In which Captain Picard must save the Enterprise by LARPing as the moon.
Much like the people disappearing in this episode, so is my attention span.
[7.8/10] It’s occasionally hard to know how to unpack an episode of Rick and Morty. The show has so many layers to it, of irony, of parody, of character, of story, of theme, that’s hard to separate each into discrete groups and consider what exactly the episode is trying to say. I consider it a feature, not a bug, but it does sometimes make the show hard to write about.
That said, there’s a few things (I think) we can take away from the episode. The first is that, as evidenced by this episode and the series finale of Community, Dan Harmon does not particularly care for The Avengers and its related films, now the baby of his old friends The Russo Brothers. “Vindicators 3” does a nice job of parodying these films with the Vindicators themselves, poking fun at oddly specific or impractical problems with convenient or unnecessary solutions, and through Rick more directly commenting on them.
The show has fun playing around with colorful superheroes and mixing them into R&M’s sad sack world where people more readily die and friends and families are more apt to turn on one another than be united by the latest adventure. Bringing in Gillian Jacobs certainly helps the proceedings, and the escalation as the heroes keep getting picked off in Drunk Rick’s amusing Saw-like series of death rooms fits the weird creativity of the show.
Now I’m a fan of the MCU movies, so I’ll admit to bristling a bit at the criticisms of the episode, but I also think that’s kind of the point. The mouthpiece of the show (and to some degree, it’s creators) is Rick, and while Rick rails away at the formulaicness and lack of complication to the Vindicators (and by extension, The Avengers), the show also acknowledges that everybody loves them and hates him, and that it’s not unfounded.
One thing I appreciate about this season of Rick and Morty is how the show’s been committed to exploring its protagonist as a bad guy, and filter it through the lens of the people around him coming to realize that. Morty is his companion through all this excitement (and his sandwich shop punch card to pick an adventure is a nice touch) and seeing Rick not only rain on his parade and excitement about working with The Vindicators, but realize that his grandfather is the one keeping him from more of these sorts of adventures, that he’s being treated as guilty by association, is a very interesting tack.
Hell, I love the fake out of this one, where the group supposes that Morty is the only thing Rick thinks is worthwhile about The Vindicators, and the episode plays up a tearful drunken confession, only to reveal that it’s Noob Noob, the Mr. Poopybutthole-esque underling at The Vindicators’ base, whom Rick was blubbering about. More and more, we’re getting indications that Morty’s questioning how much his grandfather cares about him, how much he wants this insane man to be in his life anymore, and I’m more more and intrigued by it.
Of course, the whole thing naturally (and amusingly) ends with a big party and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles style rap about the heroes, but the scars are still there. As much as Rick derides The Vindicators (and by extension the du jour superhero movies) as insignificant relative to him and what he can do, they’re something that other people appreciate, something that makes him seem less uniquely brilliant and superlative, and maybe that’s what really bothers him. Rick is the type who always has to kick over someone else’s sandcastle, and Morty’s starting to realize he’s tired of it.
WARNING: THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES EVENTS FROM BOTH PT. 1 & PT. 2. DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE WATCHED BOTH EPISODES.
[7.0/10] So full disclosure, I have no idea how to rate or review this. The first two hours of the revived Twin Peaks are, for better and for worse, much like the old Twin Peaks. There are parts of it that are unbelievably scary, parts of it that are mind-numbingly boring, parts of it that are transcendent and surreal, parts of it that are stilted and dull, and parts of it that just leave you scratching your head. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it something else altogether? I don’t really know. A lot of that depends on where Lynch & Frost end up taking this over the course of the ensuing sixteen episode, much of which the first two installments of this revival season seem to be setting up.
So let’s start with the best part, and what was the best part of the original Twin Peaks -- the Red Room sequences.
There’s a very fanservice-y part of me that is just excited to see Cooper in that room again, sitting across from The Giant, being directed by MIKE, hearing the backwards talk and elegant sound design of the footsteps. It is all familiar, but less in a “hey remember this” sort of way, and more in a way that makes it cohesive (but still different) than what came before. As much as is mystifying about these first couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, I really respect Lynch and Frost for how much they commit to the continuity of their series here.
To that end, the pair sprinkle in little reminders. The episode opens with the “I’ll see you in 25 years” exchange and includes a flashback to Dale chasing his doppelganger around the Red Room. And the revival, admirably, sticks with the idea that the real dale, the “Good Dale” as Fire Walk with Me put it, has been stuck in the Black Lodge for the past 25 years, with the Evil Dale out and about and causing trouble in that time.
And in truth, as awful as it is, there’s something captivating about seeing McLachlan return to the role of Dale Cooper, but play him as a villainous badass rather than a clean cut do-gooder. The Evil Dale has shades of a Tarantino-esque character, wandering into faraway places, disabling rifle-wielding protectors with the flick of his wrist, strong-arming information out of his criminal compatriots, and all-in-all playing the disciplined but effective black hat that we never really saw with The Good Dale. Watch out for the bad fans on this one. (Is Twin Peaks the kind of show that’ll have those sorts of fans?)
But he’s contrasted with The Good Dale still stuck in the lodge. Again, it’s a thrill to see all those familiar faces, plying their usual mysterious trade, but with enough twists not to feel like a repeat. There is a gravity that comes from seeing Laura Palmer reenact Cooper’s famous dream a quarter-century later, telling Coop that it’s time for him to go. There’s a tragedy in seeing Leland Palmer again, still appearing stricken and guilt-ridden about his actions, trapped there just as long. I don’t know what to make of the fact that The Man From Another Place has “evolved” into a tree with a bulbous orb on top of it, or the return of the white horse, but it has meaning when we see Mike once more, invoking the “past or future” aphorism froms Fire Walk with Me to suggest that Good Dale may have a way back to the real world.
The mythology of it is intentionally and effectively fuzzy. Evil Coop is or was in contact with Philip Jeffries and now someone else who knows about the lodge and offers cryptic hints about Evil Cooper’s plan to avoid being sucked back there. There’s a disruption (from the box?) that brings Good Cooper down and out. Hawk goes back to Glastonberry Grove (on a tip from The Log Lady) and sees those famed curtains, flickering like fire. Much of it is opaque, but that part of the narrative has extra weight from picking up the threads that the television series and subsequent film left off.
Unfortunately, the rest of the glimpses we get of the world beyond Twin Peaks (and even within it) are rather hit and miss at best. There’s an extended sequence where Matthew Lillard plays a local principal named Bill who seems to be implicated in a gruesome murder. This seems to be the way the show is setting up a new murder mystery in the vein of the original Twin Peaks, with Bill claiming that it was all in a dream, suggesting that some Black Lodge possession is at play a la Leland Palmer. At the same time, there’s a series of locals cheating on each other, dealing with the out of town investigator, and trying to make sense of such a dark thing happening in their otherwise calm community, making the whole thing feel like Twin Peaks attempting to replay its past with variations on a theme in North Dakota.
