#andi i might have had several mental breakdowns over this set

[muqiing]

Yunmeng Siblings + that one tiktok trend

@creatorsevents GIF Style Exchange Event → inspired by @weiwuxian’s set

[jazy3]

Station 19 Finale Thoughts

I decided to watch the season finale of Station 19 to see if I could glean any clues as to what the original finale for this season of Grey’s Anatomy was supposed to look like before COVID-19 forced them to shut production down. I was surprised in that I didn’t find as many clues as I was expecting. I did some research and it turns out that this episode and several previous episodes of Station 19 were originally supposed to have more Grey’s content, but when they were forced to shut production down and it subsequently became clear they would not be able to film the remaining four episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, including the finale, they went back in and edited out the content that no longer made sense without the Grey’s episodes that were supposed to follow.

This helps explain why there aren’t as many clues as fans had hoped for because they edited those scenes out. As it stands, we don’t really get any more information about the characters on Grey’s that we didn’t already know. With the exception of Teddy whose comments imply that she’s looking for forgiveness from someone. I do have some thoughts though so let’s dive in. After a night of partying and drinking the Station 19 crew are called in because of an explosion at the old Pac-North hospital. Everyone is hungover except for Ben who was home with Tuck and Joey because they’re sick. Over at Grey Sloan, Sullivan undergoes surgery to try and alleviate his leg pain.

First off, was anyone else surprised to find out that Pac-North still existed? I thought the hospital was shut down and its employees absorbed into Grey Sloan? WTF? The characters go onto explain that Pac-North is only mostly closed with some departments such as admit, the ER, and radiology still operating on the first three floors. I really hope they address this next season on Grey's because I am confused. Watching Ben razz his co-workers was hilarious. I loved his line about the state they were in made him glad he had to stay home with his sick kids last night.

I loved the scenes with Amelia. I have to give Caterina, the actress who plays her, so much credit because in the last few seasons she has taken Amelia from a character I couldn’t stand to one that I love. I hated the character for a long time, but I love post-tumour Amelia. She’s so strong and she’s come such a long way. I'm glad that she's finally doing well and is mentally stable and is managing her addiction and recovery well. She deserves to be happy. I love that we got to see her using her own experience to help Sullivan with his drug addiction and Andy with her fear.

Dr. Alba, the woman who died trying to save her lymphoma research, made me cry! She wanted so badly to save her research and her specimens in order to save countless lives that even when the firefighters told her they had to evacuate she just couldn’t let it go. I cried watching her die. I’m glad the team was able to save some of her research and her mice so that her work could continue after her death. I love that they got the samples. I bet the Bomb Squad and the other Firefighters were so confused! Haha! Bunch of firefighters coming out of a compromised building with a bunch of samples looking like lab techs. My favourite line of this whole episode was when the team walked out carrying all of the samples, research, and specimens and Maya looked at them confused and said, “Why are we carrying rodents 19?” Too funny!

It was great seeing Meredith! I’ve missed seeing her on my screen. I really like Meredith and Andy's friendship. It's great to see Meredith smile and be happy and be herself again. I’m glad she was able to be there for Andy when she needed her and help give her some clarity. My heart broke for Andy in this episode. Especially when she said that the memories that had come back to her made her think that her mother was so unhappy that she killed herself. I loved Meredith’s line, "Sometimes a breakthrough can look another lot like a breakdown." I also liked that she was able to use her own experience with the memories that came back to her about her mother's pregnancy and Maggie's existence to help Andy through her pain.

Also, they have definitely added more plants to the plant room and I'm calling it. That is too many plants. WTF? That's way too many. How does the hospital have such a large budget for greenery? What the heck? I loved the scene where the police showed up and arrested Chief Dixon! He is going down! I’m so glad. Dixon’s not only corrupt, but his lack of regard for human life is just straight up dangerous. Justice!

We also get to see Maya face some hard truths. In this episode her Dad shows up and she finally sees him for who he truly is: an abuser. I thought they did a good job of showing what a powerful force denial is in the face of abuse and how abusers will change things on a dime and blame others for it to mess with them and get what they want. Maya’s Dad does this to her all episode until she finally sees it and takes action. At the beginning of the episode her shows up at the fire station wanting to talk, but she can’t talk because she’s at work and a call comes in. Then he sees her on the news so he comes to the scene. She hears him call out to her so she comes over to talk to him only for him to tell her to get back to work because he wants to see her in action.

