Twin Peaks: The Return (Episodes 1-7)

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

Highways and byways of my days on the road, my shadow is always with me.

Sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, except on cloudy days or at the podcast.

I fucked up.

I said the word podcast too early, and then I decided I didn't want to not finish the monologue.

Well, you could just do it twice.

I mean,

I did do one retake in the middle of it.

Get ready.

I'm doing it again.

Nah, let's just keep it.

Here, I want to get right into this.

My family.

My two friends.

What's your voice here?

Because it's not quite Sarah as Wally Brando, right?

I'd love to hear your Sarah as Wally Brando.

No, I'm not doing it.

I'm not.

But like, it reminds me of another impression you do, and I can't think of which one it is.

Is it my old Bruce Willis impression?

Maybe that.

Yeah.

Maybe that.

I think so, right?

Sure, sure.

Kind of like, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like soft-spoken actor.

Right.

Yeah.

Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

I think that's what it is.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.

That cleared that up.

The whole time you were doing it, I was like, I know he's doing Wally Brando, but who does this sound like that?

Okay, so now that we cleared it up, I could do the quote from the beginning.

My family, my two friends.

I have crisscrossed this great audio landscape of ours several times.

I hold the map of it here in my heart next to the joyful memories of the carefree days I spent as a young boy here in your beautiful town of Blank Check.

From Shyamalan to Cameron to Bigelow.

I think about David and his friend Griffin, the first friends to ever host a podcast.

How about that?

Yeah, that's funny.

And then I don't have to feel it.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

Yeah.

The Caucasian's line is so funny in the context of the show.

Absolutely.

And then once I said it, I was like, the implications are wrong.

Yeah.

We all know the first Caucasian to ever host a podcast was Conan O'Brien.

It's just a fact.

He invented it.

He invented it.

He did.

He invented needing a friend.

He did.

And then we showed up and said, what if we're already friends?

What if we've been doing podcasts for years and we're already friends?

That was our big innovation is we said, what if we've actually been doing it for longer and we've been friends the whole time?

I really, I worry about Conan sometimes.

Why?

What's up with him?

This many years he still hasn't found a single friend.

What a loser.

This fucking, this project is a failure.

How old do I think Conan is?

Yes.

58.

61.

Wow.

Okay.

You're close.

Sometimes I just think he's even older than that just because he's such a lifelong presence for me.

But he started being famous very young.

That's the thing is that like by the time he gets late night, he has a legendary comedy career, but that's because he started getting hired onto the biggest things right out of college.

Right out of college.

Right.

He's 27 when he gets the show, maybe?

Yeah.

I mean, he was a young man.

And everyone was like, who's this young man?

And no one's ever talked about this, but he kind of like almost got canceled.

That's not true.

But the show was really skating on thin ice for a while.

David.

And the press were not on his side.

David, if that had happened, I would have heard about it from someone, most of all him.

I love Conan.

I'm trying to get to his show every week.

He never talks about this.

The man is a totemic figure in my like comedy history.

Yes.

But I swear to God, sometimes I just want to be on his bike as I'm like, Conan, you're doing good.

It worked out.

I'm sorry about 1993 or whatever.

Here's what's crazy to me.

And I'll say, I actually am always kind of interested to hear his stories about how bad he felt at that point.

He's being candid.

It's not uninteresting.

And it was crazy that he got that job and that he made the show he made.

What is astonishing to me is how often his guests are like, wait, really?

What?

And they're not doing the bit.

They're like, because I'm watching.

I'm thinking you're a big success.

And he was like, no, it was bad for eight years.

It wasn't eight years.

Like, late night was hot by the time I was a kid.

Do you remember the Conan's 15th anniversary primetime special?

And Mr.

T T comes out with a big gold chain

with a seven on it and goes like, Conan, I'm here to give you this a surprise.

And he's like, Mr.

T, thank you very much.

But we've actually been on the air for 15 years.

And he goes, yeah, but only seven of them were funny.

That's a good, good joke.

Incredible joke.

It stuck with me forever.

It's good stuff.

Yeah.

That's sort of a different era when like Mr.

T

would just get a pop, right?

Where it's just like, look, it's Mr.

T.

This is so funny.

I mean, he did that with Shatner Vogoda.

Mr.

T.

Chuck Mr.

T is a perfect example of a celebrity that should have like a haunted house devoted to him.

Great call.

Fran and I just went to the Fallon.

We went to Jimmy Fallon's to Nightmares,

which is kind of like the Twin Peaks, the return of Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show.

Oh, is it?

Yeah.

It's sort of just like

all of the loose, unstructured thoughts.

Sometimes it's tying into the past mythology of the tonight show.

Sometimes it seems totally unrelated.

Do you like do a list?

Hopefully it's the final statement from an artist.

At any point?

No.

No.

No.

How long is it?

10 minutes, a robust 10 minutes.

How much for 10 minutes?

$43?

I think all in.

Okay.

Per person?

Sure.

And this is Blank Check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby.

I know I say things like this a lot,

but this is a mini-series on the films of David Lynch and his TV shows.

Sure.

It's called, or at least one of them.

It's called Twin Pods Fire Cast With Me.

Today we are kickstarting a four-episode run on Twin Peaks the Return, which is one of the greatest blank checks in history.

100%.

Almost by

mistake, it feels like

someone was like, oh, sure, you want to make a new Twin peaks?

I'll let you do that.

And it's like, and it's going to cost how much?

Yeah.

And you need how much more?

And wait, you're here again?

We'll talk about it.

The most fascinating thing to me is this thing slowly coming together after years, over a decade, of like Twin Peaks will never return.

Then there's excitement, and then suddenly the announcement is, it's not happening.

Right.

David Lynch and Showtime couldn't agree.

Right.

The budget arguments.

It's not happening.

And then suddenly it's back on happening twice as long, twice as expensive, and twice as weird as anyone expected.

The fact that it came so close to getting pulled from reality and then ended up this insane.

Yes.

It is a miracle.

It is a miracle.

It is a miraculous piece of

content, I would call it.

A piece of content.

It's one of the best pitch tents I've ever seen.

Today we are talking about Twin Peaks the Return, episodes one through seven.

Episodes one through seven.

Parts one through seven.

Now, we are loath to cover TV on the show.

Yes.

Because primarily this is a show about filmographies.

Early on, we did it.

We did it twice in our first proper year.

Then we said, like, enough of this.

And then we've bent a couple times in the last couple of years when it felt really essential.

This is obviously essential.

Yes.

And

it is possibly the last thing David Lynch will ever make.

Quite possibly.

I'm not saying it definitely, but you know, because he's been kind of, you know, like, yeah.

Um,

but here's

a bigger point I wanted to make.

Yes.

The relief of this is the first time we are not attempting to cover an entire season of television in one episode.

Um,

and we're doing it by splitting it up, which we've never done before, but it felt essential because Twin Peaks of Return is very long

and does have sort of somewhat distinct movements to it, especially one particular episode, episode eight, which we are giving its own episode next week.

Apart from that, I think the way it was made, it is just this sort of giant document that got cut up.

It's not like he was sitting down being like, I'm going to write a Sawyer episode.

Sure.

I'm going to write a Hurley episode.

Maybe he should have tried.

I mean, he could have put Sawyer in this.

Yeah.

Sawyer just shows up.

I don't even need Sawyer to be in it.

I just want to have the feel of a Sawyer episode.

So like Kim Dickens is there and someone's sad.

Tattoos.

No, that's Jack.

The whole thing with Sawyer was always that it was like, Yeah, no, the Sawyer one drops the Sawyer episode where he's like, Methinks I'll run a con, and I'm like, Yeah, I know that's what you did, Sawyer.

And he brings Kim Dickens and he's like, But this time, trust me, this time I'm good.

And then at the end, he's like, Fuck, I'm upset about this again.

Yeah, I'm not a good con man.

Morally conflicted.

Um,

Twin Peaks the Return uh aired on Showtime

in 2017.

before showtime was showtime plus paramount plus

um

a great name for a channel yes uh

i watched it live i watched every episode as it aired now you guys had never seen it no watch it for the first time and griffin are watching it for the first time and have only watched up to seven eight being such a huge thing in its own episode i was like i i i dare not watch one ahead yet um i want to be able to talk about up until this this exact point in this episode without future knowledge.

That's fine.

Okay.

So here we are.

What do you guys think of Twin Peaks The Return so far?

I'm fucking blown away.

Yeah, I think it's good.

Holy shit.

I think it is good.

So good.

It is.

I mean, I've heard such breathless praise.

It's gotten more breathless praise than almost anything in recent memory.

Truly almost anything.

I mean, I'd forgotten that Calle De Cinema declared this the best movie of the decade.

They did.

And everyone was normal about that declaration.

Yes.

Yes.

Because I don't think it's totally fair to count something that is over 1,000 minutes long.

And was aired in episodes on television.

This is what I was going to say.

This is just this big final.

We'll talk about this more, the nature of how it was made versus how it was distributed and all of this.

But like David Lynch goes into this knowing it's going to be broadcast to television episodes, even if he did not like write it and shoot it as such.

And Mark Cross, to be clear.

Yes.

What surprised me is, I mean, I'm focusing on Lynch just because he was the director.

He directed every episode.

Yeah.

What surprised me is how much it does feel like the episodes have their own thing.

And I'm sure episode eight and some of the other episodes are going to be even more so, that feeling.

As much as this does, in a lot of ways, this feels very similar to Paranoia Agent to me.

Sure.

In an interesting way, where it's like, here's kind of this drafts folder where there's like a big unifying idea.

There's sort of a collective mythology.

There's a narrative running across it.

But then you'll also just get these fragments of pieces and stories that may or may not feed into other things and like stylistic experiments and like playfulness with tone.

But Paranoia Agent has like,

you know, it's sort of a focus on a single character every time.

It's a little more.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I mean, part of what's fun for me watching this for the first time, and I don't know if you have this feeling as well, Ben, you'll just like,

the first time in the first episode, it cuts to drone shot of New York City, titled New York City.

You're like, what the fuck?

I didn't know Twin Peaks could leave Twin Peaks.

That's a good point.

Right?

Yes.

It's a pretty drastic thing right away

to be doing that.

It's immediately like, it took me a moment to figure out why I felt so

jumbled by that.

Guys, I got a pee.

I'm sorry.

I'm realizing this immediately.

I can't hold it.

This episode's going great.

That's fine.

Should I take the Wally Brando monologue a third time?

No, we'll just pause.

Okay.

Okay, Griffin.

I'm sorry I interrupted.

And we're back.

I have to say, I followed your lead.

I also went to the bathroom.

Cool.

Here's my first thing to say.

That was no P.

No, it was no P.

You're right.

I have to, I have to.

I have to.

We need to.

I mean, I appreciate you putting that on me.

Radical honesty.

Here's why.

Because it ties into the point I was about to make.

Which is what?

Before you interrupted with your not pee.

The disorienting thing about watching this show.

And knowing it's also 18 hours, which so few modern shows are.

That's where procedurals and sitcoms are.

Most shows outside of that do not go more than 12 episodes.

And they're not, you know, especially shows where the episodes are an hour long.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And especially anything that's prestige or cable-y or whatever it is, you know.

I guess Walking Dead still was doing long seasons for all, but whatever.

Even Walking Dead has now done mini-series.

Yes.

You watch this show, or I do, and like something happens, like cut to New York, and I'm like, what the fuck?

And now we're introduced to three characters I've never seen before.

And I'm like, are they important?

Anytime it cuts to a character from classic Twin Peaks, I'm almost surprised that they're in it.

And I'm like, how much are they going to show up?

Suddenly a big movie star enters and you're like, so are they major?

Is that the only scene they're in?

You have these like

notions, these like plot lines that like cut out abruptly that are inserted in certain episodes, don't come back in that episode.

And you're like, I don't know if that was just a complete one-off, self-contained idea

or if that will return in three episodes.

Sometimes.

I'm guessing it's a balance of both, which is a bit of a balance of both, but you're, I mean, and also imagine the experience of fans, Twin Peaks.

I keep trying to put myself in this airspace.

The show is back.

Yes.

And getting this,

which I think most Twin Peaks fans have hardly embraced, but it took them a minute.

Yeah.

And watching it week by week was really kind of a struggle where you like, it slowly dawns on you, like, right, this show is never, this season is never going to be everyone's in the town and there's mysteries and soaps and romances.

It's like that's just not it.

It's almost most surprising that everyone did adjust to it rather than having a fire walk with me type response and people coming around to it later.

I think the show is so interesting.

Yeah.

That

and is so dense with kind of like

sort of theories and symbols that you can pick out and overanalyze that it worked out okay.

But I'm on the Twin Peaks Reddit and you'll always see new fans posting or people watching watching currently posting.

Like, hey, I just finished my first watch through of seasons one and two, and I started season three.

Is it always,

is this what it is?

Right.

Where's Dale?

Right.

When does it

see the fans being like, yeah, you know, get used to it.

Yeah.

Twin Peaks is so plotty.

It was the thing I was not prepared for watching the first two seasons for the first time, vases, versus the like

vases.

There's not a lot of vases in it.

If I have to ding it for anything.

Remember, there might be a few.

Versus the sort of like cultural memeification of Twin Peaks, the amount of like soap opera small town intrigue of just like, oh, this thing has like 25 primary characters and they're all tied up in naughty drama and you're cutting between all of them.

And anytime in

the

ABC, the original rung Twin Peaks.

Yes.

They're cutting from one thing to another.

It's like important in some way.

Right.

Even if it's like one of the goofier plot lines, you're like, this is an arc they're building.

This will just have like a character, for example, stand up and go, I'm sorry, I need to pee.

And then it turns out it's a poop.

And then you're like, what was the meaning of that?

I was doing the Laura Palmer.

Oh, you're doing the Laura Palmer.

Let me open the dossier because JJ did make one, just one.

Okay.

Lazy.

Yeah.

Probably told him that that's what he should do.

David Lynch made 18 hours of Twin Peaks the Return, and you made one dossier?

Just more to give a sense of the lead-up to this show's existence.

Am I correct in my memory that the marketing basically gave up nothing?

Marketing gave up nothing.

That at David Lynch's insistence.

Tyl McLaughlin's in it.

Right.

That's about it.

There was the poster, the It's Happening Again poster, I remember, but that there were like no images, no like trailers of commercials that used actual footage, that like tuning in for the first time, people had no idea what it was going to be.

I think fans on the internet have been delving into like who was clearly involved because I guess that was easy enough to figure out.

They originally like a giant press release of like a huge list of names, some from the show, some like a Naomi Watts or whatever.

But the poster was just like Dale Cooper now, right?

Over the trees.