That’s also where we get the biggest snootfuls of Lynch and Frost’s sense of humor, between a nosy neighbor who can’t work out the process to get the key to the dead woman’s apartment and Bill’s wife who complains about her husband being arrested because they have guests coming over for dinner. It doesn’t really work for me -- coming off more like “yeah, I can see how that would be funny” than anything that actually makes me laugh, but it’s true to Lynch’s M.O. so I expect partisans will be pleased.
There’s also a big glass box, being watched by cameras and local students at all times, that has some connection to the supernatural. This is probably a reach on my part, but it feels like Lynch’s commentary on television -- people staring blankly at a large box, categorizing the nothing, seemingly captivated by it. It puts me off a bit, but I’d interpret how long Lynch’s camera lingers on Sam, the watcher, dutifully performing his duties is meant as a layered, almost meta reflection of the audience doing the exact same thing at home. The fact that Cooper gets semi-trapped in there or something works as an added dimension, that Cooper was supposed to be in the lodge forever, or at least for a long time, but that the people watching, the people who kept waiting for something new to happen, brought him back and messed with the process.
But even just taking it as text, the scenes with the box provide the most suplerative non-Red Room scenes in the first two episodes. I’ll say this for Lynch, he may not always be my cup of tea in terms of crafting characters or telling stories, but he sure knows how to do horror right. There’s something that feels almost out of a slasher flick about the young kids about to have sex on the couch, when some creature from a different plane attacks and slaughters them. There’s something terrifying about the only vaguely formed, gray phase creature coming at them again and again as blood spurts everywhere. The sound and look of the scene conveys the terror expertly, and it almost makes up for all the doldrums the audience had to suffer to get there.
Along the way there’s other cryptic glimpses as different corners of the world. Jimmy Barrett (of Mad Men fame) is under somebody’s thumb in Las Vegas. Niles Crane’s former fiancee Mel is investigating the murder in South Dakota. And somebody, somewhere, wants Evil Cooper killed. There’s enough wisps and suggestions to keep the mystery-solver contingent of the Twin Peaks fanbase happy.
That just leaves Twin Peaks itself, which appears to have been left in some state of stasis. Dr. Jacoby is doing some work with shovels that requires deliveries out to his hut that are hard to make out. (There’s a recurring visual motif in the episode of figures being shot from far away which I can make neither head nor tails of). Ben and Jerry Horne are still running things at the Great Northern, though both are practically unrecognizable, with Ben enlisting Ashley Judd as an assistant and Jerry (legally) selling pot and pot accessories. James Hurley and Shelly Johnson still hang out at the Roadhouse and weird bands still play there. And The Log Lady is still calling the sheriff’s office with strange messages from her log.
The sherrif’s office seems to have changed the least. Lucy (who’s barely aged a day) is still answering the phone in her usual manner, though she’s now married to Andy, who seems to have the same disposition he always did. They confirm both that Lucy had her baby, named Wally, who’s now 24 years old, and that they haven’t seen Cooper since before he was born. Truman is still the sheriff, but there’s two Sheriff Trumans, though neither is in. And Hawk is still the strong, silent type, not saying much but acting decisively. It’s like we never left, for better and for worse.
That’s pretty much what I have to say about the two-hour premiere for the Twin Peaks revival. The things that bugged me about the original show -- the stilted acting, the rough dialogue, the long go-nowhere scenes -- are still there (though they thankfully seem to have toned down the music a bit). The things that I liked about the original show -- the Red Room weirdness, its capacity for creating great horror, the striking performance from Kyle MacLachlan -- are there too.
You more or less get what you were promised here: a few answers, a lot more questions, and the style that Lynch and Frost delivered twenty-five years ago slickened up for the modern day. That means it’s still amazing at times, still an utter slog at times, but that with a quarter-century worth of mythmaking outside the show to contend with, Twin Peaks adds some intrigue and meaning to the events it depicts. I’m not ready to call it good yet (or at least not uniformly so) but it’s piqued my interest and provoked a response, which is more than enough for a show returning to the airwaves for the first time since 1991.
[9.5/10] So much to like about this one. The show is really moving at an impressive pace at this point, with events and aftershocks and reunions that would have taken entire seasons in prior years happening one right after another. But despite that, what I like about "Eastwatch" is that it features a lot of people reflecting and taking stock and worrying about what the future holds. For as much happens personally and in terms of setting the table for later events, this episode is kind of an inbetweener, one that moves our heroes and villains around before the next big event, but gets so much mileage out of the interactions and face-to-face meetings from the show's deep bench of characters.
In the big picture, that means that Dany and Cersei are likely to have an audience together, but for that to mean something, Jon and a motley crew of uneasy allies has to set out north of The Wall to retrieve a wight for proof of the oncoming invasion. That means that Dany and Cersei are willing to set aside hostilities, however temporarily or connivingly, and that Tyrion and Jaime get a tense but impactful reunion as well. It also means that we get a much tenderer reunion between Jorah and Dany, some tension between Arya and Sansa, and most notably, a tenuous union among Jon, Jorah, Tormund, The Hound, The Brotherhood Without Banners, and Gendry.
That's right! Gendry is back! And his repartee with Ser Davos, his instant rapport with Jon Snow, and his quick-thinking warhammer use with the Gold Cloaks makes for a fistpump-worthy return for King Robert's bastard. He's one of the last few major characters whom we haven't seen in ages, and it's a thrill of a return engagement from him.
But the thing I liked most about this episode is Tyrion's concerns about what kind of ruler he's backing. The moral and political questions involved in Dany turning the Tarlys to ash are many and thorny, but it's a very timely worry that a leader who's ready to easily threaten fiery death may very well be one who raises serious concerns. Varys's remembrance of his time serving the Mad King, and the way he left himself off the hook ethically for his complicity in the deaths of Aegon's "traitors" makes for an interesting counterpoint to the view of the bold leader we've come to appreciate over the course of the series.
On the whole, it's a stellar episode, filled with humor, character history, moral ambiguities, and the kind of high-minded reflection grounded in long-standing characterization that I really like. Best of the season so far.
[9.4/10] Really enjoyed this one. On the one hand, you have a just balls-to-the-walls Rick adventure. Him turning himself into a pickle, and having to climb to the top of the food chain by brain-licking his way to cockroach-based mobility, assembling a rat-based super-torso, and then make it out of the sewer is the kind of sci-fi weirdness I love from this show.
But then, Roiland & Harmon turn it up a notch, with Rick then finding his way inside some combination of Die Hard and Rambo, having to escape a secret and illegal compound run by a generic evil boss aided by a generic badass named “The Jaguar.” It’s the well-observed trope mashup and creativity that this show does well, mixed the inherent silliness that our hero is an ambulatory pickle. To top it off, it had the right details, like the enemy goons having superstitions about a pickle monster, and the Rube Goldberg traps Rick sets to defend itself.
The best part, though, is it’s not just empty violence or insanity for insanity stake. It’s a testament to how far Rick will go to avoid doing something he doesn’t want to do, particularly something he thinks is beneath him, and especially something he thinks might force him to confront the ways in which he’s created problems for his family.
