Twin Peaks: Las Vegas - Episode 4 is a Shaggy Dog Story

Welcome back to Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, my “reviews” of the imaginary Twin Peaks spin-off sitcom! 

This week in Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, the Joneses get a new dog, and Janey-E isn’t having it!

If the opening scene with that giant hairy dog just sitting there at the feet of the lawman statue didn’t melt your heart there’s something wrong with your heart. I loved that dog immediately. And when Dougie walks up next to him and checks for a collar, I didn’t want that dog to be with anyone but the Joneses. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see the dog bound into the house and immediately be taken with Sonny Jim.
You can tell Sonny Jim loves him immediately. And you can also tell the dog loves him immediately. Sonny Jim and Dougie’s excited chatter about their new friend was really endearing too, but then Janey-E comes home. The dog stands on her shoulders he looks like he’s in love. And the five seconds of “What is going on” that was all over Janey-E’s face was solid comedy leading up to the neighbors-definitely-heard-that “Dooouuuuuggggggiiiiiieeeee!”
Next thing we see is the dog is at the vet with the family. Because, as Janey-E was telling us, he “at least needs his shots before the mongrel finds another home. It’s the responsible thing to do.” There wasn’t much comedy here since it was furthering the dilemma of the episode, but there was the glaring fact no one was saying anything about: the vet is the same actor who plays Dougie’s doctor, and I swear he was even wearing the same uniform. And after that doctor declares the dog in good health as well as microchip-free, we see everyone look at Janey-E.
Hard cut to the next morning. Sonny Jim goes to school. Dougie goes to work. And Janey stays at home, with the dog. Who wags his tail whenever he sees her. She takes him all over in the car looking for a new home. He thinks it’s a grand adventure, but it’s only so Janey-E can pawn him off on somebody which she cheerfully tells him is because her house needs to stay free of dog hair.
She takes the dog to the Pink Girls first, and it was great how they exploded like young girls meeting a teen idol in person. Mandie’s "goo-goo ga-ga" baby talk was especially endearing, as was Candie running in with a cereal bowl (ready to be turned into a water bowl) in her outstretched hand like it was an Olympic torch. I think the girls were going to give the dog a hairstyle if not for the arrival of the Mitchums and their kyboshing of the whole situation. Rod being allergic to dogs is a cop out as far as I’m concerned but I’ll allow it since Janey-E had to go through a number of dead-end options for the episode's drama.
She calls Phil on the phone (and we get his first lines!) “Sorry Mrs. Jones, but I can’t have dogs in my apartment or I’d be thrown out on the spot.” It’s not much of Phil, but it was so good for the heart hearing him today. It’s pretty fitting we get more of his presence in the episode that introduces the dog too. They’re kindred spirits if anyone in this extended cast could be.
Janey-E also calls two friends, one she calls Beth and someone else who goes unnamed. It’s good to see she has friends even If they’re only voices on the other end of the line so far.
Everyone has their excuses for why the dog has to stay with Janey-E, so she drives up to the pound with her happy co-pilot who frolicked through the parking lot on their way in. This dog was tugging on my heartstrings the entire length of the show. I’m a big softy and I didn’t want him to go in there at all, but it was all worth it when we saw that floating dream bone image over the crate’s lock. The crate's door opened up when the dog tried to get the imaginary bone and then the dog hopped right out. This is the strangest show but how can you not love it?
It’s great to see the dog’s head from the car's back window as he's running behind the car and Janey-E tries out random stories she could tell her menfolk about what happened to their "lost" dog. And it was a dramatic moment of genius to not show the dog’s head again when she turns the car onto a new street, as if maybe she lost him for real. By they time she’s home, Janey-E’s acting slightly conflicted. She opens the back door of the house and practices her speech. “Good heavens! The dog must’ve gotten out! I drove everywhere to look for him but couldn’t find him anywhere!” And like clockwork the dog walks right past her and flops on the living room carpet.
She lets the dog stay because Sonny Jim arrived then, and asks her "Can we keep him?"
She says in absolute terms "This dog will fit into SOMEONE’s family well, but not ours."
But then it’s later on, nearing the end of dinner. The guys head over to the couch for dessert and the dog flops down with them, making a pile. By the time she’s done setting up the trays, she looks back in while making her menfolk plates, and she looks like she realizes something.
She serves sonny Jim his ice cream and cake. She serves Dougie his ice cream and cake. She skritches the dog on the head. Goofball credits music.

