Things Are Getting Strange

Content Warning: discussions of sexual abuse, violence against women, murder of women, abuse of minors and yellowface. So, we come, inevitably, to the horse in the Palmer household. With all the horrors that entails and all the reveals. Please bear in mind the content warnings - we don't dwell on the details but do touch on what happens and the associated discomfort. Apart from the unmitigate...

Cooper finally contends with his litany of illegal actions! For a few minutes. Then he starts withholding medication... Twin Peaks continues! We talk about James's perplexing timing to resolve last episode's cliffhanger and how Shelly is evaporating audience sympathies in her and Bobby's escapades. Bonus points if you know what a vicuna coat is and who's most likely to own one....

Back to Twin Peaks ! We briefly talk about upcoming X-Files news (both old and new!) and The Amazing Digital Circus finale (don't worry, we're not about to spoil anything) before diving headlong into the Pacrific Northwest. We get hung up on how ambiguous the layout of Twin Peaks itself is even now and celebrate that Audrey is finally getting rescued! Support the show

We get a bit hung up on how Maddy's hair has changed over the course of the series. And reach silly conclusions about the potential Laura Palmer-ifiction of every woman in Twin Peaks. Sort of like Third Impact. Or carcenisation. Otherwise this is a kind of a place-holder episode with setups for the future and some typical soap-opera moments. Where has Mike gotten to...? Support the show

If you're watching along with the series, what perpetual cynic Albert believes in might come as rather a surprise in The Man Behind the Glass . Especially moments after his giddy glee about the pop-culture provenance of the gun used to shoot Cooper. While discuss Doctor Jacoby's surprising home-life, Donna's improbably horrible timing and why we are at best indifferent to James and...

So much coma! We wind up talking about how much of a trope the soap opera coma is... and how Twin Peaks weirdly (for Leo anyway) plays it closer to reality than most... We get side-tracked onto The Fourth Kind for a while purely because of how it used owls and how that might be a kind of inference back to this series... Support the show

Twin Peaks gets off to a slightly unusual second season start... We discuss comas and how it feels so oddly distanced from season 1. Also get minorly fixated on the previously unmentioned Hayward daughter. Support the show

Hard to ignore how good Piper Laurie is in this episode. And in general in this series! We've reached the all too soon end of season 1 of Twin Peaks and it feels like everything's happening, so many cliffhangers and dangling plot-threads! And somehow while talking about the series we loop in things like Clueless and Psychonauts ... Support the show

Watch as Dale Cooper fends off Audrey's attempts at seduction in order not to bring the FBI into disrepute shortly before making use of the Bookhouse Boys because they need to do something across the Candian border! Not saying he shouldn't have resisted Audrey, but the latter also feels distinctly dodgy. At this point in the series everyone seems to be converging at One Eyed Jack's...

Twin Peaks continues to tease that a solution to its central mystery can only be imminent! Birds singing and perpetual music get their explanations here! But in the meantime, we continue to complain about James, continue to enjoy every time Bobby shows up on-screen, and remain hopelessly fixated on Maddy and who's playing her in this series. Also the mill-arson plot is just getting more tangl...

Feels like everyone is turning out to be psychic in Twin Peaks ... Laura Palmer, Sarah Palmer, Dale Cooper... Hank Jennings?! Or at least we don't have a good way for him to call right after the letter he sent (presumably days earlier) was opened. But! For those who know the kind of things Twin Peaks is famed for may be interested that this is the first time an owl has an on-screen presence....

You may be shocked - SHOCKED - to learn Twin Peaks immediately swerves away from naming Laura Palmer's killer despite explicitly promising such an answer last episode. Such is the way of Twin Peaks , and these days its well known this was never quite what David Lynch and Mark Frost wanted to focus on, and yet... the answer is out there still. In the meantime we talk a fair amount about the fu...

The Red Room makes its appearance in Twin Peaks! If you've been wondering how the series has the reputation it has, it all ramps up from here. We talk backwards talking, our "clues" for the central mystery, compare the series to (variously) Insidious, Neon Genesis Evangelion and professional wrestling! Also come to a startling realisation about the Horne brothers... Support the show

The soap opera continues, though we will note how Cooper seems to travel. Or at least which items seem essential. We're still a bit early, not quite to the kind of thing Twin Peaks would become famous for... But there's still some weirdness. We talk a lot about Laura Palmer's astonishingly active pre-death life and the odd bits and pieces that would normally get cut out of this kind...

Join us as we take a trip into the Pacific North-West... To a town with a population way too high for how its depicted. And an eccentric population. We are, of course, talking about Twin Peaks this time. Taking in the views of the feature length first episode (critically not the International Pilot version of this which we will get into later), we find that the series is a lot more subdued this ea...

Alas we have reached the end of Darkplace with so much of the series still left unglimpsed... What sights and truths could it reveal? Maybe that Dean Learner actually can act since once again he actually does for a brief moment. Given the title and subject matter for T he Creeping Moss from the Shores of Shoggoth , we end up talking about HP Lovecraft. But there's also some Clive Barker and Q...

Looking past the less than subtle "borrowing" of John Carpenter's back-catalogue, we end up zeroing in on the actual theme of Scotch Mist ! Doesn't have much to do with xenophobia, fog, mist but is very prevalent in the episode! Inevitably we also talk a lot about Stephen King... Support the show

We reach the infamous episode! The one with Garth Marenghi's attitude to subtext... Also his questions no one else asks... Despite the very obvious Planet of the Apes styling, we talk more about Avatar, Star Wars and Rawhead Rex and have fun trying to get back to the point as usual. Support the show

Content warning: mentions of sexual assault We're not wild about this episode of Darkplace, but as discussed it contains some of the more quotable lines. Also the episode has the absolutely incomprehensible production mistake of Thornton Reed actually acting in the episode! Otherwise, as is our way we meander off into other avenues of the 80s and in particular 80s horror... Support the show

Episode 2 of Darkplace has perhaps one of the more obvious inspirations from a famed horror author's work and perhaps quailing from the maddening reality of that we talk about why where horror is set seems to dictate what kind of horror you wind up with. More fake lost media and horror projects that intend to hide their actual horror nature and how thin the border between horror and comedy is...

In a surprising move, we change our focus to something quite different: Garth Marenghi's Darkplace ! A comedy, sort of horror series from the early 2000s. We get into how it all works and talk about how it belongs to the weird sub-genre of fake lost media. Also the bewildering cloud of comedy projects the various cast are involved with. Support the show

A wrap up now we're done with The X-Files for now. A whole franchise overview, out top comedy, top serious, worst episodes and best villains! Next time: Something Quite Different. Support the show

Or at least, there are a surprising number of British people and accents in this series continuation! We discuss the implications and... probable influences on the direction of travel the book is taking. We're quite taken with the writing and how Scully is depicted. (and realised after the fact - while we note that the timeline feels off in this book and comment that it has to occur within ab...

Somehow, Nick forgot the gore-fest of Nothing Lasts Forever existed at all, but is now painfully aware of the strange choice of penultimate episode. Not least that the original intent was much more meaningful, touching and appropriate at this late stage. And not involve nailing back-street doctors to the floor with fence posts for reasons the episode never bothers to even try to justify. And My St...

It's man vs machine in Rm9sbG93ZXJz, though the robot wait-staff are also determined to make Scully pay. One way or another. We discuss the motive of the antagonist and how Scully could be plausibly tracked through her personal massager... Familiar feels very old-school The X-Files but we get hung up on plot weirdness and suspect character design. Also why Mulder and Scully got involved in th...