Religion is based on faith, faith offers consolation. Consolation also because the inexplicable cannot be researched. Had Jesus really let paralyzed? Moses shared the sea?
This text contains elementary spoilers!
At the end of the 28th and last “Leftovers” episode, Nora Durst (Carrie Conn) is sitting in the kitchen to her ex-boyfriend Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), both of them have not seen themselves for decades, he has in Tracked down Australia. Nora tells Kevin what she had experienced in the other dimension. That she met her lost children and the husband there. And yet wanted to return.
But: did she do it? Was she really there? Is this other dimension?
The final episode “The Book of Nora” Would go down in the TV history books because of their narrative courage, the persuasiveness of their actors, due to the satisfactory end of the end anyway-the series would only have been a little more popular. Episode Eight deserves a place in addition to the big series final of the nuller years, that of “Six Feet Under”.
“The Leftovers” quickly stood in the crossfire with season one, once earned. Untreated because many people on the network have been rejecting series makers Damon Lindelof for almost ten years. He was the author, who, in his view, “is already dead and waiting for the transition” twist the mystery series “Lost” in the sand, later the “Alien” prequel “Promotheus”, that sci- Fi-dead birth Ridley Scotts. But at least the narrative of “Lost” with his hundreds of secrets drove into a straight train, the individual fates were brought together. And it must be completely okay, that not every puzzle is clarified. How boring would that be?
From season two of the anarchy ruled
The “Leftovers” team received deserved criticism because this new series started so bumpy in 2014. Too many tracks were laid rather exhaustively than expanding. The question of where the two percent of the earth dwellers after their “Sudden Departure” ended was always the focus – unfortunately even when the “bereaved” delivered dramatic scenes alone. At the beginning, “Leftovers” was more Mystery than drama, always with “the others in the hereafter”.
At the same time, big mistake, Damon Lindelof announced that he did not want to dissolve at all, which supernatural (?) Power the disappeared. That meant that the viewer had to concentrate entirely on the fates of the bereaved, and the – hastily told – focus on the literary template Tom Pertrotas (“the abandoned”) narrowed the story. Only with the attempt to tell a story from season two were compulsory corset being stored. For example, with the most extensive waiver of the “Guilty Remnants”, an unbelievable sect, white, constantly smoking, only communicating by writing on notes. They only wished the penitents away with their spurks.
Chaos city “Miracle”
When it became clear that the audience would be foreseeable an early series end, so the creators freed themselves from the specifications. This is the tragedy of the “Leftovers” with their only 28 episodes: it got better and better, the scope is increasingly gigantic. Season two and three celebrated the anarchy. There was the move from New York to Texas, finally Australia, the two deaths of Kevin, his life in the hereafter as an assassin, the chaos city “Miracle” Jarten, which was characterized by the fact that none who ever lived in it “Departed” counted.
Then the songs of the Aborigines, which are supposed to prevent the apocalyptic flood on the seventh anniversary of disappearance … with the funny Scott Glenn in the role as Kevin’s father, who, like an American catwazle, copies the rain dances of the indigenous people to avert the mischief. In the recent season, his son Kevin looked like a Mad Max. Down under.
Where to go with the characters?
The final is a quiet spectacle for various reasons, but still a spectacle. Director Mimi Leder, from Season two and described by Lindelof because of her black humor as the rescuer of the series, Nora Durst (hopefully other large offers will come after the series final), one of seven main characters, in the foreground, in The truest sense of the word: There have never been so many major shots with the “Leftovers”. In general, there is a lot of chuzdown to make Nora the most important character at the end of the 28 episodes, as well as her love story about Kevin. Finally, Nora was introduced as an additional ensemble member in season one and was only provided to the main actor Theroux late in the season.
Holy Wayne
It is noteworthy that Priest Matt (Christopher Eccleston) and Kevin’s ex-wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) only receive short appearances in “The Book of Nora”. Other once important figures, such as Liv Tyler’s Meg Abbott or Tom (someone else remembers the prophets Holy Wayne, to whom he followed?) And Jill Garvey were quickly dealt with in season; Perhaps the most versatile figure of season two, John Murphy (Kevin Carroll), no longer appeared in the final of the third.
