Twin Peaks 1990

Another week, another unnecessary reboot of a fetishized show. A lot of time and effort is put into apologizing for "surrealist" works. When something seems bizarre or off-putting, it's really the symbol of [blank] that has kept the particular reviewer up for many sleepless nights and changes in meaning for them over years. It would be too simple, it is supposed, to only say the plot was weak and dialogue boring. To suggest camp as a lazy crutch to account for bad acting is to just miss the point! It's a flexible genre that not everyone tunes into for its ability to... make sense... or frame its alleged message in a way you particularly care to hear. ::huff:: Fine. There's some truth to the notion that one person's art is another's self-indulgent waste of time and resources. And in terms of "cultural impact," one must concede this is a "great" show that captured the momentum and fervor of its time and has carried such a special place that it's managed to reboot even if the notion of rebooting has smelled sour for longer than anyone cares to admit.

Whatever else I might figure out to say about this show as I carry on, I cannot get over how horrendously bored I am. One dimensional characters bouncing from one boring ass conversation to the next before schizophrenically altering their personality and plot line to be doing something that isn't better or worse than before and probably won't be given a resolution. The main arc and mystery could have ended it all mid-way in season 2, but they keep going...because. The forced introduction of painted-marionette characters to continuously drag the story along must exist in a collective blackout by the show's most ardent fans.

Check out my viewing habits. I watch nearly everything. Across cultures, eras, and languages I peek. I get that some people have very niche voices and that it can be nice just to find that someone does indeed have a voice. I get that some things are complex or difficult. I get that some things are goofy. I just don't get this. It feels bored with itself. Like someone with the resources to make a parody, or pay homage, or experiment in a bend or twist, just threw it all in a blender and poured it out on the table, dryly proclaiming, "eat." I liken it to the kind of "comedy" that comes from Comedy Bang Bang or Tim and Eric. "WE DID SOMETHING! ACCEPT US! NOT ALL COMEDY IS ABOUT LAUGHTER, DUH!" Okay, you complex, tortured souls you. So it goes not all drama has to feel particularly dramatic nor do all mysteries need to make you think, I guess.

It feels like when True Detective got undermined by its own popularity. Forcing more layers and conversations than were ever needed. It feels like if an X-Files subplot got particularly out of hand. It feels like the original college junior script for Fringe before it went through a 95% rewriting process. It feels like Wonderfalls in a universe where the word "charm" never existed. It's Carnivale without the mystery, style, or acting. It's an episode of Bate's Motel where it's 38 minutes of just Norman and Norma folding sheets and sweeping up the hotel before a slightly awkward conversation at dinner andthenohlookabloodstain cut to black. It's so goddamn boring I'm staring at a frozen frame of it because I had to capture the void and every time I look up it makes me feel even emptier. Now, go on, tell me that's Lynch's intent all along and now I'm finally starting to see the inherent brilliance and wisdom of his sad take on life. Or, let the conversation die like the show should have died in 1991, or whenever the middle of the second season aired.

I'm not sure how I feel about Twin Peaks. I mean I watched it all in a couple of weeks and there were some really cool parts and ideas and there definitely were some bad parts, mainly the second half of the second season was super boring. I was always interested when something weird or supernatural was happening and not interested when it was just townie drama. I knew it was Lynch making this and I know how some of his movies work, so I was expecting everything to make sense or matter but there was still too much stuff I didn't care about.

I thought the third season was much better then the previous two seasons. That may be because it was newer or because it focused less on the Twin Peak's townies, I'm not sure. Maybe it was because it did more weird stuff but I wasn't a huge fan of the weirdest episode 8. The ending wasn't the strongest but I wasn't expecting Breaking Bad closure.

Overall after hearing so much about how amazing the show is and how fantastic season 3 is, I was disappointed. I think it is interesting and can be very good at points but it just is a little too boring and needs to be a little weirder. I'm glad I watched it but I'm not sure if I'll every revisit again. Maybe if the do a season 4 in another 25 years.

This is now already one of my favourite TV shows of all time.

The original run of Twin Peaks - seasons 1 & 2 - is a fascinating display of the benefits of creative collaboration, but also the dangers of creative compromise.

I can see how this show revolutionised turning live-action TV into an art form on equal footing with film. It uses the (at the time) familiar setting of a melodramatic soap opera, but full of strange, quirky and likeable characters and a very foreboding atmosphere. The murder mystery that kicks off the show is quickly coated in a sinister sense of dread, which makes you want to know more yet hesitant to really find the nasty answers at the same time.

