It has been a life-long curse of mine that once I fall in love with a show, it will inevitably end in a way that is in one way or another dissatisfying, if not outright infuriating, to me. The most relevant example I can put forward is that of LOST – Damon Lindelof’s first foray as a show runner, and the show that I count among the most bitter of failures. I watched LOST for six years with the fervor of a religious zealot – and the bullshit cop-out of an ending (which I am about to spoil but get the fuck over it because it ended like 7 years ago) that the “sideways flashes” were actually flashes to some purgatorial afterlife where all the characters met up again before “moving on” literally destroyed my faith in storytelling.
Certain shit endings are forgivable in spite of their unsatisfying nature – Twin Peaks’ cliffhanger ending was as such because the network basically told David Lynch to go fuck himself, so there was no third season to follow it. And it took a full 25 years for Lynch to convince a different network to give him the money and leeway he needed to revisit the show – and it’s literally a miracle audiences will now get to see what happened to Coop and the rest of the weirdos that made Twin Peaks great.
But The Leftovers has thankfully broken that cycle for me – it has achieved narrative Nirvana. I’m going to go ahead and say for me, this show is a perfect masterpiece. The ending, mercifully, sealed the deal. Bulleted below are the reasons why, in no particular order:
· Knowing when to bow out is something many a show that began a gem but became a moldy rock (lookin’ at you, Supernatural) failed to do. I literally hate-watch Supernatural now because I am a completionist, but they just won’t fucking end the show even though it’s been beating the premise like a dead horse for at least 7 seasons now! The Leftovers was neither too long nor too short at 28 episodes over 3 seasons.
· It never flatlined in plot or let characters get stale – it very justly wrote Jill and Tom Garvey almost entirely out of the third season, and their lives (as well as the lives of every other major character who wasn’t Kevin or Nora) were resolved with scant explanation by Kevin in the final episode, and it didn’t feel cheap or evasive – it simply amicably resolved a remaining loose end.
· THE MUSIC – perhaps this reason is more important than some of the others, but I’m not sure any other TV show has even come close to the triumphant music direction The Leftovers has achieved. No other show has utilized pop music, a haunting score, and instrumental renderings of Metallica to better effect than this show. Relatedly:
· The opening title-sequences were poignant and always reflective of the subject matter to follow. The heavy and aggrieved composition that was paired with the Michelangelo-esque fresco of the “leftover” people post-Sudden Departure for Season 1 was an apt introduction to the visceral and spiritually despondent first season. Season 2’s polar opposite sequence, which laid the folksy “Let The Mystery Be” over a far more cheerful collection of pictures in which one or more of the people in the photo has been painted over with a starry/cloudy sky clued us in to the fact that while the images we would be seeing were outwardly less miserable and more hopeful than the previous season’s, it was mostly an elaborate slideshow designed to mask the emptiness and suffering the world of the show was still coping with. Season 3 brilliantly retained the visuals from Season 2’s sequence, and put a new song in to set the tone for every episode. Such genius selections included the theme song from Perfect Strangers (for the episode where the only non-Departed cast member from that sitcom convinces Nora to seek the Departure Machine that supposedly will take her to where her children went), a Richard Cheese cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” (because Matt, John and Michael all think Kevin is a messianic savior and have written a gospel about his life), and Gravediggaz “1-800-SUICIDE” (where we learn of Laurie’s attempted suicide, the direct aftermath of which leads to her joining the Guilty Remnant). Swinging away for the fences in the final two episodes, the show runners chose the theme from Season 1 and 2’s sequences, in that order, for a poetic conclusion suggesting that although the show was often bleak and doom-driven, it ultimately ends on an uplifting note – at peace with the mysteries within.
