The Leftovers Ends on a Beautiful Note
EntertainmentFor as much time as The Leftovers spent on loss and its manifestations, it was very much a show about possession and unity. And though it may have been hard to discern at times, it was also a show about hope. [Spoilers.] Each season ended with the show’s central characters, Kevin and Nora (Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon), reuniting—last night’s series finale included. The message, per Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof, is something like that of The Wizard of Oz: These characters had what they needed all along. To Quartz, Lindelof said that the ending of that movie (and, by extension, his own series) “should be unsatisfying.”
And yet, The Leftovers series finale was a profoundly satisfying experience. It stayed true to the series’s longstanding refusal to explain too much. What turned some people off immediately about this show was its lack of answers—superficial readings decried The Leftovers as weirdness for weirdness’s sake. I like weird, so that was never going to bother me, but I also loved the way The Leftovers used its expository terseness as an empathic device—the show’s unexplained mysteries (starting with the sudden departure, a rapture-like event in which two percent of the world’s population spontaneously vanished, and expanding from there) put its characters on equal ground with its viewers. That made this fantasy truer to life than virtually every other American television show airing right now. Who has all the answers anyway? Not one human, and certainly not The Leftovers. Wisdom, we’ve been told through the ages (even if we have a hard time internalizing it), is about accepting what you don’t know, and The Leftovers was a very wise show.
Its constant interrogation of its characters’ beliefs—virtually all of which were manifestations of their reactions to the sudden departure and attempts to cope with unexplained tragedy—made the show a model of agnosticism. It wasn’t about imposing a dogma, it was about understanding how dogma comes to exist in such varied ways. “Let the mystery be…” went the Iris DeMent song that played over the show’s second season credits and then again, during those of last night’s series finale. That song suggests yet another coping mechanism, this one a little more in touch with the universe’s vastness and unintelligible (at least by the human mind) simultaneity. It’s just another shot in the dark of coping with life, albeit delivered by DeMent with a jubilance that’s mighty persuasive.