Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
#26
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
Frost: Showtime has standards. Haven't you seen the series finale of Dexter or Weeds? We have to hit that level of quality.
Lynch: Hold my beer.
Lynch: Hold my beer.
#27
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Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I expected an ambiguous non-happy ending. I didn't expect 20-ish minutes of Dale and Laura(?) driving and stopping at Valero.
Hmm..
Edit: funny that this is the thread that brought Gizmo back from the dead.
Hmm..
Edit: funny that this is the thread that brought Gizmo back from the dead.
#28
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Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
You know, if you just ended it at episode 17, I would have felt good. 18 just... ugh. fucking hell.
#29
DVD Talk Ultimate Edition
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
Michael Ontkean turned out to be the true genius, by staying retired in Hawaii.
#30
DVD Talk Limited Edition
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
WTF? Just, dubya tee eff? Give me that budget and that cast and I could produce 18 hours of incomprehensible crap as well. Slap a "Twin Peaks" label on it and see if anyone calls me brilliant.
#31
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I read some posts on Reddit praising the final episode as Lynch doing a meta commentary on how these kinds of TV show reboots are destined to disappoint because you can't go back in time to when the original show was good. It's an interesting theory, although annoying if true. I understand Lynch feeling like large portions of the audience would be disappointed for the reasons he feared, but what's the sense of making it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
#32
DVD Talk Limited Edition
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I watched episodes 17 and 18 again and like them a bit more. Hopefully going back and watching all 18 hours in a binge style makes the finale feel more satisfying. Standing now I am not blown away but I don't feel like I have been Lindelofed.
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Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
Yeah overall I really enjoyed the series, I had zero expectations in terms of what I'd see, certainly didn't assume it would all be about Twin Peaks, and maybe that was key, Lynch being Lynch. I loved the Dougie Jones stuff, frankly I could have seen 10 more episodes of it. That, the Mitchum brothers, Naomi Watts, Chrysta Bell, absolute gold! Episode 17 was great, however without hating episode 18, I really don't understand what the heck happened. I loved seeing the "good" Diane, love Laura Dern. But again, no idea what happened, what it means as an ending or where it's going if there's another season.
#34
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#35
Banned by request
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I have been a big defender of this series but episode 18 felt like a mid-season finale. What was the point of all of that?
I think there were some real highlights throughout, and I'm used to Lynch not ending things in a traditional three act structure sort of way, but this felt like he just ran out of money and forgot to finish it.
I think there were some real highlights throughout, and I'm used to Lynch not ending things in a traditional three act structure sort of way, but this felt like he just ran out of money and forgot to finish it.
#36
DVD Talk Special Edition
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
As mind-blowingly frustrating as the Season 2 finale times a thousand.
Something that will perplex and fascinate for years to come.
Part 18 felt like an episode from a season 4 if it existed. Something turned inside out and reversed like a teapot steam figure 8.
At times frustrating, ridiculous, mysterious, hilarious, exhilarating. So many questions but this was unlike anything else and so much fun while it lasted. Entertained beyond expectation. I wish it could go on.
Something that will perplex and fascinate for years to come.
Part 18 felt like an episode from a season 4 if it existed. Something turned inside out and reversed like a teapot steam figure 8.
At times frustrating, ridiculous, mysterious, hilarious, exhilarating. So many questions but this was unlike anything else and so much fun while it lasted. Entertained beyond expectation. I wish it could go on.
#37
Suspended
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
Terrible ending. The whole series just feels like a general waste of time. I imagine some fans will eventually re-edit it and remove all the crap. Maybe a solid 8 hour series.
#38
DVD Talk Limited Edition
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I read some posts on Reddit praising the final episode as Lynch doing a meta commentary on how these kinds of TV show reboots are destined to disappoint because you can't go back in time to when the original show was good. It's an interesting theory, although annoying if true. I understand Lynch feeling like large portions of the audience would be disappointed for the reasons he feared, but what's the sense of making it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
#39
Banned by request
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
The AV Club was really positive about the ending: http://www.avclub.com/there-should-n...aks-1799304744
There should never be another episode of Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks’ two-part finale was a dizzying, mystifying loop-de-loop, with individual scenes of almost indescribable cinematic richness: Cooper’s face superimposed over minutes of denouement, or the unfathomable strangeness of his sex scene with Diane. But all of that was preamble to the shattering impact of the series’ final scene. The question heading into the episode was: How could David Lynch possibly tie off all the competing plot threads, unresolved questions, and barely justified detours of this wily 18-hour season? Of course, the answer was that he couldn’t, but he came shockingly close to it on “Part 17.” In terms of happy endings, it’s hard to imagine a better resolution to a murder mystery than punching the forces of darkness back into hell and then preventing the murder from ever happening in the first place.
