Twin Peaks: The Return (Episode 8) with Connor Ratliff

Blank check with Griffin and David

Blank check with Griffin and David

Don't know what to say or to expect

All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Check

This is the pod, and this is the cast.

Listen full and descend.

You want to go even lower?

Lower in the pitch?

Yeah, you know.

The horse, the podcast is the white of the pod is the white of the cast. I gotta find my Jackson mane.
I gotta do my Jackson mane.

I just wanna get another look at all. Listen, that is the pod.
That gene sucks sucks.

Why are you singing about jeans? I just want to get another one. When you should be singing about

swimming pool, shallownness, expression. Friendo, friendo.
Is it more Anton Sugar? Friendo, Friendo. Does he have a deep? I guess he has a deep voice.
He has

such a quiet voice, right, Sugar, where it's like you're leaning in.

I'm sorry, Kelly McDonald. You have to die now.
We love probably the Khan brothers. It's ambiguous.
The one sort of impediment to the idea of us ever doing it is that it's a long series, right?

Long series

and, you know, a lot of well-discussed films that we basically like. But movies, yeah, I was going to say, movies we overall basically love.

Can you imagine how much fun we'd have doing fucking Anton Sugar bits? I think we'd have a lot of fun doing Tommy Lee Jones as well. Hot the bits! You know, like no country would be, yeah,

heavy bit. It's not like that's the only one.
No, I think most of them have that kind of thing Jesus the the amount of runway we'd get off of just Anton Sugar having other types of conversations

I mean the Cohens are like Lynch no I want a baconator junior

I got a

bacon king over here no I want the junior the junior king can't finish it it's too big

it's too big you're not going to finish oh yeah David's not doing a bit david does in fact have a bacon king here fucking huge sounds like you're more of a bacon prince uh yeah you got a little too big for your britches i didn't mean to hey by the way this is an episode about uh one of the most revered works of art we probably ever covered in the history of the show right at least um

uh in of recent time right like a sort of a totemic moment in recent American art and certainly like an absolutely uh unique one-of-one object I think so yeah much like your unfinished bacon king maybe i'll finish it.

These are huge stakes to set up for this episode. We'll see.
Come on. We'll see what I do.
This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.
I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies, ostensibly. Sure.
Directors who experience.

God, I'm somehow now for

the careers. Thank you.
Geez.

Okay. Great day.
I don't know what's going on. I was like, what is the word I used to describe the success? Massive.
Massive success early on in the careers. I've only been doing this for 10 years.

Given a series of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby.

Sometimes those checks continue on to television. And then this is like a blank check within a blank check.
Is that a fair categorization? 100%. 100%.
Yep. Yep.

This is somewhat a standalone blank check within a large blank check project. Which is like, yes, there's like seven inception layers to how you get to this existing.

Yeah, two or three, but yeah, sure. I'm going to say seven.
Seven. I'm going to say seven.

We are here today. We are in the middle of discussing Twin Peaks the Return.
David Lynch, Twin Pods Firecast with me, has been our series.

We have now gotten to his most recent work to date, Twin Peaks the Return. He's in three or twin peaks, which we have split into four episodes.

And at David's insistence, episode two is only about one episode in our podcast. Yes, part eight, also known as God a a light,

the iconic eighth episode of Twin Peaks the Return. We're here to discuss it today, and that's that's what we're doing.
Now, can I say our guest is being too respectful? Way too.

Well, he might be also be, I don't know, doing his taxes on. Is he queuing something up or is he doing the taxes? I'm doing a little research, but I'm also very much being respectful.

But you know what? Loosen that tie. Get messy.
Stop showing us so much respect, Brendu.

It's a totemic work that we're about to discuss. Here's a rare thing that we don't do often.
A kind of in-series double dip. Yeah, I don't know.
We just wanted to. We wanted to.

We had a guest

for this episode, possibly, and then life circumstances came up and it was suddenly like a, we need to get this done. And it was just like, who's the right person to tackle something this big?

But also is perhaps around?

Yeah, and who we just had a lovely time talking twin peaks with. And it was like, you know what? Would be nice to just do even even more of that and it's also

as as people who have been behind the paywall people who have ventured into the patreon to experience the twin peaks season two episode uh they've already heard me talk twin peaks but what they will also know from that episode is that when you when this when david lynch won you came to me said connor what do you want to take your pick anything anything i give you first round draft pick of the entire career i say twin peaks season two without hesitation you say well well, that's actually going to be off the main feed.

I say, I don't care. I don't care.
I did have a twinge of regret thinking that because this was my second

one. This was the other one.
Oh, well, that's good.

We'll look at that.

This was the one where I almost like, if I had bailed on that idea, wanting to get into the main feed, it would be to talk about this.

Because when I think of season two, the main thing I think of is how the season two finale remains probably the weirdest thing to ever air for

any reason in prime time. The weirdest scripted thing to intentionally air on network television.
I had been primed and hyped to understand that was the case before watching it last night.

You know, there's been a lot of buildup for me. I mean, I'm talking about the season two finale.
That was the most, the weirdest thing ever on network.

Up until that point. Up until that.
And still probably for network TV. I don't know that there's that much competition for Monday night on ABC for something where it's almost all in the Black Lodge,

weird strobe lights, etc.

The episode of Two and a Half Men, where Charlie Sheen dies, is up there. Very, there are things like that that are odd because of what's happening outside of the episode.
Yeah. Yes.
Yeah.

And episode 8 of The Return.

Yes. And at some point, Kathy Bates plays his ghost.
I can't remember if it's in that episode or a different episode, but that reaches sort of like Black Lodge levels of like,

yeah.

But episode 8 of the return

is sort of david lynch then going like well i did one i already like

i already have this one sort of unprecedented thing that's kind of almost never been topped right what is the premium cable equivalent of that but i'd argue the first seven episodes feel like holy shit he's going weirder than he's gone before right what's going on here and then he's like no i need to make the thing that is weird in relation to the template of weirdness i have already set much like the season two finale you're saying and and i'll tell you something that this is what i was looking to try to to get information on within the the archives of my social media i believe that

um

in

june uh juneish of 2017 that was when this aired right 2017 uh this episode aired on exactly june 25th 2017.

i think like a at some point and i i can't find the date dana ashbrook Ashbrook did monologues at UCB. Oh, cool.
My favorite.

While

the return was airing, but before episode eight had aired. And I brought in one of my Twin Peaks trading cards, my Bobby Briggs, to get it signed.

Was it a rookie card? It's a Bobby Briggs rookie card. Yeah.
First thing.

And this is after Bobby killed a guy, but before he became a cop.

And

the

and I remember him in like one of the little, like like the the beer storage room that was off of the green and where people like kept their coats and bags and stuff I remember him signing this and saying I was like man it's really it's great I'm loving watching this and he's like yeah yeah I hear the eighth episode is pretty crazy so he hadn't even seen it he had but he was at least vaguely aware like maybe they'd been informed like that's the doozy or that he's obviously not in it yeah no and but i remember thinking what a strange thing to say how could the eighth episode like I remember thinking, like, what is he talking about?

Well, I'm like, yes. Because I couldn't, at that point, I was like, I think I know by this point, we're however many episodes in, I think I know what twin peaks the return is.

He's not doing the obvious third season. He's breaking his own templates.

What could weird me out at this point? So I was like,

what's going to happen? That's so weird. And

then episode eight, I believe, aired over the weekend of the Delclos Marathon. Oh, wild.
Okay.

So you were probably also sleep deprived? Yeah, which is like this three-day marathon of not, like where I probably did like more than 20 shows in three days.

We should say our guest today is Connor Rattler. Yeah, there.
Sorry. Yeah, of course.
I'm glad you apologized, David. It was really rude what you were doing.

It's so rude of me to not introduce our guest. Yeah.

Here I am. But for those who don't know, the Delclos Marathon was a thing that UCB used to do that was like 72 straight hours of shows basically happening all day, all night, all morning.

All sorts of venues all over the city. Across several venues, right? Mostly around Chelsea, but especially at the old UCB theater,

not the original, but the

Chelsea one.

You would have these shows that happen at like 5.30 in the morning that were 15 minutes long. There were chaos.

And someone like you, who is, I have often maintained, perhaps the greatest improviser in the world.

I certainly think at that point you were sort of the greatest improviser in New York City, at the very least. You're getting asked to jump in on most of these things.

But then Twin Peaks is like this seismic important thing for you. You probably could not wait to watch the episode.

You weren't going to be like, let me get a good night's sleep before I try episode eight.

No, I, I, and also, I, because I learned from previous years that one of my indulgences is that I would get a hotel room in Manhattan.

sort of near the venues so that I wouldn't so I'd have a place to go crash at weird times of the day and not have to take a train all the way back to Queens.

Sure, if I know anything about you as well, there's nothing in the world you hate more than any form of commute. I would say that's your kryptonite.
Yeah. And yet you live in Queens.

You should live at like whatever. Yeah, like 34th and Madison or so.
You should just be like, I'm right dead center, baby. Yeah, I need to do substantially better.
I know.

I know it's not like you can't just like pick a place around there. I don't know.
Just you should just make that your entire priority.

But I also think it is part of your core essence that if we, if you somehow were able to book a show two blocks from where you live, let's even say one block away from your apartment,

your response would be, but that's the worst block. You don't know how tough it is to walk out of it.
What subway are you on? Not to reveal your location. I don't want to dox myself.

Okay, all right, all right. That's smart.
Do you have more than one subway to, I guess, is my question. Oh, I'm near a hub.
You'll never get to where I am.

David's like waking up at this line of questioning. Have you noticed the influx of energy of David suddenly being able to talk train line? People are always like,

you know, looking for places in New York City, right? I have, you know, there's always someone to see. This is true.
I say this. People are always looking for places in New York.

And they're always like, oh, let me help. Let me help.

And I do like looking at like real estate listings, but what I really like doing is thinking about the web of transit you will access from wherever you're looking.

Can I ask for some key bleeps on what I'm about to say? Oh, of course. Amazing.
Okay. All right.
And then we'll talk about Twin Peaks episode 8, which is pandemic work of 2020.

I live in Queens. Yes, great.
It's right near the Long Island Railroad.

So that's a hack. I might as well live in Manhattan if I'm dealing with the long.

No, you're near the LIRR stop. So not a ton of trains, but enough.
Enough trains. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. A lot of trains going in every hour.
Yeah. And

it's less than 10. Like

when ASCAT was at UCB Chelsea, I could leave my apartment at 6.45 and be in the green room at 7.01. I mean, that is impressive.
I mean, but it's, you got to, do you, do you just kind of sneak on?

Well, that's the other thing. You buy a bleep this.
You buy it.

Double bleep. You buy it this is illegal you're admitting to crime you buy a

punch card ticket uh-huh and then maybe they don't punch it because it's barely here's the thing you almost always get caught unless it's super crowded going from penn station

they almost always catch you then but it's worth it you know it's it's a cheap taxi ride you know what i mean like you would never get a taxi ride to get you from there to there in 10 minutes this is fascinating because i've never heard you talk with such joy about any commute well because this is a good this is a good part of the other you had it you had it right one time um

penn station the staff on the train the conductors they are having to play a heavy-duty high-intensity game of concentration going up and down the train trying to figure out who who's new already who's new who's new yeah and they don't always get me you put your also you put your uh earbuds in you act like you're asleep is it worth their while is it worth their while so you're you're not

no sorry david go on so but you're not probably that far from the and we can bleep this

not too far right so those those are a lot of questions but i'll say this getting to the blank check studio is hell yeah yeah we are not best suitable i apologize no but that's how much i want to be here to talk episode eight which we're going to talk about so you watch it do you watch it in this hotel room you've booked i watch i remember watching it in the hotel room how did you name the hotel uh yeah it was the um

uh Four Points, Chelsea.

Okay. And so it's one of those hotels that they've crammed a lot of little rooms in.
It's not huge, but the bed's a nice size.

And I watched it late at night. On a laptop, I'm guessing, a Showtime Anytime kind of?

I think I probably watched it on an iPad mini. Wow.

Okay, but on the app. We're saying you were not watching this.
This is also wired headphones. This is the day where you could plug your headphones right into the iPad.

I'm glad we're setting this scene. So this is, you're watching it the night of, but you're not watching it live.
Not watching it live. I'm watching it in, like, probably after two in the morning.
Wow.

And I'm tired. Yeah.

And

you got the Dana Ashbrook thing in the back of your head, which I was skeptical about. You know, I, when he said it to me, I'm like, this actor doesn't, we just, oh, episode eight's gonna be weird.

I almost thought it was like a non-sequiner, like, oh, yeah, there's gonna be a real weird episode of Twin Peaks coming up. Oh, yeah, they're all weird.

You know, I really thought he was sort of joking until the episode hit.

And

there was

like, let's say, the

here's the other thing, which I don't, I guess I'll say this before the setup of what happens in the episode.

I, this is all true, and I wish that I had documented it more specifically when it happened, because it's going to sound like the type of thing that someone could easily just make up to say that, oh, this is what happened.

I had a dream. months before the return began because and the dream was fixated on the fact that

how are they going to have Bob in the new Twin Peaks when Frank Silvis died? Long dead.

In my dream, I was watching the new Twin Peaks, or I was sort of inside the New Twin Peaks watching it.

And what I saw in my dream was a dark room where I could barely see. And there are a bunch of doctors who are surrounding

Agent Cooper's body on an operating table, and they're opening up his stomach. And out of his stomach fly these orbs that have Frank Silva's head.
They're like these comets that fly out into space.

You had a dream that basically predicted. Right.
Now, Lynch has used sort of orby imagery before. I could see where maybe you could be drawing from this, maybe, right? Sure.

There's like eraser heads, right? Things like that.

But in the world of Twin Peaks, the idea of an animated sort of bobhead

on an orb flying around in space.

And

when the, when the old man, when the woodsman ghosts come up out of the

earth and start digging around in Mr. C's stomach and they pull out an orb that you, it's kind of hard to see what it is.
Yes. That it's Bob's face on the thing.

Imagine watching that in the middle of the night when you're like sleep deprived and the music itself is just kind of

and you kind of, it's hard. I've watched on lots of different screens with lots of different resolution.
It's always a little bit of a struggle to make out exactly what's going on in that sequence.

It kind of makes you feel like you're watching it with your glasses off or something. There's a very distorted, dream-like feeling to it.

Do you folks ever have the experience of watching something late at night?

