The Prestige TV Podcast - Did ‘The Leftovers’ Stick the Landing?

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Andy Greenwald is joined by Mina Kimes to discuss “The Book of Nora,” the series finale of ‘The Leftovers.’ They explain what attracted them to the HBO drama in the first place and their subsequent desire to convince others to watch it (2:32). Next, they unpack the central theme of the series, how it’s deftly revealed over the course of just 28 episodes, and the show's unique ability to reinvent itself for the better season after season (23:07). Later, they talk about the final episode’s tone, which was dramatically different from the rest of the show; Justin Theroux's and Carrie Coon’s Hall of Fame performances; and why in the end ‘The Leftovers’ is a story about love (40:36). Finally, they answer the titular question: “Did it stick the landing?” (79:40). Host: Andy Greenwald Guest: Mina Kimes Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Theme Song and Other Music Credits: Giancarlo Vulcano Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, it's your boy Johnny Bananas, and I'll be covering all the treachery, deceit, backstabbing, and murder from Season 2 of the Traders' U.S. on my podcast, Death Taxes, and Bananas. I'll be joined all season by my fellow castmates to swap stories, provide all the behind-the-scenes antics, and sorted details from filming. So Sally 4th, and join me for Season 2 of the Traders every Saturday on the Ringer Reality TV podcast feed. This episode is brought to by Whole Foods Market.

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presenting the friars turkey breast only from Borershead. The backyard tradition now available behind the counter. Visit your local delixte. today, discover the craftsmanship behind every bite, Boar's Head, committed to craft since 1905. From the sudden departure to returning doves, from Justin

Froh throwing, to Justin Thoreau taking his shirt off, to Justin Thore crying, to Justin Thoreau taking a shirt off and crying, time to light a smoke and wake up in a bathtub. Hey, that's the show I was telling you about. This is Stick the Landing, the leftovers. Everybody

is the one they all peaked where they're going to go rebate. Welcome to another edition. of Stick the Landing, my name is Andy Greenwald, and I am so thrilled to be joined in studio by ESPN's own, a podcast legend in her own right, Mina Kimes. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

I am so excited to talk about this show, not just because it's one of my five favorite shows of all time. I was thinking about the top five on the way here, but also because the show has a relatively small audience. So when you meet someone who watched it, all you want to do is talk about the leftovers. So you are fulfilling a dream of mine. This is more than a dream.

This is the first user generator, listener-generated episode of the show. I feel like we need to give the backstory here. The show, Sick the Landing, premiered two weeks ago. Within moments of the first episode premiering, you reached out and said, can I do the leftovers? Because the finale of the left, I'm so passionate about it. I also think it's probably one of the more interesting, debatable, discussable finalities of in television history.

It's very unique. I totally agree. Yeah, I love it. So you were all in. Okay, so I want to know we will get to the finale, of course, the book of Nora from 2017. But first we need the book of Mina. We need to know. I want to know your history with the show because, as you said, this was a critical darling.

It is a little cultish like the guilty remnant. It is not a show that everyone watched or everyone has strong opinions about. What was your way in? My husband and I watched this one in real time. I remember that as it was happening, because I remember waiting for the episodes to come out. I remember at times having mixed feelings about season one, questioning, like... You and me both, sister?

Listen, it's a lot. It's a lot. And if you're not in the right mood, it's maybe not the show for you, season one specifically, because it's... You can't talk about the ending without talking about the beginning. Yeah, so we'll get to, yeah, we can talk about that in detail too. But yeah, so I kept pushing through it, pushing through it. And then when season two hit, I was like, this is the best thing ever made.

I love this. And then by season three, I was like a, it's funny because, you know, a cult and cults in concepts of that sort of factor into this show predominantly. I felt like a cult member of the show. Like if I would see someone at a party, I would bring it up and try to convince them to watch the show. The amount of people I have desperately tried to convince it. Sometimes it was success to watch this show is far more than any other show. How did you at the time, in real time, like season two, which I agree with you, and especially after doing a little bit of rewatching, season two is a masterpiece of television.

