What I thought of Twin Peaks episodes 1-4

Twin Peaks has returned to an utter lack of advance knowledge of what happens in it, and this frankly is the best way to approach this new series so massive great honking SPOILER WARNINGS from now on. Also, if you haven’t seen the TV series you’ll be totally lost here. If you’ve not seen Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me then go see that as this draws upon a lot of that film, including even the deleted scenes. Basically go consume everything Twin Peaks before seeing this. Also it may be an idea to watch Lynch’s films too, even Dune as there’s visual references to all of Lynch’s previous works going on here. So, if you’ve done that crack on…

First up anyone who comes to this expecting quirky humour and weird, but still funny, characters will suffer a serious shock as the first two hours especially owe less to what people mainly think Twin Peaks is (quirky, funny, charming, sometimes scary, weird) to David Lynch unleashing his full creative forces. There are moments in the first two episodes especially that are some of the best images Lynch has even put on screen but there’s a lot of times when you the viewer will be made uncomfortable, and this is a good thing.

Far too many programmes end up pandering to keep viewers happy. There’s nothing of what one would expect of a Twin Peaks revival til near the end of the second episode, and the fourth episode features the sort of scenes (Andy and Lucy provide much of the fun quirkiness here) you may expect. Mainly though you’ll be bombarded with confusing, disturbing and sometimes grotesque images that actually helps tell what is a complex story.

The jist of that story is that Good Agent Cooper has been trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years until Laura Palmer appears again to him as promised.

In the world outwith the Black Lodge, our world, the Bad Agent Cooper is doing bad things as this is Cooper’s doppelgänger inhabited by the evil Bob at the end of the TV series.

Evil Cooper involves Kyle MacLachlan wearing a dodgy wig while doing seriously vicious things to people, and here’s another thing (and I hate using the term ‘political correctness’) this is not a programme that restricts itself to current moralities. This is a programme where Evil Cooper is amoral and brutal, where middle aged men leer after younger women and where oddness abounds. It’s designed at times to challenge you and it will because we’re used to a level of sanitisation in our television but that’s not going in here and this is a good thing. We’re not seeing a toned down or restrained Twin Peaks here, we’re seeing something that will delight, astound, shock and scare you as much as the visuals and sound (I recommend watching this on earphones as the sound mix/design is amazing) is stunning.

The opening episodes deal with Good Cooper’s escape from the surreal world of the Black Lodge, Bad Cooper’s murderous plans, the slow introduction back into the community of Twin Peaks, and the FBI being involved which means a welcome return for some old faces. The plot hinges on Lynch’s fascination with duality and multiple personalities as well as the idea that evil can be a real force which in this case in Bad Cooper. I won’t bother explaining the rest of the plot beyond that as frankly, we’re only seeing part of it right now and the main jist is just what I’ve said. I won’t go into the nightmare monsters, or episode three’s brilliantly incomprehensible scenes, or the fact a plot point hinges on the words ”blue rose” which only makes sense if you’ve watched Fire Walk With Me, or the fun little cameos that pop up or even the fact there’s more Cooper doppelgängers than just Good and Bad Cooper.

What is brilliant is the pace in which Lynch and Mark Frost slowly unwind the threads of the plot and the pacing (unlike many programmes today) is at times, glacial but this isn’t something to forward through. This is about building up the creeping sense of unease in these scenes.

Twin Peaks is a welcome return. It gives Lynch a chance to create one huge story and hopefully resolve it in a way that suits him and Frost but it may not suit us which is fine by me. In an age where TV programmes are made to ensure fans are not frightened off, the new Twin Peaks isn’t scared to go onto ground that will scare people off but this is art mixed with horror mixed with so many genres that it can only be described as Lynchian and that’s a glorious thing…

The welcome return of Twin Peaks

Tonight in the US is the very welcome return of David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. The last Twin Peaks was the horribly underrated, and undervalued Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992, so we’re now 25 years on with the programme returning on Showtime in the US for 18 episodes. That’s 18 hours of television directed by David Lynch.

This is something that’s being amazingly hyped but let’s not forget that from the moment the TV series revealed who killed Laura Palmer, the critical and audience reaction turned increasingly negative, even hostile as the series frankly fell up it’s own are for a chunk of the second year before David Lynch returned for the final episode which is still a unique piece of American television.

A lot of people say that Twin Peaks redefined where Lynch’s career went, and indeed, there’s a lot to that. as after Twin Peaks Lynch focused on the subject of duality in everything he did afterwards. Even The Straight Story has a Twin Peaks feel as it deals with small town lives in a naturalistic, but detached way and here we are now awaiting to see what Lynch does. Lynch hasn’t made a film since Inland Empire, in 2006. That’s eleven years but i can’t remember anything with this sort of anticipation barring maybe the 2005 return of Doctor Who.