· Speaking of mysteries – The Leftovers finally succeeded where LOST failed. As a disciple of David Lynch and a partner of JJ Abrams, Lindelof is a clear believer in narratives that are dwarfed by mystery. LOST only ever answered its questions (What is the smoke monster? Where is the island? Where is the Island? Who is Jacob?) with more questions, if it bothered to answer them at all. The backlash from the botched conclusion of that show clearly traumatized Lindelof, and to his credit he weaved a much more cohesive tapestry with this show, because he did answer questions – just not with direct/definitive answers. The Leftovers’ big Unknown – what actually happened to the 2% of the population who disappeared in the Sudden Departure – is actually answered! Albeit by an unreliable narrator, of course – because it couldn’t be definitively answered. Story creator Tom Perotta said there was no answer and Lindeloff promised he could keep it that way on the show, so we never do get a ‘why’ – why the Departure occurred, no one knows. But if you believe Nora, we get a ‘where’ – Nora tells Kevin she completed her journey through the departure machine (LADR, the writers abbreviated it, but it’s not called that in the show. It’s a play on ‘ladder’ if you’re dense; there was a visual motif of ladders this season), and she wound up in a mirror reality where the 2% remained, and 98% of the rest of us disappeared. Very Twilight Zone – but we never see any of it. We only see Nora’s face as she recounts her journey to their version of Mapleton NY, where she spies her teenage children and her ex-husband with his new wife and she decides that it would be wrong for her to interrupt their new life, so she hunted down the inventor of the LADR (who was the first person to test it) and asked him to make another so she could get back. This explanation is everything I could have hoped for, honestly. It’s a theory I had myself about what the Departure actually was: it’s just tangible enough to be believable from a scientific point of view, but it leaves just enough unanswered to still be considered mystical/supernatural. If you believe Nora – who considers herself honest, but is fairly skilled at lying to herself – then it’s resolved. If you think she’s full of shit – you can believe whatever you’d like about the Departure. It’s something for everyone!
· Nora Durst is my spirit animal. I’m not sure there is a fictional character who has resembled me more closely in an ideological way than she. And Carrie Coons, the actress who portrays her, needs 32934507678 Emmy and Golden Globes thrown at her fucking feet for the performance. The extent of Nora’s suffering on this show would have destroyed most normal people in real life - but she’s like a 1980’s slasher-movie boogie man because she just won’t fucking die. Just when you think she’s about to break – this woman used to pay prostitutes to shoot her in the chest, after all – she picks herself back up and moves onward. No one was more skeptical or held more contempt for religious/spiritual mumbo jumbo than she – her living was debunking liars to prevent people from financially abusing the systems established by the government to help those who lost loved ones in the Great Departure –yet she secretly believed, desperately, that her kids were alive, wherever it was they actually were. The function of Nora and Matt, her meaning-addicted pastor brother, seemed to be a way to convey the idea that, to borrow from Fall Out Boy: Sometimes the only payoff for having any faith is when it’s tested again and again, every day. Now, faith doesn’t necessarily refer to deistic faith – Nora is an agnostic at best, and Matt spends the majority of the show a devout-but-modern Christian – but faith in one’s convictions, faith in what you believe is the truth. Matt is the more obvious example of this – he never gives up on his wife, who miraculously recovers from a 4 year vegetative state. He then loses his wife and their son because of his zealotry, and his cancer returns after forty years of remission – only to reunite and regain a fulfilling life with them before his death. Nora railed against the zealous and remains pragmatic the entire show as she overcomes plentiful emotional setbacks – waking up to life model decoys of her family as part of a sadistic attack from the Guilty Remnant, losing her adopted daughter Lily to the custody of the child’s birth mother, the deterioration of her relationship with Kevin – but ultimately chucks all common sense and risks possible annihilation because she hopes to be reunited with her kids, who she knows are still alive – and when that simultaneously succeeds/backfires (if you believe her), she returns to our reality and becomes a recluse, rather than killing herself or making a go of it in the parallel universe. She’s a wonderful and earnest confluence of contradiction – much like…
· …Kevin Garvey, the erstwhile protagonist of the show. From the start, Kevin wasn’t the typical leading man, or even a typical “difficult man” in the vein of Don Draper and Walter White. He’s played by Justin Theroux, so he’s distractingly attractive, which the show uses to great effect in flipping HBO’s tendency to glorify tits and ass by objectifying his body far more than any woman on the show. Kevin was a guy so burdened by the responsibility of remaining sane to hold his family together after the 10/14 trauma that he became unhinged. If you’re against any and all supernatural interpretation of Kevin’s seeming status as a shaman or a messiah, you might dismiss his visions as psychotic delusions – it’s clearly a hereditary condition he picked up from his dad, who began hearing voices the moment the Departure happened. He never actually saw Patti Levin, dead leader of the Guilty Remnant cult, he isn’t actually in some kind of afterlife when he’s an international assassin or the most powerful man in the world or his identical twin brother – he suffers from a severe mental disorder, seeing connections and signs that aren’t actually there, and filling in the details with convincing clarity from his subconscious. If you think he was in some form or another a conduit to the spirit realm (different, of course, from the realm where the 2% wound up) – it definitely explains his physical inability to die, which is on par with Nora’s emotional inability to break. Kevin should have died – like, 4 or 5 times – but yet he lives to the finale! This dude has been drowned, poisoned, shot in the chest, self-suffocated, and suffered a massive off-screen heart attack (which is in keeping with the self-murder in the penultimate episode) – not even Rasputin survived so much! More relatable than his seeming immortality was his tragic flaw: Kevin is never content with what he has. Before the Sudden Departure, he lived in a swanky house paid for by his successful wife, had a good job as a police officer, had two functional kids. But that wasn’t enough, he was unhappy. He keeps screwing up and redeeming himself in a cycle that never truly addresses his discontent – something that is all too familiar for many people, myself included. He is a clearer example than Nora that faith and insanity aren’t necessarily clearly defined or separate – wouldn’t you define showing up in the same location year after year hoping for a different result in your search for a person that all evidence suggests is dead or sci-Departured as insanity? Or is that just faith?