Perhaps when you are intentionally trying to fall asleep, putting something on to put yourself to sleep, sleep right and you start passing out and then you like kind of like snap back for a moment you're like oh the last scene was something i dreamed i was watching something yeah i know what you're talking about slowly faded you fall asleep and then you kind of have a dream about the thing you're like with the dialogue maybe that you're hearing even if it's branching and you're sort of like i'm now starting to like and then you're like okay time to turn this off

you know, go to sleep, right?

This is the only thing I've ever watched that feels like this when you're awake where you're like this is my brain riffing on the thing i was watching right before i fell asleep so the fact that you had a dream about it yeah yeah trying to like solve a story problem basically in your mind a thing that knowing how you think being your friend for a while now that you spend a lot of time internalizing these sorts of things it makes sense that you would dream about it in anticipation.

I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. Because like, when that it was very, it was exciting, and it also made it scarier to me.
It's awesome.

Because it felt like he's pulling this from my subconscious. Right.
But, or maybe your subconscious is just linked in some mystical way through the art he's created over the years.

It's, and that's sort of a lovely thing to think about. It's really, well, because also there's, if it was anything else,

like, if I went and saw Red One and then realized

if I went and saw Red One and then pushing red one on

so hard

if I went and saw if I went and saw red one and then

I'm sorry are you implying that you're not gonna go can we move through this sentence please okay he's about to say for the fourth time and then I'm gonna circle back if I went and saw red one and then there was something in it that I'm like oh I think I had a dream about that right I might have pulled it from the trailer yeah yeah whereas it's ubiquitous this was so locked down that there was really nothing nothing that I dreamed could have been like oh well you heard that it it was going to be like this.

It was just, it was just based on my thought of how are they going to do it. The whole show was a mystery box.

But that's my experience watching episode eight, which I did not watch late at night at the Four Points Chelsea, but I did watch with no preparation, except that I, I thought I knew what Twin Peaks the Return was at this point.

And I was like, look, I could not have predicted it would be about, you know, Kyle McLaughlin is this kind of dual personality, neither totally Mr.

Cooper, but like, like, wow, I love that he's doing this. I'm into it.
And I start this episode, and it starts with, you know, Mr. C driving the other guy.
What's the other guy's name?

You know, the other guy, the heavy. Ray Monroe.
Ray. You know, and you're like, yeah, okay, here we go.
We're continuing the story of Twin Peaks the Return, right?

Like, it doesn't start black and white atomic bomb. Like, it doesn't immediately start with that.
Yes. It starts like a normal episode of Twin Peaks the Return.

Quote unquote normal episode, but still, you're like,

we're in this continuous

story he's telling. He's got trackers on the car, pull up close to another car, you press buttons on that thing, it removes the trackers, you throw the device out the window.

This is how technology works. And I think

I love that.

Normal, quote-unquote, plotty scenes for Twin Peaks Libertarian. We're in this story, which I think is so crucial to this episode because then when it starts to get weird.

again, quote unquote, weird, you have the thought of like, okay, well, this is going to be five minutes. We've had surreal imagery in this show so far.

We've gone to the sort of purple sea and we've seen the fireman and these contraptions. You know, like, all right, it's a bit of that.

And then after a few minutes, you're like, are we not exiting this? And then after a few minutes, you're like, we're not exiting this. And I need to be like

dipping my whole body into this, right? Like, this is like, this is important. Like, this isn't just

fun twin peaks dream imagery that I can pour over lay. Like, like, no, no, no, this is, this is, um, a mantra for the show or whatever.

Do you remember if you watched this on broadcast or through like the app on streaming? I watched it on my TV. I think I still, I still had cable.

I had, I think I had like a DVR.

I mean, not to rag, but

this is 2017. I think I had like a a true like DVR box and I had like recorded Twin Peaks the return that we right, you know what I mean? Like, um,

and uh, so I was watching it, like, I remember in my living room, you were the living room you two spent a fair amount of time in

Big Nice, watching commentaries with me, and so on and so forth.

And I was alone, but it could have even been the daytime, yeah.

And, like, it was just, I was like, okay, because my Forky didn't watch Twin Peaks the Return, like, that it meant nothing, but you were living together at that point, yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah, it's hard for me to like, I'm sure I've watched this in the daytime at some point over the past however many years, because I've, this is the episode I've gone back to the most.

But watching it in the deep, deep dark of night feels like, it almost feels like the type of

remember when there was going to be that Spielberg show on Quibi that you could only watch in the dark at night? That was the idea.

Yeah.

It almost feels like if any episode could only be accessed after the sun goes down, it would be this episode.

Do you remember this, David, when you were in charge of Quibi, the deal you made with Steven Spielberg? Do you remember this announcement? Vaguely, yes, I do vaguely remember.

That Spielberg was like, Kayfe beside, my old buddy Jeffrey Katzenberg asked me to do something for Quibby, and I got intrigued by the opportunity of the technology, right?

And Katzenberg's basically like, turnstile mode, look, it's like this. Spielberg was like, I don't give a shit.

Could you do a thing where you could post something on the app that could only be watched at certain hours? Right. Kind of like how you would play Pokemon.
Yes. And you'd have a clock on it.

And it's like, yeah, you can only catch the owl Pokemon Pokemon at night. And Katzenberg was like, I don't see why not.

And he was like, I think it'd be fun to do a scary thing that you could only watch when you, when the sun has gone down in whatever time zone you are in, which is kind of a cool idea. It's so cool.

I love it. And then they announced that.
And at no point did Spielberg do any work developing what that was. It was just this constant part of like Quibi is putting a billion dollars into content.

They just kept being like, and at some point, Steven Spielberg will start writing something that is spooky, which we promise you can only watch after sundown. And that will happen eventually.

Someone will make a thing that you can only watch at night. Yeah.
It just is a matter of time. I, I, out of routine, often watch the stuff for this podcast in the morning pre-record.

Not always, depends on scheduling, right? But I'm just like, I like to be really fresh on stuff as much as I can because my brain is a sieve and things fall out of it immediately.

I was like very tired last night and I had a busy day and a busy evening and and i was like i know i need to watch this at night i know if i wake up and try to watch this in the morning it will not be correct and i have felt that with a lot of twin peaks uh-huh like a lot of it i come here i watch it on the screen we have here in the office which is a windowless room where even if it was during the day it can sometimes feel like night but i still have three lights and you got yourself a nighttime i still wait for it to actually be the evening and it feels like the right way to watch the show in this episode uh certainly to your point david the fascinating thing about twin peaks that return is very quickly it just breaks any sense of you being able to predict what the show is right like this is not going to function like old twin peaks it's not even going to function like david lynch movies completely right and then like we're just going to cut out of scenes cut to new characters you saying like i was expecting this to be a regular episode The notion of a regular episode at this point is know that you can't try to game out what this is going to be, right?

Like give in to the chaos of it. People maybe initially were sort of trying to do that of like, right, what are the theories we can think about? And it's like, eh, it's never.

I think by episode seven, people have probably settled into this is what it is. Yeah, exactly.
Right. I certainly had.
Me too. I also had by episode seven, I thought, I've outsmarted this.

I know what this is. You can't surprise me.

I remember being on Twitter, cursed hell site. In the year 2017, when this episode aired and seeing people just go like, holy shit, that's the greatest thing that's ever ever aired on television.

This is seismic.

And without wanting to have it spoiled, and people were posting still images, I was just sort of like, I gather he did something pretty experimental and somewhat non-narrative within the format of television.

And over the years, I've heard people talk about this and show more images and whatever. But I did feel largely unspoiled in a lot of ways outside of knowing this is somehow about the atomic bomb.

Like that was kind of the only thing I really knew about it, I want to say.

And then I put this on last night and I had the opposite thing of what you're saying, which is I was then unnerved and thrown off by it starting with 10 plus minutes of quote unquote normal Twin Peaks that return.

I was like, isn't this supposed to be the crazy episode? When does this get crazy? Right. What do you, this is just, this is Twin Peaks that return so far.
Right.

I was like, I'm ready for this to be a completely standalone, like weird installation piece. That was my feeling of this.

It was people turned on and just went like, what, what did they do with Twin peaks and so then that transition is even more bizarre but yet coming at it from the wrong direction in the wrong order it had the same effect on me of like it does feel like reality is like ripping apart at the seams yeah ben when did you first see episode eight

i watched it for the show

ben has been watching return for the first time so you're okay so what what time of day were you watching when you got to eight did you were you prepared for eight being weird yes because of because of how i'd

curated um these episodes so i did watch it very late at night i want to say it was like two in the morning because i knew

this was so hyped up assassin's creed hours that by the time yeah for sure that by the time it was like that it was so late at night but i was like i'm on eight i gotta do this right i'm intrigued i want to like it's like there's a little sliver of light from behind the door and you're like hey i want to open it just to unpack this connor ben has like

within like bouts of insomnia, we'll have like things he watches at two o'clock in the morning when it's like, I've woken up and I can't fall asleep or I wasn't able to fall asleep.

And it's often a rotation of he will watch the same thing 30 times for a couple months before moving on to something else. And they are usually, it's just like some inexplicable.

He is connected to the tone or the imagery of this. It feels perfect that you watch this for the first time in basically that time slot.

You feel kind of like you're the only person who's awake at that time, you know, when you watch stuff. I like that.
You know that feeling? Yeah.

I'm the only little person here.

So

I've got a question for all the gamers out there, and I'm pointing at you, David. Are you seriously going to miss out on Alienware's biggest gaming sale of the year?

I mean, these are Cyber Monday prices we're talking about. So it's not just another sale.
Yeah, I took a look, and this is some pretty big bang for your buck.

You know, it's Alienware with some of the most advanced engineering out there with systems at the top of every reviewer's lists. And what about a gift for yourself?

Give yourself a new Alienware 16 Area 51 gaming laptop. I mean, this thing's got performance at the absolute next level with Intel Core Ultra Process.

And even better, you can get it during Cyber Monday. Plus, you can save on all kinds of displays and accessories like the Alienware 32 4K QD OLED gaming monitor for ultimate visual fidelity.

These really are incredible deals on PCs with otherworldly performance. So, I'd visit alienware.com/slash deals soon and grab what you can before the lowest prices of the year go dark.

Burr. Ah!

Do you know what that's me reacting to, David? What? Cold mornings and holiday plans. Oh, sorry.
Burr. Ah!

So you're cold and upset. Upset, scared, stressed.
This is when I need my wardrobe to just work. It's the last thing I want to worry about when I'm dealing with my two greatest fears.

Stuff that looks sharp, feels good, and I'll actually reach for it. That's what I'm asking for, David.
And that's why I go with Quince.

Plus, it makes gifting easy when everything's worth keeping for yourself. Now, usually we're dragging you out on a leash to do ad reads, but you said, oh, I got something for this one.

Well, I recently shopped at Quince, which I do all the time. And I did get one of their Mongolian cashmere sweaters, which is mentioned here.
Yeah.

In their ad copy, which are only $50. And literally, I gave someone a hug and they were like, you're so soft.
And I was like, I ain't soft, baby. Cashmere is.

They hugged you and they went, that must have cost $200 or more. And you said, from

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Okay, now I'm going to ask the dummy question. Okay.
Can you guys explain to me what this is about?

When did you watch it? Last night. I've only had like 12 hours to stew on this, and I didn't want to fucking dig into like reading a bunch of fucking recaps and analysis.

Well, let's talk about what happens in the episode. First, I want to tie up two things.
You want to type two things? Tie up two things. Okay.

Take out your string.

One, I forgot that Charlie Harper, the character in Two and a Half Men, Men, when he dies, that was the most watched episode of that show in history, like 25 million people or whatever.

The first Ashton Kutcher episode is basically what it was. Yeah, for comparison, this episode was watched by 250,000 people.
Right.

I forgot about Timesing.

Melanie Linsky, who is a mild friend of mine and, of course, is famous. Wow,

now it's sort of crazy how Melanie Linsky. It's not crazy because she deserves all the.
But that she was like a regular on that show for her. Right, right.

That she had the years on that show and kind of just in the mix of like yeah, Melanie Linsky from Heavenly Creatures, like is like on TV.

And I remember like seeing her in the informant and being like, It's nice that finally

putting her to work there. And then I'm like, oh, she spent eight years on the most watched show in the world.

I think she was a character who would come in and out because she was his stalker, right? But then they made her a regular.

Oh, she was a regular for at least some seasons. Yeah, I'm sure that was

the thing. She was like a guest star that then was so popular that the cat.
Right, and she's funny or whatever. I mean, I've I've not seen a lot of two and a half men so,

but I think

on the table

at the funeral. I just remember, right, that it's implied that she shoved Charlie in front of a train and he exploded like a balloon, she says.
Yes.

Because he had like cheated on her again or whatever. Yes.
Anyway, I just forgot that Melanie Linsky killed Charlie in Two and a Half Men. It's quietly the darkest TV show of all.

Right, because Chuck Laurie had that. that that strain to him.
Yes, but it's the most extreme version of it. Also, in that episode, Dharma and Greg attend the funeral.
Oh, really?

Because it's sort of like the lorry verse. Right.
Or maybe they come to look at the house because John Cryer is trying to sell it. I don't know.
Whatever. Go on, David.
I'm sorry.

Keep tying things up. The other thing I wanted to just, I just wanted to ask you.
So today or yesterday or something, this week, John Krasinski was named People's Sexiest Man Alive.

Okay, if we're talking about National Nightmares. Yep.
And everyone's up in arms about it because they're like, John Krasinski, like in this day and age, like he's fairly bland.

Like, and it's like, guys, that means a lot of people turned it down. Like, you have to remember this is not like this.

This is a weird year to do it. Is that fair to say? It's a weird year to do it because what's he got going on? Exactly.

I mean, well, this was the year that we got our first work from the imagination of. So, what's the sexiest organ in the human budget? I forgot about that.
What's the biggest organism?

What's the sexiest organ in the human body? It's the brain.

What are you talking about? If his film, if. If.
What if? And what's sexier than the possibility of something if? Now, he's 45. Just if.
Yeah, that's fine. You're, you're, you're doing great.

Yeah, watch it at two o'clock in the morning.

All right. You will feel like the only person on earth.
He is 45 years old,

which makes him one of the older, sexiest men alive.

That's also weird. That's a little surprising, right? Right.
Now, obviously, everyone knows the oldest, sexiest man alive. People, sexiest.
Sean Connery.

