I watched this very late at night a few days ago and never got around to writing about it, so this is all from memory. Here goes nothin'.
The first thing that really caught my attention was the music. It's beautiful and haunting, and creates quite the aura of mystery around the show. I can't remember the last time I liked a TV show's soundtrack so much.
I loved the slow reveals of Laura's death to the different characters. Each character had their own emotional response that was very believable, which I think is a credit to both the acting and directing, but in this case it's more due to directing. Lynch takes his time to the extreme degree. Since there is a limited amount of time to tell a story with the TV format, things tend to get rushed, and there isn't really time to explore character revelations to such a degree. Whedon was very good at doing just that in his episodes (see Buffy 5.16 "The Body"), but it's nothing compared to this. The show was very visually stunning as well, with a lot of cool angles and tracking shots and such. Just a couple examples. It was much more like a movie than a TV show, almost like watching a Twilight Zone episode.
The leisurely pace also helped heighten the mystery. The whole time all I wanted was to hear the whole story - who is Laura Palmer, who are her friends, what happened to her, why does she have that lockbox with porn! I just want to know it all now! It reminded me of Veronica Mars a LOT in that way, but VM is way more of a fast-paced show. Still, I can see how much it drew from Twin Peaks just from the pilot alone (P.S., if you've never seen Veronica Mars, do yourself a favor and watch it now).
Other thoughts:
- Most of the acting was good, some of it wasn't so much at all.
- I love agent Cooper, he's hilarious. Harry Truman ironically looks like a young George W.
- Finding the letter under the nail was awesome! Is the killer re-tweeting? :p
- Watching James makes me want to get my Vulcan out - damn April showers!
- Barking Bobby was very weird and creepy...
- That last scene, while very startling, was so confusing. Who took the neclace, who even knew to look there - how did her mom have a 'vision' of this, if that's even what happened!?
- I can't believe this was shown on network television in the early 90's.
That is all for now, what do you think? Anyone else still planning on keeping up with the tipswock? Or is this just a practice in futility...