First, a quick status update... The Patreon podcast is taking a one-week break and will return a week from tomorrow. I am going to start making a few older podcast segments public in the next month (including the Blade Runner 2049 discussion, my brief overview of the history of video essays, and my 10th anniversary episode - both as a whole and as individual sections). And this morning I uploaded the following 2016-17 Fandor videos to my YouTube channel for the first time: Not Just O.J., Ode to Boston, Nat Turner before Birth of a Nation, and MELODRAMA & minimalism.
Last Wednesday, I published a group of my extended comments on individual episodes from 2015 that had never been published on this site before. Tomorrow I will continue that endeavor in a new format. Rather than group together all of my episode comments from the 2016 Reddit rewatch, I am publishing them as separate entries, an hour apart for thirty-five hours. In the short term, this will provide a fun way for long-time Twin Peaks fans to check in on my site throughout those two days and read my thoughts on particular episodes. In the long-term, however, I have a different process in mind.
My hope is that these short, casual, but lively entries - which range from a long paragraph to several pages - can serve as a "first-time viewer companion" for people coming to Twin Peaks for the first time. That's the context they were originally written in, because although the Reddit exercise was dubbed a "rewatch" it was carefully managed to avoid any spoilers and invite new viewers into the discussion. I followed that lead and offered perspectives gleaned without giving away any plot details. Occasionally I even asked a series of questions aimed at first-time viewers, and often got interesting responses. For this republication, I folded in another type of comment I left on these threads: links to my earlier work on a given episode, noting when they did and didn't contain spoilers. And I am illustrating each entry with a carefully-chosen image from the first five minutes of that episode, so that even when scrolling the full list a first-timer won't see more than they should.
Meanwhile several of the entries aren't episode reviews at all: one offers preparatory tips before viewing the feature film and another reflects on the entire narrative structure of the series. Even in the case of episode responses, these are not orderly "viewer's guides" with plot recaps and explanations; some barely even discuss the events of the episode at all, focusing instead on style, mood, or broader reflections. There are definitely guides out there which serve that more formal function but the idea of this particular companion is to spur thoughts and invite discussion, a form of communication between someone very familiar with the series and someone new to it. Not that other veteran viewers can't ride along too!
At the end of this hourly routine, on Tuesday evening, I will publish the full companion directory so that it can sit near the top of the site and help readers navigate to the pieces they want to read. See you tomorrow and Tuesday.
(Viewer Companion gathered here)
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