When Special Agent Dale Cooper introduced himself to the world nearly 30 years ago, he was an immediately comforting presence. Unflappable in his positivity, the FBI envoy to the eponymous town of Twin Peaks was the perfect entry point to the original show’s Lynchian eccentricities: Cooper, as played by Kyle MacLachlan accepted and even embraced Twin Peaks’ many quirks at face value. Cooper doesn’t show up until 40 minutes into the feature-length pilot, well after we’ve been thoroughly discomfited by the sight of Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic; when he does arrive, narrating everything he sees to an unseen woman named Diane, it’s as a steadying force — the eye in the middle of an interdimensional, backward-talking hurricane. If this platonically square lawman could transition smoothly into a world of demonic possessions and clairvoyant Log Ladies, so could we.

Fourteen episodes into Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Dale Cooper has yet to arrive at all. That absence is key to the disorienting atmosphere of the long-anticipated follow-up. (Lynch directed all 18 parts of The Return and cowrote the script with his creative partner, Mark Frost.) Gone, for the foreseeable future and much to viewers’ consternation, is our dependable lodestar through bizarre behavior and existential evil. In his place are a handful of enthusiastic participants in Twin Peaks’ mournful, terrifying new landscape. All of them are played by MacLachlan, and collectively, they make up the best performance currently on TV.

Notoriously, the first Twin Peaks ended on a brutal cliff-hanger: In an attempt to rescue his girlfriend Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), Cooper plunged into the Black Lodge, the otherworldly locus of evil from which emanated the dark forces plaguing Twin Peaks. He never made it out, and was instead overtaken by a Lodge-minted doppelgänger. In the wrenching final shot of the series, the doppelgänger looks into a shattered mirror and reveals the face of Bob (Frank Silva), the spirit who raped and murdered Laura Palmer while inhabiting the body of her father, Leland (Ray Wise). The plot of Twin Peaks is never easy to convey on paper, but the significance of that reveal was clear enough: Our pure-hearted hero had been overtaken by the very essence of malice and cruelty. And thanks to ABC, which canceled the series just two seasons into its run, he seemed fated to stay that way.

Until now. The Return doesn’t shy away from the implications of that unhappy ending, which imprisons and incapacitates its hero in an unambiguous victory for the forces of darkness. Rather, it’s about those implications, and MacLachlan is essential to communicating the themes of loss, change, and decay, in no small part because he embodies them.

By splitting in two, MacLachlan’s multifaceted performance crystallizes the series’ black-and-white divide between virtue and vice. On one side, MacLachlan plays the doppelgänger, commonly referred to as Evil Cooper. Since we last saw him (in 1991), Evil Coop has grown accustomed to life outside the Lodge. He has recruited henchmen, grown out his hair, and taken to wearing a leather jacket—affectations that would be admittedly silly if MacLachlan didn't play them with such dead-eyed seriousness. With his artificially darkened eyes, robotic voice, and imperturbable menace, Evil Cooper is chilling; it is easy to understand why Diane, revealed in The Return to be a platinum-bobbed Laura Dern, breaks down in sobs after seeing him in prison. In Evil Cooper’s unsettling confidence, MacLachlan gives us the horrible mirror image of regular Cooper’s smooth professionalism.

While the real Cooper is stranded, Evil Cooper has thrived, and worse yet, the world has allowed him to thrive. It’s a sickening state of affairs even before you consider that all the murder and violence is being perpetrated by a man who one who once bonded with Sheriff Harry Truman over their love of donuts and damn fine coffee. For many Twin Peaks cast members, the visual effects of age underscore the melancholy of a place where so much time has passed and yet so little has changed or improved. For the remarkably preserved MacLachlan, however, the reverse is true: His similarity to his younger self only enhances the differences in his characters, who appear almost unnaturally arrested in time rather than swept away by its inexorable flow.