Overall Thoughts
The dog is adorable. The soulful eyes and the giant tongue and the shaggy everything is almost too much. An animal can't fake that kind of happiness, either. I'm surprised his butt waggle hasn't been turned into a gif yet like Corgis, but it's only a matter of time.
I’m glad Janey got to appreciating her menfolk together like that and realizing that the dog was part of the loveable oddball family already. Her hijinks were massively entertaining, and despite her actions I don’t think she’s a mean-spirited lady. She just has trouble adjusting when something comes up she’s not expecting. She gets focused on her own stuff fairly easily, same as it ever was, and concern over a clean house made her tunnel-vision until she couldn't help but notice the love in the room. She’s still majorly entertaining if myopic. And she worked with the dog really well. A big shaggy thing like that standing on her shoulders, it’s amazing it didn’t drop her. Janey-E is physically a powerhouse too.
I don’t know who Beth and Janey’s other friend is but I’m glad to know she has a larger life than whatever she does at the house (which the show is strangely vague about, now that I think about it). It’s also telling that Janey called Phil…he’s definitely a friend of the family. Which makes me really happy.
This was definitely a Janey-E-centric episode, and an origin story for the dog, but the best standout moments were with Sonny Jim and the dog. A Boy and His Dog is a major thing with these two, you can tell already. Or at least I sure hope it is.

(Original edition published 8/19/2018)

Twin Peaks: Las Vegas - Episode 3 Defuses Lawsuits and Makes Friends

Welcome back to Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, my “reviews” of the imaginary Twin Peaks spin-off sitcom! 

This week on Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, Dougie needs to help the Mitchums when Ex-Supervisor Burns returns with court papers, and Sonny Jim thinks maybe his family is too weird

Burns Returns
This episode starts with the establishing shot for the Silver Mustang before cutting inside, where Ex-Supervisor Burns storms through the rows of slot machines. It’s all very dramatic and comical as Floor Attendant Jackie ushers him as best she can over to Supervisor Warrick. We then see a cut to Warrick handing these papers to the Mitchums.

“Now we gotta kill him!?”
“Bradley, I think we can get through this.”
“Yeah! We have to kill him!”
“No, Bradley, I have a different idea.”

And then it cuts to Sonny Jim and his friend playing video games in the living room while Dougie sits near them in an absurdly still way. After half a minute Dougie gets up and walks towards the kitchen. Sonny Jim’s friend glances at Dougie, acts disgusted and says “Is there anybody IN there?” Then, “Dude, Jimmy, I think we’ll just play over skype next time, okay?” And then “I feel bad for you. This house creeps me the hell out.”
The camera stays with Sonny Jim and his friend while in the other room we hear a knock at the door, then female voices (one of them Janey-E) excitedly and loudly chatter. Dougie, who is walking back down the hall and about to take a bite out of a sandwich, gets enveloped by the Pink Girls and they pull him out of frame. Sonny Jim’s unnamed friend, who didn’t look at any of those interactions says “weird as hell, man. You gotta get out of here.” Sonny Jim doesn’t respond with words then either, but you can tell he’s thinking about it. The camera follows him as he goes to grab sodas from the fridge, and on the way he meets Phillip Gerard (projected through curtains over the sink window) who asks him “si ruoy rehtaf emoh?” with the best comic timing of the episode.
Before we figure out this is a Sonny Jim-centric episode, we move over to Dougie in the Mitchum’s office. Supervisor Burns is seen on the floor monitor, arms crossed and pouting.
The Mitchum dialogue is great:

“Dougie, we have a problem.”
“We need your particular set of skills.”
“We need this guy to mellow the fuck out, Dougie.”
“Candie, take Dougie down there to Burns.”

Their dialogue is rapid-fire and soon to be classic, and as Dougie is taken to Burns we get their faces, implying they’re wordlessly asking each other if they think this is going to work or not at varying levels of nervous confidence. We then cut to the monitor, where Burns is gesturing wildly and pointing at Dougie who is now walking towards him. Because of course he remembers Mr. Jackpots. This is good stuff.
We get the establishing shot of the Silver Mustang next, with the sun going down. Then it goes back into the Mitchums’ office where they’re positively nervous nellies. Candie brings Dougie back in and there’s more fun interaction:

Dougie: “HE’s high strung.”
Brad: “What did he say before he left.”
Dougie: “He’s clearly upset.”
Rod: “Is he going to drop it?”
Dougie: “He’s a really mad guy.”
Brad: “What’d he say before he left??”
Candie (unable to contain excitement anymore): “They have a coffee date!” And then, with love oozing out of her delivery, “Cappuccinos!”

We get another hard cut, this time to Janey-E and Dougie, in bed a la 80s sitcom staging, and some overdramatic line reading: “I’m going to have to go away for a while, Janey-E. Bradley and Rodney need me. They’ve let Mr. Mullins know, and I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but I’ve got to put out a fire.” They discuss a little more but once Janey-E gets over the news, she ends the scene with “As long as you’re my fireman first,” and a growl. They're a cute couple for sure.

