The Leftovers 3.02-3.04

I once thought Reverend Matt, Nora’s miserable brother, was the Job of this show. I was wrong. Everyone on the show is Job. And this season, we’re spending time with each of them in turn, seeing how low they have to go. Kevin and Nora are still together, but not happy. The destruction of the Guilty Remnant compound (including Evie and Meg presumably) at the Jarden Welcome Center haunts some characters but seems to have freed others. Kevin’s son Tom (once Meg’s victim) is now an effective officer, while Laurie and Evie’s father John are running a successful scam offering clandestine psychic therapy to those who’ve lost loved ones (unless they Departed, they stay away from pretending to commune with the missing). John believes Evie may still be alive, considering she fooled them all once before.

But first, we focus on Nora, who is still getting harassing phone calls targeted specifically to her (who as someone who lost her entire family may be a “lens” that focused whatever energy drove the Departure on those around her). Does she want to be with her family again? Then she must meet Mark Linn-Baker, who alone remains on earth of the Perfect Strangers cast. And he will assess whether she’s eligible to pay $20,000 for a new Departure procedure devised by scientists. Nora thinks he’s suicidal, that the device is a giant human microwave that does little more than cremation, but she plays along and heads to Australia, ostensibly as a fraud investigator. Kevin asks if he can come with?

Which is interesting, because that’s where Kevin Sr. already is causing his own brand of trouble for native communities. In season one Kevin Sr. served as a goad and irritant to Kevin Jr. once he started hearing voices after the Departure. In season two he was a mysterious voice of wisdom transmitting over hotel TV screens, a visionary who caused visions. Now he observes and emulates Aboriginal songs along a specified path in Australia, feeling he needs to perform the entire cycle in order to stop a coming flood. Along the way he alienates the local police, harasses the cultural outreach office, and manages to accidentally kill the one man who has the oral knowledge of the last song. He ends up abandoned to die in the desert, before being rescued a woman named Grace. She single-handedly stands for the insanity the Departure has caused perhaps best of all.

Assuming her children had departed like her husband while away from home, she didn’t realize they had ventured out into the desert in panic and got lost, dying of thirst. Misunderstanding Kevin Sr’s page of the Book of Kevin, she starts looking for Kevins who can’t die, killing the first one she finds.

The path to Australia is a fraught one for Kevin and Nora, who couldn’t be further apart despite some hasty bathroom sex after passing separately through security at their gate. She’s there to find the microwave incinerator people, he’s there to figure out what she’s doing. Or is he, as ex-wife Laurie thinks, fleeing his job and home in fear of the coming 7-year anniversary of the Departure, and perhaps even in the midst of a psychotic break of his own? While Nora is interrogated by an odd duo of scientists (one of whom seems cold and almost disinterested, the other of whom is reasonable and accommodating without being in the least informative), Kevin thinks he sees Evie alive outside a television studio he’s watching on the hotel TV.

When he chases after her, he seems so freaky a stranger intervenes on behalf of the frightened lookalike, leading to a scuffle and a desperate call to Laurie. Though she initially confirms he found Evie when he sends a photo, she later admits she was humoring him as the girl is clearly someone else. Someone who held a sign up on the show that red “Surah 81.”

Kevin is completely deflated by this latest realization of his instability. Meanwhile, Nora ultimately is enraged to be turned down for the expensive procedure (this after removing her clothes, sleeping in a coffin, and having blood drawn in a medical examination). They have an epic fight in their miserable reunion at the hotel, which is only incidentally interrupted by some sort of massive explosion some distance away.

Some other things we know: the church Grace started with her Departed husband is literally being turned into an ark. The good cop/bad cop scientist duo seem almost completely like some sort of elaborate gift, except they didn’t take Nora’s money. And while she said yes to a Sophie’s Choice type scenario they asked her to hypothesize about, Kevin Sr. met a man in the desert who confessed to saying no to the same question and still being rejected.  Before immolating himself in front of Kevin.

Next week, Matt and a small group from Jarden head to Australia to try and rescue Kevin, so that’s going to be a light-hearted romp I’m sure! Leftovers season three is like an unfolding disaster from which you can’t look away, in eight blistering steps. Which is the same as the other two excellent seasons of the Leftovers, only time is running out!