· The sheer, balls out, no holds barred, pure nihilistic fatalism of the tone. Never has a work of film reflected my personal outlook on life so closely – and I realize how alarming that is without explanation. Being perfectly frank: I vacillate between indifferent cynicism and nihilistic skepticism (very different philosophical POVs, although they may seem similar). Some days, pretty much all days in Trump’s America, I happily welcome a cataclysmic astronomical event that will make humans go the way of the dinosaur. Other days I rage against the machine, full of impassioned righteous anger about the bullshit that is regressing the world to a pre-WW2 nightmare of nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism. Because art is funded and produced for profit, it is very rare to have access to something that is unapologetically pessimistic and critical of religious and social mores. Many films and movie flirt with this kind of abandon and chicken out at the end, worrying that by siding with atheism or postmodernist interpretations they will be sending an undesirable message to the masses (lookin’ at you, True Detective Season One). But not The Leftovers – this show got as bleak as it basically can get (regular suicidal ideation, actual suicide, cliffhangers meant to suggest Laurie killed herself as per Nora’s plan to die accidently on purpose via failed scuba dive). But for me at least, as dark and punishing as some of the content was – it still felt enigmatic. It was deceptive in its anguish because often it was the show I laughed at the hardest – I nearly cracked a rib laughing at Nora and Erika Murphy bouncing their troubles away on a trampoline while Wu Tang Clan blared through the speakers. The “unique biometrics” which unlocked the Purgatory-bunker being Kevin’s junk-print was hilarious, as was basically everything Secretary of Defense Patti Levin uttered in that episode. Ironic juxtaposition was mastered by this show in a way few other visual mediums have. This was made possible of course by the excellent cast and ace scripts – the actors and writers deserve all the accolades possible.
· The Kevin dream sequences were so perfect in their symbolic assemblage they managed to out-Twin Peaks'd Twin Peaks. Many a prestige television show has used a dream sequence to further our understanding of a character or as a fish-out-of-water method to inject something fresh into a storyline fraught with seriousness – but I honestly can’t think of any instance where it was as successful as it was on The Leftovers. The international Assassin episode was the best kind of mindfuckery – it was confusing because we couldn’t tell if it was a dream or was actually happening in another dimension, but really it didn’t matter – the symbolic journey Kevin takes is unforgettable. Using karaoke as a way to escape an Underworld that looks like a hotel? GOLD. Having Kevin’s personality essentially halve into two different people, resulting in the death of one at the hands of the other, was so steeped in literary and psychological metaphor you could teach a whole college course on that one episode.
All in all – the ending was a graceful resolution to a thematic focus on the importance of love and family. Truly, Kevin and Nora spent half their life suffering in the aftermath of a mysterious event, and it seemed that without answers, despite attempts to gain knowledge and seize control of their lives through spiritual and secular means, the only take-away is that one can survive and cope with the terror and despair of the unknown if you have the love and support of people who you love and support in return. Now that they have come clean to each other after their independent ventures to figure themselves out– Kevin and Nora can be content, and whole, together. We can also be content, and whole, as a society if only we could also accept truth at face value and not delude ourselves into thinking we (or one religion/political party) alone have all the answers.
