It does feel a little disappointing to draw all those conclusions about Kevin’s dreams. There’s definitely more at play here than the guy’s failed marriage and screwed-up hero complex (2% of the world’s population vanished without a trace, for chrissake), but most of what we’ve been seeing from Kevin this season can be traced back to his infidelity, not the Sudden Departure.
In last week’s review, I commented on how it was interesting that The Leftovers‘ central family, the Garveys, was one that didn’t lose all that much from the Sudden Departure itself. All of them are still there, and what broke up their family appears to be Kevin’s adultery, not people disappearing into thin air. This week’s installment just adds to the sense that showrunners Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta aren’t interested in exploring what happened. They want to focus instead on the people forced to live the rest of their lives without answers. Kevin is a prime example of that. With his “dirty dick,” as Patti would put it, he’s made enough tangible problems for himself without worrying about the things in life that can’t be explained.
But then, what of Kevin Sr., who so urgently pressed that National Geographic issue into Kevin’s hands and told him that he had been “chosen”? Nothing on that front this week – the older chief seems perfectly sane. However, three years after the Sudden Departure, other forces are pushing Kevin, manipulating him. Last week, Patti warned, via poetry, that something really bad was coming to Mapleton, and no one was awake enough to sense it. Perhaps a chance at redemption is about to present itself to Kevin. After all, he was last seen cradling Patti as she bled out on the cabin floor (in an image strikingly reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pietà), attempting to save a woman who could easily destroy him. That’s one of the most noble things we’ve seen from the character thus far.
The episode title is “The Garveys At Their Best,” not “Kevin Screws The Pooch,” so I’d be remiss if I didn’t also talk about Laurie’s journey throughout this week’s episode. She’s been one of the most enigmatic characters in The Leftovers due to her silence as a member of the Guilty Remnant, and this installment lets us inside her head more than ever before. We learn that, before the Sudden Departure, she worked as a shrink, counseling troubled townspeople.
Fascinatingly, one of her patients was none other than Patti. The identity of that Neil whom Patti so kindly left a bag of shit for in “Gladys” is revealed – he used to be Patti’s husband, before their marriage turned nasty and abusive. It turns out that the future GR leader has a history of proclaiming that the end is nigh. And on October 13th, she’s getting some really bad vibes. “Those times, they were like tremors,” she tells Laurie. “This was the big one.”
And Laurie feels like something bad’s coming too, though she’s more focused on her family than the fate of humanity. Kevin is visibly slipping away in front of her – they have an argument about him smoking cigarettes that snowballs into Kevin flat-out telling her that he doesn’t want a dog, something about which Laurie had been deeply excited. The conflict couldn’t have come at a worse time. Laurie is expecting a child with Kevin, though she hasn’t told him yet. Emotionally, she’s at a crossroads with her husband, caught between cementing a commitment to a man who is slipping away or just cutting him loose.
There are many ways to interpret the calendar reading she gets for October 13th – “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground,” often attributed to the Buddha – but I take it to be indicative of Laurie hoping to find a resolve she isn’t sure she has when she needs it most. At the end of this episode, I sense Laurie will need a lot of that strength, although her joining the GR suggests she may not have enough to sustain her. Though the credits roll before it’s confirmed, what the last scene suggests is that the baby growing inside Laurie has suddenly vanished, along with 2% of the world’s population. So long, happiness.