What I’m Watching: The Leftovers

The Leftovers: Season 1, Episode 9 “The Garveys at Their Best” (A-)

This episode was enormously effective, flashing back to before the rapture to showcase all of our favorite characters – excluding Meg and Dean – and to see what they were up to in their more normal lives. It’s most eerie to see both Laurie and Kevin Sr. interacting with people in a usual way. What’s very clear, of course, is that few of these people were actually happy, evidenced most in Laurie’s negative reaction to Kevin smoking and his desire to save the deer and Nora’s inability to retrieve a simple phone call while her husband sat completely distracted on his phone at the table with his kids. Seeing Jill happy with her brother at home was a real surprise, and Matt too seemed so full of positive energy with his non-comatose wife around. This episode managed to still incorporate a good degree of foreboding eeriness, particularly revolving around the deer and Patti’s prophetic visions of something bad on the way. What was most mesmerizing was the rapture event itself, since it seemed by the tail end of the episode that there wouldn’t be time left and this had to be a few years before the big day. Instead, it struck at the most devastating time possible, literally severing the link between Tom and Jill, disappearing Kevin’s adulterous mistake into thin air, removing Nora’s entire crazy family in an instant, and, most powerful of all, removing the baby in the sonogram Laurie was looking at. What a heart-wrenching hour which makes me incredibly excited and anxious for the finale.