Twin peaks spoilers

Dearest /tv/,

I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, "Dale Cooper, we have not heard from you in ages!" Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I've been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means. This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these shores. In the time since, I have been able to think occasionally about how best to describe the intervening years, my years of silence. I do first apologize for the wait, and that done, hasten to finally explain (albeit briefly, quickly, and in very little detail) events following those described in my previous letter (referred to herewith as season 2).

To begin with, as you may recall from the closing paragraphs of my previous missive, the death of Laura Palmer shook us all. Sheriff Truman team was traumatized, unable to be sure how much of our plan might be compromised, and whether it made any sense to go on at all as we had intended. And yet, once Laura had been buried, we found the strength and courage to regroup. We had the Arctic coordinates, transmitted by Mike, which we believed to mark the location of the lost research White Lodge. Laura had felt strongly that the White lodge should be destroyed rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the Bob. Others on our team disagreed, believing that the White lodge might hold the secret to the evolution's success. Either way, the arguments were moot until we found the white lodge. Therefore, immediately after I boarded a helicopter and set off for the Arctic; a much larger support team, mainly Mitchum brothers, was to follow by separate transport.

It is still unclear to me exactly what brought down our little aircraft. The following hours spent traversing the frigid waste in a blizzard are also a jumbled blur, ill-remembered and poorly defined. The next thing I clearly recall is our final approach to the coordinates Mike has provided, and where we expected to find the White Lodge. What we found instead was a complex fortified installation, showing all the hallmarks of sinister experiment technology. It surrounded a large open field of garmonbozia. Of the Hypnos itself there was no sign…or not at first. But as we stealthily infiltrated the Bob installation, we noticed a recurent, strangely coherent auroral effect–as of a vast hologram fading in and out of view. This bizarre phenomenon initially seemed an effect caused by an immense experiment lensing system, I soon realized that what we were actually seeing was the research White lodge itself, phasing in and out of existence at the focus of the experiment devices. The aliens had erected their compound to study and seize the lodge whenever it materialized. What Mike had provided were not coordinates for where the sub was located, but instead for where it was predicted to arrive. The white lodge was oscillating in and out of our reality, its pulses were gradually steadying, but there was no guarantee it would settle into place for long–or at all. We determined that we must put ourselves into position to board it at the instant it became completely physical.

At this point we were briefly detained–not captured by the experiment, as we feared at first, but by minions of our former nemesis, the conniving and duplicitous Wally Brando. Wally Brando was not as we had last seen him–which is to say, he was not dead. At some point, the experiment had saved out an earlier version of his consciousness, and upon his physical demise, they had imprinted the back-up personality into a biological blank resembling an enormous slug. The WallyGrub, despite occupying a position of relative power in the experiment hierarchy, seemed nervous and frightened of me in particular. Wally did not know how his previous incarnation, the original Wally Brando, had died in a crash. He knew only that I was responsible. Therefore the slug treated us with great caution. Still, he soon confessed (never able to keep quiet for long) that he was himself a prisoner of the experiment. He took no pleasure from his current grotesque existence, and pleaded with us to end his life. I believed that a quick death was more than Wally Brando deserved, but I felt a modicum of pity and compassion.I might have done something to hasten the slug's demise before we proceeded.

Not far from where we had been detained by Wally, we found Sarah Palmer being held in a Combine interrogation cell. Things were tense between Sarah and Laura, as might be imagined. Laura blamed Sarah for her father's death…news of which, Sarah was devastated to hear for the first time. Sarah tried to convince Laura that she had been a double agent serving the resistance all along, doing only what Bob had asked of her, even though she knew it meant she risked being seen by her peers–by all of us–as a traitor. I was convinced; Laura less so. But from a pragmatic point of view, we depended on Sarah; for along with the white lodge coordinates, she possessed resonance keys which would be necessary to bring the vessel fully into our plane of existence.