Sean Connery was named that at 59 when he was fully in like untouchables, bald dude. And looked like the oldest man alive.
But there was an argument of like, oh, he's been around forever.

And whatever.

But like Nulty was like 55. Nulty was 51.

The others in their 50s were Paul Rudd recently was

52. Ageless.
Harrison Ford was named at around six days, seven nights time. That's about 50.
56.

And as, of course, quite bizarrely, Patrick Dempsey got it last year, I guess, in conjunction with Ferrari, and he was 57. Yes, and I feel like he had some other thing.
I mean, this is.

And I was, I remember I worked at people when he turned it down one year and they named Matthew McConney instead.

Or no, it was Damon. It was Damon that got it that year.
Anyway. But to your point, there is a lot of like press maneuvering around.

Well, you need the person to, you can't just sort of like be like, oh, they're the sexiest man alive. And they don't want to talk to People Magazine.

People's like, well, we still think you're sexiest. So we're putting you on the cover no matter what.
Like, you need them to agree.

Look, right. You can't, you can't do that to someone without their consent.
I mean, you can, but you're not going to get much out of it.

Yes. People magazine just bestowing it on unwilling people.
Paul Rudd, an incredibly handsome man, ageless, right, as you said.

When he was dubbed People's Sexiest Man Alive, we're like, that's a lot of people were like, that's the title we're giving him now.

And then the answer was, you're like, Ghostbusters Afterlife is in theaters, too. Yeah, it's right.
It just.

Krasinski, you're like, what is this even fucking tying into? If it came out

six years ago. But before we talk about it,

before we talk about

it, a sexy steelbook's coming out soon, probably. It's already out.
Is it? They might have kicked out. No, a sexy steelbook.
Okay, it'll be different. A second edition.
The sexy edition.

Is the youngest, sexiest man alive people ever mentioned? Because I sorted by age just out of interest. You have not.
I was surprised by the answer.

I'm going to guess baby Herman. It's not baby Herman.
Okay. From Who Reign, you know, whatever.

That's most sexist. Oh, most sexist man alive.

It's not Michael B. Jordan.

It's not Michael B. Jordan.
But I imagine he's on the lower end. He's 33.
He's on the lower end. David, tell me the age of the young man.
27. 27 was the youngest.
You're never going to guess this.

That's the only reason I bring it up. I'm going to give you one more guess.
Mark Harmon. No, Mark Harmon was 34.
Okay. I just knew he got it, so I'm trying to think.
Answer is Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise won People's Sexiest Man Alive in 1990 when he was 27 years old. The only time they've named him thus.
So that is like Days of Thunder? Yeah. Or yeah, sort of far and away.
Yeah.

Ah, you're a car cursor.

I think Days of Thunder came out in 1990. So I guess that would have been the explicit tie-in.

Isn't that just weird, though, that you're like, that he was the babiest, sexiest man alive in People Magazine history? Can I tell you, I gain a little bit of respect.

I've never really given a lot of thought to People Magazine's process.

But 27,

that's pretty, they've, they've given a safe, that's a safe

floor age-wise.

Go any any lower, and you're just close to boyhood. I would also bet the average is like 45.
I think the average is in late 30s, early 40s.

Yeah, I just feel like they usually go for real grown-up men. Right.
Because that's their audience as, you know,

older women are reading people magazine. I wish they would emphasize more that this is people's sexiest man who agreed to be sexiest man alive.

And there should be a little list, a little sidebar that's like, here's who said no. So in in 2017, it was Bad Coop, right? Mr.
C? Was the Sexiest Man Alive?

Thank you for this title. He's like staring over your shoulder.
I see my press people did good. I would be excited if it was Dougie.
Dougie Jones.

Like Sexiest Man Alive, and it's like him, you know, with like a tie on his head. Yeah.
Does

Dougie

do it more than Mr. C in the return? Does Dougie do it? Does Dougie do it? Dougie does it.
I mean, he has sex. Yeah.

Does he do it more? Well, Dougie, Dougie has sex. Does, without spoiling what's to come in the episodes I have yet to see,

does Coop in Dougie's body do it? Oh, right. Because the transfer happens right after Dougie's done it.
He does, right? But I'm like, do we think that he's shtupping Naomi Watts? I think he does.

You think he does in the episodes we've seen? Doesn't he? He definitely has sex with her. Yes, he does.
Yes. I just can't remember when it is.
Yeah, okay. Okay.
Okay.

Dougie do it. Don't you do it.
Don't you do it.

Anyway, episode eight of Twin Peaks Return.

Twin Peaks Return. Twin Peaks, though.
It does begin with Mr. C and Ray driving through the night, and it's kind of first there's the

kind of hilarious tracker device. I love the technology that it all reminds me of those phones that you used to get that have the giant push buttons that are like four older people.
Right,

it just looks like someone worked up some special effects in like excel it's like a big yellow box and a big black every every computer that's used in the in is that in the return feels like it's designed in that way where it's just to look very clear you type sentences in all caps i genuinely mean this I love the shit that David Lynch just doesn't care about.

You know, that it, it doesn't feel like, oh, he's just lazy. He's phoning this part in or whatever, where he's just like, this isn't important.

Just come up with the simplest representational version of this. I'm not going to make like a fucking meal out of this.

If it, if it like translates enough for the audience to get it, this is like means to an end. What do I really want this episode to focus on, you know? Yeah.

So they drive. I think there's this kind of awesome, and I do feel like it's getting you in the mood.

sort of couple minutes of just like

you're watching the road and it's dark, right? Sort of lost highway vibes, right? You're just driving through this like total black, right? Where's like this

trance-like state these episodes maintain where you're like, at any moment, you're like, is the whole episode going to be set in this car, you know?

Or are they going to cut away from this in like 10 seconds and never get back to this again for hours?

There's not a sense of like temporal security while watching the show, in my experience. He also will, like, if you look at some of these scenes,

he'll have two people driving a car, cut to that classic Lynchian just shot of the yellow line of dry, the point of view of the car sort of at the road, and then cut back to them talking and then cut to that again.

And you're like, most filmmakers would have one cut to that. and not more unless they were having lots of time pass or something.
But he'll sometimes just like, well, let's see this for a while now.

Now let's cut back to them for some more. Right.
Let's cut to it again. Like it's sort of, he doesn't.
It's a rhythmic thing. Yeah.
He

it's

the amount of patience that he has for like how long, how, how long we look at certain things.

Well, to your point, there, there are two different uses that most filmmakers would like have for that kind of cutaway, right? One is like time jump, as you said.

And the second one is, oh, I had this scene play out in a two two-shot and I didn't get coverage. And the scene's playing too long.

So if we have a reverse of the road, that way I can cut to that and cut back and cut inner fat within the scene, which is the opposite of what he's doing.

He's letting you watch them in silence for minutes. Like he's actually using it to stretch time out more rather than to compress.
I also, you know, there's.

There's, and we talked about this on the previous episode where I, I, uh, we got into it a little bit where I declared that the missing pieces counted as a standalone feature film yes sure right you guys came to blows and then uh

the

yeah we don't need to revisit the next one but if you look at I just rewatched blue velvet and the deleted scenes for blue velvet which are pretty significant length and it's a lot of a lot of it is just establishing that uh Jeffrey is at school and dating Megan Malally

and

then he

his father has a health episode and he comes back to stay there. All stuff that's established just by him showing up at his first scene.
Like, yeah, I'm here for a while.

Right, he just does that stuff. Yeah.
And there's almost like a. I have seen the Mega Mali.
I think she just posted the clip or whatever. Yeah.
She's got like kind of feathered hair.

It does add an element of like, he's not just involved with two women, that he's also got a girlfriend at

it does add an element of that.

He's more of a,

he's a three-woman man, not a two-woman man in that movie. Yeah.
But

generally speaking, like if you look at

most of Dave Lynch's movies, there are a lot of pretty significant deleted scenes that don't make their way.

And Firewalk With Me being the most, the biggest example where you have literally a feature film's worth of deleted scenes with other characters, other things going on.

Dan Lynch has that too, cut in a Firewalk With Me way of like

a semi-side feature. A wake-up Ron Burgundy.

yeah yes lynch makes a lot of wake up ron burgundies lynch loves wake up ron burgundy yeah uh and the alarm clock gang should have made the theatrical cut i should have put gethard in the main cut of part two why are all other filmmakers afraid to put gethard in the theatrical all different jokes from different takes It's a bizarro cut, like wanderlust.

The same story beats, but new jokes in every scene. Every joke is an alt.

Anyway, you know what's the kind of crazy fucked up shit Lynch would do? What's that? Make a movie that's only Gethered and cut everyone else out as a fuck you to the studios.

Let's bring Geth. I like to think that he would have

the way he calls Kyle McLaughlin Kale. He'd be like, let's bring Gath in for a Gath take.

What was your point?

My point. Okay.
No, no. My point was.

And don't worry, we're going to circle back to this later.

One of the producers, I can't remember the name of the producer who said this on The Return was asked, are there deleted scenes from The Return? Sabrina Sutherland. Sabrina Sutherland.

And I saw this quote. She basically said, no.
Yeah.

And I do think that,

and I don't say this as this is going to sound like a burn. I love The Return.
I do think I've never seen something where I was more quickly convinced that everything that was shot had been used.

Yeah, I mean,

all the stuff that maybe would have been cut, I love that it exists. It's magic.
This thing is magic.

But yes, any studio in their right mind would be like, we're fucking cutting him spray painting the shovels. Well, look,

the first moment that came to mind. Right.
We're cutting Ashley Judd just walking around the room being like, I don't know if I hear something, you know, like shit like that.

But like, of course, that has to be.

But even the shovels thing, like any other filmmaker would be like, look, let's get two minutes of footage so we have options and then we'll pick the best 10 seconds to use.

And David Lynch is like, no, the whole four continuous minutes. And then you're like, what about the other angle you shot? And he's like, that's its own four minutes in another episode.

There is, there's a thing that directors will say when they're filming. Gethard is holding the shovel.

There's a thing that a director will say when they're filming something that they may or may not use. And they're like, well, it's just so we have it.
Yes.

And I do feel like Twin Peaks, the return, could have could have been called Twin Peaks. Just so we have it.
Just so we have it. And even beyond that,

at times you watch it and you're like, where's the main footage? It feels like you're watching a missing pieces, you know? Well, and I think there are plots.

I think there were a lot of fans who, that was their exact reaction to the show initially, was like, no, but where's the actual plot line of the show of Cooper reuniting with his buddies at the sheriff's office?

He's Annie okay?

Right, yeah.

Right, to maybe rescue Laura or Annie or to defeat Bob once and for all.

Yeah, right. And this is why I think The Missing Pieces is such a perfect bridge between Firewalk with Call of Call it a movie to The Return, because I do think that

21st Century Lynch

is more, this is his rhythm of storytelling, which is sort of like a little bit less

worried about like, does this move the story forward? And a little bit more like, let's put it all in there.

That the missing pieces sort of all work together in the same sort of rhythm that I think they really prepare you for the rhythm of the return, which is like the thing you think you want, you may or may not get it, but you're going to get a lot of stuff that another person, if someone had given notes to the return, if Lynch came to someone and said, I got to cut this this down to 10 episodes it would not be hard

you could easily do a 10 episode cut of this that would be that would hit all the main beats you need to hit and you and then you'd have like a missing pieces style thing that's like oh here's like harry truman's um frank truman yeah jesus him on the phone with um

uh uh dr

uh russ tamblin no no

frost's dad yeah that is a great example of a scene that could have been, if there was a Twin Peaks Return, the missing pieces, where it's like, we really want to, it's nice to see this character, but it doesn't move forward any like of the chess piece.

Or I think more realistically, a version of that scene that is cut down to 30 seconds that is just like, we're just letting the audience know where he is and moving on.

They just need to see his face for five seconds. Isn't it nice that we got him in a Skype window? In episode eight,

after the part where the part where they pull Bob out of the stomach of...

Let's just go through this because we're almost there. Okay.

So they get to this hill, right? And

Ray shoots Coop. He goes to take a leak in the woods.
Coop's got a gun. You think he's about to pull out on him.
Then you see that he also has a gun. Ray has anticipated that he's in trouble.

So he shoots Coop. Turns around.
Coop's

gun is empty. He left an unloaded golden gun in the glove compartment.
Mr. C.

Mr. C falls and you're like, okay, big twist.
We'll

call him a fucker too.

Pretty rude of him. That's kind of even ruder than the gunshot.
I'm like,

I'm not trying to, again, I'm not trying to sound like some naive fool who is like, I really had a handle on Twin Peaks The Return up to this point, and I was like completely grasping everything it was doing.

But nonetheless,

him.

like falling to the ground and then suddenly a bunch of sooty woodsmen emerging from the forest, like kind of fading in and out of reality, and then just kind of going, like, I don't know how I'm just doing it.

David's doing an incredible, I don't know where he conjured the emotional.

He pushed back from the desk and started paddling his hands frantically in the air, eyes closed. He really got into it.
But it was like he was conjuring something.

Like David was like in touch with spirits from another plane. I felt so helpless.

watching that sequence when when they come out of the earth and start dancing around and Ray falls to the ground. I felt like Ray.

I felt like I, as a viewer, had like lost control of my point of view watching.

You're just like, I have to pay attention because this is dark and mysterious what is happening. They seem to sort of like smear mud and blood all over him, right?

And then they, you know, like, as you say, they, they,

all this crazy shit, you know, is happening. But it's my favorite thing about David Lynch where you're like, there's actual sort of like plotty import to what is going on.

And yes, this, and yet this is also imagery that I could pour over and have thoughts about, have theories about or interpretations of for the rest of my life. And it'd be just fine too.

Well, I do want to hear you unpack both sides of that.

Well, okay. Well, so basically they tear,

you know, a ball, as sort of Connor was basically setting up a ball. Bob.

Facing it.

out of Mr. C

and they sort of show it to Ray. Ray, here's the evil.
It's right here. It could presumably is covered in some sort of viscous fluid.
So it could be considered one saliva bob ball. Well,

Connor, well done. And you know, there's, there's sort of a plainness to how Lynch thinks about this stuff or presents this stuff, right? And it was true in original Twin Peaks 2, right?

Where it's like, you'll know that Leland is possessed by Bob because Leland will look at the mirror and then his face will just turn into Bob's face and back.

And he's like, this isn't more complicated than you think it is. Like, that's what I want you to understand here.
And so, in the same way, where it's like, do you know what's inside Mr.

