Twin Peaks returns after 26 years - and it's still 'inscrutable'

Lynch directed all 18 episodes of the new series, in which Kyle MacLachlan appears

Pour the coffee and bake a cherry pie - David Lynch's cult TV series Twin Peaks is back after a 26-year hiatus.

Its return was greeted with both praise and bafflement by critics, one of whom called it "familiarly inscrutable".

"After nearly three decades, Mr Lynch's visual imagination remains inimitable," continued the New York Times' reviewer.

Kyle MacLachlan reprises his role as FBI agent Dale Cooper in the 18-episode series, which began its run on Sunday on US network Showtime.

The first two episodes were screened on Sky Atlantic in the UK in the early hours of Monday morning and will be shown again on Tuesday at 21:00 BST.

Actress Laura Dern will also be seen in the 'limited event series'

The episodes saw MacLachlan's character still trapped in the mysterious "black lodge" where the original series left him in 1991.

Other characters to return included Laura Palmer, whose murder was the basis of the original show, and 'The Log Lady', played by the late Catherine Coulson.

Future episodes, all directed by Lynch himself, will see Michael Cera, Laura Dern and Naomi Watts join the cast.

According to Metro's James Baldock, the new series is "quietly brilliant... thoughtful and understated".

Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, he went on, "have taken the format and updated it, without losing the essence of what they originally created."

Variety's Sonia Saraiya called Twin Peaks: The Return "weird and creepy and slow" but conceded it was "interesting".

"It's not especially fun to watch and it can be quite disturbing," she went on. "But there is never a sense that you are watching something devoid of vision or intention."

MacLachlan was first seen as FBI agent Dale Cooper in 1990

"Through its first two hours, David Lynch's new Twin Peaks is unsettling, weird, funny and basically impossible to review," wrote The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg.

Yet he went on to call the first two episodes "accessibly scary, disturbing and audaciously funny as many of the best parts of the original Twin Peaks".

Writing in The Guardian, Mark Lawson said the cult show's latest iteration was more "what-is-it?" than whodunnit.

"Filled with giants, dwarves, monsters and ghosts, Twin Peaks most resembles a modern fairytale written on LSD then heavily redacted by the CIA," he wrote.

Walking Dead actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan was among those to welcome Twin Peaks' return on Twitter, praising Lynch for "outLynching the bejesus" out of his celebrated creation.