Who’s who,
and what the hell.

Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic. A typed “R” under a fingernail, and a killing a year ago that looks the same.

A diary, a cassette, a safe-deposit key and unexplained money. The homecoming queen had somewhere else to be.

The rock breaks the bottle on the name Leo Johnson.

The autopsy: bindings, bite marks, narcotics, more than one man. And the letter under the nail.

The one-armed man turns out to sell shoes. Jacoby, meanwhile, was in the woods that night, and has not said why.

A cabin, a skipping record, and blood. Leo, Jacques, Laura and Ronette were in it. And one more.

Jacques puts himself, Leo, Laura and Ronette in the cabin — and then he is smothered in his hospital bed before he can say more.

Ronette remembers the train car, and a long-haired man in denim. The first sight of the murder. Leland, meanwhile, killed Jacques.

Albert’s forensics: Jacques was smothered, not strangled, by gloved hands; the mill fire was arson, with Leo the man for it. Ronette wakes but cannot speak, and recoils from the sketch. A letter B is left under her nail, as one was under Laura’s.

The letter B comes out from under Ronette’s nail — her IV was got at in the hospital — and joins the others. Leland names the grey-haired man from his childhood; Jacoby, hypnotised, describes Leland at the scene; and Leland is arrested for Jacques’s murder. Donna finds a secret diary of Laura’s in a shut-in’s house.

Leland confesses to killing Jacques Renault, certain the man had murdered Laura; the confession holds under a traveling judge. Harold Smith admits he holds Laura’s real secret diary and reads a page of it aloud rather than surrender it — enough that Donna turns to Maddy to help her take it by other means.

Donna and Maddy try to steal Laura’s real diary out of Harold Smith’s house; he catches them, cuts his own face, and swears he alone knows who killed her. The diary stays where it is.

Laura’s secret diary comes out of Harold Smith’s house at last, and Cooper reads a man named BOB through all of it — and enough of Ben Horne to arrest him for the murder. The same night, in the Palmer house, Maddy Ferguson is beaten to death, and the face over her is not the one the sheriff has in a cell.

Truman charges Ben Horne with Laura’s murder on the diary’s word, and Cooper says outright he doesn’t believe it. The man who did it drives her cousin’s body around town in a golf bag through a whole bright day — and by nightfall Maddy surfaces from the water, wrapped in plastic, the way Laura was found.

The oldest question in the file closes. The letters under the nails, Laura’s own diary pages, and the whisper Cooper finally hears — my father killed me — bring him to Leland, and in a holding cell BOB confesses through him to Teresa Banks, Laura, and Maddy before Leland dies of it. Ben Horne walks free of the charge. The killer is named; the thing that wore him is not caught.

Ben Horne wants land. Catherine runs the mill’s books and sleeps with him. Josie owns it, and is watched by both.

Josie finds the second ledger. Catherine has been keeping the mill’s books in two hands.

Ben and Catherine will burn the mill and frame Josie for it. Josie finds out.

Catherine reads the second ledger and sees the shape of it: the frame is being built around her, not around Josie.

The mill burns with Catherine and Shelly inside it. Leo tied Shelly there himself.

Catherine is missing in the ashes. Pete and Shelly got out.

The mill fire was set. Ben and Jerry bend over a ledger tied to it.

Josie returns with a “cousin,” Jonathan, who speaks for a Mr. Eckhardt in Hong Kong and wants the mill sale signed inside two days. He beats Hank bloody over it the same night.

A stranger calling himself Mr. Tojamura offers Ben five million dollars for an unnamed piece of Ghostwood.

Ben brings Leland back into the Ghostwood deal proper and squares off with Mr. Tojamura over an uncashed five-million-dollar check. Josie sells the mill, blackmails Ben for the money, and leaves town on Jonathan’s schedule, not her own.

Mr. Tojamura, who’d been buying his way toward Ghostwood with a five-million-dollar check, is Catherine Martell in a disguise — alive since the mill fire, and back to settle with Ben on her own terms.