C kind of making him work? It's like, Bob, his head in a globe, kind of, like, and it's inside of his tummy. That's, I just want you guys to get that.

You talk about the feeling of losing control, right?

I feel like, whereas his like use of time in this show, in this series, season in particular, feels like up until this point, a lot of like forcing you to live in things and recalibrate away from the rhythms you're used to.

The way he uses the various effects for the rest of the episode at this point does feel like he is forcing you to stay in these things for an uncomfortable amount of time that creates its own tension, if that makes sense.

And it also is the thing that, like, he, I don't, it is kind of astonishing and inexplicable how much he is able to get so much visceral power out of using the most basic, sort of like original,

like

language of trickery in cinema, right? Where it's just like, he's like, if I basically do a digital version of a double exposure, a thing that has been done since the 19th century Lumelier, right?

Exactly. It's like one of the first building blocks of film language of like, here's weird shit you can do with cameras.

And he's just like, that's somehow more evocative, or at least I know how to make it more evocative than what a lot of other people I think would over-conceptualize

as like

as you're saying, like, what's the simplest version of this? And does that have some weird power to it?

It's also interesting to me, when, and we'll talk about this in other parts of the episode, because

throughout the return, you know, there's a little bit more of a, you know, a digital look to this series.

And very often, there are effects that are very cheap looking simple digital but like digital looking cheap effects that

are very much on purpose because you look at what a lot of the things in this episode that you would that are essentially effects and they are not at all cheap looking they are like some of the best most beautiful looking digital effects i almost feel dirty using the word digital to describe them.

But then you also get shit like

when there's like the extended sequence of the people entering and exiting the general store.

And it's basically like weaponizing the language that we're used to of what it feels like when you're watching something that starts glitching out when your service is interrupted. Yeah.

You know, it's like so unnerving to like, I am watching this on a disc

and my brain cannot stop going like, is the player malfunctioning?

And I know from like second two, like this is clearly an intentional lynch thing, but making us sit in that for like minutes does something to your brain where you're just like, this is wrong.

I'm used to panicking when this happens and then like checking my Wi-Fi or like checking the cables or like hitting a device. There's something unnerving about how much

simplifies it. And as much as, yes, you're saying in this episode, he shows you that like I could make the effects look perfect if I wanted to.

Sometimes there's something more disconcerting about like, why is it that simple?

So,

whatever,

This thing is revealed.

Ray, as I would, runs away. They're smearing the blood all over.

But Ray's like, I'm getting

the fuck out of here. He runs away.
There's a scene.

This phone call is probably one of the funnier, unintentionally funnier things in the episode, which is his description of what happened.

Let me, let me, in fact, I can probably read the dialogue. You know, he calls who he's calling is Jeffries, right? But it's sort of, I mean, it doesn't really matter.

But I mean, like, that's for nerds like you or I to think about the fact that Philip Jeffries, the David Bowie character who is now a giant teapot, is like directing an agency against Mr. C.

I mean, that's a spoiler in the weirdest way possible. It's not really important to the show in any way, but I guess if you want to know it, you can.
Bowie had passed away by this point already.

Bowie had real life.

He was supposed to be in it. He was supposed to be in it, or maybe at least lend his voice to it.
And he had died in 2016, and I think it just didn't happen.

But everything we've described so far happens basically within 10 minutes, right? And then the phone call happens around minute 11. I think he's dead, but he's found some kind of help.

So I'm not 100%.

And I

saw something in Cooper

may be the key to what this is all about. And then, of course, we're like, oh my God, big revelations coming.
Cut to Nine Inch Nails performance. The Nine Inch Nails.

The The nine-inch nails presented by the MC character here, we basically have not seen in the previous musical performances.

We're obviously getting like a Roadhouse musical number in almost every episode, if not every episode. But I feel like this sort of like MC character speaking to the mic with the pine cone.

Uh, yeah, sure, sure.

I don't remember seeing

just as you're saying, like doing the sort of introduction, ladies and gentlemen, the nine-inch nails as if they're the fucking SNL musical guest.

Uh, feels like a new frame frame for these performances. His first appearance.
Okay.

He has several more, though, so we will see him again. And I will say,

I'm not going to spoil this. There will be a point where

we see him again. I won't be around to discuss it with you.

And I'll miss you dearly. But when it happens,

I'll say to you, there is a contender for what I think is the most surprising moment.

in all of Twin Peak's The Return. At least purely just in terms of like, I wouldn't, wouldn't, if you'd given me a thousand guesses, I never would have guessed this would be a thing that would happen.

Do you think you know what he's talking about, David? I'm not sure. I'd love to.
I mean, there's so many things to think about, but the nine-inch nails performance, we should just say

that is the sort of demarcation point. We don't know it at the time, but it is unusual in the show right now for there to be

a musical act in the middle. Usually, that's the not all, but a lot of them, right? That's that's the end of the episode, yeah.

And it's it's nine-inch nails, right? It's not just

like, yeah, exactly. And it's this incredibly, you know, vivid performance.
Trent's got his sunglasses on. He's wailing.
Go ahead. They're projecting sort of digital static over them.
Uh-huh.

Like as like a live effect. It's not like a video image manipulation of how they're filming it.
It's like from the tech booth.

Yeah, at the roadhouse. Right.
Yeah. Do you know this song, She's Gone Away?

Are you a 9-inch nails guy, Connor? No, not really.

I know very little about it. I was looking at the lyrics to this before.

It was like a recent song. Like it was like a, from a recent EP.
Ben, do you care for this song? I'm not really that up on late career nine-inch nails, but I like the song. I think he

just, it's crazy how much he doesn't seem to age, Trent Rezner. It's true.
He's so hot still. The wild thing for me is just the like last like 10, 15 years turn of him becoming jacked as hell.

Yeah, he is. I feel like he was always like this weird, emo, wispy, like weirdo, sensitive, you know, dark goth guy.

And then at some point, he like started looking like the bully in an 80s team company.

I think he got sober. Sure.
And, you know, there's a natural progression to eventually getting yoked.

I just remember there, my first exposure to the idea of Trent Reznor was Celebrity Deathmatch, where the puppet looked like he was like the fuck, like a scarecrow or some shit, you know?

And it was like, oh, he's like this weird moody guy. And I believe they gave him literal nine-inch nails.

I just looked it up. He was fighting Puff Daddy.
Yeah, Puff Daddy, because it's rap versus rock. Yes, they made them represent the two sides.

Celebrity Deathmatch is one of those things that when that was on, when I was like 12, we were all like, this is like the pinnacle of art.

It was. And I'm sure if I watch it now, I'd be like, this is fucking funny.
I've tried to go back and watch them.

Not funny at all. I wouldn't say it's bad, but it is bizarre to watch now.

I think there is good craft behind it, shall you say? But you're just like, yes, exactly. When I was like 10 years old, I was like,

I treated every episode of Celebrity Deathmatch as if it were part eight of Twin Peaks the Return, where I was like, the rules have been rewritten. How can anyone make TV after after this?

Eric Fogel's done it again. We should also shout out Atticus.
Atticus Ross. Atticus Ross.
People. Is a member of Nine Inch Nails.
I think he got added. He's later.

Is he the only other permanent member now?

Right? Yeah.

And he does his scores with him, obviously, and he's a lovely British man.

I've talked about it on the show. People got angry.
We didn't give enough credit when we've talked about Reznor Ross scores. Oh, Lord.
Okay. Well, people get angry about everything.

Anyway, I just love the

performance. It's cool anyway, but as a mood setter.

And the Mr. C like pops up when it's over.

Yeah, it's a real, like, when you, especially once you know what the whole episode is, I look at that as like, this is the moment where Lynch decides, like, we're breaking the form completely.

We're going to just have a full musical number, which is not something that scripted television dramas do.

Credits not playing over it, not cutting to like dialogue happening between Roadhouse patrons in between. Like it's just fully right.

David? Yep. Oh wait, hold on one second.

She was just here. Where did it go? Griffin, what are you looking for? Well, it's just.
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We're about 15 minutes into the show, and that's a 45-minute and looking more than that.

And looking at like the lyrics to that song, it does feel like a very

i mean i'm sure this is true of a lot of but i mean you dig in places till your fingers bleed spread the infection where you spill your seed does feel like a lyric that you could put over the images of the the woodsman like digging through uh uh mr c's stomach now who do you think the woodsmen represent or what the woodsman i need you to start subjecting all of this to me such a big part of twin peaks the return but of course they're in firewalk with me in this sort of kind of goofier way where they're like guys in flannel uh they're in the missing pieces jürgen procno i always like to shout out he's in like one shot with a giant fake beard as one of the woodsmen i'll show you he's also in one shot of the theatrical is he not i believe

yeah i i would say like the first indication when you have season one of twin peaks the first sort of indications of the supernatural things that will immediately start happening in season two is them talking about there's like something in the woods.

There's like, it's this, you know, Cooper's talking about how fascinated he is. These, what are these trees? He's and all the shots of the woods and everything.

But when the, when like Sheriff Truman and Big Ed start talking to him about how there's something in these woods, I feel like the woodsmen are just the natural way of like, it's either that or you'd have the trees come to life, you know, like just a way of representing, I don't know what they want.

I don't know what their goals are, what their aims are. I don't know whose side they're on.

I tend to think they're bad. Well, they seem to mostly, I mean,

they're very malevolent in this episode. They generally are in the convenience store and all these sorts of like liminal spaces that we see

over the course of the show, which are, you know,

dark places

a few cells away from Matthew Lillard in the

second episode, and one's sitting there, and then he just floats away. There's a lot of stuff where I'm just like, I like this.
I don't know what it means, but I like the feeling I get.

I'm always excited when they show up.

But what we're seeing, so Mark Frost has said

that the, you know, the sort of origin of so much of the whatever mythology of Twin Peaks comes from the detonation of the first nuclear bomb, right? That's what the episode eight is about.

And I think it annoys some fans in a way to be so direct about it, right? Like to be like

almost, it's not a basic observation that like some new unnatural kind of evil was created that day, but it is, um,

I think the woodsman

still feels profound to me. The woodsman and the black lodge and the white lodge and all this stuff feels older than that.
They've been around in some form, right?

Yeah, but Bob, this guy dressed in denim, long hair, sure, like he's new. But is some of this,

I'm gonna just, I'm going to ask dumb questions because you guys have been thinking on these things for years, if not decades, and I'm new to all of this, right? The next shot, to be clear, after Mr.

C wakes up, is the slow motion shot of the nuke going off, the Trinity test. Is the feeling that

something like the nuclear bomb, right? This man-made evil somehow collapsed this wall between, as you're saying, these sort of ancient spiritual forces

and the tangible reality that that's sort of like the thing that started to curse twin peaks is

the

the demolishing of that barrier yeah and we see we literally see this floating weird creature barf up a bunch of stuff and one of the bubbles has bob in it yes this sort of odd creature which is maybe judy right is sort of like right this sort of

uh this entity that gets brought up a lot in twin peaks lore i will say that like the

this stuff is all more fun to watch and experience than it is to talk about i agree some people got mad at me for saying that last week though and i do want to you know acknowledge that yes some people love to delve into this lore in a deeper way and that's fine it's it's all it all sounds kind of stupid when talked about.

And I think one of the things that's like Twin Peaks,

you know, it's this thing where they're great at at setting up questions and I think generally terrible at answering those questions.

I think one of the things that's so great about episode eight is that it actually probably provides more tangible answers than any other episode of Twin Peaks.

That's just kind of bewildering about the weirdest version of an Explainer episode in its form.

Yeah, because basically, if you wanted to give the TV guide spoiler summary of the thing, you'd say, a nuclear bomb unleashes Bob into the world.

Then the giant or the fireman or whatever he's called now, and I want to get her name right because it's such a great character name.

Senorita Dido or Dido. Senorita Dido.
Right. And the giant basically create the spirit of Laura Palmer as

a counterbalance to the evil of Bob.

And

then young Sarah Palmer.

When the woodsmen knock everybody in her hometown out,

this winged frog creature climbs into her body. Grasshopper frog.

Yeah. And so it's like this origin story of like

Judy or Joda and Bob and Laura and all these things are all created in this crazy.

But I also like what I enjoy about the episode is not any of the things that like I like that Sarah Palmer isn't identified as Sarah Palmer in the episode. Yeah, I did not get that.

No, I'm getting this now. It's something you kind of

confirms in one of the books that comes along with it. And it's a thing that occurred to me when I watched it, but she's just called Young Girl.

And it's more fun to wonder than it is to have it, yes, that's definitely her.

And

you know, the boy is Blue Beetle, right?

The boy is Blue Beetle? You're saying it's the actor who plays Blue Beetle or

this is David lynch entering the dc cinematic extended universe the boy is blue beetle bring gaff in for a gaff take you know the girl his uncle is george lopez in a winning supporting term very fun no no you're lake

we we uh you know we not to jump ahead but just to jump ahead we see uh this girl in los alamos go on a date with a boy from her school who is blue beetle and that actor

the kid who plays Blue Beetle. Anyway, no, first we see this, right? This imagery of the bomb

for minutes. It's so cool.
I mean, this like crazy visual show of fire and static.

That's just computer animation, right?

I mean, yeah. Why does that shot look so good? It looks incredible.
I don't know. Why? Why does it is it computer animation? Do we know that for a fact? I don't fucking know.
Don't ask me. David?

Well, what would it be otherwise? Yeah.

You mean, like, is it a bomb they set off? Like. Well, I don't know.
Like, Christopher Nolan made such a big deal of, like, I'm doing this all in camera, right?

He did, but I mean, I certainly think when we get to it. He lied.
He lied? He lied and people died. Well, and this is.
I'm not saying there's a connection.

It's just that since Christopher Nolan told those lies. I'm saying there are human beings.
There are people who died since then.

Nolan lied and people died. Yeah.
Causality is not. You can look it up.
There are people who died the day after Oppenheimer was released in theaters. It's just a fact.
It's just a fact.

It's just a fact. It wasn't all practical.
We're not drawing any connections.

No, I'm just, especially some of these, like the ensuing shots where you're seeing just sort of like particle matter and things like that.

I could imagine some of that being practical, but I also could believe it's digital. I don't know.

I don't, part of me doesn't ever want to know how they did it. I just, when I look at that shot, I can't believe what I'm looking at.
It's so hypnotic. It's always more.

