10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 3

The two-hour premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return was genius - a sprawling nightmare at once opaque and linear, supernatural and human, antagonistic and immersive.

Much of it was unrecognisable from the original series, but the duality in both tone and theme - which rewards repeated viewings and interpretive analysis months and years after the mysteries worm their way into your subconscious - remained intact. If the original series was indelible, co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost are seemingly intent on scarring the events of The Return into your psyche.

Several story threads were dangled. In New York City, a young couple were murdered horrifically by a shapeshifting apparition summoned by what appeared to be a man-made portal to the Black Lodge. In South Dakota, a high school principal was arrested on suspicion of another brutal killing, a lurching recollection drowning him in horror and confusion. In Las Vegas, a casino head honcho played by Mulholland Drive's Patrick Fischler echoed both his role and the film itself. He was apprehensive about the presence of an unseen boss in complete control of him, mirroring the mafioso benefactors who oversaw the feature within the feature.

Fischler was a visual reminder that this series reads more as a continuation of the aborted, repurposed Mulholland Drive pilot, with its many disparate plot lines, than it does Twin Peaks - but in Part 3, we slowly enter back into a place both wonderful and strange.

Spoiler Warning: moments in Part 4 are also briefly alluded to here.

Part 3 begins with Dale Cooper crashing through a vortex within the Black Lodge, his hands inflated in a patented comical yet unsettling Lynchian image, before landing in an unseen dimension of it.

That dimension is as lush as it is expansive, a purple-hued netherworld of tower and endless ocean. Cooper then enters the tower to find himself locked in a room with an eyeless Lodge denizen. In an unprecedented use of editing, Lynch adopts a disturbing glitch effect to reflect both Cooper's tentativeness and the Lodge's impossible physics.

The spirit leads Cooper into a cosmic dimension before falling helplessly into the reaches of the cosmos before Cooper enters another room. In it, the actress who played Ronette Pulaski, here credited as 'American Girl', warns Cooper of an unseen 'Mother'. Even more impressive is Lynch's sound design; the pounding, erratic thudding on the door is deeply unsettling. The near total absence of Angelo Badalementi's score has angered many, but the spare use of sound elsewhere makes this sequence resonate to a frightening degree.

The entire sequence is both surreal smorgasbord and numerological puzzle, but analysing Lynch's surrealist oeuvre is self-defeating. Twin Peaks isn't Breaking Bad, a complex flash-forward to decode as the series unfolds. We will not see definitive answers to the impossible questions posed, but this wasn't purely a visual derangement of the senses...