By: Brandon Wolfe
On a day like any other, October 14, 2% of the world’s population vanishes into thin air. It appears to be an event akin to the Rapture, except those who were taken appear to have been done so indiscriminately. Three years later, the world is still reeling from the event. Neither the religious nor the science communities can quite explain what happened or why. As people continue to attempt to come to grips with their losses, a couple of mysterious cults have popped up, including the GR (Guilty Remnant), a silent, chain-smoking group dressed all in white whose motives are unclear, but who seem intent on reminding the rest of the world of the futility of mourning. This is the grabber of a premise that drives HBO’s ‘The Leftovers’ from ‘Lost’ creator Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Tom Perotta (who is also onboard as producer and co-writer).
The pilot episode of ‘The Leftovers’ introduces a multitude of characters, but chiefly centers on Mapleton, NY police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and his attempts to function in a world that is going mad in slow motion. Garvey’s wife is gone, his son Tom (Chris Zylka) has recently dropped out of college and won’t return his calls, and he is gradually losing his sullenly distraught daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley). Garvey is introduced on a run, trying to befriend a lost dog before it is brutally shot dead by a man in a pickup truck who quickly speeds off. Garvey is horrified by this and puts the dog in the trunk of his car as he commits himself to tracking down the shooter and alerting the dog’s owner, whom he finds is completely apathetic about its fate. Garvey also attempts to steer Mapleton’s fiery mayor (Amanda Warren) away from a public remembrance ceremony for fear that the GR will appear and cause a riot, which they do as they silently brandish a message of “Stop Wasting Your Time” to the mourners. We eventually learn that Garvey’s wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), was not among the vanished as we had been led to believe, but that she left him to join the GR and has cut off all communication with her husband. The episode ends with Garvey, confronting a pack of wild dogs who have made a clean break from humankind after the event, seemingly embracing this increasingly primitive new world by picking off the dogs alongside the gunman he once pursued back when he was still pretending that he was living in a civilized society.
‘The Leftovers’ has an eerily compelling premise. While functioning largely as a 9/11 parallel, the series also seeks to examine the many ways that the world would quietly fall apart in the face of such an inexplicable event. We are not presented with a world that has descended into fires-in-the streets levels of dystopian chaos, but with a population that is deeply shaken, but still attempting to function like normal, even though any standing notions of normalcy have gone out the window. The loss of so many loved ones is troubling enough on its own, but the mysterious circumstances under which those loved ones were lost is the real issue. Human beings fear the unknown, and being faced with such a clearly supernatural event, one where answers are not, and may never be, available has left humanity gripped with terrifying uncertainty. As such, ‘The Leftovers’ has a muted tone. People have had time to adapt to the event, to accept it as a fact of life, but the implications of it still gnaw at them, and it’s that quiet terror and despair that makes the series feel so haunting.
Because the focus remains so squarely on Garvey in this inaugural episode, the other pieces of ‘The Leftovers’ are left sketchy, given only cursory introductions. A woman named Meg (Liv Tyler) finds herself constantly pursued by the GR, who show up everywhere she goes, much to the consternation of her fiancé. However, by episode’s end, Meg agrees to join the GR for reasons we are not yet made privy to. We are also shown that Tom Garvey has some associations with a shadowy group led by a man named Wayne (Paterson Joseph), a plot thread in which we are thus far kept entirely in the dark about. But the pilot fills in its world with some intriguing details. We see a house party that Jill attends with her high-school friends that is essentially a decadent bacchanal of drugs, sex and games of iPhone-aided spin the bottle where choking your partner is a preset option. We are also, in the episode’s lone stab at levity, given a list of the celebrities who were among the taken, which includes Shaq, J-Lo and Gary Busey (Busey’s inclusion leads to an onscreen discussion of how the Rapture’s standards are clearly incomprehensible).
That ‘The Leftovers’ comes from Lindelof is somewhat troubling, given how frustrating much of his work has been, particularly the final season of ‘Lost’. However, Lindelof’s signature penchant for posing tantalizing questions that he is either unwilling or unable to answer might have found the perfect host here, given that the central mystery of ‘The Leftovers’ seems crafted by design to be inherently unanswerable. Also, for a pilot episode, this was surprisingly light on exposition, more interested in setting a tone than explaining its world to us in detail. Because ‘Lost’ often burned through reams of expository dialogue, this more minimalist approach is welcome. But more than anything, what will keep people coming back to ‘The Leftovers’ is its spookiness. The ways it seeks to illustrate how our world would plausibly react to touching something beyond our understanding is disquieting. The bang might have long since passed, but it’s the gradual whimper occurring in its wake that will really be our undoing.
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