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LupinThe8th t1_ixxxks9 wrote

So, the story goes that Lynch and Frost got screwed by the network.

They A) ordered more episodes than the creators had expected for season 2, B) insisted that the mystery be solved (it was never intended to be - the answer is obvious in hindsight, but they were never planning to explicitly reveal it) and C) made it be solved by episode 8, with a huge chunk of episodes left.

Lynch and Frost kind of got fed up and left it in the hands of others...for a while. If you tolerate it for a while it does get good again. The last couple of episodes are exactly the mindfuck Twin Peaks deserves to be, and worth sitting through the slog that is the middle for.

Also, after this you get the movie Fire Walk With Me, which is maybe the best film Lynch ever made, and then from 2017 Twin Peaks: The Return, which is maybe the best anything Lynch ever made.

So yeah, you're in for a bit of a rough patch, but I think if you stick it out you'll be glad you did. There's still gold in them there Peaks.

(And if you want more network-bullshit-free material, Mark Frost has written a couple of books which are fully canon, those are worth a look too.)

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KithKathPaddyWath t1_ixy6wia wrote

Yeah, ultimately, solving the mystery was a mistake and it's the kind of seismic shift that's really hard for a show to just kind of... keep going after.

But I really think that season 2 gets a lot more hate than it deserves. There's definitely a rough period after they wrap up the solving of the mystery, but I think they did manage to rebound after a certain point, and there's a lot of good after that point. There are still flaws, and it's not as good as season1, but it's still pretty good television. The stretch of episodes that really struggle is not as big as many make it out to be.

And yeah, The Return is fantastic. The Secret History of Twin Peaks and The Final Dossier are also a lot of fun. They work as a great story, and the format, the structure of how the story is told, is so interesting and works so well. They do, of course, work best in tandem with the series. There are some bits in the book that can make you kind of obsess over "is this just a mistake, or is Frost trying to tell us something about what's happening in canon" that end up being kind of frustrating, though.

The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes are also really interesting additions and quite good.

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DMPunk t1_iy3l1ox wrote

Relative to the rest of the show, the middle of season 2 of Twin Peaks is pretty bad. Relative to almost any other television show, it's damn great.

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KithKathPaddyWath t1_iy8lm4o wrote

I think this is a really fair point. I feel like sometimes it's not always necessarily fair, at least with some shows, to compare the worst parts of the show to the best parts of the show, at least if you're only comparing it like that and not comparing it to other shows at all.

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e_x_i_t t1_ixypop3 wrote

I still find it bizarre that the network forced them to resolve the mystery soo early in the season, I have no doubt the series would've gotten a third season if the big reveal was saved as the season finale cliffhanger.

I never knew about the episode order thing, not sure what either of them were expecting tho since 22-24 episode seasons was the standard at the time.

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