It's incredible to me that the pilot was written with very little future planning, and that the spiritual throughline of the show came from Lynch needing to come up with an ending for the European standalone film. Of course once Lynch and Frost both partially abandon the show in the second season due to their dissatisfaction with studio meddling, it ceases to be the same show anymore. But still, there's a point you can jump back in where they start to reel things back and build back up towards an excellent ending.

Despite the rocky road of ups and downs in the mainstream, Twin Peaks is an incredibly unique and captivating show that takes you to a strange, dreamy place like no other. Things get a little bumpy down the road, but after all -
Heaven is a large and interesting place.

Twin Peaks: The Return is very much about returning to Twin Peaks. It appears in a near unrecognisable state, with new characters and what appears to be a new modern style murder mystery to unpack. Instead of every scene being a soapy nugget of intrugue to grab onto, we're steadily handed what seem to be open-ended questions at a downright glacial pace. Twin Peaks is no longer welcoming; it's incredibly violent and sick. But, we're baited in with the hook of following Cooper's spiritual journey. As the series goes on and more familiar faces appear, you discover that it's all tied back into the story of the characters we love and Cooper's investigation into the source of Laura Palmer's death.

This is very much a David Lynch baby, much more along the lines of Fire Walk with Me than the original series. Mark Frost works his usual magic of weaving together Lynch's intuitive magic and madness into a (relatively) coherent narrative, forming a deep rich lore for the dream-like world of Twin Peaks. As well as the titular "return", the other main goal of the series seems to be expanding and even explaning the mythos of the series, showing us how the supernatural elements work and where they come from. Of course much of it is left up to the viewer's interpretation, but I felt it gave me enough to form a magical fairytale in my head.

That's also why I feel there's not much need to go into the final episode. It's definitely polarising by design. Lynch and Frost intentionally made the penultimate episode to be the ending that would please most people. Things are explained, all plotlines converge and the story is tied up in a lovely narrative bow, even back to the very beginning of the series. Not to say that it's very conventional, it's still one of the more beautifully artistic things I've seen, but it's there to make sure that people like me are satisfied. Part 18 feels like David Lynch's ending, totally unbound by any further obligation to conclude the narrative or stay true to character. I feel like he has every right to do that, and I'm perfectly happy with part 17 to appease my headcanon.

At first I found it a bit odd that something like The Return was considered "season 3" of a show from the 90s, but by the end of it I realised that, much like Fire Walk with Me, it's quite inseperable and I consider it all one single narrative. If there's one thing I can say for certain about Twin Peaks, if not just The Return in particular, it's that there's nothing quite like it, and I absolutely adore it.

It was one if my cardinal sins... I didn't watch it when it aired back in the 90's. I was watching the first episodes and said... what a hell? the acting seems cheesy, and what with this music? But I soldiered on through the couole of fiest episodes, and man, the thing starts to pick up. There are a lot of caricature kind of characters, but I'm pretty sure it is on purpose, because the whole thing is almost like a giant episode of Twilight Zone. Or a bug Cooper's dream...

There is a difference between unique and influential products. While unique works tend to keep their edge and traits for years after release, influential works are strongly related to the time they were created. What was felt as fresh and innovative back then tends to become stale and trivial over time as it gets endlessly imitated by later products. "Twin Peaks" has a little bit of both. I got a chance to rewatch the series after decades and could feel both its unique and influential elements. It felt a bit old and trite at times, but after getting back into the mood I thought the show still holds pretty well. The exaggerated soap opera elements are hilarious, but are well-balanced by the crime fiction storyline and uncanny, surreal elements. The first season has very little action and takes its time to introduce Twin Peaks and its inhabitants. Quality is not so uniform as different directors and writers took part in the project, but overall everything is well-balanced and, despite the slow pace, hooky enough. Attention lowers a bit towards the end, but the intense and over-the-top season finale manages to effectively bring us back on board. Donna and James' story was the only thing that felt a bit tired, sometimes even painful to watch though. Did anyone really care about them?

The second season starts strong and offers some of the best episodes ever ("Lonely Souls", above all), but it gets completely lost after Laura's killer is revealed. The cheap soap opera elements are the only things left and it doesn't even feel like a parody anymore. Characters have completely different personalities and do silly things all the time. Ben Horne's descent into senile dementia and James new cringe-worthy love interest could be counted among the worst moments in television history. Windom Earle had some potential as the new threat, but he ends up just fooling around and acting like a weirdo with no real consequences. The last episode "Beyond Life and Death" makes little sense but is at least visually interesting. It might be what David Lynch's wanted to do but made me feel the previous 10 episodes even more useless.

