This week finds us checking in on many facets of the Leftovers world. It’s fully built now, time to wallow in it. What’s become of Tommy and Christine, with little contact from Wayne and her pregnancy? Is Kevin Sr. really insane, or are his voices telling him something true? Will Kevin Jr. and Nora finally have sex, or are their demons too persistent? Who has started a “Save Them” campaign, aimed at the Guilty Remnant? What destructive hijinks will the teens get up to next?
Weirdness abounds on all fronts. When Wayne asks Tommy to split up his remaining cash and leave a stash at a drop-off point, he does so, but follow the pickup back to his home base, another seedy hotel room. There he finds another “Tommy” and another “Christine,” a clueless man (whom Wayne is probably threatening as to his sexual desires for his charge) guarding a pregnant Asian woman. She doesn’t take kindly to the news that she’s hardly unique, and shoots Tommy in the hand before he escapes.
When he returns home, he finds that Christine has delivered her own baby, a girl, in a bathtub.
Nora and Kevin try to cope with Guilty Remnant harassment, but they’re minor compared to trying to find Kevin Sr., who keeps terrorizing libraries in search of one issue of National Geographic he’s convinced Kevin must read. He keeps exhorting everyone to “wake up,” and the phrase is repeated often enough in the episode (it’s what the Guilty Remnant want, too) that a new suspicion is formed.
What if we’re not looking at the survivors of a rapture of 2% of the population, but rather some more sinister reason for this purgatory? Like a holocaust of 98% of the population, and these are the ghosts who can’t admit they’re already lost, and the 2% are the living they can no longer see? What if it’s all one prolonged version of Nicole Kidman in The Others, in other words? Paranoia, sure, but the nagging mysteries of the series lead to such dangerous speculative flights.
The worst thing that happens to Jill is that she gets locked in a refrigerator from which another teen was raptured, and then the handle breaks off. Weirdly her Grandpa shows up to break her out, randomly, and eventually she contacts his son to take him back to the asylum. No answers this week on who the crazy ones are, but we do learn his relationship with the Mayor has ended. And that Father Matt, who wants to save the Guilty Remnant, is willing to harbor Kevin Sr. for reasons of his own.