Yes.

And then the other one was just the classic Laura Palmer picture.

Right.

I remember watching the first two episodes were broadcast back to back.

And we're three and four.

That belief so.

Yes.

And then I think it premiered at Can

interesting.

Okay.

Right.

Is that right?

Or

you tell me you got the dossier in front of you, my friend.

I will tell you.

Okay.

Soon.

Yeah.

Maybe not.

Two episodes were screened at the Cam Film Festival, maybe not premiere.

And when does the actual premiere happen?

May 21st, 2017, which does light up like.

Yeah.

And I remember Karen Hun and Emma Stefanski came over

and my brother Joey.

And we all watched it together.

Past and future.

Kind of shrieking, but it's also kind of like not the show to watch in the way of like, I can't wait to see all my buddies again.

You know, like we were kind of like, what the fuck?

it does start immediately as like in a statement way of like this is not just picking up twin peaks again right we're not just like doo doo doo even though it starts with like the characters and the theme and whatever it's like immediately different um but okay let me open the dossier please creek

so inland empire comes out 2006 um made like 250 million domestic yeah right and got 40 oscar nominations um and post that lynch is not like doggedly pursuing making another movie.

But

in 2010, supposedly, he did find an idea for a new film

and had a script called Antelope Don't Run No More.

I was really hoping it was going to be an idea for a new film.

It was called Ronnie.

Rocket.

It's about electricity.

He goes back once again.

He's got like a mustache and Groucho glasses.

And the guy's like, I know about the fucking electricity.

We're not doing that one.

He puts the old script in the microwave and is like, this is hot off the printer.

I just finished writing it.

He shopped it around a little bit.

Okay.

It's apparently set mostly in Los Angeles.

It braids some threads from Mohan Drive and Inland Empire into a narrative Fantasia that incorporates space aliens, talking animals, and a beleaguered musician named Pinky.

Sounds pretty Lynch-you know, yes.

A lot of people say the script is very good, but he has not been able to attract any financing, and he's not really upset about it because he's kind of like, if it's meant to be, it'll happen.

Sure.

Even in 2024, in an interview with Sight and Sound, Lynch said,

maybe

one day, but then that was sort of the same time that he was like, but I have emphysema and I don't know if I'm going to do anything anymore.

And everyone was like, David Lynch retires.

And he was like, I don't retire.

I love cigarettes.

Lighten them up.

Puff, puff, puff, motherfucker.

We've talked about that statement, but him explaining his regret over smoking his entire life.

And then describing the experience of smoking as an orgasmic experience.

Sounding like the erratic shit in human history.

So instead, instead, what does he do?

He writes the book Catching the Big Fish, which I feel like a lot of our guests have referenced, a lot of people have enjoyed, sort of about his creative process.

He starts to do a lot of that kind of stuff.

I mean, he did like a masterclass.

He does a lot of like.

He did some art exhibitions.

He lets that David Lynch, the art life documentary.

He's from

crazy clown time.

But I feel like he's sort of opening up the process of like, here are all my philosophies on creativity.

It did feel like he was starting to like pivot into old master, let me share.

Right.

Like he appears on the Cleveland show, for example.

Right.

The kind of things.

Do you know that he was a regular cast member on every episode of the Cleveland show?

He's the bartender.

Well, of course I do because I watch the Cleveland show every week.

Religiously.

Yeah.

One of my favorite shows in time.

He is also on Louie in

he's incredible.

An incredible performance.

Very, very interesting.

But yeah, he started to do a little more acting stuff weirdly popping up in other areas.

I think it's one of those things where it's like, if you think of it and you can reach him, maybe you can talk him into it.

Yeah.

He also

worked on a Duran Duran concert documentary.

I don't think I knew that.

I think I knew that.

Yeah.

He did an ice bucket challenge where he challenges Vladimir Putin at the end of it.

Great.

A lot of our fans were saying we should have mentioned or covered the Durant Duran thing on our

shorts episode.

Okay, don't you cover it and I'll eat your shorts.

Whoa.

Insane.

Post-Poop Sims is wild.

But

Kyle McLaughlin,

many years after Twin Peaks, would check in with Lynch, kind of be like, what do you think?

At one point, there's talk of making me become a comic book.

Back when it was hot to do like a sequel comic books, Kenny did that.

Yes, the season eight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was, it was sort of kick-started by, do you have the name of the writer there?

Matt Haley.

Right.

Yeah.

They were going to finally put out the complete box set because season two had been out of circulation for so long and it was going to include

part of the box set.

And Lynch just nixed it.

Right.

Because I think Frost and some of the people were on board and then Lynch nixed it.

Lynch nixing it feels like the first instance of maybe him thinking he has something more to say.

Because if you look at the quotes

up until that point and from after it's done, I'm not doing it.

Dead is a doornail.

We'll never come back.

And like the second someone else, and the pitch on the comment book was, I want to get all the notes on what you think season three would have been and try to recreate it.

I'm not looking to make my own thing.

Yeah, Haley, I mean, he talks about some of his ideas, but I honestly don't even want to get into them because they're not that important because David Lynch was just like, no.

Rude.

Well, not rude, really.

Rude on your point.

And then apparently.

Around 2012,

right after Christmas, David had lunch with Mark Frost at Musso and Frank's,

an LA institution.

Bob's big boy probably closed for the night or something.

Yeah.

And well, he'd already eaten there five times that day.

They start chatting peaks

and they keep it under their hats, but Mark starts coming for lunch to Lynch's painting studio and they would sort of write together.

And Frost, you know, basically was like,

Laura's saying, I'll see you again in 25 years.

That's where

exactly.

If we're going to do it, now is the time to do it.

Right.

And we have this dilemma of, you know, good Cooper trapped, bad Cooper out in the world that we never had resolved.

And why don't we pick up that thread?

And yeah, I mean, Lynch's big thing is like, I have to be involved in writing and directing every single one.

I don't want to have it be like it was when it was broadcast TV.

And so they start to co-write the screenplay over Skype.

Wild.

Yeah.

Which Skype is part of the show.

That's true.

It is.

It's one of these things where I feel like...

Like Warren Frost's performance or Mark Frost's father, obviously.

Yeah.

Entirely over Skype performance.

Entirely.

Yes.

At a time where that was not as much of a thing.

Now we're sort of very blurry.

It's like, hello.

Yeah.

But you know what I'm saying?

Now we're like, oh, they'll write in like a character only exists over Zoom because it's an easy fix or whatever.

I feel like that was a little novel at this point.

One of the wet hot seasons has this, but other than that,

supposedly they did write it as a gigantic document.

One big document.

One source says 335 pages.

Another says 500 pages.

Is there any sense of whether they were sort of writing stuff in any chronology, like narratively, or if it was just like as stuff came to them and here are all the pieces?

I think it's more the latter.

Okay.

Yeah.

I just wonder if there's a lynch

that is like each plot thread as like 20 continuous pages.

Like untangling it all.

Right.

Lynch does say he sees it as a film.

Okay.

Which, you know, is part of the reason people are like, it's a film.

Yeah.

Mark Frost,

I think, cares less about that distinction.

He says one thing that really Frost interested him was to

explore what happened to a town over 25 years and the people in it, how they changed.

Yeah, okay.

Duh.

It does feel a little secondary,

tertiary to where this ended up.

But one thing that they were very interested in, which is very clear in the film, is the sort of post-recession.

You're calling it a film.

You're doing it.

Whatever the fuck.

Twin Peaks.

Is the post-recession kind of meltdown that left behind these kind of like ghost

towns?

Interesting.

Right.

Like, because that's so much of this movie of Jesus, of Twin Peaks of the Return, whatever you want to call it.

Does that get set in those weird, like, Phoenix and Vegas, like subdivisions, right?

Where it's just like these empty abandoned houses.

Yeah.

uh, you know, the sort of post-Great Recession stuff.

Does that become more,

even more textual as it goes on?

It's just, I guess, yeah, I guess I'm now.

Okay.

I'm trying to put myself in where you guys are.

It's just a big part of the show.

I've been picking up on that.

Yeah.

Anyway, we can talk about it.

In the same way.

David Nevins,

who runs Showtime at the time,

hears wind of this and basically sits down and like begs them.

Twin Takes.

The original is, of of course owned by cbs television right who also is the parent company of showtime right

um

and obviously on showtime you can do what you want you know there's no content restrictions really

um they've learned on showtime yes it's one of their favorite things

and frost was very interested in avoiding like a binge model.

He didn't want to go to Netflix because he wanted to roll it out week to week,

sort of like the original show had been.

And so in 2014, it is announced Showtime will be producing a nine-episode revival of Twin Peaks.

In 2015, Lynch starts saying like the show's in jeopardy and tweets like,

I wasn't offered enough money to do this in the way I wanted it to be done, but it's pretty much dead.

Kind of canny public negotiation.

Right.

Showtime's like, oh, we're very saddened to read this, but we love the world of Twin Peaks and we hope we can bring it back.

I think the big clash, it seems, was Showtime being like, can this please be episodic television?

And David Lynch being like, no, I want to make a basically 18-hour feature film.

So you're going to have to pay for like a feature film crew every single day

of this gigantic shoot, including like lighting machines, standby painters, special effects technicians, like basically like not going by the way television is produced.

No, and it even manifests in ways like on the absolute like back end of the thing.

I mean, I feel like you talked about this in another episode, but actors on TV shows get paid per episode.

So if he's shooting something like this and someone shoots three days, but those three days end up being split that footage across nine episodes,

that's you're paying them like

there's a lot of weird accounting at two points of like how much you're paying them weekly to film and then how much you have to pay them later based on how it edits out.

And just because he's considering it to be a film,

it is technically to the accountants.

Yes.

Episodic.

right and i think by the way that extends into like most positions yeah

i mean i've had versions of this before where you like shoot two scenes and then they end up putting one in another episode and they have to pay you twice and it's like a nice bonus he's basically designed a production where all of it's going to be like that where he's asking to have like

open like field to do a really long shoot his way with his people and then construct it however he wants later, which is also going to cause all sorts of complications.

This is my second question for you.

When they,

because the original announcement's nine, yes.

Then they have this falling out.

And then the renegotiation is Nevins basically comes to him and is like, what can we do?

And Lynch is like, I don't know.

It might be more episodes.

I, you know, and the encounters are like, it can't be more episodes.

That's even more expensive.

And finally, apparently Nevins was just like, I can give you this much money.

Yeah.

Tell me if that's enough.

And Lynch was like, okay.

And Nevins said, like, the money we gave him, he worked it out.

He, yeah, he he made it conservatively, like, or whatever.

You know, it's not like he like went crazy.

But they didn't announce 18 at that point.

No.

Right.

So this is my question is almost, and maybe there is no answer for this.

Is it like, I've written a bunch of shit.

You're giving me the sum of money.

I'm going to figure out how to shoot it.

And then afterwards, I will figure out how many episodes.

I think that's exactly what happened.

Because you could totally see based on certain scenes playing out at different lengths than they do and how much the show experiments with time and rhythm that there are many different ways you could construct this into various different episode orders.

I, I, yes, I do not, there's nothing about the show that suggests it had to be the way it is.

There might be

might be a point where all the extra cost from him making it this weird way ends up evening out if it starts to be divided across a long enough number of episodes.

Right.

You know, that like, oh, we're getting like almost four months of Twin Peaks.

And so much of this show, also, its weird thing was

this is like a different time in both cable television and streaming, where it felt like the future was more individual channels having their own streaming services and Showtime wanting to get people to sign up for whatever it was called at the time, Showtime anytime, I think.

I just know I'm going to have to poop again.

You know, you're going to have to.

I just know it's going to happen.

This is what I'm saying, though.

You think certain plot threads are resolved and then they come back and you're like, Ashley Judd is still in this.

And that wasn't a one-off.

And I love how.

But Jennifer Jason Lee might be gone.

It's like, I'm going to go again and then come back out.

And you're going to be like, and what was Showtime branded as at this era?

Like, yes, I think it was called Showtime Anytime.

They're like on-demand.

No, what happened when you pooped last time was very Twin Peaks the Return.

There was just two minutes of silence.

It was like we were just quietly sweeping up the bang bang bar floor.

And you're like, is this the end of the episode?

No, there's like two more scenes after this.

The production lasted 140 days.

What I was going to say.

Oh, what were you going to say?

When this premiered, and people were like, oh, ratings aren't great.

Showtime Showtime very quickly was like, we know this is the kind of thing that has obsessives who will sign up for our streaming service solely for this.

And they did.

They're right.

And they were like, oh, like 400,000 people or 500,000 people watched it.

And then within a week, Showtime was like, hey, the like seven day was a million per episode.

And also, by the way, the number of subscribers we got solely off of this was worth it to us.

I don't, yeah, and I don't care.

I never care about people

like telling me premium television ratings.

He's right.

I'm like, it doesn't matter.

Like, if they don't sell ads against me, this is the experimentation of like them being like, we're getting four months of Twin Peaks coming out weekly.

Like, we're both trying to get people to sign up for the channel and sign up for the streaming service and whatever.

Like, this was a time where the business was in such flux that they were open to this kind of experimentation

in a certain way.

Also, it just, but it was funny because this show came out in the midst of like the sort of Game of Thrones era of TV.

Yes.

And so there was this whole kind of machinery online geared towards like episodic analysis, weekly podcasting, the kind of industry that theory, you know, sort of

unspooling.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And

this show is so slap in the face.

Try to write like, and people were like, Twin Peaks is back.

We need to like get ready for this.

And then this show was so resistant to that kind of immediate scrutiny.

You want to watch three minutes of this camera?

hunting shovels?

Yes.

So that will give you no answers until two episodes later and the answer is just, oh, it's a grift?

Ben?

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag.

It's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes when sponsors buy ad space on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love that they to get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically, that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That's true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

What?

This is laser-targeted.

The product.

We have a copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Adventure.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters august 29th macon blair's remake of reimagining reimagining whatever uh reboot of the toxic avenger now david and i have not gotten to see it yet but they sent you a screener link yeah i'm gonna see it we're

excited to see it but ben you texted us last night this rules it fucks it honks yeah it's so great let me read you the cast list here in in billing order as they asked which i really appreciate peter dinkledge jacob tremblay trembling Tremblay, Taylor Playette Page, with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

His stepson.

Okay.

Wade Goose.

Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard of them yet.

Okay.

You got...

Fucking Dinkledge is fantastic.

He's talking.

He plays it with so much heart.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like

David sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school.

Yes, yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches.

Yes.

With my sleazy and sticky friends.

It informed so much of my sensibility.

Your friends like Junkyard Dog and Headbanger.

Yeah, exactly.