Getting Susan Sarandon to play the counselor is a complete coup, and the writing is perfect, as Dr. Wong quickly teases out exactly what’s wrong with The Smiths’ family dynamic, Beth deflecting the real issue, and the kids being cautious but wanting to identify the problem. It’s the show coming clean about its psychological perspective on its characters, which could be a little too direct, but feels right with the tone of the episode.
After all, Beth idolizes her father and so justifies everything he does despite the fact that, as Dr. Wong points out, he doesn’t reward emotion or vulnerability and emotion and in fact punishes it, making Beth worried to call him to the carpet for anything lest he run away again. And Dr. Wong’s also right about Rick, the way he’s caught between his brilliant mind as a blessing and a curse and incapable of doing the work to be good or get better because it’s just that -- work, which bores him.
But what’s great and also terrible is how that accurate diagnosis doesn’t change anything. Morty and Summer both meekly suggest that the school-mandated session was helpful and they want to do it again, and Rick and Beth completely ignore them, the same way they ignore all their problems and opportunities to make things better, when their status quo is unpleasant but comfortable and more importantly familiar. It’s another episode that shows how well this show knows its characters and their hangups, while inserting fecophilia gags to lighten the tone, and a gonzo set of action sequences that actually manages to dovetail with the deeper, darker message of the episode.
It’s all part of the amazing balancing act that Rick and Morty pulls off on a weekly (or at least biannual) basis, and this installment stands out for its frankness about the problems facing two of its main characters, its creativity in dramatizing them, and the sadness of the rut they allow themselves to be stuck in, dragging poor Morty and Summer down with them. But hey, the Jaguar saves the day in the tag from the Con-Chair-To, so there’s hope yet!
Start to finish, this episode was just fantastic. So many wonderful things going on in every scene.
People really seem to dislike this season, but I'm honestly loving every single episode! I love Dougie, I love the new characters, I love seeing where some of the original characters ended up... it's still weird, it's still so different from everything else on TV right now and it still hasn't lost it's magic for me. Love everything about this show. Praying that it will get renewed for a fourth season.
Watch TNG S07E12 and then watch this one. Its a great experience!
[7.8/10] A lot of the first portion of the episode is a bit clunky, but I like the various reunions we get. Arya and Sansa are happy to see one another, and have common ground with long difficult journeys to get back home, but they're still very different people, and I appreciate the combination of warmth and distance between them. The same goes for Bran, who's full-blown Dr. Manhattan at his point, unable to emote or even really care about much from the present. And lord knows, Jon's reunion with Theon is, uh, tense. His business with Dany feels a little more convenient, with the cave drawings persuading her rather quickly (though there's still that whole "bending the knee thing" to contend with) and him being there just in time to give a tidy monologue about what Dany being a leader means.
Still, here it means her splitting the difference between trying a more humane method of conquest and just flying into King's Landing, dragons a'blazing, and melting the place down. She turns her ire onto Jaime's forces at Highgarden, blowing up his grain (and most of his men) to smithereens. It's one of the show's most thrilling action sequences, but also one of its most horrible. It's dramatic and exciting when dragon-backed Dothraki meet Lannister soldiers, but it's also something to recoil from when you see men burned to a crisp or screaming as they're consumed by flame. War is a terrible business, and as much drama and thrills as the show extracts from it, it also gives us people we care about on both sides and horrible ends for so many, that makes us, like Dickon Tarly, question how "glorious" it truly is.
That reuninion of the Starks after so long, after so many seasons was so rewarding. And yet they all clearly showed the distance that has grown in between them during that time. Such great acting.
And wow that duel between Arya and Brienne was so amazing! I loved seeing the two different styles and the mutual respect that appeared after. That delightful smirk of Sansa and her answer of "no one" was perfect.
The cave scene was great for two reason. 1) I also loved the chemistry between Daenerys's and Jon Snow was great in the cave. Besides deepening the backdrop of the almost forgotten children of the forest lore (for me anyways), it 2) strengthened Jon's case that the White Walkers are REAL. The blue eyes in the cave drawing and that music was great at reminding me of the battle at Long Lake- in that eerie and terrifying finale where all the dead rose again as Jon rowed away from the beach.
I honestly thought that Jon was gonna tell Daenerys to attack King's Landing. The response he made started so neutral in the beginning I didn't think he was gonna say to not go. Besides that I loved the tension between Theon and Jon was great as well. There's so much tension going back and forth in this series now that there's a longer history of betrayals and cruelties this season is turning out to be really exciting.
This battle at the end totally exceeded my expectations. Small battle- another loss like the short conclusive clips of the Casterly Rock battle and in the seas with the Greyjoys.
That moment when u hear the thunder I knew the Dothraki where coming~ what I didn't expect was to see a dragon......HOLY SHIT LOL those precious seconds before the dragon spew fire was glorious. Was really anxious during the whole battle to see if any of my favorite characters would be killed. Danerys was there, Jamie was there, Tyrion was there, . Knowing that GoT has no qualms about killing main characters made this battle extremely tense. xD
Having Tyrion there and Jamie on the same battlefield also brought huge tension. Add into addition the new ballista as well as that shot into the dragon made me think Daenerys was done for. Then I thought Jamie was done for from that fire breath. Honestly this battle had me on the edge of my seat the whole battle. Jeezus.
[6.0/10] “The Counterclock” has all the elements of a good Star Trek episode: a clear obstacle, a funky sci-fi twist, and a personal element to anchor it. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, mostly for some boneheaded choices in terms of how the central concept of the episode works.
The idea of a backwards universe is simple enough, and the sort of thing Star Trek has done before, whether it’s with the evil versions of our heroes in The Mirror Universe, or the anti-matter zone in “The Immunity Syndrome.” But while it works well enough to have people talking in reverse or the crew having to learn to operate the ship backwards, and neat to have to time a dying star in one universe with one being born in another, the episode gets pretty ridiculous with it.
For one thing, the notion that people are born as old folks and die as infants makes very little sense (though I want to say Voyager did this idea too). By the same token, the episode’s very inconsistent about how quickly people age and de-age for the sake of narrative convenience. It also makes no sense that the mere fact that Kirk and company are getting younger means that they lose their knowledge of how to run the ship, talk, etc. It’s the kind of lazy, “taking the concept too far” stuff that turns a neat premise into nonsense.
There is something cool about having Captain April and Dr. April, the first captain and medical officer of The Enterprise, aboard for The Animated Series’s last outing. The de-aging thing does provide a good excuse for Capt. April to take command, and again, having to line up the supernovas to get back to our universe is a solid setup.
But “The Counterclock Incident” messes up the ending pretty bad. For one thing, we have another “we can make them the right ages by using the stored transporter signal” situation, which I hate because that could solve nearly every physical problem our heroes have ever had. (It’s a shame no one thought of it when Kirk and Spock were turned into mermen.) For another, Mr. and Mrs. April decline to stay young because they’ve “already had good lives.” It’s dumb because they could still have great lives! They’d just be longer lives! It’s not like continuing to live and be young means your old life is erased! What an odd form of Ludditeism.
