The Watch - 'Twin Peaks,' 'Alien Covenant,' and the Highs and Lows of IP (Ep. 152)

Episode Date: May 22, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald celebrate the return of 'Twin Peaks' by giving it "The Belt" and discussing the arc of the first couple episodes (2:30). Later, writer Adam Nayman joins to discuss director Ridley Scott and his latest film, 'Alien Covenant' (27:24). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and Seatkeek will send you $20 after you've made your first ticket purchase. Download the Seat Geek app today and enter promo code watch. And then you find out the Man in the Trench code is you. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the Ringer.com. And joining me in the studio, he just brought me a latte, weirdly enough. It's Andy Greenwald.

Chris, this is a big, big Monday. Yeah. For your boy. Shit is. No longer a boy. No. A little bit older now. But this is a big one. I mean, I think we have some house cleaning to get through. But before we do, let me just say, Guys, Twin Peaks came back last night. Yeah. The gum I like just came back into style. It's not the same gum, though, dog. The gum has a lot of flavor.

Really quickly, house cleaning. So today we are talking Twin Peaks. Me and Andy talked about that for about half an hour. Then Adam Neiman was nice enough to call in. And Adam and I talk about Alien Covenant for like about 15 minutes towards the end there. So you got yourself Twin Peaks and Alien today. We will be. That's some rich IP, by the way.

Yeah. The Annihilation Pod, the Double Down Book Club. If you have not ready yet, now it's. now is the time. You have a couple days. I mean, you know, you could listen to the podcast, whatever. This is, we're kind of revealing our knowledge of how podcasts work here. Apparently, you don't have to listen to it. Not necessarily.

The second you download it. Yeah, it's not Snapchat. It doesn't disappear after five seconds. This will be an evergreen. We're going to post the Annihilation podcast next Monday Memorial Day. So you're at the beach, you're doing whatever you're doing. Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, guys. Just think about dystopia. So we'll be, you know, if you guys need to, just Jeff Vandermeer, it's called Annihilation.

It's a quick read. It's very fun. It's a very exciting read. So if you're looking for something to read over the long weekend, knock that out. And that's pretty much it. Thursday, we have a guest coming in, Lizzie Goodman, who's new oral history of New York Rock from the early 21st century, meet me in the bathroom.

So we're excited to talk about strokes. Her book comes out this week. Yeah, White Stripes. And so that'll be dope. But let's get into these peaks, man. Now, you were very articulate last Thursday about it. Thank you. You've dived deep into your passion for it.

Deep passion. I sort of played the shepherd on that one. I, like, shepherded you into this. I would like to just get a little bit of an ISO ball here. And I'm going to say something without checking with you. Now, to be clear, how many did you watch? Two. Two premiered on Showtime.

I watched two. Four one up. That is very odd to me that they put four up. I can explain it to you. I can also say that your boy here stayed up way past his bedtime. You watch all four? Watch the third. Okay.

I have not watched the third yet. Based on the first two, I would like to give this show the belt. What? Yes. Let me, guys, it's still possible for there to be sparks in a relationship after this many years. I never let it be said, Chris here, he had a wall up when I walked into the studio. He's got a lot going on. He's basketball playoffs.

He's still thinking about how he's going to continue to celebrate my birthday even now that it's over. Yeah. I did not expect that. I thought you were about to go hard the other way. I can't remember the last time. I mean, like, yes, like when Atlanta came on or there's been other experiences, I'm sure. But, like, to have something be such a mystery, you know, when it's arriving, because, like, there's no real trailers. There was just these, like, shots of McLaughlin or whatever.

And some trees. They have not teased what it's about, what it would cover. I was so blown away by what I saw. Wow. I thought it was so fascinating. Yeah. I thought it was, I saw some people, and I'm really just going to probably punch out on the whole, like, conversation around the show, and so I'm finished watching it. But I saw some people be like, oh, this was sort of a little boring or a little bit patience testing.

I haven't felt an hour-long show go by that fast ever. Like, you know, there are 52-minute dramas that shall not be named that is, like, how many different other screens can I? I get going to get me through this 52 minutes. I was riveted, man. It is one of the American masters of visual storytelling, working in a zone that is like so far out there. Like you're not that dude. You can't mess with that.

Like if you think you have dream sequences, you don't have shit. David Lynch is here. He's got a bag of brain sitting on a tree branch talking to you about your doppelganger. There's a glass box in New York. I was blown away. I think we got invited to an after hours at that apartment once. Yeah, seriously.

To the 2004. Everyone just sitting on a couch looking at something. Yeah. And I know you might have different feelings because you were so excited to revisit the world and maybe you didn't get the world yet. No, here's what I think. First of all, I'm so happy to hear your enthusiasm. And I appreciated the compliment about how articulate I was last week because after we recorded and I was hype and I was hype last night to watch the show. I felt like maybe I didn't do a good job talking about it because what I don't think I said was just take everything you expect, wad it up and throw it away.

It's just going to be. This is going to be a purely sensory experience. And I felt very free, I have to tell you. I have been waiting on this cliffhanger for 26 years. But on some deep level, I didn't care. All I cared about was I just get to vibe on this again for a very long time, 18 hours of this. And it's hard to say that it met my. expectations because my expectations were just so peaceful.