Making toxic crusader drills.

And So when I heard that they were doing this new installment, I was really emotionally invested.

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Centiverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

Yeah, it's just, it's something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

Okay.

It somehow really captured that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original toxy movies and they have like updated and in this way that it was just i was so pleased with it it's gooey sufficiently gooey tons of blood tons of goo

uh great action it's really funny it just it it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version.

Cineverse last year released Terrifier 3 unrated.

Yeah.

Big risk for them there.

I feel like it's a very, very intense movie.

And a huge hit.

More interesting, yeah, theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years.

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Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

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140 days of shooting.

Lynch obviously did it all himself.

He said it was exciting, but extremely difficult.

So that's about a six-month shoot?

Like five.

Yeah, I don't know.

That's a lot.

What's weekends?

It's exhausting.

It's exhausting and grueling, I think.

And there's lots of day shoots and night shoots.

He only had one day off a week, yada, yada, yada.

But at the same time,

you know, he loved doing it, I think.

And it's kind of his opus in a way.

Yeah.

And it does feel like

let me like empty the the tanks completely of everything I have in me right now.

Right.

It doesn't feel like this is made with the intentionality of here is my final word.

No, but he's, you know, Peter Deming, the DP.

Yes.

A legend.

A legend himself.

A guy we've covered with a very diverse filmography on this show who shot.

like the Evil Dead movies, the Austin Powers movies, and 200.

And we've never done Scream, which is.

And Mahalandra.

Yeah.

But like wildly different looking films is like quietly a legend.

He is.

He's a fucking incredible DP.

He says they shot like a feature film like you would go to a location and shoot all the action that took place at that location over the course of 18 episodes.

Right.

It's like that's not how you make TV, obviously.

But actors didn't really know what was going on.

They didn't have access to the entire script or anything like that.

McLaughlin's really the only one who's sort of in on the big story.

Everyone is basically, everyone else just gives their pages.

He is basically the big story.

He is, he is.

But obviously, he's not in every scene.

Like, he's all over the place.

But it must have been very strange to be, say,

Russ Tamblin.

No, not Russ Tamblin.

Richard Boehmer.

Sure.

Right.

And, you know, it's like, hey, what should I do?

And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, show up.

You and Ashley Judd are going to like hear a weird noise.

Yeah.

And he's like, oh, and how does this feed into anything?

It's like, well, we'll see you later.

You know, anyway.

Have a long conversation with your brother about weed over the phone.

So, yeah, exactly.

It's interesting.

Carol

Struckin, the giant, the fireman, he's known in this, Lurch,

said that

he

back in the day,

he says

that the pace of Lynch's action was slower and Lynch was telling him to do everything slower.

But McLaughlin's like, but he was very efficient.

We would do things in like one or two takes.

yeah it's pace of production versus pace of scenes yeah i guess that's it right yeah jim balushi at one point ad lib something

and i think this is either you can either watch a clip of this or i've just read this before but anyway where lynch there's a pause they call cut and lynch goes mr balushi do i need to report you to the principal's office because he had like gone off script funny very funny to think about it uh lynch is very uninterested in like improv like he's like no no no do what you're you know do what you're told yeah um

they shot on digital digital, obviously.

Lynch wanted Fisk to be the production designer, Jack Fisk, the great Jack Fisk, but he was working on The Revenant.

So he gave him Lynch, his protege, Ruth Dejong, who later worked in Oppenheimer.

Very cool.

A digital thing.

It's wild to see this be the first major work he had done since Inland.

which looks, you know, bad on purpose.

That is Lynch wanting the kind of roughest.

Whereas this is like 4K cameras that are really, you know, top of the line.

It's like he's using digital photography to make things like unsettlingly clear.

Yes.

I watch this and I'm like, this is like uncomfortably focused.

You know, it feels like he's leaning into the digital of it in a way where it's like, oh, it's become easy enough to have like a very quick production where images are this incredibly clean.

Okay.

Kyle McLaughlin.

They get him on board.

Phew.

Thank God.

And

essentially, very much immediately lynches.

Like, you'll be playing essentially three characters.

Dale, who we don't see too much of so far.

Bad Cooper.

I don't know how, you know, doppelganger, I don't know what you want to call him.

Yeah.

And,

you know,

yeah, Dougie, Mr.

Jackpots,

sort of the finest creation of Twin Peaks the Richard.

I'm late to the party.

I'm just going to say what everyone's been telling me for years.

An astonishing performance.

It's an incredible performance by Kyle McLaughlin.

I was ready for this character to be funny and compelling.

Yes.

You know, I'd seen a lot of images and heard people talk about it.

And even still, I was not prepared.

And I think the actual technical craft of what McLaughlin's doing here is

extraordinary.

Yes.

But also, it's like craft.

Craft.

Geez.

I just like how he says just the last thing anyone says.

And it's point.

Like, I say something to you and you're like, something.

But that's my point.

It's like, he's right.

Yeah.

It's actually playing head empty, no thoughts, right?

Yes.

And part of the big joke so far, at least from what I've seen, is that it's like, if you look like him and you have the right haircut and the right suit, people will inevitably start to project meaning onto you.

This is the brilliant gag of Trump's.

There's a Shaun C.

Gardner-esque thing.

He said being there is something he looked at.

He looked at Jeff Bridges and Starman.

All of these people are head empty.

This is the most empty I have seen of anyone trying to play this sort of thing.

And you keep watching these scenes where he doesn't know how to walk and is holding cups weirdly and whatever.

And every one of these scenes, I'm like, How is this scene not going to end with people having him institutionalized?

How will he make it to the end of the scene without someone having a complete mental breakdown and snapping at him?

And he just slowly brings everyone around to him, despite genuinely seeming hollow.

And sometimes causing real trouble.

Truly.

Yeah.

We'll talk about it.

Anyway, Kam McLachlan involved, obviously, some guys

who are in the show, I think, were just like, yeah, of course I'll come back.

People like Everett McGill, Big Ed.

He had basically retired from acting.

Haven't gotten to him yet.

That's a spoiler.

Yes, he's in the show.

I mean, you know,

Lynch just had to call him.

Probably the biggest missing name is Michael Onkeen.

Yes, Harry Truman.

He was fully retired, had not acted in a while.

Correct.

And then did say he was going to come out and do the show.

There was, I think, some suggestion of that, but it's never been clear what happened.

Robert Forrester, who was the original pick to play Sheriff Truman way back in the day, comes in.

I mean, just a performance that I adore, him in Twin Peaks.

He's just so fucking funny and good.

This is perhaps a dumb thing to say.

Maybe not dumb, but I was just taken watching this by, I think, part of its time dilation of the pandemic, right?

That I feel like this show came out only three years ago and have felt that way for the last five years, even though it's now eight years since it aired, right?

Yeah.

And so this is just eight years shit happens, whatever.

And the nature of using a lot of older actors, it is astonishing how many people this is like their last project or one of their last projects.

Mike Miguel Ferrer.

Right.

Harry Dean Stanton died.

Both like the people who are legacy from original Twin Peaks and some of the new actors in this.

This feels like this weird curtain call for so many people.

And a lot of them had died in between it being shot and it airing.

Yeah.

Like you have end credits

in honor of

dedicated to for Colson, for Ferrer.

Yeah.

Then you have plenty of new faces.

Matthew Lillard, you guys have already met.

Yeah.

Michael Sarah is in these first seven episodes.

You might have referenced him before.

Jennifer Jason Lee, Ashley Judd, Amanda Sayfried, Caleb Laundrybag.

there's a lot of people who make sense jimbo lushy uh belushi robert knepper is gonna show up i'm not sure if you've seen him yet tom sizemore have you seen him uh i've seen sizemore uh gal gelman dalsnatchian

gelman

yeah anyway uh let's get into twin peaks i am just like the list is pretty crazy for how many of these i feel like i knew were on it while watching it you cannot keep all those names in your head yeah so some will pop up and you'll be like oh, holy shit.

And then you're like, oh, Naomi Watts is one of the main characters.

She's kind of one of the main characters.

And then others, right, are just kind of popular.

Yes.

Including some, you know, legacy characters.

Yeah.

So we're starting off with Twin Peaks.

Cooper in the Red Room.

I'll see you in 25 years.

25 years later.

Yeah.

The giant comes and is basically like, off you go.

Gives him some cryptic clues.

Here we go.

Richard and Linda.

These are things that fans obsess over.

The number 430.

Okay.

And then Cooper disappears.

The things in this scene, particularly, people obsess over?

Anything in Twin Peaks, the Return that is in the other world, in the Red Room, or any other such, you know,

all the language is metaphorical and like symbolic and stuff.

And so people try to understand, like, what does it mean?

Because I think Mark Frost especially loves that kind of stuff.

So what do you make of that?

opening we can't talk about we can't because we could spoil the future episodes i think it's mostly setting up the sort of finale of the show.

Okay.

And,

but yeah, so you know, but just think about like again, everyone's on their couch being like, okay.

Yeah.

And then the next scene, I think, is

Dr.

Jacoby.

We love Dr.

Jacoby.

Gets some shovels.

Yes.

Moving on.

And then you're just, you're saying you're like, okay,

Jacoby has shovels.

I'm trying to remember who's in Twin Peaks.

Distant shot.

Right, right.

Yes.

Like the car coming in.

It's this immediate, like, this is not the tone, the rhythm,

the flow I was expecting for this show.

And then is New York the third thing you see basically?

And then we're in New York in one of the set pieces of Twin Peaks the Return that I love so much.

There's a high-rise.

There's a weird glass box sticking out of the high-rise.

Yes.

Ben Rosenfeld.

Ben Rosenfeld is there.

He just sits on a couch all day and stares at it.

And then every once in a while takes out the SD card from the camera.

Swaps in a camera.

Puts it in the case, swaps in a new one.

Madeline.

It's not.

It's not Madeline Zima.

Yes.

Famous.

From the nanny.

Child actor, right?

From the nanny who is in California.

She's around.

Comes to visit him, or at least to drop off coffee, and clearly is constantly making a play to figure out what's going on in that room.

Also, maybe has a crush on this guy.

The rules are very clear.

No one else is allowed in.

You're like, what the fuck is this?

As I said, just immediately being in New York City, all new characters, things that feel totally unrelated is very jarring.

And then we cut over to the hotel.

I'm just going through the episode.

But also

the multiple scenes you've talked about maybe take up 30 minutes.

They're long.

They're lingering.

Long, slow cinema, basically.

Yes.

So, right, what do we have?

We have Ben Horn

kind of just rotting away at the Great Northern, right?

You know, having like this sort of aimless conversation with Ashley Judd, who's playing his sort of, you know, assistant

secretary, whatever.

Yes.

About, you know, a refund.

And you got, you got Jerry Horn now with like a crazy white beard, like stomping around.

Basically talking about like legalization of pot, how he's basically made a business off of this.

Is that right?

I guess so.

Jerry is one of the characters where I'm just like, I'm so exhausted by this.

Sure.

But also, I'm like, in these first seven episodes, way more Jerry.

Brought a Jerry.

It's nice to be back in the hotel.

It's the first time we're back in a location that's familiar.

It's a little bit more relaxing, certainly.

Yeah.

You got, then we got Lucy.

Here's Lucy.

Thank God.

Lucy's still behind the desk at the sheriff's department.

We're being introduced to Truman.

There's a different Truman.

She still can't keep the Trumans apart.

Yeah.

I mean, unsurprisingly, maybe my favorite bit, I think it comes in episode two or three,

but her being so confused by cell phones still

that it makes her literally like rock it out of her chair

it seems like people can move around on the phone yes it seems the way they've run the sheriff's department is there's like the original right part and then there's like where they actually are doing real police work computer background and those people are like so dismissive are like who are these legacy characters right um but but the like all the stuff in the police station feels the closest to the original show.

It does, but it's the change in energy from Aunt Keene as kind of like Dugat or Harry Truman to Forrester, who's so good, as like this kind of weary, like,

all right, you know, like it's sort of like how he's being given like crazy news and he just kind of reacts very, very evenly.

Yes.

Uh, it does kind of feel there.

There is this sense that like Twin Peaks has gotten pretty nasty in a modern way.

Yeah.

Like or a little depressing or something, right?

Like that there's still a lot of like

grimy original characters feel sort of like wistful dynamics.

Kind of tired, right?

You know, obviously they're older, you know.

But like I think part of this is just that like Andy and Lucy are never going to change.

Andy is changing.

And their energy is so consistent.

Right.

Even though they've physically changed a little bit or whatever.

Hawk is still.

Hawk is amazing in the return.

He looks so good.

At least he's got so much point IMAF feels like the second lead of the he has a lot of like action.

Yes.

It feels like

he's the other character that is like driving quote-unquote story and certainly just has like a lot of screen time feels like he's now the primary character within the police station now yeah

um and looks fucking unbelievable he looks really cool yeah and then we have um mr c

we cut to a driving scene with slowed down music

and i'm like

wait is it christmas already the fuck is happening this is incredible

Yeah, I think that's how we should refer to the doppelganger, right?

They call him Mr.

C, right?

He looks like Bob and Dale mashed up.

Yeah, that's the idea.

Right.

It's like, it's kind of, it's a, I think it's a brilliant job on him because the wig is sort of Bob-esque, right?

He's got like the black eyes.

Yes.

So he's really like automatically unsettling looking.

And then he talks in that kind of stilted way.

Yes.

That's, you know, awesome.

I know there's the later scene where they start to like truly superimpose Bob's face over him.

They do that a couple of more things.

Yeah, but that's their way of getting around.

They're doing something like prosthetically.

I don't want to say prosthetically, but I feel like they're

pulling McLaughlin's face back a little bit.

They're giving him a little tautness to make him have a little more of the grimace of Bob, or it's something that he's just doing himself.

He might be clenching his jaw.

I don't know.

Just the way he's dressed, too.

He looks like a bad

man.

He looks like a real piece of shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Slick back hair, sloppy stage.

And if he's hanging out with people

there.

He does.

That's, I mean.

He's a sloppy steak guy.

He likes to slop them up.

He slops him up.

He slops them up.

He's always like going to some.

He'll change.

It's never too late to change.

Going to some shack where there's like four

guys in wife beaters and stuff like in rocking chairs who are like, howdy.

Like he like knows every bizarre criminal in the world.

Yes.

I do just love this kind of thing.

I mean, Bingja Malkovich has a version of this, but like someone so badly wanting to take over another person's body, and then they get in there and they cannot help but morph that body into their own look.

Right.

Right.

That it's like, oh my god, I'm now like in the body of Dale Cooper.

I like am able to walk amongst the living.

I can like take advantage of this.

And then like Bob basically just turns Cooper into himself.

