The return of Twin Peaks is a lot to process. After each episode, Uproxx‘s Alan Sepinwall and Keith Phipps attempt to hash out what we all just watched.
Alan: After the giddy creative highs of those first three hours, I’m starting to get a little worried about the revival, Keith. Wally Brando aside, the two most recent hours have felt awfully padded and formless — all my “18-hour movie” fears coming to pass in a string of Dougie Jones scenes that run on forever — without anyone ever noticing that slick salesman Dougie is now a barely-functional human — and other stories (like Hawk and Andy’s attempt to solve the Log Lady’s riddle) moving even more slowly.
It’s still Lynch directing, which means there will still be stunning shots like Amanda Seyfried’s Becky smiling as she gazes up at the heavens from her skeevy boyfriend’s car. (Twin Peaks in any era must have an abundance of beautiful but gullible young women in relationships with criminal idiots who will bring them nothing but grief.) But the deeper we get into the project, the more troubling the scattershot narrative becomes, as subplots are introduced and forgotten almost instantly so that Lynch and Frost can move onto the next big-name guest star they hired, in whom they have more interest than most of the returning characters from the original series.
I suppose I should be grateful that the mystery of Dr. Jacoby’s golden shovels wasn’t dragged out across the entire season, but I can’t help feeling like we’re in time-killing mode until Good Coop gets his memory back.
Talk me off the ledge here, Keith. Was there more to Part 5 than met the eye at first, or was it as much of a nothingburger as it felt to me last night?
Keith: Huh. I don’t know. Is it possible that anything would feel like a letdown after The Leftovers finale? I really liked this episode, which felt less formless than the show slipping back into the mode of a nighttime soap opera, which was the form it’s always taken when it’s not Lynch sneaking experimental films onto television. The Dougie scenes are long, I’ll grant you, and the characters’ reactions to him seem to be beyond the logic of even this strange world. But I thought they felt less drawn out than in last week’s episode and I thought they were funny. If nothing else, the revival has given me a deeper appreciation of Kyle MacLachlan. He’s chilling as Bad Coop, but just as convincing as a largely vacant man who discovers he really loves coffee. Also, I may order a green tea latte today. Apparently they’re extremely satisfying.
Beyond that, I thought the mystery deepened on a few fronts. With her sweet demeanor, bad choice of boyfriends, and coke habit, Becky looks like she’s destined to become Laura Palmer 2.0, which seems like it could go to some fascinating places in a series filed with echoes and doppelgängers. And speaking of echoes, did you catch the name of the sociopath in the roadhouse played by Eamon Farren? It’s “Richard Horne.” This isn’t intriguing? Evil Coop’s phone phreak abilities? Mr. Strawberry? The exploding car? All this added up to a pretty solid hour of television to me. Plus, we got the thrill of seeing Norma and Shelly behind the counter of the Double R. What more did you want?
Alan: Finally, we are at odds! Alrighty.
A lot of my concerns are about the pacing. The original series, for all of its bizarre and memorable detours, was pretty conventionally paced over that first season-plus. The Palmer case gave structure and drive to everything, made all the oddball townies feel more important because they were all in some way tied to the investigation, and we checked in on almost everyone each week, even though Lynch and Frost had to leave time for ABC’s commercial breaks.
It’s not just that the Dougie interlude is going on for so long, but that virtually every other part of the show — whether in Buckhorn or Twin Peaks itself — comes and goes without warning or much explanation. Shelly pops up for a few minutes at the end of the second hour, then vanishes til midway through this one, and it’s only implied but not clarified that she’s Becky’s mom. Among the ways the original show was true to its soap opera roots was the way it made sure you knew who everybody was and how they were related to one another. So far, this feels more like Lynch throwing a lot of ideas out there at random, or like he shot far more material than he has room for, especially since he wants to devote so much of the revival to Good Coop vs Bad Coop. (I wouldn’t be surprised if, after all the episodes have aired, we start hearing some Terence Malick-esque stories from actors who filmed a lot of material and barely appeared, or were cut out entirely.)
