Reviews

The premise is great. Why a gloomy prison colony, you ask, populated by male, abstinent, born-again, formerly-violent felons?

Because it's a great premise to plumb the depths of Alien and Aliens' themes about the value of life, species, reproduction, motherhood, greed, corruption, hubris, courage, sacrifice, and human ingenuity. You've got 25 rapists and murderers who have chosen the righteous path (per their beliefs) of living peacefully together in an apocalyptic wasteland of a monastery. They have no weapons of any kind, and no women. They just have God, each other, and the technology and infrastructure they need to survive on a hostile planet.

Sounds cool, right? Who are they as individuals? Surely, they all must have interesting backstories, deep philosophical and/or spiritual ideas, and their community must be an interesting web of relational dynamics. And how will they, who must be tough and intelligent, but militarily untrained and totally unarmed, put these unique qualities and dynamics into play to survive the alien attack that has descended upon them? What a refreshing departure this must be from the awesome commandos of the first two films. We loved them, but we're ready for this new angle. How will Ripley fit into the whole thing? What color and nuance will the convicts' backstories lend to the question of why humans deserve to survive more than the toothy aliens that want to use them as cocoons? Aren't criminals someone's babies too? Sounds great; count me in.

Unfortunately, this is not that film. Most of the convicts and their initial leader are cartoon villains. They are flat, stupid, frothing, arrogant conflict-junkies. The only character for whom we receive a detailed backstory dies abruptly right after he tells it. The only other character that breaks the cartoon mold only gets a one-sentence-long backstory. The solution to the aliens is a familiar sequence of stressful brute force tactics, executed so memorably in the first two films, but entirely forgettable here. Smash, bang, boom, etc., and then, lava. Whatever. The dialogue is mostly on par with cheesy video game cutscenes.

This is a film that deserves an intelligent remake or recut or something someday. I don't agree that Ripley's character is tapped out. There's plenty more I'd like to know about her.

Also, why can the aliens use a dog for a vessel, but not a cat? And why do they say they have no freezers when they have a morgue? I could go on, but the point is, there are unforced errors.

Still, it's a great franchise, a great premise, a moody space thriller, time with Ripley and friends, and an essential step in the story if you're going to watch part 4. So it's not a waste of time, just nowhere near as good as it could have been.

"How it Ends" is not very exciting, Not very poignant or even gory; "How it Ends" is about as clear as The Nothing from "The Neverending Story."

Exploding clouds chase you and your girlfriend; Your jeep-so fast! Faster it's going Than thermonuclear plumes round the bend, But, Forrest Whittaker, what are you doing?

Your character's death is pretty mellow; In the apocalypse none are winners; But in the cough-off at the end of the world, I'd rather watch George Clooney eat TV dinners.

It's not your fault, Forrest, the script is so bad, Or that this movie is all about cars: This car, and that car, and another car, Who cares if it ends in earthquakes or wars?

Driving, steering, and pulmonology Are this film's only eschatology.

This episode is so good, and so comforting.

Do YOU suffer from existential dread? Can't stop yourself from trying to imagine your own nonexistence? Well, here's Cooper, blazing the trail ahead, and Lynch, making it kinda funny, too, with the lo-fi static and whatever the aftermath of the Big Bang is that makes TV snow. Thanks, The evolved Arm's evil doppelgänger, for sending Cooper there. I fear death less now. I hope the universe eventually spits me out and I wind up in The Silver Mustang, too.

I love the Mauve room and Naido, but I think the meaning there isn't translatable into sentences. There's the business with Naido at the end and the 3 and the 15 and the meta mechanics of it all, but there's more to it, and the images probably don't benefit from analysis.

Mr. C can't hold down his Garmonbozia, which we now know also smells very bad, unsurprisingly. The manufactured Dougie Jones is reduced to a golden pebble in Mike's pocket back in the Black Lodge. And then Cooper comes to in his own body, but in place of Dougie Jones, in the lovely arms of Jade, in a house they need to urgently vacate.

Cooper is still functioning as though he's still in The Black Lodge, and who can blame him, since he pops out in Vegas, a pretty Black Lodgey place? Las Vegas seems to exist in its own spacetime, and operates according to rules that are as objectively weird and illogical as those of The Black Lodge. So Cooper-Dougie does pretty well even though he's thinking in a whole different dimension.

