What is your name?

MIKE builds another Dougie Jones from a gold seed and sends him home to Lancelot Court, where Janey-E and Sonny Jim get him back.

Cooper is in the Waiting Room again. Some of Part 17's woods sequence replays. The evolution of the arm asks:

"Is it the story of the girl who lived down the lane?"

Two things are settled before the hour properly begins.

The household in Las Vegas gets a husband and a father back — a manufactured one, made to order, indistinguishable to them. Whatever else this ending withholds, the family that was improved by an accident in Part 4 is not left without anybody.

And the Arm asks the question Audrey Horne asked Charlie in Part 13, word for word. Two figures at opposite ends of the season, one in a room she cannot leave and one in a room nobody can leave, reach for the same phrase about whose story this is.

Cooper comes out of the Lodge into the circle of sycamores. Diane is waiting.

They look at each other for a long moment. Is it really you? — Is it really you? They confirm it. They embrace.

The season's most withheld reunion happens in a clearing, quietly, between two people who each have to ask the other whether they are genuine — because both of them have spent the story being replaced.

The question is not romantic hesitation. Diane has already been a manufactured copy, shot in a hotel room, and left as smoke and a seed. Cooper has been a doppelgänger, a tulpa, and a man who could not say his own name. Is it really you is the only sane opening line either of them has.

They drive. Cooper is counting the distance. At 430 miles he stops the car at a place where electricity pylons cross the road.

He tells her that once they cross, it may all be different. He asks if she is sure. She says yes.

They drive through. The daylight goes; the road is night; the country on the other side is not the same country.

The first of the Fireman's four instructions from Part 1 pays out as a mileage reading.

Remember 430 was, for seventeen hours, the season's most opaque fragment. It is a distance. The counterweight told Cooper, before the story began, exactly how far to drive — and the archive has held since Part 3 that this cosmology speaks in logistics rather than riddles. This is the clearest confirmation it gets.

And the crossing is made at pylons. Everything in this season moves through current, and the boundary between one version of the world and another is marked by overhead cables.

They take a room. Outside it, Diane sees another version of herself standing across the lot, watching.

That night they have sex. It is not tender and it is not easy: she covers his face with her hands, she looks away, she is elsewhere. The Platters' My Prayer is playing — the record that was on in the radio station in 1956 in Part 8.

Contemporary reviewers called this one of the most difficult scenes Twin Peaks has staged, and that judgement stands on the record here rather than being argued with.

What is on screen is a woman who disclosed in Part 16 that she was raped by something wearing this man's face, in a motel-lit room, unable to look at that face while she is with him. Nothing about it is presented as a reunion. She puts her hands over him to stop seeing him.

The song is the detail that ties it to the season's origin. My Prayer was on the air the night a Woodsman crushed two skulls to reach a microphone and something crawled into a sleeping girl's mouth. It is playing here.

Cooper wakes. The room is different. Diane is gone.

There is a letter. It is addressed to Richard. It is signed Linda. She says that when he reads it she will be gone, that she does not recognise him any more, and that he should not try to find her.

He goes out. The motel is not the motel he checked into. His car is not the car.

The second of the Fireman's instructions pays out, and it is the worst of them.

Richard and Linda was said to Cooper in Part 1 as two names to remember. They are not people he will meet. They are what he and Diane become on the other side of the crossing — and Diane worked it out first, wrote it down, and left.

The letter is the hour's cruellest object because it is entirely lucid. She is not confused. She knows exactly what has happened to them both, and her response is to end it and go.

Cooper drives into Odessa, Texas. He passes a diner and stops, because of the name on it: Judy's.

Inside he asks about a waitress who has not been in for three days. Three men at the counter start on the waitress who is there. Cooper deals with all three — takes a gun off one, shoots another through the foot — puts the weapons in the fryer, and gets the absent woman's address.

The name he has been hunting for eighteen hours is on a laminated sign over a diner in west Texas, and he walks in under it.

Jeffries told him in Part 17 that there he will find Judy. Whether the diner is the referent, a coincidence, or a marker left for him is not established and the file does not decide it.

What the scene does establish is that Cooper is entirely functional and entirely wrong. He handles three armed men in about fifteen seconds with the competence the Bureau trained into him — and the whole errand is an FBI agent using a badge nobody here recognises to get a stranger's home address out of a waitress.

He knocks. The woman who answers has Laura Palmer's face. She says her name is Carrie Page. She has never heard of Laura Palmer, and she has never heard of Sarah Palmer.

