Thoughts on The Leftovers

For the first three weeks of HBO’s The Leftovers, I blogged on it immediately following the episode. But after the third week, the summer turned into craziness, my husband (who is a golf writer) was away for most of it, I was at home alone with the kids, and I ended up falling behind on watching the show. By the time five episodes had piled up I knew I’d missed the boat on keeping up with the blogging. So I decided I’d sit down and watch the rest of the season in one fell swoop and blog about it at the end.

And what a season it was.

I adored it.

What started off a little slow, not really focusing on one character over another and showing a world that was intolerable in its gloominess turned into a deep, philosophical look at how we handle grief and the unknown. How we turn against each other in the very moment we should be coming closer together. How we try to move past things but they always follow us wherever we go.

The first truly spectacular episode was the third one, in which Christopher Eccleston’s reverend moved to the foreground and we focused on one particular character and what happened to his life on that fateful day. His episode culminated in the Guilty Remnants taking over his church, painting it all white, and continuing their crusade to ensure no one would forget what had happened. The rest of the season fanned out to include the other characters, and by the end of the final episode, there were enough archetypes that you could identify with at least one of them.

For me, it was Nora Durst, for no other reason than she’s married with two children. I didn’t identify with her much at all in the beginning; I didn’t like her character, I thought she was cold and strange, and didn’t quite get where she was coming from. I admired her for trying to move past the tragedy and smile in the direction of people who meant her harm (like the stupid teenagers who rob her car early on), but even when the focus moved to her trying to go to the convention as a legacy, and being upset that they’d given her the wrong badge, only to overhear how tired other people were of the legacies throwing around their tragedies instead of moving on... I still wasn’t quite sure what I thought of her.

And then the finale happened.

The season has been building to an all-out war between the Guilty Remnants cult and the rest of the citizens of the town. Officer Garvey has been warning the mayor that the GR is trouble, and that they do mean harm to the people who are there. However, Garvey is clearly suffering from a mental breakdown and people are starting to recognize that. He closes his eyes and loses long periods of time, as if he’s flitting between two universes — one in which he’s got everything under control and he sees a light at the end of this dark tunnel, and another in which he’s lost all control, the world is against him, and he’s only going to sink deeper into his own grief and heartbreak. And since the world is a dark and horrible place, we the viewers have no idea sometimes which world he’s in.

I loved the structure of the episodes. The flashback happens exactly where it needed to: in the penultimate episode, to remind us who these people once were before all hell breaks loose. Or the Christmas episode, which opens with the factory making hundreds of little rubber baby dolls, which not only becomes Kevin’s obsession in the episode, but foreshadows what happens in the finale and how the Guilty Remnants do what they do with factory-like precision.

Patti is the ringleader of the GR. I swung back and forth on my sympathy for her, but landed hard in the “NOPE” category by the end of it. I’m still trying to wrap my head around why the Guilty Remnants think what they do is OK, but Patti’s even worse than they are, because, like the best cult leaders, she’s tricking them into believing that their way is the only way. She arranges for one of their own to be killed in a brutal attack (that Patti herself led while hooded) and then tricks Garvey into capturing her while he’s in a fugue state, and goads him into killing her. He comes to his senses and won’t do it, knowing that to martyr her would make everything so much worse. He knows the truth about what she did, and she knows the truth about what he did. She could tell everyone about him tying her up and beating her up, even though he has no memory of doing so (just the mysterious dog killer knows about it aside from her). He, on the other hand, could tell everyone about what she did to one of her followers. The only way his argument loses ground is if she’s not around to answer for it. And so she does the only thing that will leave him entirely screwed: she cuts her own throat open and leaves the mess for him to clean up.

Garvey manages to get the reverend back on his side, but at what cost? In one of Garvey’s fugue states he imagines the reverend locking him away in a mental institution, which he could very well have done (was that real? Is what happens next real? There are moments where it’s not clear, but it does seem for the purpose of the other characters’ stories that it was his imagination).

Garvey’s father had a mental breakdown shortly after The Disappearance, and he’s in a mental institution, save for one episode where he tried to convince Garvey that the voices in his head are insisting that Garvey read a May 1972 issue of National Geographic.