And can't everyone kind of relate to Dougie? At least apart from his luck, which requires help from that other place? I feel exactly like Cooper-Dougie when I walk into a casino. I like the ambience, and find the lights and sounds rather pleasant, but I have no idea what to do or how anything works. Grown adults are evidently putting money into machines and pulling handles in hopes of winning more money somehow, which seems like the type of absurd conceit Lynch would dream up just to mess with us. And yet, there they are. So many of them. And doing this is so accepted that if you just stand there with no idea what to do and 5 dollars from Jade, with her pink boots and her yellow Wrangler, in your pocket, the system will guide you into doing the same thing. Of course, to actually win, you need interdimensional helpers on your side, and thank goodness Mr. Jackpots has those.

We also get a meditation on spray-painting shovels gold safely and efficiently, and the wondrous chocolate bunny scene, which also speaks for itself. Not to mention the congressman's dilemma.

Yes, Albert, I'll take a truckload of Valium, but for the real world. This episode is quite soothing in itself.

Love and Mercy is a fascinating portrait of neurodiversity, and it doesn't really follow the trajectory of most music biopics.

Usually, biopics about successful rock stars follow a clear rise-and-fall character arc where we get to enjoy the rush of the initial, innocent rags to riches phase, followed by the corruptions of fame and fortune, and usually a decline and fall. Elvis, The Doors, etc.

Love and Mercy opts out of this familiar story, though it could have chosen to narrate Brian Wilson's story this way. It could have focused on the "rise," instead of zipping through that entire phase in the opening credits, and treated everything that came later as a "fall." But it doesn't.

The story begins when The Beach Boys are already a huge success, Brian Wilson is already free to unleash his creative genius with admiring collaborators, and they're already rich and famous. Also, Brian Wilson has already been struggling with mental illness, and all the Wilson brothers have been struggling with the after-effects of their father's abuse. And, it skips over Brian Wilson's legendary reclusive and wandering phases.

These structural choices are bound to disappoint many viewers, as the filmmakers clearly were aware. The rise of The Beach Boys would be great nostalgic fun to watch, and the peak of Brian Wilson's unmanaged illness phase also seems like riveting cinematic fodder, in part because it's so mysterious and rife with semi-apocryphal stories.

So the choice to build the story out of these two quieter, almost in-between phases, is interesting in itself, and allows us to really focus on Brian Wilson as a human being-his artistic genius, his gentleness, his struggles to be himself and fulfill his vision with the help of some people and despite other people. We see some nuances of his illness and genius, and the multiplicity of factors-neurological, biographical, spiritual and otherwise-that make him who he is, though these are perhaps impossible to untangle.

Dano and Cusack are great, and give us intimate portraits of Brian Wilson. We learn a lot about him. But, at the same time, the film leaves me with the distinct impression that I've just seen a tiny sliver of this immensely interesting and complicated person. And maybe that's the point. He's much too complicated to capture and pin down in 2 hours. So much of what makes him interesting is inside his mind, and doesn't translate to externalities. And this glimpse is certainly much richer than the lore.

Giamatti is terrifying as Landy, and my understanding is that many people in Brian Wilson's life actually regard Giamatti's performance as understated. His villainy is so blatant, though, that I'm also left with questions about how Landy wormed his way into such power over Wilson in the first place, and why it took so long for others to recognize that and extricate him. Were Melinda Ledbetter and Gloria really the only ones to see the severity of the problem and to feel compelled to get the Wilson family to act on it? I realize Dennis Wilson drowned in 1983 and wasn't around by the second phase of the film, but it's confusing why others didn't see Landy's sadism and greed, or say anything, or do anything. I guess the real people have all commented on this, and their interviews and memoirs probably have some answers.

At the same time, I love the happy ending. So few music biopics end with love, creativity, and music. The structural choices allow for this narrative resolution in a way we can feel good about, and it's refreshingly uncynical. RIP Melinda Ledbetter.

Some reviewers call it sentimental, or manipulative, or one-dimensional, or they're skeptical that people would really be so cruel as the evildoers in this movie. I wish they were right about any of that.