So why the change in heart? Why are people who were hostile to Twin Peaks in 1992 onwards suddenly so hyped for when most of the last 25 years Twin Peaks has been at best, a cult.

Barring the fact a new audience discovered the programme through repeats and DVD, Twin Peaks holds a place in history for being the programme that broke the format of American episodic TV, not to mention in pushing the limits of what can be done in TV in America. No Twin Peaks, no X Files, no Millennium, no NCIS, no Hannibal, nothing. Things may well have taken a very different path if Twin Peaks hadn’t happened and I think people who were harsh on it now realise that. They know the last 25 years of television owes much to it and it’s return is a sense of squaring a circle which knowing Lynch will be something that literally happens in this new series.

But let’s not forget how good the series was. There’s a lot to live up to, and the series in my mind has one of the (still) most terrifying scenes I’ve seen on an American TV series with (SPOILERS) Maddy’s murder.

This strain of outright horrific nastiness carried on into Fire Walk With Me, and I hope carries on to this new series. Not because I’m especially vicious (or am I??) but because Twin Peaks worked well when it had these parts which were deeply, deeply disturbing beyond the odd quirkiness that most of the series had. That tone hid the darker side, and this return hopefully scares the living shite out of me.

Most of all though I want it to surprise me. I want it to be familiar and different. I don’t want Lynch to play it safe. I want him to lure me in then pummel me around the head in such a way that I’m scared of turning out the lights. See, far too many revivals sink into a confused mess (see the aforementioned Doctor Who) as it ends up pandering purely to fans who want things spoon-fed to them. I think if anyone is going to avoid that it’ll be David Lynch so I look forward to firing up my Magic Crystal Set tomorrow and viewing the new Twin Peaks…

Everyone is watching Eurovision

Virtually everyone I know is watching the Eurovision Song Contest. I’m not. Last time I watched it I ended up in hospital which wasn’t the fault of Eurovision itself, well, not solely. I’ve never had a strong love or hate relationship with Eurovision looking at it as something that exists in the same way lettuce and bunions do.

My social media timelines are a mass of horror and joy at horses on ladders and tediously dull Dutch entries (ooo errr missus) so I’ve decided to opt out, watch items I’m selling on Ebay and think of the best Eurovision entry that never was.Have a fun Eurovision everyone…

This UFO episode from 1971 is years ahead of its time

The Gerry and Sylvia Anderson TV series UFO was a feature of my youth but on the whole I remembered it as a fairly decent bit of often camp TV SF. In the last weeks I’ve watched a few episodes and one leaps out as something not just different, but decades ahead of time in terms of meta-commentary.

Mindbender features this synopsis…

Lieutenant Andy Conroy is investigating a crash involving an alien craft on the Moon when he suddenly gets caught up in a Wild west type shoot-out with Mexican brigands. Back at the SHADO’s earthly base another officer, Beaver James, gets involved in another shoot-out, this time with aliens. Then a voice shouts “Cut!” and the whole is seen to be a film being made at the studios telling the story of Straker’s life. So what’s real and what’s imagined?

This is meta before the likes of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison made careers out of it, and is arguably much more adventurous being as it takes place in what was a pretty mainstream programme of the time. Mindbender really is a superb bit of television and takes the sort of risks many a programme now would never risk in case it annoys the fans. Something like this probably did annoy fans at the time but it’s such an experimental script (possibly brought on by budgetry concerns) that it really is ahead of the curve by several decades.

Thankfully YouTube have it all, so enjoy…

UKIP voters fight for the right to bum dogs

In a YouGov poll a quarter of UKIP voters support the idea of having sex with a dog. I’ll let you digest that for a second.

SNP and Lib Dems are the least inclined to look at an Alsation and think ‘hmm, sexy’. UKIP voters are the most likely to look at a pug and think ‘I want that slobbering on my hard Brexit’. Tory voters are only slightly less turned on by a Great Dane than a UKIP voter while overall a quarter of voters would like to lay into a Labrador which is terrifying. Next time you go to vote, have a look at everyone else there as a quarter of them would like to indulge in bestiality.

I guess they’ve gone to the dogs…

Theresa May fights the War on Easter

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has taken her time out of her busy trip selling arms to Saudi Arabia to comment on the frankly astonishing story that the National Trust have axed the word ”Easter” from their annual egg hunt. Disgraceful you may say. ”Islamisation” you may drool. It’d certainly at least be odd.

If it was real of course. It isn’t.

 

On Cadbury’s website the word ‘Easter’ is everywhere. The campaign people are being offended by is just part of a larger campaign and anyone spending more than a second looking into this would find this out.

