‘The Leftovers’ Recap: In Case of Emergency, Break Glass

“Terrible things happen in this world, and the only comfort we get is that we didn’t cause them.” These are the words of Nora Durst, and boy oh boy would she ever like them to be true. Over the course of “Lens,” this week’s tense episode of The Leftovers, she’s forced to confront the idea that maybe she did cause the terrible things that happened to her, and to the people close to her. Maybe she’s a “lens,” a person whose mere presence makes the departure of those around her—from her new neighbor Evie Murphy to her own entire family—more likely. Maybe it’s all “horseshit,” as she describes it. Horseshit or not, the idea itself is shattering.

You know what else is shattering? The acting in this episode. Good Lord, Regina King and Carrie Coon, am I right? As Erika Murphy, King singlehandedly takes one of those “everyone in a huge crowd sits quietly and listens attentively as someone loses their shit in a big showy way” monologues writers love and pulls it out of the realm of cliche, her voice and body taut and flailing as she mocks the idea that the people of Jarden are “spared.” The way her second sarcastic “We’re spared!” cracks and wavers is just gutting.

But this is just a prologue to the main event: the faceoff between Erika and Nora Durst. Throughout the episode, both women have been dogged by people investigating the disappearance of Erika’s daughter (the fundraiser for whom was the site of her big monologue meltdown), from a kindly Department of the Sudden Departure employee played by Freddie Rumsen from Mad Men to a couple of crackpot scientists who believe Nora is possessed by “the demon Azrael.” The repeated suggestion that she’s got something to do with Evie’s vanishing has driven Nora to act out, first by tossing a rock through the Murphys’ window out of misguided spite, then by stealing the DSD guy’s confidential questionnaire and using it to quiz Erika, presumably in an effort to debunk the idea that the girl departed at all.

That’s where it all goes wrong. As she reads the new questions—developed in part, we learn from Agent Rumsen, from an “algorithm [that] came from the Japanese”—she starts to realize they’re pointing her in the direction of a Secondary Departure after all. Her increasingly hostile tone draws out Erika’s secret: that she’d planned to leave her husband, that the birds we’ve seen her bury and dig up were part of an old wives’ tale about wishes her Grandma told her, and that the day she dug up a bird who’d miraculously survived—the same day Evie disappeared—she’d wished her children would be able to endure her exit from the marriage. Evie was the one she was worried about, and, well, her wish had a monkey’s-paw way of coming true.

This is too much for Nora, who shoots down Erika’s attempt to take mystical responsibility for her daughter’s disappearance with barely concealed contempt. At this point, the shots of each woman have narrowed to striking close-ups; in Nora’s case, director Craig Zobel uses the back of Erika’s head to block out everything but Nora’s face, leaving her like a harsh spotlight in the shadows.

But Erika’s not having it. All but staring directly into the camera like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, she annihilates Nora’s veneer of confidence by asking about her own departed children. “What were the last words they said to you,” she asks, cruelly parroting the questionnaire. “To the best of your recollection.” Nora tears up, grabs her things, and flees without a word.

Having the two women wrestle this directly with the show’s central sci-fi/fantasy conceit helps The Leftovers solve one of its few remaining structural problems. At times it can be difficult to get on the exact emotional wavelength of some of these characters, because they inhabit a world with one major difference from our own: the Sudden Departure, and the indisputably supernatural event it represents. This doesn’t necessarily mean the involvement of God, or any kind of deity or demon or magic or religion whatsoever, mind you—a physical phenomenon beyond the reach of current science serves just as well. Whatever it was, it happened, and it’s been impossible to explain nonetheless. This can make the unyielding skepticism of characters like John, who insists there are no miracles in Miracle, difficult to swallow. (Nora, at least, has a self-evident psychological need to see the Departure as both random and one-time-only; perhaps we’ll eventually get a similarly illuminating backstory for her vigilante neighbor.)

But an episode like this helps illustrate the continuity between skeptics and believers, between those who think they may have played a role in sparing people from it Departure and those who fear they’re to blame for it: Each approach offers its proponents a sense of control amid the chaos. Nora rejects the concept of lensing or the possibility of further Departures to stave off guilt and fear, the only way she can keep going. Perhaps for John, fighting for a world without miracles is a small price to pay for a world without curses as well.

Yet a sense of safety is also why the townsfolk have embraced the eccentrics who slaughter goats or wear bridal gowns every day simply because that’s what they did on the day Jarden was spared, or why people are paying $500 per milliliter for the town’s water: Belief offers them emotional protection against the terror that it could happen again. On the flipside, Erika blames herself for her daughter’s disappearance for basically the same reason the town gives Jerry the goatslayer credit for preventing the disappearances: Knowing the cause makes the effect less frightening, whether that effect is good or bad. You don’t need to have experienced the Sudden Departure to recognize the universal tendency of human beings to look for heroes and villains, and, if no one else fits the bill, to self-destructively settle on themselves.

[You can watch The Leftovers on HBO Go and HBO Now]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.