I’m guessing this episode might best be chalked up to studio interference.

We’ve seen it before.

Take the James Bond film Spectre.

One can feel the executive sabotage.

But here is a little different.

From a quick glance.

ABC (presumably) wanted Lynch and Co. to move things along.

Enough with this suspense.

Or perhaps that was yet to come.

Perhaps this episode is like recitative in opera.

It has to be there (upon a time), but we kinda want it to be over.

We want the arias.  The choruses.

There’s no Maria Callas disc of “best-loved recitatives”.

[Recitativi?]

Yes. sì.

Here we run into a sort of auteur theory for stories.

Or perhaps we are running into auteur theory in its purest form.

If we assume the brilliance of David Lynch (and Mark Frost), then we will blame Lesli Linka Glatter for daft direction here.

But we have previously praised Ms. Glatter.  She has the chops.

So what was the problem with this episode?

Did the material (Lynch and Frost) save Glatter’s direction?

[Did Glatter’s direction ruin Lynch and Frost’s writing?]

Or did Glatter save a mediocre piece of writing by Lynch and Frost?

That’s the problem of episodes.

Chunks.

TV is inherently cubist.

And stories are not conceived with interpolated commercial breaks.

That’s why the stories suffer.

On TV.

The medium is faulty.

The medium gives very little respect for the creations it airs.

But hey:  at least the message is getting out there!

McLuhan would point out that the orientation of space and time determines to the largest extent how we interpret television shows.

[Which is to say, “…the medium is the message.”]

I would have to agree.

And so we are left hanging.

Perhaps for the first time.

Usually we are looking forward to the next episode.

But this time we’re just annoyed.

Because the episode is not a self-contained satisfying unit of entertainment.

Not this time.

You win some, you lose some.

We still love the story.  And the characters.

But we could have done without some of the clumsy fluff.

That was, by the way, my initial concept.

For my website.

A descriptive coup.

Clumsy fluff.

 

-PD