wow.
wow.
wow wow wow wow wow.
so i have a confession:
twin peaks is hit and miss for me.
i know that it has been collectively adopted by a certain faction of society as the Best TV Show Ever. and either you think twin peaks is an Amazing Work Of Genius, or you don't get it and you aren't into it and it is Not Your Thing. i have very rarely seen people in the middle.
and don't get me wrong: parts of twin peaks ARE genius. laura palmer's murder. the log lady. the red room. everything about the core of twin peaks, i find amazing and fascinating and i adore it.
and then, i think dale cooper is cute with his damn fine coffee. i adore nadine and her silent drape runners.
but, for me, the soap opera element always slightly outweighed the supernatural element, and that made me a little bit sad. but it's why my favourite parts of twin peaks are the supernatural parts. and it's why i couldn't care less about the josie/catherine/mill subplot, or james going on his weird quest, or the mayor's new young wife.
overall, i would give twin peaks probably 8/10 as a complete package.
and then.... THE RETURN.
i do not remember the last time an hour passed by so quickly as watching part of twin peaks: the return.
we are straight into a recap of the red room, and then we open with dale and the giant (or ????? as he is credited...) and from there, it's one scene after another that is fully plot-focused, and fully into the supernatural mythology that was always slightly hidden in the original series.
honestly, the return does not feel like a third season of the show. it feels like a sister show, or a cousin show. it's taken ideas and themes from twin peaks, and it's magnified them, explored them, and turned them full force into a huge supernatural thriller show.
and i am LOVING it.
the few original characters that popped up in parts 1 and 2 seem pretty much irrelevant. other than dale cooper (of course) and log lady (who, of course, acts as some sort of link between twin peaks and the other realms), and hawk..... nobody else seems important. lucy, andy, jacoby, ben, jerry, shelley, james, sarah. it feels like they're all there almost as cameos - just to remind people that david lynch and mark frost are at the helm. reminding us that we are seeing something take place in twin peaks. other than that, the show could pretty much function entirely without them.
and i am totally okay with this.
log lady is the only character i was genuinely pleased to see (god bless catherine coulson). i am totally happy to have everybody else relegated to side roles.
if this entire series is going to be about dale, bob, the red room, the black lodge, and we get a whole bunch of creepy and unsettling scenes for the next 18 hours, SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.
so interestingly, i have listened to a lot of twin peaks podcasts today. and almost all of them have expressed a little wariness about this very thing - about the fact that this doesn't seem exactly like twin peaks. that the upbeat joyousness has gone. and i guess if you fully adore twin peaks for everything that it was before, the complete mish-mash of soap opera and supernatural, then this new series may be a bit disconcerting at first. because there is no soap opera to be had here.
it's like lost, but if they knew what they were doing.
it's everything i have ever wanted in a tv show.
give me all of those extended shots, all of those uncomfortable silences, all of those unbearably bright lens flares, all of the backwards talk, all of the sticks and brains and mystery.
give it all to me.
I WANT IT ALL.
this is everything i have ever wanted from twin peaks, since the very first time i saw cooper's dream in the red room and thought "wow this scene is so fucking weird" and totally, utterly fell in love with it.
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