Then we're back to the

New York office.

And we,

the two characters, uh, Tracy and Sam, uh, they, uh, look, let's be honest, they have sex with each other.

She shows up in the coffee.

The guards are gone.

He's like, this is an opportunity.

Right.

She makes the entree.

And then nothing weird happens to them.

They have sex and it's love.

He starts to explain

what he's doing here.

I don't even know who I'm working for.

I don't know what to watch this book.

Right.

Apparently, sometimes something happens.

The last guy saw something happen, but he's not around anymore.

Like the weirdness of this job.

I will say this for me is the most unsettled I have been with any lunch scene.

It's

nasty.

To be clear.

Slashed to pieces by a monster that like emerges in the box.

And I don't know if it's just because I had no sense of this coming or even this.

plotline being anything in the show but some of the other things that i feel like you and some of our guests have talked about as like imagery that has like primally haunted you forever,

like the lady behind the diner in Mulholland and some of those things, where I like watch them and I'm like, yeah, that is upsetting.

This like actually kind of physically shook me.

It's nasty.

The actual projection itself and the length at which it stays and the eeriness of it like really kind of freaked me the fuck out.

And then obviously the attack itself is so upsetting.

Yeah.

It did immediately like recalibrate me to like, oh, this show has me on edge.

Yeah, but it's also,

it is kind of a welcome to premium cable bitch moment where you're like, right, this is like gory and like

sexual.

I think the show is creepy.

I do, not to question Lynch's intent, but I do think it was a little bit weird to have a Chiron pop-up of Freddy Krueger saying welcome to Premium Cable, bitch.

I just think that's mashing in a whole different mythology.

I don't know.

I really appreciated Robert England's

work on show.

The effect of the monster.

This kind of like a humanoid, faceless thing.

Yeah.

But there's something about it too that it feels like really crisp, like just like how the whole series looks.

I don't know why.

There's just something about it.

There's something about the special effects throughout this.

Yeah.

Can we talk about this?

I can't really put my finger on it.

But it feels like he's really capturing his dream worlds in a way that he never really has had the access to the technology maybe in the past.

I feel like when this came out, I remember people kind of clowning on the use of computer effects.

Sure, because, of course, it's his own particular style.

And a lot of it was in the framework of like.

you know,

so baller that David Lynch will just like reuse like basic 101 assets and doesn't even give a shit, right?

With this massive budget, he doesn't care about the effects looking realistic.

And then other people were like almost framing it as a Michael Mann watermark.

Is he that checked out?

Is he this lazy to this sort of stuff?

I just like find

we have this conversation.

I feel like it's come up several times now in our group text with the Doughboys.

Okay.

Where we'll just kick this question of like, is there any instance of scary CGI?

Is there any horror movie where

CGI is scary?

When these modern horror movies have to deploy their CGI monster,

it's usually a little underwhelming.

Or even CGI augmentation of a monster.

There is, I think, evocative imagery that has been created.

But has anything ever truly scared us in that way?

And I'm like, all the CGI in this actually scares me.

I agree.

And

there's something weird about, it feels like by not trying to go for the modern version of like really render it in that physical space and light it like this and whatever.

It's like he's doing a digital version of like old optically printed effects where part of what's interesting is that it's like

truly a layer on top of the image and it's surreal and you're trying to position it and whatever.

But like, it also just feels like the imagery is so much more uncanny because you're like, it's just weirder for there to just be this like

green ghostwriter thing moving across the screen or this like blur you can't make sense of.

Right.

Or just these images like morphing at this odd pace or any of that.

Like anytime, even when it's just like red block on Patrick Fischler's screen, I'm like, that's fucking creepy.

That scares me more than like Pennywise having 8,000 teeth.

You know?

Even if those teeth look perfect.

I'm like, if that happened in real life, I'd be freaked out.

I mean, it's that kind of weird, inexplicable thing of like, what?

Pennywise is a good example where you're like, the scariest that character is is when Bill Skarsgård is giving a performance in makeup because his performance is effective.

Right.

I am less scared when he then goes like, ah, and opens his mouth.

And like, it is the perfect example because you're like, the two things that are scariest in his performance where you're like, that's good CGI are him like

walleye.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Weird shaped smile.

And both of those are things he just does himself that look uncanny that he can just do with his face.

Good for him.

But anytime he like stretches into something more, I'm like,

look, if I was younger,

I think it would freak me out.

It's nightmarish imagery.

But it doesn't scare me, though.

No, not so much.

No.

Are you scared by a creepy motel room where there's like a dead body that's headless?

Yeah.

By this point, I'm basically scared by everything that happens.

I feel perpetually just kind of ill at ease.

And part of it is just the like, I don't know why we're seeing this scene now, you know, and we talked about this in the Fire Walk With Me episode, but like this style that I feel like Lynch has been like evolving further and further across his career.

And this is the ultimate heightening of it, of like going against the basic principles of narrative editing of get in late, get out early.

Where every scene, you're like, why is this scene starting now?

Why is this shot starting now?

Even sometimes camera movements or like rack focuses or things like that.

He's like weaponizing the way we're used to processing images and like putting importance on them, where sometimes a shot will start of like 30 seconds of something where you're like, why am I seeing this?

What is this going to pay off into?

And then the camera just pans over and you're like, that was nothing.

Now this scene is starting.

It's beginning.

I'm also right.

I'm really like, I'm thinking about the first two episodes and remembering how unsettling they were.

Yeah.

As this ain't your daddy's twin peaks, because it's like, right, there is a lot of brutal violence.

The thing we just mentioned, the corpse, and then the later on, Mr.

C killing because of the money.

A lot of casual nudity.

Yeah, there's a lot of sadness.

This is very current lynch.

But then there's, right, there's also just this kind of like, there's no center to it.

No.

When we check in with the town, you're kind of like, okay, are we sticking with the town?

And then we're immediately like, no, we're going off to another location now.

And the townspeople feel like any of the stuff shot in the town feels weirdly kind of elusive and distant.

I was saying outside of Andy and Lucy, who still have their basic comedy energy,

you're like, the show doesn't have the constant swelling Angelo score.

It doesn't have the sort of like

overly emotional, like monologuing, spilling out intrigue.

Right.

Like these people just all feel kind of like slowed down.

Right.

You know?

And it's also not that all of this weird stuff is happening in one place anymore.

No.

And I guess.

He's expanded it.

And it really is such a great distillation of his, like, there's weird things happening right now somewhere in the world.

Yes.

There's these unsettling people here.

There's this weird, mysterious box here.

There's this crime happening here.

And you don't know how it's all connected.

It's so, I'm, I got so locked in basically as soon as episode one ended.

Certain other things I want to touch on.

The log lady call, which I remember like the hush in the room when we all watched that because it was so clear that uh catherine coulson was you know basically making this call for like a hospice she certainly had but like you're clear that like yes that she shot this in sort of her final weeks yes um

uh where she's basically telling hawk like something's missing you have to find it it's to do with your heritage okay it's the closest thing these early episodes have to

like uh

like a plot line for fans to grab on to because everything else is it's like what's going on with the weird box what what's the the headless corpse?

Yeah.

And how does any of this relate to

the sort of subplots you can follow as their own thing?

It's unclear how it ties into anything else.

Right.

And then it takes six episodes to identify the body as Briggs, I think.

Yeah, it takes a while.

So moving, right, moving on to episode two,

you have

Matthew Lillard as Bill Hastings.

A pretty incredible performance.

I agree.

I mean, I.

of a very agitated person.

And like, Lillard is good casting,

but left field casting.

I feel like he's been talking a lot recently about what a like lifeblood infusion

fucking five nights at Freddy's was to his career and being like, I've never been this back.

Like, you know, I've been sort of on the outskirts of the industry for a while.

Right.

I mean, like, he, you know, notably, he was directing stuff for a little bit.

He also, after case of case indicted, has taken over voicing Shaggy in all media.

What she's talked about is like just the ultimate gift of a stable job in an unstable industry where there's always going to be Scooby-Doo stuff done.

But like every couple of years, he will pop up in a live-action thing now as like an older character actor and fucking destroy.

He is so good in The Descendants, a movie I don't

like.

But that's what he's incredible in.

But that's a lot.

That's

what I'm saying.

More than 10 years ago.

Yeah.

He'll pop up in that.

I'll be like, okay, so Lillard's back, right?

Everyone's going to get it.

And this was similar.

Yeah.

Like, great, perfect.

use of lillard and by his account like now people are hiring him again a bunch for a movie that no one likes right but was obviously successful this guy has just kind of been an untapped resource for a bit now

um

so he's accused of this like murder of this corpse but he doesn't know what's going on right the murdered woman is a woman he was having an affair with which is why he's kind of edgy when they're interrogating him right right or on edge at least you can't tell like i mean it's it's part of what's unsettling is like, this guy is clearly hiding some secret.

Is he lying about being a murderer or does he not understand what he's being accused of?

Right.

And the, like, watching him process all of that and like break down in real time.

And then the reveal of the body is so upsetting where it's like, you know, this sort of, it almost feels like the straight story scene of like so much wind up to getting through the door.

You know, with the next door neighbor

complaints and the keys or whatever.

What's it going to be?

What's it going to be?

And then you see this like like rotting head of a woman in a bed oh she's been there for a while it's upsetting already eye missing right and then you pull down the covers and you're like why is this head disembodied lying on top of a clearly different body right that is also like sliced open cool i wouldn't say cool i think it's good i think that's uh that's what motels should have no i've been watching i don't know when you've been watching this show ben but i've often been watching it uh at night right before i go to bed and it certainly puts me in a headspace yeah no i've been watching it late at night.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's terrifying.

It's affected my dreams.

It's made me feel very uneasy.

Yes.

I think at the time there came a point where I would actually wait to watch this show

at night, right?

Even though I was airing at 10 o'clock.

Here's the thing.

It feels right to watch it at night.

As much as it fucks with me, I'm like, yeah.

So we've got that going on.

We've got Mr.

C with this sort of coterie of weirdos that he's

gathered on some weird mission.

We do have Patrick Fischler in a Las Vegas office who's like vaguely talking about money changing hands.

We don't really know what that is.

We

see

the red room again.

Mike is there.

Older Laura is there.

Is this the introduction of the evolution of the arm?

Correct.

It's where Laura

opens her face up and there's kind of light inside of it.

Yes.

Another very creepy effect that is done at a level that could be done by like a 12-year-old on their computer, you know?

But you're like, it's more upsetting for that reason.

We are indeed introduced to the arm, Michael J.

Anderson's character, the man from another place,

who is now a tree with like a brain blob on top of it that sort of goes like

that.

It reminds me of his first piece of art.

Yes, it's got the installation pieces.

It's getting getting sick or whatever.

Michael J.

Anderson

was posting on Facebook at this time.

Like he was really had gone, it seemed, a little loony.

Yeah.

And he said that Lynch.

That's many people his age

were on Facebook at this time.

Right.

He said that Lynch screwed him over or whatever, who, you know, money-wise or whatever.

I don't know.

And apparently demanded more money than anyone else on the show.

And Lynch.

Right.

Probably Michael J.

Anderson was probably thinking, like,

I am such an iconic image.

My person is.

Like, you can't do without me.

And Lynch, of course, is like, what do you mean?

You can just be a tree.

Yes.

I'll just have you be a tree now.

Who cares?

And so, yeah.

So he's there.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know if there's any way to

parse that.

No, no, no, no.

I was going to say support this, but I do feel like what they do with with the arm is fascinating and is also very effective, right?

I have to imagine a lot of the dialogue that would have gone to Michael J.

Anderson had he agreed to do this is what they end up doing with Mike now.

Mike is there where they're sort of explaining stuff.

If you have the evolution of the arm in this form, saying all the dialogue, it will be too much.

Right.

You maybe need someone who's a little more grounded.

And then you cut to the weird tree arm for maximum impact.

And then we kind of basically have like

the exit of Cooper.

Uh-huh.

Right?

Like,

there's a lot of sort of mysterious red room stuff that,

you know, you can sort of parse as you will.

I don't know how to describe all this stuff.

But it's like.

But you do have like strong theories and all this stuff.

Yeah, there's, yes.

You'll watch the show and you'll see.

There's a logic to what happens in Twitter Peak's return.

I want to call a hint that I'm going to ask you at the end of us covering this show.

Sure.

I mean, because I feel like you've very often, throughout me watching the show for the first time, alluded to there are answers to all of this.

You can get down to less.

You can.

I mean, look, the simple fact of the matter is:

Cooper got stuck in the red room.

The doppelganger took his place.

Yeah.

So what we see now, essentially, and we're moving into episode three as well, is like, you know, it's like Cooper gets ejected out of the red room, but the doppelganger had anticipated this.

And so he's redirected into this fake Cooper that got made, Dougie Jones.

Yes.

A Tolpa, to quote the empty man.

They use that word here too, like a sort of

official being created to basically have a vessel for good Coop to go back into.

Right.

And so Cooper kind of gets stuck there for much of this show.

Like he is now Dougie, who is not a real person to begin with, but is

this perfect way for Lynch and Frost to make fun of

the modern American salary man in a way, right?

Where he like he exists.

He has some sort of useless insurance job, exists lives in this like subdivision and

has a gambling addiction.

has a gambling addiction and like a wife who's like, I hate you, you suck.

Cheats on her with sex workers.

And then he suddenly shows up and is like,

hello, coffee.

And she's like, you're my dream man.

You rock.

David, you're doing way too much.

I know.

Exactly.

It's like, it's hard to do him on radio.

Yeah.

We should reclaim this as a radio.

This should be on radio.

I think 2025, let's go on like 1010 wins.

Let's reach out to Z100, get a syndication deal, and exclusively refer to this.

This is AM.

No, AM.

AM.

I'm putting my foot down on AM.

This is a radio show about filmographies.

They love to hand out like three-hour slots on radio.

Yeah, exactly.

They like variable running times and all that stuff.

David, what?

This episode of Blank Check with Griffin David podcast about philographies is brought to you by Booking.com.

Booking.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what I was about to say.

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Ben, who's like, what's an example of someone I know who maybe has a very particular set of demands?

Bringing me in, and there's only one other person in the room.

There's one other person in the room, right?

This is so rude.

I sleep easy.

I'm definitely not someone who insists on 800 thread count sheets.

No.

That's a that's a an example of a fussy person.

But people have different demands.

And you know what?

If you're traveling, that's your time to start making demands.

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Maybe any kind of demand.

I have Lynn and I need a room with some good soundproofing because I'm going to be doing some remote pod record.

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Maybe you're in Europe and you want to make sure that's very demanding to be in Europe.

You got air conditioning.

