every single attempt from Platner to explain it has that "pissing on my leg and telling me it's raining" feel, and it's way too early in the electoral cycle for any primary voter to be putting up with that shit

I say all that to say, here's what I think about a lot when pondering the Return: do *Lynch and Frost* even know with certainty what happened to Coop/Laura? Did they write a definitive ending and then deliberately omit key parts of it, or did they refuse to answer the question altogether?

the mystery is the point! The magic is gone once it's resolved! I don't think he ever got over the network forcing him to resolve the original mystery ("who killed Laura Palmer?"), and when he got the chance to do the Return, he left it unsolved in order to keep that feeling of mystery forever

... just that we cannot prove it. I think it's clear that there is some long-running plan to Do Something About Judy, but I think Lynch intentionally did not give us the information we need to comprehend the plan or know if it worked. I think that Lynch made that mystery unsolvable, because...

I like the broad strokes of that theory, but IMO that linked post makes a lot of assumptions about things that are not made explicit on the screen, in order to make conclusions about the Plan and its results which are not textually supported by the show. Which is not to say that it's wrong, exactly,

And since then, Americans have not experienced anything remotely as violent as WWII or remotely as immiserating as the Great Depression... so far!

For 36 years after Hoover and the Great Depression, the only break in Democratic control of the White House occurred because the widely-beloved Supreme Commander of the Allied Nazi-killing Forces decided to run as a R instead of a D

Those events are a bit different in scale and scope though, no? Are we certain that sustained backlashes are dead, or could it be that it's just been nearly a century since the American electorate has felt the degree of pain that could lead to a sustained backlash?

it's not even the worst part of that "shampoo" analogy, but I really can't wrap my head around the idea that Cassidy is acting like there's zero difference between a bottle of Tressemme and a bottle of Hill Country Fare Head Soap. No difference whatsoever between cheap or nice things, you rubes

I don’t know if it’s ever made explicit whether Sensei Sergio is a dad, but Sensei Sergio seems like an excellent dad