Frank Truman

Frank Truman is the Sheriff of Twin Peaks in 2016 and Harry S. Truman's brother. Harry does not appear in The Return; the dialogue keeps him alive somewhere off screen and seriously ill, and the illness is never given a scene.

Frank runs a department containing three people from the 1989 investigation — Hawk, Andy Brennan and Lucy Moran — and one from the other side of it, Deputy Bobby Briggs. Over eighteen hours he reopens the Cooper case on documentary evidence, recovers Major Briggs's instructions, mounts the expedition to Jack Rabbit's Palace, forces Ben Horne to pay for the surgery of a woman his grandson beat, and is standing in his own office when Cooper's doppelgänger reaches for a weapon to kill him.

Frank comes back from fishing. Lucy is shocked to see him — she has been holding a telephone conversation with the same man, and both facts arriving at once is more than she can process. Behind the front desk there is a part of the building the original series never showed: dispatchers, a working back office, staff.

Hawk brings Frank the pages he prised out of the lavatory stall door. They are from Laura Palmer's secret diary, and one of them records a dream in which a woman speaks to her: "My name is Annie. I've been with Laura and Dale. The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can't leave."

The two men work it out from dates alone. Written into a schoolgirl's diary in 1989, describing an event of 1991, by a woman who would not be in the town for another two years. Frank then calls Doc Hayward, who appears on a screen from somewhere else entirely, and asks him what he remembers about the night Cooper came back. Hayward examined him at the Great Northern; Cooper, he says, was acting mighty strange, and was later seen coming out of intensive care.

Bobby, Frank and Hawk come to Betty Briggs. She is not surprised. Her husband told her that one day people would come and ask about Dale Cooper, and that when they did she was to give them what he had left. She shows them a red chair. This is the chair. Inside the leg of it is a sealed metal cylinder.

Hawk unrolls an old Nez Perce map on the table for Frank. It is not an ordinary map, he says. It is a living thing — it speaks to whatever is happening at the time it is being read. He goes through the marks: a symbol for fire, which he glosses as standing for something like modern electricity; black corn, which stands for sustenance. Put together, the two make a third thing: black fire.

Frank points at a shape above the mountains and asks what it is. Hawk tells him he does not want to know.

Frank telephones Ben Horne and tells him what his grandson has done: killed a child at a junction, and beaten Miriam nearly to death to stop her testifying. Miriam needs surgery and has no money. Ben says he will pay for it. All of it.

Bobby Briggs, Frank, Hawk and Andy Brennan walk out to Jack Rabbit's Palace — the tree stump Bobby named as a child. Each of them puts soil from the site in his pocket, as the instructions said. They pace out 253 yards east. They find a pool with vapour rising from it, and a naked, eyeless woman lying on the ground beside it. Frank checks the time: 2:53. A portal opens above them, and Andy is taken.

Margaret Lanterman telephones Hawk to say she is dying. After the call the light in her cabin goes out. Hawk tells the station; Frank, Lucy, Andy and Bobby take it standing up, and the room's light changes.

The doppelgänger walks into the sheriff's station. Andy and Lucy greet him as Agent Cooper and introduce him to Sheriff Frank Truman. In the office, Frank realises something is wrong. Both men reach for their weapons. The telephone rings at the front desk; the voice says he is Cooper and he is nearly in Twin Peaks. Lucy shoots the doppelgänger.

Later, with the clock on the wall flickering between 2:52 and 2:53 and refusing to advance, Cooper says some things will change, that the past dictates the future — and asks Frank to give Harry his regards.

The Return is built on absence, and Frank Truman is the most structurally exposed instance of it. The audience arrives wanting Harry, and gets his brother. Every scene he is in is a scene the original series would have given to somebody else.

The season declines to make that a deficiency. Frank is not a diminished Harry and is not written as a substitute in mourning. He is a competent sheriff who runs a functioning department, and the record of what that department achieves in eighteen hours is better than anything the 1989 office managed: it identifies the substitution of Dale Cooper, recovers a dead officer's instructions, executes them in the field, protects a witness by the only means available, and is present and armed when the case finally walks through the door.

What he never gets is the thing Harry had — the partnership. Cooper comes back for four minutes, calls him Sheriff, and asks him to pass a message to his brother. The most important case in the county's history is closed in Frank Truman's office by a receptionist, a security guard and a man he has met once.

Summary position: Frank Truman is Twin Peaks' argument that institutions can be inherited by people who are merely good at the job, and that this is worth something even when it is not what anybody was hoping for.

Harry S. Truman · Tommy "Hawk" Hill · Andy Brennan · Lucy Moran · Bobby Briggs · Major Garland Briggs · Doc Hayward · Naido · Benjamin Horne

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