Subject: Economist Mar0291 (WKLP spoiler) From: burns@endor.uucp (John Burns) Date: 1991-03-05, 06:10 Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks Reply-to: burns@das.harvard.edu (John Burns) Excerpt from the article "Sloping off" in the Economist (March 2, 1991): Sloping off But the failure of "Twin Peaks" has been too spectacular (its most recent rating placed it 85th out of 89 network shows) to be blamed on bad scheduling. In fact, the second season of "Twin Peaks" has been much inferior to the first.The first warning sign came when Mr Lynch and his partner, Mark Frost, failed to resolve the show's central theme, "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" before the three-month summer break. By the time the programme resumed last autumn, much of the tension that had surrounded Miss Palmer's murder had faded away. Making matters worse, the show took a marked turn towards the fantastic. Mr Lynch and Mr Frost had previously done a brilliant job of parodying a number of television and film genres--the soap-opera, the mystery, film noir--without sacrificing the elements of each that gave them their suspense. Their flair for the surreal and the genuinely scary kept the show's tone too ominous to be dismissed as camp. But when the programme shifted from the hyper-real to the super-natural--coded radio signals from space, Laura's killer turning out to have been an elusive spirit who inhabited her father's body--it quickly became disappointingly silly. --- I agree with the above, except weren't the signals FROM Earth TO space? John A. Burns (burns@das.harvard.edu, burns@huche1.bitnet) "Where there's no sense, there's no feeling."