Sonny Jim acts his age
The next day, we see Sonny Jim at school, talking to his friend about maybe doing something else after school at the friend’s house. You could tell Sonny Jim was uncomfortable doing it but he was probably rattled enough by the afternoon before that maybe his friend was right. To be fair, getting a surprise visit from Phillip would probably freak anybody out, even a son of Dougie Jones. Sonny Jim’s friend was happy to hear the news and the next thing we see is them playing video games together in a room with superhero movie posters all over the walls. They really look like they’re having fun, and before the scene’s over a song kicks in like in a Wes Anderson movie for the third montage in as many episodes.
The montage scene breakdown goes like this:

• Sonny Jim’s outside with his friend. A Frisbee lands at his feet, then he grabs it and runs towards other kids their age.
• Sonny Jim’s at what looks like a school lunch table, with four other kids and they’re all talking to each other happily.
• Sonny Jim’s at a Dave and Busters-style arcade place with the same kids.
• They’re at a coffee shop, where Sonny Jim notices Dougie and Burns at a table. Dougie and Sonny Jim see each other, but Sonny Jim looks away like he doesn’t want to be noticed. Dougie looks a little stunned.
• The montage song ends as it comes out into a bowling alley, which almost has to be a Big Lubowski reference but I can’t prove it.

In the bowling alley, we see the Mitchums shaking hands with Burns, and they’re all wearing the same bowling shirts as Phil, Bushnell, Dougie and Green Tea Latte Frank. While Bradley picks up a ball and heads down the lane, we see Janey-E and Sonny Jim come in to celebrate getting their father back from his mission. Burns comes over and tells them “Dougie Jones is a good man and you’re lucky to have him.” Janey-E beams, grabs her man by the arm, and Sonny Jim acts embarrassed. Then it cuts to the Joneses at an ice cream parlor. They’re halfway through their cups of ice cream when Sonny Jim notices his new friends come in the door. Janey-E says “They're your friends? You should say hi to them!” and Dougie says “It’s all right, Sonny Jim.” And he smiles. I get the impression Janey-E didn’t know anything about the awkward exchange her menfolk had, but Dougie seemed genuinely happy about Sonny Jim having friends.
After some hesitation we see Sonny Jim walk over to his friends while the camera stayed back where the Joneses were sitting. Sonny Jim does fist bumps and other greeting moves with some of the kids, and they all seem happy to see him. But then he waves bye to everyone and comes back to his family’s table. And he gives Dougie a hug right there in public. Janey-E gushes and says “I wish I could take that picture!” and Sonny Jim says “Moooom” and we slowly cut to credits. A sweet damn moment.

Overall Thoughts
I was not expecting to see a Sonny Jim story like this, especially with Burns starting the episode. The Joneses have been so insular it was hard to imagine what Sonny Jim was like outside of his role as son. He seems like a good kid, and right where he should be for that 12-years-old range. It was good to see him making friends and being a kid in another way that playing on the jungle gym by himself.
It was also nice to see a Dougie plot happen behind the scenes too. We’ve seen him be a good influence on people since we met him so we didn’t need to see the same thing happen yet again with Burns in order to believe something like the bowling outcome was anything but inevitable.
Sonny Jim meeting Phillip Gerard was played in such a slapstick way was great for the laughs but that’s pretty interesting on a few fronts. First of all, it’s not just Dougie who can see Gerard, and secondly that means Gerard isn’t done with Dougie after Season 3. No idea where this could go, but the choice to keep Gerard in the series is a choice I wasn’t expecting at all. It’s a sitcom though, so maybe it’ll just be a subversion of the wacky neighbor trope. It’s tough to say with the sense of humor of this show. All I know is I love it and I want to see more of this guy.
And more of Green Tea Latte Frank too! It was great to see that happy guy. I’m getting kind of frustrated that Phil Bisby keeps being underused but when has trying the viewer’s patience not been a thing with Twin Peaks? And really, if that’s my worst nitpick, that’s not a bad viewing experience. As for the new character, I can’t tell if Sonny Jim’s friend is a good character or not but his reactions to the Joneses were pretty funny. If they keep him around hopefully he’ll get to accept them all, otherwise he’ll start coming off insufferable. Either way, until he gets an official name I'm calling him Chad.
“Cappuccinos!” was the best line of the episode, and Burns really stole the show with his goofy reactions, but the Mitchums prove their strength with their back and forth dialogue. I hope they’re around quite a bit in the episodes to come. And even though it was pure silliness, my favorite image from this show was everyone bowling in their shirts. It gave me a nostalgic Flintstones vibe, and if they had an entire episode in the bowling alley one day you would never hear me complain. and maybe they could get Gerard on the team. Can't you just imagine that guy in bowling shoes?
Until next time, let's meet down the street for cappuccinos.

(Original edition published 8/5/2018)

Twin Peaks: Las Vegas - Dougie Needs A Good Night's Sleep in Episode 2

Welcome back to Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, my “reviews” of the imaginary Twin Peaks spin-off sitcom! 

This week on Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, Dougie's bad dreams are effecting his work and it's up to Sonny Jim and Janey-E to help him get better sleep.

