Just watching episode 19 yesterday I noticed how similar James and Evelyn's relationship is to Pete Dayton's and Patricia Arquette's in Lost Highway. Pete and James are both mechanics and Evelyn and Arquette (sorry, I can't remember the character's name) both are alluring blondes with powerful husbands that they fear. I suppose it's not exactly an original formula anyway but I still thought it was interesting.

Also, watching ep 19 and coming into the last part of the series the credits with Laura Palmer's Theme and her high school photo seem really irrelevant to what was actually happening in each episode by then.

Good call, giospurs 

Wicked blonde cougar meets innocent, angsty young buck, gives him much hot sex to frame him in a murder scheme.  Both women do it "for the money."

Interesting post.... I guess it just goes to show that execution is as important as subject matter. There were ways that "James and Evelyn" could have been done in a more Lynchian way - which is what I think Diane Keaton tried and failed to do in her episode.

Yes, last time through that storyline I realized that, poorly executed as it was, the James and Evelyn subplot was true to both the themes of the series and Lynch's body of work. Btw, episode 22 was one of the worst episodes, but I really don't think it was Diane Keaton's fault. I actually liked her direction, but just thought the material and writing featured in the episode was dreadful.

I found Diane Keaton's directing style to be truly dreadful... Sure, it's not a *bad* style and there's even a couple of really good moments in the episode (ones that absent BOB1 reminded me), but Keaton does something that I really hate to see in TP, she tries to imitate Lynch by *forcing* the quirkiness and the absurd... Lynch may show us something odd like the Horne bros. dancing when Leland enters Ben's office singing, but doesn't insist on that. We know Leland and we know Ben and Jerry so the scene may surprise us, but it's like it is... We don't need to see the dancing guy from the pilot more than a few seconds and it's only necessary a quick shot of a guy yelling "Hot damn this pie's good!!" to realize we're in a different place and to see Lynch's hand...

Keaton, on the other hand, insists over and over in the same kind of shots, the group of policemen and even does so in scenes where it's unnecessary... Lynch's quirkiness comes from the characters and plot and it's there, not fabricated (the Hornes scene again, Señor Droolcup,...) , but there's nothing quirky in a cop questioning Malcolm...

There are exceptions, of course, since Lynch is not by any means perfect... IMO he comits the flaw I'm talking about by insisting too much in Andy's "great moment in law enforcement history" from ep.8...

I do think that Keaton was too heavy handed and arbitrary in her attempts to be "weird". But I agree that the writing was off, too, in that one.

I just rewatched episode 22. You're right about the cop questioning Malcolm, that was terrible, how is a policeman misspelling the word "Jaguar" funny? Anyway, I didn't find the episode to be too bad. Malcolm's death was way too obvious but it was interesting to see how Keaton made similarities to Malcolm and BOB. The way Malcolm held Donna's face and the slow motion growling and Donna's cries were almost similar to Laura's at the end of FWWM (which I know this episode obviously preceded).