On the other side of The Return’s Manichean split is Dougie Jones, the character who’s directly replaced regular Cooper and therefore absorbed much of the audience frustration at his continued absence. Dougie is even harder to explain than a typical Twin Peaks plot development, but here goes: At some point during his 25 years on earth, Evil Cooper created yet another clone of himself, who went on to become a Las Vegas insurance salesman named Dougie Jones, with a wife, Janey-E (Naomi Watts); and a son, Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon). When the original Cooper is finally released from the Lodge, he's supposed to switch places with Evil Cooper, but ends up swapping with Dougie instead (who gets beamed back to the Lodge through an electrical outlet, because David Lynch). Real Cooper then takes Dougie’s place in Vegas, turning one of The Return’s most significant story lines into a comedy/tragedy about a shell-shocked, brain-damaged lost soul trapped in the exurban, middle-class life of a white-collar professional. It sounds even more convoluted than the first switch-up, and it sort of is — but the genius of Twin Peaks is that it’s all show and no tell, because Lynch’s visual storytelling is so strong it obviates the need for traditional exposition. None of the Dougie-Cooper–Evil Cooper relationship is spelled out for us; we just pick up on Lynch and Frost’s nonverbal cues.

Exactly who Dougie is or how he came to be is thus less important than what he represents, which is what happens to a fundamentally decent person like Dale Cooper when stripped of all but his most essential mental functions and forcibly ejected back into the real world. This setup offers plenty of opportunities for laughs, and MacLachlan has proved himself to be adept at a certain kind of slow-motion slapstick. In one scene, Dougie’s assistant leads him from room to room with the prospect of hot coffee, which he clutches and slurps like a child; in another, Dougie obliviously devours a slice of chocolate cake while Watts aggressively comes onto him. (What follows is an interlude as bonkers as the phrase “David Lynch sex scene” implies.) Even the mere sight of MacLachlan in an oversize green blazer — the original Dougie was on the heavyset side — has a clownlike charm to it.

But Dougie Jones is more than just a vessel for the humor that’s always punctuated Twin Peaks; he’s essentially the purest, most uncut version of the goodness that’s always defined Dale Cooper and that’s managed to survive his time in the Lodge. MacLachlan conveys the pathos of Dougie as well: Dougie is a man who can barely use the bathroom properly and yells at an inappropriate volume, but he’s also a loving father who plays catch with his son and a good Samaritan who uses his winning streak at a casino to help an old woman. It’s sad to witness Cooper in this reduced state, yet moving to see him forge connections with others and make their lives better, almost in spite of himself. The best in him wins out, a hopeful sign in a world where the best largely hasn’t.

Though nothing is guaranteed with a David Lynch production, Dougie appears headed toward a confrontation with Evil Cooper, bringing both halves of MacLachlan’s performance together. Prior to production on The Return, MacLachlan was the only actor who had access to the entire script (others have admitted they had no idea what was going on outside of their own scenes, or even in them), and it’s increasingly clear why. More than any other player, MacLachlan is charged with personifying the project of Twin Peaks: The Return.

With every tic and affectation — every burst of violence from Evil Coop, every slurred pronouncement from Dougie Jones — MacLachlan further delineates the differences between the first Twin Peaks and the follow-up. At first, the tensions in this season simply seemed like a result of Lynch and Frost making the story they wanted to make, regardless of nostalgia. But heading into The Return’s final stretch, frustrated nostalgia almost seems to be the point. It’s even written into the text: The typically catatonic Dougie comes alive whenever he makes contact with iconic motifs from the original show, like coffee or cherry pie. These aren’t meta references for meta’s sake. Instead, they’re part of The Return’s larger meditation on how much or how little people, places, and things can shift over, well, almost 30 years. We see it in the diminished state of Catherine Coulson, who was dying of cancer when she filmed her last scenes as the Log Lady; we see it in Amanda Seyfried’s Becky Burnett (née Briggs) following in her mother Shelly’s footsteps by getting trapped in an abusive relationship. Most of all, though, we see it in everything MacLachlan is doing, and how well he’s doing it.