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David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult television classic Twin Peaks was ended abruptly in 1991 after 48 episodes on ABC and a truncated, troubling cliffhanger. 26 years later in the real world and 25 years later in its own peculiar narrative world, Twin Peaks: The Return unspooled 18 more episodes on cable network Showtime (as well as on Showtime’s streaming service and on Bravo and CraveTV in Canada), ending in early September of this year with a finale of disequilibrium and non-finality. A quasi-nostalgic reboot series with many key differences, The Return found Twin Peaks operating outside of the notorious network television conventions and channeling artistic restrictions that weakened Lynch and Frost’s vision through its protracted second season after its briefer, cultural-phenom first season.

The Return is Twin Peaks for television’s new impossibly crowded, creatively robust, artistically prestigious Golden Age. This is a zeitgeist for the form that the first two seasons of Twin Peaks at the start of the 1990s (or the first more than the second) seemed to portend, or more accurately to reach for, hopefully and aspirationally but impossibly and fruitlessly. It cannot be said that Twin Peaks singularly created our current pervasive TV trend of intelligent, morally and symbolically ambiguous, serialized long-form storytelling, though it played a key embryonic role (along with HBO dramas like Oz and The Sopranos, and even the later-season extended arcs of the syndicated Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). It may have aimed for that kind of art, but never really got there. But The Return shows Lynch and Frost’s woolly, unwieldy serial entirely at home with the contemporary TV milieu while also productively pushing its boundaries and unsettling its assumptions, as the earlier version managed to do at its best.

Before digging into the rich, distinct, surreal, and often entirely ambiguous American dreamscape of The Return, it’s important to understand what Twin Peaks was before this summer, in its venerable original broadcast run. At once an extended murder mystery, a melodramatic soap opera, a drybones comedy, and a supernatural conflict between forces of good and evil, Twin Peaks was set entirely in and around the fictional titular town in northern Washington State. Organized originally around the unsolved murder of local high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and the efforts of the idiosyncratic FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Lynch favourite Kyle MacLachlan in his signature role) and the local sheriff’s department to delve into the mysteries around the crime, Twin Peaks got away from its creators, encompassing any number of sideline subplots of varying degrees of silliness, especially after the circumstances of the Palmer murder were revealed part-way through the second season (quite against Lynch and Frost’s artistic intent, apparently). Those circumstances were further elaborated on by Lynch’s divisive feature film, Fire Walk With Me, which provides important context for The Return (and which, to provide full critical disclosure, I have not seen).

It mattered less, perhaps, what Twin Peaks did with its plot from episode to episode (after Laura’s murder was “solved”, the malevolent entities behind it were transferred to a conflict between Cooper and his former FBI partner, an unstable genius named Windom Earle, played by Kenneth Walsh) than how it felt as it did so. Many of Twin Peaks’ characters, flawed or mean or selfish or dim-witted but ultimately human and sympathetic, became enduring fan favourites: Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), respected stand-up cop and devoted lover to Josie Packard (Joan Chen), the inheritor of the local sawmill with a troubled Hong Kong past; Audrey Horne (Sherilynn Fenn), the savvy, sexy daughter of hotel owner Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer); sheriff’s deputies Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) and Hawk (Michael Horse), the former a mentally-slow but surprisingly heroic sort with a longstanding on-again-off-again romance with the sheriff’s office receptionist Lucy (Kimmy Robertson); longtime screen acting veterans Piper Laurie and Jack Nance as a mismatched couple frequently involved in various Twin Peaks happenings; and many more, from the loopy, lumber-carrying prophetess the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) to the eccentric local psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) to Cooper’s FBI colleagues Gordon Cole (Lynch himself, with an eye for younger women and a comic-relief hearing aid device) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer, with a dry sarcastic wit and withering disdain for the parochial townsfolk) to decorously-speaking, secret-government-project-linked Air Force Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis) to supernatural figures like The Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), MIKE the One-Armed Man (Al Strobel), and the prime antagonist Killer BOB (Frank Silva).

At the centre of everything, though, was Dale Cooper, Coop to his friends. A bit of an eccentric who breaks leads with the help of Tibetan mysticism and can be disconnected from others through his weirdness, Cooper ultimately is the core of Twin Peaks‘ warmth and decency. He deeply appreciates the good-natured, all-American simplicity of the town’s rhythms, greets the coffee and pies of the local Double R Diner with effusive praise, and holds numerous townspeople in warm regard. Protecting this decency from the forces that would destroy it drives his sense of justice but does not dent his kindness or his moral standards. Especially considering the flawed anti-heroes of television’s current age, Dale Cooper is a breath of fresh air, albeit one tinge with odd flavours; to use a phrase in dire danger of becoming stale self-parody, he made it okay to be weird.