I was like Jerry Horn tasting his new blend of Indica and Sativa in his muffin that he and his brother's office because there was a seven out of ten chance, six out of ten chance, maybe not with Lynch involved, that this was like another murder in Tweeks 25 years later and what does it tell us? So the thing to remember, like here's the thing to think about, all the strands they can pick up. And one of the things that was interesting about it is that the show that everyone loved. and what I mean, 35 million people watched this show in its first go-round, was they loved the weird underbelly of a town and a murder mystery.

During the course of those first 30 episodes that existed in the world, it went away from that. And it went away from it in ways that were banal. And then at the very end, in the finale, what we thought was the series finale, which proved to be incredibly relevant to the rest of it. And that was the last thing David Lynch did in this world. So I strongly recommend people. I mean, I assume people have watched a lot.

of the series, but it's worth rewatching the very end of the second season. That this was what the show was now, and it's really just David Lynch continuing to pick, pick at the outer layer of the epidermis of our reality. And I intentionally am using clinical words because it gets, it's rooted in the body. It's physical and it's gnarly and it's weird despite the dream sequences, you know. There's a patch of, I guess, human skin in your boy Shaggy's not. wasn't me Shaggy. And by the way, Matthew Liller deserves a lot more than being called Shaggy because he's so dope in this in the back of his trunk. You know, this is what this show is now.

And I was filled with joy and dread and laughter. And it was a total trip. Part of my trip was trying to just understand David Nevins, the president of Showtime's weekend. Because the shareholders of the company did watch this at some point, you know? They put Twin Peaks in the We are fucking Showtime dudes real at the beginning of the episode and they were like billions.

We did that. Ice juice. McLaughlin. Homeland. Carrie Matheson, there's stuff blowing up, guys. Unshameless, Emmy Rossum's going to kiss a dude and then this. And, you know, this was a gift to people who want to go basically

and take television peyote and enjoy David Lynch just stunting on people. This is not a television show as we have come to think of it in 2017. This is not a continuation. This is not nostalgia. This is not Gilmore Girls for more seasons.

I get the feeling like he's, that was one of the things that I was a little bit surprised by was how with it this show felt. Like Blackburn, is that the South Dakota town? Buckthorn. Buckthorn felt like a pop-up town that was like overrun with people who were in there for the... I mean, this is not in the show,

but who are in the Dakotas for the oil boom there and just these sort of like destroyed lives and these makeshift condos and apartments that they have there and then there's some small town America going on. And they've got Satan running around. You know, Darkdale is out there wearing a black leather coat. Dude.

And just with an army of meth heads just causing havoc and he's got J.J.L. Jennifer Jason in the next room over. Just eating funnions. I thought that, you know, so I was pleasantly surprised not only with the scope where you're going to New York and you're going to South Dakota. Let's just note that, that I believe the original series, the movie was slightly different, but the original series never left the region. It crossed the state line. It crossed into Canada.

But we never saw the larger world. People came to the town. Right. In the movie we saw, there was some scene set in Philadelphia at the FBI office. office. Yeah. But that was basically it. All of a sudden, we're in New York.

And I think that Alan Seppenwell noted this in his recap. Everything has establishing shots of New York. I have never seen Manhattan look that fucking crazy and terrifying in those opening pans. I mean, who knew Twin Peaks could go to New York? And that's actually kind of much like the guy staring at a glass box for untold amount of time waiting for something to happen. That in itself was a good metaphor for watching. Twin Peaks for waiting for Twin Peaks and a reflection of how David Lynch, as you said, is with it.

Because he is now saying, Twin Peaks now is a shorthand for a type of experience that has been diluted in other shows. What he's saying now is Twin Peaks doesn't have to be Cherry Pie at the Double R Diner, although I'm sure it will be soon enough. It can be a loft in New York. It can be South Dakota. It can be in this casino. Who knows where it's going to go?

So here's what I want to ask you. I feel like I know your sensibilities well enough to know that part of the for all the weirdness and all the boundary pushing and telling stories in different ways that happened in the original series, that part of the retraction there was also this underlying romance to the story, that he was playing around with melodrama

and almost like a Douglas Serky and kind of like, you know, sweep you up in my arms and kiss you in front of my motorcycle and all that, you know, they think of like very American, like classic American romance iconography. This is a horror movie. like deeply, deeply unsettling, you know, two kids having sex get killed. That's a horror staple.

You know, people, what's it behind the door? Like something is appearing that, you know, an apparition. It's eating people's faces. It's people are dis, you know, and there was a lot of body horror in the first twin peaks. But this is playing with the conventions of horror films in a way that is kind of like touching Kubrick more than anything. In keeping with that idea of the horror film, the most powerful weapon in Lynch's arsenal, I think, is the silent killer time. Yeah. And what I mean is it really has been 25, 26 years, depending when they filmed some of these scenes since we last saw a lot of these faces.

And I don't want to use the word ravages because it happens to all of us, and James Marshall still looks pretty tight. But both of Zardietti just finger-gunning it up. Sipping from the Getty found of youth. People have age. That's what happens to people. And it makes the weight of the shows, and in the early going, I would say, few direct continuations of what we had seen before. It makes them much more poignant. And to your point about the original being a lot about kind of teenage romance or romantic American Rockwellian dreams, now they get perverted, the scene at the bang bang when we see Shelley for the first time.