Later on she’s in the middle of talking to the bomb squad when he starts shouting at her from behind the yellow tape. She comes over to talk to him confused and he starts yelling at her for doing her job and playing firefighter while her family is falling apart. She explains that she’s doing her job and he shouldn’t be there. He starts arguing with her and then ducks under the yellow tape and continues yelling. She tries to reason with him, but when that doesn’t work she goes into firefighter mode and tells him he’s a civilian and he needs to get back behind the tape. He screams at her that he won’t be spoken to like that and Maya tells he can either get back behind the tape or she’ll have him removed. He doesn’t move so Maya turns around to go get help and that’s when stuff gets real.

Maya’s Dad grabs her by her ponytail and attempts to assault her in broad daylight. Members of the bomb squad and other firefights see this happening and rush to her aid. They hold him back as he taunts Maya about how she needs big strong men to protect her and how he won her all of those gold medals. In a powerful moment Maya finally sees her Dad for what he is and shouts back that she won those gold medals for herself, unlike him who wins things for other people. Later back at the fire house Maya cuts off her ponytail to remove the reminder and tells Jack that she feels stupid for not seeing what everyone else could see so clearly. He tells her that’s usually how these things go. Their talk inspires her to go apologize to Carina and try to make things work.

I’m glad that Maya apologized to Carina and that they're back together! I love them! They’re so cute. Also, Teddy is standing right there telling Carina to forgive Maya if she loves her which is interesting because this episode was supposed to coincide with the Grey’s Anatomy finale. I wonder who Teddy is talking about here. Is she wishing Owen would forgive her for having an affair with Tom? Is she wishing that Tom would forgive her for sleeping with him and then trying to marry Owen? Or Both? Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait till next season whenever that may be to find out.  

And of course in true Shondaland fashion the most shocking part of all came in the last 10 minutes of the episode. When Andy went to a motel to see her Aunt Sandra and ask her some questions and we found out that her Mom was not in fact dead, but alive. I’m so confused.  My guess was going to be that Andy's parents were going to get divorced and then she died, but it looks like she's alive and well so what the heck? I might actually watch the Season 4 premiere of Station 19 in the fall just to find out what happens with Andy's Mom. Does she know Andy's Dad is dead? Why was she hiding? Was she actually sick? I have questions.

I also have a couple of theories as to how the original finale for Grey’s Anatomy was supposed to go. Clearly, they were supposed to bring the patients from the Pac-North explosion to Grey Sloan for treatment and we know from reports that the original Grey’s finale was supposed to include some kind of explosion which was supposed to take the life of a major character and critically injure several others.

So based on that I have two theories as to how the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy was supposed to go. Theory 1: The firefighters bring the patients from the Pac-North explosion to Grey Sloan for treatment. It turns out one of the people they evacuated was the bomber and that person has a bomb hidden on them that goes off in the ER. Several main characters are caught up in the explosion and the cliff hanger is you don’t know who lives and who dies. In next season’s premiere we find out that one of the main characters died and that several others were critically injured with someone possibly losing the ability to operate. The first half of the season would then showcase the doctors attending this person’s funeral and grieving the loss while working to recover from their injuries and what happened.

Theory 2: The episode starts by creating a false sense of security. The patients from the Pac-North explosion are brought to Grey Sloan for treatment which floods the ER with patients and the doctors there scramble to help everyone. Things are chaotic, but none of the characters lives are in peril until an explosion goes off in one of the upper floors. The Station 19 crew rushes to the scene and together with the bomb squad they determine that whoever set the bombs at Pac-North also planted bombs at Grey Sloan. Either because the hospital has a similar research project that uses embryonic stem cells or something similar or because the bombing was in fact personal against a doctor or researcher that worked at Pac-North and was in the process of transferring to Grey Sloan. The employees struggle to evacuate themselves and their patients and in the process several bombs go off on different floors injuring or trapping several main characters and the cliff hanger and the first half of next season would be the same.

Until next time!

[tjkiahgb]

Anon and I wrap up Season 2 - Part 3: Best and Worst Character Arcs

“Question Three: Which main character had the best arc and vice versa? I’ll go extra and give out a list in order of best to worst - Buffy, Bex, Cece, Jonah, Andi and Cyrus.

