Last night’s episode of The Leftovers — the season’s penultimate — was particularly insane, even by Damon Lindeloff standards. While we learned approximately nothing about Kevin’s fate post-Patty battle, we did get a terrifying glimpse into the mind and coke habits of Meg, as well as an explanation about Evie’s disappearance. As usual, though, the episode brought up more questions than it did answers. Here are a few of the loose ends that Lindeloff’s forced us to contend with for another week:
1. Why did Evie join the GR?
Did anybody else scream audibly at the sight of Evie in the back of that trailer? Just me, then? Anyway, we finally know where our girl’s been these past few episodes — she wasn’t kidnapped (at least not technically, though she may have been brainwashed), she didn’t Depart, and she sure as hell isn’t dead. Somehow, the Guilty Remnant got their hands on Evie and her pals and convinced them to fake their own disappearance, likely to destroy the people of Jarden’s permeating sense of safety. But it’s unclear just how the GR pulled Evie and Co. into their ranks. We know Meg and Evie met back when Meg first visited Jarden in search of answers about her mother — the two shared a bag of baby carrots, a sense of ennui about the town (“I’m sorry you didn’t find whatever you were looking for here. Nobody ever does,” said Evie), and a cheesy knock-knock joke about a pencil (the same one Evie told her father earlier in the season). Did Meg go back to find Evie after joining the GR? Did they both come upon the cult separately? Did Meg dream up the plan to have Evie pseudo-Depart? What’s the long game here? And why are they spreading bad knock-knock jokes?
Here’s a hint: In an interview with Variety this morning, Lindeloff suggested that Evie might have joined the chain-smoking cult because she’s a particularly disillusioned teen. “We were having all those conversations very, very early on and we decided the girls were really angry about [Jarden’s] exceptionalism. They sing the Miracle anthem but they sing it snidely and snarkily and with some degree of teenage rebellion. We’re like, ‘Yeah, they faked it.’ And obviously this is a horrible thing to do — it goes well beyond a teenage prank, to put your parents through this.” (He also provides plenty of thoughts about keeping mysteries alive in today’s media environment, the danger of revealing answers too soon, and, strangely, Picnic At Hanging Rock, which he cites as an inspiration for this particular plotline.)
2. What’s with all the secrets?
In last week’s Lynchian dream-isode, the mysterious man on the bridge in Jarden whispered a lengthy sentence into Kevin’s ear before Kevin carried little Patty to the well. When Patty innocently asked what the man had said to Kevin, Kevin replied, “It’s private.” Similarly, this week, after some serious prodding, Isaac the psychic-slash-palm-reader told Meg what her mother’s last words to her would have been. In both cases, the audience was left without a single clue as to what the hell was going on. Which is typical for The Leftovers, and typically frustrating. What we do know is that whatever Isaac told Meg, it caused her to a) lie to her own husband about Isaac’s supernatural abilities (“He’s not the real deal,” she said, even after Isaac correctly called out her mom’s aversion to walnuts) and b) spit dramatically onto the ground outside of the bus. Did Isaac tell her to leave a trace of her DNA in Jarden? Or was she just pissed off at Isaac, at Jarden, at the world, for being as pointless as the pencil in her knock-knock joke?
3. What’s with all the buses and trailers—and what’s Meg planning?
By my count, there were at least four different large-scale forms of transportation in this episode. First, Meg and her fiancé hopped a bus to Jarden, where the camera lingered for a while on Meg’s forced smiles and a group of tourists singing merrily (notably, they were singing “Wade In The Water,” which Wikipedia notes was associated with the Underground Railroad and “contained explicit instructions to fugitive slaves on how to avoid capture and the route to take to successfully make their way to freedom” — this song choice, like all of The Leftovers’ song choices, can’t be a coincidence.) The couple took the same bus home, albeit after Meg spit outside of it; later, Meg kicks off the present-day portion of the episode by throwing a grenade onto a school bus full of children. (The bus doesn’t explode, but Meg’s point has been made: The threat of violence is the answer.) Finally, we watch as Tom finds Evie inside a giant silver trailer — the same trailer that appears in a brief flash-forward from Meg’s perspective, suggesting she’s planning on driving it across the bridge to Jarden and doing something terrible with it. Is she going to blow it up with the girls inside, or outside? Run over the officers standing guard? Turn it into a taco truck?
4. What the hell is going on with Meg and Tom?
Let’s recap what’s happened so far with Meg and Tom this season. Meg nearly sets Tom on fire. Meg sexually assaults Tom inside of yet another trailer. Meg threatens Tom’s mother. Meg shows up at Tom’s fake-hug-healing ceremony and tells him, “I can do this for real.” (But, wait, can she?) Tom trashes the GR’s headquarters in hopes of finding Meg. It works. Meg and Tom take a road trip to Jarden, listening to Xanadu and flirting. Meg and Tom make out in a bar. Tom asks Meg, “Why did you fuck me?” Meg answers, calmly, “I wanted to get you pregnant.” Right. That about sums it up. It makes sense that Meg and Tom have bonded, albeit in an utterly perverse fashion — both have some serious daddy/abandonment issues (Meg’s stepdad left her a year after adopting her; Tom’s stepdad is currently crawling out of a hole in the ground), both feel persecuted, both are looking for some kind of explanation, or at least something to lose themselves in. What doesn’t make sense is Meg’s understanding of human biology.
5. Is Miracle full of miracles, or not?
Last week’s episode didn’t suggest as much as insist that Jarden, Texas is a place of wonder and mystery, a place where people come back from the dead, where wells act as conduits to the spirit world, where corporate hotels host purgatory. As we all watched Kevin claw his way back to life, there was no question: Miracle was living up to its name. This week’s episode flew directly in the face of that notion, providing logical, rational answers to questions that previously seemed answerable only with supernatural explanations. Evie didn’t Depart, she faked it. Those cracks in the foundation of Miracle? Made by sewage malfunctions, not divine intervention, on October 14. Now that Evie’s disappearance has been revealed as a hoax, it’s likely the draining of the lake was similarly staged. Is every seemingly miraculous thing we’ve seen so far in Miracle merely a mirage? Or is Lindeloff suggesting that magic and logic can co-exist, that they feed off of one another, and that we’ll never truly know, as the old Einstein quote suggests, whether everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle?
I hope it’s not the latter, for the sake of our sanity as an audience; at the very least, I hope at least a few of these answers are illuminated in next week’s season finale. It’s time, my dude Damon. I think Meg expressed it best near the end of this week’s episode: “Don’t give me that mysterious bullshit. I’ve been inside for almost a year now, and I need to know.”