Chromax are on stage. I know. when they make eyes at each other, and they were never involved romantically, they just know things, it's very affecting, you know, because they're still doing teenage shit. And, you know,

obviously a big influence on the first season of Twin Peaks, at least in the iconography, was Archie and Betty and Veronica and these ideas of the teenage archetypes. We give Riverdale credit, you know, it's hard to even mention that word when we're actually talking about the real, the real like WMD source here of all of the stuff at Twin Peaks.

But we give a credit for and give Archie Comics credit for continually reinventing that particular wheel and showing us new versions or updated ideas for youth. Yeah, I mean, the opposite of this is the extension of it. This is picking it up later and showing what happens. I would almost suggest that at this point the archetypes that Twin Peaks is playing with have now, like, they're Sandra Bullock out there in space. They cut the cord, you know. Just to follow up on your moment of actual human kind of how touched you were to see

Madion Amic and James Marshall, I actually, albeit a very disturbing scene, was quite touched by the moment where it's Cheryl Lee, who's just like, I'm Laura Palmer, but I'm dead, but I'm still alive where I know her, and my arm's been back and that rendition of that speech, but with her 25 years later. and the fact that they're shooting it in reverse or whatever and he gives it that completely other world we feel. But even in that moment, she had that, there was sort of like that's all that needs to be said,

that this is an actress who's been defined by one role in which she was playing a corpse for most of it. And not just that. You know, Twin Peaks gets the credit and the blame for inventing this dead girl trope on television. And the idea of, you know, we all worship and mourn this, the young woman killed at the height of perfection. She was innocent and beautiful, and now she's dead, and she's somehow weirdly more beautiful because of it, because we can fetishize her corpse.

This is, now we see, okay, so Laura Palmer grew up 26 years later, you know, she's, I mean, however old Cheryl Lee is or however old the character would be. And she's still a very beautiful woman, but she is not this 17-year-old corpse anymore, and we, and David Lynch shows us that and makes us think about how we react to seeing her now versus seeing her then. Let's start to rewind a little bit. You know, I wasn't, we discussed it briefly. We can talk about it now. Obviously, the one thing you would need to know about this show going into it to this return season series event, whatever it is, is the cliffhanger. That at the end of the season two, while rescuing Heather Graham's character from the otherworldly Black Lodge, Dale Cooper is chased down by his evil doppelganger. And right before he's about to escape, he is caught.

The line that began the series, I'll see you again at 25. five years, that is from the original show. I mean, it was really all there, even though they never, I don't think they ever really thought they were going to get to pull this off. So going into the season, I thought about it. Like, I actually thought about this, because if there had been a third season of the show in 1992, presumably Dale Cooper would have gone on a murdering spree or something in Twin Peaks, looking in the mirror, being haunted by Bob, Sheriff Truman and the other bookhouse boys would

have stopped him. Realizing the show was coming back, I wondered if they would deal with that or not, if they would just let it go, if there would be some sort of write-around. Because the actual truth, and I say truth, all the quotes in the world, because this is fiction and it didn't exist until they decided to go back to it. But I couldn't actually bring myself. Maybe this is still 14-year-old me, but I couldn't bring myself to conceive of the idea that this true hero, Dale Cooper, a hero out out of a 1950s Western. Who hilariously looks like James Comey at this point. It's true. Good call. And he dresses like Bob Mueller.

the idea of him being a murderer in the world, or the idea of him being evil, or the idea of him being trapped for 25 years of his life in this nothing place made me very upset. And the show didn't shy away from that. He has been. He's just been sitting there. This guy who went to investigate a case was trapped there.

And it reminded me of when I rewatch the pilot that before, I believe, before the first commercial break, Our old friend Mark Harris tweeted about this and I really appreciate that he did. Grace Sibrisky as Laura Palmer's mother shrieks and screams from her soul. And it's one of the more jarring performances that I can remember on television.

And it's a reminder of that that for as much as they fly away into space and for people who have seen the third episode know what I'm referencing here, it doesn't leave that. The flights of fancy or of horror are directly tied to emotional I can't believe I'm saying relatable about Twin Peaks,

but in some ways, human emotions. They are still coming from that place. And that was a relief to me. I have a couple of questions about plot stuff that I thought I would just ask you, but then I also have, you know, you just mentioned something from the third episode. And even though it's just a hint,

and I haven't seen it, how are you going to, are you just going to try and consume this stuff as fast and voraciously as possible? Are you looking at stuff online? because I think that I had his funny exchange with Cam Collins from the site this morning about, I was just like, this guy just is like, this is amazing, this is better than I ever could have possibly imagined. And he was like, I don't want to see theories.

Like we need theories to make Westworld more interesting than it actually is. This is already interesting. I agree. And even though there's a lot of stuff to be decoded and I'm sure that there's already a thriving wiki around this and I will eventually go look. I made the mistake last night when I was watching. I was like, where did I see Tracy before? So I just looked up Tracy from Twin Peaks because she wasn't on the IMDB or that I couldn't see.

