Wake up. Don’t die.

(The following contains spoilers for the new season of Twin Peaks).

I probably won’t have much to say about the new season of Twin Peaks — a new series, really — until David Lynch’s “18-hour movie” has wrapped up this fall. Mostly, I feel awe and gratitude that Twin Peaks exists in 2017 and that, if the first six episodes are any indication, it‘s likely to be the best show or movie I see this year. There’s not much point in speculating about how the various story threads we’ve encountered in fragments as the show jumps from Twin Peaks to Nevada, New York, Buenos Aires and elsewhere might coalesce; Lynch has insisted that each episode be referred to as a “part,” and he and co-creator/writer Mark Frost are clearly content to let each chapter unfold at its own pace. To try to advance any overarching theories about this season would be like reviewing a book after reading only a third of the chapters, but that hasn’t stopped TV recappers from trying (it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it).

With a few exceptions (pieces by Matt Zoller Seitz and Vikram Murthi come to mind), it’s been painful to witness TV writers try treat Twin Peaks like Lost or view it through the shallow lens of zeitgeist-y socially conscious criticism. And while Lynch hardly needs me to stand up for him — I suspect he doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks — it’s worth considering why Twin Peaks seems to be playing better for those who were anticipating a new 18-hour David Lynch movie than those who were specifically excited for a Twin Peaks reboot. Of course, doing so has its own potential pitfalls. While I roll my eyes at Lynch skeptics who proclaim “He’s just making weird shit up and pretending it means something, and you all pretend to like it because you want to look smart!”, I also have no time for anyone who’s like, “Clearly, you don’t get Lynch like I, who understands surrealism and subtext!” like some kind of imperious French ponce.

Look, I don’t know where Lynch and Frost are going with this either. However, Lynch is one of the two or three most important filmmakers to me. I’ve loved (or at least very much liked) all of his features, and there are only a few directors I can say that about. The first I saw was Dune, after reading the book when I was nine or ten, and while I was perplexed by it as an adaptation, I was fascinated by the movie’s unwieldy, industrial aesthetic (at that age, I would have defined this as “weird” and “cool”). This led me to check out The Elephant Man, which is one of the most moving and compassionate films I’ve ever seen; when I revisited it in my early twenties, it inspired me to pursue a career in human services. From there, I discovered Twin Peaks, although this was when it was in syndication on Bravo, and catching individual episodes out of sequence was interesting but confounding (a rewatch of the series in college coincided with my first experiences with pot, which worked out quite nicely).

It was renting Blue Velvet when I was thirteen and getting lost in that film’s haunting, beautiful, perverse world that blew my brain open in a way that few films have before or since and made me a lifelong Lynch devotee. It was a short step from there to Lost Highway and Wild at Heart, then Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead (which I first watched on a tenth-generation bootleg Japanese VHS, which only added to the experience), The Straight Story, Inland Empire and ten years of wondering what might come next. David Lynch is my Marvel or Star Wars, if you will; his movies consistently tickle my synapses and help me make sense of how I perceive the world around me.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I can’t help noticing the many ways that Twin Peaks is connected to not only the original series but Lynch’s entire filmography. There were rumblings before the show premiered that it would encompass Lynch’s body of work; indeed, the very first scene is unmistakably reminiscent of Eraserhead, and the first six episodes have unmistakable echoes of Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Inland Empire and probably others I haven’t picked up on. There’s even — and I might be totally wrong about this — a possible nod to Dune in the first part’s “glass box,” which is framed like the machine that transports Spacing Guild navigators, much as the glass box serves as a door between worlds.

