The Leftovers Series blog: Episode 8

Cairo opens exactly as it means to go on, as both Kevin and Patti prepare for a special occasion. Kevin cooks a dinner for Nora and the girls in what is an attempt to return to normalcy, meticulously laying the table before his guest arrives. Patti lays out outfits on the floor of Reverend Matt’s old church – to be filled by ‘Loved Ones’ bereavement dolls, as we learn later – while holding a giant tome distinguished only by the letters M.D on its cover – Memorial Day, an event fast approaching in the Mapleton calendar. From just this opening scene, it would be fair to assume that Kevin’s dreams of domestic bliss won’t be lasting all that long. The Leftovers might allow its characters a semblance of hope in their quest for happiness and reconciliation, but it rarely gives its audience the same.

The Leftovers might allow its characters a semblance of hope in their quest for happiness and reconciliation, but it rarely gives its audience the same.

The scene is accompanied by the religious “I’ve Been ‘Buked”, and its final lyrical repetition of “There is trouble all over this world”. Heavy-handed it may be, but it’s a fair mission statement for this episode, and for The Leftovers in general. Amongst the show’s many successes, it’s constitutes a singly discernible flaw – there are only so many ways in which you can reiterate that these people live moribund, empty lives before audience interest tapers away. The Leftovers lacks humour a lot of the time (apart from the bumbling twins, who are always fantastic), and this is a shame, because it often allows itself to get too caught up in its own puritanical suffering and self-importance.

Luckily then, this is the episode where The Leftovers finally decides to air some of its dirty washing, replacing long takes of pained faces with character confrontation and answers to some of its underlying mysteries. Straight off the bat, ‘Dinner with the Garvey’s’ sees Jill openly disbelieving at Nora’s outward happiness, bringing up the gun that she and Aimee saw in her bag as proof of the façade. Nora is barely fazed: open and receptive, she allows Jill to search her bag then and there. The whole episode is centered on this tension, and whether “It’ll get better” can ever be anything other than a promise of false progress.

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Certainly, Kevin’s increasingly tenuous grip on reality would seem to argue otherwise. His time-lapse adventures are finally explained as a sort of split personality, vicariously playing out his inner desires whenever he falls asleep. This time he wakes up in the middle of the woods with Dean the Dog Hunter along for the ride and a beaten Patti, leader of the Guilty Remnant, tied up in an old abandoned cabin nearby. We learn what happened to the white police shirts, how Kevin came to have the feral dog, and in a scene with Jill (who isn’t best pleased), Aimee even admits to supposedly having sex with Blackout-Kevin. It’s Justin Theroux’s performance that holds it all together, equal parts frustration and vulnerability as his entire world collapses around him.

Cairo also expands upon the Guilty Remnant, as Patti reveals to Kevin their entire Raison d’être in a scene of incredibly satisfying expositional delivery, delivered by a woman who clearly no longer has any reason to hide behind secrecy. Their aim is total self-effacement as they prepare themselves for some rapturous end, another ‘Great Vanishing’ perhaps where they are the only ones worthy, having lived out their final days as living reminders of that which others have tried so desperately to forget.

They may believe in an ever-approaching apocalypse, but the Memorial Day plot implies that they aren’t above inciting violence and hatred as a means of artificially inducing its quicker arrival. Patti even goes so far as to claim responsibility for the stoning of fellow Guilty Remnant member Gladys. She proudly announces that Gladys was on board with her own martyrdom, yet the audience knows that in her final, excruciating moments she relented and begged for mercy. Patti’s fanaticism doesn’t know such bounds, and it speaks to the episode’s strengths that her suicide (a particularly gruesome slashing of her own throat) is perhaps the least shocking revelation of all. For Patti, there is no ‘moving on’, and she dies with the satisfaction of knowing that deep down, Kevin understands too.

It comes as little surprise then when Jill breaks into Nora’s home and discovers the gun, confirming that Holy Wayne’s ‘all-in-one grief cleanse™’ isn’t all its cracked up to be. Indeed, Patti’s words echo increasingly true as Jill joins The Guilty Remnant.

Yet for all that The Leftovers invests in this view of the world, there is always some sense that life is persistent, too stubborn to simply let go.

Yet for all that The Leftovers invests in this view of the world, there is always some sense that life is persistent, too stubborn to simply let go. For Megan, complete self-effacement is a difficult task. Even Laurie struggles to remove herself from her feelings for her daughter, and Gladys, poor Gladys, most certainly did not want to die. Depression is never something easily shirked off, and the show has given us myriad representations of the pain each and every character feels.

Nonetheless, there is still a definite sense that The Leftovers is playing some sort of long con. Right now, the show would seem to want us to believe that no one can ever be happy again. The problem arises when The Leftovers allows itself to fall too conclusively, too wholly, into the pit of its own existentialism and nihilism. The show could prove truly daring, and follow the rabbit hole all the way to bottom – end on a note entirely in-line with its current trajectory, as soul-crushing a prospect it might be. Yet for its bluster, it seems more likely that The Leftovers will eventually enact a reconstitution of the family unit and a reconfirmation of individual humanity, much as True Detective did when it pulled away from its intimations of cosmic horror in its final hours. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but such a reversal must be earned, and at the moment The Leftovers feels a little too ambiguous in its intentions to really pull this off.