Why this particular issue? Does it have something to do with the cover story of Yellowstone visitors being mauled by bears? Archaeological digs on the island of Thera solving the mystery of the Minoans? In any case, Garvey will have none of it, and keeps trashing each copy he gets.

Garvey’s son has been on a mission to keep safe The One, the pregnant woman carrying Holy Wayne’s child, until he discovers that she is One of Many, and there are several other poor saps trying to keep safe pregnant Asian women. And so he decides to break away and keep her safe on his own, but she escapes and leaves the baby behind. So he returns home, the only place where he thinks he might actually find help.

The prodigal son returns, but the angry teen daughter has defected over to the Guilty Remnants, putting mother Laurie in a quandary; with Patti gone, she’s now the de facto leader, and needs to be behind the GR cause, but is this a life she wants for her daughter? And if she doesn’t want to see her daughter chain-smoking and bringing pain to others, and wearing white and refusing to speak, then how can she convince the other followers that this is the correct path to follow?

What sets up the show for the beautiful and horrifying finale is the episode that comes before it, which, like the best Lost episodes, provides us with a flashback to what the lives of everyone looked like before. And what was so glorious about this episode was the acting: If you thought that Laurie was just an unsmiling, quiet, chain-smoking weirdo in the Guilty Remnant, think again. She was a vibrant mother with a wicked sense of humour who loved her family dearly, even though she knew that things between her and Kevin were in trouble. The daughter was sweet and funny, the son came and went but he was a loving member of the family. Patti was sad and confused, and believed something terrible was going to happen to everyone. The reverend and his wife were engaged members of society, part of the local parties and social scene. Kevin’s dad was a respected member of the police force. Nora Durst was a mother of two sweetly annoying children and a happy wife who was testing the waters of moving back into the workforce. And when everyone Disappeared, Kevin later says his children were so happy to see him alive, and he was grateful he didn’t lose anyone in his family. But he did... for in that moment of disappearance, Laurie was having an ultrasound, looking at the very healthy baby on the screen. The one who was there one second, and gone the next. Only she knows that she and Kevin lost a baby that day.

And that brings us to the final horrible act the GR commits. For a couple of episodes we see Patti and the GR stealing family photos out of people’s homes; Patti uses the church to arrange clothes on the floor, and I suspected they were somehow connected (especially when she kept consulting a book of photographs to make sure the outfits were correct). And then what appeared to be bodies in white sheets were carried into the church. Do they know what happened to the Disappeared? Is it possible they’ve found the bodies? What the hell are they doing?

Nope. Somehow they seem to have stashed thousands and thousands of dollars away to have meticulous wax figures made of the Disappeared, made to look exactly like the photographs, and they break into people’s homes in the dead of night and set them up as a horrifying tableau, ready to shock the Left Behinds when they wake up in the morning.

Because we saw what Nora and her family were like in the moment of the Disappearance, that the last thing she did was yell at her daughter before she was gone (every mother’s nightmare), that she read to them every night and kissed their foreheads and was an involved and engaged mother, the scene awaiting her in the kitchen — the last place she saw them all alive — is the most gut-wrenching thing I’ve seen on TV this year. It’s not exact — the GR has the boy sitting in the girl’s spot, as if to say something is slightly wrong here — but the look on Nora’s face, and the keening howl of despair that escapes her mouth she sees them, was enough to send my heart into my mouth. For the first time, she’s trying to move on with Kevin and rely on the sweet and happy memories of her family, but seeing them all sitting there looking so much like they did in life, and yet waxy and all wrong, her entire world falls out from under her.

Most of the episode happens between here and the end, and when we come back to her, she hasn’t fallen onto the floor or raced out of the house. We can only imagine how long the wailing went on, or what went through her mind when she realized what was going on or who had left these grotesque statues in her kitchen. But when we come back to her, she’s sitting at her spot at the table, stroking the hands of her fake children. To me, that was even more devastating, and I finally identified with her 100%. I imagine wanting to fold those phony statues into my chest, and hugging them so hard they would begin to disintegrate. Not wanting to let them go, not wanting to head back into the world, and just hoping I could disappear along with them. And perhaps all these thoughts race through her head, but instead she sits there for hours and hours, stroking their hands, not talking or moving, and realizing just like these statues, the memories of her children will be staring her in the face whenever she thinks she’s moved on. And she can’t move on.

