I think their arc was completed. Especially considering we are going into the home stretch. If the show was to continue for a few more years, I don’t think that would have necessarily happened (nor the time jump). The compressed storyline means we really only have time to focus on one cult - the one around Kevin.
And yeah, the GR at times seemed like Reza Aslan doing some intellectual masturbation, but in dealing with a crazy crisis is the GR any more ridiculous than any other cults found in dystopian works (I am thinking of Handmaid’s Tale in particular)?
There are definitely others that aren’t well thought out. But I’ve also seen cases where they were. It’s better to keep it simple, I think. Did you ever see the movie Martha Marcy May Marlene? Good movie with a *great *ending (that inspired page after page of debate on the IMDb boards, RIP).
I agree. They were necessary and well done. And even though they’re (mostly) gone, we can see that people are still desperately searching for meaning and belonging, with the “psychic” readings, the cruise ship group, and the cult that’s forming around Kevin.
My understanding is that the first season, including the Guilty Remnant and Holy Wayne, is adapted, more or less directly from the source novel. So if it’s indefensible, blame Tom Perrotta.
And by the way, in the last episode (the one broadcast on May 21), was that the first time Kevin learned that Laurie was pregnant at the time of the Sudden Departure, and the fetus disappeared at that time?
I have loved the series. This season is not as good as the 1st or 2nd.
The 1st was the best though.
Anyways, I am very worried because I see no way they can end this series properly.
The entire point of the series is NOT about answers. That is why I loved he 1st season so much. There was almost no “mystical” parts, just humanity reacting to the inexplicable.
The 2nd season really started throwing in the mysticism and now I am afraid they are gonna try and answer questions in the 3rd. But, regrettably, if they answer any questions, IMHO, they ruin it.
They should have stuck with the first theme. Throw people into an inexplicable situation that fits NO religious doctrine and see what happens.
Now that they have decided to give us a false sense they are going to “explain” the root of it all leaves me interested, but very wary.
Lucky Mike, I doubt they are going to fundamentally explain it. But you’re right that they’ve gotten a bit away from the mode of “this one inexplicable thing happened, but now we’ll keep everything realistic after that”.
I respect your heterodox take on the show (I have felt that way about other shows, preferring seasons or characters hardly anyone else did) although I don’t share it.
Just tell me at least you didn’t like the first season credit sequence better too?
Wow! Incredible episode! But I have always loved the International Assassin based ones. It’s always been such an impressive and interesting way to deal with internal struggle. I really liked the jumping from back and forth between the Kevin’s and then how he has to kill himself in order to get passed his own crap and kill the pocket purgatory that he has kept escaping to (so maybe that answers the question that Kevin actually didn’t rip the duct tape away when suffocating himself, but kept dying and coming back).
Great seeing Patti and Meg back again as well. And the whole Christopher Sunday asking him if he really believed that Kevin Sr. could stop a flood with a song.
I am really excited for the finale!
It is interesting that you read that scene as confirming what you already thought about the GR ;). I think it was fairly evident that Kevin’s public pronouncements were a bunch of BS in order to get the public to think of the GR party as normal enough to vote for… so they could nuke the world.
That only can go so far. I think there is a reason Perrotta didn’t write a sequel to his book. It works for a book or a season, but if you want to go further you need more than that. The first season shows the cults that can arise, but then what.
On a side note, I’ve said before and I still believe that religious believers and non-believers get different things out of The Leftovers. They watch it in different ways. I thought about this, when Kevin Sr. started comparing the table at the farm to the Last Supper. I considered that the original apostles were probably just as flawed and messed up as the folks around the table, even though people tend not see them in those ways (although the Gospels point out how much they kept on not listening to what Jesus was saying). Maybe for non believers it was a bit of a funny through away line by a megalomaniac, but I got something a little bit insightful out of it.
I would say, first of all, that there’s only so much parsing you can do of the kind of dream logic we saw here. But if we’re going to try, I’d point out that Kevin was already president, and the plan to nuke the world was going down without any intervening vote.
I’d also argue that eliminating marriage and family is, if anything, going to be harder to sell to the public than being silent and chain smoking (not that any of it is easy, of course).
Does anybody have a theory as to why submarine guy had to be naked? I mean, sure, it added a level of sur-reality, but I just can’t make it make sense. He needed to be barefoot, yes, but naked?
That actually makes total sense to me. He was just barely able to do the splits that far as it was. In his Navy uniform, he would have been too restricted. It’s possible something much looser, or with more give (like a leotard) would have also worked, but he probably didn’t have anything like that on board.
Good piece, but I don’t know if we can safely conclude that “true believer Matt Jamison abandoned his faith entirely in the space of a single episode”. That’s a *possible *interpretation of the “lion sex boat” episode, but this exact question was chewed over on a Leftovers podcast I listen to, and both hosts believe that he did not in fact lose his faith, even if he has clearly changed his mind about how to go about applying it.
Well, the article didn’t say his faith in God - it could be his faith in Kevin as the Messiah. After all, he didn’t go to the farm at all. I think the later is far more likely, but I agree he likely didn’t lose his faith in God.