No matter how many times I watch that shot it's always more impressive even than i remember it being each time i feel like i experience it anew it is

in a in a career full of

a really really powerful imagery i feel like the part of david lynch that's like i'm a painter but i want to use cinema as my way of making these paintings I feel like that shot is one of his just, it's just such an unprecedented masterpiece in his body of work.

Like, this whole episode is like a greatest,

uh,

it is just like if you had watched the first seven episodes and thought, you know, some people were like, they watched it, like, it's not like the old Twin Peaks.

It is CG. You can, I'm looking right now

at the Visual Effects House. BUF has a big page on all the work they did on this episode.
You're right that it does look incredible. Um, I also think

11 minutes of full CG,

they They said. They said.
That sound.

That was visceral, Connor, whatever. It just happened to you.
It's also funny to think of that shot. And

you haven't watched, I assume, any of the... There's a really long, like behind-the-scenes

documentary about the making of the return, Griffin. I got the big box here.
I will be watching it.

I've been avoiding it because I don't want to get spoiled on things I haven't gotten to in the series.

Well, there's a sequence where he gets really mad, and it has to do with there's a lot of times where something will have to be made out out of like paper-mâché or something, and Lynch will be just personally like stirring something in a bucket.

And they have the wrong stuff for him, and he's like, God damn it, he's like so angry, but that's like the story of him being so frustrated that he wanted to do all the makeup for Elephant Man himself.

And they were like, David, this is a paramount movie, you can't be like in the makeup like trailer applying shit to John Hurt for hours every day. And he's like, I can figure it out.

Lots of imagery that is wonderful, like inside the bomb.

Sorry, I just want to unpack this for a moment. I love the Trinity test sequence in Oppenheimer, right? Yes.

Yes. And I love like that it was done practically just as like a sort of antidote to what we're used to of how these things look.
A criticism I have heard about that sequence from people is like.

What is happening when an atomic bomb goes off is so much more complicated and terrifying than any usual explosion, right?

That is the underlying enormity of what this weapon was and why it was so scary. And the Trinity Test is a little bit more of just like, what's an incredible way to depict an explosion on screen?

I feel like this granular digital thing that Lynch is getting at somehow evokes more of the like, matter is being like pulled apart

kind of thing. I love the Trinity Test sequence in Operation,

not for the explosion itself, which is honestly just fine. And he only uses it sparsely.
It's all about the buildup and the characters, and how you know, how tense they are about it.

And, you know, that's what's so cool about it. And the way the flash is done is cool.
I'm just saying the firewall itself kind of looks just okay because Nolan, I think, was really trying

to do it practically.

Like Lynch, who you don't think of as a CGI heavy filmmaker, is able to capture some sort of thing of like the terror of this, which is like, as much as it is like sort of hypnotizing and to a certain degree, beautiful imagery, you're also like there's something really scary about just like watching the particles for this long and thinking about what is producing them the the lighting of it the flashing and the the like it gets dark and then there's like a flash color and you're you're feeling like you don't even know physically where the camera is it's like in this cloud, this storm.

When you like read the accounts of the folks who were working at Los Alamos, they talk about it that way, where they were just like, it was incomprehensible what we were witnessing.

Like colors you can't explain, like time slowing down. Like,

you know, it's, it's what's horrifying about this existing as a technology.

I wonder how aware Lynch was of, because I have to feel on some levels completely deliberate that in the first seven episodes of this, some of the digital effects are so crude.

that they're just not even pretending they're anything other than computer effects. It's just, there's no pretense of it.

You're in the Black Lodge and it doesn't look like the Black Lodge from the ABC television version.

It's a different, more digitally looking thing that in some ways it's setting you up that when this happens, you won't, your mind won't be able to process how good it looks

to me. Yeah, because I also like, look,

I didn't think he set off an actual atomic bomb for the sake of filming episode eight of his television show, right? He didn't do that.

But I was watching it because he's established a language of when there are effects, they purposefully look very unnatural.

That to see the realism of this, I was like, was he compositing practical elements together? Did he film some weird faked version of explosion, composite into a background?

To hear that it's all CG, your brain does kind of, I think what you're saying, like it doesn't know how to process it. What's the sound, too, that's being played? Oh, it's just me going,

is that what it is? There is a second, David, that's a conflict of interest. You didn't disclose that you worked on this episode going peer-be-pew.

There's a piece of music playing during the test that is the, I want to get this right, Thronody to the Victims of Hiroshima, which is a piece of classical music that was composed in reflection on the bombing of Hiroshima years later.

So that's obviously, you know, but then it's also, you know, crazy lynch sound effects are playing. Then we see the convenience store, which is this

sort of Black Lodge-esque, maybe even sort of a scarier place than the Black Lodge, right? Like, I'd rather go to the Black Lodge than to that convenience store.

I feel like there's this implication that that's where really bad shit goes down in the arm or characters like that sort of shuttle between, but you go to the convenience store for some sort of nasty stuff.

Because when you see it in Fire Walk With Me, it's also where kind of bad transactions are happening. Black Lodge is scary and unpredictable, but it's clean.
It's clean. It's

some fancy. Wait, so we've been to the convenience store and in the past? In Firewalk With Me only? Is it future or is it past? Sorry.
It's appeared on the show.

But it looked like you would be forgiven for not realizing that what we've seen before is that because we haven't seen the outside of the convenience store before. It was only inside the show.

In Firewalk With Me when it's like a room full of... Bob and the man from another country.
And there's like people dancing around. And that guy with the weird

nose.

That's upstairs of the convenience store, which Mike, the one our man used to talk about, is upstairs. I believe it was convenience store.

Okay. But when we see it here, it's the awesome David Lynchy black and white, like stutter step, you know, the woodsmen going around like beetles, but it's all like sort of

and they're flashing. Goes on for a while.

And we have basically a period of this segment. I can't can't keep, I can never keep straight the order of some of these things.
I've got the, I'm watching it, you're watching.

I'm sort of going in sequence just to remember exactly this. There is a sequence where essentially essentially you're like, oh, we're watching something that is 2001, a space odyssey for television.

I think that's exactly right. You're watching an abstract depiction of the sort of like

development of some new kind of malevolence, right? Like, you know, that's what, you know, and these guys are these busy little evil worker bees around this kind of like

post-war symbol, the convenience store, right? Like, you know, it looks like an old gas station from the 50s, kind of. And it's just like, right.
It's like, that's how I'm taking all of it.

But let's also say, like, 2001, it's coming after two hours of more conventional narrative storytelling in a movie, more conventional, right?

And then throughout that abstract expressionist sequence, you're cutting back to cure DeLaya.

Like, they are recentering you in, like, this is what this character you have been through is experiencing. This has no grounding viewpoint in any way.

He's making you the audience member. And no precedent in the series or world of Twin Peaks.

Like, we've seen Twin Peaks in multiple forms, and this is the first time we've ever been just sounds and shapes.

Then we see, yes, this kind of figure, which the experiment is how it's referred to, but it's this kind of feminine, blobby body.

floating in space and makes this kind of weird chain of vomit and Bob's head emerges from that.

And it's another thing where if you, I remember back to both moments when i was watching this for the first time tired in a in a hotel room with all the lights out just watching the screen that when you're seeing bob you could easily miss what you're seeing it's not like it's it's subtle the way he does this it is you have to kind of focus on this this brief image that kind of swifts you know swishes by you And then we see this sort of golden imagery, golden blob,

sort of a nicer vibe, one might think.

Again, this is why I'm kind of like, it's so funny that Twin Peaks can be thought about so deeply, but then also David Lynch is like, yeah, there's the golden people. That's the nice people.

Good blob versus bad blob.

The angels are coming. Spray gath up with the gold hair, spray and paint and makeup.
for a golden gath. I want a golden gath.

Just so we have it.

And then we're on the Purple Sea, which is this. We've seen this image before a little bit.
When have we seen this episode three? Yeah, when

Cooper was kind of moving his way through, you know, from the Black Lodge after the real world. He fell out of the Black Lodge, landed in that little box in New York City.
So is it post-the-box?

Post-the box.

You know, he goes and he tiny Cooper falls down a little thing, and then he's in that little room where something's trying to get in.

And there's Briggs' floating floating head and all that stuff, you know. That all we've all seen a little bit of that, we're back there.

Question: Is I it's been a long time since I saw Dune. You guys saw him refresh.
Are there Purple Sea parts? Is that Dune? Yeah, it's Dune. Okay, uh, the worm floats by.
It's the planet Dune.

I just wasn't sure. So, uh, no, that's great question.
Freddie Jones is there. Good answer for you.
Cat in a box. Um, and so there's this castle atop the Purple Sea, and that's where the giant lives.

You're right.

I don't know how else to describe this there's a castle on the purple sea where the giant lives and there's also this woman uh senorita dido who we only see in this episode uh played by joy nash who's sitting there as well she's sitting on the couch they have a sofa in this uh castle i was it looks comfy in there it looks very cool it's an awesome beautifully designed yes it has a 50s kind of aesthetic would we say or maybe even yeah older aesthetic I don't know.

Sort of the steamy thing is going on, too. Like, there's a phonograph, there's the big kettle thing, there's a lot of clanking.

And the fireman or the giant or whatever you want to call him is there, played by Carol's

face. Credited as old him.
Credited as a series of question marks. Credited as like eight question marks.
Even David Lynch and Mark Frost were like, we don't know what the fuck this is.

You've got me. Seems weird.

We couldn't figure out what he was. We know that they live in a castle on the Purple Sea.
We don't know who this guy is. This fella.
Wish he'd tell us.

His face, it's so different from him in, you know, the TV show, in the ABC show. Like that he's so old and he's kind of drawn.
You're talking about Carol struck in.

He and Mike, I think, both have that thing that, you know, there was every few years, there'd be be one of those apps that shows up that everyone starts having fun with where it's like, oh,

you type in your email and it shows you what you look like in a painting. Right.
And type in your social security number right here.

By the way, for training AI, it's fun for three days. Then someone's like, don't do this.
They're scraping your account and using all the, and I did one of those and I didn't post. I didn't post it.

I tried like five different paintings, put me in a painting.

They all had my face basically do what happened to Mike and the giant, which is that something sort of you get older and your face sort of like

it no it kind of deteriorates in a way that makes me a little sad and so none of mine were postable because they were all kind of like oh no and and it was consistent enough that i'm like they know something because everyone else was having fun looking paintings and my face just like caved yeah but connor that's unnecessary to use that program we all know if we want to see a picture of what you'll look like as an old man we can just pull up the weekend's dawn fm album cover that inexplicably looks identical to connor in 40 years now it looks like me now look i know i know it looks like me sprayed up as george lucas it looks like if you continued spraying up until you hit george's real age i don't think the weekend looks like you under any other circumstances

i can see it that cover's identical is it not these two characters Essentially watch what we just watched. Yes.
They like literally play a movie. That is the other thing that I was like blown.

I remember being blown away by at like 2.30 in the morning, whatever, that I'm like, they just showed something that I kind of can't believe got

made it to television. Right.
And then we watched a scene where other characters said, look, watch that. That looks like Bob's face.
Can you freeze on that? You know?

And the giant is like, I'm supposed to recap this for AV Club. How do I fucking synopsize this?

Well, he synopsizes it by basically like kind of dreaming a golden cloud over his head. He sort of levitates and like a mist emerges from him.

And

that basically turns into Laura Palmer, a Laura Palmer globe. And it is like it's some real Captain Planet shit.
It's like, you know, okay,

like go, go fight Bob. Yeah.
Right?

Which?

It's, you know, it doesn't really like it's hard for me to think about these things and try to unpack the logic of it because it feels like in the fight versus of like good versus evil,

it seems like an unfair fight that it's like, we're going to create an innocent who's so good, but she's going to have to like be the victim of all of this terrible abuse.

And like, that's the fight that they're arranging. Like, why not create a big bear that can fight Bob? That would be cool if they created a big bear.

Instead, it's like, how about we create this child and we'll have them be abused? If you think about it that literally, it's very upsetting. And maybe that's is

like Big Bear.

Maybe we should think about it that literally. Or maybe it's kind of like, right, we'll imbue one of his, you know, victims with

this, you know, compelling power or, or just, I don't know. I mean, how do you want to think about it? It's just like there will be light in Counter to the Darkness.

It's, it's interesting because if you think back to what it felt like to watch the first episode of Twin Peaks when Laura Palmer's body washes up on the shore and they're like, oh my God, Laura.

And the people of the town are so upset by it. The idea that there'd be any character in the universe of this story that's like, it's all part of our plan.
We're going to fight Bob this way.

This is how we fight Bob. Well, it's also like the image of her in the globe is literally her prom photo, right?

The sort of iconic image of Twin Peaks is the, the, the, and like when you think about the pilot where it's like, uh, hey, Cheryl Lee, play this murder victim. You're going to get wrapped in plastic.

You'll do that. We'll take a prom photo.

and then we're gonna do like you know, like five minutes is sort of video footage of you dancing around with Laura Flimborn.

All we're hiring you to do, you have no dialogue, you're a day player, you're a day player. There's a world where they're like, Okay, thanks.
Like, that's all we need from you.

Not only you're a day player, but like most of your job is doing an accompanying photo shoot and basically being a piece of art design, and then obviously, like production design instead, the show you know becomes like you know, immediately

that Lynch is like, this actor is so interesting. And, like, we're going to use her all over the place.
But for like the

Twin Peaks of the Return to be like, yes, Laura Palmer is the fucking Iron Man to Bob's Thanos. I mean, that's not what the show is doing, to be clear.

But there is something just crazy about them shooting her face in a golden tube towards a like image of planet Earth. Even if it's kind of a big tuba.
Yeah, like it does feel very childish.

Even if you think back to the giant at the beginning of season two, imagine that there was a scene that they shot, just so we have it.

Gether was standing as a little giant next to him, and a scene where the giant says, I made Laura to fight Bob. And Cooper's just lying in bed, like, what? What's going on?

But also, am I wrong in feeling like

Every single second of footage we have ever seen of Laura Palmer as a character is when she is already kind of like collapsing inside. Right.
Right.

Like we never see dramatized, you know, this is like a character who's like been like the receptacle for all of like the darkness of the world.

And I feel like more than it being like Laura, we're imbuing her with the power to fight Bob.

There's something in the fact that when Laura dies, it feels like that was the last thing holding reality together. It's what makes everyone in the town spiral so fully out of control, right?

Is like it goes beyond this sort of like,

oh my God, whoever thought this could happen in a small town?

