Sigmund Brower, the author, described the storytelling method as “hiding the thumb.” You give the who, the what, the when, the where, but don’t reveal the why. It’s very effective for engaging the reader/viewer’s sense of curiousity. That’s what The Leftovers does.
Just finished season 2. I’m watching it, and it’s like… it’s like I have to squint against the grandeur.
Okay, so it was really good. I got worried around the middle of season 3 that it was going to come down to a really simplistic conclusion along the lines of “Yep, it’s totally a miracle and all this stuff that the characters have totally coincidentally chosen to interpret as being aligned with the biblical tradition they grew up in, as opposed to the many thousands of other faiths out there or some completely unknown faith/entity, actually is evidence of a biblical creator god, and you should just expect to spend the rest of the season absorbing that message.”
But of course it didn’t. Which is good. And FWIW, Nora’s version of events in the final episode aligns with my “best case scenario” theory. Although I realize there’s still some questions opened up by that which aren’t so neatly explained, and that Nora herself may be… misrepresenting things. Because people lie all the time. Even people with a reputation for honesty. Especially when it comes to deeply personal matters and trauma.
I actually think the more cynical of the two female physicists had a pretty good, if incredibly dark, take on where they (the 2%) may have ended up, and where anyone who tried to follow would have ended up as well, assuming no divine intervention.
Wait, remind me of what those two physicists suggested happened to the two percent?
Well, even though it’s open spoilers:
The one female physicist was explicit that she figured they’d just have gone to some random point in the void of space, and obviously not survived much longer. Because what are the odds of ending up in a breathable atmosphere if it’s just an unguided physical process?
I liked the scientists who wanted to study Nora to see if she was some kind of focal point for the Angel of Death.
Of course, everything in The Leftovers is just what our dog rulers want us to believe so you have to take it with a grain of salt.
I liked how that (to me at least) neatly explained why the field investigator who showed up at the door to do interviews and take readings did such a terrible job of approaching his “subjects.” Because he was either making a calculated effort to get the door slammed in his face, or he was not really a scientist, but some kind of a nutjob/hack. And given their hypothesis, and how it was explained to Nora over the phone when she eventually answered, I’d say that’s 100% in line with the latter. Roughly analogous to when creationists turned self-described geologists look to go digging up dinosaur fossils. They may be able to get a permit to dig on federal land, they may even find a fossil to dig up, but that doesn’t make them actual geologists, and it doesn’t mean they’ll know how to excavate a site and interpret their find scientifically.
My takeaway was that if something crazy and impossible happened in real life, ANY explanation you tried to make for it would sound crazy and impossible!
Reaching back to this comment… just because Nora says something, and Keven believes her, doesn’t mean it actually happened. That’s how I resolve her explanation of events. While much of the series has focused on the nexus between certain kinds of mental illness and certain religious experiences (Kevin), it has also focused a lot on characters engaging in deception, including self-deception.
Except no scientist (okay, no good scientist who knew that they were dependent on maintaining good will with subjects to get good data) would approach Nora as they did. The MIT scientists/engineers in Season 2 were much closer to authentic in my mind. “We want this thing from you, here is what we will give, here is why we want it so much since you ask. No, we don’t think you’re stupid, and whether we say it out loud or not clearly we understand it’s a lot to take in and best done sitting down together.”
I loved this show but I was mildly disappointed that the “weird dog behavior” subplot was dropped. I guess minor plot lines in shows get dropped without explanation all the time but that one had me intrigued in the early going.
I had no idea that the same person was involved with Watchmen, but it makes sense. Throughout watching The Leftovers, I kept having this thought, like, “Wow, the way so many story threads don’t just have a simple setup/payoff, but come up over and over again, long after you think they were done, and keep the plot going in new/interesting directions, keeping the ultimate outcome unpredictable without pulling shit out of thin air or injecting an uncalled for idiot plot (as opposed to keeping the established, hey, the guy is mentally ill plot going), is a lot like Watchmen.”
I like that style of writing because the setup/payoff is writing 101*, to the point that the payoffs will often become predictable once the setup is established, and it makes it difficult to sustain interest beyond the length of a feature film. For a series following an arc, rather than something more episodic like Friends, to sustain interest even for a season, it needs to do more.
*caveat: unfortunately, some major Hollywood writers (like J.J. Abrams), can’t even seem to manage this, but of course there will be exceptions and I am just speaking generally here. But if a script isn’t going to set things up and at least lay the scene before shit just starts to happen willy-nilly, then the writing had better be otherworldly levels of amazing.
For all we know, they join 140 million other corpses in space, I believe she said.
I think it had to do with the dogs’ owners having departed so a number of dogs became feral. Was it supposed to be all dogs?
It was not all dogs—at least not at its most basic. When the dog-hunter comes back, there is the implication that there is something crazy going on involving dogs (not just that the dogs have gone feral and become dangerous, but, like, more than that—almost in the same ballpark as thinking you are the second coming of Jesus Christ). But I think this is just another example of how hard it can be to tell what “sane” or “normal” looks like when something as batshit as the Departure occurrs. The truth is, dog-hunter was always a little unhinged, he just didn’t seem quite so much with so many feral dogs running about, and with much of his character being introduced through the POV of Kevin, who was himself a few kibbles short of some kibbles and bits.
Anyway, I thought there was sufficient payoff with that plot line, in the sense that it was revealed it wasn’t really a plot line. Just some crazy SOB getting his jollies off by shooting dogs. That it happened to also be a public service (feral dogs) is beside the point. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a crazy dog-murderer is just a crazy dog-murderer.
I don’t know what the “reasonable explanation” would be in that universe. God or some force seems to have targeted humans and humans only for departure. Not animals or inanimate objects. At the least, it seems humans matter in the Leftovers universe well above all of us just being sacks of meat.
So what to expect in that universe? I guess I wouldn’t bet on everyone being okay, given the Departure, I wouldn’t be surprised by a more “organized” outcome rather than chaotic.
I regard this is as “sometimes we’ve got to simplify a story, otherwise it’s too complicated in itself at the start”. It becomes a different story if 2% of farmed animals disappear (which we can measure) and cats where, well. how could we tell? Buildings disappearing? Then what about the people inside them when it happens? Chunks of insects disappearing? 3% of rare animals when there’s only 20 left in the world, does a chunk of one go?
Sometimes you’ve got to define the story, otherwise you’re spending so much time telling the story you don’t want.
I thought the premise was that dogs who witnessed a departure went insane. I can pretty clearly remember a character explaining it – I want to say the crazy dog guy but my memory points to the nihilistic teen party in the first episode – but it’s been years so for all I know it’s an “alternate ending to Big” type memory.
Wasn’t it established in season 3 that Dean (dog-killing man) was nutty as a fruitcake?
The basis for the book/TV series is the religious notion of a departure, here taken in a more secular direction.
But having it be people only fundamentally changes the nature of the story, that’s all. A bunch of random objects disappearing, including some people and animals… it isn’t really any more explicable than just people, it still violates known natural laws, if everything disappears the way it did in the show, without an obvious physical trace. But it could be explained by some sort of “space burp” or whatever that just happened to affect certain objects in certain places.
That sort of explanation doesn’t make as much sense in a people only departure. If it’s people only, it’s not dependent upon physical place only, or on just being a living organism. People are somehow special in that sort of story. People aren’t special if other objects are included.
Sure was. And he believed some government guy was actually a werewolf. Something to do with a sandwich.