Anyway, if you can forget about the goofy backwards stuff and cop out ending, there’s a solid episode underneath, with some of the usual second act exposition, but an interesting setup and a straightforward, if appropriately science fiction-y problem for the good guys to solve. There’s cool ship designs, the fun of seeing the main characters as toddlers, and some of the usual space emergency action. It’s not the best note for The Animated Series to go out on, but the episode certainly has its moments.
As a whole, The Animated Series doesn’t deserve its shabby reputation. It has its high points and low points, but it has roughly the same batting average that The Original Series did, and typically feels very much of a piece with its forbear. There are some issues with the stiffness of the animation, but there were also issues with the stiffness of Shatner’s acting in the live action show, so you win some you lose some. Still, the show offered as much creativity, invention, and fun as its predecessor, and deserves its place in Star Trek canon.
(On a personal note -- so ends my journey through the episodic incarnation of the original cast’s adventures. I still have six movies to go, and plan to rewatch the episodes from later Trek series where the original castmembers show up, but this is still something of a point of demarkation. It’s been very interesting to me seeing the early incarnation of a franchise I love -- the conventions of the time and the tropes that would be solidified for the series. The watch-through has had its ups and downs, but there’s been plenty of brilliance in it, and I’m glad to be more fully versed in the iconic beginnings of this hallowed series of shows, movies, and more.)
[8.0/10] When I think of David Lynch, I think “weird,” and that may be what was missing all too often in Twin Peaks for me. Most of the show functions as a parody/pastiche/homage to soap operas, and while Lynch and Frost seem to want to riff on the tropes on that genre, more often than not the line between playing with the form of a bad soap opera and just presenting a bad soap opera was too blurred for my tastes. I don’t mean to relitigate all my criticisms of the show here, but suffice it to say, vanilla Twin Peaks, the parts of the show that were just supposed to be about people interacting and having emotional reactions and learning things about one another almost uniformly fell flat to me.
But every once in a while, the show would get truly weird, truly outré, truly thought-provokingly bizarre, and those instances were the few times that I felt like I “got” Twin Peaks, like I understood what all the fuss was about. Sure, some bits -- like Lynch Jr.’s creamed corn or Josey getting trapped in a doorknob -- only amounted to what Futurama memorably described as standard-issue “hey look at that weird mirror” nonsense. But in some scenes, like Cooper’s dream, the sequence in the bar at the end of Season 1, and his epiphany and confrontation of Leland this season, the show lived up to its jarring, out there reputation, and for a few brief moments, it actually felt like nothing else on television in a good way.
It’s fitting, then, that Twin Peaks delivers the best episode of its original run by devoting most of its erstwhile series finale to an extended-length return to the realm of Cooper’s dream, and with it, the sort of symbolic strangeness that served as one of the few things the series could consistently do well.
But before we can get into that, we have to tie up a few loose ends (and unravel a few more) in the real world. Lucy and Andy say the L-word, and it’s as much of a waste as you’d imagine. Bobby and Shelly make goo-goo eyes at one another and talk about getting married while the episode cuts to Leo still trapped under his spider box. Worst of all, Ben Horne and Donna’s mom try to talk to her about her paternity, only for their significant others to jump in and turn the whole scene into the usual overwrought, overdramatic nonsense that consistently turned me off of the show. It’s a bad storyline and it’s featured more of the painfully exaggerated emotions of the show that make it seem like Days of Our Lives redux not something avante garde.
Still, we do get two scenes in the real world that bear some merit despite falling into a few of the usual traps. One is a brief scene where Nadine recovers her sanity. There’s a bit more overacting, and it’s patently ridiculous that Nadine’s mental issue is cured via the old “just hit her on the head again” routine from Saturday morning cartoons. But there’s some legitimate pathos in Nadine basically waking up from the weeks (months?) worth of reverie to realize she’s being comforted by a stranger while her husband canoodles with another woman. I’ve gone back and forth on Nadine over the course of the show, but there is something inherently tragic about her, and I’m glad that Twin Peaks leans into that tragedy and compassion for her in her last appearance.
We also get Audrey staging a sit-in at the Twin Peaks Savings & Loan to protest its involvement in the Ghostwood Estates deal, which just so happens to be the same location where Andrew Packard and Pete Martell go to open a safety deposit box with the key they found in Eckert’s magic box. The results of it all -- the Bugs Bunny-esque dynamite and note, the cheesy cliffhanger of who survived the blast, the flying glasses -- are all pretty silly.
That said, there’s a strange rhythm to the scene, where the doddering old man who’s in charge of the place brings an amusingly workaday energy as he putters around trying to deal with Audrey and the rest. It has sort of the same vibe as the scene with the bellhop in the premiere, and I can appreciate the intentional stiltedness of it, with Lynch (who directed the finale) choosing to keep in all the awkward little moments that slick T.V. editing usually elides.
But the main event of the episode is Cooper’s return to the Black Lodge. Lynch & Co. provide a nice enough prelude with some of the show’s trademarks. Earle strong-arming Annie through those big red curtains has the sort of chill that Leland was able to bring and which Earle had previously been unable to muster. Andy incessantly asking Harry questions about coffee and pie is true to the best flavor of the show’s humor -- awkward intrusions of the mundane into the dramatic or fantastical.
What happens next, however, is something I cannot really describe or encapsulate. It is Lynch’s unrestrained id, let out to play on a black and white floorboard girded with red curtains. Suddenly, it all comes rushing back. The owls. The giant. The man from another place. Bob. Laura. Maddy. Sarah. Annie. Caroline. Windom. The backwards talking. The barking. The damn good coffee that’s suddenly not so damn good. Everything Cooper’s seen and done comes blasting back at him in surreal sequence after surreal sequence that I cannot capture with my humble words.
But I can tell that you that it’s unique, bizarre, disquieting, affecting, and gripping in a way that so little of Twin Peaks has been. Laura Palmer screams and the strobe light flashes and the contrast of her smiling face and gaping maw makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. She promises to see him in twenty-five years (and the timing of the revival is just about right for it) in a way that seems ominous rather than reassuring.
It’s a series of images full of what the text of the episode acknowledges as doppelgangers, “one and the same.” It blends the presence of Laura and Maddy. It jumps back and forth between Annie and Caroline. A dark-haired Leland proclaims his innocence and then laughs like Bob. Cooper himself runs from his own double.
One of the show’s major themes has been duality, the notion that there’s parts of who we are we only show to certain people. But while Twin Peaks could belabor that point, here it is visceral, scene in the flashes and phantasmagoria of strange figures flitting about this weigh station beyond life and death.
It’s unnerving, the way that Cooper and Bob look directly into the camera, the way the lights come on and off, the pretzel logic and impossible geography of this far away place. With its last gasp, Twin Peaks reveals its magnum opus of weirdness, of expressing itself in iconography and poignant or disturbing images rather than clumsy dialogue or overwrought attempts at emotion. The past and present fade together, with the texture of Lynch’s warped brain to hold it all in place.
