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Then Harry drives up to where Leland is to deliver the news about his daughter. A pity for Sarah, really, who infers the worst by Harry’s presence next to Leland and a dropped phone from her husband’s hand.

And that, more or less, is Twin Peaks’ first beat, a briskly paced sequence that functions as a working backbone for what’s to come in terms of characters and scope in the extended episode’s 90 minutes. And there’s much to discuss before this debut review runs up, so let’s hop to it, shall we?

The most mysterious thing about those first 10 or so minutes is an Asian woman who we later find out is Josie Packard, the wife of a man six years dead who, Harry says, “built the town.” But we don’t learn her name, her standing, even that she owns the town’s sawmill until well into the episode.

Josie, actually, is the character we first see after the end of the opening credits. She, as Lynch and Frost intended, is the first person we meet. And she simply sits by a mirror, dressing her face with makeup.

I’ll admit when I first saw Josie I found her appearance to be rather ambiguous. As we see more of her - standing idly as Harry turned Laura’s body over, certainly at the sawmill making announcements - the idea of me mistaking her as possibly male seemed rather silly. But what, if anything, could that mean? And why, over any other character, does Twin Peaks begin with her applying makeup alone? Throughout “Pilot,” I got a sense that she’d be pivotal as the series moved along.

Soon enough, a guy from the FBI, Agent Cooper, enters the fray. He and his department are called in to investigate the death of Laura Palmer after another young girl, Ronnette Pulaski, who went missing around the same time as Laura Palmer, treks over state lines. She’s ushered into the hospital, and, as Agent Cooper suspects, she’s got a surprise under her ring finger. Removed by tweezers, it’s the letter R printed real tiny on, I guess, paper. He’d discovered something similar under the fingers belonging to a girl who died over a year ago.

Meanwhile, we meet a few of Laura’s friends and classmates. Her best friend is Donna, played by Lara Flynn Boyle, her secret lover is James Hurley, and Audrey is the most suspicious of the three. She seems to inflict random acts of madness, and doesn’t have much of a reaction, save for a smirk, when she finds out with the school that Laura Palmer died. Part of me thinks she’s little more than a red herring, though. Her part as innocent psychopath - emptying the contents of a Styrofoam cup on a desk, ruining the deal with the investors with a “slip” of the tongue” - seemed too over the top to mean she had anything to do with Laura’s death.

Once all feels built and also settled, the real investigation begins. Cooper uncovers a hidden key and eventually a lockbox, a video of Laura and Donna playing around is watched and Laura’s closest buds - including Bobby, who we might find out was cheating on Laura - are questioned about what they may know.

Twin Peaks’ “Pilot” is some good fun, but it doesn’t go by without fault. One of the things that stuck out for me - but, all the same, I was charmed by - was how heavy handed some of it was. In particular, the steady reveal of James Hurley as Laura’s secret boyfriend, and biker J in her diary. It came to a point where no one else we met could be the mystery person, so the reveal of it all was like: “Well, yeah!”

Next week: “Episode 1”

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