From his cell Ben has only one alibi and it’s a dead woman’s. Catherine, still Tojamura, sends a tape offering to swear to it if he signs the mill and Ghostwood into her hands, while Bobby turns up a recording of Ben and Leo arranging the fire and mails Ben a copy of his own.

Cleared of Laura’s murder, Ben Horne is free — but not before he signs the mill and all of Ghostwood over to Mr. Tojamura to buy an alibi he no longer needs. The land Catherine walked out of a fire to reach is hers on paper at last.

Bobby tries to leverage the fire tape against Ben Horne and is thrown out for it. Hours after Josie turns up battered on Harry’s doorstep, Catherine walks into the sheriff’s station very much alive, with a guardian angel and a family cabin to explain the weeks she was gone.

Josie confesses to Catherine her part in the swindle and the fire, done under Thomas Eckhardt’s hand, and is taken on as a maid for it rather than turned out. Behind Catherine’s office door, her brother Andrew — believed dead since the accident that was supposed to have taken him — watches their plan to use Josie as bait for Eckhardt come together.

Catherine keeps Josie in service with the same threat that put her there — cooperate, or answer to Thomas Eckhardt instead.

Harry begs Josie to leave Catherine’s house for good. She turns him down and kisses him instead of answering, and nothing about her arrangement with Catherine changes.

Catherine and Andrew tell Pete the truth of their scheme to draw Thomas Eckhardt to Twin Peaks through Josie, and Eckhardt obliges, checking into the Great Northern in person just as a fax reports Josie’s cousin Jonathan dead and Harry asks Cooper to look into what she had to do with it.

Thomas Eckhardt dines at Catherine’s own table and prices out what it will cost to take Josie back, while Albert’s fiber match against her coat closes in from the sheriff’s side of the same question.

The Packard reckoning closes: Catherine arms Josie and sends her to Eckhardt, Andrew steps out of hiding to face his old rival, and Josie shoots Eckhardt dead before dying herself, just as Albert’s ballistics name her gun as the one that shot Cooper. Ben Horne, newly sane, opens a second front over the same land — a crusade to save the Ghostwood woods from Catherine’s development, pine weasel and John Justice Wheeler both enlisted for it.

Ben Horne’s pine weasel campaign becomes a fashion show that also kicks off the new Miss Twin Peaks contest, with Wheeler at his side and Audrey drawn further into both, while Catherine is handed an unexplained sealed box left behind on Thomas Eckhardt’s account.

Ben sends Audrey to Seattle to meet the environmentalists fighting to save Ghostwood, pulling her further into the campaign he has made his own.

Eckhardt’s puzzle box springs open when Pete drops it and yields only a smaller box marked with the phases of the moon, while Dick pours for a Stop Ghostwood wine tasting and takes Lucy’s mouthful in the face.

Catherine and Andrew open the moon-marked box from Eckhardt’s legacy to find yet another box sealed within, and wonder whether its markings answer to the Owl Cave carvings, while Ben Horne holds to his new turn as a friend of Ghostwood.

Ben Horne pushes Audrey into Miss Twin Peaks to turn the crown against Ghostwood, and she sets about tracing the money behind the development while she competes.

The last of Eckhardt’s nested boxes gives up a safe deposit key, and the box it opens in the bank vault gives up a bomb — Andrew and Pete and the vault-chained Audrey all in the room when Eckhardt’s last trick goes off.

A brothel and casino over the border, run by Blackie O’Reilly. Ben and Jerry Horne are members.

The perfume counter at Horne’s department store is a recruiting pipeline into the club. Laura stood behind it.

Cooper and Ed go in undercover. Audrey is already inside, under a false name. Neither knows about the other.

Ben Horne owns the club. Audrey, inside it under a false name, was very nearly sent to her own father.

Audrey chokes a confession from Battis: Ben Horne owns the club, and Battis brought Laura and Ronette into it. Her call to Cooper is cut off before she can say where she is.

Blackie turns on the Hornes: she drugs and binds Audrey to ransom her, and Jacques’s brother Jean arrives at the club wanting Cooper dead.

