The real ending of the show is not the cheesy hokey way to tie up loose ends, it is Dale realizing that Laura Palmer can't be saved and he sacrificed himself (and possible the whole twin peaks timeline) by trying to do so.
This should've been the premise of season 3.
Things that happened in between the first few episodes and the last two aren't really necessary at all for this show to tell that to us.
With the original two seasons the ending of season 2 made the whole experience of what happened before it much more interesting than before. Now the ending of season 3 doesn't make me interested at all in watching the whole season again. Knowing the ending makes the things that were already boring during the first viewing more boring.
The ending only makes me feel this is how the season should've started.
Also while I loved Cooper as senile Dougie, I can't get anything out of the normal Dougie getting back to Janey and Sonny Jim. That makes even watching the Dougie plotline something that will have a disappointing ending.
I'm cool with how things turned out though. It's Lynch's and Frost's story to tell after all. The biggest take away from watching this series for me was, not everything has to make sense or have a crystal clear answer. I guess we kinda expect that with our entertainment, we want resolution for everything, we're so used to that comfortable small bubble it creates where we are told everything we want to know, eventually. Lynch, at times, ventures into the unknowns that plague our own realities and existence, some of which have no clear answers, and sprinkles them into his storytelling. Just like dwelling on our own unknowns can be uncomfortable, season 3 made us feel that as well. Can't say that's a bad thing.
Things not making sense isn't what the problem of season 3 was.
I can fully accept being showed things that don't make sense at all. Those things just have to be interesting to me. Lynch and Frost told a story and it ended up being more a miss than a hit. There is no way around that for me. Even if Season 4 would give context to everything it would not make this season be any better than it now is.
They even managed to make previous nonsensical mysteries less interesting.
Questions like "what Judy means", "what Blue Rose means", "why Laura screamed in FWWM" and "who is Diane" all have now given answers that made those go in directions I'm not interested to follow.
And it's not that I'm frustrated that some plotlines and characters shown in this season went nowhere. It's not that I need a resolution to those things. It's just that now those things are just boring to watch again. They could've been interesting things that never get a conclusion. But now they are boring things that never get a conclusion. There's the difference.
I feel the same, more or less, I just think a lot of the knee jerk reactions to the ending -- including my own! -- of "Please tell me there will be a S4!!" is kind of predicated on the idea that a fourth season would then resolve this cliffhanger. Which, maybe it would, but then there'd just be another one after that.
No it wouldn't have to resolve that cliffhanger. It could just show us them being in that reality. Nothing has to be solved there. Just give us something interesting to watch.
Some people are going to write this opinion off as pretentious bullshit, so I just want to preface it by saying I didn't love this season and I thought several episodes were boring and pointless, and it might still be pointless overall - but here it goes:
I think typical prestiege TV drama fans just don't know what to make of this thing. I don't think they get it. They talk about it in terms of 'villains going out like bitches' and 'og coop is back baby!' etc, and that's just not the field this this was playing in. It wasn't a continuation of Twin Peaks the 90's sensation, either, it was something else. It was an alternate reality Twin Peaks, from the start. It might actually be a very deep and interesting thing, I can't say right now because I just saw it and haven't thought about it, or it might not be. The only thing I know is that this is arthouse cinema masquerading as a premium cable TV drama, and people who don't know how to take arthouse cinema don't know how to deal with this, so you just get a bunch of dissatisfied people and the consensus will eventually be that this season was bad, but it actually wasn't bad, it just wasn't Twin Peaks season 3.
I've watched my share of arthouse stuff and I can take things that make sense and things that don't make sense and anything in between.
I don't need to have "normal tv" for me to like it.
This season just wasn't that good. Not as a season of Twin Peaks and not as another show.
There were good moments here and there but it was a disappointment no matter what angle I want to look at it. It's a disappontment in two ways. One is that I have certain expectations for Twin Peaks as I've been a huge fan since 1991 when I was 8-9 years old and I've been reading about it and watching everything about it all these years in between. So in that level it didn't give me much at all.
Another disappointment is that whenever I start to watch anything, I will expect it to be at least interesting. If it's not, I don't like it. So even outside the context of Twin Peaks this show left me cold. And I'm all for weird arthouse shit. This left me quite cold even as that. Sure, there were good moments here and there, but overall it just wasn't that good. It left me no interest to watch the season again.
This? We'll be debating for years, until the day when if we are really lucky, more comes along. We'll have a lot of answers about season three... but I'll be expected to be left with a whole host of questions when that hypothetical season 4 ends.
I'm afraid I lost my will to debate about Twin Peaks with season 3.
For the past 15 years or so I've been active in reading things about Twin Peaks and discussing about all kinds of theories. Now for the first time ever I have the feeling that I'm not into doing that anymore.
I think it's because I feel the new mysteries drowned the old mysteries with less interesting things there used to be. The answers and new questions put the old mysteries in less interesting directions.
. RIP.
