I'm not even trying to "figure out" episode 18 anymore. I'm just letting it take me in all the different and inconsistent directions that it was designed to take me.

When I first watched eps 17 and 18, I was convinced that they were set on doing another season, just because they were blatantly leaving open such big loose ends (Audrey, Beverley & Ben, Carl, The Experiment, Judy, Sarah Palmer, Whatsisname the 'sparkle' addict who maybe shot himself in the woods, 'Red' the drug trafficker who does magic tricks and might be the grandson of Mrs Tremond from the original show...), and even opening more of them (Richard & Linda, Mrs. Chalfont/Tremond, I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting).

But by now I think that wasn't about setting up another season, it was about leaving us with persistent mysteries, ideas that we could chew on and reinterpret for the rest of our lives. It's also a statement on the dream logic that Lynch likes so much, and that in retrospect we should have seen suffusing the entire show. Dreams don't get tied up before they end.

I think they could give us another season if they really wanted to; that's another benefit of this style of storytelling. But I honestly don't think that was the plan.

There's a meme going around, I'm not sure how true it is, that in a dialect of the Chinese language, "jiao de" translates to "explanation," implying that easy answers are the great evil that would destroy this world. And that world, the show itself, seems very much a part of what they're talking about with "we live inside a dream."

The woman at the door of the "Palmer" house at the end, who called herself Alice Tremond, was actually played by the real-world owner of that house. Also, near the end of their drive, Cooper/Richard and Laura/Carrie stopped at a Valero gas station -- that was the first time a real-world logo appeared over the entire course of the show (other than maybe Diane's cigarette's; I need to recheck that). This seems to imply that when Dale stepped out of the "normal" world of the show, he was stepping into the "real" world, or something closer to the real world. The show was the dream, and the dream had come to an end.

I say this right after I said I'm not trying to figure out episode 18 anymore. Maybe I am...

But this was a fucking good show. It immeasurably exceeded my expectations, and it deserves an enormous pile of Emmys (and will probably get none).