This review is going to feel a lot more like a standard recap because, unlike last episode, everything happens at the Jones house except for the one montage in the middle where we see Dougie at work as well as at home. The episode also exclusively follows one problem that needs solving: Dougie’s bad dreams are making him lose sleep and it makes him look like he’s having one of his episodes. But Janey-E knows this is different than his normal episodes, and so does Bushnell Mullins.
And yes, I HAVE seen all the Concerned Face Bushnell memes that have popped up. It makes me happy that he struck such a nerve with the audience, but instead of going over a list of my favorite people and things he’s worried about according to the internet, I’m going to stick to what he said in the show: “I’m going to tell it to you straight, Mrs. Jones: I’m concerned about your husband.” Such a great line-read. So glad it’s a classic already.

Bushnell makes a house call
Even though the show starts with Sonny Jim playing on his backyard jungle gym, the first word (just like last episode) is from Janey-E, who is inside calling him to answer the door. And the camera follows behind Sonny Jim as he gets off the gym and walks through the house to answer the door before zooming into that now-classic closeup of Bushnell as he asks to speak to Sonny Jim’s father, then patiently waits, then patiently waits some more, and then asks if his mother is home.
SO much waiting here, for Janey-E and then for Dougie. So much calling out. So many variations of “Dougie!” and “It’s Bushnell Mullins!” and “Dougie it’s your BOSS!” as Janey-E gets more and more frustrated before they all walk through the house on a quest until they find him asleep in the living room. It was trying my patience but then it skewed into really funny because it was trying the characters patience WAY more than mine.
Asleep sitting-up Dougie had a strange look. He was almost straight up and down on that chair except for his head with his chin nested into his chest, not even noticing the TV that was on in front of him. Seems like he should have been snoring like crazy but he wasn’t at all. Bushnell looked at Dougie and says, “It’s this sort of thing, he’s becoming unsafe. I worry about him driving,” and Dougie wakes up with the exclamation of “Pigeons and ducks!” that made everyone in the room jump.
Janey-E and Bushnell sit next to newly-awake Dougie just like Dougie was part of the conversation from the get-go, which leaves room for a ton of “where am I?” expressions on Dougie’s face while Bushnell asks him to tell Janey-E how Bushnell found him this morning. And Bushnell gets to explain the list of how many different ways he’d found Dougie asleep at work the past week that built to a point where it felt like Big Ed describing how he shot out Nadine’s eye. It was a really sweet scene overall, with Janey-E being maternal and Bushnell paternal towards their loveable lug, while in a nearby room Sonny Jim provided a backbeat of crunching as he eats from a bag of potato chips (though technically it could be his mom’s lettuce sandwiches, I assume with later developments it’s the chips).
Before Bushnell leaves he helps Janey-E get Dougie into bed, and then there’s a somewhat contrived “I hope Dad gets better” conversation between Janey-E and Sonny Jim that did a better job of explaining the stakes rather than pulling heartstrings. The scene abruptly ends with them both looking upstairs when Dougie screamed, then moves into the montage from here.

Five days in a minute and a half
Janey-E told Bushnell that Dougie was having trouble sleeping for 10 days, so add five more based on the number of separate shots of him in bed that are part of the montage, and we know Dougie’s been having rough sleep for over two weeks.
We see: Dougie asleep at his desk, on his keyboard, in the lunch room, on the photocopier, the glass wall, inside the elevator (with Phil Bisby bringing chairs and trying to help him into more comfortable positions in most of those moments), leaning up against his doctor during a checkup, in bed with wet towels on his forehead (three times), and Janey-E at his bedside close to tears (twice, and she’s so loveably overdramatic).
We hear: the most dramatic opera music I’ve heard not involving an exorcism. It almost makes you think there’s more at stake than a guy having a bad couple of weeks sleeping, but I guess that’s absurd comedy for you. Dougie’s obviously not doing too well but he’s really endearing to watch anyway, and I really hoped everyone would be able to help the guy.