If these were just references for their own sake, than this would be the worst kind of TV reboot and the one that many fans apparently wanted. It seems like some people would’ve been much happier if Cooper emerged from his 25-year stay in the Black Lodge, brushed himself off and exclaimed, “Phew, I’m glad that’s over with! Now where’s that damn cherry pie?” and the rest had been an encased-in-amber recreation of the original show in the vein of other reboots like The X-Files and Fuller House (“MY NAME IS GIBBLER. THE GOOD DANNY TANNER IS STILL IN THE FULL HOUSE. WRITE IT IN YOUR DIARY.”). Instead, it seems like Lynch has taken the opportunity (and sizable budget) that a Twin Peaks reboot affords to create a sprawling story that reflects both on his own life and work and the ways that Twin Peaks and the world around it has changed in the past 25 years.

With that in mind, it’s worth considering some of the complaints people have had about the new show in the context of Lynch’s work. Simply put, if you’re hung up on what Twin Peaks was and what you thought it was going to be, you’re depriving yourself the joy of what it is. This is most evident in reactions to Cooper’s having been brought back to earth in the form of Dougie Jones, who was possibly created as a doppelgänger by Cooper’s other doppelgänger, Mr. C (and oh, how I shrieked the first time he appeared onscreen) so that he could avoid being taken back to the Black Lodge (the details are unclear, but it involves electric outlets and vomit). Lynch and Frost have created delightful tension over when or if Cooper and Dougie will come to; as we aren’t privy to the mechanics of the Black Lodge it’s equally plausible that he’ll snap out of it at any moment or that he’ll stay this way until the last five minutes. The Dougie scenes are hilarious — Lynch doing Tati- and they’re only made more so by how furious they make some people. Which is a shame for them, because it seems so clear that Lynch and Frost are reflecting on the passage of time and their own advancing years, and with that in mind, one realizes that Dougie is a reflection of Lynch’s own feelings about aging and the possibility of his own eventual mental deterioration. With that in mind, Dougie’s bumbling adventures and the ways that people around him overlook or shrug off his strange behavior and cries for help feel less surreal than true to life, and Cooper/Dougie’s story (and MacLachlan’s incredible performance) is actually quite sad. But hey, where’s that damn pie.

Cooper’s absence is deeply felt, and for a reason; it’s hard not to come away from these first six episodes with the impression that Lynch finds the world to be a much darker and scarier place than it was 25 years ago. Or maybe it’s simply that the bugs that lurked beneath the placid surfaces of Blue Velvet simply have no reason to hide anymore. The original Twin Peaks was at once an earnest appreciation of the simple joys of small town life and a deep dive into the horrors lurking just out of view. But the most surprising thing about the new Twin Peaks isn’t that it’s as strange or deliberately paced as everything else Lynch has made in the past 25 years. It’s the way that it speaks directly to the world we’re living in. The original Twin Peaks existed out of time in a perpetual mashup of the then-present and an idyllic vision of ’50s Americana, but this Twin Peaks, with its references to the Iraq War, the 99 percent and the drug crisis, unmistakably takes place in present day America. Though this sometimes manifests in amusing ways, as with Jerry Horne’s successful legal weed business or Dr. Jacoby as an Alex Jones-esque huckster, the unmissable implication is that the world has gotten weird and scary enough that Lynch doesn’t feel the need to abstract it much in order to mesh with his vision, and it’s a deeply unsettling one.

In some ways, though, Lynch will always be old school, as his character, Gordon Cole, says about himself at one point. This is most evident in how his vision stubbornly refuses to mesh with our contemporary expectations for onscreen representation. To be clear, I’m not about to rail against social justice warriors; I read a comment the other day by a guy who was ranting about how anyone for whom Lynch isn’t diverse enough should “Shut up and go back to Shondaland” — buddy, please don’t help. Violence against women has long been an element of Lynch’s work; Ebert wrote about it in his one-star pan of Blue Velvet 31 years ago, a review that any Lynch fan should wrestle with and consider. What I will say in Lynch’s defense is that violence against women is the deepest manifestation of evil in his work — the original sin, in the case of Twin Peaks — and that he has consistently portrayed truly evil characters as crude, pathetic and thoroughly unattractive. As for the question of the whiplash tonal shifts from brutal violence to melodrama to goofball comedy (Wally Brando!), I can only say that it’s not for everyone but, because I find life is similarly jarring in the ways that tragedy, farce, ecstasy and horror coexist and often collide and intertwine, and I’ve never struggled with it myself. Lynch’s heart is in the right place, and while, for instance, I realize that having a cis actor play a trans woman is a sticking point for many in 2017, I can’t deny that the scene where Cole reminds his boss, Denise (David Duchovny) that “when you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die” brought a tear to my eye (this piece, by Samantha Allen, is worth a read for more on Denise and her complicated legacy).

