Part 10

Part 10. Now things are really picking up.

This episode was great. A perfect blend of funny, weird, scary, and chaotic.

It mainly centers around the new characters this time around. Candie, for example, who is acting all weird, but I still like her!

We get some disturbing scenes with Richard. Scenes that haven't been matched since the BOB scenes back in the original show, that's more than great.

It did seem like a build up episode, so I'm eagerly expecting to see what's next. And for the love of god, where are you, Audrey?!

All in all, a pretty good and solid episode, another great addition to this show.

In this episode we have - again - a series of vaguely connected, self-standing short stories. Bad boy Richard brings trouble wherever he goes; weird Candie behaves like your garden-variety Lynchianesque character; Log Lady sends cryptic messages.

At least, some of the action makes sense, even if a lot of it is violence to women. However, even in the dramatic scene of Richard and his granny, Lynch manages to dilute the tension by focusing on annoying, staged details (see the freakish doll...).

The sex scene is totally non-erotic... I felt like hitting the only woman left untouched: Janey, who by now must have pronounced the name "Dougie" just about a billion times

Despite the fact that the plot moves a bit, I doubt I will ever warm up to the characters. There are way too many of them, their stories are too sketchy and it seems a case of "famous actors wanting to add a Lynch-role to their curriculum" such as Ashley Judd - what is she doing here exactly?

Then, there is the level of suspended disbelief required. We know this is fiction, we know characters are not "real" but we still need a reason to follow their stories and root for (or against) them.

Considering the super-slow narrative, the lack of plot, the abundance of Lynch-nonsense and quirks for quickness sake, it seems to require too much of an effort to buy into this weird, unsettling, grim humorless world.

If you take the music out, this episode is disappointingly short. There are some interesting things that occur. First of all, there is Dougie, who walks through life totally out of the loop. He becomes the object of a plot at insurance fraud. The bad guys want to frame him, but since nothing fazes him anyway, who cares? We meet two brothers who are supposed to be his adversaries. We have the continuation of that violent kid who ran over a little boy attacking his own grandmother and taking everything she has. There is also probably a reason that we are focused on his mentally challenged cousin. He also killed a woman in a motor home. I would guess that next time we get back to the doings concerning bad Cooper. It seems like an eternity to get to the end. Once again, we are led into the rabbit hole.

There's admittedly little to no plot structure to Twin Peaks, sometimes that ends up benefiting with surprising results, other times it feels like the show is just showing us scenes to take up screen time. This episode was disappointingly more of the ladder. The one thing that should be taken away from this episode is probably just how disgustingly brutal Richard Horne is to people. God knows how a sweet woman like Audrey had a child that fell so far from the tree. Speaking of which, we still haven't seen her. For those who love a good fan theory, I definitely believe the theory that Richard is the offspring of Audrey and the evil Cooper who's been walking around the earth as an imposter for 25 years. It's rare that Peaks would ever appease the fans in such a way, but isn't it a hard theory to deny? Perhaps the thing more threatening is the fact that Richard has an 'in' at the sheriff's department with that one officer. This can only mean bad things. Overall, this episode was hostile and difficult to watch. No female character got through a scene without being either physically or emotionally hurt by a man, which probably isn't by coincidence. Dougie is still Dougie though, which means I'm still annoyed.

7.0/10

Goofy and sinister sums up this episode. Twin Peaks always had violence against women, after all the body of Laura Palmer is where it all started.

Nasty Richard Horne battered a witness to his crime when he then attacked his own grandmother for money.

We have a focus on the sinister Mitchum brothers. Rodney gets smacked in the face by a remote control by the ditsy Candie who also shows signs of other worldly brain activity.

The Mitchum brothers are in a collision course with Dougie Jones as Dougie is framed for the brothers troubles.

Yet the goofiness is provided with Janey-E realising that her husband has suddenly lost weight, became muscular, fit and healthy. She suddenly now wants to seduce him.

The biggest surprise was to see Albert having dinner with a female and smiling away. Just a little moment that rounds his character.