That's a great answer to what is a (slightly) more open-ended question that it initially seems. As I've noted on many occasions during this rewatch, I've actually been enjoying those midseason episodes - or at least the first three or four midseason episodes - much more than usual. That said, there is definitely a widespread dissatisfaction with them and one that I've shared on many viewings (especially my first one).

I think in my case, it's a bit hard to speak too generally about what should be expected from TV because quite frankly I am much more amenable to film storytelling than to television. Like almost anyone of my generation I grew up watching and enjoying TV, but I was seldom very committed to various shows, and was always more of a movie buff.

The Sopranos was probably the first serialized, dramatic series that I became very invested in (I think episodic, and particularly, comedic television scratches a different itch and possibly belongs in a very different category). There were things it did that I was aware a film couldn't do - a way it allowed us to live with the characters, to build relationships to them, to anticipate what comes next. Yet with that came some definite restrictions. For me, the biggest bummer was that the show seemed unable to really build to a dramatic crescendo in a satisfyingly cathartic way. (Of course, the final episode was - in my opinion, anyway - a really brilliant, even transcendent exploitation of this quality).

I remember one season in particular that was very frustrating to me because it developed a relationship between two characters that seemed to be building to a kind of revelatory climax but instead just ended somewhat perfunctorily for the obvious reason that the season was over, and it was time to close up that arc and move onto another one. I felt let down. It seemed like even at its best, The Sopranos - and shows like it (most of which I STILL haven't seen in the Golden Age of TV so I can't speak too generally) - were caught between two poles: the immersive nature of an ongoing series and the ability to create a complete, dramatically-satisfying narrative of a feature film (and yes, this includes films like Mulholland Dr and Lost Highway, which may have an open-ended quality to them but nonetheless contain everything they need to contain within their framework).

So now to Twin Peaks (which I didn't see until after The Sopranos had concluded). Here we have a show which, more emphatically than most - and certainly more than any show at the time it was made - embodies that paradox. And it embodies it for a very specific, identifiable reason: because it is a collaboration between a very filmic/painterly sensibility (Lynch) and a very televisual sensibility (Frost). A filmmaker has an ending in mind, and especially when they're also a painter like Lynch, they have a sense of the big picture and where everything exists in relation to everything else. A TV writer, on the other hand, is (at least hopefully) going to keep the wheels spinning perpetually so that the show can keep going and going and going. There has to be a certainly quality of "non-resolution" even as each episode, each stretch of several episodes, and each season contains self-enclosed arcs. This all the more true when we're talking about Twin Peaks rather than Law & Order, that is to say a serialized narrative that is meant to extend and carry from episode to episode - a novel with chapters, rather than a collection of short stories.

The tension in Twin Peaks is that it had to exist in an environment that was far more geared toward episodic storytelling so that what bothered me a bit about Sopranos, an HBO show made with great creative freedom, must be even more pronounced on early 90s TV - and yet at the same time it was designed, in the very DNA of the pilot, to propose a story that both demanded an eventual ending and, once that ending arrived, would feel as if its purpose had been served.

This is why, for me and I suspect for many others, the mid-season episodes are frustrating - even putting aside questions about the quality of execution. These episodes propose a Twin Peaks that bears little to no relation to what the pilot proposed: a story of significance and weight, grounded in a specific incident that could keep expanding. Instead, we are given a very different concept: Twin Peaks as a place in which many different stories happen.

As you've noted, that's the appeal to many viewers including yourself. I think it's also what appealed to Frost, at least at the time. He may have second-guessed himself later, but in 1990 he was not talking about the Laura Palmer mystery being the linchpin of the show. He thought it was simply the first case and wanted Twin Peaks to be a quirkier, looser, less-bound-by-a-specific-genre version of Hill Street Blues with familiar characters in a bounded environment guiding us through a whole spectrum of experiences.

Lynch has stated his attraction to Twin Peaks as being a desire to tell an ongoing/never-ending story. He's also talked about different stories coming to the forefront as the mystery fades into the background. Both sentiments could be taken as endorsements of Frost's vision but the closer we look at his specific statements, and how he actually worked (and didn't work) on the show itself, the clearer it becomes that what he's talking about is not the opposite of a movie - that is to say, a project that continue past story's endpoints and turn into something else. Instead he's talking about a new kind of movie: one which retains the essential importance of a narrative rooted in a central premise that doesn't go away, one which still encapsulates all the events within a single framework - but in which the middle of the "movie" is extended endlessly, endlessly, into the horizon so that the inevitable ending is perpetually delayed. It's a kind of optical illusion of narrative which works in movie terms while "cheating" the actual purpose of a movie. In a way, this is what all serialized narratives attempt to be but few have attempted this as boldly or baldly as Lynch seemingly wanted to.

I think all Twin Peaks fans, wherever they fall in terms of their preferences, need to recognize that the show only exists in the tension between these two poles: call them Lynch vs. Frost, call them extended middle vs. continual endings/new beginnings, call them film vs. TV (I'd hesitate to call them serialized vs. episodic, because even Frost's more short-form approach was serialized)...hell even call them Laura Palmer vs. the town of Twin Peaks since that dichotomy essentially

It does seem that eventually the show came down harder on Lynch's side because he had the final say: changing the script for the finale, creating the feature film without Frost, even writing the Log Lady intros which frame the show as a single, cohesive work in a way the episodes themselves do not. I'm curious to see, now that Frost is back in the picture, if the new series will pull the center of gravity closer to his direction or if "Twin Peaks as a whole" will remain more in Lynch's vision. I suspect the latter for a few reasons: most obviously because Lynch is directing everything and thus getting a sort of final final say but also because the third season's production resembles a film's much more than a TV show's. Plus, Frost's statements ("we need a clear path through the woods") suggest his views of appropriate Twin Peaks storytelling have changed over the years during which - it's worth pointing out - he has devoted far more attention to writing books (and even film) than TV. On the other hand, many of his books take place in series with the same characters but new adventures each time, so we'll see.

For the show as it exists now, the appeal one finds in the mid-season will depend not only in how charming they find the delivery of the various storylines, but how willing they are to accept that events can "go somewhere" and "matter" even if they are inconsequential to the conclusion of a long-form drama.