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Well, I guess Michael Murphy put it best:

Friends, I don’t even know what you want me to do here. I could meticulously describe every strange event, every striking image, every what-the-fuck moment we saw in this week’s episode of The Leftovers, “International Assassin.” But what does that really accomplish, other than playing a Pokémon-style “Gotta catch ’em all!” game with all the signs and symbols? Demonstrating how observant you are? Nah, fuck that. First I’ll give you a three-sentence synopsis: Kevin Garvey awakens in a purgatorial hotel, where he unwittingly assumes the identity of an international assassin who must kill this afterlife’s version of Patti Levin, a senator running for president, in order to free himself of her influence and return to the real world. After discovering that the woman he murders is a body double, he instead connects with the “real” Patti, incarnated as an emotionally abused little girl. Following instructions from his father, he pushes her down a well in Jarden before falling in himself, at which point he drowns the now-adult Patti and reawakens in the real world to find he’d been buried alive by Virgil’s grandson.

Now I’m gonna show you some gifs.

What does it all mean?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean: that we’ve now been given all the tools we need to determine if Kevin’s visions are the product of the supernatural or psychosis. I believe co-creator Damon Lindelof when he insists this show will never deliver The Answers to the Great Departure, and I believe that studied agnosticism extends way on down the line to every seemingly supernatural happening on the show. Maybe Kevin really did mystically travel to the other side, where he underwent a series of trials and defeated his adversary, bringing himself back to life. Or maybe he’s a schizophrenic who drank poison provided by a suicidal pederast, had a hallucinatory paranoiac nightmare while he was out in which he processed his grief and guilt and trauma, and woke up before he suffocated. The results are the same either way. What difference does it make?

Rather than attempt to determine What Really Happened, or put together a chapter-and-verse concordance for What We Just Saw, I’d prefer simply to focus on what it says about both the character and the show. For starters, it reveals Kevin to be profoundly empathetic toward his arch-nemesis. Patti has ruined his life three times over now: first by stealing his wife, second by killing herself in front of him, and third by “haunting” him. But in this vision he allows her nihilistic views of love and attachment a fair hearing. He gets to know her piece-of-shit ex-husband, and hates him so much he kills him. He meets her as an adorable young girl, and listens teary-eyed as she provides him with a litany of the insults and abuse directed at her by her father—abuse that no doubt helped make her the woman Kevin knew and loathed. And he kills her, twice, but hesitates each time, doing so only because he truly believes it’s the only way he can save his own life and avoid ruining those of his family. Maybe that’s the Almighty teaching him a lesson. Maybe it’s his unconscious mind processing buried facts about Patti he learned when Laurie spilled the secrets of their therapy sessions. The point is that he’s made to see her side of things. He’s made to see her humanity.

And what does it say about his own life? As you might expect from a dude vain enough to carve his body into the shape of an adonis, he fancies himself an international man of mystery—and as you might expect from a guy with his level of self-loathing, he hates his job. According to the true answers he’s forced to give to Patti’s security team, “I don’t want anyone to know who I really am” (he’s talking about his alias, Kevin Harvey, as in Lee Oswald, but obviously there’s more to it than that), and he smokes “to remember…that the world ended”—if that’s who he really is, then mission accomplished, because no one knows that about him. He sees himself as similar enough to his schizophrenic father for them to stay in the same hotel room on opposite sides of their vision-quest world. In other words, the show didn’t suddenly stop addressing the same issues it always addresses just because it got real weird for a week. You truly don’t need to see all of this as definitively “real” or “a dream” to get the message that Kevin is profoundly unhappy. That’s the most important thing it’s intended to communicate.

And how does it communicate it? With visual gusto, as shown above. With sonic force as well—all those Verdi orchestra hits and fire alarms and weird bursts of TV static. With disorienting fades between scenes, something the show has never done before (and which moreover Lindelof never tried on Lost, to the best of my recollection). With a self-aware sense of humor, capable of saying “Are you fucking serious?” before we can, chuckling at the obviousness of its pop-culture references and mythological symbolism. With some seriously unnerving and unexplained sights, like the cop with the bag over his head and the crying priest (both of which go unexplained), like the nurse with a biohazard box raising her voice in Spanish with hotel employees (also unexplained), like the little girl in the pool or Patti in the well. It’s risky, funny, creepy, sad, strange television, and you don’t have to think it’s a masterpiece to think that kind of TV is its own reward. You don’t need The Answers here, anymore than you needed them when Tony Soprano became Kevin Finnerty for his own sojourn in hotel purgatory. Just focus on the questions—what they’re asking, and how, and why. Just the mystery be. If nothing else, it’s a lot more fun that way.
[You can watch the “International Assassin” episode of 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. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and Netflix’s Jessica Jones for Decider.