Twin Peaks season 3 premiere review: The inscrutable, unmatchable David Lynch returns

The cult TV show has been revived for a new generation, seeing the timeline move down 25 years - much has changed, and much hasn't

*WARNING: CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS FOR TWIN PEAKS SEASON 3 EPISODE 1 AND 2*

The woods are fogged now, the roads dark. Where evil once lurked only in the shadows of pristine Americana, now it consumes everything. Even the show’s opening credits, once eerie in their stillness, now give way to a thundering waterfall, the rippling curtains of the Black Lodge, its floor. The breach has been broken, evil reigns free. Twin Peaks is even darker than you remember.

“See you in 25 years,” Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) told Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks’ original series. That time has passed now, for both its characters and its creator, David Lynch, and the mood on both sides has grown murkier, darker, and more nightmarish.

Dale has spent those years trapped within the confine of the Black Lodge, while we now witness the doppelganger he confronted within that realm walk free in our plane of existence.

The “bad Dale” is the longhaired, snake-patterned shirt psychopath familiar from Lynch’s work, explosive in his violence, from Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) to Wild at Heart’s Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe).

In fact, what’s fascinating about season 3 is how it traces the entire length of Lynch’s stylistic development, from the original Peaks to the harsher, more experimental work of Inland Empire.

Season 3 isn’t, necessarily, more frightening that its predecessors, certainly not in comparison to its prequel film Fire Walk With Me, but there is a mood more immediately disturbing here. Lynch plays these episodes like straight horror, soundtracked with an ever-constant hum that puts every scene on edge.

One sequence even recreates one of the most disturbing moments from Mulholland Drive, in which a camera slowly weaves around the corners of an apartment as it heads towards the bedroom, where it’s known a body lies waiting.

In a way, we’ve moved on from the earlier focus on fractured suburbia, evident in Blue Velvet’s white picket fences or the quaint rural charm of Twin Peaks; his later work has grown increasingly focused on darker, more claustrophobic, urban environments, so it’s almost no surprise to see a portion of season 3 take place in New York City.

Those scenes track a young man (Benjamin Rosenfield) tasked with keep watching over a glass box, with a porthole overlooking the skyline. It’s ominous and detached, a perfect metaphor.

However, as much as season 3 shows the advancement of Lynch’s style, it still remains true to its traditions. The phonetic reversal (actors speaking backwards with the audio then reversed) remains integral, as the inhabitants of the Black Lodge continue to communicate with Dale in indecipherable clues. “Remember 430,” The Giant says. “Two birds with one stone.”

Lynch even recreates one of the key moments of the original Red Room scenes; it’s an effective piece of demonstration that, though 25 years have clearly passed (you see it in the actors’ faces), nothing has also changed. Dale remains trapped in endless circularity, and MacLachlan’s still clueless, wide-eyed expression now takes on a deeply tragic quality.

Narratively, those cohesive, repetitive elements also make the whole thing surprisingly cohesive for fans (and a manageably surreal thrill for those new); there is a basic grasp to this storytelling that holds up in the face of even its more excessive moments, such as the decision to transform the famous dwarf character The Man From Another Place into a talking tree with a mouthed goo-ball for a head. It doesn’t make sense, but there’s something manageable about its irrationality.

For all the worries fans and non-fans alike may have had about season 3, Lynch has pulled off a surprisingly nimble work; creatively progressive enough to keep up with his current artistic obsessions, yet fixated enough in the world of Twin Peaks not to feel divergent.

Ambitiously surreal enough to feel like a true Lynch original, yet narratively accessible enough in the way that helped gain the original series its legion of cult fans. Truly, it’s the impressive start everyone was hoping for.

Twin Peaks airs 2am on Mondays on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV with the Entertainment Pass, in a simulcast with the USTwin Peaks airs 2am on Mondays on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV with the Entertainment Pass, in a simulcast with the US airing on Showtime. The episode will then be shown again at 9pm on the following day. You can catch up now on season one and two via Sky Box Sets and NOW TV.