Twin Peaks is back and somehow as strange and beautiful as ever

Enlarge / Agent Dale Cooper is very much back. (credit: Suzanne Tenner / Showtime)

Warning: This post contains some spoilers for Twin Peaks: The Return alongside references to details from the original series.

"Is it future, or is it past?"

-Mike (a benign spirit inhabiting a shoe salesman sitting in an extra-dimensional waiting room)

It almost goes without saying that Twin Peaks felt like nothing else on TV back when it debuted on ABC in the early 1990s. Excitingly, the same applies to last night's premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime and Sky Atlantic. A beloved cult-classic has surfaced 25 years later, and it immediately throws both old and new viewers into the deep-end without the slightest hint of a flotation device.

Don't expect any "here's what happened a quarter-century ago" catch-up sequences. Laura Palmer gets no explanation. Margaret the Log Lady gets no explanation. And the dual Dale Coopers/Red Room/extra-dimensional lodges/otherworldly spirits sure as hell get no explanations. Ostensibly, Twin Peaks: The Return aims to please fans by making such choices, but going into the series blind in 2017 probably doesn't leave you that far behind, even if it'll make those Dale Cooper-Red Room sequences extra surreal and obtuse.

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