I guess this interests me because I didn't like season three at the time.
It's a big leap to assume,
seven years later, that we'll all feel exactly the same as we did back then. That's simply impossible. Many things can impact one's view of a series or a book or a film at the time: where are you in your life, your relationships, your state of mind, where you're living, your job, what else you're reading, what else you're watching, expectations for the series. We all post here, but we don't know each other beyond a certain level and we don't know what's going on in each others' lives at a given time. I tend to allude to it if it's relevant in a film review or some such, because the circumstances in which you watch something have an impact! The human body pretty much cycles all its cells across seven years. All that's left of the people who watched season three in 2017 is a few minerals in the teeth and bones: is disliking a TV show worth carrying across to a 'new body?!'

We all grow and change. Sometimes it's gradual, sometimes it's a lot in a short time.
I was pretty cheesed off in 2017. So were my two Lynch fan friends. We all sat in the pub and moaned and moaned about
The Return, asking what the hell we just watched for the last four months, but boy, oh boy! did we discuss the heck out of it and we watched every episode two to three times as they went out! And that's something significant that we didn't consider at the time - we still cared enough to watch the whole thing and talk about it and break it down and bitch about it. But maybe that was just how we worked our way through it. And we carried on talking about it for another couple of years to come. When I think about things I said about it at the time, I bitterly regret those remarks and feel like I betrayed a 'friend': David Lynch's work is a major reason I work in the media. Life without Lynch was infinitely duller. Buying
FWWM on the UK Criterion release was my 'return'. I miss pub chats about TV shows and movies, but I don't drink anymore and I now live over 200 miles away from those particular friends. I did chat about season three, among other things, with another friend the other day in an arts cinema café... for
seven hours while drinking decaf coffee... and it was enthusiastically!! Time changes you and heals you (I probably picked that up from reading
Catching the Big Fish!!

)
Wanting to love something, but being disorientated by it, can lead to a sort of cognitive dissonance. But - and note this isn't the first time in my life - season three has lingered in my mind and I've mulled it over for years and slowly changed my view of it. I can't afford to buy the series for a rewatch at the mo (freelance work is in a serious dip in the UK at present - 68 per cent of us have been mostly unemployed for months) but I will. And I'm looking forward to it...
Twin Peaks after a long break, bringing no expectations. One of those two pub friends was bought season three - on request - for Christmas last year, so even if we all stropped off at the time, the 'prodigal' returned. Season three is also probably the only series I grew up with that's returned and been worthwhile rewatching and giving a moment's thought (
Star Trek: Picard season three perhaps being the only other, because it repaired a lot of damage done in the shaky TNG films!) Generally,
Star Wars,
Indiana Jones,
Star Trek,
Doctor Who,
Quantum Leap,
The X-Files and other 'legacy' sequels have all varied from unimaginative to disappointing to downright dreadful for me and I've blotted them out, sticking to my discs of the originals and treating the rest as optional 'continuation novels.'
I had a fairly visceral reaction to Luca Guadagnino's
Suspiria and Hou Hsiao-hsien's
Three Times when I saw them on streaming and in the arts cinema ('what the hell did I just watch??') yet I was curious enough about my reaction that I bought both on disc when they were released and rewatched them. I came to love them. In the case of
Three Times, you really need to know a bit about the historical and political background to the three eras depicted in the film and what was happening in Taiwan in each year, as well as Red China, which the DVD filled in on the extra features. In fact, I have a huge quad poster of
Three Times on my wall that I bagged from the arts cinema. It's a landscape version of the UK DVD cover below, moving the bottom image up to the right of the canvas. At night in low light, spookily enough, when you stare at the poster for a while, Shu Qi and Chang Chen seem to move!!
I'm actually surprised that someone still carries that much loathing for a piece of media almost a decade later. Surely if you hate it that much, you move on from it, find something new.
In a funny way, one of the reasons I hope there will be a season four is that, after season three proved... divisive in some quarters, I think it might bring fans back together. Season three radically changed
Twin Peaks. Season four will begin with season three having happened and the old
Twin Peaks moved on from, so we'll be delving into the new reality. Season three had the baggage of over quarter of a century of expectations - plus a somewhat misleading promotional campaign prominently featuring Kyle as Agent Cooper along with the original series cast - that was bound to disappoint a section of the audience, bearing in mind that a chunk of the audience at the time were
Twin Peaks fans rather than David Lynch fans (remembering
FWWM was also divisive in 1992.) I still wonder what a campaign pushing Kyle as Mr C would have done - 'He left Twin Peaks 25 years ago and now he's coming back!' The dead-eyed Johnny Cash image was so strong that I believe a lot of the audience would have been drawn to it and gone in with different expectations, nullifying many, if not all, of the complaints.
Season four won't bring season three's expectations. I've said before that David Lynch's work is a niche, 'cult' (in a positive sense, akin to the untranslatable French word 'culte', not 'Jonestown cult') body. There's a small, strong following with a global reach. It'll never have the sort of 'watercooler chat' power that Twin Peaks had at its... ahem... peak in 1990, with tens of millions of viewers at the same time, because we live in a different media landscape. However, there's a solid base that will waver a bit from generation to generation, but hold fast.
A century from now, I think cultural historians will be watching and analysing David Lynch's work in the same way they will analyse Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Švankmajer, Stanley Kubrick, David Lean and a few others. It's the popular 'IPs' of the present that will fizzle out. Indeed, the modern-day resurrection of
Star Trek,
Star Wars and the like, diluting them by doing little new with them, unlike
Twin Peaks season three, will likely condemn them to fade away.
Anyway, that's pretty much all have to say on it (in my usual meandering way): people grow up and change. Works 'mature' like wines, so do people and one's palette develops over time.