25YL
Those of us who wrote about Twin Peaks during the weeks of Season Three got a number of things right and a number of things wrong. And yes, by “wrong” I mean things that seem WAY outside the realm of possibility rather than literally being proven wrong. I know Twin Peaks means very few things can be 100% anything (except ambiguous).
Here, each of our authors are going to look through their writings to show what we really missed the boat on when we were extrapolating from extremely limited in-progress information. Earlier today we wrote about when we were really on the mark, but right now you’re getting our most fun, outlandish and goofy misses. Have fun with it!
John:
in Dale Cooper’s Yellow Brick Road I equated a ton of wacky characters with Wizard of Oz Characters, such as Phil Bisby as the Cowardly Lion. None of it’s right, but it sure was fun to write. And in my next one, We Long To See The Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Lodge, I completely beefed it when I said Jeffries LOOKS like he’s comparable to the Wizard but REALLY the Wizard will be the unassuming Phillip Gerard instead. Oh, and Cooper’s shoes absolutely positively will have something to do with it all. Total mind reader I am.
Remember how simple things were in the first five Parts? Back then, I was poetically convinced in A First Look Into Doppelganger Cooper and Bob, and What That Says About Leland Palmer that Cooper would break Bob’s cycle of appetite and satisfaction with the help of Laura and Leland Palmer. You know, rather than Freddy. I also give Dale the credit of being a possessed person. In A Second Look Into DoppelGanger Cooper and Bob, and What The Leland Palmer Days Say About That, I was convinced Bob was running the show in Cooper’s body and by the time I wrote Bob vs. Good Dale vs. DoppelCooper, and How Theosophy Might Just Make Some Sense Out Of This Mess I was way off base, thinking there was a three-way tug of war between Good Dale, Bad Dale and Bob inside Dale’s body for control.
Later on in the middle of August, with Come On, Hero, Do SOMETHING! (or, Evil Will Always Triumph Because Good Is Dumb), I give Cooper’s time as Dougie credit for being a stage necessary before he can become a Mason-style Asscended Master, which would’ve been amazingly prescient if I were describing Major Briggs’ arc, but instead I put all that on Cooper because I was still hoping he’d be all unambiguously superheroic at the end. Whoops!
In Richard Horne’s Car: A Character Profile Richard Horne was so difficult to tolerate that I ask if he is on an alchemical path to redemption, but settle on the fact he’s probably a step on Dale Cooper’s journey. I worked so hard to give him narrative significance but he ended up having none. Also filed under Giving Added Significance, Candie’s First Language Is Television suggests Candie is another Dougie-like being on her way to a higher enlightened state. And just like Dougie she learned her sentences from those around her, in this case her massive intake of television shows. I really love this take on Candie but it definitely needs to be filed under Creative Writing if for no other reason than Dougie not being one step away from becoming an enlightened being.
In Sparkle: The Designer Drug That May Just Bring Down The Curtains Between Us and The Lodges, I write that Sparkle is one of the causes of the breakdown between our reality and the lodges, but based on its narrative weight it’s much more a symptom than a cause. I mention the theory that Dougie Jones’ locale is a dream world, and that the Earth may be being primed for mass possessions by the lodges as the lodges wage war on each other. And if you can believe it now, I even tried to equate Shelly’s bad boyfriend Red as the modern day version of the Woodsmen. Part of me holds out hope that evidence will surface in my favor someday, but until that day arrives I’ve got to file this one under Plausible but not Probable.
And in We’re Big Ed and Twin Peaks Is Our Norma, I was tentatively getting ready for a giant-sized Cooper victory and celebration before the finale aired, and we all know how that one went. On the interesting side I made a note about a guy who holds himself back by being really paternalistic to a lady in his life, but it wasn’t Cooper…It was Ed, about Nadine. Patterns are everywhere, even when we don’t know it. Here’s to the connecting of yet more dots in 2018!
Laura:
During Series 3 I wrote a weekly column, ‘Who Killed Ruth Davenport?’ covering the FBI/Blue Rose Task Force and Major Briggs story lines (amongst others as they all intertwined) and reading back over them I realise it is a plethora of wild speculations! From the very beginning I was convinced that the key to the Major Briggs body would be upon the discovery of his head and the 3 marks that would be on his neck, proving his alien abduction. In this same episode we first saw the prison cell woodsman, who despite creeping me the hell out, I was convinced to be the ghostly spirit of Samson Lanterman, the Log Lady’s husband. Very wrong! Who Killed Ruth Davenport? Parts 1 & 2
In Who Killed Ruth Davenport? Parts 3, 4 & 5 I was convinced that the Dossier written about by Mark Frost in the ‘Secret History of Twin Peaks’ was going to be discovered in Ruth Davenport’s apartment. I’m still slightly disappointed that this didn’t happen, it would have been a wonderful revelation, so in my mind it still did, we just didn’t see it play out on camera.
