Twin Peaks: Where Did Laura Palmer Go?

Twin Peaks: The Return premiered on Sunday night with two mind-bending hours that gave fans enough symbolism, mystery and ambient weirdness to puzzle over for years to come. And that's literally just the first two. David Lynch and Mark Frost's surrealist murder mystery is back at the height of its power, and so every week TVGuide.com will attempt to analyze and theorize about what we just saw.

This week, we have five burning questions about where Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) went, Agent Phillip Jeffries, and a whole lot more.

1. What's the deal with Evil Cooper?
The true identity of the Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) doppelgänger who's been causing mayhem on Earth for the past 25 years is unclear. He could be the evil spirit Killer BOB, the primary antagonist of the original series who seemed to be possessing Cooper as we saw in the final shot of Season 2. Bad Cooper's long hair is suspiciously BOB-like. But Good Dale is physically trapped in the Black Lodge, so there's no Cooper body in the real world for BOB to possess. He's either a shape-shifted form of BOB or a different creature from the Black Lodge that's just an evil Cooper doppelgänger, since the two Evolutions of the Arm established that there are doppelgängers in the Black Lodge. Whatever he is, he's ruining Cooper's good name.

2. What's up with the box?
The mysterious glass box in New York has something to do with outer space/interdimensional transport. Someone -- an anonymous billionaire, perhaps -- is continuing the deep space monitoring that Major Briggs (Don S. Davis) was working on in the original series. Major Briggs was picking up messages like "the owls are not what the seem," but the box is going even further, receiving actual physical deliveries that seem to have been teleported from the Black Lodge.

That delivery may have been some form of Laura Palmer, since after she told Cooper that he could go out of the lodge now, she herself was lifted up, screaming, by some unknown force and flung through space. The pale horse, which seems to be a harbinger of death, made an appearance, which could mean that Laura was about to kill the young lovers in New York.

We'll see if anyone from the FBI or the Air Force knows about the box. Maybe it's a modern version of Project Blue Book, the real-life FBI investigation into UFOs that played a big role in Season 2 and Mark Frost's novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks.

3. Who killed Ruth Davenport?
It's Laura Palmer all over again -- sort of. The murder of Ruth Davenport and an unidentified man in Buckhorn, ND echoes the story of Laura and Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) and BOB (Frank Silva) in that someone was murdered and the prime suspect has no memory of doing it and may have been possessed. High school principal Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard) may have killed his mistress, or maybe it was his wife Phyllis (Cornelia Guest) in cahoots with Evil Cooper, who murdered her, or maybe it was that old-timey soot guy whose body disappeared and head floated away, whatever the hell he was.

Twin Peaks is finally back, so let's get lost

4. Where is Phillip Jeffries?
Phillip Jeffries was an FBI agent played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me for one extremely weird scene. After going missing for two years, he suddenly appeared in the FBI's Philadelphia office, shouted some incomprehensible stuff to Cooper, Gordon Cole (David Lynch) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) about infiltrating the room above the convenience store where the evil spirits lived and somebody named Judy, and then vanished just as suddenly, never to be seen or heard from again. Until now, maybe, since Evil Cooper had a phone conversation with someone he thought was Jeffries, but may be someone else. Whoever it is, he knows exactly who the doppelgänger is and is looking forward to seeing him go back to the Black Lodge.

5. Will Hawk enter the Black Lodge to rescue Agent Cooper?
Yes, because all the way back in Season 2, Cooper said to Hawk (Michael Horse), "If I'm ever lost, I hope you're the man they send to find me." That's too good of a setup to just leave dangling.

Twin Peaks airs Sundays at 9/8c on Showtime.

(Full disclosure: TVGuide.com is owned by CBS, Showtime's parent company.)