I think anyone who claims to fully understand it can be safely ignored. It’s not supposed to be understood, it’s supposed to be felt. Lynch intentionally tries to invoke a dreamlike feeling, where things simultaneously feel internally consistent and incomprehensibly bizarre. There are certainly things to understand, but there are also things which are meant more to inspire an idea of something that could be understood, without having a concrete explanation. That’s part of the magic.

I think the middle of season 2, when he stepped away to work on Blue Velvet, is frustratingly weak, but they got there in the end. I think The Return was good, but not quite as good.

Overall I love it and reference it frequently.

Look up which season 2 episodes Lynch was involved in, and which ones he wasn’t. For me, the drop in quality perfectly aligns with his brief departure.

Obviously the intelligent person on a team of idiots then. There is value in being the least intelligent person in a room, since you have the opportunity to learn from people smarter than you. But not if you’re just forgetting things so that you can relearn them.

Do I get dumber to become the idiot or is everyone else just smarter than me?

I saw both years ago, but it never really registered how similar this is to the other one

Not really? The joke about the spherical cow is about reducing a problem to a hyper-simplified version to make computation easier at the cost of accuracy.

The spherical bastard is more a joke about mathematical projections, since a sphere looks the same from any angle.