Penman61

I shouldn't say confidently the charred men revived EvilCoop, because a LOT happened in between their "ministrations" and his revival. ETA they looked like they were rubbing Coop's blood all over his body and face. Because...well, why not? But just thinking in terms of how these worlds interact, I would think the charred men would want to help Bob stay in this world. You know, because Bob is EAGER FOR FUN <shudder> and he is doing the Dark Lodge's business in our world, causing suffering and creating garmonbozia.

As the Charredly Angels were rubbing Evil Cooper back to life, we saw Bob appear in Coop's thorax, basically in egg form. But, unless I missed something, and God knows I could have, Bob didn't leave EvilCoop. So I think Bob is still inhabiting EvilCoop. I would say that's most definitely true. They seem to help bridge the two worlds, esp. the Black Lodge, which is why we see one associated with Major Briggs' body. My guess, anyway.

(Also, if we're positing a Lynch Cinematic Universe, we now have a second explanation for Sheryl Lee in the bubble at the end of Wild at Heart.)

Man's Capacity for Destruction (nuclear bomb) vs. Art & Artifice (theatre space where Laura is born/reborn) An eternal battle for the ages, ladies and gentlemen...

So...Bob vs. Laura Palmer super-villain/hero origin story? LOL thinking back to simpler, child-like times when we were wondering if last week's credit sequence in the Double R diner had a time slip. So innocent, so young were we. Stanley Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey Terence Malick: Tree of Life David Lynch: Hold my coffee...

No nukes. Ever. Ever.

Thanks for that confirmation. Now I feel like Lynch is teaching us to pay attention to the goshdarn credits!

I'm one who dismissed The Great Diner Shift as continuity sloppiness. But these comments made me look at the sequence again. (And again..and again...). And...now I don't think it's continuity sloppiness, because (in order of importance): 1) As far as I can tell, NOT ONE CUSTOMER IS THE SAME after the shift. NOT ONE: At the counter, standing at the register, in the booths--not a single one. The staff (Shelly, Norma, Heidi et al) are the same, though in different places. This is way too much for just continuity sloppiness. 2) BEFORE Bing comes in and shouts about Billy, Shelly is looking confused. It's hard to see and happens fast, but it's after the first cut in the sequence, when the shot moves from restaurant left to restaurant right: BEFORE Bing comes in, Shelly is looking around quizzically, like something's off. THEN Bing comes in, shouts, and Shelly still looks around as if to say "Wait, what? Weird, right? Anyway..." And then she goes and talks to Heidi in a normal way, puts her hand on Heidi's arm, etc. So Shelly thought something was amiss AFTER all the customers were swapped out but BEFORE Bing came in. Weird. 3) I and others had noticed non-diegetic music playing under "Sleep Walk"(!) toward the end of the credits. Someone on another site says it's a slowed down version of the Windom Earle theme. Can't verify this myself.

I went back to check, and you are 100% correct. That is NOT a one-armed man. Phew! Apologies for mis-seeing. Thank you for catching that. Now, back to decoding the digitized light reflections off the FBI Learjet windows...

My God. I...wow. What on earth could that be? Occam's razor says it was some digital artist just dressing up the scene, i.e., adding sunlight reflections to the windows, but...I don't even know anymore with this show. Could be code. Could be electricity emanating from some as-yet unidentified lodge crossover figure inside the plane (Tammy?).

Yeah, it'd be pretty evil, but remember: When BOB inhabited Leland, it "made" him rape his own teenge daughter on a regular basis for years. To quote Noah Cross in Chinatown, BOBCooper is capable of...anything.

I saw that and went back and looked at the scene. What's missing between these two shots is another shot from the other side (all the way over on the customer side) of the counter, a shot of Norma doing her books and looking up, and then we go back to the second shot you have. So this cutting honestly makes me think it's just a continuity error, though a fairly glaring one. But we never know, do we? What struck me from this scene was, if you watch the credits all the way to the end: 1) A young man outside the diner walks in front of the right window, pauses, and then comes in the diner. He walks over to an empty booth on the right, sits down, looks a bit nervous, but might be just an extra extra-ing. 2) At the same time the young man enters and sits down, the song "Sleepwalking," which has been playing through the entire scene, is now underscored (literally!) with some dissonant, ominous-sounding strings. No idea what to make of it. Could be PTSD from watching The Sopranos diner finale with the exegetical fineness of a Talmudic scholar...

My closed captioning is often wrong. I listened carefully again, and he definitely says "Billy" though cc wrote "Bing." No idea who Billy is, though. Re the 3 Giant clues, two of them are pointing Cooper toward Richard Horne. Speaking of which, I enjoy Andy, but him not immediately detaining the man who owned the truck that mowed down that little boy (the boy literally had tire tracks on his back) is some shitty police work. That perp (we know it's Richard but LE doesn't) is an immediate fatal threat to your community's safety, Andy, and you should be pulling out all stops to get him, not setting up a mysterious meeting two hours later even farther out in the boonies with the truck's owner. Bad Andy. Bad, bad Andy. Maybe he's never fully recovered from thwacking himself on the noggin with Leo's plank.

