‘The Leftovers’ Recap: The Miracle Shirker

“What you got, Kevin, isn’t love—it’s damage control. Your family blew up, Nora’s family blew up, and now you’re all just clinging on to each other, ‘cause you need to cling on to something.” When Patti, the leader of a silent cult who’s gotten a whole lot more talkative in the afterlife or whatever the hell her appearances constitute these days, says this to poor gorgeous mentally ill Kevin Garvey, she’s not just telling him the happiness he seems to have found with Nora Durst after the Sudden Departure destroyed their families is a sham. She’s telling us, the audience, that last season’s happy(ish) ending was bogus too. Never let it be said that The Leftovers pulls its punches!

With Episode Two ending at the same point as Episode One—the disappearance of Evie Murphy—and Episode Three taking a detour into the faraway lives of Laurie and Tommy Garvey, last night’s “Orange Sticker,” the season’s fourth installment, represented the story’s first forward motion since the premiere. And man, things fell apart quickly. It’s clear now, if it wasn’t already, that the new lives everyone’s assembled to paper over the damage of the old are as easily chipped away as those orange stickers. They’re supposed to provide an Exodus-style indication that the house in question has been spared; we’ve seen how much good that did Evie.

Nora’s storyline wasn’t the center of the episode, necessarily, but with her perspective on the season premiere’s earthquake leading off the hour, it was the most affecting. Awoken by the tumult, she discovers Kevin is missing; when she runs outside to see what’s going on, she’s told by her neighbor Erika that Evie and her friends are gone. “Gone?” she repeats helplessly. Maybe her worst fears have come true. Maybe the Departure happened again. The prospect is so frightening to her that she literally passes out.

By the next evening she’s learned (most of) the truth behind Kevin’s absence, and helped him cover up his presence at the scene by coaching him on how best to retrieve his missing phone in a way that makes it look like he lost it not during the quake but in the subsequent search. She’s gotten her shit together enough to tell her stepdaughter Jill some hard-truth stories about Departure insurance fraud, like the guy who seemed to vanish just after heading out to walk his dog with his wife: “I found that fucker in Puerto Rico.” “The Sudden Departure was a one-time event,” she continues. “The flood happened three years ago on October 14th, and the ark took on all the animals it needed. Why in God’s name would it take on any more?” I dunno, Nora, you tell us—you’re the one so scared it’ll happen again that you collapsed on the kitchen floor.

Kevin’s adventures are a bit more involved this time around—he’s unwittingly gangpressed into accompanying the increasingly unhinged John Murphy on a trip outside the gates of town to assault local soothsayer Isaac for his perceived role in Evie’s disappearance. (The connection of Kevin’s telltale muddy palmprint on the teens’ car to the palmistry of the fortune teller whose house John burned down the night before the girls vanished was a clever bit of business on the part of the writers, hard to see coming but ironclad once it happened.) He winds up saving both men’s lives during a tussle that leaves John with a bullet in his side; his “Hey babe—I got shot” on the phone to his doctor wife Erika was one of the episode’s funnier moments, believe it or not.

But Garvey’s storyline is more noteworthy for what he learns, not what he does. Erika tells him that John is part of a vigilante group that shuts down “claims that weren’t true” about the town’s supposedly miraculous properties. There’s just one problem: The town does have miraculous properties, or at least some of its people do. Isaac really could see that something bad was going to happen to John. Virgil, the mysteriously friendly man who seemed to know about Kevin’s hallucinations, or whatever, in the visitor’s center and who tonight tells Nora “I’m so sorry for your loss,” really does seem able to read people’s minds. And while many of chatty Patti’s little speeches can be interpreted, and written off, as voicing Kevin’s innermost thoughts—it’s she who finally makes him realize he had been trying to kill himself in the pond before it drained during the quake—she warns him “Don’t get in that car, Kevin!” before John even pulls up. So either he’s being haunted by a ghost who can see the future, or he’s developed superhuman hearing. Either way, John’s wrong when he says “There ain’t no miracles in Miracle.”

The grimmest of these signs and wonders, though, is the latest twist in the saga of Matt and Mary Jamison. Rev. Matt’s true-believer schtick has always been difficult to take. In part that’s because it’s involved so much bullshit: harassing the families of Departure survivors, participating in Jarden’s creepy ritualistic “We are the 9,261, we have been spared” prayers. Christopher Eccleston’s American accent, which always sounds like he’s about to clear his throat, has something to do with it as well; certainly he and Carrie Coon look and sound nothing like brother and sister, especially when you compare it to her uncannily convincing turn as Ben Affleck’s beloved sis in Gone Girl. But when he tells her that on his braindead wife Mary woke up and talked to him for hours on their first night in town, only to revert to catatonia the next morning, that’s fucking tough, man. He’s witnessed the only miracle that truly matters to him, but it’s over, and people don’t believe him, and if he talks about it, John Murphy and his crew will beat him up and burn down his house. Another happy ending down the tubes.

At the end of the episode, Nora handcuffs herself to Kevin. It’s her attempt to provide security for his sleepwalking, and to ensure that she never wakes up to an empty bed again. But given what we’ve learned of their quiet desperation, it reads like the jail sentence it probably is. Thus The Leftovers reduces another moment of human connection to illusion and panic. This kind of thing makes it a hard show to watch, and a harder show to turn away from.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.
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