The more conventional version of Twin Peaks, which is just a weird, inexplicable murder happens and something that feels more spiritual and existential of like

some barrier. Yeah.
I mean, episode eight essentially finally pays off. We finally learned that Jean Renault was wrong when he attributed what went wrong to Ajan Cooper.
He came to town.

Pretty girl die. Agent Cooper came to town.
Suddenly, Twin Peace is not so good a place. So, like, episode eight, finally, it's like we've tied up the Jean Renault plot line from season two.

Thank God they turns out he was, turns out he was wrong. It wasn't Cooper's fault, right? Instead, it was like a gramophone made Laura's face and shot it at a tube.

They probably did another take where it's like, let's not go with this one, but shoot it just so we have it. Of Jean Renault explaining, a giant probably shoots her out of a tube.

Pretty girl shoot a tube to a

tiny wind up planet earth seniorita titan maybe is a big bomb i don't know is a big bomb it's just a theory maybe not if this this episode has like four or five acts right so like five for act one the prologue is mr c mr c

uh and then we have the atom bomb uh no sorry then we have nine inch nails then we have the atom bomb uh sequence and then we have what we just saw this sort of

the two globes yeah we have the origin of bob the origin of laura and then the final 15 minutes, the sort of final act of it is like, okay, we're pulling out of total dream fantasy imagery.

We're now in New Mexico in 1956, in the desert, and a strange creature has hatched from a little egg.

And we're going to, it's still black and white, so we're still sort of in the aesthetic of this specific episode, but it's...

A girl and a boy, a teenage girl and a teenage boy like talking to each other. And we're back to something a little more human.

I mean, mean, he's pretty sure how he got this beetle that gives him power. It's like a suit of armor, but it's intelligent.
Heritage and all that stuff. It's a spiritual and technology.

It's a frog moth.

I read it as a grasshopper. It looks like a big grasshopper.
Because it's got the long kind of body thing. Yeah, but it's large.
Yeah, quite large.

And it has kind of froggy background. Well, no, no, I'm saying a grasshopper frog rather than a frog moth.
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Okay.
Yeah, that's fine. Right.
Yep.

And there is, I believe, in the Twin Peaks access guide book

that came out

back around season two. Okay.

There is a section that someone found when this episode came out that was like,

is this what this thing was?

Oh, yeah, here it is. Did you see it? Yeah, that it's, there's some sort of legend, like sort of Native American legend of a

mythological kind of frog creature. Yeah, you're looking at the same like Reddit post or whatever where they have that screenshot.

Frog moths. Yeah.

Well, well, well, Ben. How the frog moth has turned.
Or maybe these images just rattle around in their heads and they use them in new ways.

Maybe this show is just so carefully plotted and tightly planned that we should not doubt them. They know what they're doing.
After season two, Lynch was like, I'm done with that shit.

This isn't some Vince Gilligan thing where we paint ourselves into a corner and then trying to figure out how to get Walt and Jesse out of it. I don't need to explain the teddy bear.

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There's after this brief interlude with the boy and the girl, there's this sequence I would describe as a little spooky where one of the woodsmen approaches a couple driving in a car

and asks if they've got a light. It is unnerving to like cut to a couple quote-unquote normal dialogue scenes between young people.
You're just like, wait a second.

I thought this wasn't going to go back to this kind of thing.

It's Robert Broski. He looks like zombie Abraham Lincoln.
He's an actor who, to be clear, almost every single credit in his IMDb is Abraham Lincoln. Really?

Like, he is a well-known Abraham Lincoln impersonator. I think he looks great.
Yeah, he looks cool.

What do we think just from a fashion standpoint? Great. Sooty? Sooty.

Flannel. Good hat.

I'm very like. Cigarette.
I think I shouldn't. Well, you know, except for that part.
Should I start being sooty? Try it.

Your fiancé might object to you treading soot through the halls. Like

through that. Derby Ben 2025.
You won't know that. You won't know that until you try it.
This is. You know what? Connor has a great attitude about this.
Try being sooty.

And if it turns out to be a mistake, you can always course correct. Be less sooty or not sooty at all.
Robert Broski was in a 2014 short film called Lincoln,

in which he played Abraham Linclone, a clone of Abraham Lincoln, and he's got like Terminator Eyes. Oh,

that sounds pretty good. It sounds good as hell.
Down to watch it.

Ling clone. They clone Abe Lincoln's DNA and name the clone President for Life, except there's one problem, colon, the clone is evil.
It's five minutes long. That's a lot of plot for five minutes.

How many people are there in history? But only one problem, though.

That's true. You can knock out one problem every five minutes.
That there's like no footage of. We also, we know how to solve the problem of a Lincoln if you think that Abraham Lincoln is a problem.

You have to clear it.

No, there's like, we have been provided with a clear, uh, a clear solution. You clone John Wilkes Booth.

If you think Abraham Lincoln is the problem, this is not a how do you solve a problem like Maria situation. What is the solution, Connor? You shoot him dead.

I think you have to clone John Wilkes Booth to shoot him dead, though. Yeah, but the solution is still shooting him dead.
Sure.

If for some reason, someone who's not a clone of John Wilkes Booth also shoots him death, shoots him dead, problem solve. We don't know that, though.
We don't have the data to prove that. That's true.

It's too small a sample size. We've only got one Lincoln.
Historically, only one guy has been able to kill Abraham. Thank you for calling me out on my bad science.
You're welcome.

The sample size is far too small. We don't know.
Now, I don't have the stomach to carry out this experiment because I like Lincolns, and I don't think they're problems.

I'm just, how many people are there that there isn't like film footage of that you could be like, hey, you know who you look like is Abraham Lincoln? Like you can pursue a career looking like Abraham.

That's a great question. You know what I mean? If you commit to the beard, it's probably a lot more than we think.
Yeah. Well, Santa Claus.
I mean, people that look like Jesus Christ.

That was the other one I was thinking of. But these are, you're right that those are more like

kind of agreed upon advertising depictions of

these figures. You know, there's like a constructed visual archetype versus Lincoln, where we're like, we got a handful of photos of him.
We got the basics.

And if you got the bone structure and the height, you're set for life. Oh, yeah.

So, got a light. Kind of scary.
We never find out if they do. Nope, they drive away.
They're not into it. Rude.
Yeah, I guess you never do find out if they got a light. They have a light.

We're back to the boy and the girl. He kisses her.
It's all very like.

It kind of reminds me.

It kind of reminds me of

in the same way that a lot of Twin Peaks return people have commented that it's not just a continuation of Twin Peaks, but in some ways it feels like it calls back to many things in Lynch's

career. I always feel like the scenes where they're walking and talking remind me of the scenes of Kyle McLachlan and Laura Dern walking in blue velvet, that sort of innocent

conversation.

Yeah, she's got the kind of, she looks like... In that, like, Laura Dern looks like she's from another decade.
She's dressed in this kind of like, you know, old-fashioned way and all that.

It's also amazing that this episode, if it ended before this sequence, it would have been this crazy, weird episode with all this weird stuff.

This part is the part that makes it a truly amazingly impressive episode because it's like, we have how many minutes left? How long is this last section? The last section is about 15 minutes long.

15 minutes. And it's like, we're going to give you a fully self-contained narrative.
Sort of love horror story for new characters. It's like we're going to give you this, right?

This like budding, just hint of this budding budding teen romance, and this like monster attack on the town, I guess is the best way to do it.

It's almost like Lynch, you could, you could imagine if it ended before this segment, you could imagine some people, if they didn't like it, dismissing it as, well, this is a bunch of goofy garbage.

It's a bunch of artsy weird shit.

He's lost it as a filmmaker. This isn't cinema.
This is just a bunch of... What a lot of people said about him in the 90s.
Yeah. Yeah.
And this last segment is just

it's just it's not conventional filmmaking, but it is just like storytelling. I'm going to make a black and white horror movie.
It's going to have the pacing is perfect.

It's creepy and hypnotic, but you get invested in the characters. It's really just such, it's one of the best 15 minutes of his whole career.
It is so cool and so scary.

The Woodsman like walks into the DJ, like into the radio booth, and it's perfect David Lynch violence where it's like the only effect initially is that he's putting his hand on the receptionist's head and pushing her down.

And all she's doing clearly is kneeling down, right? Like there's nothing else happening.

And then you cut to the second like close-up of where the camera's shaking like crazy and buckets of blood are pouring over her head.

And like, that's all you need is like these two very, like, one is just nothing at all, really.

And the second is the most simple, over-the-top kind of like violin effect without any, you know, real embellishment, just like lots of blood.

It's not like we watch our head get crumpled, it's in your head that that's happening. There's also a modern technique that I can only think of a few examples of it, but like

black and white with CGI digital special effects somehow looks so impressive because I don't know if it's that my brain

processes black and white as like, how did they do these? Like it processes black and white as old. And so when I see something that's CGI in color, I see it as like, oh, it's a computer effect.

It's impressive, but I'm processing it as a computer effect sometimes. I've said this many times.

I think the trend of like, actually, I always wanted to film it in black and white, so I'm doing a black and white cut for the Blu-ray is largely kind of bullshit nonsense.

The one I find entrancing is Fury Road for that reason.

Because that movie is constructed more like a silent film and is so CGI heavy, but a weird combination of CGI and practical, when you're watching these long wordless stretches in black and white, it feels like, how did they make this in 1910?

It's also like the mist is kind of like that, where you have these CGI bugs that look like perfectly professional CGI special effects, but in black and white, you're like, How on earth did 1940s filmmaker Frank Daribont make well, yes, it makes the mist feel like a Twilight Zone episode.

Yeah. I do think the Godzilla, like, minus one, minus color thing, while interesting, doesn't really work because you're just like, I know what a Godzilla movie looked like in black and white.

It was a guy in rubber. The woodsman kills the people in the radio station, and then he says, this is the water, this is the well,

drinkful and descend, the horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.

He says it a lot, just in case you didn't get it. I do feel like, again, not to overanalyze, because I really think you can do whatever you want, but the horse is the white of the eyes, right?

The white of the eyes don't see.

The horse is this image that's in all of Twin Peaks. Sarah is always seeing the horse.
And to me, it symbolizes very plainly, like it's like just looking, not seeing what is happening.

And that's what's like the Laura, you know, that's the story of Laura. It's like everyone's just kind of looking away or looking around what's happening to her.
And that's what the horse means.

But why is it making everyone fall asleep? Like, why is it so hypnotic? Because they need Sarah Palmer, young Sarah Palmer, to fall asleep so that the

frog moth can climb into her body. So basically, they have to do a chemical attack on the whole town to put everybody to sleep.

Or not a chemical attack, but a hypnotic attack.

This is really just a lullaby being broadcast over the radio waves. Yeah.

Right.

And

they get the job done, which is that they put this frog moth into young Sarah Palmer. They imbue her with whatever sort of second sight or connection to this other world

and the woodsman is kind of in on it but he's not playing aside

right yeah

i think i feel like he's on the i feel like he's

i feel like this benefits bob

well isn't though we're gonna the creature eventually gonna lead to bob's demise

um no i think sarah

is you know is sort of I mean, I can't, I, I, I struggle with all this. Oh, yes, because Sarah is going to, Sarah is going to give birth to Laura Palmer.
She sets up all of these. Right.

So maybe the woodsmen are neutral. Well, let's just make this a fair fight.
That's what I'm kind of saying. Yeah.
I mean, I, I just like the referees.

It's tough to think about sides because it's right. This is not the woodsmen are basically like, this is a jump ball.

I don't play favorites. What's your read on it, David?

My read on it is what I said, like, is the, is the white of the eyes thing thing or whatever. Like, and is that Sarah is touched with this like awful darkness, and that's her character in Twin Peaks.

Grace Zabriski's, right? It's like, she's not well.

She's not able to help her daughter. She is aware of things

like, right, like she has visions. And so she has that connection to, and, and of course, we'll see her more in Twin Peaks of Return.

And she's, Grace Zabriski is having a lot of fun.

You'll see. But like, she's not really an ally to Laura.
Right.

I mean, in a certain way, she has a superpower to not clock what's going on. Like, even just the conjuring of the images of the horse and whatever.

It's like there are like complicated systems in place to keep her sort of distracted. In a way, that's how a lot of people cope with trauma, how they get through it.
Exactly. I think that's right.

If you just want to take the metaphor again, right? It's like Sarah represents

the sin of a mission or whatever, you know, like just like looking away and not uh but it's also stopping the evil happening under her roof but it's a in a certain way it's a basic human survival impulse right it's not like oh she's like um

failing in her duty through some like shitty parenting in her core it's like it's hard to look the horse in the eye yes yes

and she

the human brain wants to reject the the character we meet in twin Peaks is a sort of, you know, a really sad, kind of rotted out character.

Like by the time we're meeting her, like, and then in Twin Peaks, the return. Have we seen her yet? Maybe not, but we will see her.

Sarah Palmer? Did we saw her briefly? We've seen her watching animals like

eating each other on TV. And we see her, her house is very depressing.
Her house is very frightening. But we'll see her later.
We'll see her more. More.

And I feel like it's only gotten sort of worse with her. Counterpoint.
Counter theory. It could be that the frog moss and the woodsman are not connected.
It's just a coincidence of timing.

And the woodsman story could be as simple as that one of them wants to be on the radio. Yeah, he just really wants to debut his sister.

He tries it out and he learns very quickly that he doesn't get along with the staff at the radio station. Like it's just not a good fit.
This is kind of his airheads moment.

Yeah, well, it's sort of, this is where it ties in because you literally see on air

so i'm like oh this is a callback to on the air the lynch frost uh sitcom sure yeah um uh which which we're gonna cover in the uh

and in the episodes we will not release even on the patreon right just the secret

secret episodes just for us fifth tier yeah um that we pay into just the four of us it's sort of a blind trust yeah yeah um but on the air he wants to be on the radio he tries it out he finds out, oh, the people of this town, they find him boring as heck.

And he got a really bad market share. That's the other thing.
There's the scene that they cut out where the guy comes in. He's like, look, I got to just rip the bandaid off.
The ratings were not good.

And then he just, like, he walks out of the station and leaves dead air.

There's no record playing and dead people.

But the dead people would have been no problem if

the ratings had been there. If the sponsors supported the show, the dead people could have, yeah, we could have jumped over that.

It is creepy to think, though, of tuning into your local radio station and

hearing that, but even just hearing nothing. Sure, that is creepy.
Yeah, that's a creepy thing. Because

radio, I mean,

in those days, it had some kind of programming.