In real time, you're out in the world, you're socializing. People are like, what are you watching? You tell them this blank stares. How did you pitch them on the show, particularly knowing that the first season, which I can't wait to unload on still, many years later, was not for everyone. By the time I had gotten, I think it was probably near the end of season two, I was really kind of talking to people about it.

I would tell them this is a show, not only that the acting is incredible, the writing is incredible, it's weird and compelling, and it's weirdly propulsive, despite the fact that it's very strange. It's also just about themes that I haven't seen.

explored in other shows, grief, belief, love, loss, faith, all of that, right? And then I would pause and say, but you got to get through the first few episodes, which is always a really difficult sell to people. And I say that not thinking the first season or the first few episodes are bad, they're not bad, but they're difficult television. Yes, and I would say the journey of the show is as unique as the finale in terms of a show working through stuff, even though it is about characters working through stuff.

And when it gets from a place of like anger and denial to a later one of the 12 steps that I don't have handy to me of acceptance and release and peace, like it is a beautiful experience to take in totality. But when you're living with it, week to week, episode to episode, it can be a challenge. And it's so worth it because the finale, which of course we will get to,

it doesn't hit unless you've gone through. this entire journey with the characters, which of course is like life. You know, there's no pleasure without pain. I totally agree. I'm still trying to prove that wrong, by the way, but I'm not doing great. Backstory, this may be an episode that people haven't watched all of the show. I don't know why you would, but maybe they did. In case you don't know, it is worth saying Leftovers was a very, very big ticket premiere in 2014. It was Damon Lindeloff, who had been co-running, famously co-running lost. This was his first return to television, and it's based on Tom Perada's book of the same name, and Tom Perada was a creative partner of Damon in making

the show. It was a big ticket production from HBO. Pete Berg, who was coming off of Friday Night Lights and his movie career directed the pilot. And I was, if I can talk about my journey with the show a little bit, the TV critic for Grantland at the time, was very excited about it, and was deeply flummoxed by the first few episodes of the show. And I was actually kind of heartened to see, to reread my stuff and see that I was pretty, I was balanced, then I got hostile. And then I got, yes, which I think is interesting because this show is so much about

human behavior and psychology. And like, I went through it myself with this show. When I was reviewing it, I was like, this show is from the co-creator of Lost, but it could be called Lost. And he is working through his own stuff here. Got him. And, yeah, burn, first of many.

Ultimately, I checked out of the first season by the time Patty Levin took a window pain to her own neck. Because, I mean, I watched it all, but I checked out emotionally because I was like, I understand that the show is willing to do things no other show is in terms of grappling with like the heaviest parts of the human experience. The problem was, to me, there was no recognizable human behavior in that. These were avatars of pain. They were punching, you know, Kevin was chain smoking and punching mirrors and getting into fights

and choking himself and everything was so up to 11 that I didn't. see room for any like the other parts of the human experience of levity of humor. I feel like I need to say this since you're an NFL expert that in my first review, I was like, you're not telling me that like, I was like, no one is happy about this, that 2% of the world's population is gone. Like there isn't one person in Mapleton who isn't secretly thrilled. Like maybe they owed money to someone or as I wrote like, as a Philadelphia Eagles fan, would I be mad if the Dallas Cowboys disappeared?

Like, I'm not going to say, but I wouldn't be like, Kevin. we were doing the watch then or the Hollywood Perspectus podcast, and I was kind of turning against it. And then season two premiered. And do you remember the way season two premiered? The opening sequence with the, yes. I do remember, yeah. Could you characterize, there's an earthquake and a cavewoman?

It's insane. It's insane. It's long, too. So imagine yourself, you know, turning on season two, thinking it's going to be at one thing, having watched, Season one and your treat, how long was it? It's like... It's quite long.

