The past dictates the future

Gordon Cole tells Albert and Tammy Preston what Major Garland Briggs disclosed to him and to Cooper: an extreme negative force, known in an old tongue as Jowday, which over time became Judy.

Phillip Jeffries knew about it. Cooper told Gordon that if anything happened to him, Gordon was to find Jeffries — and Cooper's phrase for the plan was that he was trying to kill two birds with one stone.

Sixteen hours after the Fireman told Cooper to remember two birds with one stone in Part 1, the phrase turns out to have been Cooper's own — a description of an operation he, Briggs and Cole had already agreed on before 1989.

That is the hour's first structural move and it reframes the whole season. The Fireman was not issuing a prophecy; he was reading Cooper his own plan back to him. The instruction that opened the season was a reminder.

The name is logged as disclosed and not expanded. Nothing here says what Judy is, only that she has an older name, that a United States Air Force officer found it, and that three men have been working against it since before Laura Palmer died.

Mr. C reaches the coordinates. A portal opens and takes him — not to Judy, but to the black-and-white room above the purple sea, where he is immediately caged.

Briggs's floating head is there. The Fireman is there. The Fireman moves his hand; a screen shows the Twin Peaks sheriff's station; and the cage is run through a golden apparatus and into the screen.

The season's most capable operator spends sixteen hours manoeuvring toward a set of coordinates and arrives inside a box, on somebody else's premises, and is posted to a destination not of his choosing.

It is the only time the counterweight acts directly rather than by arrangement. Everything else the Fireman has done — the three clues in 1990, the four instructions in Part 1, Andy's briefing, Freddie's glove — has been information or preparation handed to somebody else. Here he picks the thing up and puts it where it needs to be.

The doppelgänger walks into the sheriff's station. Andy and Lucy greet him as Agent Cooper and introduce him to Sheriff Frank Truman.

In the office, Frank realises something is wrong. Both men reach for their weapons.

The telephone rings at the front desk. The voice says he is Cooper and he is nearly in Twin Peaks. Lucy shoots the doppelgänger.

The most dangerous figure in eighteen hours of television is killed by the receptionist, from a doorway, with a service revolver, and the show has been setting it up since its first hour.

In Part 1 Lucy Moran could not resolve a telephone call about which Truman was which. Across the season she has been the one character comically unable to hold two versions of the same thing in her head — and she is the one person in the building who, holding a phone with Cooper on it while looking at Cooper, understands instantly what that means.

Her own explanation is that she finally understands cellular telephones: that the person on the line can be somewhere else. The joke and the solution are the same fact.

The room darkens. Woodsmen come in and work over the body on the floor, and out of it comes an orb with BOB's face, which attacks.

Cooper arrives with the Mitchum brothers. Freddie Sykes steps up — this is my destiny — and BOB throws him around the room and hurts him badly.

Freddie gets up and hits the orb with the right hand, in the green glove, again and again, until it breaks apart.

Cooper tells him he did it.

The thing that killed Laura Palmer, that lived in her father, that MIKE cut off his own arm to escape, that came out of a stream of eggs above White Sands in 1945, is destroyed by a nineteen-year-old from London punching it with a rubber gardening glove he bought in a shop because a giant told him to.

The absurdity is the design, and it is the Fireman's method taken to its conclusion. He does not intervene; he arranges, years in advance, through ordinary objects and unremarkable people. Freddie's account of the vortex, the shop and the single glove in Part 14 read as comic nonsense at the time. This is what it was for.

And nobody in the room does it alone. Lucy fires the shot; Freddie lands the blows; Andy has been briefed; James is on the stairs; Hawk, Bobby and Frank are all present. Twin Peaks' final confrontation with its own evil is handled by the sheriff's department, a security guard and two casino owners, standing together in a room.

Cooper takes the green ring and puts it on the corpse's finger. The body disappears. The ring arrives on the table in the Red Room.

What Ray was hired to do in Part 13, and what Mr. C avoided by making Ray wear the ring instead, Cooper now does properly.

Everything recorded about that object holds: it marks, and what it marks is taken. Teresa Banks wore it. Chester Desmond reached for it. Laura put it on in the train car and was killed rather than inhabited. Dougie Jones lost it when he was decommissioned. It has been sitting on a table in the Waiting Room between uses, and it is where the doppelgänger goes.

Naido — the woman with no eyes, found in the woods in Part 14 and kept in a cell for her own safety — comes to Cooper. He touches her.

She becomes Diane. Her hair is red again. She says she remembers everything.

The woman who threw the lever above the purple sea in Part 3, was electrocuted for it, fell into open space, was recovered from a pool by four deputies and locked in a holding cell, was Diane Evans the whole time.

It re-reads her entire thread. The Diane who was in correspondence with the doppelgänger, who said let's rock, who told the truth about her own assault and discovered mid-sentence that she was not herself, was a manufactured copy — and the original had been sightless, speechless and hidden in another world since before the season began, having spent the little agency she had on getting Cooper out of a room.

What is not established is how or when the substitution happened, and nothing here is imported to establish it.

Everyone in the room looks up. The clock on the wall will not settle: it flickers back and forth between 2:52 and 2:53 and does not advance.

Cooper says some things will change, that the past dictates the future, and asks Frank to give Harry his regards. His face appears superimposed over the whole room, enormous, and says: "We live inside a dream."