And of course, like there's just already 100. The revealed, why, how did Tracy get killed? And I was like, fuck, because I hadn't seen it yet. Yeah. So I have to like, it's very strange to not have everybody on the same schedule on the same, every week we're going to watch this and every next day we're going to talk about it. It's like, no, there's four up.

And some people have watched it. four and some people have already written like explainers and how are you feeling about that stuff? I am not really looking yet. I watched three and then I went online just to, I wanted to see what Seppinwald had written. I thought Jim Panoizik had a terrific review in the Times today. I watched them and I was gleeful and I was like everyone's going to hate it. I just assumed that everyone is going to be like, what is this? And maybe it's nostalgia or good feelings or just existing separate and apart from the

world we're used to, but it seems like people were just happy for having it. And that surprised me because, you know, it's slow and it's indulgent and it's weird and it doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. So I don't want to get too far down the rabbit holes because they exist, but I also think that's the wrong way to think about the show. What impressed me, I have to say about it, and maybe this is Mark Frost's influence or whatever, as weird as it got, and it gets fucking weirder in three, what's happening is kind of there. You know what I mean? And like, the idea, they do have the flashbacks to him being chased down by his doppelganger. They say doppelganger.

It's clear that the 25 years was the furlough for this evil one, and the evil one's going to have to come back, and he's aware of that clock ticking on some level, even if the good deal has no sense of what's been going on after all this time. The, I think the beauty of Twin Peaks is that it is still so far managing to exist as both. So when we see the talking treat with the brain atop of it, and Mike, the, the, you one-arm man says this is the evolution of the arm. You could just be like, well, that's just as crazy as Richard and Linda 430. Or if you are a deep diver or a big fan of the original, you know that Mike and the dwarf,

the famous dancing dwarf, explained their relationship before, is that the dwarf was the arm. Mike cut off his arm and why he did that. There was this whole backstory that Mike and Bob were both evil spiritual killers, and Mike didn't want to be evil anymore, so he cut off his arm. So that tree is the dwarf. The dwarf's not there anymore. So does that matter to our understanding of it? Similarly in three, there's a crazy thing that happens that I won't spoil,

but it ends with Mike, the one our man, saying, you were manufactured for a purpose. What happens after that, also crazy, but I get what happened. I understand. In the broad strokes, even if it doesn't make any rational sense of what's happening in front of our eyes. Well, I don't know what to ask here because I'm sure that some of my questions will have, quote, unquote, answers in three. I was a little curious about who the voice on the phone was that Bad Dale calls, and it sounds like Miguel Ferrer.

Great reference. So, yes. The late Miguel Ferrer, who is one of the great character actors. And by the way, speaking of ravages of time, there are actors in this show. I mentioned before how some of the great performers from the original series are no longer with us, yeah. No longer with us. Jack Nance, Don Davis, who played Major Briggs, Frank Silva, who played Bob. Other performers didn't survive to see this debut, but were in it, including Miguel Ferrer, and also Catherine Colson, who played The Log Lady.

So the person he seems to think is on the phone, speaking of people who didn't survive, is Philip Jeffreys, David Bowie's character from Firewalk with me. Oh, come on. Are you serious? Yeah. Now, who that voice is? sounded like Ferrer. But one... Wait, so he's calling Philip, he says... One thing, one thing that people who... He says Philip.

He says Philip. That's right. And he was the original FBI agent who went... So there's a... All the FBI agents who seem to have become involved in this have vanished one way or another. Chris Isaac's character vanishes in the course of... Keeper Sutherland's character, right? He gets killed.

He gets killed. He doesn't, neither, but he just... He's cut out of it. He's cut out of it. In the book that I read, the Mark Frost's book, it references that he sort of disappeared into alcoholism or whatever. but he didn't disappear. In the movie, Chris Isaac's character, Chet Desmond,

reaches for a ring and vanishes. That ring shows up in three. That's all I'll say about that. But David Bowie's character went missing a number of years before and suddenly appears in the FBI office seemingly phased out of time, like not sure of where he is, and says that he found them where they lived above a convenience store, and that's Mike and Bob and their sort of killer cabal or whatever.

So whatever the case is, David Bowie, I wish... That's in Firewalk with me. Yeah, I wish I could report he's in the show, but it does seem like the bad spirits have gotten these FBI agents somehow. Who knows? Okay. That's who he seemed to be referencing. Side note, the book, the Mark Frost book, which I mentioned last week,

does give you some information that I assume he was able to give us because he didn't matter for the series, like what happened to Kiefer Sutherland's character, a couple other threads that are relevant. The FBI agent who is sort of doing the investigation in the book shows up. up in the third episode played by a singer that David that David Lynch likes and produces. It's so odd to me. There is a reference to the survivors of the bank explosion

in the finale for people who were wondering why that thread didn't get picked up right away. That was the other clip hanger from season two. This is in the book. And then the third thing was there's a reference in the book to multiple Sheriff Truman's that Harry Truman had a brother who was also the sheriff. And I wonder if that was a way to set us up for

when Lucy says which Sheriff Truman do you want. And by the way, if Michael On Keen is not in this series, which he's not, if Harry Truman's is never referred to, except obliquely when Lucy says he's fishing or sick, he's retired in Canada, didn't want to act anymore. Okay. So if that's really the only time they're going to reference it, that's just amazing.

