The Prestige TV Podcast - Did ‘Twin Peaks’ Stick the Landing?

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Andy Greenwald is joined by Joanna Robinson to discuss “Beyond Life and Death,” the series finale of ‘Twin Peaks.’ Andy starts by talking about how the theorizing around the show made him fall in love with television, before they discuss the unlikely pairing between David Lynch and ABC, and how the mystery crime drama benefited from being helmed by two very different co-creators (4:34). Along the way, they unpack Lynch’s staunch refusal to reveal any meaning behind the story, the finale itself, and making peace with ambiguity (31:49). Later, they share their complicated feelings on ‘Twin Peaks: The Return' (72:52). Finally, they answer the titular question: “Did it stick the landing?” (99:30). Host: Andy Greenwald Guest: Joanna Robinson Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Theme Song and Other Music Credits: Giancarlo Vulcano Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to Stick the Landing, a podcast that has been building to this. Across only a few episodes, I had to get my favorite show of all time in early and no better person to join me than our first repeat guest, The Ringers Joanna Robinson. Welcome back to the show. What an honor. It's like we've always been here in the red room together, Andy, talking about

finalies. Is this the future or is it passed? Hard to tell. This is extremely exciting for me. Quinn Peaks is my favorite show of all time. It's the show that I think I made me who I am for good or ill as a thinker, as a fan, as a would-be artist, whatever, as a TV watcher, certainly. It is a show that has famously ended twice. That's not counting the movie prequel. The original series ran for for what in my life felt like many years, but it was really one calendar year, essentially, from 1990 to 1991. And then the return happened in 2017,

and it ended again. So, Joanna, we're going to do this. It's a unique show. It's a unique setup. We're going to do this a little uniquely. We are going to talk about the first finale as the finale of Twin Peaks, and then we're going to consider the finale of the return

and potentially even debate over what its connection to the original might be or what it might mean. I'm so curious to talk to you about this show specifically because you and I, well, not on exact opposite ends of the TV theorizing spectrum are pretty far apart. And I just love that you love the show and I love the show. This show spawned this thing that bothers you, which is TV theorizing. And so it's so interesting to talk to you about its legacy. Wait, before we get into it, so when you say TV theorizing, what do you mean?

And I think I know what you mean, but for the sake of our listeners, it would help to clarify. Well, the phrase I like to use is like the Reddit detectives, right? And so we are, as we're recording this, we're exactly smack dab in the middle of a season of True Detective, which is when the theorizing goes completely off the rails before we all rain it back in and are like, oh, the answer is actually quite ordinary, usually in a season of True Detective. You and I are very similar in that we don't like that for the discussion of a show to be overrun by discussion of theorizing. I am completely on the same page as you with that. But I do think there's an interesting exercise to be done in theorizing following some of those Reddit rabbit holes, etc. Because the question it always poses to me is, what kind of show am I watching? I love when you say a show will tell us what kind of show it is.

That's a great Andyism. I find that it's not always as apparent to me, and I like to sort of hold a theory up next to the actual text and say, does this feel like it belongs in this story? Or does it feel completely out of left field, absolutely bananas? And that's a way that I have found to better challenge my understanding of what a story is or what kind of storyteller I am experiencing. So I love a theory. And I love listening to you talk about television and I love that you kind of hate a theory. Well, this is fascinating. This is great. This is me looking at my doppelganger then, but the doppelganger maybe has like roomy blue eyes and might want to kill me and steal the fire of my soul, potentially. All right. Or are you the evil one? Who's to say? I think I think listeners know the real answer to that, but I'm going to pretend otherwise for as long as I can. I fell in love with television because of Twin Peaks and because of the theories. Twin Peaks for me, and I watched it and I do want to like empty the bite.

Biographical notebook about this. I think it premiered right before my 13th birthday. I watched every episode in real time. It meant everything to me. There wasn't a theory that I didn't try to track down. And this is pre-internet. I had all the supplementary materials, the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer,

the audio tape of Dale Cooper, My Life, My Taps. I had all the issues of a fan magazine called Wrapped in Plastic. I remember buying the shooting script of Firewalk with me in a binder on Canal Street in New York, just so I could scour it for the cut scenes

that featured like Annie saying, I'm in the lodge with the Good Dale, it still gets me excited thinking about the world of Twin Peaks that I created, and many, many others, obviously, around the show itself. I felt similarly about loss, too, and there are shows that I think merit the debate and can hold up their end of the bargain with it,

deserve the deep dives, and then there are many that, in my opinion, don't. But I do think that, and we will obviously be getting to the finale, at least the original finale of Twin Peaks, the way that that show ended. Yeah. And the way it affected my understanding of what art was supposed to be and my discomfort with uncertainty, which is a lifelong psychological journey, informs the version of me that you're talking about.

Sorry, the version of me. It's real. What you're saying is real. I mean, I do not like too much redidding. But I feel like this show is the hinge point. It's both the birth and the death. of my love of that kind of engagement. That's really funny.

And I think, you know, Lost is a text that will probably come up a couple times as we talk about this. And then similarly, the follow-up, which is the leftovers, when it comes to when to answer a question and when to let the mystery be,

you know, which I think Twin Peaks is such an interesting lens to view that phenomenon. And, you know, if you and Mallory ever do stick the landing, lost finale, and you don't call me, I will be devastated

because I have so much to say about whether or not that answers questions. But the beauty of Twin Peaks is that it doesn't, and that's the frustrating and intoxicating aspect of the show. For what it's worth, Damon Lindeloff has already texted me and asked if we've done it yet.

And I was like, no, no. It's not a first season thing. We got to wait. We got to wait on that. It's coming. Before we get into a finale, we have to talk about how it started, particularly because this show is thinking of the ones we've recorded so far,

this is the oldest show. And I do think it's worth trying to convey to younger listeners. If we have them, people who have discovered Twin Peaks later or discovered it in the wake of the return or streaming, what a cultural phenomenon of this magnitude felt like in 1990. And also the intensity and quick burning flame that it was, which again, now today we live in a time where something can go viral for a day, but that was not the case then. So the fact that this happened, and it was a conflagration the size of it was culturally, and only lasted a year, is just wild.

So Twin Peaks, ABC television production, ABC saw the work of David Lynch in the 80s, Eraserhead, Elephant Man, the failure of Dune, the triumph of blue velvet, and was like, give me some of this. Made for network television. guy. Yes. ABC at this time was the home of America's funniest home videos, Bob Sagitt. And also Bob Sagitt's other show, Full House and the whole TGIF lineup. I mean, this was what was working for ABC. Otherwise, unremarkable executive named Bob Iger.

Wow. Bob, wow. Was running the network at the time earlier on in his ascent up the ladder to do his now, I guess, Chairman for Everest of the Walt Disney Corporation, we'll see, gave this show a shot. And David Lynch, working with a screenwriter named Mark Frost, cooked up this idea. And the idea was essentially a murder mystery soap opera, which, again, there were soap operas, there were murder mysteries. Today, murder mystery soap opera is like maybe the most profitable genre for television across prestige and streaming. But it would be a murder mystery soap opera, and it would, because of David Lynch's involvement, it would not feel like anything else on TV.

And it worked. The two-hour pilot debuted on April 8th, 1990, and a humble 34.6 million people watched it. I think, in terms of, like, rating share, one-third of all televisions turned on that night were tuned into Twin Peaks in America. Wild. I say this. I really do miss the monoculture. I do. Yeah. I do. The way that the show was received, the way that it was covered, the cover of magazines, instantly every, like all the young women of the show on the cover of Rolling Stone. Iconic cover, absolutely. The tourism to the Pacific Northwest, the spike in sales of pie once a week, outrageous.

People were debating what this means, what it's saying about America, what it's saying about TV. This premiere is in April of 1990. He hosts Saturday Night Live that September, like in advance of the season 2 premiere. And there's a great Twin Peaks, S&L sketch. But, like, you know, he had been obviously in Lynch's movies, et cetera. But like, this is just instant star making for Kyle for all the women in the cast. And then there's also, because Lynch had those bona fides, there's also all these interesting, you know, Hollywood legacy actors who are in this show. It's such a wildcast list.

I mean, it's totally unique. It's totally Lynch. It's pulling from his bench of performers that he loves, like Jack Nance, from Racerhead, plays, is the first person we see on the show, basically. Actually, we see Joan Chen first, which, again, Joan Chen, who was a global movie star on this show. And also Piper Lorry, Hollywood Royalty, is on this show. Richard Bamer from West Side Story. The two most prominent Jets are in Twin Peaks. So, you know.

So at once we're getting this thing about Lynch that I think is often misunderstood, which is that it's not a bit. Like he loves Americana and he loves this a certain type of American actor. He loves a certain type of American town and setting. And so what was remarkable about this pilot, which is that it somehow perfectly melded his sensibilities, which are at once the lightness and sweetness. and the dark decaying underbelly all at once. And for me, I'm sure people who don't know the show are familiar, the show is about the murder of the most popular girl in high school, Twin Peaks High School and remote Pacific Northwest town, Laura Palmer.

I was so struck by, on every time I rewatch this, and I think I've seen this more than maybe most things ever broadcast on television, the fact that Lynch let Sarah Palmer scream when she gets the news, which is like in the sixth or seventh minute of the show, he just lets it play. And the secret takeaway of the show wasn't just that, oh, it was kooky, which is what I think was a lot of some of the takeaway early on in the SNL sketch and like the, is it the Swedes are leaving, the Norwegians are leaving? Yeah, yeah. And the pilot.

It's very funny and weird. But the raw emotion was equally unfamiliar on primetime network television at that time. And it's incredibly discomforting. It's very freaky. It's very upsetting. And it will carry through the decades of this show's existence, that kind of feeling. It's just, it's wild to me that something this strange was as popular as it was for even, even though it could be considered a flash in the pan, I suppose, if you want to talk about how quickly it burned out. But again, we'll talk about this, perhaps the circumstances of that and how, you know, Bob Eager is responsible for that as well.

But, I mean, it's just wild to me to think about a show that debuted only a couple months later is Northern Exposure. And Northern Exposure has a similar, like, cooky, you know, small town characters. But that is, like, kooky. This is, you know, unhinged often, you know? It's unhinged. I mean, watching the pilot again, this show is real horny.

