Leftovers’ Boss Damon Lindelof Explains Sunday’s Bats$%t insane Episode

A moment later he realizes it’s a hotel room, but who’s room? There’s the music. There’s the woman in scrubs. It means that Kevin survives, which is good news. Michael was dragging his body out of Virgil’s trailer.

Kevin wakes up in a bathtub filled with water over his head and as he flops to the ground like a fish splashing around on the shore, he looks around and has no clue where he’s at right now. Kevin could have chosen the police uniform, a clerical outfit or GR whites in addition to the suit. (It’s a reference to Jesus and the Book of Revelations, for my fellow secular humanists out there.) Given his choices, the plain black suit is clearly the way to go. Where is he and why is someone trying to kill him? Our Kevin has landed himself in an worldwide spy thriller! And I found myself moved by Kevin’s confusion and desperation, and by the Jeopardy!-related pathos of Patti.

It’s also worth noting that – when Virgil and Kevin spoke openly in their cloak and dagger parking garage meeting, and Grandpa Murphy was pressed about how he made his way to this alternate world with Kevin – he said he was “atoning”. Like all of the other genre tropes The Leftovers has played with this season, nothing here feels quite right. Kevin went through this journey, through this celestial hotel setting, and it brought him back to life. Take the gun. Shoot Patti.

In one of the most moving passages in Virgil’s “Aenid”, protagonist Aeneas finds his father in the underworld and asks him why so many souls were gathered around a distant river.

Yeah, as if that’s gonna work. “He’s gotten a promise from Nora saying she’ll come back if he can rid himself of these voices”. Does he believe love and attachment are pointless? You don’t need The Answers here, anymore than you needed them when Tony Soprano became Kevin Finnerty for his own sojourn in hotel purgatory. The Kevin and Patti story has always felt like an understandably desperate ploy to keep Dowd in the fold after her character’s death, and there’s only so much impact to the death of a character only one person can see.

This might seem kind of obvious, but Michael’s tearful state upon answering his Grandpa’s door last week seemed to indicate he knew something bad was going to happen.

Kevin fails a couple of times but eventually makes it through the questions. We even meet Patti’s ex-husband Neil, an abusive, hateful man who’s well aware of his fate. Patti is still alive and she’s no longer the Senator and she’s no longer the little girl.

I bring this up because if you have watched any small amount of TV or films over the past 20 years or so, you saw that coming. Pre-Departure, she’s a sobbing, nervous wreck; post-Departure, she’s icy and strong with belief. There’s a few implication of maybe something more going on there. Kevin’s final mission is to return the child to Jarden and push her down the Orphan’s Well.

The dystopian version of Jarden was unusual; stranger still was the man on the bridge that assured Kevin that what was happening was more real than anything. “If you do this, it will change you”, he says. The moment when Kevin pushes her into the well is hard to watch, because the adorable, big-eyed Patti has yanked on our heartstrings with all her tiny, sundressed might. He’s seen what Kevin’s capable of and might now believe his condition to be as real as his Grandpa did. Kevin could have dreamed this world based on situations and people he’d encountered in real life. They’re all already dead. Aside from the fact that the show can’t stack up to the formal rigor of those masters (Craig Zobel, the director of “International Assassin”, doesn’t do surrealism or ambiguity well), it doesn’t feel like a terribly apt comparison unless you’re using them as a cudgel to beat this leaden stuff with.

No, seriously. It really doesn’t make a difference. Kevin killing Patti again and again, yet he’s still there. Once Kevin figures this out, he strangles Neil and grabs Patti to leave for the well. It’s a testament to how much sympathy this episode builds for her that not only does he jump to help her, but that I wanted him to. A moment later, the Earth begins to rumble and the well caves in on both of them. It’s “water under the bridge”, she says. She could have, but she didn’t. With one final tale, of her four night run on Jeopardy, Kevin finally finds the strength to drown Patti in the shallow water of the well. In this world, Wayne is one of Patti’s security guards, and he vaguely recalls Kevin’s face, then chalks it up to a trick of the mind.

I guess a big question is whether this all actually happened or if it was an elaborate hallucination, a product of the poison and Kevin’s own subconscious. “Holy shit”, says Michael, who’s been keeping vigil.

So, did it work? He opts for the sleek James Bond number, and wearing it seems to determine his path: A hotel employee nearly immediately knocks to deliver flowers to a Mr. Harvey, and before Kevin can tip him with the stash of Euros he digs out of his pocket, the bellhop pulls a knife and attacks. He killed Patti three times.

He’s also now filming The Girl On The Train with Emily Blunt, while it’s just been announced that wife Jen will star opposite Robert de Niro in Taylor Hackford’s The Comedian. The episode is boldly performed, with Ann Dowd, Marceline Hugot, Paterson Joseph, and Steven Williams getting to play wildly different versions of their characters. He had to refuse the chance to kill himself, and in the end, he had to be willing to die to finish the job. Maybe an opposing force has kept Kevin from killing Patti, and all the frightful things he did in this episode are triumphs of mind over illusion.

“The Leftovers” is the first time you’ve ever directed episodic television, and Lindelof hands you two pivotal episodes: “Lens” with that fantastic scene with Carrie Coons and Regina King, and tonight’s game-changer.

Except that would be a cheat, and generally speaking, The Leftovers doesn’t cheat. Not to mention how Kevin and Patti are both inside that collapsing well at the end of the episode. She fights him off a bit as he cries, but it’s over.