Though the return of Twin Peaks had the potential to be my own personal The Phantom Menace, it wasn’t because I was concerned that David Lynch would deliver a David Lynch movie. What would have truly been heartbreaking is if it were content to rely on our affecting for the original show and veer into self-parody the way he did in the worst moments of Wild at Heart (I still like that one, but there are scenes in it, like the one where Nicolas Cage graphically beats a black hitman to death before lighting a cigarette in an unmistakable comic beat, that haven’t aged well at all). It’s a weird in its own distinct way, and I’m so glad that it is; at the same time, Lynch and Frost’s script is unexpectedly tightly plotted in a way that the original show never was. While others are put off by its idiosyncrasies, I’m amazed at how, for Lynch, it’s downright easy to follow. I’d love to eventually learn more about Lynch and Frost’s writing process; for all the show’s detours, it has a stronger sense of internal logic of anything of Lynch’s since Blue Velvet. If you find it hard to follow, I’d recommend checking out any five minutes of Inland Empire. It makes Twin Peaks look like Law & Order by comparison.

If I were to go on, this would eventually devolve into a checklist of things I love about the new series — the musical outros that accompany most episodes; the quiet, funereal soundtrack to the Red Room scenes; the hilariously dated hip hop loop that accompanies Ike “The Spike”’s bluntly graphic (even for Lynch) murders; Balthazar Getty’s drug dealer character, who likes The King and I; Mädchen Amick’s delivery of the line “James has always been cool”; the majestically weird sequence that opens part three; Matthew Lillard as a Kafka protagonist; Diane!!!; the way Dougie gingerly places a potato chip on Sonny Jim’s blanket…you get the point. One of my favorite college professors — a somewhat eccentric woman who tested the patience of many of my peers for the same reasons I adored her — had a video essay she’d edited together about Mulholland Drive. It began by pointing out visual motifs in the film, parallels, contrasts between Betty’s dream world and the “real” one and so forth. About thirty minutes in, the video consisted of slowed-down close-ups of Dan Hedaya’s eyes, the meaning of which was evident only to her. I think that professor might be my future, and I’m basically okay with it, but I’ll spare you all for now.

One more thing I’ve been thinking about, though, after a couple of scenes in the last episode that seem connected to me. I was moved at the beginning by the security guard played by Juan Carlos Cantu who is the first character (besides Jade, briefly) to recognize there’s something wrong with Dougie and help him; naturally, Dougie’s wife, Janey-E, played hilariously by Naomi Watts, shrugs this off immediately. I thought of this later, after the scene where a young boy is run over in graphic detail by Richard Horne (the most loathsome of the show’s new characters) and trailer park owner Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton, God bless him), after seemingly witnessing the boy’s soul ascend, steps forward to comfort his agonized mother as the other onlookers can only stare dumbly. And I’m reminded of Mr. Rogers, of all things, and his famous advice to “look to the helpers” in times of trouble, and it occurs to me that David Lynch is not as far removed, spiritually speaking, from Mr. Rogers as one might think. There have always been helpers and figures of compassion and empathy in Lynch’s work who cut through the darkness; right now, his most famous hero is struggling to wake up. In the meantime, though, there are other helpers out there, if one looks hard enough. Whether they’ll be able to beat back the darkness when Twin Peaks arrives at the confrontation between the ancient forces of good and evil it seems headed for remains to be seen. Or maybe it won’t play out that way at all; right now, everything is equally possible on Twin Peaks, and I love that about it.