10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Premiere

There is a moment in the season premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return - or, more accurately, the first ninth of a brain-melting, expansive feature film - in which a young woman offers her romantic interest a latte. Black coffee was synonymous with the original series, but milk is far from the only unfamiliar element in a continuation that is almost - almost - unrecognisable from David Lynch's landmark series.

As a murder mystery (cum-horror, soap opera, supernatural smorgasbord), the original series naturally dangled red herrings in front of enraptured viewers.

The scant promotion for The Return did much of the same. Series lead Kyle MacLachlan played up to the original incarnation of his Dale Cooper character on social media, tweeting only about coffee and confectionery. When his demonic doppelganger first shoots a beleaguered women in the back of the head, he might as well have eviscerated the skull of the viewer. We're not in Kansas anymore. We're not even in Twin Peaks.

This is something entirely different to what came before - and even that, at its most powerful and beguiling, was impossible to parse.

Bear with me here; the attack on the subconscious was so disorienting that the conscious mind cannot help but struggle to process or articulate it...

The first appearance of the twisted doppelganger of Special Agent Dale Cooper is - initially - problematic.

The portrayal and performance has the sickening air of a mission statement, especially in contrast to the glacial pace and gradual layering of mystery elsewhere. We first encounter him very early. His long hair is the hallmark of BOB; his leather jacket and snakeskin shirt reminiscent of Frank Booth's Blue Velvet heavies.

The immediate presentation of the character is so removed from the double trapped in the Black Lodge that it is almost comically jarring - but initial misgivings of cliche and incongruity soon subside. Like much of the premiere, it is a brutal assault on the subconscious. Our recollections of Cooper, such a mythical character, are obliterated instantly.

DoppelCoop is incredibly difficult to reconcile, and that is likely the point for Lynch, a disturbingly intuitive filmmaker.

He commits brutal murder early and often, onscreen and off. He is the total inverse to the chipper Special Agent who solved the mystery of Laura Palmer's death, seemingly hatching a sequence of terrorist acts across all of North America.

The nadir of season 2 seems to have been retconned entirely, but a faint echo is heard. In that dire stretch, Windom Earle spoke of the ability to reorder the earth to one's liking by harnessing the power of the Black Lodge. This is what DoppelCoop seems to be doing.