Jean Renault sends Ben a tape of Audrey bound at the club and a price: $125,000, a cut of the house, and Cooper to carry the money. He kills Emory Battis in front of her for his carelessness, and Ben tells Cooper only about the cash.

Cooper, Truman and Hawk raid the club and bring Audrey out alive, drugged near an overdose. Jean Renault kills Blackie with his own spring knife and takes Hank in her place.

Truman names Jean Renault as Blackie’s killer — revenge on the man who caught his brother, with Audrey as the bait — and the man is still out there.

The border raids catch up with Cooper: an agent from Internal Affairs suspends him without pay over the trips across the line that left Jacques Renault and Blackie O’Reilly dead.

Hank brings Ben Horne the word that Jean Renault now owns the club outright, one more thing gone while Ben sits alone with his home movies.

Ben’s private surveillance and Denise’s official sting close in on the same address — Bobby’s photographs and Denise’s pressure on Ernie Niles both point at Jean Renault out at Dead Dog Farm.

Jean Renault dies in the Dead Dog Farm shootout, and the club he took outright from his own dead brothers goes back to having no one in charge of it at all.

Laura had a public boyfriend and a secret one. Bobby has Shelly, who has Leo. Donna wants James, who wanted Laura.

Leo leaves his wife to burn. Jacoby, who kept his patient’s secrets, is felled by the sight of her cousin wearing her face.

Ed tells Cooper the whole arithmetic of it: Norma, whom he should have married, and Nadine, whose eye he shot out on their honeymoon.

James records a song with Donna and Maddy, his eye moving between them, and Donna breaks. Bobby talks Shelly into nursing the comatose Leo for his disability cheques.

James and Maddy kiss, and Donna sees it. Nadine wakes thinking she is eighteen. Lucy tells her date, Dick Tremayne, that she is pregnant.

Dick offers Lucy money for an abortion and is sent away for good. Donna, hearing her own private fear about Laura read back to her, recruits Maddy to help her steal the diary that holds it.

Leo comes home from the hospital still catatonic, Shelly’s to nurse. Nadine tears a refrigerator door off its hinges without noticing. Lucy’s story about Tacoma turns out to have a hole in it.

Maddy says her goodbyes to James and Donna and heads home. Leo’s homecoming curdles into cruelty. Nadine’s affection for Ed keeps coming in stronger than either of them expected.

Shelly gives up the Double R to nurse Leo at home, and Bobby lifts a hidden tape from Leo’s boot hoping it’s worth something. Nadine goes back to high school still eighteen in her own head, strong enough to throw the wrestling team, with Ed trailing helpless behind.

Lucy’s sister Gwen arrives with a baby and drops Andy where he stands, the paternity of Lucy’s child no clearer than before. Norma’s mother sweeps in with a new husband Hank knows from prison, and Audrey lingers in Cooper’s room over a feeling he keeps at arm’s length.

James gives Donna a ring. Lucy sets a blood test to settle whether Andy or Dick fathered her child. And Norma’s mother sweeps the Double R with a critic’s eye.

Mayor Milford and his brother Dougie come to blows at Leland’s own wake over Dougie’s engagement to a much younger woman. Dick and Andy shake on a truce over Lucy that neither means honestly, Ed gets Nadine back into a high school that still thinks she’s eighteen, and Audrey walks Bobby off to get ice cream rather than ask what his father just threw him out for.

Dougie Milford weds a bride young enough to draw his brother’s public objection, a fight Harry says happens every year. Cooper dances with Audrey and Denise Bryson — new to the DEA case, and introducing herself under a name Cooper knew her by differently once — dances with Andy, who is plainly smitten. Nadine develops a crush on Mike Nelson and out-lifts him at the school weight room, and Dick leans on Andy to help him manage a foster boy taken on to impress Lucy.

