William Hastings & Ruth Davenport

William Hastings, a high-school principal, and Ruth Davenport, a librarian, ran a website together researching access to a place they called the Zone. Ruth found indications of where and when they could reach it. They went, and there they found Major Garland Briggs — dead since 1989, and unaged.

Ruth is found murdered in Part 1: her head, on a body that is not hers. Hastings's fingerprints are at the scene and he is arrested. He maintains, from the first interview, that he dreamed he was there. He is telling the truth. He leads federal agents to the site he and Ruth found. A vortex opens. Ruth's headless body is recovered nearby, with coordinates written on her arm. Hastings is killed by a Woodsman while handcuffed in a police car.

A woman named Marjorie Green walks her chihuahua down a corridor and the dog stops at apartment 116. The smell is coming from under the door. Inside, on the bed, is the body of Ruth Davenport, a librarian: her head, and a man's body that is not hers.

Detective Dave Macklay works the scene; the coroner, Constance Talbot, delivers the finding. Fingerprints at the scene belong to William Hastings, a high-school principal, who is arrested at a dinner party in front of his wife Phyllis, protesting that he has done nothing.

William Hastings sits in a cell. His wife Phyllis is brought in and tells him there will be no bail. He insists again that he did not do it — that he dreamed he was in Ruth Davenport's apartment. The conversation turns. He knows about Phyllis and George, their lawyer, and maybe somebody else. She does not deny it. She leaves him with a sentence delivered as a gift: "Life in prison, Bill. Life in prison."

Alone, Hastings looks across the corridor. A sooty-faced figure is sitting in the cell opposite. Its head detaches and drifts upward, and it is gone. Hastings makes a sound that is not quite a word.

Phyllis Hastings comes home. Cooper's doppelgänger is standing in her house. She is shot with her lover's gun: "You did good. You follow human nature perfectly." The frame around her husband was built before the murder.

Agent Tammy Preston interviews William Hastings. He and Ruth Davenport ran a website about access to other dimensions. Ruth found indications of where and when they could reach the Zone. They went. They found Major Briggs there. Briggs asked them to obtain a set of coordinates from a secure military database, and they did, and they brought them back to him.

Then others came. They demanded to know the name of Hastings's wife. Briggs began to rise into the air saying "Cooper… Cooper…" and his head came off. Hastings woke at home believing he had dreamed it. Ruth was dead.

Gordon Cole, Albert, Tammy Preston and Diane drive William Hastings, handcuffed, out to the place he described. He shows them where. He got about fifteen or twenty feet in, he says, before his memory stops.

Gordon walks in. Above him the sky opens — a vast churning vortex, electrical, with a dark centre, and in the dark there are stairs, and figures on them. He is being drawn toward it. Albert takes hold of him and pulls him back by the arm.

Nearby in the brush, Albert finds a body: Ruth Davenport, headless, naked. He photographs her. On her arm there are numbers — a set of coordinates, written on the skin.

Diane, waiting by the vehicles, sees one of the Woodsmen come out of the dark and walk to the police car where Hastings is sitting handcuffed. There is a sound. Hastings's head is crushed. Gordon looks in and says: "He's dead."

Set beside every other suspect this archive has tracked, Hastings and Davenport occupy a position none of the others do: they are amateurs who got closer to the actual mechanism of the Lodge than any professional investigator in thirty years of story, and the cost of that proximity is total.

Ruth finds the method — research, a website, a location. Hastings supplies the will to go. Together they retrieve one piece of operational intelligence, coordinates from a secure database, and hand it to a dead Air Force major who has been waiting twenty-five years for someone to bring it to him. That single act of amateur competence sets in motion a chain that reaches Frank Truman, Jack Rabbit's Palace and Naido.

What they receive for it is Ruth's decapitation, a frame-up built to look domestic, and a disbelieving justice system that only starts to take Hastings seriously once his account has already been confirmed by federal agents standing at the site itself — by which point it no longer matters, because the thing that killed Ruth is waiting for him too.

Summary position: Twin Peaks has always punished the people who tell the truth about what they saw. Laura told Harold Smith and he was destroyed. Hastings told everyone who would listen, from the first hour, and was killed anyway, in custody, surrounded by federal agents who could not stop it.

Major Garland Briggs · Gordon Cole · Albert Rosenfield · Tammy Preston · Diane Evans · The Woodsmen · Frank Truman

Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 9 · Part 11