Seeing Norma still running the Double-R, and still wearing the same baby blue uniform as Shelly, is a nice shot of nostalgia, but that’s all so far. Is she with Big Ed? Is (Dr. Jacoby fan) Nadine? Or is she just appearing briefly because Lynch or Frost feel like they owe it to the fans — see also Mike Nelson having aged into the kind of conservative adult who would have no patience for his younger self — even as they’re mostly focusing on this new Cooper-centric story, as well as this wave of new actors like Seyfried and Watts who are willing to appear because of the original’s reputation? And if Becky is meant to be Laura 2.0, is introducing her for a pair of scenes midway through the fifth hour the best narrative way to do that? Even if you assume Lynch prefers people to just binge the whole thing, this is still a very late arrival for Becky — or for anyone else whom we haven’t yet met, but may prove crucial down the road.
I did notice that the guy hassling Jane Levy and her friends at the roadhouse was named Horne, though that also speaks to the shagginess of a lot of the storytelling so far. Should the cast credits be the first time we learn what seems an important piece of information (see also the Bang-Bang being run by another Renault brother, but played the same actor who was Jacques on the original series)?
Bad Coop using the phone to terrify the warden (who clearly knows what Mr. Strawberry means) and connect to his colleagues was probably the episode’s most memorable scene, in part because it was one of the few where it felt like something was happening. The bomb blowing up the car thief feels like more business to protect Good Coop while he learns to stop being Dougie, and everything is lurching along, as if the show simultaneously has too much material (all the supporting characters who are appearing briefly and infrequently) and not enough (Good Coop killing time in Dougie’s life with no one batting an eye at his behavior).
Not much happened to advance the story in the third episode — or, really, in the two-hour premiere — but those hours were just so strange and vivid and alive that I didn’t care. If you’re not going to give me an eyeless woman floating in a star field, you’ve got to give me more plot than we got here, I guess.
Do you feel they’re juggling the characters well enough so far? Were there particular stylish flourishes you’d like us to discuss more? And how did you feel about Frank Truman getting henpecked by Doris, played by Candy Clark?
Keith: I think it’s always great to see Candy Clark, and I didn’t even know she was going to be in this. (Ditto Ernie Hudson.) She’s fun in her scene, too, though I think it would just be a clichéd business of a hectoring wife were it not for Robert Forster’s brilliant underplaying. Does anyone alive do deadpan as well? That being said, it also speaks to your complaint about this episode. We get that scene and some hints as to what’s going on with Harry and then it’s over and never returned to again as the show moves on to other business.
It’s weird because everything is you’re saying about this episode is how I felt about the last episode the first time through. (It improved on a second viewing.) I wonder if these will be the first “normal” Peaks episode we’ve gotten, one that flits from character to character and pushes the plot forward by inches. If so, you could be in for a slog. But then next week could be all eyeless women floating in a star field. It’s that kind of show.
Also, I don’t think we can wind this week down without talking about Dr. Amp. Does this make sense as where Dr. Jacoby’s life would take him? Finally, can I sell you a shovel?
Alan: The Dr. Amp scene wasn’t necessarily Wally Brando levels of fun — what could be? — but I enjoyed watching Russ Tamblyn tear into his anti-corporate rhetoric, and bought it utterly as a logical 25-years-later extension of the philosophies he espoused on the original series. Will it lead anywhere, or was this just Tamblyn’s big curtain call before the story moves on to more serious business? Who can tell? But it would be a very Lynch-ian approach to treat the revival as simultaneously a serialized conclusion to the Dale Cooper/Laura Palmer/Black Lodge story and a collection of unrelated comedy sketches that happen to be set in the Twin Peaks universe. Some have been very successful, and others not (even with Forster’s reaction, I had very little patience for the Doris scene), and while the original show certainly did its fair share of seemingly random comedy bits (Señor Droolcup bringing a wounded Agent Cooper some milk), those episodes had more narrative cohesion than these have so far.
These last two episodes haven’t put me off the revival — I think I may have even liked the fourth episode more than you (in part because I liked Wally Brando more than you) — but they are preparing me for the idea that the level of execution has to be really high on the individual ideas for an hour to feel satisfying, at least until someone uses another gold-painted tool to try to pull all these ideas together more than they’ve been so far.
Keith: Well, one way or another, we’re going to find out. Until then, I’m going to make some phone calls to Argentina to see if anything weird happens.