[tv] The Leftovers

[msteelers]

I feel like you should have a better grasp of the cult by now, but it's been awhile since I've seen it.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

I remember being a bit unclear about the cult's motivations in the first season. They give some vague reasons for being around, but I don't think it's until near the end of the season that you really get their main motivation. Fortunately, they aren't the focus (though they are still around) in the next season.

[Newcastle]

Thanks guys. Sorry for the negative nancy thoughts on it. I do appreciate the insights.

MS-they really haven't given much info on the background, machination, nor belief system of the cult so far. Just bits and pieces of their actions. Kind of hard when there is no dialogue . And the little signs in the background dont do enough to fill it in.

RW - i look forward to getting to that part and understanding them.

[Newcastle]

So ended season 1 last night and i have more questions and a "meh attitude" than gushy OMG feelings toward it. I think I will watch 1 or 2 more episodes of Season 2 than stop. Just to see if it picks up. I think the theme is really not for me; i think if you were heavy into religion it could be. I am not. Character acting is superb though, i get why their feeling that way. I've got a small list of gripes/questions of the show that are unanswered and could very well never be. Wont post em here since I really dont want to rain on others parade.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

It definitely picks up in the second season. It also shakes off the doom and gloom vibe from the first season; it's clear that once the writer's don't have to follow the book, they are free to have more fun with the story. More than any show I can remember, season 2 reminds me of the best parts of Lost.

[Newcastle]

It definitely picks up in the second season. It also shakes off the doom and gloom vibe from the first season; it's clear that once the writer's don't have to follow the book, they are free to have more fun with the story. More than any show I can remember, season 2 reminds me of the best parts of Lost.

All right...since you didn't ask and i felt like sharing...my nitpick/questions off the top of my head....

Spoiler:

1- what the fuck was up with the deer? why did it decide to rampage places?
2. Do i need to be interpreting the random things as imagery or allegory? IE the crows gambling; the deer, the rabid dogs.
3. what happened between the sheriff and the sassy teen girl (actually liked that character); she kept refering to thenight before when he got shot; yet they never detailed that .
4. Is the sheriff going insane? is this just a dream sequence of the sheriff? (it kind of cant be since it showed other characters Point of view).
5. Why didn't it show Liv tylers decission to enter the cult? It seems like one day she hated em, the next she's joining.
6. the cult (guilty remnant) wasn't well fleshed out i thought. So they were doing what they were doing to remember people. Ok, that doesn't explain the smoking, the fetish of white and so forth. Still dont get why she killed herself (to force the sheriff to "understand")
7. Who's the hunter? Obviously other people can see him.

I guess my mind isn't wrapped up into the why those people left; but just a lot of little things dont make things overall compelling. It raises a lot of questions but not for good reasons.

My general sense is that this is someones master of arts drama presentation/end of term project. Great acting, but very disjointed and disorganized story telling. Again my gripe is setting, character logic and general opaqueness. Sorry for the nitpicks.

[Newcastle]

So you were right RW. It did pick up quite noticeably in season 2. Got two episodes down now, and its off to a better foot. Will definitely watch a few more episodes. Love the line when they are confessing their sins "I pay hookers to shoot me!" Loved that line.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

The opening scene of season 2 really does a good job of setting the mood for the rest of the season.

[gameoverman]

I've caught up this week with the current season. Wow, I think this show has finally found itself. THIS is the show I wish it had been all along. There is a non stop flow of craziness, yet understandable motivations and plot developments. I can't help but notice that the lack of certain cast members doesn't detract, if anything it improves the show. Meanwhile, the decision to make Carrie Coon a bigger part of things helps the show immeasurably.

I think it's going to go out like Angel, on the top of its game.

[gameoverman]

That was a great ending, but it sort of reminds me of Lost. I thought the Lost ending was great, but for a different show. The show I was watching, the thing that Lost was to me, was not in any way concluded by that ending.

This Leftovers ending, in fact this entire last season, has been top notch but it's not the ending to The Leftovers show I was looking for. I was watching a show where people separated from their loved ones were struggling to find out what happened to the disappeared and if reuniting with them was possible. This ending was about people who were left behind figuring out a way to connect to people who were also left behind. The disappeared? Meh, whatever, that's not important.

If this had been the Kevin and Nora show from the start, with everything else subservient to that, it would have been 1000 times better. That's hindsight though.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

I disagree. I think the show has always been about how people dealt with the disappearances and the connections they made in dealing with those issues. Nora and Kevin was the central relationship of the show. I thought the ending was great (unlike Lost's ending which made me retroactively hate the show).

[Toe]

I think I would have enjoyed another season that focused on Nora's travels in the other place. While I enjoyed the series overall, I can't help but look back at all the useless, meaningless subplots and feel a bit cheated.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

The great thing about the ending is that you don't know if what Nora said was a lie. The whole episode dealt with people lying (Kevin to Nora, the nun to Nora, the nun to the wedding people, etc). And Nora did seem to yell something right before the water covered her head ("stop"?).