The first time you're watching it especially. There's a weird, like, and this happens to season three, too, opening sequence would basically a prehistoric, if I remember correctly. Yes. Woman who gives birth. Quite graphically. Yeah. At length.

At length. Standing up by a tree. Dies. Well, she defends her baby from a snake. And then another woman finds a woman. finds the baby and nurses the baby. Yes. And then we move into the present.

And then we see like girls jumping into a... Anyway, I didn't love that. I felt like I was being trolled. It's pretty alienating. And then Damon, who I didn't know at the time, gave an interview to New York magazine where he said that they were in the writer's room thinking about ways to piss me off.

And Chris, because we didn't like the show. So they created that to annoy us. Really? Yes. And I was like, that seems like a waste of time. So you were... You guys were public haters then? Season 1.

You just characterized it to me as being sort of like, I was balanced. No, I was balanced at the beginning. Okay, then you were just like over it. Also, I'm covering my ass here. Yes, I reread it and I was like, at the beginning, I was pretty, because now I'm rereading it and what I was responding to. And by the way, this is very unprofessional podcasting. I was like, yeah, maybe people haven't watched the show. Didn't say what the premise of the show was.

2% of the world's population has vanished. Immediately a sudden departure like the rapture and people are living in the wake of this impossible event. and people are religious cults and trauma and grief and et cetera, et cetera. And all of a sudden, like, what's possible in the world is shaken. So I think that what I was responding to was it was making me very uncomfortable. I do think that I was, I still stand by having rewatch some of the first season. I still think there was no light to counterbalance the darkness. But my intensity of my response was in the same way therapists are like,

ah, if you hate him, you love him because you're still binding yourself to it. It was touching parts of me that were uncomfortable. Something that's challenging about season one, and then you could say this about the opening sequence, too, as a viewer, there's just not much to latch on to. Like, amidst all of, which is in stark contrast to how it ends. But it's a very cool and interesting examination of these profound themes, but it's a lot easier to navigate those as a viewer if you have an avatar for yourself or these glimmers of something. You know, that make you invested. I would push back. My experience watching season one was I actually remember finding that a little bit in Nora.

Yes, and that's Carrie Coon's character. Who is a revelation and could run me over with a truck. What do the kids say about people that they're huge fans of? She could be your Zaddy, I believe, is the turn. You know, I had never seen before this show. I don't think she did much television. Right, she was a theater actor. Theater actor, I don't know when Gone Girl happened.

She was in that. That was after, I think. This was her coming out party. Fargo was after, which she's... Fargo was after. Favorite season of Fargo, which... Really? I know.

It's a bold take. Yeah. We'll have to have you back. But, yeah, anyways, she... Because even though she's portraying this, like, incredibly dark character, the character who had gone through the most horrible thing of any of them, there were these, like, weird glimmers of rhinus and humor, and I found her incredibly likable. And that was kind of what I got.

it's hooks into me a little bit season one, which of course made me happy the way it ended the way that it did. I wondered how you responded as a person who not only loves dogs but co-hosts a podcast with the dog. Dog steps rough. There's a lot of violence against dogs. Early. Yeah.

Early on. The first episode, like the first time we meet Kevin, he's jogging, and a dog gets shot in front of him. Yeah. Another point of contrast to how the show ends with the deployment of animals and the treatment of animals. Yes. It's a tough watch.

a 180. It's a lot. I also wondered, I don't know if you rewatch any of the early episodes, but I was trying to like, you know, do full reckoning with my own intensity of my own opinions. And I was realizing 2014, I was the new father of a one-year-old. And the show begins with a baby vanishing. Yeah. I mean, they evolve. I mean, one thing that is not in doubt from the show is that the specificity and the like bullseye nature of how Damon and his collaborators choose to show us and tell us story. And like, okay, so this is happening in the world. How do we show it? through one rando person and a baby. And I wonder if some of my, honestly, like, visceral emotional response was connected to that.

