‘The Leftovers’ Season 3 Is Unhinged and Unpredictable

Monet Clayton

The first season of Damon Lindelof’s “The Leftovers,” circled around a world in which 2 percent of the population has inexplicably vanished and was like the hair shirt of television shows: impressively willing to cause user discomfort, both of the physical and spiritual variety. The tremendous third and final season, in contrast, wears no shirt at all—and no pants either. The new season of “The Leftovers,” which premiered last night on HBO, is swaggering and strange, unhinged and unpredictable – encompassing floods, sex parties, nuclear bombs, bad tattoos, doppelgangers, didgeridoos, lion attacks, maybe-messiahs, suicide, grief, sadness, love, and hope – as it zooms around a planet in the midst of an existential crisis. The show has entered full-blown mania as twisted, thrilling, and devastating to watch as a person speaking in tongues.

“The Leftovers” began three seasons ago in a capital of emotional anguish known as Mapleton, New York, a town maintaining an uneasy calm three years after the Sudden Departure. The seemingly workaday residents of Mapleton included Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), the tightly-wound police chief about to begin having visions; his erstwhile wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), caught up in a cult; and their children, as well as Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), whose entire family departed. Her brother Matt (Chris Eccleston) is a preacher convinced the departure was not the rapture. Life in Mapleton appeared to be continuing more or less normally, but the questions raised by the Departure (What was it? Was it holy or mundane? Was it better to have survived or left?) had shredded its residents emotionally. The subsequent wreckage was singular, special, and not unlike getting into a scalding bath one’s body never adjusts to. It hurt, perhaps too much for a leisure activity.

The second season immediately announced itself as something stranger and more ambitious, beginning with a long sequence set in the prehistoric past in which a pregnant woman tried (and failed) to survive the death of her entire clan in an earthquake, a departure of its own. In the present, Mapleton had been abandoned for the town of Jarden, also known as Miracle, Texas, which had lost none of its 9000-plus residents in the departure and thus become a kind of holy site. The now newly-coupled Kevin and Nora decamped to start a new life there and quickly became entangled with next-door neighbors John (Kevin Carroll) and Erica Murphy (Regina King), whose daughter Evie (Jasmin Savoy Brown) soon went missing. The scope of “The Leftovers” expanded to make room not only for the Murphys, their children, and the chaos of Miracle—with pilgrims banging down its doors and men sacrificing goats in local restaurants—but Kevin’s increasingly involved visions/hallucinations.

In the third season, the canvas of “The Leftovers” has expanded further still. It is still concerned with all the themes of the first season—grief, loss, survival—while feeling almost nothing like it. Claustrophobic emotional repression has given way to gonzo and grandiose pain stretched all over the world. No one is pretending things are normal anymore. The new season begins, after brief stopovers with an 1844 doomsday cult and a clandestine military operation, in Jarden three years after the second season ended. Life seems … good. The Garveys, the Dursts, and the Murphys, slightly reconfigured in arresting ways, gather for a birthday celebration. Laughter is abundant. The horrors of the world seem at a safe distance. All, of course, is not what it seems. Small details—a cast on Nora’s arm, a loving shot of a baby, a secret writing project, the looming seventh anniversary of the Departure—soon reveal themselves to be harbingers of pain and chaos.

“The Leftovers” Season 3 premieres on April 16 and airs Sundays at 6 p.m. ET on HBO.