In fact, the film deals beautifully with the nuances and complexities of morality and curiosity. Recent trends in the humanities have increasingly treated any dead person's curiosity or interest in others unlike themselves as inherently exploitative, colonialist, power-mongering and evil. Many a krrritik (Foucauldian or otherwise) would say that Treves is just as bad as Bytes, that there's no daylight between the two, and that maybe Treves is even morally worse because his power over and exploitation of Merrick is non-obvious, and conducted sub rosa under the mantle of science and kindness. You could go even farther and say Mrs. Kendall and the London socialites are just as crass and cruel as the working-class sideshow patrons, and are worse because they're also using Merrick as an anti-scapegoat, heaping decency and kindness onto him to be fashionable, signal virtue, and assuage their guilty consciences about all the other people they've plundered and oppressed. And the fact that Merrick commits suicide in the end, when he's safe and loved and thrilled by art, is arguably evidence his rooms in Treves's hospital are just a better-decorated cage than the one Bytes had him in (and with fewer monkeys, for whom the film also ought to have a tinge more sympathy for; animals also deserve to be treated with care, respect, and freedom).

Yeah, yeah, yeah, flash, bang, whatever. "The Elephant Man" is aware of all these problems, and the crises surging through Victorian London beneath all those doilies and monocles. It's all in the film, deliberately. But what makes the movie so good is that it really gets at Merrick's subjectivity, and there are, absolutely, better and worse moral intentions and moral actions, and shades of grey in between. The fact that Treves thinks about all of these issues, and questions whether he's a good man and any better than Bytes, confirms (along with a thousand other more obvious data points) that he actually is, objectively, much, much better than Bytes, and that he does genuinely want to help and do the right thing as best as he can. He's haunted by the sense that he's failing Merrick for the entire second half of the film, and it's not just because Merrick gets kidnapped back into slavery on Treves's watch. He, and we, understand that Merrick deserves so much more than even Treves can give him. Merrick deserves agency, and liberty, and to live a long, adult, full life. But just as Treves can't cure the illness Merrick is dying of, Treves can't cure the evil predation that awaits Merrick outside the safety of Treves's custody and protection. It's a bad deal, Treves knows it, and he really is kind and good, the more so because he questions these things.

If you feel the cruelty is excessive and melodramatic, I envy you. Even a moderate amount of time in some city streets will reveal that a lot of people have not seen "The Elephant Man." I've seen children torture a dying pigeon for fun, and the children are supposed to be the innocent ones. I once saw a mendicant on the streets of Lisbon with a similar affliction to that portrayed in this film, just sitting there with a hat out. I've felt the complex emotions of unexpectedly encountering a burn victim, and then feeling bad about the feelings, and then befuddled by all the cognitive dissonance, and finally learning something. "The Elephant Man" gives us the kind of guidance that should be obvious, but for many, just isn't.

The other reason it's not sentimental or melodramatic is the absolute depth of this man's suffering. Regardless of whether we classify him as able or disabled, Merrick's life is unimaginably hard because of how other people are. No matter what philosophy or attitudes you want to put out there, he lives in a state of intractable, inescapable rejection by other humans on even the most basic levels. The struggle is real. This is part of why the film so effectively transcends critiques and paradigms. No matter who you are, anywhere in the world, and what you believe, there are just no good arguments against compassion for the severity of his predicament. Nothing is sentimental in the face of such adversity.

Honestly, this film should be required viewing for all of humanity, or at least part of the common core.

And my favorite part is that distinctively Lynchian message that the urge to make art is essential to what makes us human, and that art makes life livable. Merrick's beautiful sculptural model of the church, made resourcefully from scraps of garbage, is just a remarkable expression of all that makes humanity special. And it's the one place where he has total agency, total expressive space to see and dream and make something beautiful. When all else is FUBAR, making things still expresses our deep subjectivity, and connects us to the world, even as we transcend it through the making process. It's actually really inspiring. If Merrick can make a cathedral out of trash, maybe I can get working on some of those sculptures I've mulled over and put off for decades.

Ars longa; vita brevis. Of course, nothing ever really dies either, per Lynch.

People say the Alien movies and Rosemary's Baby will scare you out of reproducing, but they are like picnics in the park next to "Eraserhead." This thing is a depopulation bomb.