The episode ends with Nora’s voiceover dictating the letter she leaves for Kevin, that she’s realized she’s stuck and can’t move on, and she will carry these children with her forever. As it’s read over an image of her carrying the wax statues upstairs and putting the children to bed one last time, the tears were streaming down my face. The heavy anvil that was sitting on my heart got heavier, and I couldn’t imagine going through anything like this. What sounds like a suicide note isn’t; she’s simply leaving, and moving far away from the house, from the wax statues, and from the horrible GR cult that has done this to her and the other townspeople.

Kevin returns to town in the midst of an all-out riot, with people setting the GR homes on fire and starting a bonfire in front of it as they toss their waxy family members into it. “How could you DO this?” asks the aging parents of the man with Down’s Syndrome as they throw his likeness into the fire. The mayor stands in the middle of the street, shocked and horrified, and looks at Kevin and blankly says, “you were right.” He’s the one who told everyone the GR were trouble, and no one listened to him. Now look what’s happened.

Kevin helps Laurie out of the burning house, but a look of terror crosses on his face as she says her first word in two years — “JILL!!” — and he races back into the house to save his daughter. The two of them walk back home together in time to find Nora standing on the porch, holding the Chosen Baby that Kevin’s son has clearly put there because he doesn’t know what else to do. A smile crosses her face as she realizes the world is full of so much death, but maybe new life can begin to change that.

If The Leftovers hadn’t gotten renewed (and it was as of last week), this actually would have been a fitting ending. Open-ended, yes, but one where we would have felt like we’d had a snapshot into their lives, and there’s hope for everyone.

But as we move into S2, things are looking up, except for the fact that the town looks like they will kill any GR member they see, and Kevin’s mental state is so precarious he’s now imagining Patti straddling him and whispering evil thoughts into his head.

The show is dark, yes, and I’m sure that has put some viewers off. But for me it does best what so many shows of its ilk do: it shows us the darkest moments one can imagine and asks what we would do in that situation.

And then, at least for me, it makes me appreciate the people I have around me all the more, because I can’t imagine suddenly losing any of them in this way.

I'm running through the entire season by memory, because I decided to just sit down and watch it with no notes. Yes, I'm sure I've missed some items, but I'm focusing on the things that affected me the most. What did you think about the first season? Will you be tuning in to the second? 

The Leftovers 1.03: Two Boats and a Helicopter

I knew that the episode that finally introduced Matt Jameson would be a good one. And it really, really was.

The episode is called “Two Boats and a Helicopter,” which I’m assuming must be a reference to the age-old Christian joke. A man is on his porch during a flood and a woman comes by in a boat and offers him a spot. He says, “No, God will save me.” The water rises and he moves to the second level of his house and another boat comes by with several people in it, and they offer him the ride as well. “No, God will save me.” Finally, he has to move to the roof and a helicopter comes by and drops a ladder. He waves it away and says, “No, God will save me.” Suddenly a rush of water comes by and the man drowns. He goes to Heaven and sees God and says, “I believed you would save me! Why did you forsake me?” And God says, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want?!” This is an episode about looking for signs, and needing to know which ones to follow, and which to ignore, and most importantly, knowing when to help yourself.

Matt Jameson is the minister we’ve seen on a number of occasions handing out pamphlets about the bad people who disappeared during the Departure. We’ve seen him on street corners with people throwing things at him (“occupational hazard,” he says in this episode), and surprisingly, getting a hug from Nora Durst in the previous episode, despite us assuming she’d sock him in the nose.

In this episode we find out that his flock has weakened: during an impassioned sermon where he tells the story of a young boy who asked God for something wicked and then suffered the consequences, we see his congregation consists of eight people who don’t even seem to be paying attention. He’s deeply in debt, unable to pay the full-time caregiver who stays with his wife during the day, and he’s about the lose his church if he can’t come up with $135,000 within 24 hours. So he retrieves a couple of money rolls he has hidden, goes to a casino, and manages to gamble the money at the roulette table to turn it into $160,000. But... he doesn’t make it to the bank on time, and loses the church anyway.

It sounds like a pretty standard plotline, but the greatness of this episode lies in its details.

