It all comes down to Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer, although this version of her, in this reality, doesn’t go by that name. They’ve come to a place Cooper knows, in search of a woman he knows. But when he finally does return to Twin Peaks, in the very last scene of a series literally titled Twin Peaks: The Return, Dale Cooper doesn’t find what he’s looking for. He doesn’t find anything familiar at all.

I’m not going to pretend to understand much of what happened in the final two parts of The Return—certainly nothing that happens after Cooper ventures, alone, through the door of Room 315 at the Great Northern Hotel and into a succession of increasingly strange flashbacks and alternate dimensions. I do, however, find enormous resonance in how the final scene of The Return—an ending director David Lynch and cowriter Mark Frost actually planned, as opposed to the original series’ abrupt conclusion on ABC all those years ago—so closely mirrors the experience of watching the show. After 18 mind-bending hours, it’s apparent that nostalgia and a conscious effort to counteract it are essential to Twin Peaks: The Return and the powerful emotion it provokes in an audience hungry to be simultaneously serviced and surprised.

Something always rang a little false about the idea of Twin Peaks getting a revival in the vein of Peak TV rescue operations like Arrested Development, Roseanne, and Will & Grace. In 40 years of feature filmmaking, Lynch has earned his reputation as the ultimate auteur, a man so dedicated to his vision he took half a decade to will the hermetic dystopia of Eraserhead into being. The idea of a sequel felt distinctly un-Lynchian—let alone a sequel to the TV series he had a famously ambivalent relationship with, after network executives forced him and Frost to answer the question of who killed Laura Palmer earlier than they planned. (Which was never.) Was David Lynch really about to become just another player in the IP sweepstakes, giving the people what they want instead of striving to give us what we didn’t know we need?

In retrospect, it’s a silly question. It was immediately obvious upon The Return’s premiere in late May that this was not going to be the Twin Peaks of the ’90s, with its soap opera shape, good-natured quirk, and Angelo Badalamenti’s steadying compositions. What was not obvious, however, was just how aware Lynch and Frost were of our yearning for the original Twin Peaks, or how they would capitalize upon it to maximize the uncanny horror and visceral sadness of The Return.

There was the absence of Special Agent Dale Cooper, replaced by a pair of sublime performances from star Kyle MacLachlan as Cooper’s evil doppelgänger and a brain-damaged Las Vegas insurance salesman named Dougie Jones. Cooper was finally resurrected in last week’s “Part 16,” and in a quarter century of watching television, I’ve never felt a payoff register that deeply as a physical sensation of joy and relief. But those feelings didn’t erase the 15 hours of unease that preceded them. Cooper wasn’t simply gone for all those episodes: he was being strategically withheld until we simply couldn’t bear a world without him, or the violent, cruel place it had become.

At other times, Lynch and Frost seemed to confront the audience far more directly with the implications of uncomplicated nostalgia—of wanting to see Twin Peaks served back, untouched or reduced to the handful of touchstones that have come to symbolize it in popular culture. There was the way Dougie would come alive at any mention of Twin Peaks’ celebrated iconography: coffee, cherry pie, or, while watching Sunset Boulevard, the name “Gordon Cole.” There was Audrey Horne, now a nervous wreck, styled identically to the clothes and makeup as a teenage girl, in a way seemingly custom-designed to emphasize her age. There was the almost weaponized use of Badalamenti’s music, replaced largely by silence and ambient noise only to come crashing through when Bobby Briggs caught sight of Laura Palmer’s portrait in Episode 4.

These choices had the effect of highlighting audience expectations, often by following them to their logical conclusion. If you wanted the small Washington town preserved in amber, there it was. Shelly was still working as a waitress at the Double R; Ed and Nadine were still stuck in a marriage they both knew was a sham. But instead of being comforting, an unchanged Twin Peaks turned out to be deeply sad. Such is the natural result of our culture’s current mania for what used to be; Lynch and Frost simply had the guts to point it out.

The Return takes place in a world where the forces of evil, in the first series’ finale, have triumphed over good and run rampant for the past quarter century; the series portrays the resultant devastation by expanding outward from its namesake location to New York, New Mexico, Las Vegas, and South Dakota. The Return drives home its dire status quo on a much smaller scale, too, by showing us the effects of time and decay on people we love. Several of The Return’s cast members passed away during, or even before, production, and the series dealt with these absences in different ways: Catherine Coulson’s Log Lady was given a fittingly haunting goodbye; David Bowie was recast as a sort of animatronic teapot; Frank Silva and Don S. Davis’s masklike faces were used. Even the living, however, became examples of what the intervening decades had wrought, and not always by simply demonstrating the effects of age and inertia. The vitality of Richard Horne, for example, is precisely what makes him so terrifying: what would once seem like an unalloyed good in the classic TV happy ending sense—Audrey Horne and Dale Cooper have a baby—has been curdled into something awful, because Richard’s father is Cooper’s evil doppelgänger.

Sure enough, anti-nostalgia manifests itself throughout the two-part finale. Evil Cooper reaches Twin Peaks before the real Cooper, and the dead giveaway that something’s not right is his refusal of an offer of hot coffee. Several of the scenes that follow Cooper’s passage into the hotel room literally rewrite Twin Peaks’ history, including the very first scene of the pilot. And the very last line of dialogue in the entirety of Twin Peaks is Cooper, shaken and confused, asking plaintively: “What year is it?” He’s as taken aback as the rest of us.

Going into The Return, it was easy to be torn between a desire to revisit a beloved classic and a curiosity about what a creative force like Lynch would do after an 11-year hiatus from long-form visual storytelling. (His last feature, Inland Empire, was released in 2006.) Part of The Return’s genius is how it folds the former into the latter: piggybacking off our preconceived notions of Twin Peaks to push it to scarier, stranger, more powerful places. The Return killed our darlings for us, one episode at a time.