I wanted to see this for decades and only now got around to it, and I feel like some benevolent hand of fate made me wait until after being well finished with childbearing and my offspring's infancy. It's possible my head blew off and was made into pencils like Henry's at some point in that process, but if so, it can't be helped now! Don't watch this if you're pregnant or might become pregnant in the near future. Treat it like radiation exposure.

But after that, watch it, if you like cinema and the macabre. It does have a plot. It does have a story, and a gripping one. Yes, the pace is slow, but it's also not that long. Yes, it's surreal, but not just for the sake of surreality. The film has a lot to say, and an extraordinarily unique and effective way of saying it. It's also darkly but profoundly funny. And it's incredibly gross; I can't tell if the black and white cinematography makes it more or less gross than it would have been in color. It's gross. Life and death are gross.

Life, man. Paging Herbert Marcuse and the man in the grey flannel suit and all that. Culture still hasn't worked out whether young people should be okay with becoming faceless cogs in corporate machines. I'm also reminded of the "baby game" in "The Stanley Parable" which is less gross but similarly caustic, and ends in virtually the same impossible way. "Eraserhead" came first, though, for sure.

Weird, gross, and slow, but also gripping and great. I won't forget this one. Watch it, but maybe wait until after you're done having kids.

It's arguably a happy ending for Laura, since being a waitress in Odessa ensconced in some miserable, murderous crime racket and/or having just shot the man on the couch for a good or bad reason is a lot better than the existential dread of having one's body, mind, and soul taken over by Bob, which seemed like the logical result of Cooper's actions in Episode 17. Her life in Odessa is at least some kind of story, for now. And at least Cooper and Laura have each other in this ending, and aren't just alone in undifferentiated, unmediated chaos, a la the universe outside the prison ship and/or Audrey's fate.

Maybe it's not the worst ending for Coop either. A little bit Good Coop, a little bit Bad Coop, a little bit Dougie Jones. Still on the good side. But yeah, he's still stuck in the show, existing only there, after everyone else has moved on. Not so good.

As much as we want our favorite characters to be real and conscious and look back at us, it's better for them if they don't. And what does that say about us?

The only way it could have been better is if my TV actually burst into flames after the credits rolled.

Writing this before seeing Part 18, so I could be wrong, but this episode unfolds so logically, I don't understand why others resort to praising the artistry alone or wringing their hands in bafflement. This is solid storytelling.

Remember these essential facts: we, the audience, know from Fire Walk With Me that Bob has been "with" Laura since she was a young child. We also know Bob has been inhabiting her father, Leland, for a long time, and that Laura is a deeply tortured soul before her death. And, from in the murder scene in Fire Walk With Me, we know that Bob wanted to jump from Leland into Laura, but couldn't because she put on the magic ring that keeps Bob out, even knowing that he would probably just kill her in the alternative because she's realized that Leland is Bob, and Bob is Leland.

Episode 17 reminds us of this when Good Cooper puts the ring on Evil Cooper's finger, driving out Bob despite the Woodsmen's efforts to bring him back to life. I haven't worked out why Bob emerges as a punchable ghoul bubble instead of jumping into another, non-ring wearing person, as he did when he jumped from Leland to Cooper 25 years prior, but I suspect it has something to do with whatever Major Briggs, Gordon Cole, David Bowie, and the Fireman have been up to.

Anyway, Good Cooper obviously knows about the ring, but he doesn't know about Laura's lifelong, horrific abuse prior to her murder. All he knows is that Bob-Leland killed Laura on February 23,1989. He goes back in time in order to prevent what he believes is Bob's original evil act, and the precipitating event of the whole show and Cooper's arrival in Twin Peaks. We see his face on the screen in the reunion scene because he's imagining that, by preventing Laura's death, he will never be called to Twin Peaks in the first place, will never meet any of the non-FBI people, and that a lot of wonderful things will be lost along with the unnatural bad stuff. And, on a meta level, he's right. If Laura Palmer the character never got killed, there would never have been a Twin Peaks story/show/movie/universe.

But he's also wrong, because Laura's torment when on for many years before her murder. Part 17 confirms this in the shot of Leland Palmer, back in black and white 1989, watching menacingly as Bob out the window while Laura gets on the motorcycle with James. The damage is already done, long done. That ship has sailed.

