Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks is not a perfect show.
But it has so many perfect moments that honestly its still a five star for me, even with all of those filler episodes in season 2.
Laura Palmer is maybe one of the best characters in television history, despite the never actually shows up during the show's on screen events.
Lynch (somehow) understands perfectly how to write uniquely female suffering, and Laura is maybe his magnum opus in this regard. The way the entire town operates in this cognative dissonance by living in denial of the disturbing things their neighbours are doing, in favour of their idyl, pastoral ideals of life.
Unlike Blue Velvet, where the dark underbelly of Americana must be discovered by those willing to look beneath the surface, the society of Twin Peaks bears it's cruel treatment plainfaced, and the only way to not see it is to petend it isn't there.
And everyone did, and everyone failed Laura.
As Bobby Briggs says: “You wanna know who killed Laura Palmer? You did! We all did.”
Despite never meeting her, I still think the only person who ever got close to understanding her was Cooper, the only man who didn't really want anything from her, and seemingly the only man willing to confront the horrible things done to Laura.
It's pretty bad if you need to call in the FBI for just a little bit of empathy.
The way Laura's storyline ends is utterly heartbreaking, it's the reason I think about her so often, in despite of her fictionality. It's not all men, but it could be any man, even the last one you would suspect.
After the hasty wrap-up (no pun intended) of Laura's storyline, the show does admittedly take a nosedive, with a group of forgettable and boring episodes carried by their quirky tone and pre-established cast of memorable and interesting characters. But I still just can't rate it any lower despite the objectively poor quality of these episodes, as it just contains so many perfect episodes, and because the finale becomes very interesting again very quickly, the midpoint of season 2 is more comparable to anime filler then to a Game of Thrones Season 8.
Coopers final journey into the Black Lodge is so surreal and disorienting in a way only Lynch's stuff can be.
I look forward to seeing where the story goes in The Return, it's apparently Lynch's best stuff and my expectations are high.