Often with Lynch you just have to kind of go with it and this is definitely one of those episodes. It loiters even more than usual between silly and shocking, funny and sad.
This is the first episode where a score plays more of a role instead of just silence, such as in the first scene where a disoriented Dale Cooper is found by police and delivered home. It's sweet afterwards when he sits down by Sonny Jim, offering him a crisp and playing with the bedroom light. It's interesting that when he seems most human, most connected with the world around him, is when he's with a child. And then, Cooper starts working on the case files... and only David Lynch (helped along by the atmospheric score) could create such a mesmirising scene out of this.
Meanwhile a drug trafficking scene seems almost normal, although Red's unpredictability makes it pretty intense. But then he flips a coin, and it somehow manages to land in Richard Horne's mouth as well as in Red's hand.
I think the thing that makes this episode what it is is the part following Carl Rodd. It's so separate from the rest of the story that it could easily have been a short film, yet in the space of a few minutes it put me through several strong emotions. At first, it's confusion as to why Lynch has seemingly randomly decided to focus on Carl Rodd, Mickey and Bill and then cut away to the cafe and to Richard Horne madly driving his truck. Then, in a beautiful scene you see Carl Rodd finding beauty around him, in nature and in a mother playing with her child. And then, all the things introduced in these few scenes come together. When it cuts to Horne again you can start to see how it's going to end up, a slow motion car crash with all the pieces painstakingly laid out: the speeding driver and the boy crossing the road. In a few seconds, it went from beautiful to gut-wrenching. It ends up strangely tender, with Carl Rodd being the only person to go and comfort the mother. This whole part was so out of the blue coming halfway through the episode, and it felt so real, with the emotion heightened by the score. Everything in it is purposeful and neatly set up and I think it exemplifies Lynch's ability to introduce several seemingly unrelated threads and bring them together perfectly. It's why I have faith that everything we see in this season has purpose, even if it isn't always immediately apparent.
As well as the emotional, there is also the bewildering. The Spike's killings seem to come out of nowhere thematically, and it's hard to see exactly how he ties into the main plot for now, although I expect it'll be something to do with Dougie Jones/Dale Cooper.
This is the first episode where a score plays more of a role instead of just silence, such as in the first scene where a disoriented Dale Cooper is found by police and delivered home. It's sweet afterwards when he sits down by Sonny Jim, offering him a crisp and playing with the bedroom light. It's interesting that when he seems most human, most connected with the world around him, is when he's with a child. And then, Cooper starts working on the case files... and only David Lynch (helped along by the atmospheric score) could create such a mesmirising scene out of this.
Meanwhile a drug trafficking scene seems almost normal, although Red's unpredictability makes it pretty intense. But then he flips a coin, and it somehow manages to land in Richard Horne's mouth as well as in Red's hand.
I think the thing that makes this episode what it is is the part following Carl Rodd. It's so separate from the rest of the story that it could easily have been a short film, yet in the space of a few minutes it put me through several strong emotions. At first, it's confusion as to why Lynch has seemingly randomly decided to focus on Carl Rodd, Mickey and Bill and then cut away to the cafe and to Richard Horne madly driving his truck. Then, in a beautiful scene you see Carl Rodd finding beauty around him, in nature and in a mother playing with her child. And then, all the things introduced in these few scenes come together. When it cuts to Horne again you can start to see how it's going to end up, a slow motion car crash with all the pieces painstakingly laid out: the speeding driver and the boy crossing the road. In a few seconds, it went from beautiful to gut-wrenching. It ends up strangely tender, with Carl Rodd being the only person to go and comfort the mother. This whole part was so out of the blue coming halfway through the episode, and it felt so real, with the emotion heightened by the score. Everything in it is purposeful and neatly set up and I think it exemplifies Lynch's ability to introduce several seemingly unrelated threads and bring them together perfectly. It's why I have faith that everything we see in this season has purpose, even if it isn't always immediately apparent.
As well as the emotional, there is also the bewildering. The Spike's killings seem to come out of nowhere thematically, and it's hard to see exactly how he ties into the main plot for now, although I expect it'll be something to do with Dougie Jones/Dale Cooper.