I don't know. I will say, as someone who recently had a baby, he's now four months old. Congratulations. Thank you. Watching the finale, at the very end, when you get some flashbacks to the scene with Nora and her children, also, forgotten all of her children disappear, her family disappears. Yes. Both of her children and her husband.

She's the only remainder. But it's really about the kids, because the husband's kind of. kind of like, you know, he's stepping out. It's about the kids. And she hears the voices, and it's this woman who's unable to move on from the loss of her kids. Before I had kids, I don't think I really felt that part of me was like, well, have you seen Justin throws abs lady? Like, what are you doing?

Why are you still obsessively these damn kids? You could have new kids. But I think having watched kids, I now felt like I understood her whole arc a lot more. and I do think it would have hit me a lot harder when I watched season one, the idea of the people who have lost children in this show and that very specific brand type of grief is so specific. And I would say also in the rewatch, and I don't know whether it's because in the throes of like week to week television criticism or whatever my emotional intelligence went down. But watching it again now, I was really struck by the fact that at least I remember it this way. Then in my first watch of the second and third seasons, which I revere, some of Nora's decision-making, I was bumping on and I remember sort of harping on a little bit. And then on this watch, I was like, it's actually beautifully drawn.

This is a show about the impossibility of reconciling the rational and the irrational in many ways, religious and belief and emotions. Her behavior is deeply irrational in that she is like, they need me. They are alive and they need me. And everything I do comes from that. but it makes sense. If you're following, like that, it's in a rational point of view that I was like,

but they're meant to be together or the story demands X, Y, or Z, but no, the show is about her finally reaching the end of that and you can't tell her how long that's going to take. Yes,

that her arc is defined by that loss, the specificity of that loss, the, how the hell you move on from that. And yeah, it is, I would like to rewatch season one now with my life changing a little bit although I do think it would be harder

and I hear why you felt that way. It's still, like some of the early Matt Jameson stuff like I think the third episode is a Christopher Ecclestone focused episode and what is revealed in the fullness of the show that he sort of has a trilogy of suffering in one in each season. That one popped a little bit.

I think there's also just some stuff that is TV, like in a way that you sort of have to expect. like one of the beauties of it is that it can course correct, regardless of what some dumb critic says, but what the people making the show believe. And while we did Friday Night Lights on this show already, Pete Berg is a perfect creative partner for that show, the way he films things and sees the world. Mimi Leader, who basically took over as the producing director in season two and three,

has a different visual style and storytelling language that fit the show better. I don't know if you remember that season one of the premiere also kind of invented euphoria. because Margaret Qualley's character goes to a high school party that is more debauched than eyes wide shut. I do remember that. Yeah, that is funny. Yeah, it's all the colors. The whole season, it's all dark and kind of... It's in upstate New York and everyone's miserable. Cold. It has a very cold feel. I mean, and then, you know, just speaking about the visuals of it, the guilty remnant are such a big part of season one. Yes, they are the antagonist so much as there is one. And they're the worst. Yes.

And there's a reason, like, that they exist. They signify something in the show in terms of nihilism, basically. And where the show goes, ultimately, at the end, is a rebuttal to a lot of the things that they represent. But, again, because they're so predominant in the first season and they're so annoying and, like, irredeemable, frankly, even though there's some really standout performances, you know, Patty, I mean, Channely, Bill Belichick, as she said, I'll never be incredible.

And out's the best. It's hard to watch because they are, one of the more truly hateable entities I've seen on television. I mean, this is the post-departure cult where the requirements are you wear all white and you chain smoke and you don't speak. And they are sort of bearing witness to the folly of anyone trying to continue to live a meaningful

or productive life in the wake of the departure. There's nothing likable about the guilty. You know, you talk about them being the antagonist season one. Like, I think of other shows, you know, antagonists can be evil and awful, but they can be kind of thrilling or fun or the actors are kind of cool. There's nothing to like about the guilty round. Well, that also speaks to the highwire act of the show, right? Like, it's a show about loss.