Well, I think of one person in particular, although it's really both of you.

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Look, they're again,

they're specifying like, oh, maybe you want a sauna or a hot top.

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You want one of those in the recording, Stuart?

That'd be great.

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No, what I was going to say is,

I know,

as you're saying, there are sort of like in-universe explanations of this.

Yeah.

Our Lost Highway episode, as people, I think, can tell, was recorded

way, way early.

That was the first one we recorded chronologically.

So, like, even just that episode coming out, I'm like, oh, I would have talked about this movie differently having

had we gone through no shade on that episode.

I think it would have turned out great.

But just digging in more on Lynch career stuff that I wasn't digging in on at the time we recorded that episode, how much of Lost Highway came out of Lynch being like completely confused by,

and this is so much of his whole filmography, the sort of like, how can people be capable of this level of evil?

How can that be contained within like a human psyche, a person, the ability to commit this kind of harm to other people?

But that he was also, by all accounts, particularly fascinated by like O.J.

Simpson during the peak of the trial.

Lost Highway, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Right, for sure.

Just being like out with his kids and being like, hey, I'm OJ.

I'm I'm innocent.

And being like, how can you like murder your wife and then just kind of allegedly go forth and just be like, I'm dropping my kids off at school.

Hey, it's very juice.

Right.

And I do think, in the way I talked about maybe in the Twin Peaks Season 2 episode, the sort of manhuntery thing of like, if you live in this world, if you're investigating crimes, at what point does it start to break you?

Have you just like let too much evil into your psyche?

Even if you are are quote unquote the one doing good?

Beyond the like inner narrative mythology, I do think there's something he's getting at here with the like splitting of the coupe psyche of like, what happens to you if you're just like looking at dead bodies all the fucking time, right?

Like, do you start to split into like, do you curdle?

Do you go dead inside?

Like, do you just compartmentalize?

There is an allegorical level.

I see what you're saying.

I think there is also just this thing of like, to Lynch and Frost, like the world's only gotten worse.

It feels like, you know, kind of Boy Scouts like Cooper, who had their flaws, have been replaced by these kind of like amoral figures for the last 25 years.

Like that's, you know, like you watch Twin Peaks in 92 and you're like, yeah, this is about a seedy town.

There's like Coke and there's sex work.

And now it just feels like it's like, it's not just fucking drugs and, you know, prostitution or whatever.

Now it's just like, yeah, empty houses being sold to nobody by like faceless gangsters.

And also, yes, the sort of feeling of like, here's this town that looks quaint, but underneath it has like all this weird darkness and drama.

And here's a guy who like looks like a fucking Dick Tracy drawing.

Right.

You know, showing up.

Right.

And asking

like Peter Triver.

Right.

And like, that's all people.

So many people clearly just wanted this show to be like him drinking the coffee, which happens and it is important to it, but not in the way they want it, I think.

Right.

The deconstruction of this kind of like one pure, simple law man who is unwavering and unaffected by the darkness, you know, and can always cut through it with like humanity and grace.

I like everything you're saying.

All of his performances are incredible.

Khan McLaughlin rules.

He rules.

This is his masterwork.

I was going to say.

He is like dividing this character into two extremes with like the middle gone.

I'm a fan of his work in general, in particular, his work with David Lynch.

It is wild that there's such a long gap, and a lot of it is, of course, like the bad fallout of Twin Peaks.

This is the kind of thing I had no idea he was aware of.

Well, that's because he's now become this guy you call in for a specific kind of thing.

Right.

Like, the way he's used in falling

on it.

There is him as like Smarmy politician, sort of guy.

There's him as like sort of like goofy dad.

There's him as

like cartoon villain, but all of them do feel like a certain broad, weird bent on his square-jawed, like all-American thing.

Exactly.

How can we fuck with that a little bit?

We should call out that, of course, Kyle McLaughlin has reinvented himself in 2024 as Mr.

Blockbuster, the king of the box office.

Because he's an inside-out too.

He's Riley's dad.

He's the star of the biggest film.

So Cooper is going, we see this kind of series of dreamless, dreamy things, right?

You've got the weird kind of

purple sea, which we see a few times, like this kind of odd void place.

He goes to this weird room, this kind of like this dimly lit mansion room.

There's this eyeless woman who's stuck by a fireplace.

She'll come back.

At one point, you see Garland Briggs.

Don Davis has died, the actor who plays Garland Briggs at this point.

And again, David Lynch is like, no problem.

Just have his fucking face float by and go, Blue Rose.

Like, there you go.

So Garland Briggs is still in the show,

which is will be important.

And then

we see him basically sort of try to enter the world again.

We see Mr.

C

like barf corn everywhere, right?

Like, while driving the car.

Well, he's trying his hardest to hold it down.

Exactly.

As like he's getting like engulfed in the sort of fade-out of the rest of the sucker.

Right.

And he survives that.

And so we see Cooper essentially get redirected over to the box, right?

That's, yeah, you know, like, like, that's, that's how it ends up being.

But we've already seen Dougie.

We see Dougie with Jade, who's a sex worker who he's like in one of these empty houses with, right?

Across the street from Haley Gates as like an addict mother.

Right.

And he

also barfs up corn, Garmin Bozo.

He barfs up a different thing.

Dougie barfs up.

Oh, you're right.

He almost looks like a fucking rump roast or something.

Right.

And then he goes to the red room and gets turned into an orb.

Yes.

Which I love.

Where they're like, enough of you, boink.

But there's a difference to like when Mr.

C finally breaks down and pukes, it's like this endless stream of like this cream corn type.

Yeah.

Right.

And then when the cops come to get him, they're like, this is the worst smelling thing of all time.

The one cop who gets him.

Because it's like evil.

It's despair.

That's what the corn is.

Right.

Two steps closer is then like.

almost like comatose.

They mention that like a few of the guys are now laid up in the hospital.

They have to call him back up with gas masks.

Whereas, like, Jade comes out from the bathroom and is like, When'd you get a haircut?

Why are you wearing this suit?

Were you wearing a wig the whole time?

And then it's like, Ooh, are you sick?

It seems like what he puked up is a little bit foul, but it's not like.

No, it's not, it's not the milk of human evil or whatever.

That, uh, yes, no, yeah, yeah, he comes out of the electrical socket, right?

And right, so now we have him in Mr.

In Dougie Cooper's life,

but now instead of being the douchebag that Dougie Cooper, we assume, was and like a doofy douchebag.

He's this sort of trim, silent, black-suited

zombie kind of guy, you know, who just repeats what is said to him.

Yes.

And has really no reaction to anything until he drinks some sweet, sweet coffee.

He has the literal look of authority.

It's like Lynch tapping into why he was so drawn to this guy in the first place.

That's the big, yeah, exactly.

Right.

Just the look.

And there's something about like Kam Glachlan is so fascinating physically.

And the other times we've talked about him were decades earlier when he was much younger, right?

And there was something about him, like looking like a Kendall, looking like a Chester Gold drawing, where it's like, well, he is literally like an illustration of what we think of as a manly man, but yet also is like so pretty and delicate.

He is very pretty.

Yes.

Even today.

And it is odd to see him at an advanced age where you're just like, he looks like an aged boy in a way.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like, he doesn't look rugged now.

He's not like grown into some like Sean Connery has passed over into like his Silver Fox age.

And I obviously they're like dying his hair in this and making him look as sort of like natty as Cooper.

But there is something about like, he's aged incredibly well.

And it, there's something uncanny about just that face drooping only a little bit.

You know, he doesn't have these these deep lines.

No, he looks good, but he looks old.

Yeah.

He's not, he's never going to be pretty like he was as a young man.

Yes.

He's now become this like hot silver fox.

Yeah.

But that's sort of post this.

What I'm saying, this is trying to go for a different look.

It's going for the uncanniness of like, yeah.

This is then when we have, we do have some interludes, such as Dr.

Jacoby

spray painting his shovels.

We have the crazy drug-addicted woman screaming 119

randomly in a room, you know, where you're kind of like, what?

Doesn't that happen in response to, does that start before the car explodes?

Isn't it right after?

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, it's where they sleep together, Dougie and the sex worker.

Right.

He lives across the street, and it's where Dougie's car is left parked.

Yes.

So then, right.

Right.

And then he.

He doesn't take his car because she drives him home home because she can tell that he's.

No, Jade takes him to the casino.

Oh, yes.

And then, of course,

call for help, gives him the $5 call for help.

Yes.

And he starts just, he becomes Mr.

Jackpots.

He starts to see the money.

It's one of the funniest fucking things that's ever been on TV.

He starts seeing glimpses of

machine above this machine will pop off next.

And then he gets all the money and he starts going, hello.

So not to get too ahead of shit that I imagine is even going to come more to the forefront across this, but it really feels like at least in these first seven episodes and like the

Hawk being front and center, the casino, the stuff that's already happening at the end of season two, that like a lot of the big

sort of point of Twin Peaks as a grand media experiment is the like, we are a country built upon

an Indian burial.

Yeah, I think that's that.

I think that is a thing running through Twin Peaks.

It's never like loudly screamed or anything.

Although you do, right, you do have things like the log lady being like, it's to do with your heritage.

Right.

And that's all of Hawk's stuff is him trying to, like, Andy being like,

is it about coins?

Like, is it, what's the connection here?

But also that you have like the end of season two, the last handful of episodes where they're starting to like lay things out more directly is coming back to Hawk being able to filter through like, in my culture, there's this notion notion of, you know, that suddenly these things in the show that have seemed really abstract are being reframed as like spiritual beliefs within like Native American traditions.

Right.

Um, and then I just feel like it's not coincidental that he is going to a casino, a thing that is largely owned by like Native American groups at this point in time in the country, especially if you're outside of like Nevada, right?

Um, and that he's being given like directed glimpses from the red room to direct him towards the money.

Again, right, it's not like someone screams this out loud.

No, but it doesn't even

fundamentally the elemental stuff in Twin Peaks is that Bob is something you can just think of in any way you want to think of him.

Sure.

And that's what's happening in Twin Peaks The Return is Bob is running rampant.

And there's sort of a battle against Bob.

It's an abstract battle for a lot of the time, right?

Because it's all these threads coming together.

But Mr.

C is the villain, and he is Bob.

Sure.

And he is the thing we need to stop.

And then Agent Cooper/slash Dougie is sort of our hero, but he is kind of a zombie.

Yeah.

Who slowly is absorbing the world around him.

And the world is reacting to this like mirror he puts up, right?

This kind of just like friendly, reflective thing.

Mr.

Jackpots, you know, as we're moving into episode four, like,

you know, the casino is freaking out about him because he's making all this money.

And so they take him home.

And then here comes Naomi Watts just in full Mohana drive mode, just like dialed all the way up.

I feel like we've talked a lot about how the last 10 years of Naomi Watts has been a disaster in a way that feels like very unfair to her.

She's just got like blankets.

She'd catch a break.

And this is the only outlier.

She's so fucking goodness.

Unsurprisingly, like Lynch knows how to use her.

That's the thing.

Right.

But she's in this so much.

And like watching it now years later, I'm just like, why is everyone else failing her?

I think she's just, I've said it before, like she's the fourth choice, you know, for a lot of these plum roles.

And she doesn't get them.

And instead, she gets these kind of like okay roles, leading roles.

She's had a handful of abject disasters as well, though.

Not just like Book of Henry and stuff, but it's like,

oh, like here's like a career lifeline.

She's going to be the lead on the Game of Thrones spin-off.

And then they're like, never mind, this one isn't happening.

Pilot buried new show happening.

There have been like a couple things like that where you're like, this almost feels cursed now.

Although, married Billy Crudup, hot couple.

Sure, but didn't she,

you know, have her relationship with Lee Shriver for a long time and that fell apart.

Yeah, and I'm saying on the rebound, she married Billy Crude.

Sure, yeah.

He's definitely never cheated on his wife, but the

fucking nanny or whatever he did.

I forget what he did.

Claire Danes.

Allegedly.

Oh, yeah, right.

It It was Claire Danes, right?

Yeah.

Whatever.

I can't care.

This is all here.

It's all the celebrities.

They're always cheating on each other.

Who can get excited anymore?

Scottlines from Twin Peaks.

Who's been fucking who?

At this point, I think it starts in late in episode three.

Okay.

We're bringing in Gordon Cole, played by David Lynch, who is one of the biggest characters in this show.

Watching this,

I just, I thought,

why is is he the funniest actor alive?

Why is he funnier on screen than anybody?

I know we've made

a lot of hay out of his voice.

Yes.

Doing the impressions, almost anything is funny in a David Lynch voice, but somehow his performance is funnier than David Lynch as a person is.

The idea of him, there is such an odd presence to how he performs as an actor beyond just the voice and everything, but especially at this age where he has that like gravitas that everyone gets to in the later decades of their life.

The weirdest thing to me about Cole in this series, and like a lot, a lot of this storyline is always just going to be Cole and,

you know, Miguel Ferrer.

Another actor who was passed away by the time the show aired.

Albert, obviously.

And then Tamara Preston, who's this new character played by Krista Bell,

who is this kind of stand-in character.

She's, you know, whatever, the newbie.

I feel like she's also Lynch being made fun of for like casting these gorgeous women and then like, you know, like having a crush on them or whatever.

Right.

Cause like that's what Gordon Cole is basically being criticized for with her presence.

Right.

Everyone's like gorgeous.

Or she's just a good agent.

But Gordon, especially throughout the show, is kind of the exposition guy.

Yeah.

The FBI agents are the ones who out loud the most will be like, here's what's going on.

Like, we're on a hunt for Bob.

Like we're, you know, we're trying to figure out what Judy is.

Like they're the ones that are sort of like talking about the mission.

Well, also, with Cooper, like, pulled apart into like these weird, abstracted forms, he becomes the moral center of the show.

He is.

And that is very apparent early in season two,

episode four, where he goes to see Denise, David DuCovni's character from Twin Peaks, season two.

The kind of character you might expect they'd go like,

we don't need to check in with everybody.

Exactly.

Maybe it's risky to try to revisit.

This, like, Lynch looking down the camera, basically, and like lecturing his audience, not in a bad way, like, like, you know, just sort of incredibly moving, direct moment of him saying, fix your hearts or die.

It took eight years for me to watch this show.

I remember you had heard of that.

Seeing someone post the night this episode aired with just the screen grab, with the caption on, of, and I told them, fix your hearts or die.

And just being like, wow, that is the best fucking way to put it.

It is a line that has stuck with me just off of seeing a fucking screen grab for a decade of like, yeah, that's how I just think about all of this fucking shit now.

Yeah.

Of people who refuse to change in a way that is tolerant of other people.

Right.