Bex had a really cool arc from trying to find a niche between friend and mom. But more importantly, her arc on graduating and finding her career is a good message to kids not to give up on their education. 

Cece has really loosened up this season and it’s nice to see her have fun.

Jonah arguably had powerful moments but I find his arc to be disjointed. It’s like the writers never really knew what to do with him and decided to give him a mental breakdown out of the blue. I initially thought it was a clever twist to make Jyrus happen but it ended up being just more lousy writing.

Andi may be the main character but she hardly had any development for the whole season. Sure, she’s more assertive and outspoken but I feel like those are just magnifications of the same Andi that we saw in season one. It doesn’t help at all that Jandi is the biggest thing going on with her, which made her pretty stagnant. The only storyline where she had any sense of agency was playing the Bexie matchmaker.

Speaking of agency, this is the main criteria of which I base this answer. And thus Buffy Driscoll takes the crown. Where to begin? Her insatiable hunger to be good at the things she sets her mind into? Her refusal to cave in to peer pressure and engage in a romantic dyad she feels she isn’t ready for? Her determination to break barriers to show that girls can be better than boys even in sports? Her ability to exercise self-control and perseverance despite and in spite of the animosity and ostracism she has faced in her team? Her decision to be the bigger person and helping her tormentor for the sake of being a team player?  Her compassion and loyalty to Cyrus? The only time Buffy lost agency in this season is when her mom got a job somewhere else and they had to move - but even then she stubbornly refused to say goodbye and dictated the terms of her departure. Man, this season has been the season of the slayer.

In all fairness, Cyrus did have a lot of agency in this season as well. There was his aforementioned coming out scene, his determination to make his Bash Mitzvah a success, and Tyrus. However, the reason why I rate him as having the worst arc is that most of these big developments occur off-screen. On the basis of what is actually shown on the show, the biggest arcs he had was Ciris. Which was pretty okay but I felt was just abruptly cut off. I know a lot of people here lament the fact that he never used the word gay. But I think his refusal to use that label also shows agency on his part. I think my main problem is that his arc appears to be disjointed - he’s just the kooky sidekick who’s there for comedic relief until his big moments come. And this has made point A to point B to point C Cyrus seemingly different persons. And seeing all the press, I find a certain dissonance between using Joshua as a poster boy for representation and having his character’s story relegated to the backburner for most of the season. The writers have treated Cyrus’ story as this precious china that is there mostly for display only to be brought out during special occasions. As I have said before, for someone who's second on the billing, Cyrus' story gets short changed over and over and over again.”

It’s hard to argue with too many of these, Anon. I’ll pass on ranking them myself, but I’ll jump in and add a little bit more.

I love how multifaceted Bex’s issues are. She’s learning how to be a mom. She’s learning how to be a better daughter and interact better with her mother. She’s dealing with her relationship with Bowie and trying to find a split between being mature (respecting where he’s at in life) and going after the man she wants. And she’s finding her place in the working world. Her growth seems to happen pretty quietly, but it’s impressive to see how far she’s come.

Celia is such a fantastic character. I think it’s great that now that she doesn’t have to shoulder so much of the responsibility of raising Andi, she can finally be more of a grandma. Her relationship with Bex continues to be fascinating -- trying to help her succeed while also trying to figure out when she’s overstepping. Her stuff with Ham this season has been a bit of a disappointment though. They interact less and less as time goes on, so much so that their storylines have become about how they don’t talk enough. Celia buying The Fringe without telling Ham can be chalked up a little to her go-getter attitude, but that’s still way too much. And Ham deciding to leave the country without telling her is about on par. I’m hoping for some cleaner stories in season 3 between those two (though I get the feeling Ham’s going to be doing a lot of “traveling” for much of the time).

I sort of agree with you on Jonah’s arc being disjointed, though for different reasons. Much of 2A was tied in Andi and Jonah feeling out their relationship, but I found it to be not incredibly interesting stuff. As I said in part 1 of this series of posts, I actually liked the introduction of the panic attack. I think it gave Jonah some depth that he was sorely missing as a main character. I never saw it as a way to move him towards Cyrus, though. I accepted it as being sprung from his relationship issues with Andi. The stuff with him in 2B was hit and miss. I liked the idea of him treating his anxiety through music, but doing all of that therapy through the lens of Bowie, who’s really kind of making things up as he goes along, was maybe a mistake. He should seek professional help at some point (perhaps in season 3). I do like the steps he’s taking to mature, as well. Being gracious around Walker at the art fair was a great move. But, right after that, he signed up to go to a two month frisbee camp, which is the worst thing he’s ever done. I mean, it’s not really bad, but, you know, TWO MONTH FRISBEE CAMP?!

