The Leftovers season 3: news and episode reviews

On Sunday, June 4, HBO’s The Leftovers aired its series finale, “The Book of Nora.” Below, Vox critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Caroline Framke discuss the episode in full.

Todd VanDerWerff: So, Caroline, do you believe Nora?

When I finished the series finale of The Leftovers, I briefly thought about a career change.

Not just a career change actually. A whole life change. I thought about moving to the middle of nowhere and becoming a farmer or something. I couldn’t imagine a way forward for television, the medium I love so much, after watching that finale. It was so good, so note-perfect, so everything I want in a show. TV was done! Something else would have to fill the gap.

Every week, Vox Culture is diving into an episode of HBO’s The Leftovers, which is currently airing its third and final season. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Caroline Framke take on “The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother),” the sixth episode of season three, and the penultimate episode of the series.

Caroline Framke: From the second I heard The Leftovers’ season one theme start to play over this episode’s opening credits — beginning with that infamous, ominous “bwoooooommppp”! — I was both bracing myself for the inevitably intense hour ahead and laughing at the show’s sheer defiance.

Every week, Vox Culture is diving into an episode of HBO’s The Leftovers, which is currently airing its third and final season. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Caroline Framke got together to talk about “Certified” the season’s sixth episode. You can read our previous coverage here.

Caroline Framke: This is the kind of television episode that makes me wish I saved all my best adjectives for it. I’ve called almost every Leftovers episode this season “gut-wrenching,” or “devastating,” or “extraordinary,” or all of the above. But goddamn if the show didn’t just outdo itself all over again with this gorgeous hour, which knots three journeys together with such intricate finality that, more than ever, I have no idea where The Leftovers goes from here.

Every week, Vox Culture is diving into an episode of HBO’s The Leftovers, which is currently airing its third and final season. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Caroline Framke got together to talk about “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World,” the season’s fifth episode. You can read our previous coverage here.

Todd VanDerWerff: I suppose when I thought about what the final season of The Leftovers might contain, “an orgy at sea with a sex-lion cult” was not on the list, but, then, I’d like to meet the person whose list it was on. Isn’t that why we watch this show? For its endless number of ways to show us how people handled the Departure really, really poorly?

Any given episode of The Leftovers is unlike anything else in TV history, but Sunday’s episode of The Leftovers — the fifth of its eight-episode third and final season — was really unlike anything else in TV history.

“It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World” continued a Leftovers tradition by throwing aside most of the show’s other characters to follow Christopher Eccleston’s stubborn, self-possessed minister Matt Jamison, a man who’s attempting to square his faith in God with a world where 2 percent of the planet’s population disappeared into thin air, with seemingly little rhyme or reason behind who was taken.

The first time I watched “G’day, Melbourne,” the fourth episode of The Leftovers’ final season, I was blown away by its individual parts but didn’t quite buy the overall sweep of the story. It felt, to me, like the show knew it needed to separate Nora and Kevin for its last batch of episodes — can we really be halfway through the final season already? — and did whatever it could to make that happen.

Intellectually, I understood that Nora and Kevin were having trouble and had been for a while. But emotionally, I didn’t feel prepared, because much of that trouble had happened offscreen, in the gap between season two and season three (which opened with a three-year time jump).

Every episode of The Leftovers faces the same challenge: Make it seem as if everything that happens either could have happened by some divine design or by the hand of very fallible human beings who interpret what happens as the work of divine design. And by that standard, “Crazy Whitefella Thinking” might represent a new platonic ideal for the show.

Think about it: Kevin Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn, in a terrific, often wordless, performance) goes halfway around the world in pursuit of an Aboriginal song that he hopes will help him avert a global flood that will end the world.

The Leftovers, HBO’s critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic drama, is currently airing its third and final season. Below, Vox Culture writers Todd VanDerWerff and Caroline Framke discuss “Don’t Be Ridiculous,” the season’s second episode, in full — so beware, there are spoilers here, and lots of ’em.

Todd: In some ways, Nora Durst’s inability to register with touchscreens is the sort of over-obvious metaphor The Leftovers sometimes over-indulges in. Nora, reintroduced to the idea that she might be able to find out what happened to her husband and children in the Departure, starts to feel like she too is slipping off the map. All of the ways she’s defined herself since the Departure — as a hard-charging DSD agent, as Kevin’s partner, as Lily’s adoptive mother — are being stripped from her. So does she still exist? The touchscreens sure don’t think so.

The Leftovers, HBO’s critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic drama, premiered its third and final season on Easter Sunday, April 16, with “The Book of Kevin.” Below, Vox Culture writers Caroline Framke and Alissa Wilkinson discuss the episode in full — so beware, there are spoilers here, and lots of ’em.

Caroline Framke: It feels fitting that this final season premiere doubles down on the fact that no one in The Leftovers’ whole damn world is ever going to — as season two’s plucky theme song by Iris DeMent suggests — just “let the mystery be.”

The greatest trick The Leftovers ever pulled was getting audiences to stop thinking about what had happened to the Departed, the 2 percent of the world’s population who simply disappeared one October day in the series’ universe.

This was no easy feat! Damon Lindelof, who co-created the series with Tom Perrotta, the author of the novel the show was based on, was previously most famous for Lost, a series known for asking big questions that weren’t always answered to viewers’ satisfaction.