SCREEN RECORD / 02
Episode Guide
A structured chronology of the series, the film, and the revival. Seasons 1 and 2 are complete — thirty episode dossiers, Pilot to finale — as are Fire Walk with Me and The Missing Pieces. The Return currently presents curated milestones while its individual files are written. For evidence-rail chronology (arcs from Archivist zero forward), open the The Ledger.
Season 1
The investigation begins. 8 Episodes.
Northwest Passage
The body of homecoming queen Laura Palmer is found washed up on a riverbank wrapped in plastic. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper arrives in Twin Peaks to investigate.
Traces to Nowhere
Cooper continues his investigation, meeting the enigmatic Log Lady. The town's dark secrets, including Audrey's manipulations and Bobby's jealousy, begin to surface.
Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer
Cooper demonstrates a unique deductive technique involving Tibetan rock-throwing. That night, he has a profound, cryptic dream set in a red room involving a dancing little man and Laura Palmer.
Rest in Pain
Laura's funeral descends into chaos. Cooper cannot recover the name from his dream, and a secret society known as the Bookhouse Boys reveals itself.
The One-Armed Man
Sarah describes the man in her vision. Cooper interviews Dr. Jacoby, then tracks down Philip Gerard, whose mention of veterinarian Bob Lydecker opens a clue chain from twine to Jacques Renault and his myna bird, Waldo.
Cooper's Dreams
The Log Lady describes what her log perceived on the night of the murder. Her account, Cooper's dream imagery, and the forensic leads converge at Jacques Renault's cabin.
Realization Time
Audrey follows the department-store recruitment trail into One Eyed Jacks. Leo kills Waldo, but Cooper's recorder preserves a clue; Maddy's resemblance to Laura becomes bait in the Jacoby operation.
The Last Evening (Finale)
Cooper and Big Ed infiltrate One Eyed Jacks and lure Jacques across the border. Leland murders Jacques, the mill burns, Audrey is trapped inside her father's system, and an unseen assailant shoots Cooper.
Season 2
The investigation deepens, the killer is revealed, and the Lodge opens. 22 Episodes.
May the Giant Be With You
Cooper bleeds on the Great Northern floor. The Giant offers three clues and takes a ring as collateral. Albert returns. Season 2’s grammar opens.
Coma
The creamed corn vanishes at the Tremond house, Ronette answers BOB’s sketch with terror, Briggs’s printouts say COOPER three times, and Maddy sees BOB cross the Palmer couch in daylight.
The Man Behind Glass
Harold Smith and Laura's secret diary surface behind a door that will not open outward. Leland's hair turns white. Audrey's SOS reaches Cooper. Bobby calculates Leo's insurance value.
Laura's Secret Diary
Harold reads the diary aloud and Laura names BOB in her own voice for the first time. Maddy decides to leave Twin Peaks. Leland sings at the Haywards'. The dead girl speaks.
The Orchid's Curse
Donna and Maddy's diary heist destroys Harold Smith. Cooper rescues Audrey from One Eyed Jacks. Jean Renault rises. The investigation learns what it costs to crack open a living vault.
Demons
MIKE erupts through Gerard's body. Harold Smith is found dead — "J'ai une âme solitaire." The diary pages scatter. Gordon Cole arrives shouting. The killer attends his own investigation.
Lonely Souls
The mirror shows the father's face as another face. The Giant says "It is happening again." Maddy Ferguson is murdered in the Palmer living room. Ben Horne is arrested — the wrong man.
Drive with a Dead Girl
Leland lies about a bus station, putts golf balls in the murder room, and opens the trunk beside Cooper with Maddy inside the bag. Ben Horne is held for the wrong killing. She is found wrapped in plastic — again.
Arbitrary Law
The letter "O" completes the sequence. The Giant returns the ring, Laura's whisper surfaces — "my father killed me" — and Leland confesses and dies under the sprinklers. Case 89 closes; nobody agrees on what happened.
Dispute Between Brothers
The town holds a wake for its killer and Cooper loses his badge. Two old men feud over a bride. At a campfire Briggs asks about the White Lodge — and then there is only light, and no Briggs.
Masked Ball
Hawk names the Black Lodge and the Dweller on the Threshold. Windom Earle opens his game with a chess move. Denise Bryson arrives, Josie returns in a maid's uniform, and Andrew Packard is not dead.
The Black Widow
Dougie Milford is dead by morning and the town names his widow a witch. Cooper goes house-hunting and finds a narcotics site. Major Briggs walks back into his living room in a flight suit nobody explains.
Checkmate
Briggs describes a giant owl, names Project Blue Book, and is driven away by military police. Truman deputises Cooper. Earle blacks out the town and leaves a body in the sheriff's office. Leo wakes.
Double Play
Leo wakes into a rage, takes an axe to Shelly, and staggers wounded into the woods — where a man in a black suit has a lamp lit. Cooper finally tells the story of Caroline Powell.
Slaves and Masters
Albert names Earle's victim — Erik Powell, Caroline's maiden name — and traces her bridal clothing into a C drawn across the map. Josie is found in a servant's uniform. Ben Horne is talked home through Appomattox. Diane Keaton directs.
The Condemned Woman
Josie Packard dies without a wound. Her face appears in the Great Northern's drawer pull. BOB attends. Truman breaks. The Lodge takes payment in wood.
Wounds and Scars
The show returns from hiatus. Annie Blackburn arrives with her scars uncovered, and Major Briggs and the Log Lady compare the marks the woods left on them forty years apart. Cooper draws the two together into one symbol.
On the Wings of Love
Gordon Cole reports that Windom Earle served on Project Blue Book with Major Briggs. The party descends into Owl Cave, owls attack, Andy's pickaxe opens the petroglyph — and the wall gives up a stone rod bearing Laura Palmer's ring symbol.