Like, this show is really kinky. This show is very subversive and uncomfortable in ways that I, as a 13-year-old, didn't understand. I probably appreciated, but I didn't understand. the way the camera's lingering on Audrey Horn and the, you know, her, what's the saddle shoes, the way that when Cooper does show up, the way he's leering almost. It's a version of the character that I think was underrated because he is, at least in the early

conception of it, kind of the Ultimate Boy Scout, and he's so excited about the pie and so excited about the Douglas fir trees. But he's also pretty convinced that Laura Palmer is doing rails of cocaine all the time. And when he pulls the porn magazine out of the safety deposit box, he does. doesn't seem very surprised at all. You mentioned the magazine wrapped in plastic. Laura Palmer is discovered and this idea of like the beautiful corpse of an unknown girl, mysterious girl, which will be iterated again and again and again in TV murder mysteries.

But wrapped in plastic. It's so fetishistic, like the way we first meet her. And it just gets more overt from there, I think. It's Pete's line. She's dead. Rapted plastic. Yeah. One thing that has also carried through, and I think it'll be relevant to our conversation about the finale's, is when you have 35 million people watching something, it would be very difficult to find consensus on what it is they all think they're watching or what they're watching it for.

And Twin Peaks began correctly, I mean, this is a correct read of it, like it's about what happened to Laura Palmer, who killed her. You have this wild town full of potential suspects, full of a lot of mystery and a lot of interest. there are there's no shortage in the pilot of of who who may have done it um everybody's up to something everybody's living on top of each other everybody knows everybody's um everybody's secrets there's also the beginning in the pilot of the just clear evidence that david lynch isn't really just interested in this um i think that you know all shows the premiere now with murder mysteries the best of them are like well actually like if you look at something like mayor of east town Well, there's a crime, but really we're telling you about the investigators or really we're telling you about a slice of society.

From the beginning, when Cooper shows up, he's mostly excited that this is connected to a larger case that involves little letters being put under the fingernails of girls who are murdered in the Pacific Northwest, and it's connected, and there's something bigger and bigger. That would find ecstatic release in the third episode, which ends famously with Cooper's first dream, introducing us to the Red Room, which is the waiting room of the Black Lodge, the little man from another place. played by the actor Michael J. Anderson. The emergence of still the most terrifying visual villain in the history, I think of television, killer Bob, played by Frank Silva, the sense that this is all much, much bigger, much, much weirder, and not at all what you expected. Do you Twin Peaks superfan want to tell the story of how Frank Silva became Bob?

Because I don't know that everyone knows that story. I do, and I think it's also worth telling, because it speaks to how it'll, it, for us to talk about something as monumental and as deeply artistic and as huge and disparate as Twin Peaks, it's going to be like trying to put our hands around water because there's so much of it, particularly in the limits of an episode like this. But one thing that we have to remember is like famously, David Lynch, when he talks about art, he says, you know, we're not responsible for good ideas. We just are lucky enough to catch them like fish and it's on the preparation of them.

And let's just say that he was in a full stream during this period. of his creative life in the 90s. And he didn't know. He didn't know. He had things he was interested in, but this was not. I mean, people would later accuse Damon

and Carlton had lost of like not knowing the answers. Maybe if you asked Mark Frost, who was always playing the more like Dudley Doaright to Lynch's weirdo goofball, like he probably was like, I think it's this person

who killed Laura Palmer. But David Lynch was saw the, I don't know, Frank Silva was a set dresser or he worked on the production. A grip of some kind, I think. He was a long-haired local guy,

who was working on the production and he was setting something up at the foot on the set of Laura Palmer's bedroom and David Lynch saw him on the monitor and was obsessed because Frank Silva looked fucking terrifying. He was probably a beautiful and lovely man but I still cannot really look at pictures of him

or be sent gifts of him unprompted, Joanna without getting very, very freaked out. That wasn't unprompted. It was in context. The context was we're going to talk about Twin Peaks, It's not, can you please ruin my night's sleep? No, the context was, Travis Cole and true detective looks like Killer Bob. He does. It's just true.

And I needed to have a visual to show you. And I'm sorry that I ruined your night, but I'm not sorry either because it was the truth. I found out later you can delete people's gifts. They don't just keep walking towards you in your nightmare. So I guess I should be thanking you. But anyway, that speaks to the kind of let's figure it out element of this, which was, by the way, written into the DNA of the show. I don't know your level of super fandom at the time, but for me, who wanted to rewatch the pilot,

I taped it from ABC and a VHS, but I wanted to rent it. You could rent a VHS of the Twin Peaks pilot in the early 90s when the show was on, but it was a VHS of the European Twin Peaks pilot, which was a completed movie. Wow. The last 15 minutes of the pilot,

the last moment of the pilot is Sarah Palmer wakes up with a nightmare of someone, and it's intercut with someone grabbing the half-heart locket that James and Donna have just hidden in the woods. The European pilot, she has visions of Bob on the staircase. She, basically, there's a meeting between Bob and Mike in the basement of the hospital. What?

And the entire thing is wrapped up. And you can watch this on YouTube, but it's an early version of iterations of the Mike and Bob and meetings and who really killed her in the spirit world that would play out through the series. It's interesting that you brought up because it makes sense to me that David Lynch is like, let's essentially make a movie, right?

Because that's his medium story. And also they were like, we need to sell this in Europe in case it doesn't get picked up to series, so can you grab something on the end? But it's interesting to me that you brought up Lindelof and Kuse because I love to dissect when you have co-creators, what vibe comes from whom?

And with Lindelof and Kuse, it's really fun to look at what they made after. And then you can sort of backtrack that on to Lost and say, like, I could take Bates Motel and leftovers and put it in the Quezon Art and then make Lost out of that and know who brought what to the table. With Frost and Lynch, you know, Frost is a Hill Street blues guy. Like, he's bringing like conventional television, which is what Carlton Kuse did, like brought, you know, I have run shows before, like conventional television to a, creative mind that is much more interested in esoteric ideas. And you sort of, in the best version

of Twin Peaks, you have that balance where you have like sort of Mark Frost holding the string and David Lynch is the balloon up in the air and that all works together. And I read a very intricate breakdown of this on your favorite website Reddit.com. When you break down when Lynch lost interest and was gone or making wild at heart or whatever and when Frost went off to like, you know, make another show and when a, uh, Lynch went to Japan and they like basically handed the show over to one of their writers, then Twin Peaks becomes nine different kinds of shows over the course, you know, its second season is a 23 episode season, right, or 29? How long is it?

It's a bunch of episodes. It is 20, it's 22 episodes. 22 episodes. So the last two were aired as one. Right. So a classic, you know, we used to live in a society where we had 22 episodes seasons. But it's so schizophrenic in that way. And then you get Fire Walk with me, which is just like pure uncut Lynch, and then you get the return, which is once again that good, good blend. And so I love that. I love how messy Twin Peaks is for that reason when you identify, you know, I think Lynch, we would all agree, is like the true spark of brilliance in this show. But he needs Mark Frost to a certain degree.

And Mark Frost certainly needs him. And so thinking about the show that way, I don't know, it's fascinating. I love when two very different minds come together and to give us a story. Oh, I agree with that. And that's, you know, you can look at people point to the songwriting partnership of the Beatles, or you point to social network, which is like, which is Sorkin and Fincher who have nothing in common. And I can't imagine they get along, particularly what. well, I'm just assuming because of how they present and what they do.

That movie works because somehow their excesses were tempered by each other's excesses. I totally agree with you about that chemistry. I also think you make an important point to celebrate messiness. To be a fan of Twin Peaks is to be a fan of a hundred different ideas, iterations, theories, sensations, performers. It also means to be, you have to be willing to watch the scene where someone mops the floor for nine minutes. You have to wrestle with the food critic coming to town storyline from season two. I mean, all of this happened.

And, you know, David Lynch has never been a particularly linear artist. When he is on with this show, he is flooding the zone with ideas to a degree that, you know, unless he's doing like an inland empire type thing, he's hemmed in more by movies and he wasn't hemmed in here. I've seen the thing you're talking about. People have charted, like, what's essential Twin Peaks? And I would argue that's a false construction because it is all of it at once. I agree that it's all essential. I was just interested in the particular like the specifics, you know. Oh, I agree.

And I didn't mean that as a dig on your take on it. I just think that it's, you have to sort of reckon with the whole thing. I would also argue that, again, I don't really know the dynamic of Frost and Lynch in the return. For Frost to be involved in that, I feel like maybe he was like hurting kittens, you know, because it is just so lynch to the point that Frost had to publish a two-volume book. doing all of the work that he had clearly prepared to bring to the screen in Twin Peaks the return literally like why is Audrey Horn alive still after the bank explosion and none of that none of that made it onto the screen I have those I own those books and I've read them and I love

that oh me too and I love that Lynch was like it felt very much that Lynch was like oh that's nice that's nice that you thought that through it doesn't matter really to me I promise you he never looked at those books once well I that's nice in theory that that exists. I don't really care. I'm thrilled they exist as a fan I exist. Okay, so again, I've already intimated this, but like I was having weekly watch parties with my friends where we would dress up. No, that's adorable. Are you kidding? There's a photo somewhere. I'm not going to source it, but that's not even the dirtiest thing. Wait, but what would you wear? What was your costume? Suit. Trenchco with my hair slicked back. Yeah, you've got to be the best character ever. I mean, special agent Dale Cooper is like my favorite television. television character of all time. It's worse than that. In middle school, again, this is all

happening in 90 to 91, used my school's computer lab, which was all like Apple 2E's and dot matrix printers to assemble a Twin Peaks fanzine that I gave to my friends and other people at school, which I would just cobble together facts taken from issues of premiere magazine, basically, where I'd be like, you know, Twin Peaks's James Marshall will be filming a movie called Gladiator this summer, and that's, by the way, not the Redisca Gladiator. Sure is it. No internet. So I'm just like grasping at straws or like theories or being like this person is also this person. That's so funny. I don't think I have any copies of that. Did it have a title? A name?

It must have, but I don't remember. It was probably like Twin Peaks Gazette or something. Not like Danfein Kappa Zine or something like that. See, where were you? Like that would have been better. I didn't have vision is what I'm saying. I had like I had obsession. You had gumption, I think is what you had. And just to be a fan of this, though, like during the permutations, we've alluded to it that, like, the show, those first eight episodes that aired in the spring of 1990 were a national obsession and a sensation. They did not answer the question. You did not find out who killed Laura Palmer in those eight episodes, which was very controversial. There was also an expectation that I don't think was downplayed by Bob Eiger and the, like, marketing people at ABC that you would find out soon.

So when the show came back, everyone was like, here we go, we're going to find out. No, you did not find out when the show came back. You did not really find out until which episode was this. This was, it wasn't until November of 1990 on like the 16th or seven. It was the 17th episode that resolved it. I think we found out in like the 14th episode or so. But that's how long it waited to reveal it. And again, even that kind of hedged it.