It's a show about absence. It's a show where there is no middle where there usually is. It's the thing happened. Like most shows are about an event is coming. We have to stop it or we have to defeat it or whatever. It happened. And so now everybody's just left with it. And so in a way, and again, you can only say this now on a podcast like this years later

looking at the whole the fullness of it. Right. But like we are as humans very, very bad at processing stuff. And our first reactions are often like the way Kevin did. Right. It's just it's grim. it's grim. And it's a show about just people circling the drain, basically, in the first season.

And yet, somehow, and I just, I feel like very moved by this, even talking about it. The second season leaves the cold and goes into the sun. It goes into the warmer climate. They move production from New York to Texas and Austin. Suddenly, we're in a place called Jarden or Miracle, Texas. We're with a different family where there's just a different energy. And there's Regina King also, which helps a lot. Oh, so good.

But, and Damon has talked about this in interviews, but he's like, he remembered that people laugh at funerals. And the show changed. And the show changed so profoundly that I felt totally in love with it. I mean, did you, you alluded to this already, but in real time, you were a steady admirer and you were watching the first season. Was there a moment, or did you feel the change where you were like, wait, this is something else now? I know that I did because I remember. looking forward to the show in a way I didn't in season one

even though I liked it which is weird right and you know like it's like season one was like listening to Prague rock or something we were just like this I know this is good and it's interesting but do I need to get through this whole album you like the early stuff better

I get it and but I remember season two after very early very quickly because of the you know it's such a radical reset it was on Sundays right it was yeah looking forward to it all day like, oh, I can't wait to see what happens. And it was less about the plot.

The plot's very interesting and more about the feel of it. More like being like this is like that sense of relief, even though the characters are still going through some like really, really difficult shit. And like the themes are the same, honestly. But the visuals, the way they talk to each other. Like I talked about how Nora gave you these like little glimpses of sarcasm and personality and fun in season one,

season two, you start getting like a really large dose of that and you suddenly fall in love with the character. They let Justin throw maybe like smile once, you know, it changes. Yes, and also I was noticing

there's this thing of like, in a writer's room, you say like, oh, well, like hang a lantern on it. You know, like if there's a flaw, let's steer towards it and call it what it is. And there's a lot of stuff in the second season

when whether it's emotional gobbledygook or metaphysical gobbledygook comes out. And Kevin goes, huh? Because he's just a cop from upstate New York with remarkable abs. And he's like he's having the right

reaction as the audience. This doesn't make sense. I mean, that's even something that happens at the end of season two when John and Kevin one has shot the other and one has gone into the underworld and sung Simon and Garfunkel to get out of the underworld. And he's like, I don't understand what's happening. Kevin, and Kevin is

really the stand in for the audience in that way. He never seems to understand what's, he seems perpetually befuddled. But he goes with it. And I think one of the things that's worth noting, you know, that all shows have their own internal rules and logic. But when talking to people who were involved in this, the rule of the show was only one absolute definitive, metaphysical, supernatural thing has happened. And that's the departure. Everything else could be either way, which leads into the finale in a very profound way. So did Kevin go into the underworld and become an international assassin

and throw a child into a well in order to come back to life. Yes. Also, he drank some weird psychoactive poison and came back. We don't know. I felt like by season two, and this also kind of gets at,

again, why the viewing experience, I enjoyed it so much more and fell in love with the show, I stopped caring? Like, I stopped trying to figure out exactly what was real and what was not. It's almost like the show teaches you how to watch it as it progresses. And then by the end, you're ready for like the final ultimate exam of like,

do you know how to watch the show? Do you understand what is happening? But that's beautifully said because I think that the show's central theme, and it's certainly the central theme of the finale, is does it matter if you're lying? Right. As long as you believe, you know, as the nun says in the finale, it's a better story. and that's the characters have to wrestle with that you know the characters have to wrestle with who they believe what matters to them what's true and the idea that is slowly revealed over three seasons right that they're all just blinded by their own ego and their own emotion and their own narcissism like

