"Want to watch another one?" said the woman, her voice distant and eerie, as though she was lost inside an otherworldly plane of extra-dimensional hyper-reality.
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The man gazed straight ahead, his expression blank and lifeless, as if he were haunted by malevolent demons who lurk in dark ethereal realms. "OK…" he finally said. So the woman clicked the remote and together they watched another episode of Twin Peaks, season three.
Twenty-five years ago the couple had watched the first season of Twin Peaks and they'd loved the dream-like surrealism, savoured the sinister wackiness. But now … after watching three episodes of season three … they were feeling slightly disoriented and unsettled.
They stared at the TV with vacant, dead eyes, occasionally communicating in disjointed Twin-Peaks-ish dialogue.
The woman said, "Do you know what's going on?" The man did not speak for 10 seconds, then said, "Nope". The woman said, "So who's that guy? Is he a new character?"
The man did not speak for eight minutes, then he said, "I think he's a federal agent who's an evil doppelganger of another evil doppelganger and that's why he's sitting in the red-curtained gateway to hell, talking to the dead lady with the backwards voice."
"Ah, that makes sense," said the woman, but it didn't really, then she got up to make a cup of tea and get a bowl of corn chips for mental-sustenance. She did not press pause while she was gone. It would not make much difference.
A few minutes later the woman was back in front of the TV, sipping tea and crunching corn chips, creating her own ominous, ambient Twin-Peaks soundscape: slurrrrrp, crunchhhh, slurrrrrrrrrrrp.
The man looked at the woman, slowly rose from his chair, and walked toward her to grab a handful of corn chips from her bowl … but just as he reached down, she said, "Hey, get your own!", her face contorting horrifically, as though possessed by a malevolent entity who takes control of human souls and forces them to kill.
The man slowly reverse-walked back to his chair and sat down again. He wanted to say something about how he always shared his TV snacks with her, but her translucent eyes were flickering menacingly, so he thought it best to just leave it alone.
A long stick with a brain stuck on top began talking to the man and woman. It was their son, standing in the doorway. He said, "Hey, you're watching the new season of Twin Peaks. Yeah, David Lynch is a great director. He delves into metaphysical neo-noir using his own unique brand of satirical magic realism. Quite the auteur!"
The brain-head stick-son was a university film student but the man and the woman were not impressed – they knew he lifted a lot of that from Wikipedia. The brain-head stick-son stood there a bit longer, got bored, then exploded into a billow of black smoke and vanished into a power point outlet.
The whole room began to shudder and the floor opened up beneath them. A vast netherworld appeared below. The man and the woman did not notice a thing. They could not look away from the TV.
"So who's that character?" said the woman. The man said nothing for 20 minutes, then he spoke. "No idea."
Into the night they sat there, unmoving, their bodies disconnected husks, trapped inside a bizarre nightmare of unimaginable confusion, plotless plotlines, infinite characters, hilarious weirdness, and dark, unspoken corn-chip grudges.