Twin Peaks was cancelled after its second season in 1991, forcing Lynch and Frost (who word has it had retreated from the day-to-day creative process anyway, disillusioned with the demands of meddling ABC executives) into an abrupt conclusion steeped in the show’s self-constructed mythology (malevolent spirits, dancing dwarves in the red-curtained Black Lodge, that backwards-talking dream with the flaming cards, etc.) that nonetheless felt naggingly open-ended to fans. Enter Twin Peaks: The Return a quarter-century later, which simultaneously expands, extends, and further explicates the vision of this peculiar, symbolically-charged world while radically transmogrifying its metaphorical implications.

The Return greatly diminishes the melodramatic elements that ran rampant in the second season of the show but which were, and remain, a vital aspect of David Lynch’s style and emotional appeals (it also, perhaps as a related consequence, marginalizes composer Angelo Badalamenti’s heart-string-plucking, recurring synth themes). At the same time, it expands the scope and settings of the show as well as its particular surrealistic visual mythology, which takes up a much greater share of the running time, often taking over episodes entirely, to indelible but often head-scratching effect. Furthermore, it is a show obsessively occupied with time and death, acknowledging and textualizes the aging of its characters and, in very many cases, their passage into death. Silva, Davis, and Nance all died years before development of the revival began, yet all appear in it, in some form. Ferrer, Warren Frost (who played local physician Dr. Hayward), and Coulson all died after filming their scenes but prior to the season’s airing; in Coulson’s case, she passed a mere four days after completing her onscreen work, and her character’s death is incorporated into the text itself. Crusty veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton, who plays a supporting role, died most recently, shortly after the finale aired.

Summarizing generally, The Return revivifies the original run’s recurring motif of the doppelgänger (think of Lee’s dual role as Laura Palmer and her identical cousin Maddy, who suffers the same fate as Laura) and applies it to Dale Cooper in triplicate. Last seen in the second-season finale being possessed by evil BOB as the price to defeat Windom Earle, Cooper himself remains imprisoned in the Black Lodge 25 years hence, while his malevolent doppelgänger (The Return offers the term tulpa for the entity) runs rampant in the criminal underworld and a second double, a good-natured but imprudent insurance agent named Dougie Jones, dwells with his wife Janey-E (Naomi Watts) and their son in the suburbs of Las Vegas. Meanwhile, a mysterious but brutal murder draws the attention of the FBI, namely Cole, Rosenfield, and newly-elevated agent Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell), to Buckhorn, South Dakota. And in Twin Peaks, events continue as they always have, with small dramas and larger mythological connections dripped out in equal measure: Harry Truman is direly ill (Ontkean has retired from acting and could not be persuaded to return for the new season) and has been replaced as Sheriff by his brother Frank (Robert Forster, who was cast as Sheriff Truman in the 1990 pilot but was replaced due to scheduling conflicts), waitress Shelly (Mädchen Amick) was married to now-sheriff’s deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and had a daughter (Amanda Seyfried) but they appear to be on the rocks, the Double R has franchised to half-a-dozen locations and caused owner Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) greater stress, the popular Roadhouse bar has top-notch musical performers every night (Nine Inch Nails, Eddie Vedder, and numerous indie-rock acts, often with a shoegaze or dream-pop bent, guest on the show, often playing episodes into the credits), and Audrey Horne appears very late in the process, arguing incessantly and hysterically with her nebbish husband Charlie (Clark Middleton).

If this set-up sounds like The Return is set to be more of the same for this property, then be prepared for the numerous, gleefully obtuse left-turns, u-turns, and rabbit-hole descents engineered by Lynch and Frost. A protracted sequence (nearly all of them are in these 18 episodes; Lynch delights in dragging visuals out with hypnotic absorption, and his brief scenes are interludes of near-abstraction) early on establishes an unexplained monitoring experiment in a New York skyscraper, which becomes one piece of Cooper’s hyper-surrealist sort-of escape from the Black Lodge. Cooper is plunked into Dougie Jones’ body as a quasi-lobotomized figure, barely capable of the basic necessities of living but gradually, almost magically succeeding and triumphing in every sphere of Dougie’s life despite his prodigious slowness. Laura Dern shows up as a highlight supporting performer, embodying the unseen Diane figure to whom Coop frequently addressed his tape-recorded observations of the Palmer case and life in Twin Peaks in general. And certain Twin Peaks returnees appear in greatly modified and bizarre form: Dr. Jacoby is now Dr. Amp, a species of online and radio anti-government, anti-elites invective-spewing ranter and huckster (InfoWars’ Alex Jones is a clear satirical target here) who sells gold-painted shovels for listeners to use to dig themselves out of “the shit” of modern neoliberal capitalist America; FBI agent Phillip Jeffries, played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me, has left the human realm entirely (fitting, considering the life and death of the man who played him), now manifested as a kind of man-sized steampunk teapot; Benjamin Horne’s worldwide-schmoozing brother and business partner Jerry (David Patrick Kelly) has become a bearded hippie social drop-out who spends most of the season lost in the woods, his own foot at one point telling him that it isn’t his foot; and although Andy and Lucy are happily married, they also have a Marlon-Brando-esque biker-seeker-poet son, played in a single desultory scene by Michael Cera.