Why does his wife — Donna from The West Wing — need a caregiver? Because she’s in a catatonic state and needs round-the-clock care. After answering questions about “Mary” with a curt “she’s fine” all day long, we’re led to assume that whoever this Mary person is, she’s at home and depressed and he’s staying out all day as an escape. When he first returns home to find the caregiver sitting morosely on the couch, we think that’s her. But it’s not; that’s Roxanne, the caregiver who hasn’t been paid for three weeks and is pretty pissed off about it. When he does go to see Mary, who is, for all intents and purposes, a vegetable, we see him deal with her with so much love and tenderness that you forgive him everything else he’s done in the episode. So far we’ve seen people who lost loved ones during the Departure, as well as those who are left behind in depressed states. But what about those whose current state of illness rests entirely in the events of the Departure itself? Matt and Mary were driving down a road when the driver of a car coming towards them suddenly disappeared, and the driverless car just slammed right into them. If there were ever a case of shit happens, this is the epitome of it.

But then Matt, the Episcopalian preacher, is suddenly surrounded by people who believe the Departure was actually the Rapture (same letters, just rearranged). They believe that only the good and holy went up to Heaven, and it’s the bad ones who stayed behind. How could an Episcopalian minister be left behind? How could a minister’s wife? Did they do something bad? Who’s going to come to his sermons now that they think he’s a bad person who can’t be trusted; after all, he wasn’t taken up into the sky with the holy ones.

And that’s why Matt devotes his life now to trying to break down that misconception, reminding people that pedophiles, murderers, drug dealers, rapists, and generally awful people were among the innocent, that the Departure had nothing to do with God’s Plan, and instead is an unexplained incident. “If we can no longer separate the innocent from the guilty,” he says, “all our suffering is meaningless.”

He must convince people that what happened wasn’t the Rapture, because he can’t live in a world where he was one of the ones who’d been left behind.

This isn’t a man who’s lost his faith, though; to the contrary, he’s watching everywhere for signs, hoping that God will show him that he’s doing the right thing. He tells his meagre congregation the story of a 10-year-old boy who has all the attention until a baby sister comes along, so he prays to get the attention back. When he is stricken with cancer, he fights it and survives, and then must face the question: was he punished or rewarded?

We can’t answer this question, just like we can’t say why these people suddenly left. Matt can’t offer a suggestion as to where anyone went, but he believes that their Departure was a test, “not for what came before, but after,” as he tells Nora Durst, who turns out to be none other than his sister. “If it’s a test,” she replies, “then you’re failing it.”

He needs to hold onto the church, because he truly believes he can lure his flock back through his pamphleteering. He needs people to believe that what happened wasn’t the Rapture, so much so that he’s willing to hurt people to do so (including Nora, when he reveals to her that her husband had been having an affair). He doesn’t care that he’s alienated most people from himself, and doesn’t see that even if he were to convince them that the Rapture took the guilty along with the innocent, no one will come back to his church because he makes them think the worst of people.

He needs to believe he’s doing the right thing, but is thwarted wherever he believes he sees a sign. He asks his congregation to pray for eight-year-old Emily, who is in a coma in the hospital. When he goes to the hospital to see her, she’s gone; she’d revived and went home. His face lights up. “My congregation prayed for her this morning!” he excitedly tells the porter. “She woke up last night,” the porter replies, reminding him of the futility of everything he does.

When two pigeons get into a casino where he’s “conducting business,” he believes it’s a sign that he needs to go to that roulette table. And on his way back to the casino to do just that, he sees pigeons sitting on a traffic light that’s flashing red. And so he throws it all on red... and wins. And does it again, and again, until he’s up to $160,000. Does that mean it really was a sign from God?

No, because he first almost kills a man who tries to steal the money from him, and then the Guilty Remnants stage an attack so he’ll get laid up in the hospital for so long that he’ll miss the payment at the bank, and his church will be turned over to none other than them, a group he sought to help but who stabbed him in the back in return.

Is there a miracle in Matt’s future? Presumably if they cast Janel Moloney as his wife, they’re doing it because they need an actress in the part with some dramatic heft, and I doubt they’d cast her just to have her lying in a bed all the time. So perhaps his miracle really will come. He’s got $140,000 in his pocket (he returned the initial $20,000 to its container), after all.

