Subject: Re: The Message
From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Date: 1990-10-10, 00:50
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <MUFFY.90Oct9104115@remarque.berkeley.edu> muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy) writes:
> >Indeed, it is very likely that the message was added after the
> >transmission was received.  The entire printout contained slash,
> >letter, digit, digit, digit, slash, etc.  There weren't any other
> >combinations of letters that I could see (someone could check this by
> >freeze-framing, if you care).  

This makes cryptological sense, but not dramatic sense.  In the teleplay
we (the audience) must be able to recognize, on the strength of a few
seconds' viewing of a sheet of printout, that a message has been
interpolated into that space data.  To make this feat practical, the
printout has to make the extra words stand out without looking too
obviously unrealistic.  One easy way to do this is to "imbed" the
message words in a background of regularly spaced gibberish: the eye is
then naturally drawn to the anomalies, i.e., the message.

In these cases the Star Trek Principle is operative: do whatever plays
the best, and the nerds will rationalize around it for you later.