By the way, shouts to Michael Horst, because seeing Hawk with his silver hair was maybe my favorite part. I think of what else I was kind of curious about. See Max Perlick, who plays Hank outside of the apartment building. It was really cool. Ashley Judd, obviously, a personal favorite of mine from Kentucky. hockey basketball. The faces.

I mean, Patrick Fisler, who you remember from Mad Men and from Cohen Brothers movies, just has an incredible face. He's the guy in Vegas, briefly. The credits at the end are such a treat because it just doesn't, you just see these names and you're like, oh, wait, really? That was that person for one second. And there was Matthew Lillard. And then the giant, by the way, opens the series.

The giant is still alive. I didn't know that actor was still alive. He's just there as this incredible gift to fans. In the credits, his role is listed as five question marks. They're having fun with this. And I think that for as much as this flouts every rule of television as we've come to understand them, the thing that they did understand deeply

is that when you bring something back, especially after this much time, it is not about the original thing. The original thing is done. It cannot be the continuation of a murder mystery. It's really about what fans fell in love with. And so this is a love letter to those fans. It is that world.

But it understands the essence of the show in a way that, you know, Adam and I, you're going to hear a conversation with Adam Neiman about Covenant. And for as much as I adore those movies as a franchise, they are so stuck on the hamster wheel of sending seemingly smart people who behave incredibly stupidly to a planet full of aliens and watching them get picked off one by one.

And that is entertaining. But there's clearly so much more you could be doing with that world. And they've just settled on the one that makes people just happy. enough to keep working on them and also provides a solid profit base. Yeah, it's a horror movie saying like you were saying, right? You have to follow the same beats. To be back in this world and to have no diner, you know, no... Not yet.

It is coming. Yeah, I'm sure all that stuff is coming. But just to put people in a place for two hours where they're just like, you have to come with us. And that was what you had to do 25 years ago. You had to take a leap of faith. And, you know, we talk about challenging television in terms of like, oh, the subject matter is challenging.

Maybe it's, you know, tonally, it's very demanding of you. And, you know, I mean, I'll do respect to American gods, which has its moments. But I haven't felt as intellectually and emotionally engaged with something that was made for television in a while. Also, just think about how much it doesn't care what you expect or think. Like this, the special effects are like Harryhausen-esque, you know. It's not trying to dazzle us in traditional ways. And I also think that we should, obviously, we're going to keep talking. about this as the episodes reveal themselves.

For those who don't know, Showtime aired too linearly last night, but three and four are available on Showtime anytime. I think the reason is just to give people more to fuel the conversation because next week is Memorial Day. So while they will be airing episodes... Do you think that they'll continue to put them up in batches of four?

I doubt it. I think they wanted to give people more early to really get people excited because I think that they looked at the first hour and they were like, I don't know, better give them to. Maybe we should just keep giving them a little bit more to sort of prime the pump as our president invented the phrase. Yeah. But I do want to say shouts to David Nevins, who's the head of Showtime, because this is crazy town. You know, I think we give Netflix a lot of credit and we also make fun of them for seeming to just have limitless pockets and they just fund stuff and they just put it on the air. And the added, that's not actually true to reality, but the perception is they just... I dare Netflix to make something that's interesting.

Yes, but also they really committed to it. Now, I've joked before that it felt like maybe he got a little out in front of his skis because they announced that this was happening almost three years ago, I believe. And it was a huge announcement and evidence was, you know, it's a big, like, crowing moment for him. Because, you know, Showtime often is in the second tier underneath HBO and now Netflix and maybe even Amazon in terms of, or FX in terms of prestige projects. Well, we tease them all the time for having these shows go for six seasons, seven seasons. And just, I actually don't even, I actually think they would be better if they were a little more formulaic because, because they just use the same characters in, you know, increasingly preposterous circumstances. Yep.

If it was more procedural, I think I would accept Homeland, whereas, like, now I'm just like, are you just... Right, because Homeland is a... Come on. Homeland really is 20... It is Slow Food 24, as you always said, but they're trying to... Still trying to pretend that it's a prestige drama where we care about the character's development over time, and we don't. So he announced this, as a TV critic at the time, at the end of that year, I believe it was the end of 2014. They sent all of us cherry pies and like Showtime branded pie slicers.

Oh, wow. Kyle McLaughlin came out at TCA the following year to give Nevins a cup of coffee to basically do a reveal he was involved. They were doing this. It got great press. And then it was going to be like seven episodes or nine episodes. Then David Lynch quit, remember? And it was clearly over budgeting slash money. At that point, as upset as I was about it, you knew they were going to give him whatever he asked for.

He had him over a barrel because they had already announced that David Lynch was doing this thing. Then he wrote the thing, he submitted however many pages. At some point, it slipped to 18 hours. Now, having watched the first three, I can tell you that brevity is not what the show is about, nor should it be. But basically, they were all in. Whether Nevins was bluffing or not, someone called it, and he went all in on funding this insane thing. It is not Fuller House. You know what I mean?

It is not even Gilmore Girls a year in the life or whatever where the certain passionate fan base is going to feel, you know, is going to feel heart-warmed by it. This is just a crazy thing. David Lynch hasn't made a movie. I didn't realize this in 11 years. It's so impressive so far. I hope we get to keep talking about it. Let's just think about this.