The symbols throughout the episode weren’t just for Matt’s eyes; there were several in there for the viewers as well. Let’s do this old school, shall we?:

Did You Notice?

• The hymn numbers behind Matt during his sermon correspond to the following hymns in the Episcopalian hymnal: 518: Christ is the sure foundation; 656: Blest are the pure at heart; 602: Kneels at the feet of his friends; 376: Joyful, joyful, we adore thee. While the latter two are fairly common hymns in the Christian church, the first two seem to be directly related to the subject matter of the show.
•  Pigeons aren’t often mentioned in the bible, but when they are, it’s usually involving a sacrifice of some kind.
• Matt’s wife’s name is Mary, the same as the mother of Christ and Mary Magdelene. Just as Mary Magdelene washed the feet of Christ, in this episode we see Matt, who is set up as a flawed Christ figure, washing Mary.
• I didn’t mention the opening credits last week, which is when we saw them for the first time, but I wanted to mention them now because they are spectacular. Using Christian imagery, we see the Departure as many of those left behind see it: as some sort of act of God, ripping their loved ones from them. But the violence and agony of the painting begs the question: what sort of God would do this to people?
• Matt’s coma-induced dream is filled with imagery, from a church filled with people (many of whom are GRs, which is prescient indeed) to a murky-sounding singing as if they’re underwater, a suggestion that he’s being baptized, but into a new world that might not be a good one, to a place on fire where a little girl named Laura (a reference to Laurie?) asks why no one is doing anything, to him having sex with his wife before the accident, and her morphing into Laurie, which then causes his body to catch on fire. Did he have an affair with Laurie? Does he believe Mary’s accident is his fault and he’s going to hell?
• During that dream, when he first passes into the vestry, you see him sitting on a table and a doctor comes in and says, “I’m sorry, Matthew, but it’s spreading,” an indication to the audience that he, in fact, was the 10-year-old boy who overcame cancer after wishing he could have more attention, and we’re seeing an eerie flashback to his parents finding out the news.
• And just to link back to Ye Olde Lost days for a moment, did you notice that on the roulette table, the second number, which changed his 40,000 into 80,000 (before that became 160,000), was 23?

An excellent episode! What did you think?

The Leftovers 1.02: Penguin One, Us Zero

There was some discussion in the comments after last week’s episode of whether Damon Lindelof has no more originality in him and just keeps writing stories where mysterious things happen with no explanation, or whether Damon Lindelof is a humanist who explores how people react in dire situations, and I loved reading the back and forth from everyone, both positive and negative. As I always said with Lost and every show, the comments are a place for everyone.  

I’ll be perfectly honest: for four years, I’ve felt like an apologist for Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and I’m not. Sure, Lost had its flaws and faults, but for me, it was a fantastic show, and I adored that finale. Many people didn’t, but many people did, and I’m tired of people who cannot wait to meet me just to say, “That finale SUCKED” just to see if it’s going to get a rise out of me. It won’t. I enjoyed it; I don’t know why I have to apologize for having loved it, or why people feel it’s necessary to point out all the flaws as if they’re trying to take away this thing that I love. Trust me: I’ve studied every frame of that finale and wrote a 22,000-word piece on why it works: you’re not going to convince me otherwise.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was introduced to someone, only to discover that the only reason I was being introduced to her was because she thought the Lost finale sucked. Once I realized why she’d been told she needed to meet me, I was already standing in front of her and had no way to excuse myself from the conversation without looking rude, so I looked at her and joked, “Well, maybe give me 15 minutes and see if I can change your mind!”

“No, you won’t,” she replied, without a smile. “Because you would be wrong. Damon Lindelof is the devil.” And that’s when I just excused myself from the conversation, not really caring if it was polite or not. The devil? Really? Wow. No wonder the poor guy left Twitter; with fan thought processes that simplistic, I’m thinking he’s better off leaving social media altogether and actually doing something productive with his time.