As it became increasingly obvious that Richard Horne was the son of Audrey and Doppelcooper I speculated that she wouldn’t have known anything about her rape and would have presumed his father to be John Justice Wheeler as she had lost her virginity to him only hours before the bank explosion that left her in a coma. Who Killed Ruth Davenport? Part 7: There’s a body all right. In this same article I still wanted the Charcoal Men who turned out to be Woodsmen, and not just two of them but many, to be good spirits, lost souls who were killed in a fire. Whilst we still may not know the origin of them, they are most definitely not the sweet harbingers of death my optimistic heart hoped for.
Amongst other speculations, I had hoped that Candie would turn out to be the daughter of the real Cooper (and Diane) as she was so overjoyed at the simple things like air conditioning, just like our long lost Coop once was about smelling those Douglas Firs. I would still love that to be the case. I wondered if Tammy was an alien, if Ike The Spike was a Lodge Denizen, if the original ‘Blue Rose Case’, Lois Duffy was the Judy they had all been searching for. Perhaps most hilariously of all I actually thought the big Twitter frenzy for Part 8 might herald the return of Audrey Horne. Yeah, it turned out a bit bigger than that. As if she’d be back that early on anyway right?
You can read all my previous articles here: Laura Big thanks to everyone that has already!
Lindsay:
Much of what I’ve written isn’t easily recognizable as right or wrong yet. I can’t be sure if my writings on quantum physics or my theories about Diane will hold up to scrutiny; only time will tell. But there were a few things throughout the season that I feel confident admitting I got very wrong. One of those was my theory that the Dougie Jones storyline took place in the past. These ideas weren’t preserved for posterity on the site but I do recall looking for evidence that what we were seeing in Las Vegas was taking place as far back as 2002 or 2003, based on license plate sticker colours and Lorraine’s Blackberry model. These things haven’t been explained satisfactorily — Nevada license plate registration stickers, while nominally showing the month of renewal and not the year, are colour-coded by year and the goldenrod colour of Dougie’s license plate sticker has only ever been in use in 2003; Lorraine’s Blackberry is definitely at least 15 years old, and probably wouldn’t work well on existing cell networks — but that’s par for the course in Twin Peaks. If these questions are never resolved, I’m fine with that.
I’m not sure if I was right about the link to childhood rhymes, folktales, and farming seasons (“The Cow Jumped Over The Moon“) or the questions about dreams and dreamers (“Dream A Little Dream of Me” and “No More Yielding But a Dream” — though I will say that Eileen and I anticipated the “Who is the dreamer?” question by a couple of months, so that’s something to be proud of!) I also wrote that Dale Cooper was on a heroic grail quest; by the end of the series, I (and many others) were left wondering if it was possible that Dale Cooper failed at that quest, or that maybe he wasn’t the hero we needed after all. Was I wrong to suggest he might have been? I’m not sure.
And then there were all the predictions and assertions made in the Black Lodge/White Lodge series. Were the inhabitants of the Purple World truly bent on diverting Cooper from his final destination? Since Naido was Diane all along, and she seems to be on Cooper’s side, that’s hard to say for sure. There certainly wasn’t anything else going on with Candie, contrary to what I argued back in July. The jury is still out on the true identity of Judy, but although many people are jumping to the conclusion that she has to be Sarah (an assertion The Final Dossier didn’t discount), it’s still sort of possible that she could be Laura, as I argued in August.
On the whole, it would be all too easy to be self-critical at this juncture and lambaste myself for getting these and other issues wrong. But the fact is that no one was going to be 100% right. The experience of putting my neck out there and making predictions was a fun one, and I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Brien:
Like I had said previously, Comparing Reboots was admittedly a bit of a stretch, and thus it was full of some pretty bad predictions. Looking at the low percentage of returning cast members (37 of 217 that we knew of before Season 3 aired), I wondered that perhaps our returning characters would not so much be the drivers of the story, and instead be in supporting roles, as they are in the new Star Wars trilogy. That’s not exactly what happened. There were “new” storylines (Las Vegas and Buckhorn) running parallel to “old” storylines (Twin Peaks). Where their paths crossed, new and old characters were actually intermingled pretty seamlessly, I’d say.
Nor did the story jump back a generation and focus on the younger characters. In fact, Season 3 left the high school behind entirely, with the younger generation already being in their 20s (like Agent Preston, Wally Brando, Becky and Steven). The original series teens were now adults, but largely the reins had not been handed down to their generation. Ben still ran the Great Northern, Norma still ran the RR Diner, and Truman (albeit a different one) still ran the sheriff’s station.