Naturally, it ends with a cheesy cliffhanger, one that reveals that Bob has now wormed his way inside Cooper, perhaps signifying that there’s a darkness in all of us, even the most decent and upstanding, or perhaps just signifying that the show wanted somewhere to go in the event it was renewed. While Cooper’s headbang into the mirror and maniacal laugh carries its own force, and haunts just enough as a closing image, even it cannot match the virtuoso, nightmarish dreamscape that Lynch and company craft as the culmination of everything Twin Peaks has been and promised.
This is what Twin Peaks should have been, what I was promised by the partisans and diehards who speak of a show that is so, to put it charitably, uneven in such hushed tones. Beneath the convoluted conspiracies, beneath the painful love stories, beneath the dreadful dialogue, there is a capacity from this show to convey these liminal, atavistic, subconscious versions of the themes and ideas it has such trouble expressing directly. I don’t know if it’s worth thirty episodes of mostly dreck to extract those bold and unmatched gems, but at least Twin Peaks saves it best for last, going out with an extraordinary, unnerving dose of the weird, the sort of genuine strangeness the show promised all too often, but delivered all too rarely.
[4.5/10] Oh Twin Peaks. If you can’t make me care, the least you can do is make me laugh, and “Miss Twin Peaks” at least gave me that. Almost nothing about the Windom Earle storyline has worked, but god help me if seeing him not only dress up like the Log Lady, but bonk Bobby Briggs on the head with his log, cracked me the hell up. (Why couldn’t you have done that sooner, Wind-y?) I’m not made of stone. Putting your uber-evil, scenery-chewing villain in the getup of your town’s oddest oddball (which is saying something) and having him cavort around and give the ol’ el kabong to nudniks tickles my fancy.
So did Donna’s story here, where by god Donna is uncovering secrets and she has feelings about that! Her overdramatic confrontation with her parents in her bow-heavy prom dress lookalike is the kind of overwrought nonsense this show delivers on a regular basis. She also confronts Ben Horne about it, and her mouth-covering gasp is the kind of reaction you look for on a telenovela. I guess they needed something to do with Donna now that the Laura stuff is finished and Bobby’s been either off the show or embroiled in his own terrible storyline, but it’s cheesy to begin with and Lara Flynn Boyle isn’t up to it.
The same goes for poor Heather Graham who, it’s increasingly clear, must have been to five acting boot camps between now and when her movie career kicked into gear, because she displays all the acting talent of teleprompter come to life in this series. That would be fine if she were one of Twin Peaks’s many picked-up-and-forgotten side characters with little to do, but she has to make a heartfelt expression of love to Cooper and an impassioned plea for the environment at the pageant, and neither land. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that (a.) the love part is supposed to seal the tragedy and threat vis-a-vis Cooper and (b.) the speech is supposed to be what wins her the Miss Twin Peaks pageant, so when two major events happen as a consequence of these things, the reaction is a great big “huh?”
That’s right! True to the title’s promise, we’ve made it to the Miss Twin Peaks competition, and Annie’s game-winning oratory seems even sillier when Audrey gives a much more convincing and compelling speech about two minutes earlier. Lana, the probable succubus, fails in her attempt to rig the contest by sleeping with Dick Tremayne in a closet (something The Mayor is oddly okay with), and by doing a contrived bit of “jazz exotica.” And we round out the talent show portion by revealing that, what do you know, Lucy is a pretty great dancer! (She also picks Andy as her baby-daddy, hopefully ending that terrible plotline forever.) Nobody else involved has much to do, which is kind of a shame since Shelly, of all people, seemed to be the most hopeful about this gig.
But mostly, it’s all a contrived setup for Annie to win and for Windom Earle to attack. I’ll admit, there’s something cool, albeit cheesy, about the strobe light effect, and Earle mugging his way through the crowd while Cooper looks on in shock, but it’s a predictable, all too neat end for everything involving Earle, this contest, and the old love triangle involving Cooper and his former partner. (The episode also has Earle clumsily deliver the information that he did, in fact, kill his wife Caroline.)
Which leads to what is probably my biggest beef with this episode -- the literalizing of Twin Peaks’s mythology. I’ll admit, it’s a very tough line for any supernatural-themed show to walk, because you want the magical elements of your story to feel like they make sense, but you also want to ensure there’s a certain degree of mystery or unknowableness to them as well, or it feels like every problem is solved by just following the recipe and baking your mundane-but-technically-magical cake.
Spelling out so many details about Bob and The Black Lodge and the cave pictogram make the whole “evil in these woods” -- one of the few elements that I liked about this show early in its run -- into run of the mill B-movie supernatural thriller material. The Black Lodge is now a literal place, and Bob comes from there, and you can only get there from a certain place and certain time. We may as well have Link assemble the seven magical amulets to open the gate. The unexplained origins and abilities of Bob and his evil and the possession that came with gave the whole thing a certain power. Making it so rote and ordinary takes a lot of that away.
It doesn’t help that the key to opening this portal (which, I imagine, will work out about as well for Windom Earle as it did for the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark), is the combination of love and fear. What do you know! Annie has both! Love for Cooper! Fear of Earle! It’s all too simplistic and convenient and contrived, and turns one of the few cool things about Twin Peaks -- its mythos -- into a bargain basement fetch quest. (One deciphered, appropriately enough, by a dolt like Deputy Andy.)
As usual, there’s other minor, mostly pointless developments along the way too. Nadine suddenly seems jealous at the news that Ed and Norma plan to get married (and crushes Mike’s arm for his troubles). Andrew Packard plus Pete and Catherine Martell continue to play The Da Vinci Code with Eckert’s box to my continuing disinterest. Leo frees Major Briggs from Earle’s cabin, apparently wanting to save Shelly despite the fact that he himself was trying to kill her pretty recently. For the effort, Leo gets put in a ridiculous contraption that threatens to drop spiders on his head and Major Briggs is too brain-scrambled to be much help to anyone.
And so, Twin Peaks approaches its endgame determined to try to ruin one of the few half-decent things about the show. With any luck, there’ll still be a predictable but welcome “more than you bargained for” twist to unlocking The Black Lodge, but regardless, it reduces one of the distinctive factors of the show to a magical flowchart. At least the end is nigh.
[6.6/10] It’s appropriate that this episode opens with the face of Ted Raimi, because much of the best parts of “The Path to the Black Lodge” evokes the cinematography of him and his brother Sam in the Evil Dead movies. In several moments, the camera pulls back, or someone feels as though they’re being watched or pursued, in the same way that the demons or spirits that attacked Ash once did. There’s even a POV shot swooping through the woods for good measure.
In the episode, Twin Peaks gets literal with its demon. Several people in the episode -- a random lady, Pete Martell, and Cooper himself, start to feel their hand quiver as though it’s acting without their control. Only later, after the aforementioned swooping, do we see that it’s the product of Killer Bob, presumably trying to force his way back into the land of the living. His writhing limb is appropriately creepy (as most Bob stuff is). And while the notion that there is an actual entry point for The Black Lodge makes the show’s mythos feel a little too literal for my tastes, the whole in the ground where the infamous red-curtained room from Cooper’s dream is reflected gives the whole thing a bit of a charge.