There is, in retrospect, I'm curious how you think about this now, in retrospect, it is the most perfect Twin Peaks explanation. There is something that is more straightforward and itself incredibly disturbing and dark. And then there is something more imaginative and do it that way you will. And the answer was that Laura Palmer was brutalized, raped, and killed by her father, Leland Palmer, who was possessed by killer demon. known as Bob. And Ray Wise is like perfect, perfect. Incredible. Twist of casting.

But I think that not only is it such a duality of the evil that lurks inside the heart of the American family and the external evil, the supernatural evil that the lynch is interested in. The evil that lurts in the heart of man and the evil that infects externally. And this is something that Rob Mahoney, I don't know when this is going to err in how far away from True Detective it is. I'm so sorry that we're like, True Detective is definitely on our minds, but... You're talking about Night Country, too. We're recording this in the middle of the night

country. Yeah, we didn't record this during season three of True Detective. But, like, Rob Honey and I have been talking a lot about this idea of like external supernatural, evil that infects an internal, you know, this is just the evil that lurks in the heart of men. So all of that is in Leeland Palmer. And then there's also... I just love how right David Lynch was when he said, like, we never wanted to explain who killed Laura Palmer. He says, there's an interview that he gave, I think around the return, where he says, that was the goose that laid these golden eggs.

And at a certain point, we were told to wrap that up and it never really got back going after that. Right. So he was like, we just wanted to never say who killed Laura Palmer. And I, Ray Wise is tremendous. And there's a lot that is very satisfactory about Leland Palmer. And then there is this other version of Twin Peaks, the platonic, perfect ideal version. that runs for maybe four seasons, like not forever, but like four seasons. And we never find out who kills Laura Palmer and we're still asking that question to

this day. What Lynch and Frost masterfully did in both the season two finale, which we're going to talk about and the return finale, is give us another unanswered question that people are still debating to this day. Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about zebbound, terse appetite. The first and only FDA-approved prescription. prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and adults with obesity.

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This is all there. Leelan Palmer killed his daughter. That is canonical. That's what happened here. Why? Why do people behave this way? Why do we inflict pain and violence and Garmin Bozia suffering on each other across communities?

Yeah. That is more interesting to David Lynch throughout all of his work and maybe throughout all of our, throughout time. And it's doing both at the same time. I also think the quote you're bringing up about what Lynch said is really interesting in terms of what do we want from these things. Now, there wasn't Reddit at the time. There were probably message boards that I didn't have access to because I didn't know what the internet was or modems. But they probably existed.

And these conversations were probably raging. But, you know, you are a proud veteran of the online wars about what things mean and the theory wars. and like what we want from these things, what we demand of them, what we expect. David Lynch has never cared about that. But in a way, birthed that debate with what he did with that show. And I honestly think that's, again,

we're not here to talk only about Lost, I promise, but I think that's a mistake that Lost made was actually answering too many questions. People accused of not answering any questions. I actually think it answered too many questions. And then again, with the leftovers, one from the start of that show, they said, we're not going to tell you what happened ever.

And we're just going to put that out there. You're never going to know what exactly happened here and why. And enjoy. Marinate that. And when an artist, when a storyteller, and there are plenty of really ones who are not named Damon Lidloff, but like when a storyteller is like, I know what's better, I know better than you what kind of story you need right now. I like that because I think, I think.

I think there are ways in which I love how online fandom and Reddit boards have democratized discussion of television. And then there are ways in which, you know, the concept of like the fandom menace or whatever, there are ways in which that idea of when a place like Lucasfilm coweres in front of an angry fandom and warps their story to fit the feedback that they've gotten. The audience becoming inspired by someone's art is the reason why, not the thing. the reason, but it is the most beautiful thing that can come from art maybe other than the art itself. That's the wonderful byproduct of it, and it should be celebrated at all times. The artist isn't responsible for those feelings, though, and shouldn't answer to them directly. That becomes customer service.

And that's what a company does when it's delivering content to people. It's like, oh, you didn't like that? Let me tweak it. You want me to repaint that? I'll repaint it. Yeah. It makes me think of something, and I mentioned this on the watch recently, but when Albert Brooks was on the Mark Maren podcast, he was like, I fear for young people today,

because they are beholden to the audiences more directly because of their access to them or vice versa. The artist is more accessible. He's like, I don't care what you think about why I did this. I had to do it. And I can say from personal experience, having been on stage with David Lynch and Kyle McLaughlin and Laura Dern

was like, honestly, that's the dream of my life I moderated the FYC thing for the return. Handy. Did you wear your dredge coat? Did you slick your hair back? I didn't. I should have. I mean, okay, so this was after the return, and I had met Kyle McLaughlin before. He's the loveliest, kindest guy. Laura Dern was awesome and sweet.

David Lynch, I had also spoke to and met before, like, couldn't be nicer. Will not participate in this whatsoever. He agreed to go on stage to be with his friends, Kyle and Laura. Yeah. And he sat there, and I asked him things, and he stared at me. And he said, no. I was at the, I was at the TCA panel when at Showtime, like David Evans, the Showtime was desperately trying to get David Lynch to sell this show,

and David Lynch is just giving us nothing. Let me give you absolutely nothing. But I would like you to watch my show. And I watched it, and I'm glad. I am personally very glad. And I'm impressed the way that he has influenced, you know, Kyle McLaughlin, Lord Durham, Mark Frost, like everyone involved to not say the meaning of the thing.

He's just sort of like, it's up to. you what you feel like the meaning of the thing is. And plenty of people say that. You know, certainly David Chase has played with that. But like, I think no one more staunchly than David Lynch in regards to Twin Peaks. Almost everyone else plays the game. And I don't blame them. I certainly would. If someone is looking at something that we made, we want to be there for them. We want to be accessible to them. We want to be validated by them to a degree that's probably psychologically unhealthy, but I have therapy tomorrow, not today, so I'll save it. Why wouldn't you want to talk to someone who wants to talk to you about the thing that you did?

It's human. He is immune from that, and I think he's teaching us all a lesson that way. So with that in mind, Twin Peaks burns so bright and so fast. And after the reveal of Laura's killer, Lynch sort of walks away for a while. Again, I don't know if this was the wild at heart time, but the show pivots in true TV fashion to a new villain. Kenneth Welsh comes. in playing Windem Earl, who is a very brilliantly designed character, I think, in terms of, like, the big bad from Cooper's past, who pushed him down this road of occult things or starting to believe in things like that. And Cooper had fallen in love with Windermerell's wife, and Windham Earl is a trickster and games player, and it's haunting. He's coming to Twin Peaks.

And meanwhile, a whole lot of other stuff is happening. Like, David Duchovney is showing up in drag. And literally everyone who is announced as dead in the pilot is not dead, whether it's Andrew Packard comes back, deal with a sawmill. I guess Hank Jennings is not dead. He's paroled. Like, let's just, let's flood the zone. Let's bring everyone back. It is a way more traditional procedural show with giants and dwarves sometimes.

There's yellow face. It's really exciting. Yeah. Oh, my God. And then every so often, you're just like, wait, what am I watching? Such as when Josie Packard, who is presumably one of the major characters of the show, dies from fear and becomes a bedside table. Okay, but that is...

Okay, so this is what I loved about, like, figuring out the timeline. So basically, like, Lynch and Frost have both essentially fucked off from the show. And a writer named Harley Payton is essentially running the show. And then Iger... Harley Payton, a big listener of Ringer podcasts and a nice correspondent, I must say. I'm sure he's going to listen to this. I love that, and I'm not saying anything bad about the show, but Iger's like, where's that Frost Lynch duo that I hired to run the show?

So he takes... Lynch and Frost 2 lunch, like an apology lunch, of like, please come back to the show. Sorry made you say who killed Laura Palmer or something like that. And so they come back, the episode that Lynch writes is the episode where Joan Chen goes inside a knob on a drawer, right? And then they cancel the show. Twin Peaks is canceled. And then David Lynch is like, that's when David Lynch starts his lobbying where he like goes on Letterman and is like, please, here's the address. Here's Bob Eager's address.

I looked it up. It's just the ABC offices in New York, so don't even worry about it. He didn't actually docks Bob Eager. But he was like, please write in. We sure would like to keep making our show. And so they greenlight it for six more episodes. So there's a version of Twin Peaks that ends with the knob reveal. And instead, we got six more episodes and the finale that we're going to talk about.

I mean, again, in the scheme of things like from people's perspective, the episode where Leland Palmer's revealed as the killer, and that happens when he kills a doppelganger, Laura's cousin, Maddie Palmer, is killed and the giant says it's happening again, et cetera, et cetera. That episode was watched by 17 million people, which would make it basically the Super Bowl of television today, but that was half of the people who'd watch the pilot.

So the show is kind of already in free fall at this point. It wasn't just that it became less culturally significant. People got angry, and it became kind of a punching bag. because it was just still on the air. It also should be noted. This wasn't just America falling out of love with weirdness. This was Bob Eiger and his team at ABC, fundamentally not understanding what they had,

not in the sense of like you have an artistic jewel and you should treasure it, more that you have a popular show that might not always get 30 million people. You probably shouldn't put it up against cheers. Because the show was put on Thursday nights against the most popular lineup in television. And then when that didn't work,

they jerked it to Saturday nights, which is a time, yes kids, networks used to put original shows on Saturday nights. So all of the young people who should have been watching Twin Peaks were probably out as they should have been, except me. That's the money quote from that David Letterman interview with David Lynch, where he says, the people who like Twin Peaks are party people. They don't stay home.

They don't stay home on Saturday night. So you identify with half of that, but not the bad. Yes, I was home. You're own, yeah. It should be noted that Lynch and Frost also still had business with Iger. They had a sitcom called On the Air. that lasted six episodes that isn't as fondly remembered, but I taped all of those too, looking for clues.

Anyway, the show is essentially done, to your point. Everybody knows it. It's DOA so badly that even though the second season is building up to something, ABC pulls the plug and doesn't air the final two episodes for two months. They pull it from their schedule. Their Saturday night schedule, they had so many other things to do in April. And I will tell you, you know how time moves differently, not when you're in the Black Lodge, but when you're a teenager?

those two months were like the longest two months of my life. Oh my God. I remember the show being off the air for like half a year. It was maybe eight weeks, tops. During this time, there's a citizen's a group called Coop, citizens opposed to the offing of Peaks that are doing letter writing campaigns. There was some stuff. This is how wholesome we used to be, speaking of having a society.

It was a reverse boycott where fans of Twin Peaks were buying products advertised on Twin Peaks and cutting out proof of purchase stamps, which used to be on products, and mailing them to prove that they had bought the product because of Twin Peaks, none of this worked, of course. Not only did none of it work, it is worth noting that during this horrific Saturday night free fall, eight million people are still tuning in.