I’d argue Andi’s arc has been the worst of the bunch. Season 2 overall for her has been a lot of messy back and forth about how much she does or doesn’t need Jonah in her life. Her relationship with the GHC remains pretty much the same, which is sort of nice, to keep it as this constant bright spot in her life, but doesn’t allow for a whole lot of drama. And the Bexie stuff has been pretty static for her as well. Andi started the season trying to get them together and didn’t really veer off that path. I feel like even in 2A, when it seemed like Bexie maybe wouldn’t happen, or later, when there were obstacles like Bowie getting a serious girlfriend, Andi never stopped believing that Bex and Bowie had to get married. I’ve enjoyed the growth in her relationships with her immediate family members, but on the whole, her arc has been lacking.

You’re right about Buffy having had the most to do this season. She’s shown strength throughout all of season 2 in various ways, but being strong is fairly consistent with her character. I find her most interesting moments come when she lets her guard down a bit: admitting to Jonah she’s chasing victory to prove to herself she’s strong, admitting to her mother she’s not strong enough to leave her friends. I think finding the ability to forgive those who’ve wronged her -- Amber and TJ -- showed a lot of emotional strength. Buffy’s season has been an interesting study in the ways strength manifests itself, and that sometimes the strongest thing you can do is admit to a weakness.

I know we’ve made a lot about Cyrus’s storylines receiving a lack of visibility, but I will say I think his arc is still a decent one. (For the record, I think not saying “gay” and the fact that he does only have a few explicitly gay moments a season comes from the Mouse up above rather than being a choice made by the writers.) Cyrus has matured a lot over the season. He’s grown, he’s had his Bar Mitzvah, he’s begun to learn what he does and doesn’t want in a relationship. Letting go of his vision of Jonah and moving on (while it upset a lot of viewers) is actually quite a big move for him. He’s trying to see people more for who they are rather than what he’s made them out to be. Plus, he’s starting to gain more confidence, which is great. When you look at his three explicit moments of gayness this season, you see that. The coming out conversation with Buffy was fraught with confusion and fear. His coming out with Andi was much lighter. By the time he’s talking to Buffy about his lost crush on Jonah, it’s business as usual. He’s gay. He can talk about his feelings for a boy (at least to Buffy) with little drama. Here’s to hoping it gets a little more spotlight in season 3.

I want to touch on a couple of the recurring characters, too. (Not TJ. Everyone knows where I stand on TJ’s arc.)

Amber. Poor Amber. My heart goes out to any Amber stans in the audience. Her redemption arc was beaten up and tossed around all over the place. I thought maybe they were heading there in 2A but that whole ferris wheel thing happened. I thought they might try again in 2B, but they just ripped off her eyebrow and forgot about her for almost the entire rest of the season until they suddenly brought her back with a few episodes to go and did a pretty sloppy story. The friendship with Cyrus could maybe work, given some time, but the Buffy thing happened way too fast. And really, Amber’s story is mostly with Jonah and Andi anyway, so why go there? At least she’s starting to get put into a better light. Maybe she’ll finally get to settle things with Jonah and Andi in season 3.

And Walker? He was introduced as this charming, artsy boy, and now, several appearances later, what more do we know about him? Sort of nothing. He’s still a charming, artsy boy. We know he’s coming back for season 3. I’m curious what kind of arc he might have in store for him. What other aspects does he have besides being charming and making art?

[douxreviews]

Twin Peaks - ‘Pilot’ Review

“Mr. Cooper, you didn’t know Laura Palmer.”

Twin Peaks is both cultish enough and popular enough that there’s a thrill every time one fan meets another—and those thrills aren’t too far between. When it premiered in early 1990, people went wild. Remember when we were all so excited about Lost? Move those conversations to the water coolers instead of the internet, add some hairspray, and that’s about it.

And just like that, it was gone. After the initial adoration, viewers quickly drifted away or were turned off by the more surreal aspects. When the show’s second season finished (completing a total of just 30 episodes), viewership was way, way down. The follow-up movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me did okay…and yet the die-hard fans remained as intense as only fans can be.

