We both remain consistent. I tend to dislike most elements that come from Perrotta, whereas you seem to prefer them.
I am rewatching the 3rd season to see if I missed something others have pointed out. Very open to other viewpoints and I really do love this show.
For debate points and discussion…
Do you believe Nora, and why? Did she really do what she said?
How did Kevin reincarnate so many times? The show does not explain this as I can see. Any thoughts?
On the second point, I am at a loss.
I do believe Nora, as I noted upthread. I am actually more convinced now because of a comment I read online. Nora had broken off the tender romantic dancing at the wedding because she couldn’t stand to be with Kevin under the pretense of the false story he was telling. She was irked by the nun’s lies. For Kevin to come the next day, admit he had been lying and tell her the real truth, and then for Nora to promptly invite him in for tea, tell him a complete fiction, leading directly to reconciliation? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And whatever you believe, the more I think about it the more I really want to see that 2% world–whether it’s a spinoff of this show or just its own thing with different characters. We saw that when you lose two percent of the population, it causes great stresses on society but basic social order (including government) is preserved. Hard to see how that would happen in the reverse situation.
Would they really track down the presidential line of succession? What if the president or vice president happened to be one of the two percent? What happens to the military? To nuclear power plants? How many of that two percent would survive the first year? How great a percentage of the population could you lose before things like money or socioeconomic status would be irrelevant or just ignored?
Yet this would not be a postapocalyptic scenario like in the British show *Survivors *where more like 99.9% of people are dead and all the survivors can do is sort of scavenge from what civilization had previously created (well, there was one small group that did a little more, it’s true). You would have just enough people that with enough work and cooperation, you could maintain modern civilization if you picked a few cities to gather in (based partly on geography and resources, but partly on how lucky they were not to have too much damage from crashing jetliners) and were smart about how you allocated people to different roles and worked quickly to educate people in more practical vocations as needed. (To start with, you’d need a massive number of tow-truck operators, to clear the roads of all the smashed-up cars.)
For some significant length of time, families would presumably be cobbled together from new couples adopting all those orphans Nora talked about (and part of what would be interesting is to see how many babies like the one from the pilot would be saved before they died of thirst). Would there be a baby boom as well? Or would that at least initially put too much of a strain on a world that has to work so hard just to get back on its feet and needs all hands on deck rather than sacrificing a significant amount of productivity on childcare?
I kind of want to chew this over in a thread that goes beyond the few of us who watched this show. But what board does it belong in? And how do I avoid spoiling the show? Just not mention where I got the idea?
I too regret we do not have more in this conversation. It really was a good show, but regrettably we are a small group here and everywhere else. No one I know has watched the show 
I too believe Nora.
As for Kevin, I once again reiterate my point about the show in that season 1 was realistic, a human experience. Season 2 went all mystical with some human element. Season 3 reinforced the mystical at the start and then just abandoned the mystical storyline entirely for a scientific explanation (alternate universes). I am afraid the man who created the quagmire of the show Lost did not redeem himself here, at least as far as I could see.
Was I the only one sad that Lauries unborn child just zapped to basically a death outside the womb?
I think the other world had to be related via someone else, not shown onscreen. It allowed the explanation but left all the details to the imagination. A world full of orphans, but still they’re alive, because up until that point, they could have been zapped to their death like Lauries child.
Lindelof is redeemed for Lost in my opinion. Really, he had made up for it to me in Season one, which I took to be a wonderful and different journey (the aftermath, the governments attitude to just wiping out the cults, the fact that pretty much all except Nora and Laurie were kind of the lucky ones and didn’t lose any REALLY important. The remnant.). It had to be ended with some sort of decent ending for it be a full redemption, and that was a good one for me.
For me, this season was often about an episode where I don’t have a clue as to what is happening and where it is going, and then at the end, it fits… It was doubly so in the last episode.
I do believe her and I think it comes down to the way the actress performed the story. I believe it. There is a 98% world and her family is the lucky ones over there, since only Nora disappeared.
I also think her seeing her family and realizing she is a ghost to them is both haunting and beautiful. She knows they are OK.
I believe her.
Good point. I assume before too long, one of the few workers left in the hospital would go around and check rooms and find a fetus on the table in an empty exam room. 
I do believe Nora. But the part of her story that I have the hardest time with is how it is she got back to the 98% world. She does indicate that it took a long time. And it’s not clear just how much older she is.
But with only 2% of the population 1) finding the doctor could take a lifetime, 2) getting to the doctor would take a while, but likely the most difficult would be actually 3) building the “transporter” device. I don’t see how you could even gather up the manpower, let alone the resources. It would seem that with only a select 2%, scattered around the planet, likely just figuring out how to survive, building the “transporter” device is not plausible.
Yes, this seems to me the main reason to say Nora isn’t telling the truth, though it always is the case of “Why?”
The world across there is like MASSIVELY underpopulated. Like the post plague world of The Stand, without the corpses and diseases. Though, you do have to wonder, about the animals (can you get chicken across there? Did chicken and other animals go?). You’re talking of a city of new york being reduced to a population of a small town. However, out in the small towns, there will barely be a 100 people around. It could be an interesting post apocalyptic world to explore and the practicalities of such things as mass comms, transport, feeding themselves and not going tribal, though I suspect religion would feature MUCH more in that world…
But someone in that world getting from Oz to wherever the one person who has the information to get her back, well, it’s definitely into the level of impossibility…
I disagree somewhat. According to Wikipedia, 99.4% are killed by Stephen King’s superflu. It may not sound that different from 98%, as both are certainly the vast majority. But the 2% remaining where Nora went are more than three times as many as 0.6% remaining. And I do think that makes a difference. The 2% world would have a chance, if people were smart and organized and hard-working, to maintain a form of streamlined modern civilization. It would be much harder to pull off in the 0.6% world, particularly in any way that did not involve people congregating into a relatively few locations.
