‘The Leftovers’ Lets One More Mystery Be in Its Gorgeous Finale

Only four main characters were present for The Leftovers‘ final episode on Sunday night. After three seasons’ worth of the Guilty Remnant and Jardin, Texas, and the Hotel Purgatornia (where you can check out any time you like, but you can only leave after global thermonuclear destruction), the final episode settled on Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) and Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), with some crucial contributions from Nora’s brother Matt (a phenomenal Christopher Eccleston, whose one big scene is perhaps the episode’s biggest tearjerker) and Kevin’s ex-wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman), who’s back despite it really seeming like she was going to kill herself two episodes ago.

But perhaps the most welcome return was the old season 2 theme music, Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be.” When the new credits were installed at the beginning of the second season, they seemed like a cheeky bit of trolling on the part of executive producer Damon Lindelof, aimed at the people who were grumbling that The Leftovers would disappoint fans in the long run the way that (a lot of people believe) Lost did. For his part, Lindelof has been steadfast in insisting that The Leftovers was never going to address what caused the Sudden Departure or where everybody went and why. Indeed, if you were along for this ride, you were going to have to let that particular mystery be. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t other questions to be answered along the way. But just as often as those questions seemingly yearned to be answered by some kind of ecclesiastical thunderclap, they would be answered by something far more Earthbound. Evie Murphy wasn’t raptured nor murdered, she just went and joined a cult. There wasn’t a flood coming to Australia to end the world on the 7th anniversary of the departure, just a hard rain.

Perhaps the most clarifying moment on the show came last week, amid Kevin’s wild and wooly twin adventures in whatever we’re calling the afterlife weigh-station he goes to when he drowns. When Kevin tracks down Christopher Sunday, the man his father says needs to teach him a song (so that Kevin can teach it to his father, so that his father can sing it, so that he can stop the flood), Sunday simply asks Kevin, “Do you believe your father can sing a song and stop the flood?” Kevin is forced to take a step back and realize that no, he doesn’t. And then the follow-up question: “Then why are you here?” So it’s been for the Leftovers‘ audience. Did we really believe that the show was going to explain everything about the Departure and surrender all its mysteries? Or were we here, instead, to see how that grief and uncertainty and rootlessness made these characters seek out one thing after another to help them make sense of a world that had betrayed their trust?

With the final episode, “The Book of Nora,” we end the series on perhaps its most emblematic character. While Kevin was always the purported Messiah figure, it was Nora who always represented the core struggle of The Leftovers: when there are no answers to what happened, all that’s left is to wrangle with the grief and the unmooring. But closing the loop on Nora’s story doesn’t provide answers to the Sudden Departure, not why it happened nor how nor of what it portended or if it will ever happen again. Instead, after a harrowing scene where Nora enters the device that is supposed to ionize her into a mirror universe or whatever the hell, we flash all the way to that scene from the season premiere, where Nora is an older woman keeping doves in cages and delivering them to an old church in Australia. She’s going by Sarah now, and the nun tells her that a man named Kevin came looking for her. When Kevin does find her, he greets her as someone who she met once, back when they both lived in Mapleton, and who saw her in Australia now and wanted to look her up. It’s a clever bit of fakery from the show, because the audience is still primed for something magical. Are we in the mirror universe where the Departures went? Is there a version of Kevin here who never took up a relationship with Nora? Is that why Laurie’s alive?

It’s not, though. Kevin’s just telling a story. After all this time has passed, how was he going to bridge that chasm once he found Nora again? So he thought he’d pretend it never happened. So much of this final season of The Leftovers has been about how these characters choose to tell the story of their lives after the Departure. Matt Jamison tried to write a new testament about Kevin and it only ended up pissing people off. But in the finale, he helps Nora write her own story, dictating her obituary in Mad Libs.

Of course, true to her character, Nora doesn’t want to hear prettied-up stories. “Lies” is more like it, to Nora. But she meets Kevin at a local wedding anyway, and they dance, and it’s beautiful. And then after some business with a goat, followed by perhaps the most definitionally Nora moment of all time, as she calls a nun a liar to her face after the nun denies having entertained a gentleman caller, Nora returns home. And on the next day, when Kevin comes back, without any stories or pretense, Nora sits him down and tells him where she’s been all these years. What she saw there. How she got back. Nora tells Kevin that the device worked, that she woke up naked and alone in a parking lot and wandered out into a world where 2% of the world’s population hadn’t departed, but rather 2% of the world’s population remained. In this world, Nora’s family were the lucky ones. In our world, Nora lost everything. In their world, her children and husband got to face their own scary world together.

It’s a deeply humane monologue that, in true Leftovers style, still manages to leave the audience with a question or two to answer on their own. After all, as Nora tells her story to Kevin, we don’t get any flashes to Nora’s experience. The show doesn’t take us there. Which leaves a little bit of a question mark, or at least something to ponder.

Sunday night’s finale was the tenth episode of the series directed by Mimi Leder. No other director put their stamp on the show as definitively as Leder did, and it was only right that she close the series out in style. She spoke to Decider about the ambiguity of Nora’s final speech.

[Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta] had made the decision, and I feel like I completely agreed with it, because this story is about our characters’ journeys and their belief systems and their release from grief, and finding love and finding community is the way to do it. So seeing her son and daughter and actually showing it would mean that it really happened, and I think the ambiguity of not knowing if she’s telling the truth or telling her truth is very important to the audience and to the character and to Kevin’s character. We felt that she could most powerfully tell that story, and I think a lot of people believe that [what Nora says] actually happened, and I think that’s a good way to leave the audience as to “Do you believe that happened?” If you see it in a flash forward or a flashback, you’ll know what happened. But I think it’s far more interesting to question the reality of it actually happening and therefore losing its value. We all need belief systems, and we all have them to get through our day, to get through our lives. We all have our own truths, and it was very important, I think, for us to tell the story that way. I felt it to be the most honest way to tell the story, because that was Nora’s explanation of what happened to her. That’s the closest explanation that the audience is ever going to get to knowing what happened. I think a lot of people believe her story, and I think some just see it as her way of having some structure in her life so she can love again.

It’s only appropriate that in its final minutes, The Leftovers once again asks us to sit in that space where the mystery lingers. These characters won’t ever have all the answers they seek. Even if Nora’s story is true, it still doesn’t explain why the Departure happened, or how, or if it ever will again. The story was always going to be about what happens when the world doesn’t end, and finding some way of living with it. And in its final scene, The Leftovers leaves us with what it always has: a gorgeous, melancholy, quasi-believable story about finding peace amid the uncertainty.

 

 

Where to stream The Leftovers