Eight million people. Which anyone would kill to have those numbers. It's interesting, to your point of, like, what's going on at the time in terms of, I did not, let me give a mini-biographical, sketch of myself in Twin Peaks because I am just a bit younger than you. And so I was definitely more TGIF at the time. I was like hardcore to probably boy meets world or whatever it was. I did not come to Twin Peaks until later. And then I didn't really, I would say I didn't really,

and then I watched it because again, the references were in the water and I wanted to know what the what this building block was later in my life. And then when the return happened, that's when I studied it and like obsessively studied it so that I could better understand what what was coming in the return. So my bona fides are not your bona fides at all. But I will say that like, I think X-Files is largely considered sort of the birth of message board TV fandom is the X-Files. And then I would say my first foray into like message board TV fandom was Buffy Vampire Slayer, which was like five years later, something like that. And so that's my journey through on line, rabbit TV fan. I can't imagine the days of having to buy Premier Magazine for Crumbs or

whatever. Like, Annie, you were in the minds. You're in the fandom minds. I mean, there used to be columns, like this guy, David Bion Cooley, who's a great TV writer, he's on fresh air sometimes. Like, he would have his like, essentially in the Philadelphia Inquirer, he would have his like, bits and Bob's column. And like, you'd get some reporting. You'd see like, oh, ratings don't look good. I mean, I read TV guide for the articles. Pretty cool. Yeah. So you could kind of piece it together, but it was still overwhelming. And I think to your point about X-Files is an important one, because it's not just that Twin Peaks was influential in that brief moment that it was on.

It sort of served, like many of these shows have, as a cautionary tale. The sense for a while was you had to be very delicate about how you balanced the weirdness and the normal stuff, the procedural and the dream in order to succeed. And X-Files for a long time was lauded because it kind of, siloed its canonical episodes to like the beginnings and middles and ends of the seasons, right? And otherwise it was just weirdo thing of the week. We then entered a different universe in this century

where everything is micro-targeted and programmed and like the weirdness is the thing. And you don't try to do a mainstream thing anymore because then you end up making no one happy. But so in terms of this first finale, you set this up correctly in terms of like the lunch with Bob Eiger and the feeling, like this was doomed. And it was that,

sort of hung over it. So going into this, it's hard to describe what the expectations were other than they were, like the New York Times when it, before the two episodes aired in June,

in May, they wrote a big piece basically being like, it's called peaks and valleys. And it was like, what went wrong during this insane year? Yeah.

It was a settled text, and it had very little to do with what people were going to see on these episodes. There are a very weird double feature because Miss Twin Peaks, episode 28,

is about the Miss Twin Peaks pageant that, like, you know, Nadine is entered into for some reason. And there's all sorts of nonsense. It's directed by a very good television director named Tim Hunter. It's written by a guy who was on the staff named Barry Pullman. And it's fine. You know, it's like it's this weird kind of like methadone version of the hit where it's like, Windham Earl is going to kidnap the winner of Miss Twin Peaks to get into the Black Lodge.

And you're like, okay. News at 11. Yeah. This was the first hour of the finale on June 10th, 1991. And then episode 29, which was directed by David Lynch. and written, credited to Mark Frost, Harley-Paeton, and Robert Engels, which is really the triumvirate that were keeping the normalcy and keeping the show alive, all of those people will tell you that when the script entered David Lynch's hands,

it became David Lynch's script, and he shot what he wanted to shoot. In prep for this podcast, read the shooting script that they turned in, and the differences are really interesting. Again, to just sort of like figure out what's important to Frost Payton Engels and what's important to David Lynch. Do you want some of the differences? this? I absolutely do. Okay. It's funny because my assumption, before I read the shooting script, was that the

check-in with everyone aspect of the finale, because we check in with Audrey, we check in with Donna, we check in with, like, a bunch of people at the double-R diner, that that was, like, a Frostian concept. But that's, well, the Audrey stuff was already in there, but that is, that is the lynchy thing to add in a check-in with all these characters, because that's, that's, And it almost sort of doesn't, it doesn't mix. The blend is not blending in the finale. That's right. Because, you know, Dale Cooper's entire quest,

and when we talk about the return, we'll talk about the way that they did it differently in that. But like his quest is just operating a different planet. And it speaks to how sort of frayed the tapestry, the threads of Twin Peaks had become at that point, because to your point in the pilot, everyone's stacked on top of each other. Everyone is like cheating on someone with someone else

or all this sort of stuff, but they're all like intimately related. And by the time you get to the finale of season two, Donna's storyline and Audrey's storyline is nothing to do with Laura Palmer seemingly at all. Yes, Audrey's become an environmental activist. Yeah. There was a lot to reckon with if he chose to reckon with it. He changed the tone of the Ed Norma Nadine scene, which in the shooting script is like played for laughs.

And here is a very sad and poignant. There's dignity in a way for Nadine. in her hysteria, a character that was often not afforded any dignity. And then there's just the, like, absolute wrench of Ed and Norma, like, start the scene literally, like, dancing. They're dancing by the fire. With the happiness of their future.

And then it's all taken away from them in the span of a scene. So he changed that from, like, slapsed comedy to something very poignant. And then this, this, I think, is the most interesting, is the red room is far more, literalized or the concept of Black Lodge and the Red Room are far more literalized in that, I don't know that I'm telling you anything you don't already know, but I'm telling listeners things. Maybe they don't know. No, I appreciate it.

In the script it says, quote, a dark, ominous version of the Great Northern, everything in black and white, including the checkerboard floor. There's a dentist chair. Bob is dressed as a dentist. It's giving International Assassin an episode of The Leftovers that I love, but a much more like

literalized tour through a space than endless red curtains and zigzag floors, the iconography of Twin Peaks that already existed, but it's far more surreal and esoteric and odd in Lynch's version. And the way they get out of there, the way Dale goes into the lodge, which is that he's basically dragged into the lodge rather than it's an active choice he makes to go into the lodge. I think that's a huge, important difference. And then I want to save the final shot description. for later. But that was changed, I know. And it's interesting to think about this. Again, like,

this is not meant as a dig because I think this is a credit to the show that the bones of this episode, if you take David Lynch out of it, it's a plausible prestige television show with elements that are real, that are surreal, with drama, pathos, comedy. It's all there in a way that was very, very ahead of its time. But when you think about it being something that David Lynch would then do, it's like the Muzak version of something. It's the difference between someone telling you about their dream and having a dream. The idea that the red rumor would be like, oh, and you're tortured there. So he's a dentist now.

Like, yeah, that's working within the parameters of what someone else gave you from their dream. But then the dreamer steps up. And it's like, I don't need to show you something that you might be scared of. I'm going to fucking scare you. It's sure the shit out of you. Absolutely. And one of the things that is scary about it is. that it comes from, seemingly comes from nowhere, but it is emotionally true, you know,

and it's something I said on Big Picture last month that I feel like really in terms of our modern landscape, like Miyazaki and Lynch are the only people who can show you their dreams without feeling like you're being lectured to. Like you just, I don't understand where this is, but I feel it's this, I have a slight tweak on that, which is like you feel like other people show you their dreams and David Lynch and, you know, if you prefer Miyazaki, invite you to dream with them. Like, you're in the dream with them, you know? I like that.

You're dreaming. There's the line from the great prophet, Monica Balucci in the return, right? We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer, direct address to the camera. And I just, I love that. When people shave on Twin Peaks's tone, which they sometimes do, because I've introduced the show to, you know, some people who haven't watched it before, and I will say just, like, pretend this dream launching. and then it all just let it wash over you, you know? And so when you think about this as a finale,

it is very much, and again, I watched this so many times, but I used to watch it, I taped it off of TV. Fast forwarding the commercials, I watched it like parsing for clues. You know, like what does this mean? What is, where is this going? And because of that, I kind of gave short shrift to the non-Cooper stuff. And so watching it now, it is really interesting to see what a sometimes awkward dance it is

between things that are just like laying track for future episodes that would never come versus what the spiritually, what the show is going towards on a different level. So, you know, like the, the, and we're going to talk about a little bit out of order, I think, because we have a lot of text to get through here. But, you know, you were talking about the check-ins of the different characters. So the like the double-art check-in with Bobby and Shelley is a intentional repeat of the scene from the pilot. But when the German waitress comes in and just like a little too much knock worse this morning or whatever. Like they just, it's a replay.

It's a mirror image intentionally, I think, because of Lynch of the pilot. The fracturing Hayward household feels like it's, at this point, it almost feels like a scene from invitation to love, which was the show within a show soap opera. Yeah. That's the one that jangles the most, I think, is that whole sequence. It totally does. And to bring people up to date, like Don, like the pilot ends beautifully in a way that I didn't appreciate at the time where after, especially knowing the Leland Laura relationship to come, the Doc Hayward-Donna relationship where she has snuck out, but he's like, I'm proud, we're proud

to have a daughter like you, and he's not mad, and he's welcoming. And it's the, you know, the Betty Veronica thing between these two girls, but she's lucky because she has this structure. At this point, the necessities of soap operatic storytelling has suggested that actually Ben Horn is her father. And he's come to make peace and be a good person by destroying everyone's life. And so we have Lara Flynn Boyle, who acts her ass off in these two seasons, by the way, screaming in Worn Frost Arms, you're my daddy, you're my daddy, and Doc Hayward, the moral compass of the show, punches Ben Horn into the fireplace, bloodying him, potentially killing him. He didn't. We only know that because of 25 years later. Because he looks, he certainly looks dead in that

moment, yeah. He looks dead, and this was another tweak that Lynch put in. I think in the original shooting script, Doc Hayward realizes what he's done in horror and rushes to Ben Horn to save him, because he is a doctor first. In Lynch's script, he falls to his knees and bellows like a cage lion, which is gnarly. But yes, doesn't really make sense other than this idea that maybe fear and violence and hatred is taking over everyone over time, not necessarily because of the proximity of electrical wires and owls. We have what may be one of the lynchiest sequences of all time, which is Dale Mibler at the bank. Audrey goes into the Twin Peak Savings and Loan, and at the time this is the most foreshadowing of the return scene

more than the red room stuff where it's just like I'm going to put you in a place and you're just going to be there for a minute. She goes to chain herself to the vault because she's now an environmental activist and she tells the very elderly guy in a suit, Dale, that she wants all these things done, call the newspaper, but also get me a glass of water.

And so instead he just gets her glass of water for a very long time. Did you call? Did you call newspaper? Did you call Agent Cooper? But also the way he builds tension for something that doesn't even make any sense because Andrew Packard shows up in quotes Marcus Aurelius and Pete's there for some reason.