Cooper asks her to come with him to Twin Peaks. She has reasons of her own to leave town, and agrees.

Inside the house, visible behind her: a man dead on the sofa with a hole in his head, an assault rifle, and on the mantelpiece a small white horse.

Everything the hour will not say is in that living room.

She does not know the name. She is not pretending. And she agrees to be driven a thousand miles by a stranger who has knocked on her door talking about a dead girl, because there is a body on her sofa and she needs to not be here.

The white horse is filed and not decoded. It has stood in Sarah Palmer's living room in her sedated sleep on the nights her daughter was assaulted, and in the dark beyond the curtains in Part 2 when Laura was taken out of the Waiting Room. Here it is an ornament on a shelf in Texas. (See Glossary: The White Horse.)

They drive. It takes most of a day and a night. They barely speak. Headlights come the other way. At one point Cooper watches a car behind them for a long time and it turns off.

They stop for petrol. They keep going.

The last long sequence Twin Peaks ever stages is two people in a car not talking, filmed in real time, in the dark.

It is the same instrument the season used on the glass box in Part 1 and the swept floor in Part 7: hold on something that is not a scene until the holding becomes the content. Here the content is dread — Cooper has a woman in the passenger seat who does not know who she is, and no plan beyond an address.

They reach Twin Peaks at night and park outside the Palmer house. Cooper takes her up the path and knocks.

A woman answers. Her name, she says, is Alice Tremond. She does not know any Sarah Palmer. She and her husband bought the house from a Mrs. Chalfont.

Cooper apologises. The door closes.

Two names, given without emphasis by a stranger on a doorstep, and both of them are from the show's oldest strangeness.

Tremond and Chalfont are the same household. An old woman and her grandson lived in the trailer at Deer Meadow before Teresa Banks as the Chalfonts; they appeared in Twin Peaks on the Meals on Wheels round as the Tremonds; a Tremond handed Donna the diary page that led to Harold Smith; a Chalfont handed Laura a framed picture and told her to hang it on her wall.

They now own the Palmer house, under both names at once, and the current occupant says so to Dale Cooper's face without any idea what she is telling him.

They walk back to the road. Cooper stops in the middle of it, looking at the house, working at something he cannot get hold of. He says:

"What year is this?"

Carrie looks at the house. Somewhere inside it — faint, from a long way off — Sarah Palmer's voice is calling: Laura.

Carrie screams. It is Laura Palmer's scream.

The lights in the house go out. The picture cuts to black.

Over the credits, in silence: Laura in the Red Room, leaning to Cooper's ear, whispering. What she says is not audible.

The last question anybody asks in Twin Peaks is a request for a date, and the answer is a scream.

What has gone wrong is not stated and cannot be reconstructed from what is shown. Cooper has crossed something, lost Diane, been renamed, driven a woman who is and is not Laura Palmer to a house that is and is not the Palmer house — and in the middle of the road it reaches him that he does not know when he is. He has been operating on the assumption that the past can be corrected. The question is the moment that assumption fails.

Carrie's scream is the one thing in the hour that is unambiguous. Something in her recognises the voice. Whatever else she is, she is not a stranger to that house.

And the last image Twin Peaks ever offers is the whisper from 1989 — the piece of information the entire thirty years has been built around, delivered into Cooper's ear, withheld from everybody watching, twice.

Twin Peaks ends with two endings and refuses to rank them.

Part 17 is the ending the audience asked for. BOB destroyed, the doppelgänger shot, the department standing together, the girl taken by the hand out of the woods before the train car. It was co-written by the man who made the original series what it was, and it works.

Part 18 is the cost of having asked. Cooper does not fail because he is beaten. He fails because undoing it is not a thing that can be done — the murder can be lifted out of one version of the world, and what is on the other side is a woman with Laura Palmer's face and none of her life, in a town that has never heard of her, in a house owned by the Chalfonts.

The Fireman's instructions were a route, not a prophecy. 430, Richard and Linda, two birds with one stone, listen to the sounds. Every one of them pays out literally, and every payout is worse than the mystery was: a mileage marker to a crossing that costs him Diane, and two names that turn out to be what they become.

And the whisper is still withheld. Thirty years, two seasons, a feature film, eighteen hours, and the one piece of information the entire property is organised around is spoken into a man's ear with the sound off, twice. What Twin Peaks has always been about is a girl who was killed and who would not stop being present; it ends by refusing to hand over the only thing she ever said in confidence.