Twin Peaks is back. And it's great.

Twin Peaks aficionados can take heart: It is happening again.

Good Cooper, trapped.
(Image credit: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME)

Toward the tail end of Twin Peaks' two-part revival season premiere, the one-armed spirit, Mike, sits across from Special Agent Dale Cooper in the Red Room; it is nearly 25 years to the day that our intrepid G-man was lured into this neon hellscape, and his cackling doppelganger walked out. Every second of those 25 years is etched on Agent Cooper's face; he holds himself with an immaculate stillness that has, most likely, been honed through the years of steeling himself against yet another fresh terror. "Is it future?" Mike asks. "Or is it past?" Those of us who have loved Twin Peaks have held this question uppermost in our minds as we've prepared for the revival season — would it be a half-warmed slice of the same cherry pie (only gone stale in a bid to capitalize on '90s nostalgia, like The X-Files reboot) or a wholly new, fully Lynchian beast (and if so, would the lack of the soap opera trope and narrative framework, which anchored the original, strip out some of the humor and pathos from the original?).

The answer, at least based on this premiere, is that it is future and it is past — the wild inventiveness and unabashed weirdness that drew us to the original series (particularly the first season) is evident in ways that can still shock and titillate — even in age where weekday prime-time fare like American Horror Story can deliver sequences where a worm-faced demon can rape a man to death before the first commercial break. Lynch, in his own wry, sick way, acknowledges how far Peak TV has come, since his own foray into the genre; one of the core subplots includes two dismembered corpses — a woman's comely face and a broader, stouter body — pieced together under a blue bedsheet. The female victim is a local librarian, a beloved member of her small South Dakota town (sound familiar?)

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Laura Bogart

Laura Bogart is a featured writer for Salon and a regular contributor to DAME magazine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, CityLab, The Guardian, SPIN, Complex, IndieWire, GOOD, and Refinery29, among other publications. Her first novel, Don't You Know That I Love You?, is forthcoming from Dzanc.