Mr. C

He is the figure that walked out of Glastonbury Grove in 1989 when Dale Cooper did not. He carries BOB, and has done so continuously from the last frame of the original series until Part 17 of The Return.

In 2016 he has hair down, wears reptile skin, drives a Mercedes, and speaks in a low flattened register. He arrives at a house, goes through the man on the door without breaking stride, sits with the man he came to see, and collects his people. Everyone he addresses obeys immediately.

Across eighteen hours he runs an organisation across state lines, kills or has killed at least seven people on screen, enters an FBI system with working credentials, takes an operation from a man who had held it for fourteen years, has his own son burned out of existence to test a set of coordinates, and is finally shot at a sheriff's front desk by a receptionist.

A freight train passes. In a roadside diner, Ray Monroe, Darya and the silent Jack sit with him. Ray says something about what Mr. C needs. He is corrected, flatly:

"Want. Not need. I don't need anything, Ray."

He is staged as a logistics operation: meetings, drivers, a schedule, subordinates who are frightened of him. In Las Vegas, Duncan Todd pays out on his instruction and warns his assistant: "Never have someone like him in your life." In Buckhorn, Phyllis Hastings is shot with her lover's gun and told, "You did good. You follow human nature perfectly" — the frame around her husband having been built before the murder.

Later he orders Hutch and Chantal to kill Warden Murphy inside two days and then take a job in Las Vegas; in Part 15 they kill Duncan Todd and his assistant on his instruction, and the next name on their list is Dougie Jones.

The evolution of the arm states the rule: the doppelgänger must come back in before Cooper can go out.

Mr. C spends twenty-five years avoiding his scheduled return, and the entire remaining season is built on the attempt to enforce it. In Part 3 the dashboard socket glows green, the road doubles, he crashes and vomits garmonbozia with the Waiting Room curtains on his windscreen — and the exchange reaches for him and fails. In Part 4, interviewed at Yankton, he admits he was "behind schedule" when he crashed.

In room 6 he takes Darya's gun and tells her he killed Jack two hours ago. He plays her a recording of her own conversation with Ray — in which Ray says he has been told, by Jeffries, that they are to kill Mr. C. He asks who hired them and what they want. Half a million, split. He produces a playing card, an ace of spades, scratched and marked, and says: this is what I want. She tries to get out. He beats her, puts a pillow over her face and shoots her through it.

Afterwards a voice on the telephone claiming to be Phillip Jeffries says: "You're going back in tomorrow and I will be with BOB again." It knows about New York and about a meeting with Major Briggs. When Mr. C presses on whether this is really Jeffries, the line goes dead.

He checks his reflection and finds the Waiting Room, and BOB in it. He says: "You're still with me. That's good."

He enters an FBI system with working credentials, resolves coordinates onto the Black Hills, and downloads the security plans of Yankton Federal Prison.

Arrested with cocaine, a machine gun and poison in the vehicle, he is interviewed at Yankton. To Gordon Cole he says: "It's yrev good to see you again, old friend." He claims deep cover with Phillip Jeffries and admits he was behind schedule when he crashed. In Part 7 he and Ray Monroe walk out to a waiting rental car at one in the morning — nothing supernatural is involved; the mechanism is leverage.

He walks into a warehouse run by Renzo, with Ray there. Renzo hits him on the back of the head and tells him it is from the nursery-school teacher. The house rule is explained: Renzo is boss because nobody beats him at arm-wrestling, and in fourteen years nobody has come close.

Mr. C sits down. He does not push. He lifts Renzo's arm back to the starting position, and then again, and then again, telling him each time that this is the starting position — until Renzo is frightened. Then he puts the arm through the table and breaks it, and kills him with one punch. The room accepts the new arrangement immediately.

Ray names Phillip Jeffries as the man who paid for the killing, and gives the location as the Dutchman's — "it's not a real place." He also says the green ring was to be put on the body afterwards.

Mr. C makes Ray wear it — ring finger, left hand — and then shoots him. The ring arrives on the Red Room floor, and Philip Gerard sets it on the table.

He arrives at a convenience store. Woodsmen take him up, through stairs and corridors that do not behave, to a room where Phillip Jeffries exists as a large bell-shaped apparatus that emits steam and speaks. Mr. C wants to know about Judy. Jeffries tells him: "You've already met Judy." Smoke rises and forms the figure 485514. Mr. C writes it down.

Richard Horne is waiting outside the store with a gun, saying he saw FBI photographs his mother had, and that his mother is Audrey Horne. Mr. C takes the weapon off him without effort, looks at him, and tells him to get in the truck. He texts a single question — Las Vegas? — and drives.

In Part 16 he drives Richard out to the coordinates, hands him a device that beeps as it approaches the point, and sends him ahead onto a large boulder. Richard calls down that he is there; the tone goes flat; and he is burned out of existence by an electrical fire, from the feet up. Mr. C watches. Then: "Oh. Good-bye, my son." He gets back in the truck. The coordinates were the ones Ray gave him.

The coordinates deliver him to the Fireman's room, where he is caged and run through a golden apparatus into a screen showing the Twin Peaks sheriff's station.

He walks in. Andy and Lucy greet him as Agent Cooper and introduce him to Sheriff Frank Truman. In the office Frank realises something is wrong, and 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 him.

He burns. BOB comes out of the body as an orb and attacks, and Freddie Sykes destroys it with the green glove. Cooper takes the green ring and puts it on the corpse's finger; the body goes, and the ring returns to the Red Room table. Gerard says of the doppelgänger that he did not go back in.

Twin Peaks' central horror has always been that the thing destroying a family looked exactly like a member of it. Mr. C runs that operation on the audience.

He has Kyle MacLachlan's face, Dale Cooper's intelligence and the Bureau's training, and the series withholds everything that made the face mean anything: the pace, the courtesy, the delight, the voice. What remains is method with nothing behind it. The most affecting thing about Mr. C in Part 1 is not what he does, because in Part 1 he does almost nothing. It is that the warmest presence Twin Peaks ever created has been running loose in the world for a quarter of a century, and neither the town nor the Bureau has noticed.

The horror is administrative rather than supernatural, and the season is consistent about it. He does not summon anything. He hires, files, drives, negotiates, downloads a prison layout, sends a text message, and breaks an arm slowly to establish terms. When he needs a body taken he pays somebody; when he needs a rule evaded he manufactures a substitute; when he needs coordinates checked he uses his son. The one moment he loses composure is a telephone call from somebody further up.

Filed against BOB, the distinction that matters is consent. Leland did not know. Mr. C looks in a mirror, finds his passenger there, and says that it is good. Twenty-five years of the most effective evil in this story is not a possession — it is a working relationship, and the human half of it is the senior partner.

And filed against Cooper, the file's summary position is this: the doppelgänger is what Dale Cooper's method looks like with the ethics removed. Every faculty is intact. Attention, patience, reading a room, understanding how evidence is assembled, seeing what somebody will do before they do it. Twin Peaks spends two seasons arguing that these are the qualities that make a good man good, and then spends eighteen hours demonstrating that they were never the load-bearing part.

Dale Cooper · BOB · Dougie Jones & Janey-E · Richard Horne · Ray Monroe · Darya · Phillip Jeffries · The Woodsmen · Diane Evans · Gordon Cole · Lucy Moran · Frank Truman · Chantal & Hutch · Duncan Todd

Part 2 · Part 8 · Part 13 · Part 15 · Part 16 · Part 17 · The Double Is Not a Copy · Jowday (Judy)