But while this is happening, Lynch's idea of being like, guess what something big is happening? Is it the security guard takes a phone call and goes, it's a boy. It's a boy. I was thinking about quotes like this for 20 years. And then there's a bomb in safety deposit box

and blah, blah, blah. Who cares? I don't really even remember the point of the Packard's. 25 years of did Audrey Horn die in the bank explosion? This episode is so interesting for, we talked about this when we talked about freaks and geeks, this idea of making a finale when you know it's your finale

versus making a finale not knowing it's your last episode. And so what they do in this episode, they were pretty sure they were cooked, but there was a chance that they would have a season three. So to seed in potential springboards to season three or cliffhangers, what happened, Audrey Horn, what happened to H.D.L. Cooper, is he going to be okay? all that sort of stuff, is there to entice you into a season three,

while also giving you, as you say, this like, pilot, you know, reflections to the pilot, which makes it feel like a true finale, right? Where we're come full circle, we've wrapped certain things up. This could be an ending, you know. And also, just again, for contextualizing it, this is from an era when shows didn't get to write their own ticket. You didn't get to resolve things unless you were a very, very popular long-running show, at which point there really wasn't that much to resolve.

It was just a question of like, is it going to be, have been a dream sequence? Like, what are we doing here? Right. You know, so it would have been very odd. And in fact, it was basically Lindelof and Kuse who demanded this also at a luncher, I think in this case, a breakfast with the head of ABC being like, we're going to finish this. We're going to end this and you have to let us do it. So both by, it's not just that Lynch loves ambiguity.

It's also that this is just what TV was. Like, you weren't going to doom yourself. You were going to give them as many reasons as possible to bring you back. so you could keep it going. At least that's probably what was going on in the room before Lynch stepped back into it. But to deliver a cliffhanger and yet also a sense of an ending

because there are plenty of finale that end on a cliffhanger where you're just sort of like, I cannot fucking believe because he's my language that I never get to know what happens here. And with Twin Peaks, that question, maybe Audrey Lesto,

because that's a more like straightforward cliffhanger, but certainly with the very end of the episode, it just gives the Andy Green Walls of the world, like just something to snack on for 25 years, you know? This finale, this ending of this episode, destroyed me. It was impossible.

I would not accept it. But then I had to. So specifically to let people know, I don't think there's great joy in the two of us sitting here and recapping what happens in the Black Lodge when Dale actually enters into it. There's great sadness in rewatching it, realizing that this character is walking into his prison cell,

his metaphysical torture chamber for the, the next quarter of a century. But you obviously didn't know that at the time. But it is a bravora sequence. The cab racing or little Jimmy Scott is there, which is cool. I'd love to have him come back just to entertain everyone because he has a beautiful voice. Coffee turns into motor oil. Laura is there.

Shirley is just screaming her head off every opportunity you can. It's truly one of her great skills. A lot of things that, for people who are like, oh, the return didn't pick up on anything. actually, much of it is here. She says to him, I'll see you again in 25 years. The dwarf says, when you see me again, it won't be me, which is both true of Dale Cooper. It's also true of The Little Man from Another Place, aka the Arm, who is not Michael J. Anderson in the return. It is a electric tree with a talking brain on top.

I have this in my notes as the retroactive bolstering of the finale via the return, right? Like when you watch the finale now, knowing what you know about the return, you feel like the knowing you say Cooper's walking into his prison, you know it's a 25-year sentence. Like, that's the thing we know now that we didn't know then. And then everything else you said, except I wrote Van Hands after I'll see you again in 25 years. And then she does her Vana White Hards, which I don't know what that is. But there's also a different reading of Cooper now that I don't know if it's benefits, if it's because of time passing, if it's because of the return, or if it's because of, or if it's because of,

of what you can tell, the type of story you can tell in prestige streaming versus broadcast, which is Cooper was a Boy Scout and the hero of Twin Peaks during the two years Twin Peaks was on the air. This act, he's going into the Black Lodge

both to save Annie, his girlfriend, played by a very young Heather Graham, and also to make sure that what happened with Caroline his first love doesn't happen again is also an incredibly hubristic act of, like, I can handle the metaphysical.

I can handle demons. I can walk into hell, like Orpheus, which comes up a lot in the return, and walk back out. And I did not have that idea baggage when I watched this finale because Bob says, you can go. He can't because he tried to take your soul. That's not allowed. Windermerell's soul goes out the top of his head like flames.

But then Cooper's doppelganger is in there too. At this point, isn't Bob or it's just physically, it's all a little mushy, but he chases him. And there's a chase sequence across the same room over and over again. and the fatal grab of an arm, which indicates that Cooper loses, essentially. He, or a version of him, emerges back at Glastonbury Grove with Annie's face covered in blood. Loyal, loyal, Harry, the last time we'll ever see him,

is these scenes, helps him up. Annie goes to the hospital, we're told she's going to be fine. Cooper wakes up a little creepy in pajamas at the Great Northern with Doc Hayward and Harry. He says, how's Annie? He says he needs to brush his teeth. I've watched the scene more than maybe anything else in the history of television. They're like, that seems like a good idea.

And they're used to him saying weird things like, I know who killed Laura Palmer, I'll tell you in the morning. He goes into brush his teeth. He squeezes out the entire tube. He sees Bob in the mirror yet, right? He smashes his head into the mirror. And Frank Silva's head is across from him. He's demonic blood down his head.

He starts saying, how is Annie in a mocking way? and then the credits. Then the credits appear, and young Andy is destroyed. Credits appear over his bloody grinning face. Over his bloody face. It's not like cut to black. It's like you have to sit with that while the credits are rolling. I have been watching the scene for 33 years,

and I wrote, What the Fuck Man, in my notes yesterday. So yeah, so in the shooting script, here's how it's described. Cooper looks at the sink at his personal effects. He picks up the toothbrush, squeezes some toothpaste, on it and lifts it to his mouth. He holds it in front of his mouth, looks into the mirror and smiles brightly. Looking into the mirror, staring back at him, is the face of Bob.

So, like, that's kind of what happens here. But you add the truly demented upsetting, why is Agent Dale Cooper squeezing out the entire tube of toothpaste into the sink, like, what is happening now? And then the smash in the blood and the grinning and the, how is Annie mockingly, as you say? Like, it's so... He's our hero. He's become a demon.

And like, if he just smiles in the mirror and smiling back at him as Bob, we get that message too. But Lynch is like, let's make it bloody. Let's make it violent. Let's make it jeering. We're jeering at you. And we're jeering at, like, a character that you love. And that is what we're doing. And Cooper is always immaculate.

His hair is perfect. His suit is perfect. And we're messing him up. And, you know, so there's a bunch of different ways to look at it. And I remember at the time not being very thoughtful about a lot of things. I was a kid. Even at that time thinking, like, oh, well, this is, they were trying. to get a season three, you have a cliffhanger.

And what cliffhanger is bigger than your hero becoming a villain? Like, okay, it was, and in a way, I was thinking it was cynical. You know, and then I was angry, because how could you do that to me and to the fans of the show? I was that guy. You should have, if I have read it existed, Reddit Jr., little dial-up Reddit, look out. What I'm left with now, and I'm really wondering what your impression of this is, both maybe you watched it later, but how you felt about at the time versus post-return, where you are in the world,

where you are with receiving art now, is it's just incredibly dark and sad. It's just an incredibly dark and sad conclusion for the whitest night to be corrupted and to sit with that and to live with that. And that that in and of itself maybe is an ending. And for me, my wrestling with the show over these years has been trying to make peace with that as an ending,

because it is the ending. At least so we thought. There wasn't an alternate version where he came back and conquered Bob in the fall of 91 because that didn't happen. Right. Yeah, the corruption of Dale Cooper, I think is, I think it's one of the best endings of any show ever. I think that image, that moment, and what that does to how you go back and watch the entire show. Because as you said, like, when you watch it now and Dale Cooper comes to town and you're like, is he apple pie?

Like, is he? Or, you know, what lurks, what looks at the heart of all of us? And the thing about Dale Cooper, again, I've read a million interpretations of both this finale and the return. And they're almost all deeply plausible and satisfactory. Like, there's just so many, there's so many wonderful, brilliant, you know, pouring over every single detail and coming up with these massive connections that I could never think of, incredible stuff. And they're often thrilling, I should say. Because they're grabbing the same Legos and building some. something beautiful. And then the next one is taking the same pile of Legos and building something

completely different. And I'm like, well, these are the Legos. I recognize them. And that's, I mean, that's what I love about both of these finale is, so there's this Lynch quote about, like, an ambiguous ending. And he says, an unsolved mystery is frustrating, but it's like a gift. It gives birth to ideas. It makes you think, dream. A story has no end. Some things come to a conclusion and something's dangled out there. And that's sort of the way it is in life. Great. Lines. What it means then is that whenever we go back and rewatch Twin Peaks, it meets us where we are in our life. And so the way we interpret it has as much to do with what we're bringing to the table

as what the show itself is bringing to the table. And that's incredibly satisfactory to me. Really nourishing its art. That's what art is, you know. I think that's beautifully said. For a long time, I wouldn't even have answered the question if it stuck the landing. because I was like, no, it didn't land. Because there's a denial, you know.

And I think this speaks to the kind of, sometimes I think understandable, but, you know, this comes out in some of the, you know, you're alluding to my feelings about theories. Like, I am increasingly defensive and, you know, and bothered by like some parisocial elements of fandom because there's a sense that we are owed things. And what I hear in that is often an extension of the way people are not dealing

with their own lives because in our own lives, we are not owed anything and we can't control things, you know. And so I recognize in the same way that like, this is all very peaksy and Twin Peaks, two, doppelganger, all of it, I'm really wrestling with my own younger self and experience because I am both upset but also embarrassed at the degree to which I was upset by the show because it didn't give me what I personally wanted and needed, which was, you know, I'm not saying it was a ribbon at the end of all my contributions to larger Twin Peak Society. but I didn't like none of us.

I didn't like uncertainty. I didn't want uncertainty. I didn't want to live in a world where good people could go bad or people could vanish or I might never know. And this show being my favorite was just this like open wound about that

for so long. And so as I said earlier, like buying the shooting script of Firewalk with me, I think I've told the story before on a podcast, but like Firewalk with me when I heard it was coming,

I was like, thank God. They're as mad about this as I am. They're going to end it. No. And I was, I did a school exchange trip to Europe in 1992. My parents met me and took me to France. I'm lucky. This is a lucky story.

