Part 18 (Twin Peaks)
Cooper travels through time to prevent Laura Palmer's murder.
"Part 18," also called "What Is Your Name?," concludes the surrealist mystery horror drama Twin Peaks. Mark Frost and David Lynch wrote it, Lynch directed, and Kyle MacLachlan stars. It aired on Showtime with "Part 17" on September 3, 2017, drawing 240,000 U.S. viewers. Critics praised it, but audiences found its slow pace and ambiguity less appealing.
Quick Facts
- Series
- Twin Peaks
- Director
- David Lynch
- Writer
- David Lynch; Mark Frost
- Photographer
- Peter Deming
- Editor
- Duwayne Dunham
- Airdate
- 3 September 2017
- Length
- 57 minutes
Facts from the source article.
Plot
The murder of high school student Laura Palmer and the attack on her friend Ronette Pulaski rattled the small Washington town of Twin Peaks. FBI agent Dale Cooper arrived to investigate and learned that Laura’s father, Leland Palmer, had been the killer, but he was under the control of a demonic entity called Killer BOB. At the close of the original series, BOB trapped Cooper inside the Black Lodge, a dimension outside normal reality, and released Cooper’s doppelgänger to serve as his physical vessel in the world. Twenty-five years later, Cooper escaped the Lodge through an interdimensional portal. The plan was for Cooper to take the place of his doppelgänger, but instead he ended up inhabiting the body of a second double, Dougie Jones, who had been created by the first doppelgänger as a decoy. The exhausted doppelgänger crashed his car and lost consciousness, leading to his capture by police, but he soon broke free. He then split his time between searching for a way into “the Zone” and ordering his followers to kill the catatonic Cooper, whom Dougie’s family and coworkers mistook for the real Dougie. Eventually, the doppelgänger found the right coordinates to enter the Zone, but was redirected to the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Station, where the real Cooper was also heading after waking from his stupor. Secretary Lucy Brennan shot the doppelgänger dead. When BOB emerged as an orb and tried to flee, an English boy named Freddie Sykes, wearing a gardening glove imbued with Lodge power, punched him into oblivion. A prisoner at the station called Naido was revealed to be Cooper’s assistant, Diane, whom the doppelgänger had trapped in a disfigured form. Cooper then traveled back in time to the night of Laura’s murder, hoping to stop it from happening.
Production
The episode was co-written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, who also directed, as with the rest of the limited series. In 2025, former series writer Harley Peyton noted that Part 17, described as "sweetly nostalgic," was Frost's intended finale, while Part 18 represented Lynch's preferred ending. Frost himself stated in that same interview, "I would say that we both got our ending, and they actually work hand in hand." The Platters' "My Prayer" plays during the intimate scene between Diane and Cooper; this same track had already appeared at the end of Part 8. A notable coincidence: one of the group's founding members shares the name David Lynch. Closing the episode, Angelo Badalamenti's composition underscores the credits, later released as "Dark Space Low" on the September 2017 soundtrack album Twin Peaks: Limited Event Series Original Soundtrack.
Reception
"Part 18" was met with strong praise from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it scored an 88% approval rating from 24 reviews. The site's summary described the episode as a boldly dark conclusion where Dale Cooper goes down a rabbit hole and gets lost, an ending meant to confuse and anger viewers while remaining unforgettable. Hanh Nguyen of IndieWire gave the episode an A grade. She called the sex scene between Diane and Cooper one of the most disturbing and tense moments in the entire series and argued that the finale should be accepted as the true conclusion to the Twin Peaks story. Nguyen described it as a brilliant and certainly controversial ending for a show that returned after 25 years only to leave its audience wanting more. The A.V. Club's Emily L. Stephens awarded the episode an A-minus. She wrote that it shatters the answers provided in Part 17 and raises even more bewildering questions, reinforcing the harsh reality that closure is a luxury, not something guaranteed. Noel Murray of The New York Times gave a positive review, saying he personally loved the episode and called certain scenes pure televised poetry, though he acknowledged that fans had some reason to be frustrated by its vague, elliptical style. Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly compared the episode and its predecessor to David Lynch's film Lost Highway. He praised the entire series as Lynch's chance to redo a big fantasy saga, produced at a length and with the poetic abstraction he could not achieve in a Hollywood feature film.
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