I only experienced those early days by proxy. I was deemed too young to watch the show (looking back, I agree with that decision, but it made me so angry at the time—if I could watch Murder, She Wrote, why not this?), but my father loved it. My father lets himself get involved in exactly one TV show at a time. Sometimes he picks a clunker—The Event was his choice in this past season, poor guy—and sometimes he strikes gold: 24, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos. Back in the day, he loved Twin Peaks enough to buy the soundtrack, which he frequently played on our family’s only CD player, in the living room. My pre-teen years were scored by Angelo Badalamenti. No wonder I turned out so odd.

My first real Twin Peaks experience was in high school, when the boyfriend recommended we watch the prequel (made after the episodes aired) Fire Walk With Me to prepare for seeing Lost Highway in the theater. FWWM was okay, given that I had no back-story (fore-story?), but Lost Highway was great. It appealed to my desire to dissect things. (Well, not living things. I’m squeamish.)

It took me five years to finally watch Twin Peaks, the series. The only copies in the town I then lived in were on VHS, rented from the tiny independent video store housed in a house. (When they went out of business, I owed them a late fine of $2. I still feel bad about that.) I promptly got the bug, watched the tapes as fast as I could rent them, and theorized like mad with the one person I knew who also liked the show, a kindly bartender. He explained the finale to me over strong drinks, and then I was done with the show. This was before the internet was fun, so it didn’t occur to me to look elsewhere for more theories and speculations, much less a fan community. I haven’t re-watched it in the many years since.

All of that backstory is by way of warning: I’m not a die-hard Peakean. In fact, I don’t even know if TPers have a name for themselves. That’s all information I could easily find out, now that I’m used to spending my days glued to a computer screen, but I’m oddly disinclined to eavesdrop on 20-year-old arguments, get tangled up in sides, camps, or even the dreaded ‘shipper wars that every show has. When I review this show, I want to watch the show and talk about the show. I don’t want to pick sides, start fights, or invest in a SuperDuperGold DVD set. Twin Peaks isn’t that kind of show for me.

What kind of show is it, then? The pilot episode doesn’t do justice to the delightful zaniness that is to come. Frost and Lynch shot the pilot, Lynch did a movie (Wild at Heart), and then Frost and Lynch began work on the first non-pilot episode. The pilot establishes important characters and a few of their relationships. It welcomes us to the town of Twin Peaks, pulls back the lace curtains a bit—but not all the way—and leaves me with a strange impression of humor-laced tragedy. In other words, even in the face of tragedy, people still make bad jokes, still have bizarre personality tics, and generally still live their lives.

That tragedy, of course, is Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), who is found dead in the show’s opening minutes. Laura Palmer is screen-siren beautiful even in death, and just as inscrutable. We learn in the pilot that she is a homecoming queen who dates the football quarterback, a tutor, and a beloved daughter.

But for some reason, no one seems surprised that she is dead: At the end of the episode, her secret boyfriend James Hurley told Donna, Laura’s best friend, that “It all made some sort of terrible sense that she died.” Even before that, her mother’s panic in the morning when she can’t be found feels like she had been waiting for that moment for months, and her father, once warned of Mama Palmer’s panic, tells the sheriff that his daughter is dead, rather than the other way around. Even the opening lines, when Pete Martell tells Sheriff Truman “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic,” the first question isn’t “Who?” but “Where?” When Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James (James Marshall) see the police at school, their first thought is of Laura, and their first reaction is to cry.

The overall impression is of a town, and a girl, on the brink. Laura finally tipped over into something—shocking but not surprising itself. The town, meanwhile, continues on its way for a while, but might never be the same. With a population just over 50,000, Twin Peaks may be “a town where a yellow light still means ‘slow down’ instead of ‘speed up,’” but the main industry is intrigue (with a healthy dose of tourism and logs).

And the intrigue industry is definitely impacting the tourist and log economies. The Hornes, who own The Great Northern hotel, are trying to con some Norwegians into building a golf course (with houses), but son Johnny has “mental issues” and daughter Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) is one breakdown away from a borderline-personality diagnosis. Meanwhile, Benjamin Horne is working with Catherine Martell to take down Josie Packard (Joan Chen), Catherine’s sister-in-law who inherited the mill. The Sheriff is dating Josie Packard, while his friend Big Ed (James’s uncle) is cheating on his crazy wife Nadine with sexy Norma (Peggy Lipton). Norma, of course, is Shelly Johnson’s (Madchen Amick) boss—and Shelly is married to a crazy truck-driving maniac who beats her and just so happens to come home with blood on his shirt after Laura’s death.

