By: Brandon Wolfe
It might be time to call it with ‘The Leftovers’. After four installments, the HBO show is still struggling to locate its pulse. The premise at the core of the series remains spooky and promising, but the series itself is fumbling to tell stories that build off that premise in any meaningful or compelling way. With its cast of stiffs, lifeless narrative and hokey symbolism, ‘The Leftovers’ is so deep in the ground right now that it’s hard to imagine it pulling itself out.
Kevin is imploring Guilty Remnant lieutenant Patti (Ann Dowd) to avoid crashing a Christmas dance at the local high school, but as with all interactions with the GR, it’s literally like talking to a brick wall, if the brick wall chain-smoked and made smarmy faces. But soon Kevin’s attention is focused on something much more pressing: the baby Jesus doll from the town’s nativity scene has been swiped and Kevin has been tasked with locating it, much to his chagrin. Kevin begins to suspect that his daughter Jill is the one behind the Christ-napping and intimidates a couple of her male classmates into seeing to it that it is returned to its cradle immediately. Jill, as it happens, is indeed responsible for stealing the doll, and at a lakeside party, she considers giving it a Viking funeral before having second thoughts, allowing the two boys to retrieve the doll and return it to Kevin’s doorstep before pulling the most inept getaway imaginable. Kevin gets to be the hero who announces at the dance that the doll has been found, but this announcement is met with a collective shrug by the indifferent audience. It seems the townspeople weren’t any more invested in this crime of the century than we at home in the viewing audience have been. Kevin, upon learning that Reverend Matt has replaced the doll with one of his own at the center of the nativity, opts to just chuck the original Jesus out the window of his car.
The baby Jesus doll is a loaded image, clearly intended to be a symbolic representation of the characters’ faith and feelings of loss. But as with all things ‘Leftovers’, none of it lands with the import that the creators are clearly intending it to. What we are left with, as point of fact, is a show deciding to devote the bulk of its fourth episode, a point where any series is still actively attempting to establish its identity, to the hero hunting down a plastic toy. ‘The Leftovers’ feels that this gripping mystery supersedes doing things like establishing its dull, flimsy characters or giving us any reason to continue looking in on its dreary world.
The episode doesn’t soar in its B-story, either. Tom Garvey is still on the road, taking care of Christine on the orders of his enigmatic boss, Holy Wayne. Christine is attacked by a half-naked crazy man (allowing HBO to add the scrotum to its nudity database in the process. Progress?) who shrieks “I know what’s inside you” to her as he lunges in her direction. Tom fights the man off and Christine is taken to the hospital, where he learns that she is pregnant with Wayne’s baby, a fact that the scrotum guy inexplicably seemed privy to. But when the doctor looks at the bruises on Christine’s body, then the damage on Tom’s knuckles - both courtesy of Scrotum Guy - the wrong dots are connected and Tom is forced to flee the scene. After hoping that Wayne will contact him with instructions on what to do, Tom comes up with his own plan. He returns to the hospital with a bullseye painted on his forehead, which he claims renders him invisible (!), and he paints the same symbol on Christine before they make their escape. They then board a bus that comes to an abrupt halt when a truck in front of them crashes, spilling dozens of what appear to be white-clad corpses all over the highway. Yeah, I don’t know either.
The better moments of “B.J. and the A.C.” belong to Tom and his temper. Confronted by his wife Laurie at his home, with Liv Tyler’s Meg in tow to speak for her, he is presented with divorce papers that he furiously refuses to sign. And presented with a protesting GR at the dance, he has them all arrested, even though technically they are not trespassing. Justin Theroux does rage fairly well, and the moments where he gets to blow his top at least give us something to bite down on. He also has a flirtatious encounter with Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), where the two of them bond over the issue of marital infidelities. It’s not much, but on ‘The Leftovers’, you take whatever you can get.
‘The Leftovers’ is running out of time to jolt itself out of the melancholy coma it perpetually resides in. A show about the aftermath of a Rapture-like event shouldn’t be this hopelessly inert. Hopefully the writers have more substantial plans in the coming weeks so we aren’t stuck watching Kevin solve the case of the Jesus fish that was stolen from the back of the mayor’s car.
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