There's a body all right

Hawk brings Frank Truman 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 the dream 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 through out loud. Annie Blackburn did not arrive in Twin Peaks until 1991. Laura died in February 1989. And the Dale Cooper who came out of Glastonbury Grove that night, with Annie, was therefore not the good one.

They also work out who most likely put the pages in the wall: Leland, who tore them out of the book in the first place.

This is the first true statement anybody in Twin Peaks has established about Dale Cooper in twenty-five years, and it is arrived at entirely by reading.

No dream, no log, no vision, no Lodge. Two officers sit at a desk with three sheets of paper, check a date against a date, and reach a conclusion that is correct. Against six hours of coordinates, reversed speech and numbered sockets, the case moves because somebody found a document and did the arithmetic.

The document itself is the strangest object in the season's evidence file. A message from 1991 is written into a diary in 1989 by a girl reporting a dream, torn out by her killer, hidden in a bathroom wall, and recovered by a deputy in 2016 — and it is accurate. The chain of custody runs backwards through time and then sits in a stall door for a quarter of a century, waiting.

The last inference is the one worth holding. Leland Palmer hid the pages to conceal what they said about him. In doing so he preserved, intact, the only surviving record of what came out of the woods wearing Cooper's face. The man who destroyed the evidence is the reason it still exists.

Frank calls Doc Hayward, who appears on a screen from somewhere else entirely, and asks him what he remembers about the night Cooper came back. Full leaf: Doc Hayward dossier.

Hayward examined him at the Great Northern. Cooper, he says, was acting mighty strange. Later, at the hospital, Hayward saw him coming out of intensive care, fully dressed, at an hour when he should have been in a bed — and there was something wrong with his face.

Hayward adds where he thought Cooper had been: in the intensive care unit, where Audrey Horne was lying in a coma.

The pages establish that the wrong Cooper came out. Hayward establishes what the wrong Cooper did in the first twelve hours, and the hour delivers it as an old man's recollection over a video link, with no music and no reaction shot.

The detail about the face is logged as a witness statement and not converted into a mechanism. A doctor who had known Dale Cooper for weeks looked at him in a corridor and registered that something about the face was not right — which is precisely the identification Diane will make from the other direction later in the hour, and neither of them can put it into a report.

The location of the sighting is on the record and nothing is built on it here. Hayward says Cooper came out of intensive care. Audrey Horne was in intensive care, unconscious. The hour states both facts, in one breath, from a man who is not accusing anybody of anything, and moves on.

Diane agrees to see him. She goes into the room alone, with Gordon Cole and Albert watching, and asks him about the last night they saw each other.

He says it was at her house. He says: "I'll always remember that night."

She cannot continue. She ends it and comes out. To Gordon she says: "Listen to me — that is not the Dale Cooper I knew." Not the time passing, not how he has changed, not the way he looks. She puts her hand to her own chest: there's something that definitely isn't here.

The season's most reliable identification is made by describing an absence, and by a witness who is describing her own body while she does it.

Everyone else who has looked at this man has looked for evidence. Gordon watched him through glass and came out unsettled. Albert compared the story to the record. Tammy caught a discrepancy about direction of travel. Diane sits opposite him for two minutes and reports that a thing that used to be present is not present, and cannot name it, and is right.

What is on the record about their history is small and terrible. The last night they saw each other was at her house. He remembers it and says so, evenly, in a way that is meant to reach her. Nothing else is stated in this hour, and nothing later is imported to state it — but her reaction is the whole of the testimony, and it stands as such.

The gesture is the detail to keep. Asked what is wrong with him, she touches her own sternum. She locates the missing thing in herself, because that is the only place she can point to it from.

Warden Murphy has been leaned on. Names have been said to him — Mr. Strawberry again, and another — and something about what has been done to somebody's legs. He does what he has been told.

At one in the morning, with the security cameras switched off, Mr. C and Ray Monroe walk out of Yankton Federal Prison to a rental car left waiting for them.

The two halves of the hour are stated in sequence and the order is the argument.

The sheriff's department reopens the case correctly. Diane confirms the identification. Doc Hayward supplies the first-hand account. And then, on the same night, the subject of all of it is released by a prison official who has been frightened into it, in the dark, with the recording equipment off.

Nothing supernatural is involved. Part 5 showed the phone call; this is the invoice being paid. What defeats the investigation in Part 7 is not the Lodge — it is leverage, applied to a public servant with a family, by somebody who has had twenty-five years to find out what he is afraid of.

Andy goes to see the man whose truck was at the junction when the child was killed. The man is terrified. He tells Andy to go — not here, not now — and to meet him later, up at his place, on his own.

Andy goes at the appointed hour. Nobody answers. The door is open.

The hit-and-run in Part 6 was the one crime in the season with no mystery attached to it: a witnessed death at a junction in daylight. Part 7 shows what happens to it anyway.