Who like insist on being fucking prejudiced out of habit?

Um,

yeah, it's just it's uh it's perfectly fascinating.

And there's something to just the simplicity of Lynch as a performer for how bizarre and overstated he is.

It is like it's him and Louie and it's him in the fucking Fablemans where it's like, is anyone more effective just having like basically staring down the barrel of the lens and saying the thing?

Absolutely.

Yeah, just kind of, I mean, the ostensible point of that scene, right, again, is like your mission, if you choose to accept it, is figure this out.

Right.

Mr.

C, like, who's this?

But it's really, right, this scene of Lynch being like, your character was a part of season two that I am not forgetting about.

And like, I want to address that, like, you, like, you know, your identity is paramount.

Like, right.

So, I, I mean, I think the company's performance is very good.

I loved it.

In this scene in particular, but also, like, you watch season two, it comes on screen, you're like, is this going to be a problem for someone watching like me for the first time decades later?

And, like, unlike a lot of performances of trans people until, let's say, the late 2010s, when those roles start to be played by actual trans people, there was a lot of like, they are being played as if they are drag performers.

Yeah, sure.

Right?

There's not a real understanding of the actual what's going on, right?

Yes.

And I do feel like DCovney, to his like best abilities, tries to play it like a real person.

This is like a woman.

I'm not like overstating it.

You know, I'm not sort of like doing, yeah, the broad strokes.

Yeah.

Lucy Truman.

I'm trying to think what else.

Is this where Wally Brando shows up?

Yes.

Yeah.

They set it up early.

They name their son

Wally Brando because he, what is it?

He was born right after Brando died.

He was born the same day as Marlon Brando,

is what we know.

Right.

Just another scene that's just so fucking memorable.

Yeah.

Here's the thing I want to talk about.

Yeah, this is Michael Sarah's only appearance on Twin Peaks the Return.

Not to spy assumption.

Yes.

He's coming in and out.

Yeah.

He has said that the way he got this part was that he went to one of David Lynch's transcendental meditation classes and that afterwards he was like, I might have a part for you.

I feel like a lot of directors in this age group, when they are casting things and in interviews, people are like, so what made you want to work with this actor?

You often get the sense of like, oh, they don't really watch stuff at this point.

You will get the thing of like Paul Schrader being like, my financiers gave me a list of like 10 people who I can get the movie made if I get one of them.

And I watched their reels and I said, like, this guy feels like he could work.

But he's not like watching every episode of Euphoria and going like,

oh, I should write a part.

Sure.

You know?

Yeah, right.

What's his name?

Why am I freaking tall guy's name?

Jay Elordi.

Thank you.

Similarly, I know like

vinyl, when Ray Romano went into audition, casting was like, hey, just so you know, he doesn't know who you are.

And he was like, oh, he's never watched the show.

And he's like, no, he's never heard of you existing.

And he was like, how could I just like, without taking this personally, the show was big enough, long enough?

Wouldn't he at least have heard the name?

And he's like, he has no awareness.

But I feel like with these kinds of guys, oftentimes it's either the casting directors are just like, we have picked actors we think you would like and we'll put them in front of you.

And the first time they're ever seen that person perform is in that audition.

Or

it is like, they've been told that this name is bankable.

Or you'll hear that they saw one weird.

I cast them because I saw them on the tonight show and I thought their interview was funny.

So, when any of these like more current-day actors show up who Lynch hasn't worked with before, in the Sarah case, I know it was that, right?

Some of them, I'm like, has he seen Amanda Seifreed in anything?

He might have.

Did Amanda Seifreed like reach out to her reps?

I can't imagine him watching TV or going to the movies.

I'm sure he does it sometimes.

Did she like reach out to her reps and go, like, anything to be in pieces of riches?

I'll audition for anything.

Or was he like, I've seen Red Riding Hood 10 times.

Ben, did you have something to say?

Well, I was going to say also at the police station, we see Bobby.

Oh, that's right.

That's when that scene is.

An incredible scene.

And it's the first time that we hear the theme,

which is just such a hammer blow.

And like, it's what people have been talking about, my love of Dana Ashbrook.

Yes.

And on I've noticed on like the Reddit and stuff.

And it's like, yes, he has a particularly broad thing.

It's not like Dana Ashbrook.

I look at him and I'm like, wow, Hollywood gave up on a big movie star here.

I understand that his acting style as Bobby is very big and like it's very well geared to this show.

By the way, it's so beautiful.

He has a very good career and has kept working consistently.

Oh, yeah.

He's one of those guys where it's like, it's not like he disappeared.

He works steadily.

He does lots of TV.

Yes, he does feel like a perfect fit for this.

And it does feel like he is one of these guys who is able to have a foot in multiple spheres simultaneously.

He knows how to play to like the bigness of Twin Peaks and the like emotional realism of Twin Peaks simultaneously.

That scene is, I mean, it's not just that the score comes back in, but him sort of being surprised by how much it's he can still be emotionally.

Yeah.

And

like and then trying to kind of cover it and be like, wow, it's just a blast from the past.

Like he's embarrassed that it he broke that quickly.

But it also feels like the show, like this like bolt of light coming through a crack where it's like, Yeah, everyone sort of agreed to forget about that.

As we talked about with Connor on about season two, if you think about how Twin Peaks actually moves quite slowly, like day by day,

like the whole Cooper-Laura thing is just a few months in their lives.

That's exactly, and it's just like, and then that was that, and Cooper disappeared.

And also, like, season two, once it solves Laura's mystery, stops invoking her a lot.

Like, if I were to throw out a major ding on season two, it's, I think, the most powerful thing about season peaks from the onset is there is something about her death that has shaken this entire town to its core.

Right.

It feels representative of like a cultural rot that they've all been ignoring, and everyone is so haunted by it.

And then once they saw her murder, it does feel like it's like, well, and on to other weird things in Twin Peaks.

So like him being this affected, seeing the photo again does feel like there's this reminder of like, this is where this all came together.

You know, this is what it was all about.

It's cool.

It's magnificent.

Yeah.

Some of the other things I want to mention, yeah, you sort of have Preston and Rosenfeld and Cole going on their mission, but you also have

Dougie drinking coffee,

doing the sort of like laughing where he has like the tie over his head.

His connection with his son.

His connection with Sonny Jim.

Sunny Jim's son.

His inability to know how to pee, so he has to be like shown how that works.

But you've also set up this thing.

Naomi Watts making scenes that make no sense make sense.

Where she's like, oh, I mean, fine.

I'll just take your penis out for you.

Basically, like, like she's just this put upon housewife.

Like, I love Lucy.

Having to be like, oh, Richie, you know, Desi, don't you know how to pee?

But also he's come home in a limo with this inexplicable bag full of money, a burlet sack full of money that Brett Gelman was loath to give him.

He's like, I'm going to fucking, I'm dead, right?

Belushi and his guy come in and beat the shit out of him and fire him immediately.

And she's like, oh my God, amazing.

We can get ourselves out of this jam.

Right.

This immediate setup of like he was in some financial hole.

Everyone's been closing in on them.

He now has this like windfall of money.

Everything can be corrected.

The only problem is he doesn't know how to speak English.

Right.

Or go places.

Or open a car door.

Do anything.

Let's say it.

Do basically anything.

But he drinks coffee and that does something.

He loves the coffee.

It's a reminder.

Much as when they someone acknowledges that he is an insurance agent, the word agent rings in his head.

Right.

It's like the Cooper psyche is in there deep down waiting to be active.

In episode five, which I'm moving to now, like there's that point where his boss is like, here are some case files.

Case files.

So again, it's like, right, like, yeah, that's something in FBI.

When he stops the assassin and suddenly it's like he has the muscle memory of how to like

stop a shooting from and that assassin, by the way, is really normal and not lynching at all.

No.

Like to have like a weird little Wolverine of a man who's just like,

does someone else guest direct to this scene?

Episode five also has a scene that like, so like I watched this show live and I had not really seen it since apart from Enclips because the show doesn't kind of pervasively exist in that form.

Completely forgot about the scene with Candy Clark as Doris,

Sheriff Truman's wife, who just comes and fucking harangues him about a leaky pipe in this like black box theater monologue and forced her just completely impassive.

Right.

And then she leaves.

this thing i've talked about a lot that like lynch can pull off like no one else which is have a scene with actors in wildly different performance styles in a master shot somehow feeling intentional feels so intentional they are in opposite universe it's like truman seems just like burdened with sadness yes his brother we forster is just all honest presence like that's his whole thing the way they've written off harry truman is that he's clearly sick with something and truman you know sheriff truman will just occasionally be like Yeah, he's, you know, he's still fighting, you know, but like we don't know what

phone call scene where you only hear his side of it, and he says, Just promise me you're gonna beat this thing, right?

Which coming out of Forster is like very emotional, very moving, but so like he's obviously like sad about that.

But then he's just also just feels like burdened by all the sadness of the town.

Yes.

And everyone, all these old characters like Ben Horn, when we see them, it's like, yeah, they just never got over it.

The time passed, but he's just still stuck there, like kind of, and it's not like fun anymore.

Or you're Jacoby and you just went nuts and you just got gold shovels and you're doing your podcast.

Figured it out.

Right, right, right.

The fucks are at it again.

He's right.

Yeah.

That's an incredible sales pitch.

No, I was just going to say, much like the new agent, it does help to have someone in the precinct who is on the side of the old people, but wasn't on the case in the original show, not as like an entry point for new viewers, but just to sort of reestablish things where characters can explain things to him, you know, that he has a little bit of a like one foot in, one foot out awareness of the history.

And then that second Candy Clark scene is so devastating where she comes in even hotter, but my dad's car isn't working and this and that.

That guy is such a fucking good actor who is also incredible on Barry, who plays like the asshole new cop, who also is the one

who takes the cash buyout from the smoking guy, which we need to talk about in a second.

My new most evil character in the the world of Twin Peaks.

Yes.

So the character you're talking about is Richard.

Yes.

Pin in that for one second.

But that scene of her chewing him out and then him just being like, what a fucking hag, what a ball and chain, whatever.

And just the immediate, like this thing that Lynch is so good at is just like making these like desperate pleas for empathy in a weird way, in a non-corny way of just like, they are people.

They are going through things.

Everyone has their pains and their like sufferings.

Like, their child killed himself.

This will haunt them forever.

They're never going to get over it.

That's exactly it.

Yeah.

So no one just like turns out some weird way.

So, Richard, the character you're referring to, played by Eamon Farron, not an actor.

He's an Australian actor, but I don't really know him at all.

He'd worked.

He was in Jennifer Lynch's movie Chained,

which I haven't seen.

He's got David Lynch's talk.

He's like a look.

The craziest face.

So obviously, basically, he is.

He's a bully face.

He is the most evil character

in Twin Peaks.

Yes.

Bob is obviously evil as well.

But with Bob, you're like, this is a spirit.

It's a little bit different.

It's not like Bob's someone who, right, like can go to a grocery store and be mean to someone.

I mean, it's like Richard Horn.

Like, even Jacques Breneau.

Right.

I get that.

That's an evil businessman.

I get it.

But right now.

He doesn't feel spiritual.

He just feels like a terrible person.

You know, and even like

Papa Horn, Richard Horn, not Ben Horn.

Thank you.

Ben Horn

has the thing that is so terrifying of like he is able to put this veneer of like gentle sophistication, you know, right and class on top of that.

100% right.

And then Richard, it's like, right, it's like pure, like no

mask or facade or whatever.

It's just like, what if there was the most evil piece of shit on earth, just kind of walking around?

Right.

And like, and everything about him is awful.

That, that first like bar cigarette scene, yes, which starts with just under a smoke, no smoking sign, smoking.

Right.

This guy's such a dick, and the staff is so pissed off at him.

He pays off a cop.

Then you see the girls at the booth next to him be kind of turned on by his bad boy attitude.

And he immediately pivots to just the most upsetting thing.

Like, I will rape you.

Like, it's just not, it's, again, it's just, there's like a blunt, naked, like, evil to how he's talking.

We've talked about that Lynch is so good at capturing of like these moments in life where reality just suddenly changed, where you are seeing behavior that is so bizarre that you almost don't know how to process it.

Right.

And like her friends sitting at the booth next to it, who like kind of don't know how to react because they're like, wait, did this guy truly in 15 seconds say that?

Kivic choking her?

Right.

He's got, and then you cut out of that scene.

Right.

And it's so much more disturbing to not have resolution on that.

You'll sort of get it.

But certainly I'm watching for several episodes after that point, and they're not cutting back.

The next time we see him, he's just in a truck.

And then he does something terrible.

He runs over a boy

with impunity and no remorse.

Yes.

And yells, I told him to move when he's like five blocks away.

This is the only, so like, again, when this show premieres, I see some people being like, gut, there's a lot of like sexual violence.

There's like nastiness in this show that's like kind of too much.

I know Twin Peaks was about dark things, but like.

Also, basically the entire David Lynch project.

Right.

But like, this is so explicit and intense and someone like richard i think especially it's like do i want to watch this every week like and i remember having that feeling a little bit with like richard especially where you're just like i kind of want to go to bed like

having watched you know nelly bake a really good cake on bake off like you know and make a couple you know funny jokes with noel fielding like i'm not sure i want to watch like a slab-faced evil boy like running people over pen's fiancé's on bake off yeah uh i can't believe this hasn't come up sooner.

I'm actually.

She's a character on the new season of Bake Off.

Who is delighted to be in the future?

Who is incredibly delighted?

Who plays the character?

Who did they get in the cast?

She's a human being, David.

A really

wonderful person.

Flesh and blood.

No, I think we've talked about a little bit the flip of how you felt by the end of our

Lynch experience and watching all of these things, both the rewatches and the things for the first time, I will be pretty happy to move on from this.

It has been an oppressive headspace to stay in.

Yeah, you're right.

And I think the next couple of things we're doing are going to be lighter.

Yeah.

Not that there won't be intense stuff in them.

There is.

There's

more commercial fare as well.

Correct.

Which is, by the way, conscious on our part.

It's a little conscious.

Strategic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But this is definitely, I mean, yeah, I don't know.

David Lynch's work makes me think about the worst parts of humanity a lot in a way that I don't think feels

exploitative or like punishing for like effect.

It's really him trying to reckon with these.

But it's narsty.

It's nasty.

I can't think of any better way to put it.

It is nasty.

And that's what Kaya Decinema said when they called this the best film of the 2020s.

So to give you some other things from episode five, I want to mention

more on Dr.

Jacoby's podcast where he is Dr.

Amp.

Feels like his two listeners are Jerry Horn out in the woods getting high and Nadine, who basically is just like in love with him.

Silently loves it.

