#that just doesn’t really line up with a maddie abduction storyline

[itsactuallycorrine]

A thriller story Maddie and Athena are going to work together on really makes it sound like they’ll be together like Athena and Buck were a la Fight or Flight, maybe tracking Buck down this time instead….

[greygamer]

TP Countdown Day 22: May The Giant Be With You

We Holy cow, I’m not sure where to start. I had forgotten just how good this episode was, and it is very good. Part of the reason for that, I suspect, is that we get Mr. Lynch behind the camera again, which you can tell almost immediately. When Lynch is running the show, things have a tendency to slow right down. Scenes are given the opportunity to breathe. Actors take their time with their lines. They’re allowed to really live in the moment.

And they get a lot of time to do that in this double-length episode. And Lynch takes great advantage of that.

Something else that’s a sure sign that Lynch is behind the camera is the way that the darkness of Twin Peaks, which is usually left hovering at the edges, gets a chance to drift further towards the center. Even scenes that should be completely innocuous get an edge of tension.

Take, for example, the beginning of this episode.

We pick up immediately from where we left things -- Agent Cooper is laying on the floor having just been shot. He was wearing his bullet proof vest, so two of the bullets have been deflected, BUT he had rolled the vest up to try to find a wood tick that had been crawling on him, leaving a vulnerable spot for that third slug.

Coop is soon visited by a 100 year old room service waiter who brings him his warm milk, helpfully hangs up Coop’s phone which is still connected to Deputy Andy, and also helpfully doesn’t phone for an ambulance or anything else. The old waiter does give Coop a friendly thumbs up a few times, so that’s nice. It also takes about five minutes for all this to play out, as this elderly waiter shuffles from here to there, exits and re-enters, smiles, and advises Coop that his milk will get cool if he doesn’t drink it soon.

Coop is later visited by what appears to be a vision of a giant. The giant tells him three things, then takes Coop’s ring and explains that it will be returned to him once those three things have come true. The things are.

1. There is a man in a smiling bag.

2. The owls are not what they seem.

3. Without chemicals he points.

This, on first glance, appears to make as much sense as Cooper’s dream way back in the third episode, and that’s probably not a coincidence, because Lynch directed that episode too.

It only takes a short time for the first of the giant’s statements to prove true. After Coop gets patched up at the hospital (Doc Hayward removes a bullet complete with a squashed a wood tick) and getting the low-down from Lucy on what’s happened since he was shot (which also gives the low-down to anyone just joining us at the start of the second season), Coop sees Jacques Renault being carted away in a body bag -- the smiling bag of Cooper’s vision.

It’s not all visions and smiles, though, as this episode has to dance its way through all the cliff-hangers set up at the end of last season. Catherine and Josie are both missing following the fire at the mill, though Pete and Shelly both survived their run-ins with the blaze. Leo is in a coma after being shot by Hank. And Audrey -- poor Audrey! -- who I think I forgot to mention in the last recap, is trapped in One Eyed Jacks, having only just avoided a sexual tryst with the owner of the place, specifically, her father. And if you can think of a more awkward family meet up than that, I’d sure like to hear it.

But this is a new season, and that means we can’t just focus on the old storylines, we’ve got get some new ones rolling too. Donna gets her hands on Laura’s old sunglasses and instantly turns into a bad girl, which is kind of hot (full disclosure, Donna was my show crush when I first watched in 1990, but looking back on it now, it’s clear that Audrey was substantially hotter). Donna also gets a note to check out the Meals on Wheels that Laura used to do, so she signs up to take over Laura’s route, hoping to find some more clues into Laura’s murder.

Meanwhile, Leland seems to be doing much better after murdering Jacques, except for the fact that his hair has turned completely white over night. Also in the Palmer household, Maddie has a vision of what seems to be a massive blood stain on the living room carpet. That sure can’t be a good sign.

But maybe the most important revelation this episode is that of a third man at Leo’s cabin. In a scene where Cooper breaks down the case for the rest of the investigators -- another great moment to bring newcomers up to speed -- he explains that there was a third man apart from Leo and Jacques at the cabin who took Laura and Ronette to the train car to murder them. That means that after building towards the apparent resolution at the end of the first season that Leo must have been the killer, we learn that, in fact, no, he wasn’t, and the mystery continues.

Oh, Laura, will we ever learn who murdered you?

Yes. The answer is yes. We kind of find out at the episode’s close -- it appears to be Killer BOB. As Ronette wakes up, we get the chance to catch a few flashes of her memory of Laura’s death. And holy shit, those flashes. Laura with blood running down her face, either grinning  or gnashing her teeth; BOB attacking; Laura screaming; BOB screaming. It’s all pretty goddamn terrifying, and is probably the darkest sequence that show has put on TV yet. Oh, also, it’s goddamn stunning.

So now we know Killer BOB is the culprit. But we don’t know exactly who Killer BOB is. Shoe salesman Mike returns this episode to sell Truman some shoes, though, so maybe he’ll have something to offer?

“The owls are not what they seem”

I want to take a second here and talk about owls.

There are things that I remember about this show, and things that I don’t. For example, I remember how the giant’s prediction that “Without chemicals he points,” plays out. But I don’t remember how “The owls are not what they seem,” does.

But I wanted to make mention of something i read about years after watching Twin Peaks that I thought might have been loosely connected. Not in an exact literal way, but in a weird, Lynchian, tangential way. And that is that owls may have something to do with alien abductions.

I’m not sure where I read it -- it might have been in Communion, Whitley Streiber’s supposedly true account of his abduction by aliens, but apparently many people who claim to have been abducted also have “cover memories” that are implanted to cover the time during which they were in the alien’s custody. And, strangely enough, those covering memories often include owls.

I’m not sure why, that’s just how it goes.

Now I’m not suggesting that Killer BOB and the little man from another place are aliens, because that would be too on the nose and not very Lyncian at all. But I do wonder whether the prevalence of owls in the show might have come from this notion, that perhaps the owls could signify someone passing into the Black Lodge, or some other kind of thing.

On the other hand, is I think Sigmund Freud once famously said, “Sometimes an owl is just an owl.”