But then came “Part 18,” which seemed designed to obfuscate and infuriate, sending the protagonists to a parallel dimension and ending with a whole new batch of questions. I’ve seen some variety of musings that it was yet another cliffhanger, à la the infamous “How’s Annie?” that concluded the show’s first run, or the beginning of a new mystery now that the saga of Laura Palmer is closed. This is wishful thinking, imbuing a sense of sequential order and normal TV logic where there shouldn’t be. Like the infinity symbol Phillip Jeffries breathes into air, the conclusion of The Return marks the completion of a loop that feeds back into its very beginning. Lynch has doggedly refused to talk about continuing the show after this season, and now that we’re here, it’s clear why. It’s over. The story may not be complete, but the loop is.
What’s most remarkable about The Return, and “Part 18” in particular, is the way it has cast the entire series in a new light. The initial appeal of the show, outside of the Laura Palmer whodunnit, was its gradual unveiling of a mysterious realm that existed outside of ours, and some of The Return’s most indelible moments were those that expanded our understanding of that realm, whether it was the creation of Bob in “Part 8” or the frequent journeys into the bizarre logic of the Black Lodge. But peppered throughout were allusions to the wormhole we’d go through in the finale. The Giant’s opening scene referenced Richard and Linda, and Gordon Cole’s monologue about Monica Bellucci introduced the notion that this was all someone else’s dream. Audrey Horne’s wrenching return to reality from the heaven of the Roadhouse, too, provided a clue that there were more realities at play here than merely the world of Twin Peaks and the world of the Red Room. “We live in a dream,” Cooper intones with godlike solemnity in “Part 17,” but whose? Horne’s? Lynch’s? Monica Bellucci’s? The final episode gave us a reason to reexamine the entire show under this new rubric—not for evidence of a murder, but for evidence of a dream, of an unmoved mover.
It set us on this new journey with a series of images and sounds that it spent 18 hours rendering as unsettling as possible. The series’ long-running exploration of sound reached its crescendo in “Part 17,” in which Laura emerged from the woods to “Laura Palmer’s Theme” in a vision that eerily echoes the old video of Angelo Badalamenti talking about writing the track with David Lynch. Much of the rest of the episode—as Cooper and Palmer wander through the forest together, and as Sarah Palmer shatters her daughter’s picture—was given over to dense sound collages of the sort The Return leaned on regularly. In the indescribable sex scene between Diane and Cooper, ambient music and real-world pop play simultaneously, themes commingling as they transcend the world we’d known and enter—well, one that looked a lot more like ours. Odessa was filmed with a plainspoken realism, full of shabby cars, Valero gas stations, and, notably, utter silencio—no music, no ostentatious sound design, just unaltered ambient audio. The burble of a deep-fat fryer. The woman he and “Carrie Page” find at Palmer’s old house may have had Laura Palmer’s hair—much like Cooper and Leland got Bob’s hair when possessed by him—but she was played by the property’s real-world owner. They’d entered our world but it still had doors to the Red Room, or maybe the inspirations to its dreams.
It’s only fitting that all this silence was finally shattered with the show’s most famous sound—that is Laura Palmer’s primal, phantasmagoric scream. That, in turn, was what we were building toward, despite all the goofy humor of Dougie’s odyssey and meandering detours into suburban ennui. It was a bloodcurdling reassertion that the show is horror and that it always has been, both the otherworldly horror of the TV series and also the very real horror of incest as depicted harrowingly in Fire Walk With Me. Many TV shows turn dreamlike in their final moments, winking at the viewers for their devotion over the years—Star Trek: The Next Generation’s cosmic game of poker, Lost’s notoriously unfulfilling extra-dimensional gambit, Tony Soprano’s richly layered vision of eternal paranoia. But the final images and sounds of The Return work instead to undermine everything, presenting a question that cannot be solved: Who is the dreamer? The difference between the Lynch who buckled to studio pressure to solve the mystery of Laura’s murder and the Lynch of today is that he knows never to give us that answer. Like that shattering final scream, it’s left to echo.
