Let's rock

Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield bring Agent Tamara Preston into a hotel room and tell her what she has been working on.

In 1970 the United States Air Force shut down Project Blue Book, its public investigation into unexplained aerial phenomena. Albert's account is that the closure was a cover-up, and that afterwards a small, secret group was formed inside the military and the Bureau to carry on with the part of the work that had not been resolved.

That group is the Blue Rose task force. Albert tells Tammy she has been watched since her school days. She accepts.

Twenty-five years of the phrase being used as a designation — Cooper working a blue rose case in 1989, Gordon saying it after the Yankton interview, Briggs's floating head saying it in space — and the season finally sits two agents down and explains it in plain sentences.

The explanation is deliberately unromantic. There is no mythology in it. A public programme was closed for political reasons, the unresolved material did not go away, and a handful of people were quietly given the job. Everything Twin Peaks has done with the Lodge since 1990 is, from the inside of the Bureau, an administrative continuation of a shut-down file.

The recruitment method is worth logging as characterisation. Tammy has been under observation since she was at school. This is not a task force that takes applications; it selects people young and watches them for years, which is also how Cooper, Albert and Chester Desmond arrived in it.

The founding case itself — the incident from which the phrase comes — is not told in this hour. Albert gives it two Parts later, and the archive does not bring it forward.

Gordon asks Diane to come in — temporarily, deputised, for this.

She raises her right hand, two fingers up, and says:

"Let's rock."

Gordon knocks on the table.

Three syllables, and they are not hers.

Let's rock is what the Man from Another Place said to Dale Cooper in the red room in "Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer" in 1990, rubbing his hands, before the dance. And it is the phrase written in lipstick on the windscreen of Chester Desmond's abandoned car at the Fat Trout Trailer Park in Fire Walk With Me — a Blue Rose agent who walked toward a ring and was never seen again.

Diane says it to the head of the Blue Rose task force, in a hotel corridor, as her answer to a request to join an investigation. The hour gives no indication whatsoever of whether she knows what she has said.

Gordon's reaction is the only comment the scene makes. He does not query it, does not look at Albert, does not follow it up. He knocks on wood — a superstition, performed reflexively, by a man who has just been given a piece of Lodge vocabulary by a colleague he already knows is in correspondence with the thing at Yankton.

The recurrence stands on the record and nothing is built beyond it. What Diane is, at this point in the season, is OPEN.

Sarah Palmer is buying vodka. At the checkout she sees a rack of turkey jerky — a brand that was not there before — and stops.

She asks the cashier about it. She is told it came in a couple of weeks ago. Sarah begins to come apart, and what comes out of her is a warning she cannot make specific:

"Your room seems different. And men are coming. I'm trying to tell you that you have to watch out! Things can happen! Something happened to me!"

She abandons the conversation, demands her car keys, and leaves.

This is the most frightening scene in the hour and nothing supernatural is shown in it.

A woman in her sixties, drunk in the middle of the day, is triggered by a snack display and starts shouting at a shop assistant about men coming. Every person in that shop reads it as what it appears to be. She is describing, accurately, the thing that happened in her house, to her daughter, over years — and there is no register available to her in which saying so would be heard.

Something happened to me. The sentence is recorded exactly, and nothing is built on it. Sarah Palmer has been sedated, bereaved, and left alone in that house for twenty-five years with the television on, and this is the closest she comes to testimony.

Set against Margaret Lanterman in the same season, the pairing is exact and cruel. Two older women in Twin Peaks issue urgent warnings about something they perceive and cannot prove. One is treated as an oracle and written down by a deputy. The other is watched by a cashier until she goes away.

Audrey Horne appears for the first time since 1991. She is in a room with dark wood and lamps, arguing with a small, mild man called Charlie, who is described as her husband.

She wants to go and look for somebody called Billy, who is missing. Charlie says he has paperwork and a deadline. She tells him what she thinks of him — what kind of shit are you? — and eventually he agrees to telephone somebody called Tina, who may know something.

The scene does not connect to anything else in the hour, or to anywhere else in the season.

The season's most anticipated return is staged so that almost nothing about it can be verified.

What is on screen: a woman who is unmistakably Audrey Horne, older, furious, in a room that has no exterior and no other characters, having a circular argument about people the audience has never heard of. The lighting, the pace and the acting register are unlike any other scene in the season. Nobody from Twin Peaks walks in. No location establishes it.

Everything else — where she is, whether Charlie exists, who Billy is, whether this is happening at all — is not established in this hour, and the archive imports nothing from later Parts to establish it.

What can be said is what the season does with her. In 1991 Audrey Horne was chained to a bank vault in an act of political protest and was standing beside it when the bomb went off. Twenty-six years later she is in a room she does not appear able to leave, trying to get a man to help her look for someone, and being told he has paperwork.

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.

Afterwards, alone with Beverly, he talks about a green Schwinn bicycle his father bought him when he was a boy, and how much he loved it.

The man who ran One Eyed Jacks, who tried to buy Ghostwood out from under the town, and who sat in his own department store recruiting teenage girls, does the one unambiguously decent thing available to anybody in this hour, on the telephone, in about fifteen seconds.

The bicycle is why the scene is in the episode. Told that his grandson is a killer, Ben Horne's response — after the money — is to remember being given something by his own father and being happy. The hour does not join the two thoughts for the audience and does not need to: a man is looking for the point at which a family was still all right, and the furthest back he can get is a bike.

Jerry Horne comes out of the treeline into open ground, still without his car, still not right, and runs across the meadow — away from the mountains — until he falls, gets up, and keeps going.

Jerry has been lost in these woods since Part 1, and the running joke has been that a man in his seventies took too much of his own product.

By Part 12 the joke has been running for eleven hours and has quietly stopped being one. He is not finding his way out. Nobody is looking for him. The season has put a Horne brother in the same forest that contains Glastonbury Grove and left him there, and the hour films him from a distance, small, in a field, going the wrong way.

Part 12 is the season's exposition hour, and it is built so that the explanation and the unexplainable sit in the same forty minutes without either winning.

The institution can now describe itself. Blue Book closed; a cover-up; a quiet successor. That is a complete, sober account of why the FBI has been in Twin Peaks since 1989, and it takes about ninety seconds. Everything the Bureau does in this story is downstream of a government deciding to stop investigating something in public.

And it still cannot describe what it is investigating. Within minutes of that briefing, its newest deputised member answers a direct question with a phrase from the other place, and the deputy director's response is a superstition. The task force has a name, a history, a mandate and a recruitment pipeline, and no vocabulary at all for the thing itself.

Two women warn people and only one is heard. Margaret Lanterman telephones a deputy who writes down every word. Sarah Palmer shouts at a cashier and is managed out of the shop. The difference between them is not accuracy — it is that one has been assigned the role of the town's oracle and the other has been assigned the role of the town's tragedy.

The Hornes are the hour's moral spread. One grandson kills a child and robs his grandmother. One brother pays a stranger's hospital bill and remembers a bicycle. One brother is running through a field in the wrong direction. And Audrey, who was the most alive person in Twin Peaks in 1989, is in a room arguing with a man about paperwork.