I’m not an apologist for Lindelof; I simply love the way he thinks, and his constant examination of human nature — he does not believe we’re inherently evil, but inherently good, as he showed for six years on Lost. Despite comments to the contrary, I respectfully think he’s not presenting some overly Christian viewpoint, but quite the opposite, saying that our connections with each other are more important than our connections to some big bearded deity in the sky. As I’ve said for four years, he doesn’t write to the end game, but instead his writing reflects the lives we live. When you wake up tomorrow morning, are you going to know exactly how that day is going to end, and just live your day working to that ending? Or is it just possible that things might happen that you don’t see coming? At some point in your life has something mysterious happened that had no explanation whatsoever? Or can you explain away absolutely every single moment of your life and the lives of those around you?

I don’t know Lindelof personally, but I would bet that’s what he’s working towards: looking at things that happen to us on a daily basis and how we respond to the unexpected. In real life, it’s someone who cuts us off and then shouts obscenities out their car windows at us. What the hell is that guy’s problem, and isn’t he the one who just drove like a maniac? Shouldn’t I be shouting obscenities at him? It’s a mystery.

Now, would I write a show around that incident?

Of course not. Boring.

So to explore these ideas of human nature, Lindelof goes bigger: what would happen to a bunch of people trapped on an island with no explanation of how they got there or why? What would happen if 2% of the population just suddenly disappeared?

In both cases, these fantastical events are simply the catalysts that he uses as a metaphor to explore real-life responses to it. That guy who cut you off in traffic? In the big picture, a menial thing that you’ll never remember on your deathbed, but when it happens you think it’s the WORST THING EVER, you’ll tweet and Facebook about it, you’ll rant about it at work all day, and it’ll entirely affect everything.

And then something truly terrible happens in your life, and you forget every stupid thing you’ve complained about for the past year.

On Lost, those people were trapped on an island, but we identified with it because they responded and dealt with things just like people who are lost in their everyday lives, not tethered to anything in particular, questioning the decisions that got them this far, wondering why. In The Leftovers these people are reacting to people who literally disappeared, but we can watch it as an examination of people who suddenly lose someone with no explanation. Ever had someone break up with you without offering any valid explanation? Or a loved one die quite suddenly with no obvious medical problems? What does it feel like to be suddenly left alone? How could they do that to you? Why is this happening to you?

That is what this show is about. Lost was about the people who disappeared. The Leftovers is about the people who have been left behind by the people who disappeared.

Lindelof isn’t a writer who keeps writing the same material, but a man looking to explore all facets of human nature in its darkest, lowest moments. And that’s why I love what he does. I appreciate and respect comments to the contrary, and welcome them as long as they actually have something backing them. You want to point out that The Leftovers has a number of flaws, can drag at times, and frankly, is a little too damn dark and could use some humour? Hey, I’m right there with you. I wish there was some humour in this aside from joking about the celebrities who were taken, and that we could see a bit of a lighter side at times, but I’m willing to give him more time. I’m intrigued by Christopher Eccleston’s minister character, and the fact that, despite the girls understandably thinking she’s going to punch him in the nose, she gives him a hug on the way past him. What’s the story there?

So now, onto the second episode. We go from a gory and violent ambush against a man who might be a charlatan, might be the real deal, but generally surrounds himself with Asian girls while purporting to heal bigwigs with deep pockets. And Tom Garvey steps up to save Christine, the one girl Holy Wayne thinks is the most important above all the others. Tom becomes a killer in order to obey Wayne’s orders to protect Christine at all costs, making Wayne an even slipperier character. Who the hell is this guy? Can he be trusted at all? And why is Christine so damned important?

Meanwhile, Kevin is dealing with people thinking he just might be a dog-killing crackpot, and by the time the dog killer’s pickup truck shows up in Kevin’s driveway, I started to think he just might be one, too. But when Jill and her friend show up in the doorway and take the beer from the guy, and then Jill asks who he was, I was relieved. Thank goodness this wasn’t just a figment of Kevin’s imagination. Kevin is drawn to this guy because he acknowledges something that Kevin’s been feeling all along: that the world is no longer the place it once was, and that “these are not our dogs, not anymore.” Other people think Kevin’s going crazy, but this guy suggests Kevin might be the only sane one around. At least he’s not burning his brother’s clothes (and dentures) in the front yard.