Dougie Milford dies on his honeymoon and his brother turns on the widow left behind, who confides to Hawk that she thinks herself cursed — and watches him fall under her spell exactly like every other man in the room. Nadine pins Mike Nelson in front of the wrestling team without noticing anything strange in it, and Dick nearly gets himself killed proving to Nicky, and to Lucy by proxy, that he can be trusted with a child.

James finishes Evelyn Marsh’s car and ends up in her bed over it, her husband still supposedly out of town, while Nadine turns her unnatural strength on Hank to put him down cold for going after Ed.

James learns Evelyn Marsh and her “brother” Malcolm, in truth her lover, rigged her husband’s car to kill him and meant to let James hang for it, and runs straight into Donna waiting outside. Norma and Ed edge toward the open once Hank is booked on a parole violation, and Lana Milford ends up in the mayor’s lap agreeing to adopt a child with him.

Evelyn shoots Malcolm dead the moment his frame on James stops suiting him, and Donna gets James out ahead of the police. Ed and Norma finally have their future out in the open, and Nadine walks in on the two of them only to bless it and announce Mike Nelson as her own.

Norma leaves Hank rather than alibi him and Ed asks her to marry him at the Double R, both marriages finally loosened enough to say it. James Hurley rides out of Twin Peaks for good after a last goodbye with Donna, who holds him to a promise to return.

Wheeler takes Audrey on a picnic and sings to her, easy in a way that surprises them both, while Nadine checks into the Great Northern with Mike Nelson under a false name, still certain she is a teenager away with her boyfriend.

Cooper and Annie ease toward each other at the Great Northern bar, Wheeler tells Audrey outright that he loves her, and Nadine checks out of the honeymoon suite with Mike still certain she’s a teenager in love, while Andy’s turn in spelunking gear catches Lucy’s eye at last.

Cooper and Annie kiss out on the lake trading the worst of their pasts, Gordon Cole kisses Shelly in full view of Bobby and narrates it to him at volume, and a telegram pulls Wheeler toward urgent business with Audrey still away in Seattle.

Cooper names Annie his queen at the pre-pageant dance and the Giant appears to forbid it, Audrey gives herself to Wheeler aboard the plane that is about to carry him off to Brazil for good, and Shelly and Bobby find their way back to each other.

The pageant crowns Annie the queen Cooper named her, and in the same hour Earle takes her out of the smoke and out of his reach — the Giant’s silent no made real.

Bobby asks Shelly to marry him at the Double R, Nadine wakes with her right mind and leaves young Mike the moment she sees Ed with Norma, and Annie, the queen Cooper loved, is carried into the Lodge and found bloodied in the circle at dawn.

Sarah sees a hand dig up a necklace nobody told her about, and a face in the mirror that is not hers.

A grey-haired man is crouched at the foot of Laura’s bed. Only Sarah sees him.

A red-draped room, a dancing man who speaks backwards, and two names: BOB, and MIKE.

Truman names the Bookhouse Boys. Local men have been guarding the town against something in the woods for a generation.

The log saw men, a girl, and an owl.

A Giant stands in Room 315, gives Cooper three clues and a fourth line, and takes his ring away with him.

The Giant returns to tell Cooper the owls are not what they seem, and sets an owl over the face in the sketch. Major Briggs logged the same words from deep space the night Cooper was shot. Maddy sees the man climb over the couch toward her.

Cooper lays out the Giant and his clues for Harry and Albert, and the one-armed salesman is unstrung by the sketch of the grey-haired man.

Cooper places Audrey’s note as the lost thing the Giant warned him about, and finds her because of it.

Under questioning, Gerard convulses and speaks as an old partner of BOB’s — the same name once spoken in Cooper’s dream. It says BOB feeds on fear and is holed up in a large house made of wood by the lake.

The one-armed man convulses when Ben Horne nears, reading BOB close by. Sarah Palmer sees a white horse standing in her living room before she loses consciousness. And on the Roadhouse stage the Giant comes to Cooper with three words — it is happening again.

MIKE speaks through Gerard again — the answer is in Cooper’s heart, not his head — and helps call the Giant, who comes to the Roadhouse and gives back the ring he took. BOB confesses to the killings and then goes out of Leland into wherever he came from, uncaught.

