This is a mirror image of the first episode. Last week we met the Murphys in all their quirkiness, saw them suffer a devastating loss, and witnessed their incredulous first meeting with the Garveys.
This week we see it all from the Garveys perspective, and it’s an experience different in every particular, but with the same squirming sense of dread underlying it all. These are two families that are deeply primed to understand each other. Both have survived the Sudden Departure with a personal accumulation of scars, loss, and ill-formed coping strategies. Both seem to access an underlying reservoir of rage.
How it all happened hinges on quite a few mysteries, and no small degree of chance. The odd events of the post-Departure world continue to proliferate. The Garveys (not really married, but Kevin and Nora assure the agent they won’t be splitting up) adopt Baby Lily, left for them on his porch without their knowledge by his estranged son Tommy, who visits his sister Jill in secret. Jill and a formerly wild black dog have come back to the family unit, as she has resigned herself to giving up on speaking to her mother ever again.
Nora is selling her house, and she gets a ridiculous offer from MIT researchers (“Good school!” “Thank you.”) who believe the Departure had a geographic organization, and that had she been sitting at the table with her family she would have been taken as well. Their answer to her scoffing incredulity is pretty much “why not?” but as such an endeavor in the face of how personally the “leftovers” have been reacting to the rapturing seems hopelessly naïve, she just takes their money.
Which frees the family to relocate. At a goofily stiff fancy restaurant dinner (a nice family moment, as the new unit, however artificial, has a solid chemistry) they hatch a plan. As Nora’s brother Matt is already in Jarden, which is something of a promised land as no one apparently Departed from what has now become Miracle National Park in Texas, they have a destination.
Getting into town is relentlessly polite but surreal, as not everyone qualifies to make it past the patrolled and fenced borders, and the park rangers are insistent about keeping peace and order. Turns out the Garveys were to be the new tenants of town psychic Isaac (owner of the house John Murphy burned down last week), and now they have no place to live. Luckily, Nora finds an ongoing home auction, and bids relentlessly (she’s got the money, after all) for the available house. Which turns out to be next door to the Murphys, sorry John!
Kevin is freaked by her zealous commitment (she feels Miracle will keep her new family safe) and even more so by the ghost of Patty, who delights in relentlessly haunting him through sound and even force. Though he confessed her death to Nora and Jill (he kidnapped and tortured her, but she killed herself), and went so far as to dig up her body and take it to the police (the police, in a quirky character turn from a one-eyed cop, treat him like a brother and basically thank him for getting rid of a problem, as all cops hated the Guilty Remnant), Kevin’s still not free from her singular mission to ruin his life, to make him acknowledge a truth only she knows.
His formerly insane father has been released, because he’s begun to listen to the voices in his head. Something his son isn’t ready to do. He goes to sleep in his new bed with Nora, but he wakes up in the newly drained reservoir, with a cinder block roped to his ankle. A different town psychic urged him to make a visit, and earthquakes and inexplicable crickets are just some of the weird happenings in Jarden. If there’s one thing this is all a matter of, it’s not geography.