Some comparisons:
NYC’s remaining population: 170,000 vs. 50,000. But you should probably double that, because that number does not include places like Jersey City or Hoboken that are more urban than parts of Queens and Brooklyn, not to mention closer to Wall Street or Midtown. If you went by the official definition of the NYC metropolitan area, you would triple it.
Remaining population of Vermont: 12,000 vs. 3,600
A typical 25 year old with an extended family of three living grandparents, two parents, two siblings, five aunts/uncles, five first cousins, and a niece/nephew would have a strong chance of having one of their fellow family members surviving in the 2% world, maybe even two. In the “Stand” world, the odds would be decidedly against any of them surviving; more than one would be very unlikely.
My son will graduate next year in a class of about 200 kids. In the world Nora visited, roughly 4 of them would remain. In the Stephen King universe, most likely only one would still be around.
My impression of the mechanics the writers were trying to communicate: it wasn’t that the 98% went to a new planet or dimension; it was more that Earth was duplicated and on one, 2% were removed and 98% remained, while on the other, that same 98% were removed and the 2% remained.
If so, all living things other than humans–chickens, insects, bacteria, etc.–that were present on Earth at the time this happened, would be present on both worlds/dimensions/whatever-the-hell.
I agree that they would “have a chance”. But this would be mere survival, and maybe get some amenities like electricity. Maybe even phone landlines, if the people with the right skills could be located.
But consider all that would be needed for Nora to get transported back to the 98% world. Consider that if the 2% had the same distribution of adults vs. children as the normal population. It just doesn’t seem plausible.
No, I think they would have a chance for a smartphone type society. Just the existing inventory of solar panels would provide plenty of flexible, small scale, decentralized power (and keeping the production of panels going would be a major priority). And we have seen in the Third World that it is actually easier to put up towers and get people smartphones than to build a network of landlines.
I have seen estimates of a million engineers in Silicon Valley. 50,000 are left in 2% world. As long as they all drop their work on dating apps and peddling customer data to advertisers, and coordinate in a smartly directed way, I think they could keep the mobile Internet going.
I’m late to the party but I just finished this show. I loved it, especially the last two seasons (but the first, despite some weaknesses, was really good, and absolutely indispensible to the second two).
The biggest loose end I didn’t see mentioned here: what was in the May 1972 issue of National Geographic?? Would that have made Kevin Jr’s path a lot easier had he read it? Kevin Sr was wrong about the rain dance, was he wrong about the magazine too? Was he actually crazy all along?
I think Nora was telling the truth. Kevin said his dad was 91 in the last episode, so that’s, what, 20 years in the future? How much of that time did Nora spend in the 2% world? 10-15 years? That seems like plenty of time to sail to the US, look up her family, find the scientist, who had probably already started the process of building his machine, and get back to 98% Australia. With maybe 5 years to settle into her new life as a pigeon handler?
I think Kevin Sr. was right about some stuff, but also a little crazy. Does that make sense? I think you can definitely argue it both ways, but if he’s just crazy then Kevin Jr. is too, and he only imagined seeing his dad in the hotel TV. At which point you have to ask how he survived being buried, and then how he survived being shot and not treated for a long time.
I agree that Nora was telling the truth, and I like your logic. I really wish the book author hadn’t put his foot down and so strongly resisted showing the 2% world! That would have been so cool.
I don’t know that I agree with you about the first season being indispensible. Maybe just some of the episodes? I watched the pilot, the season finale, and “Guest”, and I had no problem following (and absolutely loving) S2 and S3, which I watched in their entirety.
I loved The Leftovers to death; just behind Rome and Deadwood on my all-time lists. But for me, every season has significant chunks I fast forward through on rewatch.
Season 1 was my favorite, though I typically skip past the Holy Wayne stuff, including Tom and the pregnant girl. Season 2 is excellence, though I typically skip past the hotel stuff. Season 3 was pretty good, though I skip right through the afterlife stuff. The final conversation between Nora and Kevin was a stellar finale for the series.
Wow, I never heard of anyone who liked S1 the best (although among critics, Alan Sepinwall was nearly alone in loving the series during that season; starting in S2, the rest of the criticverse came along for the ride). It’s possible that my wife might have a similar outlook as you, though. I showed her only the first few minutes of the pilot and then “Guest” before watching all of S2 with her. She said she really liked parts of it, but not the seemingly supernatural elements.
Sometimes a show looks perfect, nothing to rearrange. But sometimes you just get a feeling like you need some kind of change.
That’s what I liked about the show. To me, it wasn’t really about a mystery that needs to be solved. It’s more exploring the question: “In a world where reality is crazy, how can you tell the difference between crazy and non-crazy people? Is it crazy to be sane?”
Some of my favourite parts are where people are proposing absolutely nutsy-cuckoo ideas in a serious manner, like the scientists who want to test Nora’s house for a dimensional vortex to the angel of death, or the dog-shooting guy who suggests that dogs in disguise are controlling the world (and you can see Kevin giving it serious consideration for a minute).
I strongly disagree with your last assertion, in parentheses.
The producer/showrunner was one of the guys behind Lost and I remember him promising in an interview about The Leftovers that it wasn’t going to be about why what happened happened. I always thought of it as basically a show about grief. The two percent that disappeared amounts to the same amount of deaths as occurs in a few days or weeks. And with those deaths, most of us grieve individually and cope but when the two percent disappeared, society seemed to have broken down.