Note: As with all TV recaps, there are spoilers below for those who did not watch the episode. If you’re only looking for a content advisory, I’ll tell you: this HBO show, were it a movie, would be rated R for language, violence, sexual content, and thematic material, but it changes from week to week. The first commentary carried a Caveat Spectator, so you can check that out. This episode does contain a scene of sexual content, including some brief nudity.
Episode 9: “The Garveys At Their Best”
With its penultimate episode, The Leftovers finally becomes a proper tale of apocalypse. Not so much because the end of the world occurs (though it does, after a fashion), but because it does what apocalyptic literature is meant to do.
And what is that? I can’t explain it better than James K.A. Smith does in his book Desiring the Kingdom:
Apocalyptic literature—the sort you find in the strange pages of Daniel and the book of Revelation—is a genre of Scripture that tries to get us to see (or see through) the empires that constitute our environment, in order to see them for what they really are . . . the point of apocalyptic literature is not prediction but unmasking—unveiling the realities around us for what they really are . . . the empire (whether Babylon or Rome) has something to hide and so tilts the louvers just slightly to cover what it wants to hide. But apocalyptic is revealing precisely because it gives us this new perspective, just to the left, which lets us see through the blinders.
In showing us the twenty-four hours just before the disappearances occur, The Leftovers pulls back the curtain just a fraction more on its characters subsequent grief. And this is the important part: nearly everything that happens in the “Rapture” was already happening before it. In fact, the events of October 14 just helped some characters make sense of things.
So we get Laurie—whom we get to hear talking—happy and self-possessed, but quietly in turmoil, knowing she is pregnant, not sure if she wants to be, and sensing that her husband is checking out. We get Nora coming to the end of her rope with her children and husband, who seems to be able to disappear even when he’s physically in the room. Tom has evidently been thrown into confusion by the discovery that Kevin isn’t his biological father, and is getting drunk and trying to fix that repeatedly. The Jamisons deal with chronic problems (though it’s Matt, for now); Patti anticipates the end of the world; the walls of the beautiful house are cracking.
And there is Kevin, who is, it turns out, already coming apart at the seams, before anyone disappears, while his father is still chief of police, before he loses Laurie to the Guilty Remnant and Tom to Holy Wayne and Jill to her own profound unhappiness. At a party for his father at his own beautiful house, surrounded by his beautiful family and happy neighbors, Kevin is miserable and goes out to smoke.
“Why isnt it enough?” he asks his father.
“Because every man rebels against the idea that this is f—ing it,” Kevin Sr. replies. “Fights windmills, saves f—ing damsels, all in search of greater purpose. You have no greater purpose, because it is enough. So cut the s—t, okay?”
The contrast couldn’t be stronger between this and what Kevin Sr. said in the diner two episodes ago, insisting to Kevin Jr. that this (gesturing at the National Geographic) was his purpose. So now I have a purpose, Kevin spits at his father, who says that it’s all about context.
But while both Kevin Garveys are about to change their tune, Patti—a patient of Laurie’s, in a context in which all they do is talk—is saying the same things she says much later: “I think something terrible’s about to happen . . . This is the big one. Like the world is gonna end.” She slips, and says that it feels “like a hand is inside my chest and it’s squeezing my heart tighter and he won’t let me go until it’s over.”
That slip of the tongue—which Laurie catches and (mis?)interprets—is, in a nutshell, the great conflict of The Leftovers, a show that still is only partly about a Rapture, but completely about revealing us for who we are, like all apocalyptic literature. Because the question is this: if there is a “he,” a person who is squeezing Patti’s heart and will soon be speaking to Kevin Sr., is he also the “he” that Matt serves, the “he” that takes Matt’s wife away from him? Is it the “he” who snatches away Laurie’s unborn baby and Nora’s family and many others?
Or is the “he,” as Laurie guesses, Patti’s abusive husband who made her leave her home—or manipulated her so that she felt as if she must? In other words, is the one who squeezes our hearts and makes us feel as if we have come to the end of all things ourselves? Is hell something people are condemned to, or something they bring on themselves?
C.S. Lewis conceived of hell this way in The Great Divorce, a way that predicts Kevin’s choice:
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
It used to be, in old stories, that our apocalypses were sent from on high as punishment for our sins. But the very randomness of The Leftovers’ disappearances, the purgatory its souls are thrust into, seems to imply something we increasingly assume: that when the end comes, we will have brought it on ourselves. That hell is other people. That hell is us.
Whatever it is, it seems like Kevin, in all his misery, is playing a part he doesn’t want to play: he sees the deer’s antlers lit up, and later he doesn’t want to kill it, just as he doesn’t want to kill the dogs. But it doesn’t matter. Fate wants the deer dead. And later, on the day of the disappearances, a car full of odd women pulls up to him and asks, “Are you ready?” Then they consult: “Sorry. Thought you were someone else.”
Now we also know why Kevin was startled, but not surprised when his kitchen was ripped up by a deer: this has happened before, right before the October 14 disappearances. That deer seemed to be warning people of the impending doom, but as far as we can tell, it didn’t appear again between October 14 and the events of the show thus far, three years later. All this lines up with the sense that we’re at the midway point, that “time is up,” as several characters have said. This is a new deer, but the message is the same: the big one is coming. Whatever that means.
And the fire that came blasting out of the manhole, the electric spark that lights up the science experiment, might burn them all alive.
Other Notes:
- Here are some people we didn’t see in this episode: Holy Wayne, Aimee, the twins, Dean, Meg. We also don’t find out why Kevin moved into his father’s house, or how the GR was formed, but we did find out who Neil was, and what Patti meant when she asked Laurie if she remembered what she’d told her “before.”
- And I think it’s probably incidental to how the story is being told, but it seems like everyone who had touched the life of one of the Garveys didn’t disappear (or, in the case of Nora, a second degree of separation). Sure, probably a coincidence, but who knows, anymore.
- If I don’t miss my guess, the letters in the credits are disappearing more and more as the season progresses.
- In a show that has quoted the Bible, the Qu’ran, and the Gnostic gospels, it is perhaps not surprising that this episode includes a quotation often attributed to the Buddha: “The foot feels the food when it feels the ground.”
- Of course, now we know for sure what was in that bag that Patti dropped on that porch with “Neil” on it.
- A few more echoes: Kevin was also running at the start of the first episode when the dog crossed his path; he’s hiding cigarettes under the post office box, just like Tom later hides the money at Wayne’s behest.
- Laurie tells Tom about Michael, his biological father: “Don’t forget about him.” “Why not?” Tom asks. “Because as a trained professional, I can tell you: it doesn’t work.” Indeed.
- Nora: “As far as you’re concerned, for the next four weeks, I don’t have a family.”