And, by preventing Laura's death that night, Cooper also might prevent her from getting the ring, so even if she didn't mysteriously vanish into the night at the end of the episode, it stands to reason that the intervention would have allowed Bob to kill off Leland and possess Laura-not a great alternative, and not the one she herself chose when given the option in Fire Walk With Me. This would also explain pretty clearly why Sarah Palmer freaks out and frantically stabs Laura's picture. She's not stabbing Laura-qua-Laura, but Bob-the-evil-entity who will kill Sarah's husband and possess her daughter, on top of the horrible damage he's already done to all of them.

Plus, in 3.8, we saw how Trinity somehow let Bob and various evils into the world back in 1945, but Cooper didn't see that and doesn't know about it. Only the Fireman knows about that, I think. So why doesn't the Fireman tell Cooper? For one thing, to really stop Bob, Cooper would have to go all the way back to 1945 and stop Trinity, which creates a problem of infinite regress. How could he stop the atomic bomb from exploding? Well, at that point, he might as well kill Hitler and prevent the Holocaust and World War II instead of having a man-to-man to talk Oppenheimer out of the Trinity test, but then we've also entered an entirely different territory, and maybe The Fireman has his reasons. Or maybe The Fireman and the forces of good just don't have that kind of power.

So why doesn't The Fireman do something else about it? Well, he does do something...Laura Palmer's existence and the entire show came from the Fireman's golden thought-bubble in 3.8. "Judy," the bigger, badder baddie even than Bob, is a sort of avatar for the larger problem of evil in the world-cruelty and suffering and all that-that extends so far beyond the confines of the show. Art can go a long way, but it's too much to ask a single show to bring about actual world peace. All it can do is lead us in the right direction.

Also, for those who are miffed that Freddy gets to punch Bob to smithereens with his magic hulk glove: who cares? He's just a mechanism, and for that, any movie trope will do. We've got the mob guys, the playboy bunnies, the soap opera stars, the dramas, the comedies...why not throw the superhero genre a bone too, and bring it into the army of cinema fighting against cruelty and sorrow?

It's all pretty logical.

A lot to comment on here, but the arm wrestling scene is especially notable for a couple of reasons.

This scene gives us a fun spin on an old trope-the one where mediocre bad guys are no match for the ubermench or the supernatural character whose inhuman strength shatters their smug delusions of power, and where all the tables are turned on the bullies. We've seen this in many forms, from the heroes who flabbergast hoards of would-be attackers with their superior skills and power, to the big baddies that show the little baddies for the crawlers they are.

What makes it fun is that, elsewhere, we abhor evil Cooper. We root against him. We want him to die so good Cooper can win. He's unfathomably cruel and utterly barbaric. And here, in this scene, we totally root for him. As evil as he is, he's not a complete idiot, and he's not a cookie-cutter macho thug out to inflate his own ego through petty and pointless games of oneupmanship. His evil is calculated, thoughtful, and purposeful. The humdrum sadism and barbarity of these thugs-far more common a realistic villains that inhabit our real world, are so disgusting in their ego-driven small-mindedness and sheer stupidity. In this scene, evil Cooper sort of represents Twin Peaks against the brainless machinations of lesser films and shows, with their cliched thuggish villains. If you love the show, you root for him, because it's really an arm wrestling contest between Twin Peaks and the ocean of mindless macho content and base instinct that floods the world. Lynchian violence is often brutal and gory, but it's also deliberate and thoughtful, and intentionally challenging, rather than just chaotic action for the sake of it.

On one hand, it forces us to ask whether sinister, Machiavellian evil is worse than the mundane, despicable kind that's everywhere. On the other, we're delighted to watch a Lynchian brainchild punch in the smug bad guy's face so hard it practically implodes, and then decline the spoils of power and followers. Evil Cooper doesn't have the slightest interest in power or attention from this band of idiots. It's the thinking person's revenge fantasy against ubiquitous, hostile power morons.

Evil Cooper is still super scary after this, but it's an unexpected use of a familiar trope, and he's kind of an antihero in this scene, even out hero.

It's a little meta, and a lot of fun.

This episode is just not that far out there.

Nine Inch Nails does "She's Gone Away" and then it's nuclear apocalypse time. Very good then.