[Malificent]

Yeah, I'm not convinced that what she said was the truth. But the beauty part is that it didn't really matter. What mattered was that Kevin believed her. To quote the nun, "It's just a nicer story."

[Hamlet3145]

I loved the ending. The disappearance was always just a MacGuffin, an exaggerated version of "unexplained bad things happen in life sometimes." The show was about people dealing with that, not solving a mystery.

[gameoverman]

I loved the ending. The disappearance was always just a MacGuffin, an exaggerated version of "unexplained bad things happen in life sometimes." The show was about people dealing with that, not solving a mystery.

That's my problem with this ending though, they did not 'deal with that'. They dealt, in much the same way the Lost characters did, with their own issues in their own lives. The MacGuffin turned out to be irrelevant to any of it. This could have been a show about two people, Kevin and Nora, dealing with their divorces and it could have had that same ending. Nora's husband leaves her for another woman and has a happy life with the new wife and full custody of their kids, and she has to come to terms with it. That's the show that this ending is about.

It's a bit of a ripoff when the hook for the show is completely pointless and useless. A lot of screen time went to story and character that is moot if it's not about the disappearances on some level.

[Malificent]

I loved the ending. The disappearance was always just a MacGuffin, an exaggerated version of "unexplained bad things happen in life sometimes." The show was about people dealing with that, not solving a mystery.

That's my problem with this ending though, they did not 'deal with that'. They dealt, in much the same way the Lost characters did, with their own issues in their own lives. The MacGuffin turned out to be irrelevant to any of it. This could have been a show about two people, Kevin and Nora, dealing with their divorces and it could have had that same ending. Nora's husband leaves her for another woman and has a happy life with the new wife and full custody of their kids, and she has to come to terms with it. That's the show that this ending is about.

It's a bit of a ripoff when the hook for the show is completely pointless and useless. A lot of screen time went to story and character that is moot if it's not about the disappearances on some level.

The theme song was "Let the Mystery Be." The hook is not "What Happened to the People" but "How Do People Deal With the Aftermath"? That theme is pretty consistent throughout the show. Lindelof has said a million times that it was never intended to be a Lost like mystery box show. I'm not sure what else they could've done while still being honest to what they were trying to accomplish.

[Toe]

The theme song was "Let the Mystery Be." The hook is not "What Happened to the People" but "How Do People Deal With the Aftermath"? That theme is pretty consistent throughout the show. Lindelof has said a million times that it was never intended to be a Lost like mystery box show. I'm not sure what else they could've done while still being honest to what they were trying to accomplish.

How Do People Deal With the Aftermath ... of what? Of a mysterious phenomena that made people disappear. A mystery that is never solved. Perhaps they could have had an ending that made me not dwell on that, feeling slightly cheated, but they didn't.

[gameoverman]

I'm going to use Game of Thrones to try to illustrate what I mean, because I can tell I'm not being clear since I'm not talking about getting answers.

In GOT, the fight for the throne is the MacGuffin. Who has it, who wants it, what will they do to get it? However, the show is about the characters. The stuff going on in the north for example, it has nothing to do with the fight for the throne yet that MacGuffin still affects it. The fight in the north is so desperate because indirectly the fight for the throne means no one in south cares about the north right now. The north is on its own. You can't have the current show that GOT is without the throne being up for grabs. If there were a legitimate king or queen on that throne with the support of the realm, this show would have to be radically different.

In The Leftovers, the disappearances should be affecting everything even if it's indirectly. The problem is ultimately it doesn't. Laurie lost her baby and that led to pretty much everything going on between her and Kevin. If she has simply had a miscarriage would that change? I say no. You could tell the same story between them, including the ending. Does she find out from Nora what the deal is, did Nora go over? Laurie has the chance to get information about something she was directly affected by and it was specifically not brought up. Not addressed because the disappearance was meaningless.

That's the best way I can explain it. If you're doing a drama grounded in characters relating to each other and it's not about anything mysterious or weird, don't feature anything mysterious and weird as its raison d'etre.

[Malificent]

I'm going to use Game of Thrones to try to illustrate what I mean, because I can tell I'm not being clear since I'm not talking about getting answers.

In GOT, the fight for the throne is the MacGuffin. Who has it, who wants it, what will they do to get it? However, the show is about the characters. The stuff going on in the north for example, it has nothing to do with the fight for the throne yet that MacGuffin still affects it. The fight in the north is so desperate because indirectly the fight for the throne means no one in south cares about the north right now. The north is on its own. You can't have the current show that GOT is without the throne being up for grabs. If there were a legitimate king or queen on that throne with the support of the realm, this show would have to be radically different.

In The Leftovers, the disappearances should be affecting everything even if it's indirectly. The problem is ultimately it doesn't. Laurie lost her baby and that led to pretty much everything going on between her and Kevin. If she has simply had a miscarriage would that change? I say no. You could tell the same story between them, including the ending. Does she find out from Nora what the deal is, did Nora go over? Laurie has the chance to get information about something she was directly affected by and it was specifically not brought up. Not addressed because the disappearance was meaningless.

