In the closing episodes of HBO's
The Leftovers,
showrunner
Damon Lindelof gifts us the dots, but not the connections. We witness
Kevin's bizarre journey through the underworld, complete with weiner
jokes and one last star turn from Ann Dowd. And when Kevin awakens on
the other side of that journey, we find Senior's dubious apocalypse
has been averted. The flood came after all, but in the end it wasn't
that bad. Ten feet? Enough to send Garvey Sr. scurrying to the roof
of the Playford House, but mild enough they didn't end up needing
that boat in the yard. Why?
Was
the End of Days really coming? Who gives a shit.
Did
our heroes stop it? Doesn't really matter.
The
final scenes of “The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His
Identical Twin Brother)” offer an alternate interpretation: the
epic flood was a red herring all along; the real tragedy, the real
apocalypse, was the dissolution of Kevin and Nora's relationship a
few episodes before, and by proxy, our astonishment at the impossible
fragility of familial relationships.
Kevin
Garvey encounters this truth in the literal nuclear bunker of his
subconscious. The Beach Boys' “God Only Knows” pipes in while
Kevin wrestles with his mirror image: the manifestation of his Other
Self – the one who leapt with a cinderblock into the lake outside
Miracle, Texas. The one who was so alone he captured a wild dog and
tried to tame it. And just as Kevin prepares to snuff out his Other
Self once and for all, the twin realizes something. “We fucked up
with Nora,” he says. Not a word about the nukes in the air, nor the
flood that might or might not obliterate the human race. At the end,
he's thinking of Nora. And it makes sense; the sleepwalker has been a
couple moves ahead this whole time.
In
this moment of violence, Kevin finally comes to terms with the guilt
of leaving Nora, not just over their most recent fight in their
Melbourne hotel, but the guilt for each suicide attempt, each jump in
the lake, each plastic bag over the head. The rest of humanity be
damned; for Kevin, the true disaster is the realization that he was
so desperate to escape every meaningful relationship in his life, he
eventually succeeded. By the time Kevin saves the world (or doesn't,
whatever), his life is over anyway. He has driven Nora away, and now
he is doomed to be alone in a world he destroyed himself to save.
Yet
how far gone can Nora truly be? About fifteen years and possibly
across dimensions, apparently. In the series finale we finally catch
up to Nora Durst, quietly living her own pseudo-apocalyptic reality.
Exiled to a small Australian village where she works as a
dove-wrangler for a huckster nun, Nora too has been running. The
woman who lost her entire nuclear family in the Sudden Departure
spent the first two seasons piecing together a new one. Yet by the
midpoint of the final season her adopted daughter is surrendered back
to her birth mother, and her proxy husband has taken off to save the
world with the show's entire supporting cast at his side.
But
let us not be fooled by Nora's escape into the outback; she has had
one foot out the door all along. From early in season one, back when
she used to hire sex workers to pop her in the chest with a handgun,
Nora has craved release from life. She wants to go “wherever they
went,”
in the words of one of the talking heads on her computer. Since the
departure of her husband and children, “anywhere but here” seems
to have always been Nora's destination.
And
why shouldn't she? Like Kevin, her life has been completely reshaped
by the Sudden Departure. Whole family wiped out, Nora is practically
a black hole of loneliness. She hides it better, to be sure, only
found out by the occasional spike of intuition from Jill Garvey or
Erica Murphy. And like Kevin, her suffering leads her way the hell
out to Australia, where a pair of German scientists have figured out
how to launch desperate people into an alternate dimension – or
just fry them with radiation, it's not entirely clear. What is clear
is that Nora has been using Kevin and his family as stand-ins for her
own lost clan, and as soon as she gets a chance to see her own
children, she goes for it. As Patti Levin sometimes put it, “There
is no family.” There is only the ache where they used to be. Nora,
whose personal void is so vast, so utterly replete, ditches her
“fake” family for even the most marginal hope of reuniting with
her children.
She
gets there eventually, or so she would like us to believe. When Kevin
reunites with Nora in the series finale, she tells him the story of
her travels to the “other side.” A multi-year odyssey that takes
her from Australia to New York to Germany, through a sparse world in
which the “lucky ones” mourn those who remained behind, and in
which Nora comes to find something we the viewers are just now
beginning to suspect: that there may be a way out after all.
She
and Kevin reach for one another. After all this time, all the gray
hair, all the incredibly graceful aging, they are finally able to
move on. How beautiful.
Of
course, Nora's story may just be bullshit. After all, we saw her try
to abort the experiment. We don't know she went through with it.
Which reminds me of Kevin Garvey's attempt to stop that apocalyptic
flood.
Did
Nora really explore an alternate dimension? Who gives a shit.
Did
she get to see her children again? Doesn't matter.
Here's
what does matter: the world didn't end. Of course it didn't end. The
Leftovers was never really a show about the end of the world. It
isn't about Biblical floods or alternate dimensions, and it certainly
isn't about the people who disappeared. It's about grieving. It's
about facing your mistakes. It's about coming to terms with the
unknowables, the unwinnables, the unfixables. It's about Kevin taking
Nora's hand at her kitchen table. It's about those words she says to
Kevin when she accepts him back into her life. “I'm here,” she
says. “I'm here.” And just like that, the doves return, as if
bearing good news, as if they've spotted dry land on a vast and
flooded sphere.
