“I am dead, and yet I live,” Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) intones in her melancholic backward-speak, proving she’s still the soul of her show after all these years. Who could have put it better? Sunday’s return of Twin Peaks was everything fans might have expected: as confounding, horrifying, and furtive as its co-creator David Lynch’s (relatively) recent work, but not entirely lacking in the homespun charm of the original network-TV series. This new Twin Peaks might have a vicious box monster, an eyeless corpse, and a much nastier Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) on board now. But Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost haven’t let go of the show’s sense of humor, its soapy grandiosity, and their strange affection for the tormented souls that make up its ensemble.

When the duo brought the original Twin Peaks to ABC in 1990, they seemed largely uninterested in distinguishing between episodes, unfolding their serialized horror-soap in increasingly inscrutable fashion until the ratings plummeted too low. Though original programming on premium-TV networks barely existed then, it’s now the default home for the kind of weird, auteur-driven television Twin Peaks helped pioneer. And today, Lynch and Frost seem even less concerned about keeping audiences on board with a propulsive or linear narrative.

As such, it’s a challenge to summarize the actual plot of “Parts 1 & 2,” which aired Sunday night, the first two in an 18-hour series. These episodes scattered a lot of fascinating imagery, disconnected story ideas, and inter-dimensional nightmare antics in front of its audience; it’s up to viewers to try and put the pieces together, or (my preferred method) simply soak in every bizarre tableau with glee. It’s been more than 10 years since Lynch has come out with a major work (2006’s Inland Empire), and judging from what has aired so far, Twin Peaks (subtitled The Return) is a worthy new entry in his canon.

To recap: Some 25 years ago (within the timeline of the show), FBI Agent Dale Cooper journeyed to Twin Peaks, Washington, to investigate the murder of local prom queen Laura Palmer. In doing so, he both fell in love with the town and began digging into its nefarious, drug- and sex-fueled underbelly. He also encountered a mystical netherworld, the red-curtained Black Lodge, that lay at the core of Twin Peaks’ pain and suffering. In the series finale, he was trapped there while the demonic spirit “Bob” (Laura’s true murderer) took charge of his body.