So why so much Nora, why so little Kevin? Because she is the one who brought the biggest victim at the “Sudden Departure” that most people lost – Kevin, largely spared losses, was more likely to be the question of whether he is perhaps an immortal Messiah. Nevertheless, Theroux deserves every television price. What a development of that actor who was only traded as a weird David Lynch side actor and Jennifer-Aniston friend, of all people as successor Brad Pitts. Now he is a pain man who has worked hard his Nora.
The horror is in the water
Nora’s “transition” to the other dimension is an example of successful horror production. Damon Lindelof said that he was inspired for his transport capsule of David Cronenberg’s apparatus in “Die Fliege” (1986), and this box really lets you raise all hair. In protective suits, researchers wrapped up nora to a truck, the fossil of a deported human being is carried out in a “blink and you’ll measures it” moment, naked nora climbs into the vehicle. Then pure creep: everything dark in it, full of cables and lasers that she must not touch, she has to go in the capsule in the fetal position, never heard hearing sounds, radioactively contaminated water flows over, it will have to stop for 30 seconds , the only human -acting instruction of this process. Then the transport takes place. But before Nora goes down in the water and masters the “transition”, you think you can read the approach of a “stop!” From her lips.
Hard cut to Australia in the outback. Nora, who has become old, lives her life in a kind of restored past. Her farm is old-fashioned, her clothes, the (wedding) festivals that she visits, even the-tastefully selected-music that she hears is old-fashioned. She hears Billie Holidays “The Man I Love” or Robin Trowers eerie “I’m out to get you”. The staging of this episode is full of such loving retro details.
If everyone suffers, it is difficult to compare suffering
The idea of the authors is just as daring as it is ingenious, not even indicating the other dimension. Nevertheless, the last five minutes offer “Leftovers”, after more than 1,000 minutes “Leftovers”, a real “Attention, now it comes!” Money Shot!
We do not experience how life is over there in the picture, only in the brilliantly written monologue of Noras. Believing is Seeing. A story of empty parking spaces, from a designer named van Hagen, who takes over the return transport by building a new machine – the imagination is already traveling. A world with fewer electricity, paths that no longer have to be covered in hours but in weeks because the qualified staff is scattered on a empty earth. As actress Coon reports about these things … never with emphasis on the fantastic (the intermediary! She murmurs the eerie details away, that makes it so life.
And in this world with just a few million people, according to Nora’s report, we first find ourselves in the statement: It has to be much worse than us. They have lost many more people – who have just stayed in our world. So should we be the “Leftovers”? Mastery, as Damon Lindelof holds us the mirror: if everyone suffers, it is difficult to compare suffering.
The locked bathroom
Of course there are also a few small logic holes in this episode. It is the fan boys who are most interested in something like that. Laurie (Brenneman), Kevins ex, is now Nora’s therapist. She will know whether Nora tells the truth. Whether she was over there. Fanboys would now say: Laurie could be squeezed. And: If Nora has not transferred to the other dimension, as many travelers in the world not before her – where did they all go away, have they also submerged? And were the – dizzying – researchers held accountable with their futuristic hell machines?
If Nora left the flooded transport capsule in front of her “transition” – what did it mean that she only had difficulty leaving her own bathroom years later, what about the closed door?
“Because you are here.”
What is truth is a question of faith. We decide what we make true. Kevin had lied to Nora when he was to tell how he managed to track her down in Australia after all these years. Just as she has to recognize his version of a reality of life, he has to recognize her. Lindelof actually ends his epic not to have not cleared the reason for the disappearance of the two percent (or 98 percent!). And it doesn’t hurt at all.
It can also be part of belief to trust the love of other people. That you can fall with the risk of being left by them. “Do you think of me?” Asks Nora in the end of tears. “Of course I believe you,” replies Kevin, he also cries, but he smiles. “Because you are here.”