How other famous fictional detectives would have solved the murder of Laura Palmer All versions are witty, but the Philip Marlowe and the Phryne Fisher one cracked me up especially. Though I note with disapproval that wihile Poirot is represented, Miss Marple is not. Clearly, the Log Lady would have told her everything she needed to know on the first day. :)
Speaking of
Twin Peaks, at first I had no intention of watching
The Return, because I didn't feel a sequel was necessary, but then
abigail_n's
favorable review made me curious, so I marathoned it. And... I can see all her points, but my own impression was far more negative. Not least because there were elements in it which to me felt gratitiously spiteful, such as the fate of Audrey Horne, or disturbing in an unintended way (there's also plenty of deliberately disturbing, but that's a given with
Twin Peaks), to wit, things like Janey-E blissfully declaring
( something spoilery ). But also because while the original
Twin Peaks was not short of female suffering (I mean, the premise alone...), it had a lot of female pov characters as well (Donna, Audrey, Josie, Norma, Shelley).
Twin Peaks: The Return, otoh, feels relentlessly male pov to me, and that in combination with the sheer number of abused female characters was very off-putting.
All this being said: Lynch's visual imagination is as good as ever, and I don't regret having watched it, not least for the incredible tenderness of the conversations between Hawke and Margaret, aka the Log Lady, which were filmed while the actress was dying. Oh, and given it's David Lynch, I should have known he'd cast Laura Dern as Diane. It's now impossible to imagine anyone else in that role, and as the recipient of all those tapes.
I've also continued my
Star Trek: Enterprise watching to the point where the infamous post-9/11 narrative shift happens, and great maker, as Londo Mollari would say, is it ever immediately noticable. So that feels as good a point as any to look back at the first two seasons with a couple of observations.
1.) At its best, the show uses its early space flight/no Federation yet setting quite well, and certainly does a better job than
Voyager did recalling its ship and crew don't have the Starfleet resources for repairs and restocking at their disposal whenever they need them. The episode when
Enterprise has to undergo repairs at a fully automated alien station also struck a good balance between satire (for those of us in need of repairs and unable to talk to a human being, going from automated message to automated message instead) and suspense (the reveal about the extra price may have been a tad predictable, but it worked). Also, I appreciate that through the first two seasons there are repeated scenes where our heroes marvel at some space phenomenon in joy and awe - as explorers who'd never been in deep space before and had not seen pictures
would.
2.) Otoh, when the show does the genre- and franchise immanent tropes, it rarely if ever rises above formula. This is where the comparison to
Star Trek: Discovery is most striking to me.
Discovery also does tropes, but delivers them with original twists. When
Enterprise does Episode With Alien Princess And Male Starfleet Officer, it follows the same beats we've seen on TOS, on TNG. When it does "Enemy Mine" (another Trip episode), it does so by the letter. It's not that the result is objectionable (I like "Enemy Mine" stories! I do! And the alien pilot here can act better through his latex than Padma Lakshmi without any in the Princess episode), it's that there is no particular twist unique to this particular show in it. (Meanwhile, TNG gave us
Darmok, which for my money is still the best ST twist on this particular tale, and not just because Patrick Stewart gets to tell the tale of Gilgamesh.) Whereas, when
Discovery does a time loop episode, it does so in a way that's different from the TNG version, or for that matter the Xena and Buffy versions, furthers the relationships between regulars (Michael Burnham & Paul Stamets, Michael Burnham & Ash Tyler) and expands everyone's characterisations (plus the way our heroine forces the antagonist of the episode to reset the loop one more time is both inventive and outstandingly brave).
3.) Back when I had watched the fourth season without having watched more than the first three episodes of the first or any other season, I said that I found Malcolm Reed and Travis Mayweather bland as characters, without defining characterisation. Which I take back now; in the first two seasons, they get ample characterisation unique to them. Hoshi so far had to do more in s1 than in s2, and I do wish they'd have given her more scenes with T'Pol, because the few they get are always very interesting.
4.) At least two of the episodes are outstanding examples of HOW
NOT TO WRITE MORAL DILEMMA EPISODES. Good lord, Berman & Braga. I haven't seen such tone deaf examples of "episode thinks it tells one story while actually coming across as telling something completely different" since TNG's
The Outcast (aka the one where the writers' idea had been to do a sympathetic allegory about homosexuality while the result, not least due to the casting of the supposedly androgynous species by solely female actors, came across as Riker versus the planet of the intolerant lesbians). What I'm referring to: "Dear Doctor" in season 1, and "The Congenitor" in season 2. "The Congenitor" irritated me more because for the most part, I thought it worked quite well until we came to the denouement. It was a painful joy to see Andreas "G'Kar" Katsulas again, and his parts of the episode were one of those "space exploration is amazing!" scenes
Enterprise, when it wants, does in a heartfelt way. I also before the denouement thought that the presentation of the aliens as both technologically advanced, friendly
and, as was revealed through the episode,
( doing something spoilery that goes to the core of the ep ) But this is not what this episode does. It claims this is about cultural differences, and Trip having made the mistake of trying to impose his values on a culture he knows next to nothing about. And nobody, at any point,
( calls it the spoilerly thing it really is about. ) 4a)Otoh,
Stigma, aka the AIDS episode, to me was a good "sci fi take on a contemporary problem" episode, without any moral smugness and instead an earnest and intense "look in the mirror" subtext. The episode choosing to focus on medical research being slow as long as the illness is regarded as a problem for a minority the majority feels itself entitled to disdain morally, and the hypocrisy of differentiating between "good victims" and "bad victims" (depending on how they got infected) was particular on point for those of us who remember the 80s.
5.) Oh good lord, the bio gel really is as awkwardly fanservice-y as the introduction episodes made it look. I think the most awkward (and very, very American) thing about it is that T'Pol, who ends up in these scenes more often than the rest of the gang, always keeps her underwear on. Look, writers, if it's for de-contamination, you have to put the stuff on your entire skin, surely? *Note to self: don't go off on a tangent about how to do Sauna again*