Another episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, another impenetrable barrage of questions. What’s Dougie’s wedding ring doing in the stomach of the Buckhorn corpse? Is Garland Briggs alive and leaving his fingerprints all over the place? Who’s Becky’s dad? And what’s the magic phone number that sends prisons into meltdown?

Five new episodes in and Twin Peaks: The Return is up there with the most intriguing/indecipherable series in TV history. But it’s up against some serious competition. From killer balloons to tropical polar bears, these are the series that had us throwing our TVs out of the window come the finale and vowing to spend far more of our lives drinking in future.

Lost

So a plane crash lands on a tropical island and the survivors set about turning on each other as distrust and desperation set in. So far, so Lord Of The Flies. Then JJ Abrams’ cult TV classic went very, very weird indeed. Suddenly there were rampaging polar bears, mysterious hatches in the ground and ‘others’ complicating the plot, and if you stuck with it for a few seasons you found yourself fathoming your way through episodes where the entire island time-travelled back to the 1950s, forces of evil were trying to extinguish the light of human kindness and the entire sodding setting vanished into the sea. Lord Of The Brain-Fries, more like.

Twin Peaks rating: five riddling giants.

Sense8

Tackling such broad issues as global human empathy, transsexual politics and psychic evolution, Sense8 - the TV debut of Matrix directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski - was never going to be Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates, plot-wise. Its ultra-confusing set-ups whereby eight disparate, psychically-linked characters hop around the globe without warning due to their innate ‘connection’ – made even more baffling since they clearly had no idea what was going on themselves - were well received by critics and audiences, but Netflix cancelled the show after two seasons because viewing figures didn’t justify the production costs.

Twin Peaks rating: three trees with brains.

The Prisoner

The daddy of all you’re-not-supposed-to-know-what’s-going-on-actually TV shows, The Prisoner emerged in 1967 (the height of LSD culture, whodathunkit?) and quickly instigated the concept of the ‘enigmadrama’. The less you told the audience about what the hell was going on, it turned out, the more avid they became to work it out. By today’s standards, the story of a secret agent renamed Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) being kidnapped and detained in a surreal Village guarded by a murderous white balloon called Rover was virtually drip-fed to viewers, but it blew the ‘60s (fairly easily blown, to be fair) mind and became a televisual cult. Today you can even attend Festival No.6, a tribute music festival in Portmeirion, Wales where the series was filmed, where processions and human chess games from the show are recreated and everyone is proud to be a number, actually.

Twin Peaks rating: one glass box under surveillance.

American Gods

“What the heck is American Gods actually about?” asked IGN two episodes into Neil Gaiman’s modern fantasy confusarama, and the world yelled “hear that!” Turned out it was an epic battle between the classical Old Gods and the New Gods, representing technology and social media, for the faith of the country. Cue a fair bit of inter-dimensional travel, Gillian Anderson being Lucille Ball and a buffalo with flamethrowers for eyes. Um, give us ten minutes with Mr Bean to reset and we’ll get right back to you…

Twin Peaks rating: eight evil dopplegangers.

Read more about Twin Peaks: The Return on our plot blog.