Many scenes in The Return are desultory when taken in isolation, and even recurring sequences and visual elements hardly add up in the conventional sense of narrative or character arcs. But when The Return, and Twin Peaks as well in a retroactive sense, is understood more as a surrealistic dream-logic tone poem on American decline and dislocation – indeed, on all decline and dislocation, on precarious human mortality itself – it begins to adhere in a greater sense. In the original two seasons, Twin Peaks could be understood, for all of its Lynchian abstractions and melodramatic tangents, as a moral metaphor for America’s loss of innocence (or for the terrifying lack of an innocence that was never really there in the first place). The killing of Laura Palmer was both the consequence of and the catalyst for divisive and malevolent forces being unleashed upon the town and its people, but it portended wider forces of this sort in America at large. Echoes of the forceful dispossession of Native American peoples came through Hawk and in cryptic elements of the mythology (the symbolist map during Season Two, for example). Ben Horne’s mania for Civil War re-creation was not simply an amusing conceit to display his mental disquiet, but a personal crucible to allow for him to atone for his past mistakes and misdeeds, much as the historical war itself was a delayed judgement in blood for centuries of brutal, exploitative slavery in America.

The Return makes these associations between Laura Palmer’s murder and larger historical crimes both more explicit and more abstract. In the season’s most surreal, visually arresting and interpretively baffling hour, “Part 8”, the atomic age is blamed for birthing the evil spirits that haunt Twin Peaks. The first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert is depicted by Lynch with slow-paced, aesthetically stunning detail, in the midst of which a translucent orb containing the iconic, terrifying face of BOB floats into existence. The splitting of the atom, in Lynch and Frost’s understanding, cleaved a permanent evil apart from a vulnerable good; the same dark forces can likewise split human identity, morality, consciousness, even corporeality, as Cooper’s trippelgängers demonstrate. Laura Palmer herself is portended as a balancing force to BOB in the same episode (created by the Fireman, “the giant” from the original series, in the black-and-white-and-sepia edifice above a purple sea), as are the ominous Woodsmen. Glistening black and clad in plaid, they emerge from the radioactive smoke and crackling static (electricity is an important marker of the mysterious shadowy powers here) to occupy an abandoned roadside convenience store. Then, in New Mexico a decade after the first atomic test, one woodsman passes motorists on a nighttime highway before lethally invading a remote radio station. He intones “Got a light?” menacingly, bloodily cracks open skulls of his victims, and hauntingly repeats the following cryptic phrase over the broadcast airwaves:

This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.

Radio listeners pass out in their homes, and a young teenaged girl lies on her bed while an insectoid creature that hatched at the bomb site crawls into her mouth.

These images are never “explained”, in the conventional sense (and whatever else they were, they remain phenomenal, purely surreal television), but they gain dimension through interconnections within the text. A huge print image of an atomic explosion hangs behind Gordon Cole’s desk in his FBI office, and the secretive “Blue Rose” task force he leads delves into the various supernatural mysteries at the core of the show’s mythology. Such a character as conduit for exposition being played by the director and co-creator himself is a meta feint typical of David Lynch: “Here I am to tell you what the deal is,” he seems to imply, but really he isn’t going to do that at all. The art itself, as Lynch stated recently, is the explanation.

A real clue to Lynch’s method, and his self-awareness of the audience’s impressions of that method, with Twin Peaks: The Return comes earlier in the season, however. In Twin Peaks, Hawk is spurred to reopen the evidence files of the Laura Palmer case by cryptic prophecies from the Log Lady. Sitting in the sheriff’s office conference room with old evidence covering the table, he speaks vaguely to Andy and Lucy about what he’s looking for. A mortified Lucy sees an empty chocolate bunny box and admits to eating the candy rabbit, then wonders aloud if the consumed bunny might be the missing clue that Hawk is looking for. Hawk confidently dismisses the notion, but then vacillates between that dismissal and the nagging possibility that it just might be, after all.

David Lynch and Mark Frost are tipping their hats here to the obsessive fanbase, now bolstered by the internet, searching for clues in every symbolically charged moment of the show. They are also implying that the interpretive labour is not exactly all for naught, but may very well be misplaced or misdirected. The experience of Twin Peaks itself is what matters, and carries its own essential meaning. Hours, days, weeks, maybe even 25 years (maybe even 2740 words of a blog essay), could be spent attempting to tease out its meanings. These attempts are spin-offs from its rich and surreal visual and informational tapestry, but that tapestry itself communicates more in amorphous, difficult-to-quantify terms than any number of pop-culture thinkpieces or explanatory-theory video essays could ever manage to do.