‘The Leftovers’ Recap: Take This Job and Shove Him

The Leftovers gives you a lot to chew on with no guarantee you’ll like the taste, and “No Room at the Inn,” last night’s episode, was even more of a mouthful than most. It focused on Rev. Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston), who last season was the star of what was, for my money, one of the worst episodes of prestige television ever aired. This new spotlight ep strings together a series of trials and tribulations in which Matt drops his phone in a toilet, learns his brain-dead wife is pregnant with a baby whose conception no one will believe she consented to, gets his head bashed in and his hand stomped on by a mugger who steals his ID bracelet and sabotages his car, pushes a wheelchair for over five miles in the Texas sun, loses a fight with a man in a wedding tuxedo, gets detained, gets thrown out of town, is forced to knock a stranger unconscious with an oar for cash, nearly drowns in a flash flood, loses his wife’s wheelchair, gets smuggled back into town in the trunk of a car, gives up his recovered bracelet to the son of the guy who mugged him after the guy dies in a car wreck the kid somehow survives, and voluntarily has himself locked up full-frontally nude in a pillory—and just in case you didn’t get what’s going on, says his favorite book in the Bible is Job. By rights this shouldn’t be any more successful than the first go-round. Instead it winds up being one of the series’ finest hours to date.

There’s so much to pick at here it’s hard to know where to begin, but the beginning seems as good a place as any. We start with a portrait of Matt and Mary’s daily routine: eating, churchgoing, shopping, eating, “chatting,” going to bed, all to an easy-listening soundtrack; only Matt’s meticulous videotaping of Mary as they sleep, which he scans for evidence of her reawakening from her vegetative state, indicates that anything funny’s going on.

Then the next day comes, and Matt does it all over again: same review of the footage, same meals, same prayers, same grocery store, same Bellamy Brothers song. Then comes day three and he does it again. By this point I was laughing at the audacity of it all. If it tries your patience, well, that’s the point—imagine how he feels! The ominous tones that creep into the music this last time around give you some sense of that. So does the way he grabs Mary’s face and shouts “LOOK AT ME!” right into it, before glancing at the monitor and coming to his senses. He’s trapped in a Groundhog Day of his own design.

The next highlight happens in a hospital, where Matt has taken Mary for a semiannual testing to monitor her condition. She’s got a conditional, alright: She’s pregnant. I’ve got some reservations about how Christopher Eccleston has played Rev. Matt—there’s always something a bit too broad about him, perhaps owing to the awkwardness of his American accent and the over-enunciation he requires to pull it off. But by god, contrast between the grin plastered from ear to giant ear across his big thick goofy head when he learns the news with the fact that he’ll be seen as a rapist responsible for a pregnancy that will all but certainly end in miscarriage and you’ve learned all you need to know about his faith. You don’t need his blithe reassurances to the hospital administrator, or even his Pollyanna-ish attempt to help a stranger with “car trouble,” to demonstrate his implacable believe that God has blessed them; he’s communicated it purely physically.

Y’know, for all the good it does him.

Later, after his attempt to reenter Jarden goes up in flames following a confrontation with vigilante skeptic John Murphy, Matt enters the squatter camp outside the fence and begins the best sequence of the episode. Like Burning Man without Grover Norquist yet still somehow even more repellent, the place has attracted a parade of weirdos so skeevy that a man dressed in a cowboy hat and a loincloth winds up being the friendliest face in the crowd.

He’s sure a lot friendlier than Sandy, a fanatic played by, of all people, Brett Butler, who Matt recognizes as a Christian and comes to for the cash he needs to pay a sleazy Swiss smuggler to get him back across the border into town. Just when it seems they’ve come to an agreement between believers, she trots out a big bearded guy named Reggie (her son?) and demands, as a condition of payment, that Matt hit him in the back with a wooden oar as hard as he can while saying the name “Brian.” “Who’s Brian?” he asks. “The fuck do you care?” she responds. “I don’t understand why you want me to do this,” he says. “Look, you’re a bona fide man of God. If you do this, it counts.” Oh, okay, that explains it!

To Sandy and Reggie, this ritual of abuse is the most important thing in the world. To Matt, to us, it’s completely incomprehensible. Who is, or was, Brian? Are we memorializing this man or condemning him? Did Reggie do something, or not do something, to deserve this? What is Sandy’s relationship to Reggie, or to Brian, and what does her relationship to Jesus have to do with any of it? Who the fuck knows?

Even aside from the farce that follows, this is a perfectly crushing scene. It distills in just a few minutes The Leftovers’ preoccupations with faith, grief, and guilt (a hell of a lot better than the awful Regina Spektor song that plays during the closing sequence; “No one laughs at God in a hospital”—oh word?), and how they’re all based on emotional connections that lose their meaning the moment we remove them from their personal context and display or explain them to the world. Everyone’s got their oar and their Brian, whether it’s Kevin and his visions of Patti, Nora and her handcuffs, John and the secret that drives him to drive out miracle workers, or Matt and the conviction that leads him to take his place in the stocks until Mary wakes up again. None of it means anything, except to the people involved, to whom it means absolutely everything.

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