Add in the mid-century New Mexico desert, the old movie-house, the golden stardust of the mind, the vault of the stars, and a madman confidently unleashing destruction via poetry, and now it's an abundance of riches that feels tender and personal, not remote or abstracted. So many things I love from different contexts brought together.

If you were to imagine 1,000 metaphors for the redemptive powers of cinema, storytelling in any medium, beauty, humor, and/or love to assuage pain and sorrow and garmonbozia, and imagine metaphors for these things as weapons of war on behalf of good in some great planetary battle of Good vs. Evil, and then you ranked them in order of pretentiousness, this episode's approach would not fall all that high on the list. Yes, an odd man's ideas take a rather beautiful, ethereal yet material form and a deft facilitator sends them out into the world, but it's not like Lynch is claiming to be Batman, or even a powerful figure like Prospero in The Tempest. The Giant is a low-screentime character, and a relatively unassuming choice of avatar for Lynch, and for any dreamer and maker of beautiful ideas, including the idea of Twin Peaks in the first place. And he dreams in weird places and positions, not in the screen, not on the ground, but floating orthogonally somewhere near both. It's not quite right to call the golden bubbles that emerge from his ideas "weapons," but they are nevertheless powerful forces, unleashed gently and quietly, by marginal characters in the liminal movie house of dreams. It's low-key, the opposite of an atom bomb. Both are sublime, both oceanic, but in opposite ways, and art is on the good side.

Of course, art can also be weaponized to destroy, as the woodsman does. The line between the two can be hard to distinguish sometimes. The woodsman uses Jungian archetypes and poetry to lull his listeners into a nonthinking sleep, and where they are vulnerable to nasties crawling up in them and doing nasty things through them.

But to those who find this episode self-consciously artsy and indulgent, I'd suggest remembering that TP is, first and foremost, a dark comedy, and for all its intrigues, it doesn't actually take itself too seriously. While some of the characters are earnest, the show always has its tongue in its cheek; it's always playing, as if Lynch never forgets film and TV consist of grown-ups pretending elaborately to be other people, that life is absurd, existence is absurd, it's all absurd, and often maddening, senseless, unknowable, infuriating, and so forth. This episode plays hard, and leaps out of the show's already very loose conventions to reflect back on the wonder and beauty in all that playing, and the authentic healing and relief it brings so many who watch it.

If you love Nine Inch Nails, you know how their music is all about Garmonbozia, and cares tenderly about pain and sorrow, but is also shot through with recognition of life's absurdities and futilities, and that much of its gravitas is laced with dark comedy. As a fellow phenomenon of the 90s and 00s, working in a different medium and genre but thematically close to Lynch, they belong here. Arguably, Reznor has gotten closer to expressing some of what Lynch is always trying to say, and the mutual homage makes total sense. Plus, if you grew up on Lynch's films and Reznor's music, and they live in your head, the pairing speaks to one of The Return's other themes-questions of how to grow old, how to endure sickness, how to be a parent to a kid or an adult caregiver to an aging parent or partner, etc.-when such art forms have constitutionally shaped you to despise the mundane and banal and vapid, to abhor suffering fools, to cope using dark comedy and much less healthy mechanisms, and to crave sublimity and transcendence. How does Reznor be Reznor on stage and then turn around and play Candy Land and watch Blippy or whatever with his kids? The whole concept is Lynchian, like cherry pie and grisly murder. Reznor and Lynch help make sense of each other, and therefore of life, for aging weirdos like myself.

As to Trinity as the origin of Bob and the Black Lodge: I don't think the episode is stating unequivocally that the bomb is the source of all evil, or the real origin of even these evils, exactly. It's more that the bomb channeled these things, or opened a rift through which they could access our world, and seized the opportunity to do so. There was plenty of Garmonbozia to go around before 1945, and ample evil of the profoundest sorts. I don't believe Lynch would dispute that for a moment. But, with the bomb came an explosion of imagination, whereby global destruction became a fathomable idea. And with the ideas come the thought-forms, the tulpas, the possibilities, which shape both our dreams and our realities. Just as perilous is the forgetting of these real capacities, as younger generations increasingly are. Hence the need to linger inside the explosion, and to viscerally experience it as well as cinema can enable us to do so. There are statistics, and there are ineffable feelings. Nothing here says definitively that Bob was born in the explosion, or that Bob is the only evil in the world. A lot of things also changed in the post-war era, plus Roswell and Bluebook and all that, which the show is obviously tapped into.

