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Let me tell you about a pair of images that left an indelible impression on me this year.

Both show haunted people through the windshield of a moving car. Both are stark and simple: seat-belts fastened, characters in silent repose. In the first, a man drives a woman along a quiet highway in the black of the night; in the second, a young man cruises through a small town in the afternoon with a man more than twice his age. Both are striking in their ambivalence and eerie calm. Both seem somehow… off.

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Remarkably, both are more vivid, provocative and dense with meaning than anything seen in cinemas this year – and more remarkably still, both are to be found in the ghetto of cable television.

The first of these images is from the beguiling final chapter of Showtime’sTwin Peaks: The Return, and it bristles with the nightmare force you’d expect of a vision conceived by David Lynch. The man is Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), on an ill-fated mission to whisk the seemingly amnesiatic Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) back to the bosom of her family home. For what feels like an eternity, toward the end of the 18th hour of this sprawling mystery, Dale and Laura simply drive, languishing in vehicular limbo without exchanging a word. This ending defied every convention, frustrated every expectation. One plain shot of the two of them in the car: it’s the cold proof that clinchesThe Returnas art of the highest order.