Leave it at this. In the first episode of something people have been waiting for for 26 years, there was a plot line about a guy in a loft in New York staring at a glass box sucking in the night air waiting for something to happen. That's an thing. That's an image. It's also a metaphor for 25 years. of people waiting for this thing to come back to their television sets.

It works as both, and it is extremely exciting. And I understand people who may be tuned into this. You didn't say give it the bell. No, I'm shocked, because here's the thing. I was ready to come in here. I'm glad you called me on that. I was ready to come in here and basically make the point I was just about to make, which is this is a counter-narrative side story to mainstream culture.

We grabbed it back in because of nostalgia and because people were excited and 35 million people had watched it at the beginning. but I didn't know if we were going to even be continuing this conversation as if this was on the same television that every other show was. We need this. Television needed this. Television needed a real like even if it is quote unquote not successful either in terms of how much conversation it drives, what kind of ratings it does, whether or not people feel like it satisfies or disappoints their expectations of the show and whether it tarnishes the legacy. I can't imagine people thinking that. but if that's the case. But television for as good as it is, it's just good right now. And it needs shows that are trying to be something different. And if you're going to have all this money and all this production and all this, you know, this wave of content coming, do something brave like this.

And I'm not saying that other shows aren't brave. I'm not saying that there are pockets of brilliance in these other shows or that somehow, but they all feel very much like variations on a theme to me. They are discussing, you know, these sort of like the vagaries of, you know, of American life now. And just, you know, whether or not they're looking at it through the lens of comedy or drama or whatever or procedural, I just feel like to have something that's so outside of what the typical narrative constructs that we use is just such a breath of fresh air. I am thrilled to hear you say it. I agree with you. So here's what I'm proposing.

I think that we are giving Twin Peaks the return, the television championship belt. through the holiday weekend this week and next week. And I think that we should revisit this question. With Netflix, with, sorry, leftovers is after the last few episodes. I'm sure there will be some exchanging. And we're not,

I'm not saying this to diminish the leftovers, which has knocked me out and continues to knock me out in this final season. But I think even, even Damon Lindelof, Twin Peaks fan, wouldn't begrudge us this. And let's, let's see what happens, man.

Let's just, as a great dwarf one said, Let's rock. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, and then I'll be back to talk with Adam Neiman about Alien Covenant. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Tile. Andy, what if you could find anything in seconds? Now you can with Tile, the tiny Bluetooth tracker that makes finding your things easier than ever.

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last week about late period Ridley Scott, which, Adam, I guess for the sake of conversation we're defining as what, post what? Well, you know, in his storied 800-year career, you know, Ridley Scott had a bunch of different phases. I guess we'll call late Ridley everything since American gangster, though mostly I was writing about the stuff since and including Prometheus. Yeah. And it's, you know, he remains incredibly prolific into his, into his, into his golden years. And one of the things that I found fascinating about the lead up to covenant and then the actual viewing of Covenant was really, Scott had talked about how he was prepared to make six prequel films.

including Prometheus and Covenant, and that he had already had the third one written and that he was willing to just keep making these for as long as he was able. And it felt like midway through Covenant, he changed his mind. Yeah, I mean, it's a fine line between, you know, like commitment to a vision and brand extension, right?

Yeah. And I have a hard time not being cynical about the subtext of these alien prequels, which are all about engineering and building and accountability. I mean, you can do this reading of them as kind of self-portraits where Scott's a master builder and he's interested in how things are made and who's responsible for that. But it seems like for every question they raised, the answer is kind of just keep watching and keep paying to see more of these movies. And I'm just really not sure

that the sum total of all these revelations, you know, makes watching Alien or Alien or even Alien 3 any better. I'm just skeptical of this fetish for reverse engineering these big narratives, these big sci-fi franchises. I'm not sure that in the end they really add to our understanding or enjoyment of the older films, the iconic films, the films that came already, and that these later movies are just kind of shamelessly stealing from and borrowing from and repeating anyway.

Yeah, I mean, you have an alien the scene when they first descended, to LVU4Syrex of the planet where they find all the eggs. And there was this shot of the engineer strapped to his, I guess, you know, console or in this cockpit or whatever. And that was one of the cool, you know, of a movie that is pretty much note perfect, that was this just like amazing suggestion that there was all this stuff underneath the surface. But part of its charm is leaving it under the surface. And I think that, you know, between the need to do origin stories,

the need to explain everything. And then we have this entire sort of fan theory industrial complex surrounding these sci-fi movies now that we didn't have necessarily in the same way back in the late 70s and mid-80s with Alien and Aliens. You basically trying to tow the line between, yeah, we want to deliver scares, we want to put Amy Simets in a hallway running away from terror.

But we also want to go into, is it, you know, is David an Old Testament god? Is David going to, you know, how do we connect this from this to eventually getting 18 more years in the future to get to where Alien begins? And I can't tell. It seems like Ridley Scott isn't even that committed to this idea because if he was, he could just make a movie about the mythology of Alien. Yeah, I mean, commitment's an interesting question, too, because in some of the reviews of Covenant, there's been some, you know, persuasive, positive writing on the movie. they're detecting a real sense of kind of humor and satire and sarcasm and what Scott is doing by making David this kind of, you know, manipulative, evil, calculating creator.