Twin Peaks’ two-part finale was a dizzying, mystifying loop-de-loop, with individual scenes of almost indescribable cinematic richness: Cooper’s face superimposed over minutes of denouement, or the unfathomable strangeness of his sex scene with Diane. But all of that was preamble to the shattering impact of the series’ final scene. The question heading into the episode was: How could David Lynch possibly tie off all the competing plot threads, unresolved questions, and barely justified detours of this wily 18-hour season? Of course, the answer was that he couldn’t, but he came shockingly close to it on “Part 17.” In terms of happy endings, it’s hard to imagine a better resolution to a murder mystery than punching the forces of darkness back into hell and then preventing the murder from ever happening in the first place.
But then came “Part 18,” which seemed designed to obfuscate and infuriate, sending the protagonists to a parallel dimension and ending with a whole new batch of questions. I’ve seen some variety of musings that it was yet another cliffhanger, à la the infamous “How’s Annie?” that concluded the show’s first run, or the beginning of a new mystery now that the saga of Laura Palmer is closed. This is wishful thinking, imbuing a sense of sequential order and normal TV logic where there shouldn’t be. Like the infinity symbol Phillip Jeffries breathes into air, the conclusion of The Return marks the completion of a loop that feeds back into its very beginning. Lynch has doggedly refused to talk about continuing the show after this season, and now that we’re here, it’s clear why. It’s over. The story may not be complete, but the loop is.
What’s most remarkable about The Return, and “Part 18” in particular, is the way it has cast the entire series in a new light. The initial appeal of the show, outside of the Laura Palmer whodunnit, was its gradual unveiling of a mysterious realm that existed outside of ours, and some of The Return’s most indelible moments were those that expanded our understanding of that realm, whether it was the creation of Bob in “Part 8” or the frequent journeys into the bizarre logic of the Black Lodge. But peppered throughout were allusions to the wormhole we’d go through in the finale. The Giant’s opening scene referenced Richard and Linda, and Gordon Cole’s monologue about Monica Bellucci introduced the notion that this was all someone else’s dream. Audrey Horne’s wrenching return to reality from the heaven of the Roadhouse, too, provided a clue that there were more realities at play here than merely the world of Twin Peaks and the world of the Red Room. “We live in a dream,” Cooper intones with godlike solemnity in “Part 17,” but whose? Horne’s? Lynch’s? Monica Bellucci’s? The final episode gave us a reason to reexamine the entire show under this new rubric—not for evidence of a murder, but for evidence of a dream, of an unmoved mover.
It set us on this new journey with a series of images and sounds that it spent 18 hours rendering as unsettling as possible. The series’ long-running exploration of sound reached its crescendo in “Part 17,” in which Laura emerged from the woods to “Laura Palmer’s Theme” in a vision that eerily echoes the old video of Angelo Badalamenti talking about writing the track with David Lynch. Much of the rest of the episode—as Cooper and Palmer wander through the forest together, and as Sarah Palmer shatters her daughter’s picture—was given over to dense sound collages of the sort The Return leaned on regularly. In the indescribable sex scene between Diane and Cooper, ambient music and real-world pop play simultaneously, themes commingling as they transcend the world we’d known and enter—well, one that looked a lot more like ours. Odessa was filmed with a plainspoken realism, full of shabby cars, Valero gas stations, and, notably, utter silencio—no music, no ostentatious sound design, just unaltered ambient audio. The burble of a deep-fat fryer. The woman he and “Carrie Page” find at Palmer’s old house may have had Laura Palmer’s hair—much like Cooper and Leland got Bob’s hair when possessed by him—but she was played by the property’s real-world owner. They’d entered our world but it still had doors to the Red Room, or maybe the inspirations to its dreams.
