-"Mary" that Boy from 1956 mentions...is he lying about their break-up?:

Aaah, that must be part of the dialogue between those two I couldn't make out. Now I need to rewatch it, oh dear...:-)

I mean....adultery/infidelity/sexuality is like a core theme of TP, so I'm assuming...

-Reason that "the Giant" is no longer credited as "the Giant" but now as "????????" (8 question marks):

Doppleganger?? Could it be that he "created" Laura for BOB instead of to combat him? We see her in a ball of gold, which could signify garmonbozia. 

Note: I don't necessarily agree with this theory, just thought of it after listening to the latest "Diane" podcast in which they fielded a listener question about Laura. I know there's a lot of belief that Laura is created as a way to offset or counterbalance BOB's existence, and I acknowledge that that theory may be more likely. But if Laura was created as a vessel for BOB, it would be even more meaningful that she prevented him from inhabiting her. 

My thoughts:

-Space castle out on the ultraviolet sea where Giant and flapper woman reside: White Lodge (but it seems too darn ominous still). I almost feel it's a middle ground, a neutral ground, waiting place, like a purgatory between the good and evil lodges.

-Reason that "the Giant" is no longer credited as "the Giant" but now as "????????" (8 question marks): this is in the past, I'm assuming because of the black-and-white theme. I don't believe the Giant has become a spirit yet. I think he's in a position of servitude or opportunity. Once he creates Laura Palmer in the golden orb and the flapper woman is approving of his work, I think he may move on to a higher position.

-Girl from 1956: Bob's first host, not Sarah Palmer (I'll explain why when I get to the frog-roach.)

-Amphibibug/frogbug and it's speckled egg: We saw The Experiment/Mother spewing out the same speckled eggs that the frog-roach crawls from, so it's from The Black Lodge. The frog-roach can't be Laura's spirit.  The egg appears in the New Mexico desert, most likely near the nuclear blast...the quasi birthplace of modern evil. Not near Twin Peaks where Sarah and Leland are most likely from. There's nothing good or Laura-y about the frog-bug and you know it :P.

-Charred Lumberjack/hobos (credited as Woodsmen): I believe these are the OG spirits of the Black Lodge. The Black Lodge is called a lodge for a reason, although it never has once looked Lodge-y. Mention of an apartment above a convenience store or anything we've seen in red room doesn't look lodge-y. Woodsmen would congregate in a lodge though...these guys look like they are from the Abe Lincoln era, and like they've been through the oil pit in Glastonbury Grove or charred in a fire. I think these men founded/originally inhabited the Black Lodge and throughout time new spirits have taken over and changed location/appearance of the Lodge but these guys still are around to listen in and appear to the public, do dirty work, etc.

-"This is the water, this is the well" chant: Possibly a way to lull listeners to sleep so that a seeds/frogbugs could be planted, but also possibly a call out to all evil spirits listening that it's time to party.

-BadCoop waking up from the Woodsmen's ritual: We see Bob extracted from BadCoop with a grin, and BadCoop as blase as ever. I believe Bob is still somehow in control of BadCoop whether or not he is headed back to the Black Lodge.

Significance of Convenience store (with Woodsmen rushing about):

From FWWM:

FIRST WOODSMAN We have descended from pure air.

Indicating that the Black Lodge spirits entered our realm through the void in the air brought about by the nuclear explosion?

BOB  Light of new discoveries.

Light = Nuclear explosion = Got a light?

MRS. TREMOND  Why not be composed of materials and combinations of atoms?

Indication that spirits became corporal due to the nuclear reaction

MRS. TREND'S GRANDSON  This is no accident.

Brought about by humans deliberately messing with nature

TREND'S GRANDSON Fell a victim.

Go ahead and do that Got a light skull crushing thing

MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE Fire Walk With Me...

Bob claps his hand and a circle of fire appears in the room.

This is the exact moment of the nuclear explosion, after which they leave the Convenience store.

Just a thought

More on the space castle:

Deputy Hawk, Brigg's, and Windom Earle's descirption of the White Lodge doesn't match up with the space castle we've seen:

Deputy Hawk describes the White Lodge as:

"My people believe that the White Lodge is a place where the spirits that rule man and nature reside."

Windom Earle relates a past-tense story about the White Lodge which is replete with Edenic imagery, suggesting that the White Lodge belonged to a time now lost or forgotten.