when matt jameson gets to speak to god on the sex boat in season three it's it's an incredible incredible episode and he decides that he's talking to god so he can have the conversation he's always wanted to have, you know, and the guy is just basically like, you just, you just wanted me to pay attention to you. Yeah. That's all you wanted. I really distinctly remember. Maybe it was international man of, uh, international assassin, pardon me, maybe earlier, where this something potentially spiritual or not real is happening, you don't know. And I remember watching a lot of points during season two, these things happening and my brain not thinking, is this really happening in what does it mean, but thinking,

is this character changing or getting to the place I want them to? Is this what it's going to be to finally help them get over the thing or fall in love or whatever? Ultimately, again, speaking to the education of viewer, by the end of the show, me not caring about the answer, but wanting to know other things that I felt were resolved. In that way, and actually in many ways, but that is one way in which the show was the incredible Bring You Back to Life, antidote from Lost for Damon and maybe for the audience as well to a degree, that show so much was

reduced to being about, are you giving me the right answers? Yeah. And I think he valiantly throughout the show is being like, no, no, what's interesting is their lives, not the polar bears. But people at the end were like, but why polar bears? This show, what you just said is so exactly right that like, ultimately do we care how characters we come to love get from A to B as long as they get to B? And this show, in a way that was in some ways more out there and beautiful than any other show was just like, fuck it, we're going to get on a sex boat. We're going to go to the underworld.

We're going to go places you can't even imagine, but we're going to get them there. I think season one, I cared. I was watching that, I was like, what the hell's going on? Is this real? Is that Patty this or that? And over the course of the show, the things that I was interested in changed,

which again is a testament to how unbelievably well-crafted and written the show is. I also think the show did a great job building up towards the finale, building up towards the end, of shedding things that didn't matter anymore or that we didn't care about. Like, holy Wayne. Like in the first season, if you remember, Patterson Joseph, most recently seen in Wonka, is like a major figure looming over everything.

And he says things in the pilot that make you think this is totally different show in the offing where he's just like, darkness is coming, Tom, I need you. We're like, oh, is this the passage? What is this? And then he dies in a bathroom, and it doesn't matter. You know, I will never get over the fact that, like, going into season three, I was like, I kind of don't really care about the guilty remnant. And on some level, I don't know if I ever did.

And I don't really understand Liv Tyler and what her role is in all of this. And we go into the third season, and it starts back in Jarden with Liv Tyler and Evie. And then do you remember what happens in the first three minutes of season three? After the Guilty Remnant is taken over the town at the end of season two. Season three opens. Oh, when the bomb hits. Yeah. A drone strike eliminates the guilty remnant within seconds of the season beginning.

Incredible. And that's like a couple of years later. It's an incredible way to start. Let's go. Yeah. Let's move on. It's so good. It's so good.

And I think that it's important, like, for people who are listening, the thing that I really loved in the revisiting of this was just realizing, I mean, A, I can't believe we got this show. I don't know if the show gets made ever again in any other circumstance. But B, like, it's really a triumph of TV as a living medium. Like, it's not about the answers. It's being open to the right questions. chasing your moments of inspiration and story

and emotional truth above all else and keeping it moving. Like just reinventing yourself. Like is a show, I mean there aren't very many, but which do we value more? A show that is unimpeachably perfect or at the same level from beginning to end. Or do we love shows more that struggle

or that take a while to find their footing that we're rooting for and then surprise us? And I feel like that's a kind of a parasocial relationship that I can get behind. Well, it's like I think for the same, reason that I told you I like to corner people at parties around 2016 or 17 or so and try to force them to watch this. Or I'll say this, like maybe more than any other TV show, if I meet someone who likes the leftovers, I assume we'll get along. Really? It says something.