The breakthrough
Going on and on to a sleeping Dougie about how out of sorts she is these days, Janey-E remembers she ran out of bread for everyone’s sandwiches (a Lucy-sized emergency!) and she calls in Sonny Jim right away to her bedroom. He runs in so quickly like something was really wrong that he’s still holding his game controller and giant potato chip bag.
Janey-E tells Sonny Jim he’s the man of the house now until she gets back, and then runs out the door, leaving Sonny Jim with a “what just happened” expression on his face. But you can tell he loves his dad and he sits next to him on the bed waiting for the next time Dougie wakes up in a panic. Which of course he does almost right after Janey-E leaves. Dougie looks like a worried toddler, and Sonny Jim didn’t know exactly what to do so he offers his dad a potato chip. And in an endearing Charlie Chaplin movie kind of way, they end up eating a ton of that bag. There is barely any dialog between them, just a lot of love. You can tell the actors really get along well, and that the characters do too. Dougie calmed down enough that he patted Sonny Jim on the shoulder before he falls asleep again, and I thought that might be all Dougie needed to kick the problem but the bad dreams come back almost immediately.
Sonny Jim puts the wet towel on his dad’s head and sits with Dougie, but the only thing that worked is when he nervously ate a potato chip. And it worked the next time Dougie’s bad dreams come back too. Sonny Jim figured out the pattern just as Janey-E gets back home and pokes her head in the room. I laughed hard when her eyes narrow and we’re shown multiple extreme close-ups of the chip crumbs on the bed in progressively higher detail and size, but though she is obviously horrified, she figures out what the sound of the chips were doing for Dougie before she can even yell at Sonny Jim. By then there is nothing but love on her face and I could feel the relief inside me too.
When she takes that bag of chips and dismisses Sonny Jim for bed I actually almost cried. She knows what helped her husband, knows that her son needed sleep for the next day at school, and knows what she needed to do. She brushes some crumbs off the bed because she can’t help herself, and then reaches into that bag of chips when Dougie started acting upset. And she crunched on those chips until he settles down.
I got the impression she had to do that all night, because next scene is morning and Dougie wakes up with the biggest smile on his face and his arms outstretched. He looks great, and he’s happy! He is practically skipping he feels so much better. And when he leaves for work, a happy but exhausted Janey-E goes back upstairs. We hear but don’t see her collapse on the bed, and the scene cuts to credits.

Overall thoughts:
I LOVE that the sound of crunching was what Dougie needed. It’s not said out loud, but hearing someone nearby him seemed to be exactly what he needed, like a security blanket. As far as mysteries go, it was extremely low stakes, but as far as putting a family back in balance with each other, it was pretty sweet.
Sonny Jim is endearing as hell, and so is Phil Bisby (once again underused without any dialogue in the show), but Bushnell Mullins is the star of the week as he inches closer to the ranks of the all-time best TV dads list. He’s not there yet, but I at least think he’s already on the best TV boss list. And he worked well with Janey-E as well. More Bushnell in the show, please.
And for Dougie’s sake, I hope he NEVER eats anything on the bed.
I’m still not sure what to think about the goofy credits music, but I liked the overall vibe of the episode. It struck me like a one-act play, and the stakes were just about the right size for a half hour show. It showed a Jones family who loved each other, and their concerned support system showing the same. I can’t see exactly how it could figure into a giant overall arc, but characters interacting with each other and solving problems is pretty solid entertainment if they do it like this every week. Especially if it’s those characters every week. It’s official: I like visiting this Las Vegas.

(Original edition published 7/22/2018)

Twin Peaks: Las Vegas - Episode 1 Finds Its Top Gear

Welcome! You’ve stumbled upon my first “review” of the imaginary Twin Peaks spin-off sitcom, Twin Peaks: Las Vegas. The finale of Season 3 hurt. It really hurt. I needed something to laugh at, something healing. This, at long last, is the thing I needed. I hope this heals you like it is healing me. And I hope it makes you laugh, or at least smile. Smiling is good.

This week on Twin Peaks: Las Vegas, Janey-E talks Dougie into trying out for Nascar, and the Pink Girls take Sonny Jim on a nature study.

Breakfast with the Joneses
We jump right into the show as Janey-E looks fiercely into a mirror. I timed 8 seconds of silence before she momentums her way into her hysterical self-pep-talk about how “I deserve a life! A better life! In the fast lane! And my tiger can do this -- I’ve seen him drive, he can beat all of them! And he’d look so good on camera -- and so would I honestly though I’d need to straighten my hair and find a good rotation of three new pairs of shoes, let’s make sure to stop off at LuVonne’s on the way home -- that’s how confident I am that this is going to happen!”  And so on and so forth (and constantly adorable). Then she march-bounces downstairs with the camera following her all the way to where Sonny Jim and Dougie are eating lunch.
I love how Janey-E springs the You’re-Going-To-Drive-In-Nascar plan on Dougie and doesn’t even give him time to finish chewing his sandwich to answer (not answering must be a way of saying yes according to Janey-E) before she says “I know a guy” as if it’s already cleared to happen. Which of course it is because two scenes later we’re looking at Dougie behind the wheel of a genuine Nascar car. But we’re not there yet because through Janey-E’s entire kitchen monologue she’s also packing Sonny Jim’s backpack and shoving him out the door just before the Mitchum’s limo even honks their horn. It’s like Janey-E is tapped into something and the world’s just working for her. This is a good choice for her character in this new Pilot. Let it be known this show treats Janey-E like a force of nature.
A note about how the show is filmed: right up until Janey-E walks past the coffeemaker it appears to be done all in one take, which is impressive. With the upstairs, downstairs and the stairway included as it was (not to mention the street and limo seen from the front door), I think they’re filming the Jones house scenes on location in a real house.
As far as the rest of the show, I’ll talk about the Dougie and Sonny Jim halves of the episode one at a time rather than bouncing back and forth between them like we see it.

