The last 20 minutes of tonight’s The Leftovers feels like an entirely different show from the nine hours and 40 minutes that precede it. Or to be more exact, it feels like the entire season has been building up to the moment in which Kevin and Matt’s idyllic drive back to Mapleton is suddenly destroyed by the two men finding that the town has descended into pure chaos. From a purely cinematic perspective, it’s a powerful, gripping conclusion. Mimi Leder directed “The Prodigal Son Returns,” and her work yields masterful stuff: Kevin running into the burning house of the Guilty Remnant to look for Jill elicited the most engagement I’ve had with the show all season.
In fact, the episode doesn’t quite come together until minute 40. “The Prodigal Son Returns” is in fact astonishingly slow, meandering through cigarette-based imagery as Jill initiates herself into the Guilty Remnant and Kevin and the Reverend Jamison bury Patti in a makeshift grave out in the woods of Cairo. And then, all of a sudden, when Kevin and Matt get to the diner, it clicks into a groove. That conversation in the diner, over cheeseburgers, might be the most important scene in the episode—Kevin finally says something that portrays his own feelings about why the disappearance happened, after spending the last nine episodes (and three years, in the timeline of the show) focusing instead on how other people are handling it. Immediately following, he finds Wayne in the bathroom, and that man’s dying wish is to grant Kevin a wish. And then the rest of the episode is Wayne’s will slowly but surely coming to pass. I’m not totally sold on whatever The Leftovers is trying to get me to buy, but the last chunk of this episode is magical.
A lot of that comes down to Justin Theroux’s performance. Carrie Coon is the big find from this show, but rediscovering Theroux’s talent has been part of the experience for me as well. Kevin is broken down and remade in this episode, and Theroux makes it work—from the not-so-subtle self-baptism as he’s washing the blood off of his hands to his confession to Matt in the diner. He emerges on the other side shaken but far more resolute than the man we saw in episode nine, “The Garveys At Their Best”—he knows who he is. And that is a man who is terrified that he is not a good man.
A lot of it, too, is the consistently powerful imagery of the show, coupled with musical direction that for once feels restrained and thought-out. It feels like Kevin is searching through hell for his daughter, and it feels like the Guilty Remnant have turned back time in a horrible, frozen way, when the sun rises on the Loved Ones dolls posed all over town, and it feels like a huge triumph, when Laurie finally screams from her disused vocal cords, “JILL!” and points back at the burning house.
It feels like a lot of things. And that is really the best way to summarize this episode: It feels like a lot of things. As I said a bit for the last episode, it’s throwing up Rorschach ink blots and waiting to see the reaction on its audience’s faces. So it’s not particularly coherent, and I’m beginning to believe that it’s not really trying to be coherent. There’s something to be said for forcing the audience to hover in the space between knowing and feeling the beats of a story—which is what The Leftovers asks us to do, when it layers a totally bizarre, bait-and-switch dream sequence in the midst of Kevin’s already erratic behavior. But at its most basic level, it makes the show awfully difficult to watch. At its best, the ambiguity opens the show up to moments like the ones with Wayne, where the show allows some doubt for whether or not Wayne really does have the powers people ascribe to him. And at worst, the ambiguity offers basic comprehension questions, like: How did Wayne get that huge wound in his stomach? What was Nora going to do before she found the baby? Of course the answer to both questions is “it doesn’t matter,” but you still have to try to figure it out.
Because, to be honest, as beautifully shot and directed and executed that last 20 minutes is, it’s thematically kind of a mess. Absolutely nothing is resolved: Rescuing your child from a house doesn’t repair your relationship with her; speaking your child’s name in a moment of crisis doesn’t fix anything, either. The Guilty Remnant went far out of its way to get the crap beat out of them, to get shot at and burned down. Patti died, and her death meant… something. And Tommy finally came home, as we have long expected he would.