TV Tuesdays Free Talk

I read a few interpretations online after watching the show, and it made me look at the plot, especially the ending of the third season, as a demonstration that good and evil are relative. Cooper is a paragon of good all throughout the show, yet in the end, his good intentions end up damning himself and Laura/Carrie to an alternate reality that he inadvertently breaks. It is as if Judy punishes him for meddling too much in the balance of good and evil, and puts him in a position where he ends up being the one who is causing the trauma and pain. Carrie was not Laura in the end, but she is reminded of Laura's trauma somehow at the very end. So now he is in an impossible situation. He didn't fix it, but broke it even more in an even more complicated way. The relativity of good and evil, or at least there being a fine line between them, is also suggested by the way so many characters transform in the show, or how good people do bad things/bad people do good things. The rich casino owners who are probably total scumbags are capable of generosity and kindness, Mr. Horne was basically a complete piece of shit but totally changed his ways, etc.

However, I think there is still so much more going on here. I recall from the original seasons when they first learned of the Black Lodge, they also learned about the White Lodge. I may be misremembering, but one character, Garland Briggs or Hawk probably, told them that the Black Lodge is a place of pure evil on the way to the White Lodge. They describe entering it as a kind of spiritual journey that you have to face with "perfect courage." Perfect courage is perhaps the best way to describe Agent Cooper. Perhaps season three ends at a point where he is deeper into his journey through the Black Lodge; another trial against evil. His character always represented such pure good, and I sometimes get the impression that his presence in the world is almost the equivalent of Bob's, as if he is an Agent of the White Lodge or something like that. Maybe he is trying to return. His story has always been one of trying to reconcile his past with a better future, of enduring and overcoming the evil he inevitably encounters in his job not just to solve the crime, but to extinguish the evil somehow (in the world, but in himself and his past perhaps). I don't know what the White Lodge actually is or what arriving there would do. It could be that the White Lodge and Black Lodge are actually the same thing, and perfect courage is required for that journey because you end up having to face the fact that good and evil are intertwined?

Also, it annoys me how Gi-hun blindly trusts player 001, despite his knowledge that the last time he was in the games, 001 was an infiltrator. I'm also confused as to what the Front Man's plan was in the case of 001's team losing the game. I assume they'd fake his death, like they did the first time around, but that would be a lot harder to pull off with a public firing squad.

I also felt like they spent too much time on the Six Legs game, especially since I care less about who lives and dies this time around.