Variations on Relations
Earle seals a travelling musician inside a papier-mâché chess piece and leaves him in a park. Donna finds a blank line where her father's name should be. The town books the stage for Miss Twin Peaks. Mark Frost returns to write.
The Path to the Black Lodge
Briggs finds Earle in the Blue Book files and learns what the dugpas were for. Two men in a horse costume drop him with a dart, and haloperidol takes the rest: the conjunction, and a sentence spoken backwards.
Miss Twin Peaks
The town crowns Annie Blackburn in a hall where the opening number is danced in plastic slickers. Leo frees Major Briggs and asks him to save Shelly. Then a man wearing the Log Lady's coat turns off the lights.
Beyond Life and Death
A bomb in a bank vault, a message spoken through Sarah Palmer, and Cooper's passage through the Black Lodge to trade himself for Annie. Laura promises to see him in twenty-five years. The mirror does not hold his face.
Fire Walk With Me
The prequel film detailing the final seven days of Laura Palmer's life.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Teresa Banks in a town that does not mourn her, a briefing danced by a woman with a blue rose, an agent who reaches for a ring and is not seen again — and then seven days in which Laura Palmer finally gets the camera.
The Missing Pieces
Ninety minutes of the town Lynch removed so the girl could be seen — assembled by him twenty-two years later. Filed as supplementary, and read for what the theatrical cut refused.
The Return (Season 3)
25 years later. The world is fractured. 18 Parts.
My log has a message for you
Four places with nothing to do with each other, and a funded glass box in New York that somebody is paid to watch. The Fireman issues his instructions, the Log Lady gives Hawk the season’s only brief, and a head belonging to one woman turns up on a man’s body in South Dakota.
The stars turn and a time presents itself
The Waiting Room states the one rule the season runs on — the doppelgänger must come back in before Cooper can go out — while the doppelgänger spends the hour killing his own crew. Laura removes her face; the Log Lady sends Hawk to Glastonbury Grove.
Call for help
Cooper falls out of the Waiting Room into a second room with its own attendant and its own departure time. The Arm’s “253” turns out to be a clock reading. Dougie Jones is decommissioned in a chair, and what arrives in his place cannot tie its own shoes.
…brings back some memories
Cooper is installed in a life that suits him better than it suited the man he replaced. Bobby Briggs sees Laura’s photograph and breaks. And Gordon Cole sits across a pane of glass from something wearing Dale Cooper’s face, knowing it is wrong and unable to say why.
Case files
A man who cannot read is handed a stack of case files, and a man in a cell makes one phone call that trips every alarm in a prison and is answered by a machine in Buenos Aires. The gold shovels are finally explained.
Don’t die
Janey-E faces down two loan sharks and wins the only clean victory of the season so far. Richard Horne kills a child at a junction and does not stop. And Hawk drops a coin in a bathroom and finds what has been missing for twenty-five years.
There’s a body all right
Hawk lays three diary pages on a desk and the sheriff’s department establishes, from dates alone, that the Cooper who left the Lodge was the wrong one. Diane identifies him by what is missing. At one in the morning the gate opens anyway.
Gotta light?
Twin Peaks gives its evil a date, a location and a time to the minute. The Trinity test opens a hole; an orb carrying BOB comes through it; and in a fortress above a dark sea something watches the footage and answers with Laura Palmer.
This is the chair
Major Briggs’s body is identified in a Buckhorn morgue — aged forty, thirty years too young — with a wedding ring engraved to Dougie Jones in its stomach. And Betty Briggs produces a chair with instructions sealed in the leg.
Laura is the one
Three women are attacked in three rooms by three men, and none of it is mysterious. Against that: Gordon Cole opens a door and sees Laura Palmer weeping, and Margaret Lanterman telephones Hawk about a glow that is dying.
There’s fire where you are going
Hawk unrolls a Nez Perce map where fire means electricity and black corn means sustenance. Margaret warns that there is fire at the destination. The sky opens over Buckhorn, and a cherry pie saves Cooper’s life.
Let’s rock
The Blue Rose task force is finally explained aloud — and then Diane accepts a badge using the Man from Another Place’s line from 1989. Sarah Palmer tries to warn a cashier, and Audrey Horne returns after twenty-six years.
What story is that, Charlie?
Casino owners arrive at an insurance office in a conga line, a man is beaten to death at an arm-wrestling table, and Audrey Horne — in a room she cannot leave — asks her husband which story he is threatening to end.
We are like the dreamer
The season asks its own question aloud, Albert finally tells the founding Blue Rose case of 1975, Andy Brennan is taken up to the Fireman and shown everything, and Sarah Palmer lifts her face away from her head.
There’s some fear in letting go
Nadine walks to the gas farm with a gold shovel and gives Ed his life back. Jeffries tells Mr. C he has already met Judy. Cooper puts a fork in a socket. And Margaret Lanterman telephones Hawk to say she is dying.
No knock, no doorbell
A father sends his son up the rock first to test a set of coordinates, Diane discovers mid-sentence that she is not herself, two assassins are shot dead over a driveway — and Dale Cooper opens his eyes.
The past dictates the future
Judy is named, Lucy shoots the doppelgänger from behind the front desk, a boy from London destroys BOB with a gardening glove — and then Cooper walks into the woods on 23 February 1989 and takes Laura Palmer’s hand.
What is your name?
Four hundred and thirty miles to a crossing that costs him Diane, a diner in Odessa called Judy’s, a woman with Laura Palmer’s face who has never heard the name — and a question in the road answered by a scream.
Chronology sources
- Paramount+ episode guide — official Season 1 ordering and summaries.
- Early broadcast episodes are commonly known by later titles; episode number and original air date are retained to avoid title ambiguity.