Okay, first things first. This may be at #152 on a “Great Movies” list, but it’s not actually a movie. Like, it’s not just that it’s 18 hours, which is way too long for a movie, it’s that it’s structured as a TV show. Every episode has a kind of internal rhythm and ends with a credit sequence (usually musical in nature). If you got rid of all the opening credits and strung the whole thing together, it wouldn’t feel like a super-long movie, it would feel like a paste-up of a TV series.

But given that it’s a TV show, boy, it’s fascinating in a way that TV typically isn’t. Narratively, it plays things just straight enough to make you feel like there actually is a narrative truth in Lynch’s head, whether or not he’s deigned to reveal it on screen (this is in contrast to Mulholland Drive or indeed the original Twin Peaks seasons, where I suspect he never intended for the narrative to mean anything at all). It’s still incomprehensible in bits, there are still major things set up and never resolved, and it ends on what would be a cliffhanger if one imagined for even a moment that Lynch ever intended to resolve it — but there’s a core of a story here that you can tease out and follow, even as it winds amidst an ever-shifting morass of digressive side stories. (And if you’re wondering, yes, you do have to have watched the 1989 original and the Fire Walk With Me movie before watching this; it’s legitimately a direct sequel and depends a lot on you knowing things from those. If you haven’t seen them, it would be completely incomprehensible.)

But also, those digressive side stories are at least as much the point as anything else. Even when they don’t go anywhere, they’re almost always fascinating. Like, this Wally kid appears for one scene, which could be excised without any harm to the larger narrative. But it’s an unforgettably weird scene, and the show is richer for having it.

I think you could make a case that in 1989, Twin Peaks was the first real Prestige TV — serialized television with a central mystery, made by an auteur, and way smarter than the stuff around it. These days, of course, we’re swimming in Prestige TV, but most of it really doesn’t feel all that prestigious or interesting — it’s yet another antihero or yet another squabbling family or yet another bunch of grim elves or sometimes several of the above.

This new season of Twin Peaks feels like Lynch cracking his knuckles, picking up the old tools, and showing everyone how it’s done. It’s got its flaws, sure, but it’s easily one of the best TV seasons of the century. (My temptation is to say very specifically that it’s the second-best, with Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad as the single thing that’s better, but I have the uneasy feeling that I’m forgetting something.)

So yeah, great television. But it’s not a movie. I can’t be too mad that the S&S people made me watch this show, but I’m frowning very sternly at them.