It was so exciting when he started.

delivering that poem on the air. We're calling it a poem, right?

I'm calling it a poem. Sure, absolutely.
Or it's a slantry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guys, I'm going to go read my poem on the radio, okay?

You guys want to hang around other parts of town while I

wait for me? If the zoo crew wants to stand by,

I'll let them know when the interjections are allowed. I'm going to do my water while poem on the radio.

Now, Mark Frost says the idea for this episode, and he says it very plainly, is like we've never done anything close to what you would call an origin story for Twin Peaks,

showing where this pervasive sense of darkness and evil had come from. So we just sort of wrote down a 15-page script, he said, eventually.

And he knew as they wrote it, like the atomic bomb on the page is like half a page. And he's like, I know that's 15 minutes.
Like, David will then just take that and do whatever he wants with it.

And he said, you know, we wanted something that would stand apart and blow your mind. It's like, it's as simple as that.
Because half of this episode has no dialogue at all.

Yeah, maybe more than half, probably.

And even the stuff that, quote unquote, has dialogue, it's pretty spare. There's like five pages of This is the Water and This is the Well.

I was so excited when it got to the This Is the Water and This is the Well part, particularly because

it felt like Twin Peaks, but it also like was not like anything that had ever been on Twin Peaks before. You know, like that whole sequence is like, yes, this is like, it's not a callback.

It's not like when you are in the Black Lodge again, like we've seen that. This is a completely new thing.

And

I can imagine a world in which

a sequence like this, if let's, let's imagine a world in which Twin Peaks runs for eight seasons on ABC.

It's very easy to imagine there'd be a point where there'd be a sequence where a woodsman walks into the modern day 90s Twin Peaks radio station, then you cut to a sequence of Big Ed and the principal and all these people falling asleep.

At this point, it would be, it would have been like three months after the death of Laura Palmer,

or like, or six months, I guess, with every episode being a day.

But it felt so exciting to see something like that after an episode with so many different strange things that had no precedent in any previous form of Twin Peaks.

to get this little horror movie at the end and then to feel like, oh, and maybe this is Sarah palmer but it just says young girl but i'm like it lines up time wise time wise exactly so it's like it could be her but it also could be that we don't know what this is about yet you know yeah

i just think you can really do whatever you want with it like i i really support that and if someone wants to send me a sort of wild out there take i'd be intrigued you know but i do think mark frost and he talks about twin peaks all the time and then david Lynch, whenever you get him to talk about it, would probably, yeah, be up front of like, yeah, no, but we kind of just wanted to do this kind of flashback origin thing.

That's what we were going for. They wouldn't be like, yeah, it means what it means what it means.
Like, I don't know, you guys figure it out. They're like, no, no, no.

We sat down and they were like, what's the origin of the evil specificity? So on the one hand, it's the most baffling, inexplicable, artsy,

abstract episode. And in another sense, it's like...
The most straightforward.

Yeah, it's like it actually would be harder to synopsize some of the other episodes that look like conventional storytelling, but it's like Dougie Jones works for this office in Las Vegas.

And you're like, wait, how is this? And you're like, well, no, no, because Dougie Jones is the body that

is a tulpa that Mr. C created.
You know, you're just like, that stuff is so much harder to summarize than when they created nuclear weapons that generated unspeakable evil.

And then like the sort of simplest idea. And then there's like a vertical, someplace that's kind of like heaven or something where positive forces created some light to balance it.

And then we go back and see Laura Palmer's mom as a little girl and how she got like infected by this monster at an early age.

So, there you go, Griff. Are you, you know, completely caught up? Thank you for a perfect answer.
No, I'm serious, truly serious. Like, I feel like you can watch it again.

I'm being serious. I don't have time to goof around.
I'm not goofing. I'm deadly serious.
It's not Riff Trax.

If you know what it is, though. You could watch it again.
It is Griff Tracks. And just, you know,

not the first time you watch the episode, you're just sort of bewildered because it doesn't sequentially follow what happens. And you're just sort of like, what's this now? What's this now?

What's this now?

But then the more times you watch, and I've watched this episode several times because it's fun to watch standalone.

I also had to keep starting and stopping the episode the first time I watched it because, not because I fell asleep because I was sleepy or bored. Right, right, right.

But because I kept getting sort of like hypnotized by it. And then I had to be honest,

I have to back up. Yeah.
I have to back up because I'm not sure what I just saw. Well, so you had been up all night the night before doing big sloppy naturals,

which, of course, was an improvisation. Intro that were runnable.
Whippets. Yeah.
Yeah. Seriously?

Murph Meyer, our good friend Murph Meyer.

That's kind of his part eight, right? Was big sloppy naturals. That was his ultimate.

David, don't say seriously when we're in the middle of, we've just established, we worked so hard to establish how serious we were. Yeah, we're trying to be serious here.

Don't question the seriousness. It's being very serious.
It's so confusing to me. It's more confusing than episode eight for us to convey to Griff that we're being serious here.

Let's say seriously with a pen and then say seriously. And not throw around our question marks, Willie, Willy Nilla.
Willy Wonka. Let's not Willy Wonka our question marks.
Let's not make them edible.

Oh, of course. No, you don't want to do that.
Right. Oh, by the way, I want to call it, we're going to find out that Willy Wonka's middle name is Nilly in Wonka 2.

Because Nilly rhymes with a lot of stuff. Silly, Billy.

But that Willie. Right.

Won't he? But you want to put your chips down on Nilly being the middle name. As you just said, there are a lot of other things that could be.
We're going to learn a lot of things.

We're going to figure out, does he learn to read?

Are there other animals he can milk? Yeah. I have nipples, Greg.
Can you milk me? Can you milk me? Right. Does he milk Robert De Niro? Does he meet the Fokkers? And Wonka too, willy-nilly.

Would it be funny if I hope Wonka meets the Falkers. There's the Adam bomb and then the Fockers.
Oh, because the Adam bomb.

Just all the Fockers.

My prediction is we'll find out his middle name is Nilly. You can take that to the bank.

But

my hope, my wish is that he meets those Falkers. Do you hope he meets? Do you meet those Falkers? Do you hope he meets the Little Fockers? Because he's good with kids.
Yeah. Yeah, some little Fockers.

I don't mind that.

Wonka's good with kids. Wonka's good with kids.
Most characters in this show are not good with kids. And Twin Peaks the Return? Yeah.
Also, most characters in the Fox universe are not good with kids.

No, they're sort of ill-equipped with pretty much everything. Wait, are you referring to Little Nikki when you say people aren't good with kids?

Okay, let's get all of our threads cleanly established here. Wonka 2, colon, willy-nilly.
We predict he will meet the Fockers, the Little Fockers, and Little Nikki.

That's what we're predicting? Okay. Good prediction.
The ratings game. Oh, sure.
So this is the point in the podcast where we usually do the box office game. We are covering TV.

Now, our friends at Regal, of course, the folks behind Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits, are continuing to sponsor the ratings game, even though this is a TV show.

Now, some people say the Twin Peaks of the Return is like an 18-hour movie. And with Regal Unlimited, you can see 18 hours worth of movies a month if you're smart, if you use it well.

And right now, for the holidays, if you you use code blank check at checkout for your regal unlimited subscription, you can get 20% off. That's double the previous offer.
This is unprecedented.

Anyway, now we're going to try to guess television ratings. I'm going to give you the cable ratings for June 25th, 2017.
So you're not going to compare it to network broadcasts.

The network ratings are so irrelevant because I guess it's sort of after the TV season is ended. So

more fun games. Four game shows and one America's America's Funnies Home Videos.
It's AFE still in AFE number one. Number one.
But AFE was beating seasons one and two of Twin Peaks.

It's crazy to be like AFE is still beating The Return.

So crazy. Yeah.
If you were to put me in a coma for all that time and not tell me that it was season three, I'd be like, wow,

all these shows lasted the whole time. Okay.
So summer 2017 came. Yes, the most watched cable

show that Sunday night got 3.8 million viewers. Solid 1.5 in the demo.
It's a special event on a cable channel. It's a special event.
An awards show, one might say. Okay, in the middle of the summer.

Yeah, not one of our better-known awards shows, but an awards show. The ESPs? No.
Am I close? You're close in that it's an award show named for a network. Is it the BET award? B-E-T Awards.

Look at that. What were you going to guess, Connor? MTV something.
Right.

Yes, the BET Awards. The MTV awards.
Hosted by leslie jones okay

beyoncé won five awards the gary the rats album of the year video of the year the booba rills so on and so forth stripperlla uh like chance the rapper was best new artist that's how much time has passed this is what's crazy like it's like now i'm like chance the rapper that guy is cooked you know cooked as hell right what is this yeah i don't know anything about what's happened with chance

i'm just saying like he's not like cool anymore or whatever you know and it's like hold on.

Hold on. I'm catching up here.
Let me just get my notebook out.

Not

best.

Hold on, hold on. Anymore.
He had this incredibly exciting shot out of a cannon, like prodigious career. And then he was like, I'm ready to make my first proper album.

And it was quietly one of the greatest boondoggles of modern music. Is that fair to say? I'm not a huge expert, but I do know that right.

The big day. He made a concept album about a wedding going wrong.
Boondoggle.

And it got kind of bad reviews. And there was some controversy about him maybe leaning on websites to like, hey, don't write bad reviews about me because then I won't like do interviews.
I don't know.

Like there was a lot of that going on. And then A24 dumped his movie.

It just felt like he had a couple projects in a row where people had no enthusiasm for what he was doing after there being so much enthusiasm.

Because

I want to just have enough information that in. polite society, I can look like I really know what I'm talking about.
So Chance the Rapper, everyone thought he won awards for best new rapper.

And then within a few years, he made an album about a wedding gone wrong. It was one of the great boondoggles.
And he started leaning on websites saying, hey, don't write bad reviews about me.

Look, first of all, amazing recall. I feel like that was almost verbatim.
If I say that in a conversation, people will be like, wow, this guy knows a lot about Chance the Rapper. Connor gets it.

Best movie that year at the VT Awards was Hidden Figures. Oh, sure.

So that's number one. Number two is a a spin-off of one of the big cable hits.

What is it? It's a spin-off of one Sunday night show.

Is it a fear of the walking dead? Fear. Fear.
Fear of the walking dead.

Because people watch The Walking Dead and they would watch the show, and zombies are eating people, and they'd be like, But should I be afraid of these guys? They'd be laughing. I'm more scared of

watching The Walking Dead. I'm more scared of Neegan and his baseball bat.

So no, humanity is the biggest nightmare of all. Wait a second.
This is actually true. That's always been my secret take.
Are the real monsters the living? living number

you should be scared of the zombies is the title of that show

number three that's what they do uh at the amc's you should be scared of the zombies is um course correction is number three the box office i mean the ratings cable ratings cable ratings office yes is a uh a on a long-running drama comedy drama series fantasy comedy drama that was a spin-off of a hit tv uh films

i'm sorry wait a second there There was like a hit TV movie. Is it the librarians? No, but

you're kind of

a hit TV movie. Yeah, I think there were several.
Which then turned into a comedy fantasy drama. What were the terms used to describe? It's like a fantasy, comedy, drama is the genre.

Basically, there was a bunch of TV movies. So there were a bunch of TV movies.
I think there was

a TV movie franchise. And then they

had to make seven seasons as a

proper series. As a proper series, I think interspersed with even more movies.
It's kind of one of the big sort of shows for

this network. Is it like The Descendants? No.
But is it a young person's thing like that? No, I don't. It's not like Pretty Little Liars.
No, what is it? The fuck?

There were series of...

Critically revered? I'll tell you the... No, I don't think so.
I'll tell you the network. It's the Hallmark channel.
Oh, Christmas in the Marriage Town.

Great call that they should do something called Christmas in the Marriage Town. Connor, you've just sold a

million dollars. You just made a million dollars.
There was a series of movies. You can't live here.
You're single, and it's almost Christmas.

And they turned into a series, and the series ran for six or seven seasons on the Hallmark channel. On the Hallmark channel, yeah.
Fantasy. Clifford the Big Red Dog.

Tiffany the Big Red Dog. Clifford the Big Red Dog.
It stars Catherine Bell, who, of course, in the 90s was the star of Jag. Astonel liked to make jokes about her bosom.

Talked about that in a recent episode for a reason I don't remember. Jag has come up a lot.
It's still safe. Catherine

Belle. It came up because they were talking NCL.

But why? Oh, in the ratings game?

Oh, look, it all comes back.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm just going to tell you.
I'm out. It's called Good Witch.
Good Witch? Genuinely? Good Witch. Genuinely? News to me.
News to you. Well, this was

a fucking multimedia franchise.

It had 2.3 million viewers that night, my friend. More than Twin Peaks the Return Episode 8, which is supposedly the apex of TV storytelling or whatever.
2.3 million.

Well, Twin Peaks Episode 8 is no good, which, ratings-wise. Exactly.
Number four and five are both shows on the esteemed network HGTV, which I think Ben occasionally.

Yeah, I was going to say Ben might be able to guess this better than the rest of us. I watch it

because it is, it's just junk food. It's not good for you, but I just find it deeply comforting.
Ben, if you had to guess who was the top of the hg tv pile in 2017

i don't know you'll never ever guess

you'll never guess there's this show is so many shows like whatever that it doesn't have a wikipedia page like because htv just punch punch out this stuff but i'm gonna guess it's called making house is it a great flipper show no it's a show about people looking for things on the beach

property one might say sand grabbers no beachfront no

Is it is it like metal detectors? No, I don't. I think it's, I think,

look, the title makes it sound like it's metal detectors, but I think it's actually just looking for like treasure finders. I think it's just Dr.
Beach and the Sand Squad. There you go.

It's called Beach Hunters. I was so close.
You were very close.

It's like house hunters, but it's an extension of that. It's people hunters.
It's people looking for beaches. People getting beach.

Sand marriage and Christmas desert. That's right.
Yeah. And the number.
That's what the Hallmark version would be.

I'm trying to get the million that Connor just got. I need to start pitching my own Hallmark Christmas marriage movie.
Number five is another

HG TV show. See how quickly he made a million? The church's already around.
I invested it. It's making money just sitting there in that cap.
He's a crypto. He's a crypto pilot.

You need money to make money. That's so true.
You do need money to make money.

I make my money, make money. I make my money, make money.