I worried that our returning characters might be killed off right before our very eyes, as Han Solo was in The Force Awakens. There were many on-screen deaths in Season 3, but amazingly none of our returning characters suffered that fate. Save of course for the Log Lady, whose death served more of a Yoda death scene purpose, if I can be allowed one last Star Wars comparison.
It was inevitable that Lynch would want to cast Laura Dern in a role opposite of Kyle MacLachlin, and many foresaw that it would be Diane. In my Pre-Season review, I personally thought it would be foolish to answer one of the great mysteries of the original series and reveal Diane to be a real person. Actually, maybe I wasn’t all wrong on that stance.
My bet as to how they would handle the lack of Frank Silva was on recasting. A lot of folks were betting on existing characters being the “new BOB”, everyone from Leland to Deputy Hawk. I just couldn’t really see them doing any of that, but I also actively poo-pooed the idea that they would bring back BOB as a “CGI monstrosity”. Ha. Boy, good times, eh?
While I “got right” that there would be two Coopers (OK, there were three – or more like six in the final count – but who could have predicted that?), I “got wrong” that the two halves would have to reunite. In fact, once again, Good Cooper never really confronted his shadow self in this season. Bad Cooper and BOB were taken out by The Fireman and his agents, Andy, Lucy and Freddie. So that was unexpected, to me anyway.
I threw out a wild prediction that the premise of Season 3 would be that Agent Cooper had been in jail for a murder (or two) committed by his doppelganger 25 years ago. The idea being that new evidence would be found to exonerate him, he’d be reinstated as an FBI agent, and then he and Agent Preston would partner up to investigate. To be fair, I wasn’t really married to that prediction or anything, but come on, did you see how grim Agent Cooper looked in all of those promos?
One prediction I was invested in however was that Sarah Palmer would have a moment of redemption in Season 3. Lynch had already shown us that Sarah was on the decline in the Between Two Worlds segment on the Fire Walk With Me Blu-ray, and the Showtime promo clip of her walking down the liquor isle was even more telling. I really thought all of that was set up for Sarah to redeem herself for her role in Laura’s death, somehow be the key to defeating whatever new evil reared its ugly head this season. Turned out it was more like she was damned, damned, and then damned again. Yikes, I sure got that wrong.
Going in to Season 3, like most of us primed by The Secret History, I was fairly convinced there would be an alternate timeline or reality going on in this season. I still don’t understand what Frost was up to with all the deliberate discrepancies planted throughout that book. There was no payoff in the series for it, not that I detected anyway. Granted, we did have some weirdness, like the RR Diner swap scene and Big Ed’s reflection, and of course Cooper did go back in time and change the past. But that’s not what I intended in my prediction, so call this a “got wrong”.
That little glitch when Bad Cooper shot Phyllis Hasting in Part 2 had me convinced that she was possessed by BOB or some other Lodge spirit, and that was what we saw leaving her body as she died. By extension, I thought that perhaps Bill Hastings had also been possessed and made to kill Ruth Davenport. They seemed to be giving us a parallel to Leland realizing what horrible crimes he had been made to commit under BOB’s possession. Of course, now I look back on that glitch as no more than Lynch just messing around with digital effects, and maybe messing with us a bit too.
In Parts 1 & 2, I put out a wild theory that maybe Leo Johnson was going to show up after all, having become a redeemed man after his time with Windom Earle. Crazy, yeah, I know. There had been hints that a few cast members had been kept off the officially released lists, and when the credits rolled on just “Shelly”, with no last name given? Stranger things have happened in Twin Peaks. Of course, given the ring around her neck, I later revised this to maybe Leo had returned 25 years ago, but at some point prior to Season 3 he had died. Was this the goal of making her last name some sort of mini mystery this season? Who knows. If so, I fell for it a bit. It all seems kind of silly now, looking back on it.
While I think The Magician Longs To See stands up pretty well in the post-season analysis, the direction I thought we were heading in was some sort of final epic battle between the good magicians and the bad magicians, possibly tying in to some of the Masons vs Illuminati stuff Frost was hinting at in The Secret History. With regard to final good vs evil battles, Season 3 had nothing of the sort in mind, it would seem. The Fireman just kind of swiped Bad Cooper aside like a bug. He never stood a chance. And the BOB bubble was punched to pieces by a random stranger wearing a green garden glove. So, uh.. yeah. I’ll take my “got wrong” on that one, for sure.
Check out What We Got Right while you help us send off the most amazing Twin Peaks year of 2017!