"Once upon a time, there was a place of great goodness, called the White Lodge. Gentle fawns gamboled there amidst happy, laughing spirits. The sounds of innocence and joy filled the air. And when it rained, it rained sweet nectar that infused one's heart with a desire to live life in truth and beauty. Generally speaking, a ghastly place, reeking of virtue's sour smell. Engorged with the whispered prayers of kneeling mothers, mewling newborns, and fools, young and old, compelled to do good without reason ... But, I am happy to point out that our story does not end in this wretched place of saccharine excess. For there's another place, its opposite:"

Earle then describes the Black Lodge in the present tense, perhaps indicating that it has replaced the White Lodge.

There are stories and clues that suggest the White Lodge exists or at least existed and one is Major Briggs who claims to have been there but doesn't remember more of it than seeing "a huge owl".

Based on this information, I believe the space castle may be a place of refuge for the leftover good spirits to seek shelter from bad spirits if the White Lodge (their former home) was indeed destroyed. The only entrance to the space castle we saw was the very small rectangular window, and the castle itself looks fairly sturdy and in the middle of a raging sea. "????????" looked slightly disturbed when the alarm went off and he gazed out to the stormy sea for some time. Anticipating something? He thought it best to go check the projector screen after that and is when he saw all the craziness that was happening/had happened.

I think it's important to remember that "???????" is wearing that butler/tuxedo uniform and our beloved Giant is dressed in slacks and a cardigan. Total possible doppel but I think more than likely the Giant, just in the past.

Hi Nikki.

The building in 1956 has a gas station, but it's not clear enough to tell if there's a convenience store.

The convenience store in 1945 looks like a dummy store.  Historically the government did build a dummy town in White Sands to test the effects of the explosion on a town.

The Experiment spawning scene happened in another dimension, and that's why the eggs reached Earth 11 years later.  The Giant's Laura orb even took 25 years to reach Sarah's womb.  So travel between dimensions messes up time.  Which happened also with Phillip Jeffries, and likely Briggs' body.  Also Annie's message for Laura to write in her diary.  So time travel is possible.

?

I don't think Bob was separated from Bad Coop in that scene .  I think that the Burnt Men were healing Bob/Bad Coop.

I'm hoping there's gonna be more to it, but meanwhile, THEGIANT is still 8 letters, as in ????????

😛

Also, I didn't get the impression Mother was all about evil/Black Lodge, nor was her regular offspring. So much so that ???????? spots and has to act on BOB's orb among them, and not on the whole thing or anything else. I think BOB being there is like a mutated damage in something that was natural and balanced til that point, but suffered that because of the atomic explosion (both in terms of radiation and excess of evil). That's also why I tend to see the frogmoth as something not bad. If anything, more likely to have been born from the Laura egg than BOB's orb (which wasn't even an egg anyway).

I don't think Bob was separated from Bad Coop in that scene .  I think that the Burnt Men were healing Bob/Bad Coop.

Any thoughts on the Burnt Men removing the black orb (BOB) from Bad Coop? Is that insignificant?

Weeeellllll, if the White Lodge (good) is past tense & the Black Lodge (evil) is present tense - maybe someone needs to wake up the lion?
(has anybody mentioned Narnia yet?  😉 )

-Space castle out on the ultraviolet sea where Giant and flapper woman reside:
In the original series the giant always assisted Good Coop and made a pact of sorts by taking and then returning Coop's ring and warning that 'It' was happening again.  I'd have to associate the giant with the White Lodge.  It appears to be the same purple sea Coop observed from the space box porch after leaving the glass box.  Remember those jiggling white specks Lynch showed during part of the nuclear blast scene?  Very similar to the starscape that Coop fell through after being expelled from the Black Lodge. Not sure what the connection is, if any.

About the question whether the nuclear blast created the entities revealed during that sequence, it appeared to me that Lynch focused on apparent tubes within the mushroom cloud with periodic & ominous openings, as though they were openings to other dimensions or universes that at that moment gained access to our Earthly plain. That's my take, the entities weren't created but just given access to our world through the detonation.  Taken literally, at one moment we're shown a golden nodule in the mushroom cloud and as Lynch moves the camera forward, we apparently enter that nodule and arrive at the purple sea that leads to the Giant's home (White Lodge?) where there's always music in the air. The sea is much more stormy in that scene than Coop's view from the space box porch, possibly alluding to the concurrent circumstances on Earth.

-Reason that "the Giant" is no longer credited as "the Giant" but now as "????????" (8 question marks):
Correction - it's actually 7 (seven) question marks in the credits. That number keeps cropping up, notably in Lucky 7 Insurance and 7's on the one-arm-bandits that Coop plays for instance. Is it possibly literally related to 7 questions that will become apparent throughout the season?