A young 15-year-old boy on vacation with his parents, only child. So cool. We're walking in Paris. And Firewalk with me has just debuted at Cannes. And it is open in cinemas in Paris three months before it opens in the U.S. And young 15-year-old boy says, mom and dad, can you take me to see this movie with just you in a movie theater? You were like, you saw the opportunity to be the most insufferable version of yourself,

and you're like, I must have it. We all must take that. Yeah, of course, obviously, yeah. Now, the second takeaway was, oh, French movie theaters are nice. There's like velvet-covered seeds, and my dad ordered a beer. I needed a beer because I watched Firewalk with me with my parents at age 15, which I don't think I've ever recovered from. Horrible, yeah.

But Firewalk with me gives you no clothes. The shooting script has a few references. There's some sense of like a larger story here, but it is a brilliant, difficult, furious, furious movie. I really, I love the redemption arc that Firewalk with me has had. You know, it dib as it can. It's, it's reviled. It's, you know, hate it.

And now, and again, a true detective colon, night country is, we're just in the midst of it. We were just talking about this in the episode that just aired last week, which is the episode three of that season, where we get a lengthy flashback with the murder victim. And I was talking to Rob about this idea of, like, getting to know Laura Palmer alive and vital and her story does so much to undo the bad version of the story that a lot of other creators have taken, which is just like the beautiful dead girl, who we never, who is an in inigma. And that's such a great thing about her. And Lynch,

telling Laura Palmer's story and Firewalk with me from her point of view is one of my favorite things that he's ever done, honestly. I love that point. And I also, it makes me think of something you said so wisely before, which is about like the show meets us where we are. And one thing also that I'm critical of, but I'm really being self-critical of, which is that as a totally fine and relatively comfortable 13-year-old, I had no conversation with the story of a traumatized girl. the humanity of it, her father, the sexual violence, all of it meant nothing to me. What meant more to me was, oh, there's a mythology about demons and owls, and there's secret alien stuff.

Like, yeah, that I'm in a vibe with. And it helped me avoid the hideous truth at the heart of the show. And one thing about David Light, I mean, there are many things about David Lynch. He doesn't let you do that. he does not let you take comfort in the more familiar hideaways of culture. He brings you back to it. He keeps bringing you back to it with a relatively straightforward honesty that I find, you know, it's never comfortable, but it's essential.

Yeah, that discomfort. And, you know, take it back to that Audrey's scene in the season two finale, the discomfort in just watching this man shuffle around. This old man. And like in the return finale, which we're going to talk about, just watching people drive silently in a car for a very long period of time as your dread and your discomfort builds. And there's just a lot of confidence. It takes so much confidence to do that in a, you know, a network television show. And we keep talking about night country, you know,

it's an unfair comparison, but night country, if I was going to criticize it at all, and I'm sure I will continue to, you know, it'll probably be done by the time this podcast comes up, is full of needle drops. It's busy. It's noisy. And Lynch famously, you know, he's, it's, He does his own soundage. I mean, he works with people, but he's obsessed with the way things sound, and whether it's the way Cooper's shoes land on the floor, the check floor of the red room, or it's the lack of comfort that songs can give us.

You know, we're just driving. We're just there. You can't look away. And that's sometimes what life is like. So this is a long journey to say that the making peace with the ambiguity of season two finale just really changed how I look at everything, whether it's TV shows when I became a TV critic or paintings or whatever

because you can't, and I know people are going to say, listen to this, I know I do this because I can't help, but I'm still a fan. You talk about the idealized version of what you wish it was, but Twin Peaks, like the way my dad used to do when the cat would throw up, would hold the cat's face in front of it, as if somehow the cat's like, what?

The cat was probably like, cool, this is a new thing I've never seen before even though it happened five minutes ago. But the idea of like it holds your nose to it to teach you something. That's what Twin Peaks kept doing. Don't call the ASPCA. My parents no longer have pets, not for legal reasons.

No, and I think I do want to go back and clarify one thing I said, because I do think that all stories, if there are any good, should meet you where you are in your life. You're always bringing something to the stories that you read or consume. It's just with Twin Peaks or Lynch in general, there's so much negative space for you to fill that it just invites that much more of you into collaborative storytelling, which is...

I agree. I agree. But there's something his silence matters, not just the silence in the scenes, but his refusal to engage with your ideas other than to sort of smile helps. Because it weirdly, that encourages, I think, a better spirited, good faith theorizing

because there is, because God's not talking back. The worst version of this is, like, I think when you talk about like TV theory trauma, Westworld Season 1 a season of television that I greatly enjoyed actually

and a great theory show and a show that Reddit was a bit ahead of where the show Reddit was clever than the show in that season.

That happened. Okay. And I think if that's true, if you look at the crowdsourcing, if you look at like, you know, all the, you know, chimps typing Hamlet

out on Reddit, like they're going to stumble upon what is happening. Like, That's just true. That's what the Reddit detectives do. They're just freeze-framing everything. We didn't used to have that way of watching television, but we do now, et cetera.

What Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan then did, unfortunately, is they were like, we're going to make the subsequent seasons so incomprehensible. We're going to make them gibberish so people cannot possibly crack the code of what's going on. But then the entire storytelling apparatus suffers because they're talking about. trying to out clever the clever Reddit detectives. And again, that's the creators being too online, too much too engaged. I think Lynch is genuinely the platonic ideal of just sort of, no, it's up to you. This is not to get too heady before we even talk about the second finale, but like, what is the role of an artist?

And in a prestige television, highly corporatized streaming environment, the role of an artist is to be an architect at your best, right? you build something that is that is load-bearing for theories or character or emotion, David Lynch is a fisherman. You know, he's not interested in that. There is no, because what you just sketched out, which I agree with, is Nolan and Joyer very clever, which is a good thing, I think, broadly in life. And they are like, we're going to outsmart you with our beautiful and intricate design

so that you can't come at me and say, A, I figured it out, but also you can't say, B, ah, this is inconsistent because if he was, X was this, then Y would be Z. Lynch is like, now the giant is a fireman. Now David Bowie is a tea kettle. Something, and the only thing he

said about that, that I love, is he said, in response, I think it was like either the tree or the teapot or one of those things in the return. He was like, necessity is a mother of invention, right? Like, these various actors are not available. So, we figured,

something out. So let's fast forward. There were rumors about reboots. There's all these things. This was, you know, in many ways, the first fan-obsessed show that ended in cliffhanger. So when it became Reboot City out there, a lot of people were looking. Showtime says yes. Showtime pulls the trigger. Showtime says there's going to be 10 more episodes of Twin Peaks and they give them some money. They have no idea what they're doing. I mean, Showtime has no idea what David Lynch and Mark Frost are really doing. They have some script ideas and stuff. The people on the show don't really have an idea what they're doing. They're not being told.

They're not being shown other pages. This ends up being an 18-hour experience that debuts in 2017. It's only Kyle McLaughlin that got all the scripts, right? Kyle McLaugh and got all that. That's it. Yes. And I think it's worth noting early on that for as bold and idiosyncratic and challenging as the work was, this really was done in a...

different spirit, I think, than a lot of other, not just reunions, but maybe other TV projects, which is to say, David Lynch got his family together again in a way that is deeply moving. And I think relevant when you have a show where the creator and director is a character who takes his two leads who have been with him for his own career by the hand and leads them to a mystery door. It's fair to bring in the real world to it. because this not just his normal collaborators like Dwayne Dunham or Sabrina Johnson, like the people that he's worked with forever, but also so many actors that he hadn't seen in so long and not just the Twin Peaks actors.

There's a beautiful story about how when he was trying to get this going, no one knew where Everett McGill was, who plays Big Ed Hurley. And he went on Twitter. This is so pure. David Lynch said, hi, Twitter, friends. Does anyone know how to get in touch with Everett McGill or find him? I'd like to talk to him about something. No one knew where he was, including people who'd written about Twin Peaks.

Someone's like he's playing in an R&B band in Arizona. He got a phone number that turned out to be Everett McGill's ex-mother-in-law's house. David Lynch called that number, and Everett McGill was there. And if he had called any other day, he wouldn't have been there. And they talked, and they talked for an hour or two, and he never said anything about Twin Peaks of Return. He just said, do you have a better number to reach you on? And Everett McGill is on Twin Peaks of Return.

So, like, and then the next level is that, like, Catherine Colson, who played The Log Lady, who's been a friend of David Lynch for decades, was very ill. And she's on screen in this. Miguel Ferrer had cancer and is on screen in this. He's so good in this. Miguel Ferrer is so, like, every scene with him, knowing, watching it knowing that this is, like, the last thing we were going to see him in, every scene is, like, precious and you're like, don't want it to end. That's an incredibly emotional aspect of watching this. season of television. Warren Frost filmed a scene before he passed away.

Peggy Lipton was in it before she passed away from cancer. It is a beautiful thing, and it was a beautiful thing for the people involved. And, like, again, as an audience, we should be treating it like, what's it doing for us? But some of that spirit is in it. And when I did interview Lynch about it, that was the only time he really gave me an answer. And I asked him about the people who had lost along the way. And of course, he took way too long to answer, making everyone in the audience uncomfortable. And then he went, solid gold.

That's how you felt about working with his friends again. Absolutely top tier. It's maybe your best impression I've ever heard. It's really good. Thank you. Well, you study a guy long enough. This was exhilarating. It was confounding.

It had moments of like one-to-one, like Big Ed and Norma get together finally. And it's a beautiful thing. Can I confess something, which is that sometimes to feel things inside of my blackened heart, I will watch either or both the Otis Redding dance scene from the Leftover's finale. And then usually I'll chase it with the Otis Redding, Norma and Big Ed get together a scene in Twin Peaks of Return. It's beautiful. It's absolutely gorgeous. And by the way, I didn't allude to this, but we recorded Leftovers last week.

So the Leftovers will be preceding this in Sick the Landing. Exciting. That's a perfect example. episode of television. It is. And they have something to say to each other, I think, in the way, in terms of, like, what we owe people and letting the mystery be. Anyway, specifically, part 18, like a lot of contemporary finale, although Lynch wouldn't know this if you said this to him, Twin Peaks to Return does the thing where the penultimate episode finishes the story, such as it is. I mean, we're not going to get into it now, but whether it's, whether it's

Dougie or the apparition or the experiment, or Freddie, the British guy who has a lot of a rubber glove that allows him to punch Bob into non-existence. We're back at the Great Northern. Cooper is, after 16 or 17 hours, is back in Twin Peaks. And they have seemingly reached the end of this road, but it's not. And Gordon Cole walks Diane and Cooper back to the basement of the Great Northern. And then we have this episode. And it's really intense. The end of 17 is also like the undoing, right, of like, they go into it and there's this suggestion that he goes back in time. He was the one

watching Laura in Firewalk with me from the bushes and that he can somehow not just solve the crime but make it so that the crime never happened. But in part 18 at the beginning, speaking of Orpheus and Eurydice, he's leading her through the woods potentially towards life and their hands disconnect and he loses her. I love that. I love the use of the

Firewalk with me footage, the black and white Firewalk with me footage in the penultimate. I, in my rewatch, I queued up 18 and I was watching like 15 minutes of 18, the A sensible finale. And then I was like, nope.