Dougie sure knows how to drive
Anyone following the rest of our site’s Season 3 analysis knows why Dougie would be driving the #9 car, but on this show no one makes a thing out of it at all, or even winks at it. I love how even as a sitcom Twin Peaks can work on multiple levels.
It was honest fun to see Dougie with the hefty racing gloves clamped onto the steering wheel, and Janey-E needing to help him get his helmet on correctly. Some things never change, even though Dougie does a better job acting like he’s an active participant.
It was an interesting choice to film the actual time trials from a fixed position, as if it’s from the crowd seats where no one turns their heads to follow the cars. The shot focused on the back half of the track, let the cars go through the frame until they’re off camera. We hear them rumble through the closest part of the track without seeing them, and eventually the cars came back in the shot at the back of the course.
I get that the show’s going for the theme of cycles and circles, and the sound design made it feel like we were in the seats, but why keep the camera so still? There was so much action happening on the track itself, but most of everything in frame was static. It took going to the crowd shot near the end of the scene before anything was filmed like an action sequence, and then it was only to see Dougie’s supporters be happy to cheer on Dougie while wearing ambiguous expressions as if maybe they didn’t know if Dougie did well enough to qualify for a real race or not.

Sonny Jim's great outdoors
Sonny Jim had a much more peaceful day out with the girls on their nature study (Candie, Sandie and Mandie, particularly standing out from the forest in their pink dresses), and I love how lush their hike scenes looked…the forest is different than the Pacific Northwest but no less beautiful.
The way Sandie spoke about all the flora and fauna around them, it sounded almost musical, and slightly comical because she’s describing all of this action yet we see such stillness around them. If you told me Candie’s random nonsequiters would not be the highlight of the scenes she’s in, I wouldn’t have believed you, but Sandie carried the forest scenes ridiculously easily.
I’m not sure how they’re planning on characterizing Sonny Jim in this show yet. The comedy that came from him was mostly reaction shots as he almost laughs every time Sandie interrupts him. You can tell Sonny Jim loves when people are passionate about things.
Did anyone else notice the shot of ducks on the lake followed the same kind of formula as the Nascar Track shot? If you noticed behind the picnic lunch scene, the ducks were actually swimming in a circle in and out of frame. Don’t know how they got the ducks to do that; almost wonder if they were somehow animatronic.
The last scene was late that night (after the sun had gone down at least). Janey-E and Dougie come in from the garage after their (what should have been) celebration meal, both acting stuffed to the gills. Dougie seemed non-plussed about not making a spot on the racing team, but Janey-E was still fluffing up his ego anyway (for her own benefit I assume). You could tell it revved her motor whether or not he could make a career out of that driving, and some of her innuendo was positively filthy, so we know she came to peace with the day’s outcome. A slower moving life will work for her just fine after all, it seems.
And before it veered too far in that direction, the knock on the door led to one of the more endearing moments of the episode when Bradley Mitchum carries a fast-asleep Sonny Jim from the car to the boy’s bedroom. Janey-E got to tuck him in, she and Dougie got to share a really sweet look, and as soon as the men exchange thumbs-ups and Bradley turns to leave, Janey-E looks up at Dougie and her expression changes from mom to tiger. Cut to credits, and the most Yakkity-Sacks-inspired music I’ve heard in a long time.

Overall Thoughts
This pilot was character-based like any good sitcom, but it feels like it doesn’t just want to be a sitcom. The whole show hits me in an Arrested Development way of bringing humor out of absurdity, but it all still has the look of paintings on the screen. Maybe it’ll look less that way as the scenes won’t always be outside in nature (though for Sandie’s sake I hope they get some time outside so she can rhapsodize again), but based on how they filmed the outside of the house I think this show is going to be gorgeous the whole way through.
And before you ask, I have no idea why the Jones house’s mailbox was focused on for so long. Maybe it’s foreshadowing for the future, but it might just be a statement on an old system like snail mail, or maybe the shot could just be there for mood. There’s lots of reasonable answers so let’s just wait and see before we turn it into a theory on life. If it comes to nothing, though, it’d be weird they left it in the show with all the other stuff going on. We could’ve had another Sandie monologue about a different kind of butterfly (or something) to go along with her take on squirrel hibernation.
Sandie and Janey-E were obviously the standouts, but Phil Bisby (who wasn’t given a single line the whole show) deserves a mention for getting into the spirit next to Bushnell, Janey-E and Sonny Jim in the Nascar stands during the time trials montage. And his prop is a classic already: the mustard yellow pennant with the lime green letters (D and J) was as glorious as it was hideous. I expect to see that for sale in the Showtime store one of these days, and I think I would even buy it when it gets there.
A lot happens in this first episode (Dougie’s entire Nascar audition and Sonny Jim’s full day of nature study, all over the course of the half hour), but it doesn’t feel like much of anything happens in this pilot.  Not sure what to make of this, other than there’s a blatant repetition (whether it’s in camera angles, or specifically mentioned in dialog) that says “slow down” (my favorite of these being Dougie obeying the Yield sign on the way to the audition and Janey-E saying “oh come on”).
The only thing I don’t know about is that credits song. It’s goofy as hell but somehow not entirely incongruous. It could grow on me, or I could end up hating it. A truly confusing choice however you look at it. But I’ll take the show’s advice and not jump to conclusions about it.
When I heard the topic of this episode involved race cars, I was skeptical at first, but it turned out to be a cute show based around people who love each other. I’ll take this little burst of compassion in a TV landscape otherwise filled with anti-heroes and monsters. Not sure where the dramatic tension will come from (though I suspect it’ll mostly be from misunderstandings), but for a pilot it introduced us to a status quo I’m happy to return to.

