Richard Horne

Richard Horne runs product for a man called Red, kills a child at a junction and drives on, beats the only witness and leaves her for dead, robs his own grandmother by the throat, and is finally driven into the mountains by his father and sent up onto a rock to test a set of coordinates.

He appears in seven hours of television, harms four people on screen, and is never once shown being told no by anybody until the man who kills him takes a gun out of his hand.

Richard meets Red about running product for him. Red flips a dime, and the dime does things a coin cannot do — it hangs, it moves, it ends up somewhere it should not be. He laughs at Richard while he does it and makes clear what happens if Richard fails him. Richard leaves shaken and furious.

Richard drives his truck through town at speed, overtaking on the wrong side. At a junction a woman is crossing with her small son. The truck hits the boy and kills him. Richard does not stop. The mother holds the body in the road. People come out. Nobody can do anything.

Richard comes to Miriam's trailer. She saw him kill the boy. She tells him, through the door, that she has already written to Sheriff Truman and put the letter in the post. He breaks in and beats her. Afterwards he leaves the gas on.

He then telephones Chad, a deputy at the Twin Peaks sheriff's station, who intercepts the letter as it arrives and takes it out of the pile.

Richard forces his way into Sylvia Horne's house. He takes her by the throat, demands the combination to the safe, and calls her every name he has. In the corner, Johnny Horne is strapped upright into a chair beside a bear-headed device that repeats, over and over, in a cheerful recorded voice, hello Johnny, how are you today? — and he can do nothing but rock and make sounds. Richard empties the safe and goes. Sylvia telephones Ben, who declines to send money.

Frank Truman 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.

Richard is waiting outside the convenience store with a gun. He says he saw photographs — FBI photographs — that his mother had, and that his mother is Audrey Horne, and that the man in them looks exactly like the man in front of him. 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.

Mr. C drives Richard out to the coordinates. He hands him a device that beeps as it approaches the point and holds a steady tone when it is on it. He sends Richard ahead, up onto a large boulder. Richard calls down that he is there — and the tone goes flat, and he is burned out of existence by an electrical fire, from the feet up, in a few seconds.

Mr. C watches. Then he says: "Oh. Good-bye, my son." He gets back in the truck. The coordinates were the ones Ray gave him.

Richard Horne is the answer to the question The Return is actually asking, and it is not a supernatural answer.

The original series located its evil in an entity that wore a father and could not be seen. The revival locates it in a young man with a truck, a temper and a grandfather with money, and stages every one of his crimes in daylight with witnesses. Nothing about Richard needs decoding. He is the part of BOB that survives without BOB — a man who hurts whoever is available, in a town that has a deputy on the payroll and a hospital bill nobody can pay.

Read against the family, the file is bleaker still. He is the point where two of Twin Peaks' longest arcs meet: the Horne fortune, which converted the town's land and its daughters into holdings, and the doppelgänger, which converted Dale Cooper into an instrument. What comes out of that junction is a boy who throttles his own grandmother for a safe combination and is spent by his own father to check a number.

And he is never confronted by the law. Miriam's letter is intercepted. No arrest is made. No charge is brought. The department that identified the substitution of Dale Cooper from three sheets of paper cannot touch him, and what finally kills him is not justice but a father economising on risk.

Audrey Horne · Benjamin Horne · Dale Cooper · Frank Truman · BOB · Carl Rodd · Leo Johnson · Tammy Preston

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