I got to go back and watch 17 and 18 together. Like, you really need to, you need that and they aired together, I believe. Yeah, they did. They both aired. So it's, you know, similar to the original finale. It's like a two-parter. But yeah, and I love a finale like that. You know, the

sort of Thrones approach of putting everything, throwing everything in the wall in episode nine, and then what happens in episode 10? And then you clear your throat and see. But so, as a modern viewer of television and a fan of this world, like, where were you psychologically on this night? Did you expect anything, you know, which is sort of a hard question to ask? Did you hope anything?

This is, by the way, this is September 3rd, 2017. We're talking about part 18. What is your name directed by David Lynch written by Mark Frost and David Lynch? And I'll say my attitude at this point was, and we were covering it on the watch, I was just grateful. I was grateful for all of it. And I figured I would sort out my more complicated feelings later and I still have some about the Audrey Horn stuff. But like I was grateful for anything I got. And yes. And I felt it again here at the 40 minute mark of this finale, speaking, I became the giant in season two. And I was like, it is happening again. It is happening again.

I'm like Dr. Manhattan on the moon being like, it is 2017. And I'm sitting here realizing I'm running out of time on my favorite show ever. It is 1991. I'm sitting here realizing I'm running out of time of my favorite show ever. I couldn't help it. It was still part of me. Because we've been podcasting for so long, I don't want to like, we don't need to recap every moment of this incredibly intense and disturbing finale. But essentially, Cooper and Diane willingly enter a different universe and become different people where he finds Laura Palmer living as Carrie Page in Odessa, to Texas and brings her back to Twin Peaks to finish, like, complete the circle and fix things. And that is not how it goes.

I want to say a couple things. First of all, just experientially in 2017, we were watching this and covering TV the way that we did. We should note that for seven awful weeks, Game of Thrones season seven was airing at the same time as Twin Peaks to return on Sunday night. And we didn't have screeners for either of those shows, right? They didn't give out screeners for either of those shows. So you had to make a choice. and since I was covering Thrones intensively, for those seven weeks I had.

And so we were clear by the time we got to the finale, but I just remember I was so resentful because I had started the return free and clear, and then I had to like, but what an embarrassment of riches. So essentially I would like do my Thrones thing, which was like an all-nighter, insomniac, terrible experience, and then my reward was I got to watch the return.

I don't know that I had expectations because Twin Peaks is so good. at training you out of expectations. And there is earlier in this season that is 11, the incredibly bizarre black and white. That's eight. That's the one that people pull out and are like, this is one of David Lynch's best movies. It is a black and white episode that essentially suggests that the first nuclear test made famous by the film Oppenheimer. And also by history.

Is responsible for the evil in America, if not the world. that it somehow birthed Bob and all of everything else that's still to come. That episode sort of broke me of trying to have expectations about what was to come, I think. And I wasn't doing like theories around the show, though I know people had their theories and they called the Diane reveal in episode 17 and all that sort of stuff. That's not how I was interacting with the show. I was just, again, sort of letting trying to dream along with the show as best I could. I had such a good time watching both the season two finale and 17 and 18 of the return

and creating like a new unified theory of what went wrong for Dale Cooper, which again is just sort of just makes sense for me right now this week and who knows how I would feel if I watched it next week. And that just opened up for me this idea of what a joy to always be able to come back to this and always think about it in a new light in a new way. It's informed greatly. My interpretation this time is informed greatly by the fact that we're in the middle of a true detective season. And I'm thinking about what it means to be a guardian, a keeper of the peace, and what you have to sacrifice, what you're not allowed to have in order to perform that role effectively.

and the inherent corruption of touching the darkness in that kind of way. But I love this finale, and I love, I think the final, it's so uncomfortable, but I think the final, what year is this, scream, all of that. Sorry, do you want to say? Yeah, let's just say it. I mean, Cooper and Diane, the beginning of the return, the giant who's now known as the fireman, says three things you have to remember, 430, Richard and Linda, two birds, one stone. And of course, Dale Cooper's like, I understand.

Sure you do, buddy. 17 hours later, he and Diane drive 430 miles away from Twin Peaks where they encounter an electrical grid. And they're like, if we do this, we don't know who will be. They drive through it. It's suddenly night. They go to a motel. Diane sees a doppelganger. With the same music that played during the episode 8, Atomic Bomb episode playing,

they have one of the most excruciating sex scenes in filmed history. where she is covering his face and he is impassive. He wakes up alone the next morning in a different hotel room with a dear John letter to Richard from Linda. He's in a different place, completely different car. He is an FBI agent again. He stops at a diner called Judy's. Judy is a significant word in Twin Peaks.

It's David Bowie doesn't want to talk about Judy and firewalk with me. Some people have said, like, this is the manifestation of evil. Someone is like there's a Chinese word that it's relevant. I mean, there's a whole thing. But this is Judis. And at Judis, he's asking about another waitress. He basically disarms some sexual harassing cowboys by stealing their guns and shooting one in the foot.

And then it's just weirdly psychotic. He puts the guns in a deep friar and it's like stand away. I don't know if it's hot enough to make the bullets explode. He's very threatening. He's very unlike Dale Cooper that we have loved and been waiting for and have been denied for this season as he's been Dougie or he's been the evil doppelganger. he goes and he finds Laura Palmer

who says her name is Carrie Page she doesn't know who he is, she doesn't know who Sarah Leelan Palmer is, but she needs to get out of town because as we discover, she has shot a man through the head and his body is decomposing in the living room, and she's like, do I need a coat?

Colin Gawkela's face as whoever he is, Dale, Richard, whatever you prefer, is just sort of regarding this corpse is 10 on 10. It's incredible, and again, like this is Twin Peaks, right? We don't recognize these people. We don't know how they're behaving, but there's things. Like, no matter what she's calling herself, Laura Palmer is being preyed upon by violence, by men in shirts that looked like that.

You know, there's something here. How significant do you think it is when Cooper walks up to her door and she thinks she's Carrie Page? And he says, I think you're a girl. You're a girl named Laura Palmer. A girl. I think it's deeply significant. Yeah. Because I think this idea that she never got to live, she never got to become a woman.

But also his idea that he can just make it, it never happened. You're still a girl named Laura Palmer. You're not the woman called Laura Palmer. They then drive, and I Google Map this. This would be a 28-hour straight shot from Odessa, Texas to Snoqualmie, Washington. We feel a lot of it. No, not much small talk, no music. No.

And they get to the Palmer household, and it's very creepy, and the woman answers the door isn't Sarah Palmer. It's actually the real-life woman who owns that house in Snowqualmie, Washington, who David Lynch liked the look of and cast. She says her name is Alice Tremand, which is a significant name in Twin Peaks deep fandom. A demonic associated name. Yes, of the evil people above the convenience store. This person whispers that they don't know any Sarah Palmer,

that the house was bought from in Mrs. Chalfont, which is another significant name, the grandson who had the Garmin Bozia and the weird mask. Cooper seems to not recognize these names at all in the significance of the demon stuff. But basically, like, and this is the moment where I'm staring at the clock. I'm like, are you kidding me?

Are you kidding me? Nobody recognizes it. Laura's just look, Carrie, is just looking around moonly. It's a very intense and good Shirley performance. They walk back onto the street. he just doesn't accept it. He looks back at the house. The lights are odd.

What year is it, he says? And then we hear Grace Zabriski's voice calling to Laura, Sarah Palmer, and Cheryl Lee Uncorks her latest and greatest and last scream, a scream that blows out the lights on the house and blows out the electricity on the fictional world that is Twin Peaks forever. Right? And we're done. I love it. Huh?

I love it. I mean, yes. Tell me why. I think I agree with you, but tell me why you love it. And tell me also, if you can, how it deepens your larger love of the entire thing. Because this is a rare show. I mean, we're talking for such great length about something we both love. But these are two finalies separated by decades that are talking to each other, I think, in a significant way, even if they're never telling us what we think we want to hear. Because I love shows about mess and messy emotions and fallible humans, I think failable humans, I think fail. is so much more interesting than success. And the fact that Dale Cooper fails twice, at least as far as we see, who knows what happens after, you know, she screams the lights out. But the fact that he fails twice to save anyone is fascinating to me.

And the fact that it just opens the door and invites us to wonder about what the fuck happened forever or for the next 25 years if we put David Lynch in some cryogenic chamber or whatever and thaw him out in 25 years for another go at it. I think the... Oh, he'll be fine. The smoking is preserving him.

He'll be here. Have you ever watched him make quinoa on YouTube? I have. He eats a lot of quinoa and broccoli, so I think he will be fine. I watch him do anything. Yeah, so I think that that anxiety space, that thinking, I just, I like what it invites. That there are no easy answers and there are no happily ever afters.

And, you know, as much as anyone did give interviews about what it meant, Mark Frost did say, you know, someone was like, is this a happy any or unhappy any? And he's like, neither both. It's like life, you know, and I like that a lot. And here's the thing, like, what do we want from things we, want more of. What do we want when they come back? Do we want to be comforted? Do we want them to just be the same? That's not really a fair ass because nothing is ever the same. I was angry at the return at a certain point for how long it felt wicked and cruel for how long they made us wait

for Dale Cooper to come back. That was wild. That was like absolutely wild. Because we had already waited 25 years. And then I, and it's called the return. And you're like, where's Dale Cooper? And then I fell in love with Dougie and then I was like sort of eased into it. So I did get, I got mad at that, but I did not get mad at the finale. And I want to just really quickly and then I want to hear a thought, but like, you know,

we all in the last couple weeks were grappling with the finale of the curse, which I think is similarly like confounding and open ended and invites all these you know, theories etc. Well, the curse where the curse

lacked for me is my emotional investment in those characters. And I am so emotionally invested in Dale Cooper. And so the power that that has over me in this moment of his yet another failure for Dale Cooper is juicy. I think that's beautifully said, and I totally agree with you. I think one of the things that I realized was a feature, not a bug, was like, I was trying to articulate this someone yesterday being like, you know, I don't know. Like Bobby, for example, gets a redemption arc. Bobby becomes a cop and he makes peace with his father and he gets these opportunities. Shelley is still working at the diner.