That's the best way I can explain it. If you're doing a drama grounded in characters relating to each other and it's not about anything mysterious or weird, don't feature anything mysterious and weird as its raison d'etre.

I get where you're coming from and can understand why you feel that way. I don't feel like I'm using my words particularly well either, but let me give it one more shot.

For me, the Leftovers is about grief, but at its core, it is about stories - about the stories we, as human beings, want...no, need to tell ourselves and others to put order and structure around things that don't necessarily have them. We need to have a reason for things happening, good,bad, or otherwise:

Won the lottery? I deserved it for all the heartache of the last couple of years.
50 people shot in a nightclub? They weren't living good lives and got punished for it.
I didn't get that promotion I was aiming for. The boss is probably sleeping with the person who got it.
The sun rises in the morning. Apollo's chariot is racing across the sky.

Some stories we tell ourselves are true, some are partially true, some are outright lies or deception. But we tell ourselves these stories so we can define reality in a way that we can live in it. The Leftovers uses the Departure as a shared global unexplained experience and then looks at the stories that people tell to get through it. It chooses to look at what happened through the eyes of individuals rather than a big picture disaster movie style.

This is why the ending works for me. Why I don't mind that we didn't *see* what happened. That Nora's story is deliberately ambiguous - did she scream to be let out and then was ashamed to let people know what happened? Then maybe what she told Kevin was, in the words of the nun, "just a nicer story" that lets Nora continue moving on through life. Something that helps her deal with what happened.

You said that Laurie had a miscarriage that it wouldn't have changed anything. That if Nora had lost her husband and children in a car accident that it wouldn't have changed anything. The show, multiple times, argued that wasn't true. Characters couldn't gain closure, couldn't figure out what to do because they weren't dead, they were just gone. To follow through, if they were dead, at least then there would be an easy path towards a story they could tell themselves, a path through the grief. But because they just disappeared, they didn't know what to tell themselves, there was no easy shorthand for what happened. That, for me, is why the Departure being unexplained was a key element in the show.

If you don't agree with that premise that it *wasn't* the same as if everyone had all died at the same time, then of course the ending isn't going to work for you. And while I understand that this is the Internet and I should be arguing to the death, it's cool if it doesn't work for you. We all get different things out of art, right? For me, the Leftovers made me think a lot about how I moved through life and some about the core of what it means to be human. ANd because of that, I probably spend too long writing defenses of an hour long episode of television.

[Hamlet3145]

I think the reason why The Leftovers worked for me and, ultimately, Lost did not is because I understood from the get go what The Leftovers was about and focusing on whereas lost was all over the place.

[gameoverman]

You said that Laurie had a miscarriage that it wouldn't have changed anything. That if Nora had lost her husband and children in a car accident that it wouldn't have changed anything. The show, multiple times, argued that wasn't true. Characters couldn't gain closure, couldn't figure out what to do because they weren't dead, they were just gone. To follow through, if they were dead, at least then there would be an easy path towards a story they could tell themselves, a path through the grief. But because they just disappeared, they didn't know what to tell themselves, there was no easy shorthand for what happened.

Well, that insight about no easy path makes sense and I hadn't considered that. It's true that if a thing happens, because it is a defined thing it is easier to deal with. If something happens but it's mysterious, it's impossible to deal with it so efficiently. Nora, for instance, was treated a certain way by people. If her family had simply been killed in an accident, people would be sympathetic but those interactions would have been different. Maybe if it had been a miscarriage, Laurie talks to Kevin about it early on and their story plays out differently. That does give it a bit more relevance.

[Sudy]

I finished watching this for the first time just as COVID-19 was spinning up in the west. It seems kind of eerie this was about the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world's population, when that's the approximate mortality rate of this virus. While I doubt the world of The Leftovers is what we're going to be looking at in a couple years, I'm sure there will be some parallels.

I read many critics felt the series came into its own in seasons 2 and 3. I kind of felt the inverse... I loved season 1, and while the following seasons amazed me and kept me guessing, I could never quite decide whether the series had become outstanding or simply gone completely off the rails. It was definitely satisfying they were willing to completely blow things up rather than continue on in Mapleton, falling prey to unsatisfying season 2 syndrome. It still felt a little contrived that so many of the original cast wound up in the same place in season 2. I'm not sure John Murphy was the same character in season 3. Scott Glenn on the other hand, does he do anything that isn't amazing?

[Daehawk]

Scott Glenn has The Right Stuff.

[Daveman]

I finished watching this for the first time just as COVID-19 was spinning up in the west. It seems kind of eerie this was about the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world's population, when that's the approximate mortality rate of this virus. While I doubt the world of The Leftovers is what we're going to be looking at in a couple years, I'm sure there will be some parallels.

Counterpart has an eerily similar premise too, in which a nasty virus has killed a notable percentage of the population (hundreds of millions?) and scenes show a world of extreme social distancing... empty streets, face masks, etc.

Show was cancelled after 2 seasons but has a functional finale.