Major Briggs takes Cooper fishing, tells him he may be marked for facing evil, and asks if he’s ever heard of the White Lodge. Cooper hasn’t, and a flash of light in the trees takes Briggs before either of them can say more.

Betty Briggs tells Cooper and Harry that Garland has vanished before and had lately fixed on the woods around Twin Peaks. Hawk answers Cooper’s question about the White Lodge with its shadow self: the Black Lodge, where a soul meets the Dweller on the Threshold and only real courage survives the meeting.

Colonel Reilly tells Cooper and Harry that Major Briggs’s disappearance is a national security matter and that the signal meant for Cooper came from the woods around Twin Peaks, not deep space. Two days on, Briggs reappears in his own living room in a flier’s uniform decades out of date, with no explanation for either the woods or the wardrobe.

Major Briggs turns up with three strange marks and a half-told story — a giant owl, and an unofficial hunt for something called the White Lodge that outlived Project Blue Book — before his own Air Force pulls him out of the room.

Major Briggs arrives distressed, doubting the motives behind his own Air Force’s search for the White Lodge, and can say only that he believes he was taken there himself before warning Cooper and Harry that trouble is coming.

Josie Packard dies in Eckhardt’s rooms with no wound to explain it, and as Harry holds her body Cooper sees BOB scrambling across the floor demanding to know what happened to her, the little man from his dream dancing, and Josie’s own face screaming out of the grain of a wooden drawer pull. The room shows him all of it and explains none of it.

The Log Lady tells Cooper that her own disappearance as a girl left her marked exactly where Major Briggs is marked, the first time her own history and his have been tied together.

Cooper, Truman, Hawk, and Andy break open a sealed panel deep in Owl Cave and find a rod carved with a symbol matching the one Cooper pieced together from Briggs’s and the Log Lady’s marks combined — and after they leave, Windom Earle finds the same rod, turns it to match its twin on the cave’s ceiling, and brings the roof down around himself.

Owl Cave stands opened — Earle has been there ahead of the lawmen and left the petroglyph fully uncovered — and Major Briggs, asked what Project Blue Book held on Earle, says he has seen the cave’s drawing before, in a dream.

Briggs’s Blue Book footage shows Windom Earle lecturing on the dugpas and the Black Lodge, and the Owl Cave carving gives up its secret at last — a map to the Lodge, its door in the country around Twin Peaks, opening only at a conjunction of the planets. That night, in a ring of trees deep in the woods, a hand rises trembling out of a pool of black oil into the descending light with the red-room curtains mirrored on it, while across town the same tremor takes one hand after another — Cooper’s, Shelly’s, Pete’s.

The Owl Cave figures resolve into Jupiter and Saturn, so the Black Lodge opens at their conjunction, and Briggs comes back from Earle with the rule of it — fear and love open the doors. Cooper, reading BOB’s pull toward Josie’s fear, takes fear for the Black Lodge’s key, while Andy sees the carving for a map.

The door the map marked opens at last — a pool of oil in a ring of twelve sycamores, the red curtains rising over it at the conjunction’s hour. Earle takes Annie through and Cooper follows, and inside the Black Lodge the dead and their doubles speak in riddles: the Man from Another Place, the Giant who is one and the same as the waiter, Maddy, a shrieking Laura, Leland who killed nobody. BOB tears Earle’s soul out there, and what walks back into the morning wears Cooper’s face and BOB’s reflection.

An anonymous note reaches Cooper: an opening chess move, and a name he doesn’t need to be told — Windom Earle. Gordon Cole flies in with the rest of Albert’s findings, including a coat fiber from outside Cooper’s door the night he was shot.

Cooper tells Audrey, at last, why Windom Earle matters to him — a woman they both loved, killed because Cooper’s own feelings left him blind to the threat, and a partner the grief drove out of his mind.

Cooper answers Earle’s opening chess move with one of his own, printed in the local paper where Earle first placed it — the game keeps going in public, in plain sight of a town that has no idea what it’s watching.

