, the Good Cooper has supposedly positive forces from "the Lodge" within him. They are guiding him and protecting him in his catatonic state.

This is clear in the casino scene. Cooper isn't using supernatural power to make the slot machines pay off. He barely understands where he is. What's happening is that good forces from the Lodge are guiding Cooper toward the machines that are primed to win.

And see, that's my problem. It's not very interesting when the characters are puppets being guided along by Lodge entities. The storylines of the old Twin Peaks were driven by their human characters whose will was magnified by the occasional supernatural touch.

Once we get into wars between dimensions, it loses that grounding humanity. It's not the casino bits I remember from Dougie, it's how he helps people. That's the humanity. But there's again, not enough of that.

[ebin namefag]

[Rushy]

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN MEGA-RANT: PART 2 OF 18

We continue with the Bill Hastings/Buckhorn plot. This is to me one of the weakest threads of the Return. It's focused on characters that we don't know and don't get to know, either. The centerpoint of it all is Matthew Lillard. I haven't seen Scooby-Doo since I was a kid, so that doesn't distract me. But what does distract me is how terrible he is at acting. I'm sure this is Lynch directing him to be like that, but at the end of the day, the performance doesn't work for me like some of the other stylized Twin Peaks performances do.

Still, that's not really the problem though. Let's really break this story down. Hastings and his secretary have somehow made contact with Major Briggs, who is Quantum Leaping through realities. For some reason, the Return treats Major Briggs as some kind of omniscient deity who has predicted everything that's going to happen and can travel through time and space.

Which is very much in contradiction to his original series self, who was flawed, didn't understand Bobby very well and had next to no idea what was going on. Briggs was enlightened only in his own spirit. Now, you might say he evolved past that, but according to the Return, Briggs disappeared a day after the events of season 2.
So in a day, he had to figure out Cooper has a dopplegänger, had to figure out that Bobby was going to grow up to be a police officer (when previously he'd expressed only a vague hope that he would be happy), had to set up an unnecessarily obtuse clue for Bobby to find, and had to figure out he himself is capable of dimension jumping and that dimension jumping was something he should be doing, when previously he'd only been kidnapped by Lodge entities against his consent.

There's some sort of melodrama between Lillard's character and his wife that Cooper's dopplegänger has taken advantage of, presumably as part of framing Hastings/killing Davenport. The weird thing is that this episode also introduces the idea that the dopplegänger needs Ray to get information from Hastings' secretary. This is a pretty transparent attempt to needlessly complicate the plot, because the dopplegänger should be perfectly able to force or trick the coordinates out of the secretary, or even Hastings himself. Putting Ray into the mix only serves to delay him another few episodes.

What's amusing though is that all this time spent on Hastings, Briggs and Buckhorn only accomplishes one thing in the grand tapestry of the Return: the ring found in Briggs' stomach leads Gordon Cole and his merry FBI gang to Dougie Jones. That's it. Everything else could be dropped from the script and it would make no difference. Bobby never even learns about what happened. It's not compelling enough to justify taking up screentime, and it's not important enough either.

We cut to Las Vegas, where Duncan Todd (played by the great and thoroughly wasted Patrick Fischler) is being coordinated by Cooper's dopplegänger to repeatedly try to assassinate Dougie Jones... we assume. We can infer that the dopplegänger thinks that Dougie and the real Cooper will switch places, and killing Cooper stops him from going back to the Black Lodge. So logistically, these scenes with Duncan add up. But emotionally, there is no effort put into them. Duncan never shares a scene with Cooper's dopplegänger. The only one he talks to is his lackey Roger. These scenes feel phoned in, like they just have to be there to move the plot along and there is no attempt to give them flair or life.

Later that night, Cooper's dopplegänger learns that his accomplices Ray and Darya were sent to kill him by Philip Jeffries... or was it really him? Do I care which? No, because Jeffries is a blank slate character. It's more pointless questions for the sake of them, without substance. Cooper's dopplegänger is chasing coordinates to a location. It might be the White Lodge, but the Return mostly acts as if the White Lodge/Black Lodge mythology is bogus anyway, so who knows where he's trying to get to and why. It's not important. His entire villainy exists so everything else in the Return could happen, so why bother developing him, eh? It's a big comedown from BOB. Hell, it's a comedown from Windom Earle. You can at least make a case for the massive emotional damage that Earle's actions leave on Cooper in the past and present.

(The Return, incidentally, bizarrely acts as if Windom Earle never existed even though he should be their prime suspect on the Cooper investigation. He was never caught.)

The dopplegänger makes a telephone call to who he believes is Jeffries, but it becomes quickly apparent that someone is fooling him. Why would anyone choose to impersonate Jeffries? Beats me. I get that the idea is to manipulate the dopplegänger into pursuing specific coordinates so he could be caught, but why Jeffries? Why should the dopplegänger ever trust Jeffries to begin with?

The identity of the caller is likely Judy (since she mentions missing the dopplegänger in New York), but I will save my massive steaming rant about Judy for when the characters actually talk about him, because Judy is one of the dumbest things in this entire series and might get an entire page onto herself.

I wish it was MIKE instead (the One-Armed Man). Remember when MIKE and BOB had a rivalry? Good times.