Audrey, who is a, you know, sexy, as brightest, most exciting character, is trapped in either hell or a feedback loop or a mental hospital. And the implication that is buttressed by the Mark Frost book is that she was hospitalized after the bank explosion, raped by Cooper's evil doppelganger and gave birth to the devil, who's Richard in the series, and has never been freed of it. And I'm like, well, wait a second now. Like, why does Bobby get it? And why do these women get stuck?

And the person I was talking to was like, because the show's honest. That the show that the people who are stuck over time, like, there is an honest reckoning with like, happy stuff doesn't necessarily happen in the years we're not watching the show. And if we ask to look in on them again in the terrarium of their fictional universe, it's not going to have gone the way we necessarily wanted it to have gone. The thing with Audrey had me Googling like David Lynch-Shirley. Fen, like, beef. I was like, are, is he mad at Sherilyn Fenn? And there is some evidence that that might be true. And I was just like, I was... Well, the later stuff I saw was, it does seem like she didn't like the scripts that were written for her. But what I read was that they sat down and worked different stuff out. I don't know what that could have been, considering what we ended up with,

but it was odd. But it was, but artistically, I'm willing to go along with it. I think the thing that is wild to me, and again, upon this rewatch, is a larger, and I want to be clear. Like, I love your theory. I love Jeff Jensen, who is the goat recapper, writing 19 pages the night the return finale aired, saying things like, and I'm just going to quote it just so people understand, like, the level of this. You should check this out on Entertainment Weekly. So where was Cooper? He wasn't in a timeline where Laura never died because the retcon didn't stick. Cooper was in another modal reality of his subconscious creation, a world of mystery in Garmin Bozia to give himself purpose. He was the experiment and he was Red Room Parasite all in one. But I also think he had

created a snare, a world of negative energy to lure demons now looking for a new home, to which I say, yes, queen, go, go off, go off, go off, all the way off. I totally love it. I love Jeff. But when I watched this, I was like, this is so weirdly about our obsession with going back. It's weirdly about an archetypal character, the Boy Scout FBI agent, who doesn't understand what his job is. Because his job, theoretically, was to solve the crime of Laura Palmer, just like the job of Twin Peaks was to solve the crime of who killed Laura Palmer. By the end of this return, he's trying to undo the crime via metaphysical actions so that it never happened at all. He's trying to bring her back to life. He's trying to be God. And that is wild. And is that accurate to what

audiences want too, which is like, do we want at the end? I think Lynch knows this, that even me, even you probably, the people who are like on board for David Lynch, when that door opened the first door and it's Carrie Page, I wanted her to be like, I'm Laura Palmer. Why? I live here. I wanted Grace Zabriski to be in that house so badly. And I fell for it again. I was Charlie Brown and Lucy in the football, you know. And I kind of, because I'm old now, like that he got me. He pointed out what I want, you know, and that he wouldn't give it to me. I thought that was important. But maybe that says more about my psychology than it ought to. is tomorrow, you said. I'm moving it up. I think that the idea that it's so funny because in trying to sell Twin Peaks the return

to us, Showtime, given that they were not allowed to tell us anything about what the season was about, sold it a lot on nostalgia fumes. We got like the double our diner crew, we got all the returning characters in their costumes in Entertainment Weekly.

That's what we were going off of nostalgia fumes heading into the season. And And the bait and switch was there from the jump because we're spending times with like Amanda Seiford's character. Like the next generation, like all this stuff is happening. We're not spending time with those characters that we were promised. We had to wait forever for Dale Cooper. We're not even spending time in Twin Peaks.

We're largely just across the mountain west. And so that idea of you can't go home again, you can't go back. It's not just that no, no one, the Palmer's don't actually live here. There's a real family who lives here. Right. But also when they drive through the town and you see the double-ar dinner at night, It's Twin Peaks at night, and it's so unsettling and so off kilter of that sun-drenched Americana, apple pie thing that Twin Peaks is supposed to sell us. I just, yeah, I love that interpretation as well. Every interpretation is welcome to me of this finale. It's also interesting to note, and by the way, the thing I was reaching for before, that Judy sounds like Zhao, a Chinese word that means to explain, and that's the most evil thing in David Lynch's universe. I kind of buy that. He's a funny guy, too.

The fact that we got this at all is a miracle. The fact that it, none of it made, the fact that it continued to not make sense in the culture, even though we were like, well, of course Twin Peaks is coming back, because the rest of development's coming back, and Will and Grace is coming back, but Twin Peaks isn't that. This is David Lynch.

So Entertainment Weekly was like, okay, a show's coming back. We'll put them on the cover again. And then this was the show. And we're talking about how 10 million people watched the first finale 30 years ago. Now, streaming is different. Pay TV is different. people watch things on demand at different times,

and those are the metrics that determine and awards, which this got none, the metrics are like what determines the success. But purely, let's just be like, Randian, objectivist, like, let's look at the numbers. Twin Peaks of Return was getting 200,000 viewers on Sunday nights on Showtime. The Curse is getting 20,000,

a few years later. Now, again, nobody's pointing to those numbers. Showtime is now a subsidiary of Paramount Plus, and it's blah, blah, blah. But, like, this is, this show, was preaching only to its dwindling choir, that's okay. That's not a bad thing.

Because I think that it was, I think that it was really tough. I think that it was a very challenging watch and experience, even though it had these moments of incredible beauty and light. Well, to your point, we are in that peak TV micro-targeting era. And again, the counterprogramming was Game of Thrones season seven. That was like the original going up against cheers.

It was horrifying. The fact that they, and I mean this jokingly and lovingly, quote unquote, failed both times. Like the Twin Peaks, when Twin Peaks was on, everyone was like, oh, it was ahead of its time. And it influenced everything. And it did. And then it came back into an ecosystem that, again, this is 2017 when people were still bullish on go, go, go, we're spending money and we're making things for everyone, blah, blah, blah. It failed in that ecosystem, too.

it didn't win Emmys. It didn't get new fans. I don't know how many people it drove to watch the first version of the series on streaming. Now on Paramount Plus. It did get a standing ovation at can. Yeah, as it should. As opposed to David Lynch getting booed for Firewalk with me. That was a very important moment in the culture of my life.

And it's so funny because in the echo chamber, the media elite echo chamber, everyone I knew was watching two weeks their turn. So it is like a... Totally. It's sort of a... It doesn't matter how... Sometimes it doesn't matter how many people are watching. It matters like who's watching.

But at the same time, it's just, it double mystifies us how many people watch the first season of Twin Peaks. How did that happen? How did it happen? But it mattered. I think that being exposed to stuff, unexpected weird stuff matters. Whether you become TV critics or like we did or you become a stockbroker or you run a bank until you're as old as. Dale Mibler, like, I think that stuff matters. And I think that my takeaway now, I mean, if we're going to do this, like, this show just,

it's Twin Peaks. I don't think you can do the, like, did this stick the landing? Because I don't think this show recognizes air or ground. I just don't think it can be conceived of that way. But I do believe, especially now a few years later, I cannot believe that in my lifetime, I got this. I got as a kid, as a teenager, and then as an adult, I got pushed off my square so deeply by something that I loved and trusted,

that I have to keep wrestling with the uncertainty, that my hero was a villain, that happy endings aren't possible, that solving crimes is an abstract concept. I'm going to say what I realized about myself 30 years ago, which is that I feel grateful. I love that. I think we have to say, again,

this is not an easy binary, yes or no. I think the stickiness of the image of, of Dale Cooper blood down his face grinning at the camera. And then evoking that same shock and horror with Shirley's

screaming at the end of the return. Like those shocks to the system that are so, that any TV creator would sell their teeth for. Like, they're constantly trying to shock and surprise in awe

audiences. Like, that's all they want. And shock and awe is not the only and best mode of telling stories, I believe. But when it's Lynch and it's stabbing at the beating heart of what we hold dearest in terms of safety and good and all this stuff, these are smashes, smashola finalities for me, I think. I agree. I think I appreciate you putting on that hat and being like, I can't believe something made me feel that way. You think you know what the range of possible.

musical notes on the TV keyboard are and then he finds another one. And if the end message of this is you can't go home again and you're doomed to just retramatize yourself over and over if you dare to try, shit. I mean, it's like the first series influenced so many people.

Good shows, bad shows, good art, bad art, good lives, bad lives, probably. This one is also, despite the advanced age of him in many of his collaborators, I think it's still kind of a rallying call. It's like, do not settle. Yeah. Do not. You shouldn't return. I mean, you can make another 18-hour what the fuck, but you're not returning to what you did before because you have changed. And even the idea of like, which one is the real Cooper? Well, he's older now. His face looks different. Everybody's different.

Nobody is the same. And that's part of the beauty of it. And I mean, Lynch himself, I mean, Not everyone gets to do this. But I remember that Showtime makes this deal with Lynch. And then he's like, nope, it's not of the terms I want. Like, they announced that it's happening. Oh, he walked away. And then he walked away until he could get it on the exact terms, the exact amount of artistic freedom that he desired.

Lynch has talked a lot about how much he loves Franz Kafka. That's not a surprise. Jeff Jensen, who is the third chair, the little man from another place of this podcast haunting it. I don't know, he's not a little man. He's very tall. Yeah, that doesn't work at all. he's the giant. He put this quote in his epic finale recap, and I feel like we should, we should leave listeners with this, which is, this is a Kafka quote,

don't bend, don't water it down, don't try to make it logical, don't edit your own soul to the fashion, rather follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Jeff. That's Dale Cooper's credo. That's David Lynch's credo. And I wish it was the credo of more people who are making television shows, regardless of whether they get the chance to write their ending or reboot it or not. Let's make it our podcast credo.

Let's make it your therapy session, credo. Let's just do it, you know? Honestly, I do that on Zoom, too, so like, this is how we're halfway there. And thank you. I don't know, do you have a super bill? Do you take copay? We'll figure this out. We're done.

Joanna, obviously we could podcast about Twin Peaks for another few hours or a few days or weeks, but I feel like we got our arms around the ending, and maybe we'll get a chance to begin again. Wow, Andy, wow. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It doesn't work backwards, but I appreciate it. I feel like wow Joe, no, even that. Then you would just be wow, OJ, wow, yeah.

Oh, that's worse. Speaking of early 90s, thanks for joining me. Twin Peaks, it was the best. This episode of Stick the Landing was produced by Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady, and our theme music was composed by my good friend, Giancarlo Volcano. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality, an elderly widow working at an aquarium.

Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their crumudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Remarkably bright creatures is now playing, only on Netflix.