One of the reasons people are waiting for Kevin to lose his shit is because his father (despite his protestations to the contrary) has already lost his. We see him in the mental institution — kissing Mayor Lucy — and he seems to be pretty together, until he begins talking to the voices around him. And when he does, he tells Kevin that they will try to contact him with a message. Earlier that day, Kevin put a bagel in the conveyer-belt toaster oven and it never came out, as if things just disappearing into thin air will just become a way of life. But when his father tells him this he decides he needs to go and find out if that bagel did, indeed, disappear. Maybe he’ll reach in and there will be a note from beyond? Or he’ll find a croissant? But no... it’s just a burnt bagel. I thought this moment was a bit of humour (which, I must say again: there NEEDS TO BE SOME HUMOUR IN THIS SHOW), in its rendering of Occam’s razor: sometimes the easiest explanation isn’t that the bagel got sucked up into some Holy Bagel Rapture, but that it goes stuck in the gears — like every friggin’ bagel I’ve ever stuck in one of those stupid conveyer-belt toaster ovens — and is burnt. From now on, Kevin, just use the damn push-down toaster.

Meanwhile, over at the GR house, we find Meg Abbott finding out the hard way that it’s not as easy as she thought it might be to become a Guilty Remnant, as she’s stuck in the Pledge House for weeks. Laurie is assigned to her and has her cutting wood and keeps taking her things, but she doesn’t seem to be getting to her. It’s only when she finally reveals that, like Meg, she was escaping a life that seemed to others to be ideal, that Meg finally realizes she’s not alone.

The saddest part of the episode (and the one that makes Aimee and Jill even more annoying than they’ve already been) is the section focusing on Nora Durst. The woman who lost her husband and two children on October 14th still drives around in the SUV with the little stick-people stickers on the back showing a happy million-dollar family, plays The Chipmunks CDs while she drives so her imaginary children will enjoy travelling in the car, and keeps a bag of jellybeans in the glove compartment as a treat for them. The girls cruelly follow her around after she purposefully pushes a coffee mug off a table in the café as if she gets off on people letting her get away with things out of pity, and they follow her to the house of an elderly couple looking to collect benefits for losing their son. She asks them questions that are hurtful, and they stop her after she asks if their son knew more than one language: “Charlie had Down’s Syndrome,” they tell her bluntly. She apologizes, and tells them that she has to continue asking. “To your knowledge,” she says, with a pained expression on her face, “Did your son have more than 20 sexual partners?”

Why does Nora do this job in particular? Is it a Norm Peterson thing, where the company figures others will allow her to ask these questions because she carries around even more pain than they do? Or is there some catharsis in it? By inflicting these questions on others, could she be perhaps alleviating some of her own suffering from having to answer them herself? Is it a form of group grieving? Or passive-aggression?

The title of the episode is “Penguin One, Us Zero,” and it refers to the blow-up penguin in the psychiatrist’s office. He tells Kevin that he uses it for his children’s therapy sessions when they need to work out aggression. Everyone in this episode is working out some sort of aggression in one way or the other, whether it’s shooting dogs, stealing jellybeans, knocking mugs off tables, chopping wood, or slaughtering the people at Wayne’s compound. But no matter how much aggression they take out on others, it’s not removing any of their own pain. That penguin just keeps popping right back up again, but everyone else is unable to move much of the time. “She’s gone,” Patti writes on her paper at the end of the episode, and she’s wrong: Meg isn’t gone, but has chosen to stay with the cult. However, she’s chosen to leave the real world and join a world of silence and chain smoking. Not exactly a penguin who bounces back from the blows that come at her.

Once again Max Richter’s music is ace. However, it would be nice to hear some original music from Richter: hearing music that I know really well playing throughout every scene is becoming a distraction for me. (However, I was thrilled to hear Ty Segall’s “Thank God for the Sinners” playing on the radio in the twins’ Prius.)

While I’m happy to be back in the world of Damon Lindelof, I can understand and appreciate the skeptics out there who feel like they were burned once, and just want to disappear like Kevin’s bagel. And it’s for that reason that, despite enjoying these first two episodes, I do hope the pace picks up soon, and we find some humour embedded in there very soon, or else Lindelof’s audience might just disappear in the same fashion as that 2%.

But then again, one of those departed was Balki Bartokomous. And I remember that while Lost was good in the beginning, it didn’t become stunning until the fourth episode. So I’m actually quite happy knowing that I’ll be one of the leftovers still watching, no matter what.