Oh, and that bug that crawls in the girl's mouth while she sleeps that enchanted sleep of jungian archetypes? War, politics, bigotry, arbitrary and slavish devotion to self-serving social constructions? The creeping evil that spreads beneath veneers of virtue signaling, trickle-down economics, McCarthyism, etc.? Indifference to the suffering of others? All of the above? Unclear.

Regardless, Lynch says here: dream, kids. Send out your orbs of light and creativity into the world. You might fear, like Garland Briggs, that love is not enough, but try anyway. It's not a bad hill to die on.

Yeah, it's a lot. But at the core is lightness and comedy, from which romance in the medieval or Shakespearean sense emerges. The meaning, the gravity of it, isn't forced. Fantastical things happen, and you feel their effects (or don't).

Seems relatively straightforward, and fully consistent with the gestalt of TP, if you just pan out far enough.

Lastly, something about this episode feels inevitable, like it was discovered rather than written, and watching it feels like finding a lost memory more than seeing something new. So much of this season has surprised me, and this episode stands apart for that reason. I don't know what that means, but I love such experiences. Who doesn't love lost treasure?

If you come to Twin Peaks expecting a small town mystery drama, you'll sort of get that, but there's a good chance you won't like it much. If you approach it as a pitch-black comedy disguised as a whodunnit, you'll have a better time. If you don't think the universe is an absurd, confusing place on some level, Twin Peaks just isn't going to make a lot of sense to you.

On several fundamental levels, Twin Peaks is just true to life. Characters and audience get caught up in a mystery about something bad happening to a beautiful girl, and in a bunch of interpersonal subplots, and most of it just doesn't matter. It doesn't even really matter who killed Laura Palmer. The more interesting question is why, and what her death means for her-where did she go when she died? Where did she really live in the first place? What is any of this stuff that seems like reality but mostly plays out arbitrarily and performatively like an episode of "Invitation to Love"? What is base reality? These are the show's real mysteries, and it's preposterous to think they've just been tacked onto the relatively superficial mystery of who killed Laura Palmer to make a buck.

Yes, much of the acting is stylized, and the stylization references 20th century tropes that kids today might view as so dated they're unworthy of comment. That's partially because Twin Peaks and other genre-bending satires broke that stilted culture, and for that we owe it a debt of gratitude. At the same time, Film Noir and live theater both retain a kind of hyper-staginess in their forms, and aren't for everyone. If you're struggling to get past this element to get into the show, it helps to imagine you're giving yourself over into the hands of the director, and it's all a function of the director's care and vision, and not sloppiness or unskillfulness. You gotta trust.

Much of TP's comedy comes from the incongruities of real life. Absurd lightness smashes up against tragic catastrophe. It's baked goods one moment, and death the next, and then it's squeaky curtain runners the next. This is life. TP is uncomfortable for some because it doesn't declare a clear genre, so we don't know what to expect or how we're supposed to feel about anything. This is also life. Is your life a light romantic comedy, or the prelude to stormy tragedy? Nobody knows. We pretend we know, but we don't. Genres are nice because we get to escape that uncertainty, but they're nonsense and lies, mostly. TP teaches us that defaulting to dark comedy is a reasonably safe way of being in the world when you don't know what's coming (and you don't).

Yes, the characters do silly things-eccentric things, dumb things, spastic things-just like people do in real life. Cooper is our hero because he doesn't discriminate, and social constructions are just that, to him. He sees through them, all the way into the bizarre nature of the show's base reality. Talking to a log isn't any weirder than half the things most people do on a daily basis. Lots of people operate under a 99% impression that they are perpetually 18 years old. What's another 1%, really? None of it matters, especially once you pan out into the context of the greater mysteries.

At the same time, some of the characters come off as eccentric in their kindness and decency, their good intentions, open-mindedness and sense of justice. These things do matter enormously in the world of TP. The fact that they come off as quirky is more a testament to the normalization of arbitrary conventions to the point of societal insanity. But in the ominous context of a reality beyond anyone's grasp, and which may very well be a bad one from our perspective, goodness holds up its weird little candles.