I have to admit, as skeptical as I’ve been about Twin Peaks more supernatural side at times, it’s become one of the most interesting things about the show. The series seems to have dumbed it down a bit here -- Bob trying to break back into possessing people, the lodge having a welcome mat, and The Giant being much more clear than usual -- but it’s still a neat wrinkle to otherwise run-of-the-mill drama the show has to offer.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that the show is setting up something terrible to happen for the winner of the Miss Twin Peaks contest, but The Giant specifically warning Cooper off from letting Annie enter adds to the doomed quality of the event.
We check in with a number of potential contestants this week (presumably just to ensure there’s a wide array of possible victims). Lucy is going to enter, I guess because the baby could use the money. The probable succubus is still plotting with The Mayor to rig the contest in her favor. Ben Horne wants Audrey to enter so that she can become the spokeswoman for his cause. Shelly is practicing her speech about the environment with Bobby (the two have a gooey, disappointing reconciliation). I forget why, but Donna previously expressed a willingness to enter. And as just mentioned, former nun Annie is trading theologian quotes with Cooper offering a thin excuse for why she would enter. Who knows why exactly it will all go wrong, but surely it will, and Twin Peaks contrives ways to include every conceivable young woman in the contest.
The romance angles with these young women continue apace, only this time with a more sexual twist. Cooper and Annie are still a pretty disappointing couple. Again, I’m a fan of Heather Graham’s work, but she definitely seems stilted and overmatched here, with her line delivery seeming as though it’s being read off of cue cards without any convincing emotion to speak of. Annie and Cooper exchanging quotes feels like the show trying hard to show there’s a connection between them that the chemistry just doesn’t support. And Annie telling Cooper she wants to sleep with him feels out of nowhere and out of step with the character we’ve come to know thus far.
The same goes for Audrey and John Wheeler. The pair have a variety of missed connections in the episode, but at the last minute, Audrey manages to flag her beau down before he has to leave back to wherever it is he came from. I’ve generally enjoyed the two of them as a couple, but “The Path to the Black Lodge” really doubles down on the overwrought romantic drama, and it’s not for the better. The revelation that Audrey is a virgin kind of works -- the idea that her bark is bigger than her bite -- but it too comes out of nowhere and worse yet, feels like a thrown-in way to try to heighten the importance of her relationship with John rather than something that develops organically from the character.
In terms of other major storylines, Windom Earle continues to be an utter bore as he chews scenery in the most rote manner imaginable. The character is going for something like The Joker but comes off like an overactive toddler who hasn’t taken his medication. The cackling and faux-crazy routine still doesn’t work, and having him babble about The Black Lodge or torture Major Briggs for information does little to counteract that fact.
We do get some reasonably important plot details. Apparently the pictogram from the cave is a map to The Black Lodge. Leo is quietly (and mostly incompetently) planning a rebellion against Earle. And Cooper’s figured out that Earle has been toying with Audrey, Donna, and Shelly, and warns them to be on the lookout. It’s not much, but it’s nice to see the show at least moving the ball and bringing us closer to the endgame.
Otherwise the episode checks in with the other parts of the narrative that are rolling merrily along. Catherine Martell and Andrew Packard break through another layer of Eckert’s box and find...another box. Donna seems poised to discover that her dad is not her dad, which the show keeps dragging out. Lucy is going to “decide” who the father is soon. Some random guy who looks like Truman’s illegitimate son is working at the sheriff’s office without explanation. And Ben is seemingly committed to his “trying to be good” routine.
Again, there’s some force that comes from the fact that Twin Peaks is digging into its supernatural side once more. That latent creepiness carries the episode through some of its weaker points. But the predictability of the Miss Twin Peaks shtick, Windom Earle’s sideshow and the miscalibrated romantic stuff drags much of the rest of it down. This is still more watchable than the average episode, maybe because it seems slightly more focused than usual, but without the Bob material, it wouldn’t be much to write home about.
As if this show wasn't far fetched enough, now you expect me to believe that Christian fundamentalists changed the whole power grid to solar?!?
It´s amazing how many of the storys reflect events in the present no matter when you watch them.
[8.6/10] One hell of a premiere and one hell of a surprise. It delivered what I want from a show like Rick and Morty -- crazy, imaginative, absolutely insane sci-fi experimentation and adventure, with dark introspective emotional and character material to support it. The bits of the sci-fi weirdness, from Inception-like brain journeys to transferred consciousness to battles between disparate forces in space were colorful and mind-bending the whole way through.
But what I really loved about this episode was how it asked (and maybe answered) the question I was left asking at the end of the last episode -- what motivates Rick Sanchez? Is he a hero, as Summer thinks, a demon or crazy god like Morty thinks, or somebody whose motivations are just so opaque and arbitrary that he more or less defies that sort of characterization? The episode seems to give a troubling answer, one that pulls away from the way Rick was softened over the course of S2, but it spends most of the episode teasing you in either direction, making you think he's a hero or on an opportunist or an amoral crackpot or just a complicated guy.
I'm not sure I'm any more clarified on what he wants or what kind of guy he is than I was before (and Morty clearly still has its issues), but I love the way the show leans into that complexity, even amid the crazy science fiction wonderment and disaster taking place all around.
On the whole, this was one thrill of a surprise premiere that sets the stage for the rest of the season, changes enough of the status quo to make things meaningful, and delivers another exploration of what makes Rick tick, and how that affects his grandchildren, without giving any easy answers.
these roots are going to take three hours to soften
get out the plates and utensils
Please. You didn't even give her time to prep the root you handed her a minute before.
I love this episode because it's such a touching character study.
[8.4/10] Another quality episode in this short season, which is always welcome. I liked the apparent theme of people seeing one another in an unvarnished fashion, recognizing them for who they are, for good and for ill. Lady Tyrell recognizes that Dany is a dragon, not a sheep (or a shark, for my fellow Futurama fans. Nymeria recognizes Arya as something familiar, but also very different than what she was the last time they were together. Sam sees Jorah as more than just a plague sufferer, but as the son of a man who saved his life. Missandei sees Grey Worm for the good man she loves, regardless of the abuses, physical and mental that he's suffered. And Theon is not so lucky, when Euron and the carnage around him reminds him that part of him is still Reek, and that part cannot be so easily escaped.
I also liked the political business in the episode. It's nice that the show had Dany confront Lord Varys about his hand in her assisination attempt and his shifting loyalties, but his response -- that he truest loyalty lies with the common people, because that's where he came from, and her retort -- that she values his advice but would rather he tell her if he thinks she's stepping out of line than plot behind her back -- works really well too. By the same token, the dichotomy of "listen to your advisors and strategize to gain loyalty" or "go your own way, come in dragons blazing, and just take over" presented to Dany is an interesting one. Last but not least, Cersei appealing to her countrymen's xenophobic impulses to gin up support is an interesting tack.