The witness will not speak in the open, will only meet alone in a remote place, and is not there when the deputy arrives. Twin Peaks' new violence does not need to be hidden the way the Palmer case was hidden. It simply needs the people who saw it to be more frightened of the perpetrator than of the police, and in this town in 2016 they are.

Ben Horne and his assistant Beverly Paige stop, in an office at the Great Northern, because of a hum — a low ringing in the building that neither can place. They move around the room chasing it. It does not resolve.

Also arriving at the hotel, in the post, is a key. It is the key to room 315 — Cooper's room, twenty-five years ago — posted from Las Vegas by a woman who found it in a house on Rancho Rosa.

Ben holds it and talks about the agent who stayed in that room.

Two threads arrive at the same building in the same scene and neither character notices that the other is happening.

The hum is filed OPEN. The Great Northern has been an acoustic object since 1990 — the lobby music, the running water under the floor, the sound a hotel makes at night — and something in it is now audible enough to interrupt a conversation about business.

The key is the season's quietest piece of plotting and its most patient. Jade dropped it in a mailbox in Part 5 as an act of tidiness, having no idea what it was. The postal service carried it two states. It is now in Ben Horne's hand, and it opens the room where the whole thing started.

Cooper and Janey-E come out of the office. Ike "The Spike" Stadtler is waiting with a gun, and comes at them.

Cooper — who cannot speak a sentence, dress himself or cross a road unaided — puts himself between Ike and Janey-E and takes him apart. He blocks, strikes, and disarms him with trained economy.

The evolution of the arm appears to him mid-fight and tells him to squeeze the man's hand off. Ike breaks away and runs. Cooper stands there afterwards, vacant again, with a crowd forming.

The season has been careful to keep exactly one thing intact in him, and this is where it shows what.

Language is gone. Judgement is gone. The ability to want something and pursue it is gone. What remains is trained physical reflex — the Bureau's hand-to-hand instruction, sitting below thought, firing when a weapon comes toward somebody he is standing next to. He does not decide to protect Janey-E. His body does it.

The Arm's instruction is logged and not softened. The one intervention the Lodge makes in this fight is to tell Cooper to maim the man permanently. Whatever is guiding him through Las Vegas is not interested in restraint, and Cooper does not comply — not out of mercy, as far as anything on screen shows, but because Ike gets away first.

The Roadhouse after hours. The customers have gone. Jean-Michel Renault is behind the bar on the telephone, negotiating: girls, ages, false identification, straight-A students. The conversation is unhurried and entirely businesslike.

In front of him, a man sweeps the floor. He sweeps it for about two and a half minutes, in real time, while "Green Onions" plays.

This is the most confident formal gesture in the first half of the season, and it works by refusing to help.

An hour that has just reopened a twenty-five-year-old case, released its subject and put a hitman on the ground ends with a man pushing a broom. Nothing is happening in the frame. Everything is happening at the edge of it, in a phone call the camera is not interested in, about children being sold by a man whose family has been selling things in this town since 1989.

The Renault name is the point of the scene that is easiest to miss. Jacques, Bernard and Jean Renault ran the traffic through One Eyed Jacks and the cabin in the woods; Laura Palmer went through their hands. Twenty-five years and three dead brothers later a Renault is at the same bar, on the phone, doing the same business with the same age group, and Twin Peaks has produced no mechanism whatsoever for stopping it.

The broom is filed as method. The season has spent seven hours training its audience to watch things that appear not to be scenes — a box, a chair, a corridor — and this is the training paying off: two and a half minutes of nothing, and the nothing is unbearable.

Six hours of dispersal, and Part 7 is the hour that behaves like an investigation.

Paper beats prophecy. Everything the Lodge has issued since Part 1 — coordinates, times, room numbers, warnings — has been correct and unusable. The case actually advances when a deputy reads three sheets of paper and checks a date. Twin Peaks has always argued that its supernatural evidence is real; Part 7 is the demonstration that it is not admissible, and that the thing which moves a case is a document with a date on it.

The best witness reports nothing. Diane cannot describe a feature, a discrepancy or a fact. She describes a hole. And she is the only person in seven hours to identify the man correctly on the first attempt, which sets the season's standing on evidence: the most reliable testimony available here is somebody's involuntary reaction to a presence that is wrong.

Knowing does not help. The department reaches the truth and the truth changes nothing. The subject is out of the building by one in the morning, the only witness to the town's other crime has vanished, and the last scene is a man sweeping a floor while children are traded at the bar behind him. Part 7 grants its investigators a complete, correct finding and then demonstrates that the machinery for acting on it does not exist.

The old crimes are still running. A Renault is at the Roadhouse doing what the Renaults did to Laura Palmer, in the same room, to the same age group. Nothing in this town was solved in 1989. It was interrupted.