Scott Meslow, GQ.com culture critic: Well… what did we expect from a Twin Peaks finale? This show ended its original run with one of the strangest and most mesmerizing hours of network television in history. Twin Peaks returned on premium cable, and Lynch used every bit of creative freedom at his disposal, delivering a brand-new Twin Peaks finale that’s at least as mesmerizing, and inarguably even stranger.

So let’s try to unpack it. Josh, before we get into what happened, and do our best to make sense of it: How did the new Twin Peaks finale make you feel?

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Joshua Rivera, GQ.com contributor: I felt like something was… very wrong. In a weird, creeping way, you know? It's as if all the strange horror of the original run's finale was distilled to a single moment. I don't know what I feel right now but I will be feeling this way for a very long time.

Scott: It’s only been about a half hour since it ended, but I’ll give you my snap reaction: I loved it. I can’t explain most of what happened logically—though I suspect some of it will make a little more sense after I rewatch and ruminate on it—but it felt right on some subliminal level. Even as it left me with an awful knot in my stomach.

So let’s talk about what happened. The finale starts normally enough, for Twin Peaks. It’s basically a race to the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, as the doppelgänger arrives and successfully passes himself off as the real Cooper. As soon as he set foot in the building, I was wracked with anxiety, watching all of Cooper’s former allies warmly welcome this dead-eyed pretender.

Joshua: And it's all remarkably straightforward! Especially for the climactic confrontation with a cosmic evil that's taken the form of the beloved Agent Cooper! Essentially, everyone who was brought to the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department—from the employees to the detainees down in the holding cell—are there for a reason, and all of them contribute to defeating both the doppelgänger and what I can only describe as The Essence of BOB in relatively quick fashion, leading to an all-too-brief reunion between the true Cooper and many of his former friends. Then, the mysterious eyeless woman known as Naido was revealed to be the real Diane, and she embarked with Cooper on a journey that I only kind of understand.

Scott: Well, let’s start with the part I definitely understand: The return to the night of Laura Palmer’s murder, which is kicked off by a superimposed image of Cooper saying, “We live inside a dream” (a phrase previously muttered by Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). Cooper is transported back to 1989, as Laura Palmer and James Hurley ride to the stoplight at Sparkwood and 21, in footage repurposed from Fire Walk With Me. Cooper emerges from the future and watches from the bushes. Lynch even retcons an apparent non-sequitur from the original movie, when Laura looks over James’ shoulder and suddenly, inexplicably screams. That moment previously played as the culmination of the stress and drugs compounding in Laura’s brain; now, we know she saw the shadowy figure of Dale Cooper in the woods.

Laura goes into the woods, where she previously met Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault—but this time, Cooper intervenes and guides her away from the site where she’ll be abducted by BOB. And we see how life in Twin Peaks might have continued if Laura had never been murdered, as Pete Martell heads out for a quiet day of fishing on a totally corpse-less beach. It was obvious that this total rewrite of the inciting incident in Twin Peaks couldn’t last (for one thing, there was still an hour left in the finale)—but I still found it tremendously moving to see a happier alternate reality for these characters, several of whom never even appeared in Twin Peaks: The Return.