He’s back. The David Lynch who invented a cinematic tone that’s instantly recognizable as a personal signature and a vision of the world—as opposed to the David Lynch who let the power of his imagination become a style and a signature that took the place of a world view—has made his return in the third and fourth parts of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” and the result is mind-expanding, haunting, and deeply moving. When I got to the end of the second episode, disappointed, I nonetheless knew I’d keep watching because flickers of inspiration suggested that Lynch, the great Lynch, could make his own return. And now he has. It’s not an unequivocal return; the plot sprawl of the series, as well as the sheer cussedness of Lynch’s hermetic fantasies, still clots plenty of screen time, and the return of Lynch at his best is only intermittent—but it’s ample and grand.

The best part of these episodes is no mere flash or aside but a pair of simple yet mighty inspirations who enter the scene: a version of Agent Cooper, and a version of David Lynch. These twin poles anchor the series in the two crucial elements of the modern cinema—the director’s onscreen counterpart, and the director him- or herself—provoking a tension that seems to crackle with explosive potential. (It also, incidentally, features a literal explosion that’s waiting to happen, the classic first-act gun that will have to go off in the third.)

The first breakthrough idea depends on a pair of setups. The first is a woefully distended scene of hermetic fantasy that matters only for its payoff: a steampunk wall panel does weird things to Agent Cooper (and, in the conceit’s one droll touch, leaves him, or a version of him, shoeless). The second is a scene in which one Dougie Jones, a jowly look-alike for Agent Dale Cooper, is finishing an encounter in a nearly empty house with a prostitute named Jade (Nafessa Williams). It’s a scene that involves an unfortunately gratuitous bit of nudity from a stereotypically model-esque female (who’s also the season’s most prominent black character so far), but it also includes a bit of visual wit that, despite its shoulder-shrugging self-congratulation, introduces Agent Cooper’s alter ego: a blanked-out, robotic version of himself. The Cooper-oid’s mimetic efforts to fit in—along with a very specific and lucrative clairvoyant power that comes with it, in a casino—make for a calmly funny and deeply moving vision of the American nowhere man, a metaphysically improved version of Peter Sellers’s Chance the gardener from “Being There.” (It’s also the one place in the series where the use of the Red Room, one of “Twin Peaks” ’s most overused and long-exhausted tropes, is truly wondrous.)

But this Cooper-prime character, with his blankness and his imitative bellow (“Hellooo-ooo-ooo,” three syllables, already a meme), is also a figure of pathos and a mirror of indifference: he keeps repeating the one phrase that Jade left him with—“Call for help”—and not one of the many people he encounters in the casino, to whom he utters that seemingly unambiguous phrase, calls for help. He repeatedly drops another word—“home”—and a happenstance encounter fills in the picture of that word’s blank outlines. This Cooper simulacrum ultimately helps himself, however, and gets home (at least, to someone’s home), where a brief, wordless glance with his ostensible son, Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon), captures a moment of gendered energy that both beams with family life at its best and hints at poisonous exclusions and resentments to come.

But there’s a third Cooper-ish person out there, whose destiny seems programmed merely to set up the plot point of his arrest. When he gets arrested—seemingly in possession of one controlled substance and another, so to speak, uncontrolled one—the F.B.I. is called in, in the person of the regional bureau chief Gordon Cole, played once again by Lynch himself. Cole’s office has a picture of a nuclear blast on the wall behind him, a portrait of Kafka on a wall in front of him. Cole is again hard of hearing and again wears an old-fashioned hearing aid, an earpiece connected to an outboard microphone and amplifier that he wears strapped to the lapel of his dark suit jacket. In the second season, he’s an object of self-comedy, a squawky glad-handing presence whose hearing loss is played for a laugh along with his chatty persona. Now he’s spare, pared-down, and precise. He speaks in a crackly, papery voice that’s terse with authority, keeping his phlegmatic gaze fixed to gather knowledge and ripen insight in the inner silence of his own counsel. It’s a lovely, deep performance, rendered all the more resonant by the air of nostalgic distance that Lynch builds into it.

Cole is summoned to a meeting with his own chief, Denise Bryson, who’s back from the original series. Their reunion is suffused with great warmth; Cole and Denise, who is transgender (and played, as in the original series, by David Duchovny), reminisce frankly of their earlier days together and the time when she was transitioning. Here, Lynch gives himself the best line in the whole series so far, regarding transphobic agents: “When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

But, above all, Cole, who is both profound and abstracted, fiercely in the moment but a little out of date, rushing against time with a very deliberate and pensive pace, embodies Lynch’s own primal cinematic pleasure in watching himself think. In a series that is built on doubles, on multiple selves, on simulacra that take over, Lynch is also self-multiplying, splitting off the analyst from the fantasist, the thinker from the creator. The capper is a droll moment in which he admits to his right-hand man, Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), that he himself doesn’t understand the events that are transpiring around him. It’s a good joke, of course, but one that masks big matters.

Pondering evil in the universe, in its immediate, local, and intimate manifestations, Lynch launches metaphysical speculations in which hair-trigger shifts launch major actions on the other side of the continent. Absurdity coexists with logic, appalled or astonished bafflement blend with efforts at analytical comprehension of practicalities and motives. Lynch’s genius, his insights, and his emotional vitality emerge most forcefully when he cuts close to the bone of familiar, even clichéd, situations and settings, when he endows them with one twist of mad wonder. With his Cooper-ite and himself onscreen, he gets as close to the core of observation and of personal engagement as he has ever been.