Almost thirty years later, Lynch finally gets a chance to revamp the show and have full creative control. For the first time, he co-wrote and directed all episodes himself. However, the final product is closer to "Fire Walk With Me" than it is to the original series. As the characters also keep saying, it doesn't even feel like the same place anymore. America changed, television changed, we changed. A lot of the events do not even happen in Twin Peaks, and most of the historical characters just got minor roles. While the original series was fairly linear and self-explicative, there is no-one helping us figure out what is going on. There will be some challenges even if you are familiar with Lynch's recurrent themes and symbolism, especially in the ending. It's one hell of self-indulgent, purely Lynchian 20+ hour movie, but I personally enjoyed it. Despite some cheap-ass CGI here and there (God, that Bob ball and glove dude scene), there are a lot of visually and atmospherically striking shots and a lot of cult moments. I would recommend it to hardcore fans only though.

One of the most revered shows about the world, Twin Peaks is my personal favourite TV show thus far. It's a cultic, surreal mystery with myriads of construals and an emphatically subjective conception. David Lynch refuses to explicate the meaning behind any of his work being a firm proponent of art subjectivism. He often gives people small hints, such as the fact that Eraserhead is his most psychedelic film, but he believes every piece of art is up to interpretation and artistic intent is merely one of those possible interpretations. He fills his films and this show with symbolism, seemingly haphazard surrealism, and overall wackiness. Hence, most of his critics berate his work as nonsensical, random, and pretentious.

In all honesty, the subjective meaning behind his work was never the main attraction, for me. Throughout my viewing of the show, I seldom bothered attempting to analyze all the metaphysical happenings and instead opted to just experience them on a visceral level and see what comes out of that. And the surrealism is enjoyable regardless of the method with which you choose to experience it. Even pure audiovisuals suffice to enrapture the viewer and make this show an indelible experience. For instance, The Black Lodge is one of if not the best cinematic portrayal of prepubescent nightmares. So much so, that it reminded me of one such nightmare I experienced as a kid.

One of the show's main strengths is its romanticization of 90s American country culture. Twin Peaks is the epitome of the relaxed, isolated life in small American towns. Every character is interesting, friendly and has their own quirks, issues, and charm. Particularly, one of the most iconic characters in TV history, Special Agent Dale Cooper. He is by far the most charming character in TV history, whether it be his love for coffee, his sweet and caring nature or simply the way he records everything in voice recorder he has named Diane (who's later revealed to be an actual person). Or the smaller, simpler characters like Audrey, the classic femme fatale, who enjoys randomly dancing to a particular song, which also happens to be my favourite OST track ever. Not a single character is left absent a quirk or otherwise distinctive individuality.

The second season is by far the most controversial since David Lynch stops directing the show amidst it. Many hate that part of the show and think it's the worst filler ever, but I beg to differ. It isn't as good as the rest of the show since it's not directed by David Lynch, but to me, it was a nice break from the main arch where several characters received considerable development. The characters are brilliantly created, so I didn't mind simply watching them interact at all. Plus, the season finale is one of the best episodes. The next season, which revived the show in 2017 is singularly astounding. David Lynch has all the money he could ever need at that point and uses to create some of the prettiest imagery you've ever seen. Namely, the bomb sequence is a strong contender for the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Okay I talk about deadly premonition a lot which is very obviously and doesn’t try to hide being highly inspired by this. I do feel that tough topics should at the very least be discussed not that there is very much to be discussed when it comes to r-pe or csa even though it is constantly adopted just for fun. Even in deadly premonition. Another reason for me to tell you about live action bebop that adopts one of my favorite parts of do for no reason but to be sexy and not include the sexual assault it comes with also for no reason. Def some transphobia/ in twin peaks but ahead of its time with technically ig. Racism/ Not ahead of anything there. Probably a lot of other things but yeah. I really like the aesthetics and spooky small towns. I love damned good coffee and cherry pie ;)

Lots of dad and daughter stuff not just one couple of characters.

To get personal . I am also a inc-st csa survivor like Laura Palmer. I was and am still ugly trying to just survive it. I went through it for 18 years and am still having to deal with that person from time to time. That isn’t something you come out of clean. I have had to do similar things to Laura Palmer. A lot of the people in the show are glad she is dead. And we are supposed to feel bad for the person who has done all these things because he was possessed or whatever. I do not care. I have not met a decent person who likes this show anyway. Def not the do guy the second game is equally as bad as this shit. But yeah that is basically the whole show is people shitting on someone that was abused and like and being nice to the ped-phile while still having other ventures of sexual assault. But uh. I don’t talk about it here much since he doesn’t have a lot of shows I think but I hate David Lynch in general so I am biased ig. He loves inc-st.