Yeah, season 2 drags in the middle, but there are still a lot of enjoyable goodies, even then. Again, it's true to life, wherein we slog through long stretches of banality, where depressing things happen to characters we sympathize with, where the bad guys seem to get the upper hand for awhile, and when we don't feel like we're making much progress towards getting to the bottom of any fundamental mysteries. Just gotta make the most of the little treats, like Duchovny in drag, until the process starts to unlock some answers. TP's base reality is interesting, and worth the effort by the end of season 2. And then in season 3 it gets bananas interesting.

"The buck stopped here."

The bad: I agree with many of the criticisms leveled here against this revival. The surrogacy plotline defies believability in several ways, from the notion that Luke and Lorelei haven't discussed marriage or children during their relationship until now despite the timeline coinciding with the twilight of Lorelei's fertility, to the superficiality of their discussion of it now, to the unfathomably stupid portrayal of Luke's misunderstanding of the process, and finally to the far-fetched position of Paris at the helm of the fertility clinic. It's all pretty whackadoodle.

The "Wild" plotline would have worked if Lorelei had actually gone hiking and discovered some pleasure in camping and nature, which we know Luke enjoys (these are among his very few hobbies) but takes little interest in without Lorelei, and could have supplied another line of intimacy between them and a means of healthy compromise on her part to match his many willing concessions in the relationship. Of course, we don't want to watch Lorelei go through a cliched journey of self-discovery on the trail, but a less-uptight twist might have been a concession to at least go glamping with Luke or something like that. As it is, though, her "now or never" explanation, the nonsense about the permit, and the cheesy lightbulb moment make the whole thing feel like a flimsy way to drag out the suspense before they finally get married.

There's clearly some awkwardness with the chemistry among the performers, I can take or leave the musical bits, and there are various other plot threads that seem half-baked, if not so totally absurd.

The good, and the controversially great: Like others, I really liked Emily's story, but unlike others, I loved Rory's character development. I understand that fans were disappointed and perhaps struggled to believe that Rory would wind up floundering in her thirties despite all of her wonderful qualities and the best launching pad into life that anyone could hope for. But this does, in fact, happen all the time, especially to people with aspirations in creative and wobbly fields like traditional journalism and writing (and is probably much more realistic than the revival's portrayal of Jess's moderate success with a small publisher). Even more importantly, the Rory trajectory comports with the universe of the original show. A central theme and source of comfort is the idea that life's paths are winding and crooked, that plans go awry, but that happiness can be found even in unconventional circumstances that crusty old fossils disapprove of. Richard and Emily and the hoity-toity worldview of their country club and DAR friends would certainly expect Rory's early success to translate directly into career success and a respectable relationship ten years later-a steady, clear, upward progression-but life just isn't that linear or guaranteed. That works both ways; just as Lorelei could drop out of high school and become a single mother at 16, and yet still make a happy, successful, and fulfilling life for herself by 32, Rory can do everything right at 16 and find herself adrift at 32, and even find herself single and pregnant. And that's okay. So what if she hasn't become Christianne Amanpour? So what if she's not ensconced in a rat race of bourgeoise success and respectability? Her aimlessness is analogous to that of Jo March when she writes the fictional "Little Women" in Louisa May Alcott's book. And in that same vein, Rory's fictional "Gilmore Girls" reiterates the original show's fundamental themes that made it so great, which also echo those of "Little Women": women's lives and loves and whims aren't just frivolous detours on the way to some grand, real, serious destiny, but are the stuff of life itself. The Gilmore girls make mistakes as they try to define themselves and meaning in their lives, and those mistakes largely constitute the story. The girls aren't perfect, even if others want or expect them to be. Like everything else on the show, their perfection lies in their imperfections, and in coffee (and pizza and movies and jokes and snow and kisses and twinkly little lights). The revival gives us Emily and Lorelei's happy endings, for now, but it's just the beginning of Rory's story, just as the original series began with Lorelei's life at the same age. It's okay if she doesn't have it all figured out already at 32 or whatever. Many ways to skin a cat.

The revival is flawed, but if you're a fan of the original series and you've already come this far, it's all worth it for Emily's new leaf and the gosh darn wedding at the bitter end, finally, at last, thank goodness.