Earle’s next move arrives as a body propped in Truman’s own office with a hand pointed at a chessboard, timed to a fire at the power station that drops the whole town into the dark.

Cooper tells Harry the whole of his history with Windom Earle and a federal witness named Caroline, Windom’s wife, whom Cooper loved and failed to save — and now believes Windom killed himself, faking the madness that got him committed. The corpse in Truman’s office carries her exact wound, and by the episode’s end Windom has a face again, welcoming a fleeing Leo Johnson into his cabin in the woods.

Earle collars the fled Leo Johnson in his cabin and drills him like an animal, while the drifter left dead in Truman’s office turns out to be named Erik Powell, Caroline’s maiden name, chosen on purpose. A death mask on Cooper’s own pillow and a letter elsewhere in town confirm Earle means to make a queen of one of three women before the game is through.

Earle tears the poem “Love’s Philosophy” into three and sends a piece to each of the three women he named — Shelly, Audrey, and Donna — bringing them together at the Roadhouse so he can study his queen candidates in one room while he watches disguised.

Earle calls on the Hayward house disguised as an old friend of Doc Hayward’s and leaves Donna a boxed chess piece with his next move written out, plus a phone number that rings a cemetery once Eileen dials it — proof he can walk into any house in Twin Peaks wearing any face he likes.

Earle bugs a bonsai tree sent to Harry as a gift from the dead Josie and listens in on Cooper’s FBI reinstatement from his own cabin, then has the collared Leo turn up three queens, a king, and a blank Queen of Hearts meant for whoever wins Miss Twin Peaks — and, made up as a poetry professor, corners Audrey in the library over her own stolen verse. Doc Hayward tells the law it was Earle himself who called on his house in disguise.

Earle lures a travelling musician to his cabin, lectures him and the collared Leo on the Black Lodge, and leaves the boy dead inside a giant pawn at the town gazebo with a note promising Cooper someone he knows next — while the handwriting on the torn poem comes back as Leo Johnson’s, and a fisherman on the lakeshore watching Cooper and Annie kiss is Earle in yet another face.

Earle seizes Major Briggs and drugs out of him the last of what the Blue Book knew, and with it reads the Owl Cave petroglyph for what it is — the map to the Black Lodge he came to Twin Peaks to find. Cooper, watching the same footage from the other side, sees the revenge for the pretext it always was.

Earle strings a cage of tarantulas over Leo for freeing Briggs, then walks into the pageant wearing the Log Lady’s face — kills the lights, fills the hall with smoke, and carries off the newly crowned Annie, the queen his whole game has been building toward, gone before the lights return.

Earle carries the crowned Annie to the sycamore door and into the Lodge, and offers her life for Cooper’s soul — and Cooper gives it, and it buys Earle nothing. BOB stops the knife and takes the soul out of Earle himself, the pursuer of the Black Lodge ending as a puppet in the hands of the thing already inside it.

Ben Horne tells Eileen Hayward he means to make right something between them from twenty years ago, and she comes to return love letters she has kept ever since, insisting Donna must never know. At the pageant he starts telling Donna herself what that history means for her, and she runs before he can finish.

Donna follows Eileen to the Great Northern and watches her meet Ben Horne, noticing flowers on his desk that are not from her father, her suspicion sharpening with still no answer to it.

Donna presses her mother about the meeting with Ben Horne and is told it was charity work — an answer she plainly does not believe.

Donna turns up old photographs of her parents with Ben Horne and a birth certificate with no father named, the question sharper than ever — while Ben, unaware of any of it, tells Doc Hayward he means at last to confess the old business with Eileen.

Donna demands the truth of Eileen and Doc Hayward and is refused, then wrings from Ben Horne himself the affair with her mother twenty years back and the admission that he may be her father.

What Ben started to say backstage is finished for him: Donna knows he is her father, and the reckoning lands at the Hayward house, where Doc Hayward comes home to the sight of Ben and puts him on the floor.