While the adults play those games, the teenagers follow suit. Laura was dating Bobby in public and James in private; Donna was dating Bobby’s best friend Mike in public and falls for James in the pilot. Bobby and Mike, unfortunately, are terrible actors: I sometimes wonder if the director just said, “Give up acting! Just stare and vibrate a little without blinking!” This makes their teenage rages and exaggerated misbehavior all the more disturbing, as they seem just like the cartoon villains one would find on a Lifetime special. No wonder Donna’s dad doesn’t let Mike in the house.

In life, that was Laura’s world. Now that she’s dead, her place in that world—and whatever else it might encompass—has to be discovered by a hero, a man who should need no introduction, the greatest detective who ever lived: Special Agent Dale Cooper.

Special Agent Dale Cooper is a straightforward man who appreciates good coffee, good pie, plain speaking…and absolutely loves the process of detection and discovery. In the pilot, some of his smiles seemed horribly inappropriate, until I realized he was So Very Happy that he had found a clue—he is certainly not haunted by Laura Palmer’s death, at least not in any traditional sad-detective way. How he will come to relate to Laura and the circumstances of her death is one of the main arcs of the series.

How the town relates to that death and those circumstances is equally important. In the pilot it emerges that Laura did not die alone: Ronnette Polanski lived through whatever rape and torture killed Laura, but remains comatose. Ronnette gets short shrift in the town’s imagination, perhaps because the cast of characters the show focuses on knew Laura better, perhaps because Ronnette was working-class and Laura came from Twin Peaks’s small aristocracy.

In the pilot, the town is like a live wire. When the kill site is discovered, there’s a quick shot of the train car surrounded by men who aren’t police officers, holding rifles as though they expect the killer to still be inside. The pilot effectively captures the way each member of a small community can be struck differently but with equal virulence by the same tragedy. Likewise, it introduces the idea that no one can really know Laura Palmer, not James the secret boyfriend who claims she wasn’t acting like herself, perhaps not even Donna who claims to know her better than Laura realized. And if we can’t know Laura, perhaps we can’t know anything that’s going on in this tiny town.

Bits and Pieces

• Quick shout-out to the folks at the Sheriff’s Station: Lucy, Andy, Hawk. We’ll see more of them.

• Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), wacky shrink, was rubbing a very inappropriate place on his hula-dancer tie.

• Crazy Nadine seems to have a fixation with her drapes.

• The severed moose head on the table in the bank. Yep, it’s a David Lynch TV show.

• Zooming in on an image to catch a reflection of the person taking the film is equally Lynchian, as are the flickering light in the morgue (symbolizes a reality-shift or a personal satori) and the stoplight.

• Diane, to whom Special Agent Dale Cooper dictates his every move and every thought—I do not envy your job.

Clues?

• Laura’s diary entry for a few weeks previous said she was “nervous about meeting J tonight.” Who is J?

• Cooper says that the letter “R” under Laura’s finger matches her case to that of Teresa Banks, a year ago in another part of the state.

• Laura’s half of the broken-heart necklace was found in the traincar on a mound of dirt with a scrap of paper on which was written, in blood, “Fire walk with me.”

• Ronnette Polaski advertised her services in Flesh World, and Laura kept a copy.

• According to James, Bobby had told Laura that he’d killed someone.

For all its atmosphere, the pilot episode of Twin Peaks does not give an accurate picture of where this series is headed—and, trust me, it’s going to some very weird places. Having said that, it does a very impressive job of establishing relationships both covert and overt, and focusing on the two emphases of this show: Laura Palmer and the town itself. The final shots, of an unidentified hand taking James’s half of the heart necklace from the woods, of the stoplight, and of Mrs. Palmer’s sudden screaming as though she has seen something—in the living room? The scene in the woods?—are just a hint of the mysteries to come.

Three and a half out of four Douglas firs.

(Let’s try to keep spoilers for future episodes out of the comments. There might be someone out there who still doesn’t know who killed Laura Palmer.)

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)