10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 16

"Finally."

Dale Cooper, belatedly jolted into consciousness by the shock of electricity, is back. He removed the breathing tube, arranged to create a tulpa with Phillip Gerard, and answered the question we have all posed since Part 3. He is awake - "one hundred percent."

Lynch and Frost revelled in the pat nature of the resolution. Cooper occupied his old self with a rousing immediacy. He gently and justifiably contradicted medical advice. He assumed the conscious memories of his time spent adrift; much like the clues to the Laura Palmer murder, he gained knowledge in a dreamlike state. As Sonny Jim rushed to his bedside, Cooper, with a heartfelt grin, patted the space next to him. It's no exaggeration to suggest that the viewer experienced a similar urge to sit beside him, revelling in his borderline magical guardianship. Every other character did, too. Dale Cooper is a paragon of good in a f*cked world. The timing of The Return isn't just perfect within its own, baked-in narrative; in a televisual age in which the antihero is a cliche, and a real age in which toxicity spills over the expanse of the entire world, we need Cooper to escape (and as escapism) more than ever.

Scratching deeper, it wasn't pat. It never once felt as if his time spent operating at the subconscious level was another Black Lodge-enforced sentence, nor that his electrical awakening was the end of his journey, in and of itself; Cooper's time with the Joneses restored his heart and inspired everybody around him to find theirs in a doppelgänger arc of the original Twin Peaks.

Dale Cooper is back.