That's what I meant by that idea of kind of self-portraiture. Like there's people who see a critical edge to this work, but I'm always a believer. I mean, it's just my own taste, but, you know, in genre film, you know, show don't tell. or if you're going to tell, you've got to pick your moments. I mean, in the original alien, I love Ian Holmes monologue because it's largely a terse, quiet, action-packed movie, and then you finally have this kind of disquisition on the alien and its structural perfection.

I feel like Prometheus and Alien Covenant are kind of just entire movies of Ashes monologue. Yeah. And it's a matter of proportion. You know, if everything is like that, it devalues It devalues that approach. The same in Blade Runner, where you really only have the one grandiloquent character. I mean, David and Covenant is definitely Scott trying to do a new variation on Hower's performance.

I think Michael Fastbender is a better actor than Rutger Hower was, but the novelty is worn off. I mean, how could it not be? That was 30, you know, nearly 40 years ago now. Yeah, and then I think you have this situation where, you know, Scott had made one of these. movies, but the thing that Alien and Aliens definitely shares, aside from just incredible set pieces and sense of scope and grandeur and immersion into a foreign world, is this ability to work with an ensemble cast to give tertiary characters, moments where you just, you can just see exactly who they are, whether it's Yafat Koto and Alien, or you and I were talking

back and forth about Lieutenant Gorman and aliens. And, you know, these last two films, Prometheus in government. And I actually have a lot of time for Prometheus, and I enjoy all the, like, scholarship around it and the sort of decoding of it. But the, what, 12 really good actors, who he's had come through the alien and Prometheus halls, and that he's just like summarily dismissed all of them, except for Fastbender, is kind of an incredible act of waste. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. And one of my issues with Prometheus is that you don't do have a number of pretty vivid actors who only get to make a limited impression or they're just kind of stopped for making an impression at all. And I think in Covenant that Catherine

Waterson and Billy Crudup fare a little better, particularly at the beginning. I saw the movie with a friend and we were kind of leaning over to each other at the beginning being like, well, if you let good actors just kind of recite dialogue and create a rhythm, it's amazing what a lift that gives your $200 million movie. But yeah, I mean, the thing that both alien and aliens had were wonderful ensemble cast. And I think in the case of aliens, the Cameron film, just a great sort of, you know, terseness. I mean, the dialogue is so well-chosen characters, like say one or two things and you have a total bead on who they are. Absolutely. And, you know, you just don't have that in these two later movies. I wouldn't say that Scott doesn't have

attention to character. It's just that his attention to character here is completely focused on Fastbender. And I just think that the conceit, of the kind of, you know, defeat's malevolent, angry android. I mean, not only is it not that original, because again, he's been working with that since Blade Runner. I mean, I just find that it's, like, richly funny and self-satirical and self-critical, and they're very welcome to their enjoyment of it, but I just found myself rolling my eyes, even at the stuff that I think was meant to be funny.

Yeah. Because some of that's clearly, clearly intentionally comic. The scene with the two fast benders, there's no way that's meant to be seriously. Oh, yeah. The flute scene is. the recorder scene clearly, yeah. Do you have, first of all, I was just going to say when you're talking about the ensembles,

and you mentioned Catherine Waterson and Billy Cruddle, but I want to say that Amy Simits is definitely the PJ Tucker of this movie, just like all energy in a limited appearance. I just really, I really enjoyed her sixth man performance. Yeah, although she fares about as well as PJ did when he's trying to guard LeBron ultimately. There's probably a ringer piece in there somewhere,

about the structural perfection of LeBron James versus the various creatures of the alien. Which alien is LeBron? I know. If Alien had done better at the box office, I think we would have done it. Since you did this piece on late period, Scott, I feel like we can end the conversation

by talking a little bit about what of late period, Scott, you do like. You mentioned in your piece you talked about the counselor a little bit and how that's become kind of the cult film because people are so, I think because it was just completely abandoned at the box office. It's sort of inevitably taken its place as a cult movie.

But what do you think? Do you have any recommendations for our listeners if they aren't completely up to date on their Ridley Scott filmography? Well, I recommend the counselor as an oddity. I mean, I wrote pretty harshly about it at the time, and I haven't softened, but I concede that there's something absolutely mesmerizing about it. I mean, it's this very long, very severe thriller that's set, I mean, it's the same real estate as no country for old men. I mean, really, if you ever needed further proof that the Cohen's no country for old men is, it's a great McCarthy adaptation.

You can just look at it side by side with the counselor because they find a way to kind of alleviate the self-seriousness and the pretentiousness of McCarthy's writing in a way that I think Scott doesn't. Right. But, I mean, it's a movie filled with things that you won't see. And I concede that there's images and bits of staging in it that are completely indelible, even though, again, the pile-up of speeches is kind of antithetical to how good Scott is visually.

Yeah. But I mean, it's strange because the, you know, one that I would recommend is such a lame recommendation because it's such an obvious mainstream title. But I think there's a lot of good stuff in The Martian. And I think that even if the master builder allegory stuff in that is a little boring, like I much prefer watching Damon alone on the planet sort of scienceing the shit out of stuff to the giant rescue operation to bring them home. And I think that giant rescue operation is the kind of filmmaking.