Well, because like I love Friday Night Lights, but a lot of people love Friday Night Lights. A lot of different kinds of people love Friday Night. If you like the leftovers, we probably share a sensibility. but it also means we went through the struggle to get there of season one. It feels, season three feels earned in a way because you go through, we're saying this like watching season one is like running out a treadmill or something. You have to watch it, I believe, for season three to pay off. And that in itself is a really fascinating way of doing television. I think you're right.

And I think just purely as someone who knows Damon, but also just like the creative process of this of like seeing where, I mean, that show is, that first season is, is so tight and it's so upset and like in a fog, much like the characters are, to reach a place of just like ecstatic, creative celebration where Justin Thoreau is both, you know, the president and an assassin,

and to access the president in the underworld, he has to put his dick on a slab to get measured. Like what? It's insane. I mean, there's a sex boat with a lion, and the lion eats God. And to be, to come up with that once is a wonderful thing. Like, you're in a room and you can,

come up with the craziest idea possible to then make that idea contagious and spread and everyone's laughing and then you find the truth and why you're laughing and then put it on TV and have people like you be like, I didn't expect that, but yes, that's what we're doing here. Like, that's the goal. Yeah. And going back to coming back to coming up saying about the show, teaching you at a walk, by the time that happens, and it's, you're at the very end of the series, you as a viewer are not surprised. Yes. And you're also, you've kind of trained yourself to expect the unexpected, expect untraditional plotting, expect timelines to be all over the place,

characters, you watch that, and if you came into it cold, you wouldn't, you wouldn't understand what you were saying, or it would be very, very confusing. By the time you've gotten through these first two seasons, you're in season three, and this stuff's happening, and it's totally surreal, and it's things you've never seen

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if you're nursing pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-9-9 or visit zepbounds.lily.com. The big picture, the macro look at this was season one, as we said, was challenging, but people were watching and talking about it, and it was renewed. for a second season of 10 episodes. The show reinvented itself for the second season.

And I mean, I think that second season is, in retrospect, close to perfect, if not perfect, like in terms of payoff, delivery, creativity, exhilaration. The end, International Assassin is that season, and that's a perfect hour of television. I don't, but I don't think you can talk about it without talking about the end of the previous episode, which I'm not sure if you remember, but that's when a bunch of things happened. Like at the beginning of it, Virgil, the grandfather tells Kevin what's going to have to happen for him to get rid of his haunting, to get rid of Patty. And he says, you're going to have to die. And there's this long lingering hold on Kevin.

And then it just cuts to him leaving, you know, Huff being like, get the fuck out of here. It's funny. It's funny. Then he goes to Lori and brings Lori back into the fold. And there's a beautiful conversation, you know, where Lori's like, you are unwell and you need help. And she doesn't realize she's saying what he wants to hear because he's like, I will go get medicine. but it's of a different sort. They're talking truthfully

as people who have a history, but also he's luring her back in to take care of Jill in case he doesn't die. In case he really dies, doesn't come back. He says, like, you say I need help, then help.

It's a beautiful scene. Then he goes, and there's this long-drawn-out drama. It's this beautiful room with lights hanging. He just drink this hideous, milky poison. He sees that he's going to be brought back to life with a shot of adrenaline. He drinks it.

He says, how long does this? And then he collapses and dies violently. And then do you remember what happens? Virgil takes out the syringe, pushes out all the epinephrine that would save him, calmly crosses himself and shoots himself in the mouth, and we see that he's dead potentially forever. And that's the end of an episode. And I just, in my rewatch, I just wrote, I wrote, yes, in all caps.

Then I read, this is big boy grown up storytelling. It's risky. Yeah, risky is right. There are so many points in this series where when you write it out, it's, like insane that they expected people to keep watching. Totally. It was a provocation. Yeah, right, exactly.