We don't know how young she still is or isn't.

Right, or what year she thinks it is.

Yeah.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse, and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

No, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix September 10th.

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We have these cuts to the Pentagon where Ernie Hudson plays like a colonel who's like,

you know, Major Briggs's fingerprints have just popped up and we have to figure it out.

I need to pull the brakes for a second.

I have...

This thought every time they cut to Ernie Hudson sitting behind this desk, just fucking, just, just like serving me dialogue on like a silver platter, right?

Yes.

And I feel this every time he shows up for fucking four steady moments in a new Ghostbusters movie.

Why is no one writing like the incredible late career part for Ernie Hudson?

Someone do it.

This guy is here.

He looks amazing.

He looks unbelievable.

He is like a classically trained, like titan of an actor who is like beloved.

Anytime he shows up, people are like, oh yeah, Ernie Hudson.

Ernie Hudson.

We love him.

And like speaks without a lot of bitterness about the fact that he's basically never been utilized to his full ability throughout his career.

And you're like, anyone writes like a meaty dramatic supporting part for Ernie Hudson in a TV show or a film is going to look like a fucking genius.

Like, he has like a Robert Forster Jackie Brown-esque, you could frame him in a way that would feel.

So you're saying the Frozen Empire didn't do this for you?

It tried.

It got close.

I will say the one scene you saw Frozen Empire.

Yeah, I did.

There's the one scene with him and Ackroyd arguing about the running of the business that I'm like, just by the nature of Ernie Hudson being such a pro and Ackroyd so deeply believing this shit, for like three minutes, you're like, this movie feels like it's about something, even though it's nonsense.

And it's just these two guys.

Ackroyd thinks he's not acting.

Right.

He is in a real conversation.

with his good friend, Winston Zettelmore, who he willed into existence.

And Ernie Hudson can just just sell shit.

And I'm looking at Ernie Hudson and this, who basically has to sit behind a desk and go, Good reporting.

Thank you.

Report back with more.

And I'm like, this guy is so captivated.

He is.

He just speaks with such gentle authority.

It's the kind of stuff.

And he looks like $10 billion.

He certainly looks.

Do you know how old Ernie Hudson is now?

He's like 70 or something.

He's like 75 and jacked.

Really?

Yeah.

And not like a weird old man jacked.

Like, just hearing.

He's just in great shape.

He's incredible.

Um,

yeah.

I mean, again, right.

If Showtime was just like, hey, this has to be 10 episodes, stuff like Jane Addams and Ernie Hudson, like the sort of random cuts to these sort of procedural workers being like, there's a weird thing with these fingerprints.

Yes.

Would probably go.

Yes.

Like the assortment of cops in very, in like Arizona and Vegas and, you know, where it's just like these great David Lynch character actors being like, yeah, I don't know what's going on.

You know, like that, that'd probably all go.

But I love it.

I love sitting in all that.

No, and I do, I'm repeating myself here, but I do love the thing of like when a new element or a new world or a new threat is introduced, you have no idea what kind of follow-up or continuation you're going to get and when.

Yes.

So something like Jane Adams, you're like, I could see this being a character who's in this one episode a lot until they get the conclusive like findings they need from this autopsy.

And instead, that's like doled out across the season.

Yeah, she's kind of in it a fair amount, but just in little bits.

Right.

Okay, so some things that happened in the biggest thing that happened in season in episode six is we meet Diane,

uh, played by Laura Dern, the uh person that uh

Dale Cooper talked to on the on the recording, you know, on his tape.

This whole, you know, he's always addressing Diane.

Here is Diane.

This is the one card they play in that kind of lega sequel way.

Yes.

If them, you know, where you're like,

not only are we showing you Diane, but she's played by like David Lynch's muse, Laura Dern.

A real, like, how could you ever cast cast someone who is satisfying in the role of Diane?

It's like, that's the perfect way to do it.

It's the perfect one.

Right.

Yeah.

And she is, um, she's got a chip on her shoulder.

Uh, she does.

Griffin just sent us a picture of her.

Ben needs to see this.

This is Ernie Hudson at the Frozen Empire Premiere this spring.

He is 78 years old.

Wow.

Holy shit.

Right?

That's crazy.

And that looks natural.

That's not like stallone muscles.

No.

He's just in great shape.

It doesn't look like he's had work done.

If he has, it's been very subtle and delicate.

I don't think he has.

I think he just looks good.

I want to see like an Ernie Hudson, like one-man, like, fucking Broadway show with him melting down the house.

Well, I don't know.

This is my age inspiration right now, guys.

I don't know.

You just sent one to us?

I'm going to send one now.

This is the guy I want to be.

Also, Ben, just the confidence of going to the premiere just wearing jeans and a black t-shirt.

Yep.

And he's like, I got to show off the guy.

David, who are we looking at?

What is this photo you just sent us?

Are you not aware of this?

No, I don't know what's going on.

So that's Frankie Valley.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

And they've been because he's still on tour.

He's 90.

Yeah.

Right.

And there are these videos of whatever, you know, where it's basically like these four young men doing the four seasons stuff where they're, you know, they're all in sync and they're singing and they're singing the old hits.

And then he will come out looking.

This honestly, this picture looks pretty good.

Moving like Dougie.

He looks like a broken Chuck E.

Cheese animatronic.

David, I.

It's like, remember when there was those, like, Prince Philip, like the last 10 years of his life when he was alive, but you would be like, what's that like dead body doing sitting next to the queen?

Right.

Who's where are the puppeteers hiding?

Right.

Are they just out of frank?

And he's kind of like lips syncing.

It's kind of unclear what he's doing.

His mouth is moving to the Frankie Valley parts.

David, what you just sent me is an upsetting image.

The only thing that could make it more upsetting is to imagine the Frankie Valley voice coming out of it.

That face with like, baby.

That's basically what's going on.

I'll show you a video.

It's up with you.

It's so weird.

No, you should.

It's really fun.

This is the thing that happens.

I just want people to know.

If we talk about an image on an episode that we feel like the other ones need to see, we send it to the blank check group text, which Marie is in.

And then Marie will just respond with something like, I can't wait to find out the contents of it.

Yes, now.

If She's not hearing the conversation.

She'll hear it like a month from now.

Then she listens to the edit.

And we send the things so that she knows to post them when the episode comes out, but we don't tee them up at all for her.

So she just got Jack Derny Hudson and then Frankie Valley Facebook.

But the whole thing was like these videos started going around.

People are like, this is an elder abuse.

So he had to then be like, put out a statement being like, no one's making me do this.

I like doing it.

It doesn't look like you like doing it, but okay.

When I hear about something like this that I've somehow missed, it makes me feel really proud that I'm in a good place.

You are in control of yourself.

You're doing really well.

I've been missing

a lot of bad shit.

Yeah.

There's been a lot of like, you know, this fucking thing.

And I'm like, I don't know how, but I've actually maybe

got my shit under control.

Griffin, that's a great song.

Thank you.

It's been a long process.

Yeah.

But I'm just like, I don't want to be engaging with most of this.

Sherry.

So

yeah, so there's right.

There's this in part six is, I would say, one of the darkest episodes where Richard runs over the kid with impunity.

You say run over.

He runs through the kid.

He kills his child, his mother screaming.

You know, it's like, I don't even really want to talk about it.

But there's also...

What's his name is there?

We should.

Harry Dean.

Harry Dean.

Yes.

Which is like them tying in a

Firewalk With Me only character for the first time.

Yeah, that's true.

I'm trying to think if there's more.

But another person who's no longer with us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He died the year this came out for sure.

It's 2017.

It is crazy how much this show ends up being.

Not to repeat myself.

Well, don't worry about it.

It's sort of like final bow for so many people.

But yeah, yeah.

And other upsetting stuff,

Truman's wife.

Yeah.

Like this is just kind of a dark episode.

Diane's just like this sort of like clearly kind of fucked up person who's really mad at them.

So there's not like that like immediate satisfaction.

Which is the episode that introduces uh uh saferid and laundry bag

you have laundry bag uh ending the worst job interview of all time where a guy's like your resume sucks

carry on caleb laundry jones of course is your piece of shit you dress back

up five i want the baseline from tush sucks it feels like the anyway do you know so do you know who becky is

who becky is that's uh sayfried's character yes she is uh mad Shanamchik's daughter.

Right.

She is Bobby and Shelly's daughter.

I've gotten to the end of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because that's what I'm trying to.

I, in my sort of what, right, rewatch, I forget like when that information appears.

Right.

You're in.

She works at the introduction laundry bag.

Then you see Amanda Seifreed coming into the diner, asking her mom for money.

She's stuck with this, like,

you know, even worse version of the sort of toxic relationships we saw on the original show.

Right.

Right.

Are they going to continue to be a part of the show?

Yeah,

they're popping in and out.

Yeah.

I just feel like the shot I knew was the tilting her head back to know him is to love him kind of glow, staring at the sky coked up thing.

Right.

So when that came so quickly, I was like, is that the end of her stuff?

I don't want you to spoil these things.

No, it's not that spoiling.

But she's around.

Yeah, she's absolutely around.

Episode seven, I want to think,

just take a look here.

Right.

So at this point, like, Hawk finds Laura's diary

that's in the bathroom stall.

There's this sort of reference to Annie Blackburn, things like that.

I guess the point is that these points, parts of the diary which implicate Leland, were hidden by Leland in like one of his interrogations

of Twin Peaks.

Right.

Right.

But yeah, Hawk finds it through a series of like

Native American reappropriation symbolism.

Right.

Logos and coins and like these things that are like the cultural sort of commodification of his people

leads him straight to this,

yeah, these hidden pages.

Albert and Gordon work on Diane and basically convince her, like, can you go talk to Cooper?

We found Cooper.

He's in prison.

Like, we need you to identify that this is Cooper.

There's something off about right.

Diane's like mega-reluctant, but they make her do it.

They go on the corner.

She's very hostile to

Albert, especially.

Yes.

And then, yeah, he's like, I have to go back with Cole.

They really implore her.

And then that scene is so upsetting where you just see immediately her o'clock that something's wrong.

She's got this test in her mind of like, when was the last time we saw each other?

And even when he seemingly kind of answers correctly,

she knows it's not him.

And she's very, very upset.

And Dern is the best.

She is the best.

And then we have Cooper, just the way Cooper talks in his like creepy kind of like, hello, it's good to see you again.

You know, like, it's so

down, it sounds like, right.

Especially when he's behind the glass.

But you also, you already have the thing of him asking for his phone call and calling the number that makes the security system short circuit and then saying the Mr.

Strawberry thing that clearly like terrifies the warden.

You have this sense of like he has a plan for how to get out of here.

Of course.

Something about a strawberry.

Mr.

Strawberry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that's going along.

But very shortly shortly after the Diane conversation, where she says, like,

there's something missing here.

Yes.

That's not the same person.

Then Bad Coop, Mr.

C makes his very quiet escape, which is basically tells the guard to tell the warden he wants to talk about strawberry, goes in and says, like, I'm not going to talk about it, but I'm going to tell you what I'm not talking about.

Right.

And if you don't want me to talk about it more, that's the other part.

The fucking dog leg thing.

When they arrest him, they find the one dog leg in the car, and they're like, What the fuck is this?

And he's like, That dog leg wasn't coincidental.

There's three other legs.

I'll be sent to other people who know about you or whatever.

They will be sent if you don't release me.

And then he just drives away with his buddy.

Right.

Yeah.

Pretty weird,

uh, in my opinion.

No good.

Um,

and

what else do we have going on?

This, this is right.

This is where Ike the Spike, the um

is the strange little assassin, very normal assassin, Tries to kill

the other woman.

Yes.

Given the two photos.

Right.

Yeah.

And Dougie stops him by going into muscle memory.

Yeah.

At one point, the tree pops out and is like, squeeze his hand off.

Yes.

It's kind of cool.

But you also have the thing when he's assassinating the first woman and going through all the other people in the office who are witnesses.

Right.

Where he like bends his assassin spike.

Right.

He's got his, like,

what is it?

Is it like a letter opener or like an ice pick?

It's an ice pick.

Yeah, it's like an ice pick.

Exactly.

That's just like an innate wooden carved handle.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

We haven't talked about, I guess that's all the big stuff, right?

We haven't talked about like that most episodes end with a musical performance at the Roadhouse that wasn't disconnected.

Right.

And does feel a little like David Lynch playlist.

Like, here are some artists I like.

I I think that kind of is it, but there is also just this thing of like

we're seeing the townspeople, like we're seeing characters we know, we're also seeing characters we don't know who turn out to not matter.

Like, sometimes we're just sort of like in on a conversation for a minute between some girlfriends and we're like, who are these people?

And it's like, don't worry about it.

It's just like Twin Peaks kind of like chunders on, even though, like,

all these years have passed the deliberate disorientation of it's like training you out of trying to make this show conform to normal television narrative expectations, right?

Like you need to stop looking at every single thing as a clue.

There's a certain part of me that thinks, I mean, part of it is just him evolving as an artist and being interested in different things, right?

Yeah.

But there's the thing at the beginning of Firewalk with me where Lynch is literally like creating this like woman who does like a pantomime of clues that are meant to be like deciphered as to what the case is the thing with his yeah the interpretive dance woman i love her right that felt like him mocking people wanting to like solve twin peaks yes and

if you just look at the clues right it's all there rather than this doing the mocking it's like there are scenes in this that are in this just because i think they're interesting not all of this is like building to a codex yeah that you need to use to decipher it.

No, it's not.

I'm realizing something we haven't touched upon and we don't have have to spend that much time, but just the money that Dougie owes.

That whole little subplot where there are the two hitmen

who put a bomb under his car.

The kid explores it and you're like, the kid's going to blow up, and then he doesn't.

Instead, it's like carjackers get exploded.

And then Jeremy Davies.

Who's that?

Jeremy Davies, one of our twitchiest actors, was Faraday on Lost and was in Saving Private ryan and he's the one with the crazy hair who goes to meet her at the playground to get the money

yeah yeah nice yeah yeah

just popping in the naomi watts performance was just so good but her fucking monologue where she convinces these guys to accept her terms right again just force of nature kind of stuff and the same thing happens with the um investigators who come to check in on the exploded car at dougie's office

where she's able to just talk these people down, but she's also able to like weirdly contextualize Dougie.

You know,

he can say his two elusive things and people are like, what the fuck?

And then she comes in, she's like, you don't understand what our life is like.

The other scene that is unbelievable, I mean, I should say the other scene, a scene we have not talked about that is unbelievable is Dougie coming into his boss with all the folders where he's done the doodles.

And his boss is like, how am I supposed to make sense of this?