It’s only fitting that all this silence was finally shattered with the show’s most famous sound—that is Laura Palmer’s primal, phantasmagoric scream. That, in turn, was what we were building toward, despite all the goofy humor of Dougie’s odyssey and meandering detours into suburban ennui. It was a bloodcurdling reassertion that the show is horror and that it always has been, both the otherworldly horror of the TV series and also the very real horror of incest as depicted harrowingly in Fire Walk With Me. Many TV shows turn dreamlike in their final moments, winking at the viewers for their devotion over the years—Star Trek: The Next Generation’s cosmic game of poker, Lost’s notoriously unfulfilling extra-dimensional gambit, Tony Soprano’s richly layered vision of eternal paranoia. But the final images and sounds of The Return work instead to undermine everything, presenting a question that cannot be solved: Who is the dreamer? The difference between the Lynch who buckled to studio pressure to solve the mystery of Laura’s murder and the Lynch of today is that he knows never to give us that answer. Like that shattering final scream, it’s left to echo.
#40
Suspended
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I wonder who had more screen time - Kyle or David Lynch?
#41
DVD Talk Hero
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I'm fascinated how so many people can look at this, say it was a waste of time and barely made any sense, and then declare that's what made it brilliant.
#42
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
#43
DVD Talk Legend
#44
Banned by request
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
I have to rewatch this but I don't think it's actually a disappointment for me. I think I was expecting the wrong things out of it and have to take time to digest it.
#45
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
#46
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
After taking a couple of days to think about it and reading some stuff online, I think I'm inclined to go against what seems to be the consensus here and say I disliked 17, but liked 18.
After 16 hours of meandering story threads, most of which I didn't really give a crap about, I held out some hope that there would be a satisfying resolution of some sort. Instead we got one final Gordon Cole info dump and some dude punching a balloon with Bob's face pasted on it. Not to mention the big emotional resolution was Cooper rescuing Diane, a character it turns out we had never actually met before and one whose role in the original series was more or less a running joke.
18 at least felt like something to sink my teeth into. Sure it rendered a lot of the previous 17 hours almost meaningless, but I'm not sure that was a problem for me. At the very least it recontextualized them, which is definitely a good thing. There was a looming sense of dread that is present in most of Lynch's work that thankfully didn't require shocking violence or Cooper in a crappy wig that made him look like Eugene from Walking Dead. It was all mood and mystery. That's what Lynch does best. I'm not sure I totally understand all of the story details, nor do I necessarily like all of what I did understand, but it felt closer to what I maybe would have wanted out of this new season than exploding Bob balloons.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully process all of my feelings on The Return though. After seeing the finale I am inclined to rewatch the whole thing from the beginning. However, knowing how it ends, it's going to make the stuff I didn't like that much more painful to get through.
After 16 hours of meandering story threads, most of which I didn't really give a crap about, I held out some hope that there would be a satisfying resolution of some sort. Instead we got one final Gordon Cole info dump and some dude punching a balloon with Bob's face pasted on it. Not to mention the big emotional resolution was Cooper rescuing Diane, a character it turns out we had never actually met before and one whose role in the original series was more or less a running joke.
18 at least felt like something to sink my teeth into. Sure it rendered a lot of the previous 17 hours almost meaningless, but I'm not sure that was a problem for me. At the very least it recontextualized them, which is definitely a good thing. There was a looming sense of dread that is present in most of Lynch's work that thankfully didn't require shocking violence or Cooper in a crappy wig that made him look like Eugene from Walking Dead. It was all mood and mystery. That's what Lynch does best. I'm not sure I totally understand all of the story details, nor do I necessarily like all of what I did understand, but it felt closer to what I maybe would have wanted out of this new season than exploding Bob balloons.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully process all of my feelings on The Return though. After seeing the finale I am inclined to rewatch the whole thing from the beginning. However, knowing how it ends, it's going to make the stuff I didn't like that much more painful to get through.
#47
DVD Talk Special Edition
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
The best thing is that the whole 18 hours will be re-edited into a two-and-a-half hour film to be released theatrically in Europe. So if you couldn't stand to make it through the entire run of the show, just check that out instead.
#49
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
#50
Re: Twin Peaks (S1E17/E18) -- Season Finale -- "The Return - Part 17 & 18" -- 9/3/17
It was essentially a deus ex machina (that tried to disguise itself by being brought up in an earlier episode).