Overall, it was a well-done episode of the show, that ended with some good fireworks (both figurative and nigh-literal) and had a good sense of character exploration amid the plotting and storytelling that is setting all our heroes and villains on a collision course.
Anyone care to explain to me why Bashir couldn't simply replicate another dress uniform when he realized he'd misplaced his? It's not like they're forced to ration replicator usage like the crew of a certain ship lost in the Delta Quadrant…
What is the deal with Starfleet officers falling in love after a few days?
Ugh. Bashir's acting in this is atrocious. Even more so that usual.
"Dammit, if you were still a man…"
This line struck me as somewhat uncharacteristic of Trek. They usually try to avoid portraying any human behavior that would suggest inequality between men and women. To insinuate that a woman is less capable of taking a punch than a man goes against that.
But what is very characteristic of Trek? The rest of the legal adventure into whether Dax is or is not responsible for the actions of every past host. This was a lot like putting Data on trial to determine whether he qualifies as a life form with all the rights guaranteed thereto. Trek is at its best when attacking philosophical questions like these!
[5.8/10] I’ll say this for David Lynch. I may not think much of what he’s done behind the camera on Twin Peaks, but damn if Gordon Cole hasn’t become one of my favorite parts of the show. There’s just something about his hard-of-hearing, chipper demeanor that makes him a nice compliment to Cooper (love their little joint thumbs up) and a funny addition to the show.
I wouldn’t have predicted it, but he actually has pretty great comic chemistry with Shelly. There’s something kind of neat about the fact that he can hear her, and Shelly’s bemused response to his ordering massive amounts of cherry pie and claiming to want to compose an epic poem about her is superb. And the whole exchange with Shelly playing telephone between Cole and the Log Lady is a fun exercise in farce.
The only catch is that it’s interspersed with scenes between Cooper and Annie. I have to admit, I found nothing offensive about Annie in her first appearance, but I get why she’s reputed to be hated by the fans. In this episode, the show lays the romance with Cooper on really thick and really fast, and the pair don’t have the chemistry to support that.
There’s something interesting in the premise of the character -- someone who’s had a suicide attempt, been shut off from a lot of the modern world, and is just taking her first steps back into it. (Her line about reintegrating it being like a foreign language -- knowing just enough to know she doesn’t understand -- is one of the few great bits of dialogue on this show). By the same token, the idea that she is her own brand of strange and that attracts Cooper is a solid idea. But the two of them making goo goo eyes at one another doesn’t really work, and there’s a lot of that here.
Thankfully, Annie provides some plot momentum as well, as she pieces together that the tatoos for Major Briggs and the Log Lady look like a symbol in “The Owl Cave.” Remember, they’re not what they seem! The show has started to get more literal with its mythos, losing the sort of mysterious nature and devolving into Da Vinci Code-esque symbol hunting, but it’s at least advancing the plot on the whole White Lodge/Black Lodge business, which is something.
Unfortunately, we also get Windom Earle entering the same cave, doing some Indiana Jones-style twist of the knob that emerges in the cave from Andy’s pickaxe-ing, and a seeing cave-in to end the episode. It’s another would-be cliffhanger that will no doubt be wiped away within the first five minutes of the next episode.
Speaking of which, this episode opens with an attempt on Sheriff Truman’s life from Eckert’s mistress. Cooper chalks the whole thing up to sexual jealousy from Eckhert, but it’s an odd thing, and the woman’s method of trying to strangle him is pretty odd. I guess she’s trying to make it look like S&M gone wrong or something? Feels like more weird for the sake of weird, but what the hell do I know?
We also get some minor progression, or really lack thereof, with Audrey and John Wheeler. They’re all flirty and have a big date planned, but Ben inadvertently messes it up by recognizing Audrey’s potential and sending her off to Seattle to do some business. I enjoy the back and forth between Audrey and John, but it needs to be going somewhere, and right now it feels pretty rudderless.
Speaking of which, Windom Earle also gets a face-to-face with Audrey, where he creeps her out doing his master of disguise routine in the library. I suppose it’s a fine scene, but why we need him interacting with all his “queens” ahead of time is beyond me. I suppose it’s supposed to be creepy, but instead it feels like an overacting version of dress-up. We also get another painful game-related metaphor, as Earle’s taken the time to affix the women’s faces (plus Cooper’s) to playing cards. The law of conservation of major characters suggests Annie will be his fourth “queen” so yipee.
Twin Peaks is also pulling a Veronica Mars here (which, in many ways, is a better done take on this same sort of mystery show set in a quirky town with a dark underbelly), as Donna discovers that her mom and Ben Horne had a thing back in the day, and the episode hints that Ben might be her real father. It’s a pretty dumb, soapy twist to pull out, and the show seems like it just needs something for Donna to do. God only knows where the show is going with Ben’s “I’m a changed man” routine, but it’s not promising.
Otherwise, we get a weird button to the story where, you know, Nadine statutorily rapes Mike and no one seems to be bothered by this in the slightest. We get a San Francisco postcard from James Hurley, which provides the nice reminder that we don’t have to see him on a weekly basis anymore. And there’s some an amusing running gag where the G-men trying to help Truman’s hangover by describing sickening dishes to make him puke.
Overall, it’s a better episode than usual, if only because there’s some legitimate plot progression and the worst storylines are kept to a minimum, and the addition of Gordon Cole is a shot in the arm for the episode’s comedy quotient. Only four episodes to go!
[3.4/10] Here’s the weird thing about Twin Peaks for me. I feel like, after twenty-five episodes, I pretty fully understand why it’s bad. (What is still a mystery, granted, is why people not only thought it was good, but so good.) It’s easy to point to the terrible dialogue, the convoluted plotting, the awful performances, and oh man that ridiculous music that sucks the ability to take the show even slightly seriously.
But then, the show will do something different, show a performer in a different light, and I start to question my diagnosis of the pathology. Sometimes, that’s good. Take Shelly for instance. Shelly has basically been a human prop on the show. She’s there for Leo to abuse, Bobby to fawn over then ignore, and occasionally do something sexy. The show’s never really developed the character beyond that, and so she pretty squarely falls into the unfortunate “sexy lamp” category.
But for literally 15-20 seconds, Mädchen Amick shows that she has at least a modicum of talent and personality. Her little routine pretending to do a Q&A session for a beauty pageant has her doing amusing character voices, creative facial impressions, and overall just seeming like she’s a person and not a prop. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s more than Shelly usually gets to do and it makes me wonder if someone I’d written off as a mediocre actress on the show just wasn’t getting material commensurate with or at least well-suited to what she can do.
The flipside of that is Michael Ontkean as Sheriff Truman. For the most part, I’ve found Truman to serviceable at worst. He spits out his fair share of the show’s bad lines, but he’s one of the more normal seeming people in Twin Peaks (not much of an achievement) and he’s one of the few performers on the show who generally delivers a believable, not overly exaggerated performance. It’s not exactly naturalism, and sometimes it tends toward the bland, but Truman seems like a regular enough guy which is what you’d expect for the sheriff of a small northwestern town.