And Dougie just repeats, make sense of this.

And then he looks at it.

And this guy gives this fucking unbelievable performance, checking the notes back, and it dawning on him, like, oh my God, it all makes sense.

And it's a great lynching.

What happens over and over again?

He doesn't explain what has now become clear to him.

Yeah.

But he's like, this is a stuff.

He's just someone

who sit down and think about things.

He drew a staircase moving from one line down to the other.

Right.

And now I see these things so clearly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I feel like I.

So now that I've gone through these episodes, before episode eight, we really are just completely grasping in the darkness.

Yes.

Like, if you're, if you're watching this show, you understand that evil Cooper is out there and you understand that good Cooper is kind of trapped in this body.

You also are beginning to understand that the show is definitely not just going to be about sheriffs and deputies and Twin Peaks solving mysteries.

Yes.

But you don't really know anything else about what the fuck is going on long term in this show.

No.

I guess it's just like it's a lot of plot lines,

but even some of them, you're like, I don't see where they're, how they're tying into other stuff.

Right.

You're just kind of like, I guess we're just fucking Las Vegas.

Right.

Like, what's this going to be?

Yeah.

And then that's

probably just by design, obviously.

But it does mean that episode eight, which is not like an episode that explains what's been happening,

but why it hits in this kind of crystal way where you're like, suddenly it's like a mission statement episode about this season and this show.

Okay.

And like Bob and like

what's at the core of Twin Peaks.

And it feels like Lynch and Frost doing that more than they do.

Like, it's kind of what you're talking about, but it's not really about like Native American, you know, sort of heritage or anything.

It's a little bit of that.

You'll see.

You haven't seen it.

No, I haven't seen it.

Do you know anything about it?

I know it's the atomic bomb episode.

Right.

So you know that.

Look, I was, I was, unlike now when I am healthy and good and in control, I was way too online at the time that this show was airing.

And so, I just remember reading so many fucking tweets of like live watching and immediate responses.

I was very fascinated by just watching people talk about the show.

Right.

Not in like a spoiler sense.

I wasn't reading like full

people floundering trying to recap it.

Yeah.

But just the sort of like, holy shit.

of like Wally Brando or whatever.

I remember that episode seeing the wave of people being like, David Lynch just like rewrote the rules of television.

This episode changes everything.

Not just within Twin Peaks, but like this medium.

Yeah.

And I feel like you've talked about this, but that

this was a point in time where it felt like TV is in some transitional stage.

Is it about to evolve into something much more interesting?

And it feels like we've gotten stuck in an absolute dead end of television.

And it's partly because nobody actually gets to make TV like David Lynch got to make this.

Yeah.

Like most people aren't being given a true blank check by a network of like, yeah, it can be as long as you want with as many people as you want.

Yeah.

Here's another thing.

I was talking to my brother, James Newman, past and future guest, about a prestige TV show he is watching that is similarly directed by one auteur filmmaker.

Uh-huh.

And was complaining that he's like, this really just feels like he couldn't figure out how to edit the script down to a movie.

Like one episode episode ends because an hour is up, and the next episode starts immediately where the last episode ended.

And they're just credits tacked on to the beginning and end of every hour.

Like, what are we even doing here?

And as much as he did not design these as like separate episodes in the scripting stage or the shooting stage, it sounds like.

And as much as it's not like each episode resolves its own thematic concerns, each episode does, in these first seven, at least, and I know eight's going to be very much its own thing.

Sure.

Each episode does feel like a piece, it's really well done in that way.

This doesn't just feel like a fucking it doesn't end abruptly.

I think that's one of the musical performances really help with that as well, and sort of like decompressing you.

But there's like a painting

editing and construction, and sort of rhythm and flow, and mood, and tone of these things.

Where I'm like, what I like about it is that it doesn't feel like he's trying to do a movie as much as he maybe talks about it that way.

You know, and I'm sure if you watch all 18 hours straight through and you cut the credits out, maybe it plays differently.

But I'm like, I think these things have inherent value as one-hour chunks.

I know the first four were aired as two two-hour chunks, but like all of this.

Yeah.

It works in whatever form.

Trying to find like the ratings.

I know that's kind of not that helpful.

I did see on the Wikipedia there was the

hyperlink to the deadline piece of the first

episode, not living up to expectations.

Right.

I mean, it's like a funny article to read where they're like, much higher expectations for the return of a whole

debut for Twin Peaks.

Yeah.

Okay.

I have found that article.

Okay.

Can you just find got a point to in the demo?

Any ratings list from that?

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to look for here.

Deadline's not exactly the most useful on this front.

There's just not anyone that keeps like a clean database of this stuff.

That's weird because in every other sense, the Nielsen ratings make perfect sense.

Are flawed.

It's another thing Conan talked about recently on an episode where he would be like,

we realize like that the demo fluctuating for us would be like six people with Nielsen boxes at one in the morning, like just not turning their TV on that day.

Like it was such the sample was so small.

It is insane that for decades, the way television success was measured was they would just randomly write to certain people and be like, congratulations, you've been selected to choose, to receive a new box.

And by the way, you have to keep a detailed diary of what you're watching and when and which member of your family is watching it.

And then they'd get the reporting back from those people on honor system that they were reporting things accurately.

And they would extrapolate from that.

Well, if 30% of the families we sent boxes to are doing this, it probably means 30% of America is watching the same thing.

That's that's how they did it.

It's insane.

Makes no sense.

And now we have all of our television in a way that is very easy to track.

Like you can get hard-ass data, and all the companies are like, we're not really

seconds watched over years.

All right, maybe this is something.

Just give me something.

All I ask is these broken websites.

Jesus Christ.

uh interactive tv ratings database help me out here please please help the man out you know what we're just doing the top 10 shows of 2017 right now i'll think of other things maybe if i can find them later but uh twin peaks didn't crack this sadly

um and i'm you know it's kind of annoying what the number one show of 2017 was it's kind of annoying well because it's just sunday night football it's always annoying when it's just that that's very annoying but all right but what's number two number two is it the big band-running the

big bang theory yeah okay what's number three newer procedural drama i think just recently ended its run blue bloods no that is not on the top 10 is it an ncis no is it a chicago no it's not part of a series it's it's a total standalone yeah and it just ended yeah it just ended at its seventh season this is its first season Weird.

It's not the good doctor.

It is the good doctor.

It's the good doctor.

That was the number three show on TV.

It was huge.

He was a good doctor.

Yeah.

This is another fascinating thing.

That show was huge.

It obviously, like, you know, its peak was early, but it stayed big.

The financials of television are so fucked that the show ended season seven basically because they were like, it is impossible for this show to stay profitable.

Right.

Like the old systems in place of how much actors get raises the longer shows go on and when they have to renegotiate contracts.

They're now at like a perfect like sort of bottleneck of the show is so successful that they can't argue that there isn't room to give them raises.

But also, if they give them raises, the show no longer makes money because the value of a show is so dispersed now.

Speaking of, and like every year, just fucking ad sales money goes down.

Anyway, go on.

Number four, spin-off of a sitcom.

Young Sheldon?

Young Sheldon.

Sheldon Burlington.

Also, recently in that.

Yeah, finally did.

Now there's a spin-off that people think is problematic, man.

Zeygoat Sheldon.

No, it's Sheldon's

brother-in-law.

Oh, boy.

I'm not kidding.

It's Sheldon's sister's first marriage.

Georgie and Mandy's first marriage.

Jesus.

Okay.

Number five.

See something.

Big running show.

Procedural.

You've already mentioned it.

I have.

Is it Blue Bloods?

Nope.

Is it

N Law and Order?

Nope.

Is it Mothership NCIS?

It is Mothership Original Brand NCIS.

Market Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Which now they're doing a prequel show about young Mark Harmon.

Good.

Yeah, great.

Is it just NCIS Origins?

You're right.

Yep.

Starring Austin Stowell.

It's navel.

They do navel crimes.

It's a Jag spin-off.

People forget that NCIS is a spin-off of the show.

Jag.

I never forget.

I know you don't.

I know you don't.

Jag.

Jag, which was one of those shows when I was a kid where I was like, this is just like for grown-ups

who are boring.

That's what that show is.

There was like a run of like two or three years on SNL where sketches kept making references to catherine bell from jag as like the hottest woman in the world like they used her as like placeholder hot woman she was hot where i was a clearly one writer at snl has a huge thing yeah this keeps coming up number six uh big uh drama that was a big hit big buzzy drama network drama are you being facetious no is it uh the good wife nope

bigger than that yeah Way bigger.

Yeah.

Buzzy.

And it's ended since?

Yeah.

Where was it in its life at this point?

It would have been.

I don't need hard numbers.

Just give me kind of like.

This is the end of its first season, I think.

Oh, wow.

So this was the start.

It ran for six seasons.

Is it how to get away with murder?

No.

Is it a Shonda?

Nope.

It's not, it doesn't take.

It's not.

Within Shonda Land?

No.

Well, don't get angry.

I think that's a fair question.

It's not my fault you need to poop again.

I don't, actually.

It went away.

What a twist, much like Twin Peaks of Return.

Sometimes you think, I feel guaranteed that a thread.

All right.

We'll come back.

I don't even know why we're doing number six.

We We don't usually do that.

We're going to eight this time.

Number six.

It just ended.

It was buzzy.

This was season one.

Yeah.

Was it an Emmy player as well?

Yeah.

It won Emmy.

What network was it on?

NBC.

It was the rare, yes, yes.

The rare network drama that actually was like an awards player.

Bad show, I think, but lots of good acting and crying.

Anytime I would just read a headline about like shocking twists in this week's This Is Us, and I'd click the deadline for the explanation.

I'm like, I swear to you, every twist on this show is you're introduced to a character.

And at the end of the the episode, they revealed that character is related to something that is, I think, what the show kept doing.

Was a different character at a different age.

Right.

Yeah.

That man just loves the like, oh, well, of course, you're a bunch of uh disconnected characters that have nothing to do with each other.

Twist, they're married.

That's not a tweet.

You're just telling us stuff in the wrong order.

Number seven is a reality competition program.

It's not American Idol.

The voice.

Nope.

No.

Is it hmm?

Dancing with the stars?

Nope.

Survivor?

Nope.

America's Got Talent.

America's Got Talent.

Okay.

Kind of the one people forget about, but was obviously a big deal.

It still is.

And number eight is the only cable show on the top 10.

Walking Dead.

Correct.

Which was a phenomenon unlike any other in terms of right.

It was a basic cable show that did network hit numbers.

It was crazy.

They still have like new off-spin.

Yeah, now it's like Walking Dead.

The one time they went down this road at that point.

These three characters are there.

What do they do?

I don't.

They fucking fight zombies, bro.

It's always the same shit.

What do you think they do?

They're like fine.

They're dirty.

They're fine.

Atlanta.

Yes.

I think there's one that is Walking Dead, Colin, Daryl, Colin Harris.

Yes.

That's what I'm saying.

Like, it's literally becoming just kind of like these two characters.

But wasn't Fear the Walking Dead created for like eight seasons?

I know.

Yeah.

And I watched at least two of them.

I was kind of into that show.

I mean, it had an incredible cast.

Yeah, fucking Ken Dickens and Coleman Domingo.

Ruben Blattis.

Yes.

Cliff Curtis.

That show was like day one, right?

It was like, this is like Boots on the Ground, the start.

That was taking you back to the start with new people.

Yes.

Right.

And then they did a show that was like Latchkey Kids in the Middle.

Yeah.

Is that World Beyond?

I think.

And then now there's like.

I don't know, man.

There's one that was like a Negan spin-off, right?

With Lauren Cohen and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Yeah.

There was one that was Daryl.

That one's still going, I think.

And then there's the one that's, you know, Rick and Michon

doing their own kind of thing where they just like, fuck.

But they're all like now filling in different timeline guys.

I don't.

I don't know.

Like, that's the simple fact of the matter.

Maybe Dossier.

I have no idea.

Maybe Dossier for next episode.

Maybe JJ.

Just to fill us in on the chronology of The Walking Dead and its seven spin-offs.

Yeah, the other shows in the top ten are Another Day of America's Got Talent and Bull.

Bull.

Remember Bull?

Bull.

Is it still on?

No, I think ended.

Bull had a lot of it.

Just ended.

Just ended.

Had a lot of lawsuits around it that it survived, but it finally ended.

Yeah, it was certainly surrounded.

No, not just.

It ended in 2022.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

there you go.

There you go.

But yeah, just crazy to think about the good doctor.

We will be talking about...

Look, the number one takeaway from this, our episode on the first seven chapters of Twin Peaks of Return is that it's crazy to think about the good doctor.

What if a doctor was good?

And Conan, you know, give it a rest, man.

You've had a great career.

No, I'm joking.

We love you, Conan.

Come on the show, Conan.

Come on, make some friends.

Maybe the podcast format's not how you're going to make friends.

Maybe go to a bar, bring a book with you, wait for someone to strike up a conversation.

No, and say he's got to talk to Jack White.

Yeah, I bet that one's going to bear fruit.

Look, hey, Conan,

is old he doesn't have space in his life for you to be his friend you've known jack white for like 20 years if you were going to become friends it would have happened by now you've done a bunch of projects together and you're not friends it's so funny how it was initially him like i'm talking to interesting people and now it's like sorry here you have a tv show i mean

obviously it's not a book

originally was do i have friends who aren't in show business and are show business friends real i'm gonna have people on who i have a history with right and interrogate are we actually friends right and then after 20 episodes it just became the WTF, right?

Two.

WTF two.

Yeah.

To be clear, we both enjoy the show.

I love it.

I listen to it every week, and it's really well done.

Although,

can I throw out a complaint?

It's a sloppy feed.

Sure.

It's one of those things where

Cono Brian needs a friend.

It's basically now composed of four different shows.

But did she listen to him and Jordan Schlansky at each other's throats for an hour?

It's really fun.

It's great, but I'm also having a hard time keeping track of like, yeah.

Because there's Conan Bryan needs a friend, friend.

Conan Bryan needs a fan.

Then the campfire ones.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They had the Carvey ones, which then I guess basically kind of indirectly turn into flying holes.

It's like the Walking Dead.

It's like the Walking Dad.

Join us next week for episode eight of Twin Peaks the Richard.

Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Thank you to Marie Barty for helping to produce the show, A.J.

McKeon for editing and being our production coordinator, J.J.

Birch for our research, Leigh Montgomery and the Great American novel for our theme song.

You can go to blankcheckpod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, where we are finishing up our series on Andrew Lloyd Weber, leading up to a big end-of-year cat's bash.

Angelic Ball, if you will.

So check that out.

And as always, Ernie Hudson, 78, still looking hot as hell.