Three of the season's oldest signals converge in one shot.

253. The Arm's utterance in Part 2; the watch face in Part 3 at which the exit opened; the distance in yards on Briggs's slip in Part 9. Here it is a clock that cannot get past it — the minute of departure, refusing to become the next minute.

"We live inside a dream." Phillip Jeffries said it in the Philadelphia office in 1989. Gordon was asked in Part 14 who the dreamer is and got no answer. Cooper now says the sentence with his own face laid over the entire room, which is as close as the work comes to naming a candidate without doing it.

The past dictates the future. Stated as the plan's operating principle immediately before he goes back and changes the past.

Cooper, Diane and Gordon walk down through the hotel to the furnace room. The hum that Ben Horne and Beverly could not locate in Part 7 is louder here.

There is a door. Cooper opens it with the key to room 315 — the key Jade posted from Las Vegas in Part 5, which reached the hotel in Part 7.

He tells them not to follow. To Diane: he will see her at the curtain call.

A key dropped in a mailbox by a woman tidying up after a stranger, carried two states by the postal service, handed to a hotelier who was talking about the old days, opens the season's most important door.

The hum is filed as answered in one respect and open in every other: something is on the other side of that wall, it has been audible in the building all season, and the room the door leads to is not the hotel.

Through the door, Cooper meets MIKE, who speaks the old chant — through the darkness of future past… fire walk with me — and takes him up to the Dutchman's, where Phillip Jeffries is the bell-shaped machine.

Cooper asks for a date: February 23, 1989 — the night Laura Palmer died.

Jeffries says he will find it. He says it is good to see him again. He says to tell Gordon he will remember the unofficial version. He warns that there he will find Judy, and someone will be there. He asks Cooper whether he asked him this.

Steam forms the Owl Cave figure; it breaks into three and reassembles as an 8, turning on itself with a point travelling across it. Jeffries says: remember. MIKE says: electricity. Cooper is gone.

The machine that used to be an FBI agent is a date-finder, and the price of using it is a warning that the destination contains the thing everybody has been avoiding naming.

Jeffries's last question is the hour's most disquieting line and it is left exactly as spoken: he asks Cooper whether Cooper asked him this — which puts the request outside the order in which it was made, and is consistent with everything this figure has done since he stepped out of a lift in Philadelphia in 1989 and pointed at a man who was standing right there.

The woods, at night, in 1989. James Hurley's motorcycle. Laura Palmer gets off it and ends things with him, and he rides away, and she starts walking toward the meeting with Leo, Jacques and Ronette that will end in the train car.

Cooper is standing behind a tree, watching, in footage from Fire Walk With Me and the Pilot, colour drained.

She sees him. She knows him — from her dreams. She takes his hand.

He tells her they are going home, and leads her away through the trees.

This is the most audacious thing Twin Peaks has ever done, and it is done almost silently, with old film.

Cooper does not stop Leland, or arrest anybody, or explain. He walks into a night that has already happened — into material shot in 1990 and 1992 — stands behind a tree until the boyfriend leaves, and offers a seventeen-year-old girl his hand. She recognises him because she met him in a dream in a red room, which is the one piece of foreknowledge she was given and was never able to use.

We're going home is the whole of the rescue. Not the Lodge, not the Bureau, not a case — home, which is the one place in this story that was never safe, and the direction he leads her in is away from the boxcar.

Angelo Badalamenti's theme for her plays over it, unchanged since 1990.

Morning. Pete Martell goes fishing. He walks down past the water and there is nothing there. The plastic-wrapped body has faded out of the shot.

In the present, in the Palmer house, Sarah Palmer is howling and attacking the framed portrait of her daughter, smashing at it over and over.

In the woods, walking, Cooper hears something behind him — a scratching, wrong. He turns.

Laura's hand is gone from his. She is not there. Her scream goes through the trees and away.

The Pilot is unmade on screen. Pete Martell walks to the shoreline and does not find her, and the five words that began Twin Peaks are never said.

And it does not take. Something takes her out of Cooper's hand mid-rescue, in the dark, without showing itself — and in the present Sarah Palmer is destroying the portrait at what appears to be the same moment.

What has changed and what has not is deliberately unresolved here. A body that was found is now not found; a girl who was rescued is now missing; a mother in 2016 is screaming at a photograph of somebody who may or may not have died. The hour ends on Julee Cruise singing at the Roadhouse, which is where the show put its grief in 1990.

Part 17 is built as two endings laid end to end, and the join is visible on purpose.

The first is communal and small. The great confrontation with BOB is settled in one room by a receptionist, a security guard, a deputy who cries at crime scenes, and two casino owners who came because they like the man. Nobody is a chosen one. Everything that works was arranged years earlier by people who are dead — Briggs's slip of paper, the Fireman's glove, Cooper's own plan repeated back to him by a giant.

The second is solitary and enormous. Cooper goes through a door alone and walks into the show's own past — literally into its earlier footage — to undo the murder the whole thing is made of. And Twin Peaks lets him get about ninety seconds of it before something reaches in and takes her back.

The past dictates the future. He says it, and then attempts the opposite, and the attempt is interrupted rather than refused. What is on the record at the end of this hour is that a body was not found at a shoreline in February 1989, that a girl who took a federal agent's hand is missing from the woods, and that her mother is screaming at a photograph twenty-seven years later.