But then you hit an episode like “Wounds and Scars” where, rather than playing the strait-laced lawman, Ontkean has to yell and weep and be an emotional wreck and god help him, he’s just not up to it. Again, the script doesn’t do him any favors, making him a generic mourner spouting the usual clichés. But when he’s supposed to be angry or suicidal or just despondent, the emotions feel insincere.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I was never invested in Josey as a character, so maybe it would mean more if the loss of her was something I really cared about, but still. It’s a sign that every performer has their strengths and weaknesses, and maybe there’s a version of Twin Peaks that asks different things of its actors: allows Shelly to have more personality, lets Truman remain the even-keeled normal dude, doesn’t try to hang so much on the emotional turmoil of James “I’ve never felt an actual feeling” Hurley.
One of the show’s strongest performers has always been Audrey, and Billy Zane isn’t bad either, which is why what should be another bog standard banality of a story -- young rich guy swoops in to save a local business and falls in love with the daughter of the business owner -- feels more vibrant than most of what “Wounds and Scars” churns out. Audrey and Zane’s character have chemistry, and it plays on Audrey’s sense of feeling lost and not understood in a nice way. There’s still as much cheese in their plot as anyone’s (and there’s an Attack of the Clones vibe to their picnic, of all things), but the talents of the performers make it work better than it has any right to.
What doesn’t work is the entire rigamarol around the charity fashion show. My lord, that scene just stretches on and on into eternity, jumping from dull story to dull story. Ben Horn and Catherine Martell taunting and being lusty with one another hasn’t been interesting for a long time, and it’s just interminable here. By the same token, I was naive enough to think the show had actually minimized Andy, Lucy, and Dick. But here they are doing a sub-Full House level comedy routine about a lumberjack fashion show and Dick getting bit on the nose with a weasel. It’s the broadest of broad shlock and just a bear of a scene to get through.
Windom Earle is also back to playing master of disguise. He’s such a bond villain type that I can’t really be invested in his story. I’ll admit, there was some juice to him pretending to be one of Donna’s dad’s old friends from medical school, and a bit from him seeming to sense Cooper’s presence, but for the most part it’s just cornball monologues and groaners.
Speaking of Cooper’s presence, we see him lock eyes with Heather Graham! She had to be super young here, right? Mrs. Bloom tells me that people hate her character, but thus far she’s unobjectionable, if a bit wooden in her delivery. Though again, like I’ve been saying, that’s not unusual for this show, and the lines the script feeds are no great shakes.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual on Twin Peaks. We get some hint at the supernatural stuff with Major Briggs and the Log Lady revealing that they have similar scars from similar white light encounters. Ed gets Dr. Jacoby to try to get him help explain divorce to Nadine but she’s still deluded. (Her “I think I’ve gone blind in my left eye” line is a big laugh, I’ll admit.) And Pete is freaking out trying to figure out the right stalemate moves for a game of chess in the world’s most belabored ongoing metaphor.
None of it’s terribly compelling, and none of it is especially well done, but as scenes like Shelly’s and Truman’s show us, there’s an alternate world where this show could have been much better, or, god help us, much much worse.
[8.7/10] It's a stellar season premiere. I really enjoyed three themes in particular that flitted throughout the episode.
The first is the notion of homecoming. Arya beckons all the Freys to return to their family home in order to slaughter them. Jon returns the family homes to the survivng members of the northern families who betrayed him, and last but certainly not least, Dany returns to the place where she was born. There is a sacredness in return, in where a person is from, that GoT recognizes and plays around with.
The second is the notion of guilt, something that comes through in Arya's conversation with the run-of-the-mill soldiers she meets in the Riverlands. One of them speaks of hoping his wife had a baby girl, because girls take care of their fathers while boys go off to die in another man's war. There's a look on Arya's face, one that seems to reveal a lament that she'll never get to take care of her father, and that her victims may just as easily be lowborn who no more wanted to fight and die than Arya wanted to see her family killed.
There's a parallel with The Hound's portion of the episode there too, where he sees the corpses of the farmer and child he mugged back in Season 4, and can't help but feel guilt at the actions that if not caused, then at least contributed to their demise. This is a different Sandor Clegane, one who buries the people he did wrong, who believes in things, and even if he doesn't know the right words, gives them a eulogy that serves as an apology.
The third is the idea of perspective. Most of the players in the episode are concerned with who will sit on the Iron Throne. Jon is wrapped up in fighting the Night King. And Arya's on her rooaring rampage of revenge. But when Sam is caught up in the same struggle, the Archmaester (Jim Broadbent!) cautions perspective, that this too shall pass, and that there are certain things worth preserving, certain projects worth pursuing, apart from the worldly concerns that consume most men.
It's a rich episode, full of colorful scenes and potent themes. Exciting to have GoT back!
[7.3/10] I have to say, it’s nice to see Uhura get to be the driver of an episode for once. TOS was pretty exclusively the Kirk, Spock, and Bones show, with Scotty occasionally getting to be the main character for an episode, so it’s pleasant to get to see one where Uhura takes command of the ship, uses her wits, and saves the day.
The premise of the episode is somewhat silly, but nicely sci-fi. The Enterprise is in the intergalactic Bermuda Triangle (after coordinating with the Klingons!) just in time for the mysterious event that happens every twenty-seven years to happen. It turns out to be a planet of sirens, who lure men to their planet and suck their life force away after tempting them and plying them with this or that.
I’d almost call it a sexist metaphor if it weren’t for the fact that this is probably the most capable and sharp the franchise has ever made Uhura seem. Kirk, Bones, and even Spock get suckered in by their enchantments. (And Scotty sings an old Scottish air, seemingly just to pass the time). The episode drags a bit in places as this whole thing is obviously a trap and none of the men can seem to resist it, but that’s pretty much the point.
(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s some more great design work for the palace and grounds of the women on the planet. For all the stiltedness of the animation, the show does know how to make the most of the cartoon setting to create some nicely elaborate and beautiful “sets.”)
The only thing that really keeps this episode from being higher is that there’s a lot of extraneous, silly stuff in it. The women’s technology being operated by tones made me laugh out loud. The entire end bit with the men of the Enterprise being de-aged using the transporter was unnecessary (just have the women reverse the process or something) and opens up a big can of worms. And the whole belaboring the resettlement of the women on the planet felt like more than we needed.
Still, seeing Uhura and Nurse Chapel not only avoid befalling the latest alien wizards’ spells, but then taking control and winning the day, is a real treat. (And for a Spock-Nurse Chapel shipper like me, it was nice to hear a dying Spock call her Christine and implore her for help.) Another fun outing from the show.
An okay start to the final season, but a bit disappointing. In particular, I have to question why they spent over 12 minutes on digging up William's grave there at the end. It's obvious what the goal was, but did we have to see all of that? Dig, dig, dig. Shovel, shovel, shovel. Not the sort of thing that puts the "thrill" in "thriller."
The more I watch The Americans, the more afraid I become of Keri Russell.