Now Theresa May could have said ‘no comment’. She could have laughed it off. She could have said ”I’ll look into it” and find out the truth. No, she said;

“I’m not just a vicar’s daughter, I’m a member of the National Trust as well,” she told ITV during a visit to Amman, Jordan. “I think the stance they have taken is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know what they are thinking about frankly.”

This is the Prime Minister getting outraged about a non-story in a country where human rights abuse are insanely numerous. This frankly is insane. She’s in a country where if you tried to celebrate Easter you’d be imprisoned or worse and she’s jumped blindly onto a argument generated by far right commentators who’d get offended at anything.

Consider this; if May jumps blindly into this fairly trivial piece of bullshit, imagine what else she blindly jumps into without thinking?

I hate April Fools Day

I hate April Fools Day. It’s an excuse for companies to release things which are clearly just marketing like this…

Stuff like that is just smug bullshit but all it is, is marketing. Nothing more. Then there’s newspapers doing ‘funny’ stories which frankly, in the era of Brexit and Donald Trump is hard to distinguish from ‘normal news’.

Stuff like this classic BBC prank seems a relic today. It’s silly. It’s fun. There’s a skill in how it was made and it’s played straight without any ironic winks at the camera from Jonathan Dimbleby.

Or there’s this jolity from Grandstand, the BBC’s Saturday afternoon sport programme which ruled the airwaves for decades.

That was then. Now it’s just people trying to sell you stuff or unfunny crap which was dreamed up over an evening’s line of coke at the members club.

Or it could be I’ve grown old and cynical. I dunno…

The dead places of Glasgow fascinate me

Glasgow has the third oldest underground network in the world.The subway has been around since 1896, and is nicknamed ‘the Clockwork Orange’ due to the fact the line goes in a simple circle on subway maps and the trains are bright orange. I’ve recently returned to Glasgow after 28 years away and the subway still smells and sounds as it did when I was a child, but like any underground network it’s shrouded in ghosts.

Descending into the subway is like any other in the world. You enter a subterranean world where the world above melts into a world where it seems Morlocks could lurk round every corner as the world above vanishes behind you.

Once underground you enter a world of smells and sounds like any other.

The subway in places links up with Glasgow’s railway system, some of which is also underground, and is also, very, very old. Some stations over the years have died leaving only their grafftii-strewn corpses to be hidden by darkness and twilight, not to mention nature reclaiming what was once hers.

One of those stations is the Botanic Gardens. As a kid I used to explore it with the bravery only children can have in delving into places which you shouldn’t.

These places are haunted by the past, and hounded by the present. They exist as shadows of time lost with only a sign to remind people what lurks nearby.

Dead places fascinate me. They make me think of what people did in them then before being reclaimed. They make me wonder what might happen to the world if we let nature reclaim everything as opposed to the odd station and building here and there. It fascinates me just how quickly dead buildings are reclaimed.

These places are haunted, not by ghosts of the scary kind but by ghosts of our imagination. I adore these places but even so, they’re not for the faint-hearted…

At this time of strife, we can all agree Piers Morgan is a cock

Donald Trump in the White House. A hard Brexit coming. The rise of the far right across Europe. We are truly in hard days as we wade our way through a variety of bastards and pricks, but step forth Piers Morgan, the biggest prick of them all to proclaim himself as the man who will stand up for racist, bigots and the sort of people that would paint swastikas on doors for a laugh.

To be fair it isn’t a revelation that Piers Morgan is a cock. Those of us who have had to see the wee shite on British media for years realised it the moment he opened his mouth or hacked his first phone. However this new phase of arseholery is about him being at the centre of attention as Donald Trump’s familiar.This is the man who tells people to ‘get over it’ and then spends days whining about Ewan McGregor refusing to appear on TV with him, or indeed, anyone who’s managed to get through his paper-thin skin just as comedian Jim Jeffries did.

So as we enter the dark times remember that what unites us all is that Piers Morgan is someone who is the biggest cock you’ll ever see in your life. That will keep us all warm as the lights go out across the world…

Yes, we have no Brexit Bananas

Last night’s Question Time featured an answer from a member of the public even more stupefyingly stupid and inane than usual. Be warned; this is Olympic standard fuckwittery…

Just to go over that again. A woman was going to vote remain in the EU referendum but when she saw evil foreign European bananas she decided to vote to leave for the new opportunities that would see bent bananas galore!

Truth is that 40 years of bullshit about the EU has vomited up a myth about bananas. It is of course, a lie. There’s no regulations to make ‘straight bananas’. There’s rules about standardising them so everyone in the EU buys them at the same standard. That’s it.

So there we go. Someone made a massively important decision based upon a lie and rather than find out the truth, she followed through her stupidity to the ballot box. Depressing isn’t it?