-Amphibibug/frogbug and its speckled egg:
Clearly hatched from one of the eggs that 'Mother' spewed out along with Bob's sphere. By the way, notice that 'Mother' spewed her product while floating on her stomach while the Giant created the Laura sphere while floating on his back. Opposites. I tag the bug frog as a form of evil.  I agree with other posts, Cole had a photo of the mushroom cloud and Franz Kafka on his walls. Metamorphosis. Cole knows more than he's revealed.

-Charred Lumberjack/hobos (credited as Woodsmen):
They moved about randomly at the convenience store, sometimes bumping into each other like the subatomic particles portrayed in the mushroom cloud. Like others, I believe the charred appearance is due to their appearance on our plane of existence via the blast. The Lincoln Lumberjack is associated with that electrical static sound the Giant played for Good Coop. And 'It' is in the Giant's house now. There's something here that hasn't been revealed yet.

-Laura:
Ok, now we've seen the origin story. I have a hard time believing that, unlike Bob, she'd be a one-and-done tragic story of a single teen. I think we're going to see that she inhabits humans time and again, including the teen we knew from the original series. Earlier in S03 she said 'I am dead yet I live' and then got sucked out of the Black Lodge. Good Coop then encountered Leland who asked Coop to find Laura. Where'd she go? I think that was the Laura spirit created by the Giant, not the physical Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, Washington State USA. As a spirit similar to Bob, the transactional nature of the Black Lodge might not apply to her. I think we're going to see her again this season, but maybe not in the visage of Sheryl Lee.

-Convenience Store being like the McDonald Ranch House just with Woodsman inside (see answer about woodsman down here). I think there are many, like decoy experiment facilities that look like something mundane so that people don't get too curious.

-Significance of Convenience store (with Girl from 1956 + boy): Can be the same store recladded 11 years after, or simply an esthetic cross-reference to give the viewer subconscious some continuity between arcs of the episode

-Space castle out on the ultraviolet sea where Giant and flapper woman reside: I guess that's what we call the White Lodge. Something beautiful, outwordly, and unexplainable. A place from which "good" observes that everything is balanced in the world to function properly. Made me think of The Chamber of Guf  

-Flapper woman (Joy Nash): Man! Isn't she beautiful? She is the feminine counterpart of ????????. She adds "love" to the "creations of ????????

-Reason that "the Giant" is no longer credited as "the Giant" but now as "????????" (8 question marks): I do not know. I guess the name could reveal much.

-Girl from 1956: No idea yet. The boy meets girl part is very sweet to me, very very sweet and mellow, two clean pure souls having a walk in the middle of nowhere (coz they don't need anything but themselves, no cellphones, or gossiping or vehicles or shit) enjoying their company and sharing affection. To me this is Lynch take on what we lost. The beauty of the America that was. The Return is full of scenes where kids are sacrificed for the sake of the shitty life of today. I believe that this series is full of references to the loss of innocence suffered in particular by children. Sonny Jim sad face in the car (and JUST Dougie who is "pure" and not at all in our society current competitive and hysterical mindset notice that sadness and cries), the boy run over by Richard Horne which is a drug addict and a bad person, the son of the 119 drugged mother, abandoned on his couch.. etc

-Boy from 1956: A boy from 1956 who

-"Mary" that Boy from 1956 mentions...is he lying about their break-up?: I do not think so.

-Amphibibug/frogbug and it's speckled egg: One of the Experiment offspring. I think those eggs are not Bob, which can be seen as the BOB we know already when Experiments vomits stuff out. I feel like (especially after having read "Lynch on Lynch" that as Lynch said the destruction of some kind of natural equilibrium was destroyed in the beginning of the 50s. I need to find the exact quote but the juice was that with the advent of plastic, big scale industrial production, mass production of war machine, and the starting of several wars arranged in an almost arbitrary fashion was the beginning of mass hysteria we are living into this day and age.

-Charred Lumberjack/hobos (credited as Woodsmen): Either offsprings of evil, or human experiments of radiation. Possesed entities, or the Dugpas.

-"THE" Woodsman/Abe Lincoln guy: Same as above

-"Gotta light?" The light= the atomic explosion, "We are here cause of you, where is that energy you released now?" Or maybe he just wanted to have a smoke so bad! Must be hard to be in the desert with no lighter on you.

-"This is the water, this is the well" chant: This is the water (Human Fear, garmonbozia) This is the well (Our plane of existence) Drink full and descend (Come here all of you woodsmen and lets have a blood orgy)

-BadCoop waking up from the Woodsmen's ritual: They need to keep the doppelgänger alive otherwise White Lodge wins. And they have to take care of BOB too.

-Vintage metal electicrical boxes: A way for energy to flow. Quantum physics magnetic field currents and shit 

-White horsey: The white horse is pestilence and bad biblical tradition