(Original edition published on 7/8/2018)

My Earthquake Theory - The Secret History of Twin Peaks

The BBC Science Hour played a segment within weeks of Secret History’s release with Geologist Ross Stein, who was explaining the system of fault lines that were creating the large number of earthquakes suddenly wreaking havoc across towns in Italy.

In the specific situation Stein spoke of, he said the tectonic plate Italy called home was being compressed until about a million years ago. Now it’s being stretched so its faults are trying to figure out how to do something different than it was born to do and they’re reorganizing.

He said the lines were “little broken shards of faults that haven’t been organized by repeated earthquakes into a long continuous smooth fault, so that means if you jostle one faultline, you tend to move the others around it, and no one fault is able to rupture for a very long distance and produce a very large earthquake, so we get these little groups or families of moderate sized events.”

He also explained that aftershocks happen randomly over time, but the magnitude of release does not strengthen or weaken over time. It’s more likely to have earthquakes hours apart than years apart but there’s still that possibility. All these earthquakes are part of a conversation between faults.

The continued danger after an earthquake are aftershocks, and there will be aftershocks.  They are generally smaller than the first shock but sometimes aftershocks are bigger. When this happens, the semantical trick the scientists use for their terminology is that the largest shock is considered a Main Shock, while smaller quakes that contribute to the main shock are now called foreshocks. Faultlines that have been loaded by any shock at all are closer to fail than they were before these events began.

 

Looking specifically at Secret History, reread everything Stein just said but instead of “faultline”, substitute with the name of someone who’s had an interaction with the lodge. And every time you hear “earthquake” substitute with “timequake.”

Every time one of us meets a lodge denizen, or we reach into one another’s worlds, our realities scrape against each other at a proverbial faultline and it becomes charged. Enough meetings like that, and the line between our realities will slip and a reality quake shakes up time.

I’d have to say the original main shock in Twin Peaks, and the reason I’m so keen on this earthquake metaphor in the first place, occurred when (fire-based) volcanic activity in the Twin Peaks area formed Blue Pine and White Tail mountains. Deer Meadow Radio’s Mark Givens is fond of mentioning the Michner-style book Frost wanted to write as early as 1990 that would begin with the formation of the mountains and focus on the weird electrical energy that settled between them, so I feel good saying this was on Frost’s mind the entire time he was writing Secret History.

So what do the shocks do? They cause ripples through time that, if you could see them, would look like a lake after a rock skips across it. It would look like the rings of a tree in a cross-cut.

The points of time captured on the crests of the shockwaves, on the rings of the trees, would be Ed and Norma’s distance from each other when Laura died. The points between the ripples, or between the tree rings, are the less solid details of Norma’s family and how Ed actually met Nadine. The most important details (the details closest to the moment of the shocks) rise to the top, are indelible, while the less important details can be re-remembered. Just like our own memories.

This matches up with Joel Bocko’s observation on Twin Peaks Unwrapped: character cores are the same in Secret History. Alternate universe stories usually change characters entirely, but here different beginnings come to the same outcomes rather than the same beginnings coming to different outcomes in usual parallel universe situations. Which is why I think it’s more about metaphysical geologic events rather than parallel universes.

If you make it about timequakes and shocks to our reality, that can credibly explain how one dossier can contain blatantly inconsistent documents from seeming parallel universes. If we were dealing with multiple realities, the dossier would be internally consistent within one alternate reality only, and there’d be at least fifteen similar-but-inexact dossiers in play. In this model time is overwritten, but not before documents are written and immortalized. Think how there are copies of rough drafts out and about, earlier moments than the “final” products (the Star Wars Trilogy and then the Special Editions let’s say) and you can put them both in a dossier next to each other if you want to. They all exist, but one is the more official version according to history.

