I first watched Twin Peaks in earnest in college. I’d seen some of it when it was on the air, but not enough to become truly preoccupied. No, my obsession was saved for my junior year in college, when I watched the entire original series on DVD over the course of a couple of weeks, ten years after it went off the air. I borrowed books about Twin Peaks from the campus library. I cornered every person I saw and asked them if they’d seen the show, in the hopes that they’d want to talk about it. I needed constant conversation about this brilliant, bizarre thing I was watching, and I was never satisfied.

There’s something to the idea of watercooler television, which Twin Peaks certainly was during its 1990-1991 run. Viewers had to keep up from week to week in order to be a part of the dialogue surrounding them in their office the following morning. And Twin Peaks – a property riper for fan theories and armchair speculation than just about any other show that’s made its way to television – generated a tremendous amount of dialogue. Over the years, through many rewatches of Twin Peaks and as online television criticism and fan forums have grown in popularity and cultural significance, I’ve wondered many times: what would it feel like to watch new episodes of Twin Peaks in the Internet age?

Invariably, my answer was, “Awful.” Like many people, I don’t have a lot of patience for far-reaching fan theories that disregard thematic intent and instead focus on Easter egg minutiae and throwaway lines. I felt certain that David Lynch and Mark Frost’s meandering eye-poem would get lost in a sea of what-ifs and did-you-considers. But five days after the first episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return aired on Showtime, I’m so happy to concede that I was wrong.

Well, not about the crackpot fan theories. There have already been plenty about these first few extraordinary hours of television, but they in no way detract from the product itself. In fact, Twin Peaks is a narrative so blissfully unconcerned with fan response that it may be the first modern show truly impervious to the online conversation it inspires. Lynch and Frost have a plan. They have a dream, one that was suppressed twenty-seven years ago by the constant interference of ABC to the original production of Twin Peaks, but ten minutes into the third episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, it’s clear that Showtime has no intention of suppressing these two creatives any further. And if Lynch and Frost don’t care to hear from Showtime, they sure as hell don’t care to hear from us. We can theorize and criticize all we want, we can death-of-the-author this text to death, but David Lynch and Mark Frost are going to tell this story the way they want to tell this story.

There’s a freedom there – for Lynch and Frost, surely, but also for us. Audiences have been given an unnerving amount of responsibility in recent years. No longer are we complaining in a vacuum. Showrunners, producers and writers are listening, and there have been plenty of instances of those who have true ownership of a show changing its narrative based on the rantings of those who feel like they have ownership. And sometimes, the fans are wrong. Sometimes showrunners should stay the course and leave us to our noisy opinions.

That’s what's so great about the conversation surrounding Twin Peaks: The Return. Noisy opinions and unlikely speculation already abound, but there’s no responsibility here. We can have a thousand theories about the box, Dougie, Jacoby’s shovels and the countless coded messages of the first few episodes, but none of that will touch the show itself. And that leaves us to enjoy it however we want, in the midst of hundreds of thousands of other people who are enjoying it the way they want. We all get to be at this great party together, talking over one of the most original and thematically rich series in television history in the very moment that it’s happening! Isn’t that a marvel?

The idea of the Internet as a vast modern watercooler is certainly not a new one, but Twin Peaks: The Return is a new experiment in that those who once gathered around literal watercoolers to talk about their favorite show can now virtually do so again, three decades later. It’s thrilling and rewarding and fun, and every time I find myself wanting to talk about Twin Peaks – a certain moment, a cameo, a sly reference to an original episode, my ideas about who the hell Albert means when he says “I know where she drinks” – I can do so, right then, with any number of fans who are just as happy to hash out their own ideas with me.

Thinking back to the days of hunting for an old Fangoria magazine just so I could find some new content about the object of my obsession, of randomly trapping strangers at parties to ask if they’d ever seen a show that ended a decade earlier, I can’t help but feel like this ongoing conversation is the most glorious luxury imaginable. I am surrounded by people who love what I love, who want to talk about what I want to talk about, this strange, dense, beautiful mystery that feels too weird for the wider public and yet somehow... isn't. That's something to cherish, to celebrate, a present we can give ourselves every single day.