Scott does, like multinational corporate infinite resource kind of directing. Yeah, I mean, you know, I, he's so prolific and he makes a, he pretty much makes a movie every 15 to 18 months. And he has this, obviously, this backroom staff that is able to excuse vision pretty easily. I, you know, I understand that his filming, his process is essentially storyboarding himself, the entire movie. And so that once the filming is happening, it's basically a multiple camera shoot that doesn't allow for, it doesn't have that much, There's never much like of a drama on the set. Like he knows what he wants.

He goes and gets it. But I would say that his films are definitely dependent on their screenplays. And the Drew Goddard screenplay for The Martian is just a really tight, almost throwback Hollywood entertainment screenplay that then rendered in this billion dollar way. Yeah. And you don't have to squint, I guess, to discern the sense of humor. I mean, I wrote a bit of a throwaway help. It was bizarre that that won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy. because that seems taxonomically incorrect.

It's not a comedy, but it's funny, and it has a comic spirit, whereas you could say the same thing about the counselor, but I think you've really got to be on its wavelength or else it seems just like unbelievably self-serious and pretentious. So I think you're really right that Scott's very dependent on the quality of scripts that he's working with. I mean, I'm also, you know, relatively fond of the long cut of Kingdom of Heaven. Me too.

One of those rare cases where even, it doesn't seem like, more of that would make the movie better, but it kind of does. Yeah, yeah. And it's him sort of, I think a lot of what you see with Prometheus and Covenant without knowing anything about how what Fox wants from these movies is a little bit of tension between, okay, so how long, how short, how scary, how ponderous, how many are we going to make, how far do I have to kick the can down the road to make the next one, but to not kick it too far down the road.

And Kingdom of Heaven was this movie where obviously, Obviously, they decided they needed it to be at a certain length, and they wanted it to be Gladiator, too. But the four-hour version, while excessive and over-the-top in lots of places, is obviously Scott trying to do a David Lean impersonation, and it's quite lovely. Well, it is. And also, I mean, a director who gets mentioned a lot with regard to Scott. Well, it gets mentioned with regard to everyone. But, you know, when people talk about Kubrick, what I liked in Kingdom of Heaven was some of the battle scenes had this kind of geometric clarity, like movement and counter movement and maneuvering and countermaneuvering

that, you know, if you wanted to mention stuff like Paths of Glory or even Barry Lyndon, like it, I think that that can, you know, maybe even better at Kubrick comparison in Kingdom of Heaven than some of the more obvious cases people make where people compare Blade Runner to 2001 or Alien to 2001. Yeah. But I would also say, I don't know if there's really a precedent for what's happened with these last two alien movies, whether you like them or not, which is here you have a guy starting. directing the franchise 40 years ago, moves away from it, because as you say, he's prolific doing all this other stuff. And now he's just kind of grabbed it back by the throat and wants

to make six more of them, you know? Like this kind of franchise ownership over a, with a break of 40 years in between is really something. Yeah, it's bizarre to watch. Well, I'm curious about if they wanted to make it a trilogy and they wanted to end it with the next one, you know, he still obviously has my attention. I like seeing really Scott movies, but I am kind of puzzled as to where it goes next. I'm just going to say, I think what everyone's waiting for is whether or not he will entice or someone will entice Sigourney Weaver back into the fold, right? She's stuck with it for the first four.

And it's very obvious why she's not in either of these movies because they predate Ellen Ripley. But this is kind of something that happens in all these franchises now, the kind of legacy cameos. Yeah. You know, like they were, you know, there were big examples in the recent Star Wars movies, and Schwarzenegger keeps popping up in the Terminator movies. So you got to wonder if they're going to find some way, whether it's, you know, digitally de-aging her or makeup or some other parts. for them to bring Sigourney Weaver back

because I think everyone will like that. Yeah, I mean, Neil Blomkamp was working on a sequel with her, and that was put on ice because Ridley wanted to make all these prequels. So it'll be interesting to see if they ever reunite. All right, Adam, thank you so much for joining me today. You can read Adam's piece on Late Period Ridley Scott on the Ringer, and you can read all his other reading on the ringer.

Thank you so much, man. All right, Andy, so we'll be back on Thursday for a rock and roll pop with Lizzie Goodman talking about Meet Me in the Bathroom, her book, which is released this week. Which is released this week. It's an oral history of sort of the New York rock scene from 2001 to 2011. 2001 to 2011. The strokes and white stripes through Vampire Weekend.

That's our decade, buddy. I know. Well, you and I are in the book. And we will talk with Lizzie on Thursday. We'll have our special Double Down Book Club Annihilation podcast going up on Memorial Day. Happy long weekend to everybody. And then we'll be back the following Thursday to talk probably more Twin Peaks. Do a Fargo catch up.

Fargo and to prepare for the last left of. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Shudder's exclusive series. George Scott, a 10-episode detective series praised as a Borgon and Stranger Things mashup by the Toronto Star. You can stream it as well as all the best in thrillers horror and suspense today at shudder.com and get a month of Shudder free when you use promo code watch at checkout. Today's episode of The Watch was also brought to you by Tile. Protect the things you use the most with Tile, the convenient, tiny Bluetooth tracker.

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