Reality timequakes allow for canon changes to fit within the same canon. It doesn’t require multiple worlds, but it does make multiple realities exist within one world without needing to find a way to travel between the realities. This allows for a certain kind of dream logic, allows it to work intuitively rather than explicitly, which should be right in Lynch’s wheelhouse. It doesn’t require time travel but it sure allows for it. It’s science-leaning and magick-leaning, and finally allows for the different versions of Twin Peaks to coexist peacefully in their solar system. And even if I’m somehow exactly right about this, it’s just a framework: there’s plenty of room for so many more possibilities and surprises to come.

Over the course of this blog, I'll dig into more instances of lodge/earth interactions and label them as main shocks (Jack Parsons and Laura Palmer for example), foreshocks, and aftershocks, all the while digging into the time discrepancies, but for right now feel free to let me know what you think in the comments. I'm endlessly fascinated by this stuff and would love to turn this monologue into a conversation.

If you're having trouble with The Secret History of Twin Peaks:

If you've been having trouble with The Secret History of Twin Peaks, if you think it diverges so far from the Twin Peaks you know that you don't know how to analyze the book, or even call it Twin Peaks, what I have to say to you is this: This is exactly how I reacted to Fire Walk With Me. You can get through this.

And even better, I think Secret History has actually created a framework where the TV show, movie, and books can coexist. Seriously.

As Joel Bocko said in the Sparkwood & 21 Podcast's Fire Walk With Me Feedback Episode (and I'm paraphrasing him here rather than direct quoting), it's easier to embrace Fire Walk With Me if you weren't a fan of the TV show because there was too much new/contradictory Twin Peaks mythology for us TV show fans to accept easily. Secret History's intentional branching from (and "disregard" of) what has come before seems like quite the familiar echo. In so many ways, Fire Walk With Me finally found its missing sock and completes a much desired pairing.

Here's my advice:

Don’t try to make Fire Walk With Me and Secret History meet at some mythical ever-shifting middle point so they can be part of one thing. All that leads to is aggravation. Instead, put TV Twin Peaks, FWWM and Secret History near each other and triangulate.

I spent years unsuccessfully trying to make a super-planet out of TV Twin Peaks and Movie Twin Peaks, but it took Secret History to make me realize I’ve been using the wrong metaphor.

We’re not working with a super-planet. We have a Solar System.

Secret History is its own thing.

FWWM is its own thing.

TV Twin Peaks is its own thing.

Their gravities influence each other but all three are equally their own thing with their own related-but-individual orbits. And Showtime Twin Peaks will be as well.

The thing that makes them all Twin Peaks is found in the feelings they have in common.

I think.

Why ARE Twin Peaks Fans so darn nice?

I used to look at Twin Peaks like ‘break the code solve the crime’ was the way to go. I’d dutifully have my fine-toothed comb at my side while I pulled Twin Peaks apart like an old watch. This has been a highly fulfilling pursuit for well over 26 years now, and I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Even though I know full well the code isn’t here to be broken.
I’ve now mainlined the show, the four TP books, Fire Walk With Me (but a little less so than the others with that one), deep-dive analysis books such as Brad Dukes’ Reflections, and any Twin Peaks-related podcast I can get in my ears, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that 'break the code, solve the crime' is sort of true, but (especially with Lynch) there’s a different kind of understanding that’s more important. It’s not the kind of knowledge you can put concrete words to…it’s more about how mood and instinct are understood truths, and the truth Lynch gave us is something you’re supposed to feel somewhere between dream logic and waking brain. And I think that’s where he wants it to stay.

And then we have Frost, who has a clarity and workmanship with his storytelling, but that doesn’t mean he lays out clear answers, either. Frost is just as interested in misdirection, subterfuge, and multiple meanings of the scene in front of us as Lynch is. No matter how precisely constructed his phrases appear, Frost seems to make each word mean as many of its different dictionary definitions as he can at once.


HERE'S WHAT I KNOW

Twin Peaks presents us with just enough facts that we CAN:

- mix and match the facts for any myriad of competing theories

- create perfectly valid theories using inference and pattern recognition

- support any fan theory

- refute any fan theory

- support multiple contradictory theories at the same time 

- refute multiple contradictory theories at the same time

 

But not so many facts that we can:

- prove anything once and for all

- disprove anything once and for all

 

Therefore, the only Wrong way to interpret Twin Peaks is to say: “I have the ONLY answer”.

I'm pleased to say almost Everyone in the fandom seems to fundamentally understand this, which is why I think we all get along so smashingly. We support each other because no one is any more or less valid than anyone else, and that means we get to have fun building our theories together.

This is worth keeping in mind as I continue to post my thoughts here. Even if you read my words like I somehow have supreme confidence in them, try to remember I’m just playing in the same sandbox you are. I'm always happy to share the landscape. And I'd love to talk about this with anyone.  Don't be shy with comments (unless of course you want to be).