It Still Stings: The Leftovers Answered Questions It Shouldn’t Have

This juxtaposition between a fractured family and family proudly kept whole is rife with potential. The idea of a second miniature departure, that the event that traumatized the entire world could happen again at any moment, keeps you at the edge of your seat. But as new mysteries unfold, this time there are answers, too—and they’re rather lackluster. For example, Evie didn’t disappear, but faked the event in a plan with the ever-expansive Guilty Remnant to shock Miracle out of their holier-than-thou stupor. The initially carefully crafted world starts to fray at its seams because of these answers, but nothing was unforgivably bad. That would wait until the third season.

You see, everything in the first two seasons of the show generally revolved around a question framed from the beginning: how would you live life if 2% of the world departed? It never mattered why the Great Departure happened, it never mattered why Kevin was losing his mind; all that mattered was that these things were happening and our characters had to deal with them. The Leftovers was a carefully constructed thrill ride, with no choice but to grab on and enjoy. But once you turn the lights on, you can see the track is rickety, the turns lack their surprise, and you understand that the scary monsters surrounding you are nothing more than twisted pieces of metal. In other words, providing answers sucks the experience of its power. And, much like his mistake with Lost, Lindelof just couldn’t help himself.

While the third season of the show isn’t anything to write home about, the ending unequivocally ruins it all because everything was for nothing. Kevin’s whole quest throughout the season to Australia to stop an apocalyptic flood? There was no flood to begin with, so I guess it doesn’t really matter. Matt meets a man who claims he is God, but he refuses to believe him and the man ends up getting mauled by a lion. Oh well. Nora decides to trust some crack-scientists and leave Kevin, his family, and the entire life they had built together to attempt some completely unproven process to find her departed family. Who needs love anyway?

These answers feel like an exercise from Lindelof in excising all meaning from a series and telling viewers that they wasted the past three years of their lives. All the empathy built for the characters, all of their troubles and hardships that we watched them endure are for naught. But the actual ending turns this nihilism into sadism: Nora actually found her family.

In the last episode—the bulk of which takes place years in the future—Nora explains that some quantum quirk made it so that while it seemed like 2% of the world left here, a parallel world was created that had 98% of their population leave. That’s the grand answer that Lindelof found for this earth shattering trauma: it was a little quantum oopsie. Finding her family happy after years without her, Nora tracks down the scientist who originally created her portal thingamajig and demands he build a new one to send her back. And he does. Let me repeat that. Nora forces the creation of some scientific device that can send people freely between these parallel worlds seemingly without consequence and only ever tells Kevin.

Perhaps Nora, and in turn Lindelof, believes that this explanation and reaction are justified. They reckon that these worlds are too far gone now to reconcile, that both have actively mourned and grieved and moved on. Nora is representative of those in humanity who hold onto hope, clinging desperately to its last vestiges, and then suddenly, such a determined belief is dashed upon observation through her own eyes, and not years of self improvement and understanding. It doesn’t matter that she spent years faking growth and stability, now that she knows her family is safe and happy without her she can finally put the past away and be with Kevin. They can, as the episode’s Wikipedia entry puts it, “happily reunite.”

But it’s this final answer that ultimately strips the show of all of its meaning; with a device to travel between worlds and a true explanation of where everyone went, why does it matter what everyone felt? All trauma, the show seems to say, has a definite source and it’s only when finding that origin that you can fully move past it. The years of agonizing and theorizing and introspection don’t mean anything, because if you ask the right person everything can be explained away. Complexity and ambiguity, both tools utilized by Lindelof earlier in the show, get chucked out the window in favor of neat, convenient answers.

Ultimately, The Leftovers deeply misunderstands that what matters is often not the answer itself, but the journey toward it. People grow and change when faced with a problem that lacks a solution; it’s how we’ve survived as a species to this point. For all the biblical references and Job-like trials his characters face, Lindelof ignores the power within the mystical divine. The unknowable. We live in ambiguity daily, unsure of when we may ourselves depart this earth and whether or not an afterlife truly does exist. What I do know, though, is that if the answers are anything like what Lindelof and The Leftovers gave us, I want no part of them.

Mik Deitz is a freelance writer and Paste intern. They inhale stories in videogames, films, TV and books, and have never finished God of War (2018). Yell at or compliment them on Twitter @dietdeitz.

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