Right after Dougie vanquished Spike, egged on by the Tree Thing that is "the Evolution of the Arm," a (non-Mike) one-armed man walks up and stands behind Dougie/Janey during the aftermath. Hard to miss once you see it. I swear to God, this show... ETA: Moxie Cat correctly corrects my mis-seeing this. It is NOT a one-armed man. Apologies!

Well, that figure looks pretty charred, and Bobby said Major Briggs burned to death, right?

Does anyone know the shipping address of the Roadhouse? I'd like to Amazon them A GODDAMN PUSH-BROOM... This was the same figure that was a few cells down from Matthew Lillard (principal) 4-5 eps ago. In that scene, we saw his disembodied head float away...so you can imagine HOW HAPPY I WAS TO SEE HIS SUNNY FIGURE SKULKING AROUND THE MORGUE <shudder>

It looked like Andy/LE had traced the truck Richard was driving when he killed the child in E7 to this bearded guy. Said nervous bearded guy said he'd meet Andy in two hours at agreed upon location. Andy showed; guy didn't.

Since this episode told us BadCooper visited the hospital where Audrey was recovering after the bank explosion, I'm guessing 1) Richard (drugged-out truck-speeding child manslaughterer) is the spawn of BadCooper's rape of unconscious Audrey. God help us all. On the lighter side: the Girl from Ipanema! I'd forgotten Warren Frost had died. Many, too many, swansongs in this series. But I'm glad to see them. Am I wrong about this?: The last time Kyle Maclachlan and Laura Dern shared screen time was at the end of 1986's Blue Velvet, when they were celebrating the return of the Robins of Love? Times have changed... Josie Packard!

Also: "Noon-thirty"? Who says that?

LOL it's like they think us gay peeps are unfamiliar with DVR technology and the skill of prioritizing. SOME OF US WATCHED BOTH.

For anyone else who was not impressed by the "acting" of the extras at the scene of the car accident that killed the boy.

Bushnell, after some initial puzzlement/frustration, seemed to understand Dougie's doodles on the insurance forms. What I saw in Dougie's Doodles was a ladder, a staircase, and then something that could have been a streetlamp or a noose (or something else!). (I associated these with the Space Room w/the Blinded Lady in Red, but that's a stretch, no?) More to the point: What did Bushnell see in Dougie's Doodles?

Good points about Nora's honesty and bullshit aversion. I can't agree about the moral imperative to not disclose what happened to the Sudden Departed. It could very well be that many--most?--couldn't handle the truth, as you plausibly describe. Certainly some would still want to know where the 2% went. But that is not for Nora to decide. People deserve to have facts--especially life-or-death facts--about the people they care about. How they manage that is up to them. Not Nora. For her to withhold that information is morally reprehensible.

Fair enough. I truly understand this way of accepting it. But I'm not Kevin. I'm not being asked to believe Nora; I'm being asked to believe The Leftovers' entire story. So, for me, it's worth working out what happened to her with the machine and what the various possibilities mean for the story. YMMV. As I see it, the show offers three possibilities for the veracity of Nora's account: It's 100% empirically true: The 2% are in their own parallel world, bereft of the 98%, and vice versa. Nora believes it happened, i.e., she had some kind of near-death neurological event (as Kevin did), and that episode played out emotional things she needed to work out (as Kevin's did). As Kevin said to her at the hotel, "You need to go be with your kids." Her mind took that advice, and gave her the journey she needed. But it's not empirically true--true for the rest of the world in The Leftovers. Nora is deliberately lying. In the tank, she screamed to get out at the last minute, was let out, and stayed in Australia for years until Kevin found her. Not psychologically dissimilar from #2, she has constructed the story of crossing over to help herself continue to live. But she knows it's not true. Number 1 implies the moral imperative that Nora, having returned, tell the 98% world where the 2% are. To NOT do so is, morally, monstrous and truly unforgivable. Her character really can't recover from that with an audience. Number 2 is, from a story-teller's perspective, too similar to what happened to Kevin, and she didn't have the "death" experience (being shot, being drowned, being asphyxiated) that Kevin appeared to require to enter that other world. Number 3 requires that Matt would have been in on the lie (until he died) or at least sworn to secrecy. I'm sure I'm missing things. :)

Expectation is a big part of how much we do or don't enjoy something. And if you're watching The Return but haven't seen FWWM, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and especially Inland Empire (Lynch's last full-length film), I'd imagine you'd feel truly, unpleasantly confused. And I wouldn't blame you. Your expectations have been set mainly by Twin Peaks S1 & S2, and The Return must seem random, overwrought, and tedious. But again, even if you'd had seen all Lynch's post-TP work, I understand how one might find The Return dissatisfying.