We skirmished with experiment soldiers protecting a Bob research post, then i attuned the white lodge to precisely the frequencies needed to bring it into (brief) coherence. In the short time available to us, we scrambled aboard the white lodge, with an unknown number of Bob agents close behind. White lodge cohered for only a short time, and then its oscillations resume. It was too late for our own Sheriff Truman support, which arrived and joined the Bob forces in battle just as we rebounded between universes, once again unmoored.

What happened next is even harder to explain. Laura, Sarah and myself sought control of the lodge power source, its control room, its navigation center. The Lodge history proved nonlinear. Years before, during the Bob invasion, various members of an earlier science team, working in the hull of a dry-docked white lodge situated at the Black lodge Research Facility, had assembled what they called the Bootstrap Device. If it worked as intended, it would emit a field large enough to surround the lodge. This field would then itself travel instantaneously to any chosen destination without having to cover the intervening space. There was no need for entry or exit portals, or any other devices; it was entirely self-contained. Unfortunately, the device had never been tested. As the Bob pushed Earth into the Seven Hour War, the aliens seized control of our most important research facilities. The staff of the white lodge, with no other wish than to keep the ship out of Bob hands, acted in desperation. The switched on the field and flung the white lodge toward the most distant destination they could target: Arctica. What they did not realize was that the Bootstrap Device travelled in time as well as space. Nor was it limited to one time or one location. The Borealis, and the moment of its activation, were stretched across space and time, between the nearly forgotten Lake Huron of the Seven Hour War and the present day Arctic; it was pulled taut as an elastic band, vibrating, except where at certain points along its length one could find still points, like the harmonic spots along a vibrating guitar string. One of these harmonics was where we boarded, but the string ran forward and back, in both time and space, and we were soon pulled in every direction ourselves.

Time grew confused. Looking from the bridge, we could see the drydocks of Black lodge at the moment of teleportation, just as the Bob forces closed in from land, sea and air. At the same time, we could see the Arctic wastelands, where our friends were fighting to make their way to the protean white lodge; and in addition, glimpses of other worlds, somewhere in the future perhaps, or even in the past. Laura grew convinced we were seeing one of the Bob's central staging areas for invading other worlds–such as our own. We meanwhile fought a running battle throughout the white lodge, pursued by Bob forces. We struggled to understand our situation, and to agree on our course of action. Could we alter the course of the Borealis? Should we run it aground in the Arctic, giving our peers the chance to study it? Should we destroy it with all hands aboard, our own included? It was impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles. I felt I was going mad, that we all were, confronting myriad versions of ourselves, in that ship that was half ghost-ship, half nightmare funhouse.

What it came down to, at last, was a choice. Sarah Palmer argued, reasonably, that we should save the white lodge and deliver it to the resistance, that our intelligent peers might study and harness its power. But Laura reminded me had sworn she would honor she father's demand that we destroy the white and black lodge. She hatched a plan to set the  lodge to self-destruct, while riding it into the heart of the Bob's invasion nexus. Sarah and Laura argued. Sarah overpowered Laura and brought the black lodge area, preparing to shut off the Bootstrap Device and settle the lodges on the ice. Then I heard a shot, and Sarah fell. Laura had decided for all of us, or her weapon had. With Sarah Palmer dead, we were committed to the suicide plunge. Laura and I armed the white lodge, creating a time-travelling missile, and steered it for the heart of the Bob's command center.

At this point, as you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form of that sneering trickster, The Arm. For once he appeared not to me, but to Laura Palmer. Laura had not seen the cryptical schoolmaster since childhood, but she recognized him, instantly. "Come along with me now, we've places to be and things to do," said The Arm, and Laura acquiesced. She followed the strange grey man out of the white lodge, out of our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized research white lodge into the heart of a Bob world. An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Bob's power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Borealis, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.

Just then, as you have surely already foreseen, the Audrey parted their own checkered curtains of reality, reached in as they have on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.

And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final return.

Yours in infinite finality,

Dale Cooper, FBI.