This show, Griffin, is set in Mexico. It's another HG TV show about looking for properties in Mexico.
Okay.

Hola Felicia Vidad wedding. You guys are just doing so much more work than

bums at HGTV. La Casa.
You guys are like trying to think.

And they're just like, no, it's just going to be called Mexico Life. It's called Mexico Life? That sounds like a spicy cereal.
I'll tell you that.

I'll tell you that.

It's like, is life cereal a little too uncomplicated?

So it's like, it's like the hot ones ones version of life. Some of the other shows you've got in the top 10 here.
You've also got an HGT. How far out of the top 10 do we have to go to

peaks? Not in the top 15. Is it in the top 100s? I don't know.
I only have 50. Oh, my God.
You also have something called Lakefront Bargain Hunt. How different is that from Beach Life?

I guess it's lakes, not oceans. Yeah.
No, I like it. It's really different.
Okay, you're right.

It's one of the few shows. It's the only show so far that the title fucking rhymes.
That's true. That's true.

You got to give them credit for that. You got Hunter seems very

i've been sitting through all this like bjork level non-rhyming title you said

finally lake front house hunt what's it called

uh lake lake front bargain hunt lake front bargain hunt you've got amc's preacher which was you know kind of a thing back then

for a minute yeah you've got uh starz is power which i feel like power is always there's always more power i mean we're on like the eighth book of power yeah they keep opening new books to that sucker uh you have a food network show called Foodstar, and you have the, I would say, fairly well-known reality show, 90 Day Fiancé.

Is that about people who get married within 90 days,

or they're married for 90 days?

Oh, I see. It's long-distance couples have 90 days to decide whether or not to get married.
Okay.

And then finally, you have, and I think it's really important to note, An ESPN broadcasts of a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I mean, we just have to say that that ate Twin Peaks Episode 8's lunch. And yet doesn't even have the dignity to rhyme.

So how many people watched Twin Peaks episode 8? Wikipedia is saying around 250,000. I think that was basically what the ratings were for Twin Peaks The Return generally.

About a quarter million of live viewers. We discussed this that when the deadline wrote about the premiere, the first episode of The Return, they were like, this is embarrassing.

Not a lot of views for this highly anticipated legacy, you know, revival series and showtime was like we feel good about this and the ratings were basically always that linear yeah but they got a lot of showtime sign-ups

and then they'd be like plus seven days with vod and dvr i'm still signed up to showtime this is the thing They were basically like, it was, I think it was kind of like

the Sirius XM Howard Stern move where they were like, this just gets people over to our channel who will sign up for anything if it's Twin Peaks.

I also think it's probably example, an example of the kind of long-term thinking that not enough of these companies do, which is like, we build a library, we build a brand, we build a legacy, we build, we build stuff and we, you know, and it means something.

And then like Showtime and CBS and Paramount all remerged and now all of Twin Peaks is on Paramount Plus. And that's the thing they get to put in the mountaintop.

Laura Palmer's trekking up there with Cartman and Picard. I mean, you got to get the Criterion app.
You wanna watch the Firewalk with me and Missing Pieces, though. Well, but that's in the box.

I got it in the box right there. I know, but I'm just talking.
You want to stream it? You got to get two streams. Okay.
You got to get a paramount stream. You got to get Criterion stream.
Okay.

So I'm going to say that we're done discussing Twin Peaks the Return. Wait, wait,

are we? We're done. We're not covering the last 10 episodes at all.
Oh, yeah, we're done. We're actually, yeah, you know what? Check in with the other ones.
Some stuff happens.

People are going to hate it. No, I'm saying we're done discussing Twin Peaks the Return.
Episode 8. Is this episode of Blank Check ending? Soon.
All right.

Was there anything else we want to talk about? Connor, is there anything else you want to talk about?

Is there anything else to sort of bring in? As your one appearance within Twin Peaks the Return, without spoiling anything for Ben or I that we haven't seen yet or listeners. Well, yes, of course.

I definitely had a feeling of, I mean, I love Twin Peaks the Return overall.

I'm not going to spoil anything past eight, but with all kind of revisiting of an old thing where you could ruin it, you know, you could like botch it in in a way that you get a negative feeling and it sort of retroactively has the, there's always like the risk that it'll taint what came before.

I'm always looking for

what

will make it,

well, this will be worth it. If we only got this out of it, then it'll be worth it.
It's a little bit how I feel about some of the

Netflix arrested development era, which is there are aspects of it that I'm like, well, if we only got that part of it, I'm glad just for this part of that part.

And there'd be stuff like Wally Brando, like moments like that, where I'm like, even if it was just this scene, it's worth it.

Even if the rest of it was terrible, I'd want it to happen just so we have Wally Brando.

Episode eight, I liked everything of one through seven, but episode eight was the thing where it's like, if it ended now,

I would be like, I'm so glad they came back, even though there wouldn't have been closure on anything at all.

Yeah, I mean, I genuinely feel like I have no sense of what is going to happen in the rest of of the season to a certain extent i'm like everything i feel like i absorbed about this show through cultural osmosis and i've not been digging around reading fucking summaries and whatever but just like seven eight years of being online and out in the world and whatever oh you're there i guarantee i feel like most of it's been crossed off the list of what i knew going in i guarantee you that all almost all of the parts that are my favorite of the remaining part i don't think you will have been spoiled for by meming or yeah anything like that i'm just surprised by how much of it has already happened of like, oh, the Amanda Seyfried shot and Wally Brando in episode eight and Dougie with the tie on the head.

I know there's one more thing that I wanted to talk about, which I talked about a little bit with Griffin when we were on a boat ride last weekend. We took a nice boat ride.

We took a nice little boat ride. To be clear, we took a ferry to New Jersey.
Yeah.

I've been working on a thing lately, which is

I've watched the return all the way through start to finish twice.

And it's not the kind of thing I want, there's a lot of parts of of it.

I'll revisit a lot of favorite scenes or moments in episode, but there's also scenes that I will fast forward through because I don't need to see them again.

But one of the things that was most shocking to me when I saw it, because I said before it started, I had my dream of digital animated Bobs flying through space and flying out of stomachs.

The other thing that I was really positive of is that, well, the fact that Angelo Bottlamenti is back means that no matter what, we're going to get wall to wall, Angelo Bottlementi, Twin Peaks music.

And he made even the lowest points of season two feel like Twin Peaks and feel watchable because his music was always there to say, even a scene that wasn't funny would have that kind of like

jazzy mood. And you'd kind of feel like, yeah, it's kind of funny.
Like, what's going on?

Even if the scenes weren't good, you'd be like, ah, it's as good as any funny scene because it has this funny jazz, whatever.

There's so little of the Battlementi music in this show compared to the first two seasons of the movies.

I say two movies there because there's two feature films, Firewall With Me and the Missing Pieces.

David is crying.

One of them was theatrically released. The other one's a streamer.

That's okay.

You can count a streamer as a real movie now. David has smoke coming out of his ears.
Yeah.

And then I was shocked. Really, in the first few episodes, the thing that was the most shocking was how many scenes play out to total silence.
That's an interesting point.

I'm going to think about it more, too, because like there is lots of beautiful music that he made that you can listen to, the soundtracks out there and all that.

I have started because I have, there's a thing called the Twin Peaks archive that they released at one point that's like hundreds of cues that didn't make it onto the soundtrack albums.

All the raw material that Bad Lamente. Everything that they were working with, basically, including some.

The Twin Peaks archive is so full that it even includes music that was written for on the air. Is it really? Yeah, there's tracks at the end.
They're like, oh, this is for on the air.

But also just like him coughing on microphone. Yeah.
He's accidentally lobbed up and he takes a leak and they forgot to turn off. And it's beautiful music, Angelo.

I have started scoring Twin Peace to Return

using these

tracks. And I don't know if you know this, David, but Connor has a touch of the tofer to him.

You're messing with the man. The man's been known to make...
You're ripping out the guts. You're tinkering.
Yeah. I got a touch of the tofer.
He's got a touch of the toffer.

He's been known to make a cut or two.

I consider it's a feeling of grace, to be honest, to

there's a there is a certain grace to having a touch of the tofer.

And I have to say,

it's really interesting because there's so many things where there's scenes that are so long that you actually can't score them. without it feeling like, no, no, this is too much.
So those,

I'm being like discreet about it, but there are a lot of scenes where if you add a little bit of discrete jazz in some of the comedic scenes, like for instance, the very first scene with Jacoby where the shovels arrive, putting a little bit of the

under, it's amazing how it takes a, I think, four-minute scene and makes it feel like it's not four minutes of a truck arriving in a box.

Like there's just like it, it makes it feel like it's Twin Peaks when Jacoby comes out of the, his like a motorhome or whatever he he steps out of

and

episode eight i'm up to episode eight and scoring these things and episode eight by far needed the fewest um music cues i think i had a little bit of scoring to the mystery c stuff in the beginning but then almost nothing because it's sort of like

And I know that there's the thing, Griffin pointed out, that there's the moment where they bring in the Laura. This is my counter.

The scene where Bobby sees Laura's photo in whichever episode is five or six, sort of out of the evidence box and Laura's theme hits for the first time is such a kind of hammer blow because they've been holding that music back for most of the series.

And I did not use the Laura, I haven't used that Laura Palmer theme, but I have used the

first part of that theme, which is used a lot for its own, the part that's the synthesizers going,

you know, that sort of back and forth because like a lot of the Matthew Lillard stuff, you add a little bit of that to it, sort of like the Packard mill sort of like music to it and it really makes it it really amps up some of the um

it just makes it feel like twin peaks in a way that is exciting to me i'd be interested to see it like truly listen do you ever share these cuts with anybody i feel like you've described a lot of cut editing projects to me I think when I'm done with this, I'll probably have it sit in a Dropbox folder and I'll give people the link to this Dropbox folder if they want to experience it.

Because it is like, if you've already watched it all the way through and experienced it as Lynch intended, because it definitely was a choice. He had access to all these tracks too.

And he wanted to do this. I do think it is an interesting thing just to see, like, can you make it feel even more like Twin Peaks with this music?

And my answer so far is like, it is a very good feeling. It would be like.
if they made Star Wars movies without John Williams music all of a sudden and it was just sort of like quiet space battles.

And you're like, well, they're truly, they're really trying to make a point here that you can't hear this music in space. Yeah.
And it's not the same as before. The vacuum of sound cut.

Then you show them and you add some John Williams music to it. Probably it's like, oh, it feels like Star Wars.
Yeah, right. I think what you're doing is probably a perversity

of what, whatever. A perversity, yes.
Of what Lynch was attempting with the return, but I'd still be interested to see it. I agree.
What I'm doing is a perversity. Right.

Lynch wouldn't like that you did that. You want to hear about an ultimate perversity of director's intent.

Connor, tell David about your fucking alternate cut of Sully.

What did you do to Sully? Just crash it. It's even worse than Michael Malley did.
The crash cut. I got it on my phone.

I cut out all the parts that weren't the crash.

So it's just crash, crash,

it's it's a tight 40-minute feature. Sure.
It's still go by the Saludos Amigos rules. It's still a feature film.

But I would say... I'm invoking the Saludos Amigos doctor.
The power of Saludas.

By the precedent set by Saludos Amigos,

it is still a feature film. But you know the thing is, I started cutting it.
I'm like, you know, I like the crash parts more than I like the parts where he's like...

I include the dream crash. So even if it's 41 minutes, 21 seconds, it's tight.
You know what it sounds like to me? You railroaded Sully.

Yeah, I would say you're not really delving into the beautiful kind of storytelling of that movie. It sounds like a railroading.

We're withholding the full crash for a long time because it's about Sully sitting in the trauma of what happening to him.

No, no, you see the crash, then you see the crash, then you see the crash, then you see the crash. It sounds like Sully's nightmare.

No, but then it has a great, it has a great cut at the end because they finally, it cuts to the part where they land the thing

and then Aaron Eckhart. And the simulator or the real one?

The real one okay aaron eckhart looks to camera he's looking at sully camera moves to aaron eckhart's point of view sully looks to him hard cut to black and then we hear tom petty and the heartbreakers learning to fly

well i won't be watching that one but i'd love to see i'm going to share the link with you so we'll just see if you don't watch it okay fair enough

thank you for doing this again thank you for having me on the main feed yeah so glad to return on main. Yeah, and we'll have you back on in another nine years.
Yeah.

I'm just kidding.

I'll see you again in nine years.

Tiny Dinos. Tiny Dinos.
Your podcast with James III.

My podcast. Another blank check favorite.
About two best friends who are scientists who bring back dinosaurs, but they bring them at very small so they won't cause any problems like in Jurassic Park.

We got some George Lucas talk shows coming up in California and San Francisco and Los Angeles in January, February. Find out about them.

Connor Ratliff presents the acting class. It's going to be,

it keeps performing monthly in New York, but we're also going to bring it to Sketchfest. And you're doing live streams of those too for you don't live in New York?

If you don't live in New York, you can see those. That's my one-person show where I pretend to teach an acting class.
It's fantastic.

And Griffin, you're going to be a part of that at Sketchfest. So that's going to be an, yeah.
You don't know about this? No, I said I am. Period.
I'm not throwing around willy-nilly question marks.

I didn't. Seriously? I didn't.
Seriously? I'm being serious right now. Can we get serious? Ah, satellite radio.
Yeah, what?

The bits are stacking on top of the corner. All right, that's enough.
That's enough.

And I think that's all my plugs. Thank you all for listening.
Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Tune in next week for Twin Peaks colon the return colon parts 9 through 14.

Is that correct? 9 through 13. Well, the egg on my face.
I'm a fool. Yeah, but those five episodes.

And as always, on August 13th, 1998, MTV aired an episode of television titled The Missing Girl, in which fight one was Trent Reznor versus Puff Daddy. Fight two was David Hasselhoff versus John Tesh.

Why?

Because, I don't know, they're corny music guys. I guess.
They're guys who have moonlight. Puff Tesh won.

Hasselhoff won. Yeah.
Puff Daddy versus Trent Reznor was a draw. They slice each other to bits, and then Mills Lane put them together as two composite creatures.

And then the final fight was Bruce Willis and Demi Moore versus Tom Cruise and Nicole Kitty. I remember that one.
This is a power couple fight. And what happens is the women win.

Thank God. Stone Cold gives them the assist to feminism.
They knock down those men. And that episode...
The most seismic episode of television I had seen up until that point in time was episode eight.

Wow.

what a world.