Questions & Answers THE LEFTOVERS Why You Should Watch [No Spoilers]

This is Damon Lindelof's The Leftovers on HBO. It takes place years after an event known as The Sudden Departure, in which 2% of the world's population, 140 million people, suddenly vanished all at once, with no warning or sign as to where they'd gone. The Leftovers might be the best television show of the past 5 years, and has never gotten the attention it truly deserves. So today, we're going to look at what makes The Leftovers unique, and we're going to do it with minimal spoilers. The idea is to talk about it for both people who have and haven't seen the show, because even though there are so many shows returning this fall and The Leftovers has finished its run, you should still go back and watch it. It's seriously special. I'm Jackson, and this is Ideas at Play. Despite its crazy mysterious premise, The Leftovers isn't interested in answers. And look, I know it's weird to tell someone to watch a show that won't give them any answers. It sounds like a cop out, and an automatic deal breaker. But answers don't always equal a satisfying ending. Let's back up for a second. If you've watched TV at all in the last 15 years, you've probably heard of Damon Lindelof's previous show, Lost. Now, full disclaimer, I'm a huge fan and apologist of Lost. But its ending was certainly controversial. It was a show full of questions and mysteries, and a significant chunk of people felt it really didn't live up to its promise to answer them. But really, all the answers were right there in the show. All of them. Seriously. It's all there in the show. You can find them. Just because they weren't the answers you wanted, doesn't mean they didn't go out of their way to answer every- Sorry. The real reason people were disappointed in the ending of Lost is because, as it turns out, questions are always more interesting than answers. And, in a lot of ways, you can read The Leftovers as a kind of spiritual sequel to Lost. It deals with a lot of similar ideas. Weird supernatural event? Check. Mysterious group of others? Check. Clothing constantly drenched in water and also sweat? Check, check, and check. But Lindelof also takes the lessons he learned from Lost, and bakes them into The Leftovers. Right off the bat, the sudden departure that sets off the whole series takes place on October 14th, the same date that Lindelof deleted his twitter account, with this tweet. After much thought and deliberation, I've decided to- More than 3 years after Lost ended, people were still adding him to air their grievances. He was the creator of this entire universe of Lost, and everyone wanted answers for why he made it the way he did. The sudden departure deals in the business of not having the answers. It's one of the reasons it's so devastating to the characters in The Leftovers. In some ways, losing someone to the departure is worse than having them die. At least, we understand death to some extent. It's scary, but familiar. The departure adds a layer of complete what-the-fuckery, and the show explores how we grapple with the idea of the unknowable throughout its 28 episodes. In the first season, we deal with grief. That's our main character Police Chief Kevin Garvey. Despite not explicitly losing anyone, the departure still has taken its toll on him. He's seen his family splinter, and deals with the cult of the Guilty Remnant, who see themselves as aggressive living reminders of what happened. Another character, Meg, lost her mother to a heart attack the day before the departure, robbing her of her chance to grieve. Our other main character, Nora Durst, lost both of her children and her husband in the departure. It's such an unlikely outcome in a world of already unlikely outcomes, that she constantly fights the totally reasonable urge to think that this is all her fault. The pain that these characters feel all stems from not having answers. If these were standard deaths, although they would be incredibly hard pills to swallow, it would make more sense than this. The departure doesn't just make characters question their world, it also makes them question themselves. After all, if we accept that the departure happened, then maybe everything we know about everything is wrong. It's an event that defies understanding. So does that mean that life does as well? Just because something doesn't make sense, no longer means that it's not real. One character, Holy Wayne, claims to be able to hug people's pain away. It might be a complete scam, but it also seems to actually help people. And who's to say he doesn't have superpowers, when 140 million people just vanished from the earth in a moment? Kevin finds himself sleepwalking in more and more bizarre ways, but is that because he's going crazy? Or is there a reason for why this is happening? The second season starts to answer these questions with bigger questions. Like a kid asking why after each explanation, the Leftovers expands its horizons. When you ask what happened to the departed, you're also asking why are we the ones left? And if it was truly random, then does that mean everything is meaningless? If our existence is random, then why are we here? But nothing about this show is random. It's all meticulously constructed. Every character has crossed paths with every other character in ways both seen and unseen, before the show, and as it goes on. The interconnected nature of the plot is a hallmark of both The Leftovers and Lost, and brings with it a sense of fate, of purpose. But what's great about The Leftovers, is that it doesn't provide you with the answers to that question of purpose, just as life won't. You may feel the pull of a reason for being, and there might be, but the universe is never going to tell you what it is. It's a paradox, the idea that the answers are out there, you'll just never find them. This funnels us into that search for purpose. Eventually, each character comes to terms, in one way or another, that they don't know, and will never know exactly what's going on. So the question becomes, now what? If you're thinking this all sounds a little religious, I can't tell you you're wrong. The show is wrapped in Christian imagery, but this is not a strict Christian show or message. Nothing is cut and dry, and nobody has the answers. Reverend Matt claims to know what's happening, but he's grasping at straws just like everyone else. The Guilty Remnant is a cult, reminding us of the less than ideal things that religion can bring with it. The show leans instead on the ideas behind religion, giving us a spiritual experience without buying into the details. It's about exploring intangible ideas that don't have a right answer. We turn to TV in a lot of ways as a form of comfort. We like to know what will happen, or watch to find out. It's an escape from life, from not knowing. A place where everything will be explained. The Leftovers isn't going to offer you either of those things. But that's also what makes the emotions of The Leftovers so rich. It immerses itself in the very nature of questions. It's about struggling with tough questions, and how that struggle is vital. We're not going to find the right answers. And that's okay. The real value comes from the process of working through them. That process is the only way you can come to a deeper understanding of yourself. In some ways, it is the answer. So no, The Leftovers isn't going to give you the answers to its mysteries. It'll force you to look at yourself, and life, and come away without the right answer, but maybe a better one. It's not the type of comfort we usually come to TV for, but it is comforting in its own way. Those big questions aren't going away anytime soon. And you can't answer them. But The Leftovers can help you get used to their presence.