There's just no conventions to it. I guess that's, it's so unconventional. And so the second season was not very highly rated. And there was a conversation, I mean, critically rated, but like, they didn't get a lot of viewership. And there was a question about whether they would get a third season. There was a conversation about what it would look like and what it would be. and the agreement was a final season with a shorter episode count.

I think there was some bartering. Like, I'll give you five, I'll take six, I'll do eight. So they did eight instead of ten with the final episode, moving production to Australia, et cetera, et cetera, final season. One thing that I think can't, we have to mention before we even talk about this

and why the show is the way it is, is that for season two and season three of this show, most TV shows for a season get like 20 weeks of writers. And then you go into production, you make the show. season two and season three of the leftovers each had over 40 weeks of writers. In a room

full morning to evening always altogether breaking every scene. Not like yeah so Kevin will talk to Lori in the room saying this is what they might say. They crafted this as a group over a long period of time in a way that TV shows just aren't anymore. So there's a luxury

to it that I feel like is remarkable and you get a sense of that in this, I sent it to you this morning that was, speaking of unprecedented, like New York Magazine did a feature on the finale that I don't think anyone else has ever done this sort of thing with a TV show

where Boris Kachko went into the writer's room when they were breaking it, went to Australia when they were filming it, and then went into the edit bay with Damon when he was making it. So in terms of like behind the scenes, people should check that out.

It's not, it's the way TV always gets made, but this is on like a bespoke level that most shows don't get. So season three is, fucking goes for it. Goes real hard. Eight episodes that get to Australia,

every character gets a wild celebration of themselves. There's an explosion of character. There's a nuclear explosion. There is another visit to the underworld. There is floods. Speaking of my full circle with Damon, he did that beginning of season two to provoke me. It worked.

I loved the show. And my reward was, in the beginning of season three, Sheriff Kevin of Jarden, Texas is riding a horse. Do you know what the horse's name is? No. It's Andy. because they were writing me. Oh, that's funny.

What an honor. It's sweet. Setting up the finale is the premiere where at the end of it, we have a flash forward, a little bit like Lost, which is Nora, who I feel like I worry we've given short shrift to, but we're going to have to talk about because the finale makes it clear that this was her show. Sometime in the future, with some gentle aging makeup, is living in rural Australia under the name Sarah and keeping pigeons or dubs.

Do you remember where you were, how you felt when you saw this, speaking of provocations? No, this goes, again, goes back to this. By now, I know how to watch this show. I am not, I know I am confused. It's unclear what's going on timeline-wise and what this means, but I am just along for the ride. I do remember feeling like a sense of relief because I was like, oh, this woman lived. Yes, right. You know, which you just didn't know how things would end.

These are all characters who seem, you never know what's going to. You know, they might not, they're kind of multiple deaths. Anything could happen. Attempted deaths and whatnot. But it took me kind of a click of a second to realize what we were seeing. And I was nervous. I didn't know, you know, if it would pay off. It was interesting to do because it kind of, like you said, gave away the one of the many points at the end,

which was that the show had been about her, the fact that they flash forward to her being in the future, thought, okay, well, this is what the season is going to be about. Yes, and it's interesting. I'm glad, I mean, to hear your response to it in doing some research for this podcast, that Damon put that scene almost reassure of years that we were going somewhere, that this was the end and we were going to an end and they had the end in mind and all this stuff. I could see it being received in a totally different way, being like, oh my God, they're just really throwing shit against the wall now in the sense that like with Breaking Bad,

when we saw Walt with a beard in the future, we've since learned that they had no plan. They didn't know how he was going to, why the guns were, they didn't know what any of that meant, and they figured it out later. Interesting. This was not that.

So the penultimate episodes are about Marklin Baker, famous from Perfect Strangers. By the way, this was to me was the sign that the show was going to be a different show. It wasn't just that they changed the opening credits to something, like, let the mystery be. It's that suddenly the non-bulky half of Perfect Strangers was a recurring character for faking his own disappearance.

And then, of course, he becomes playing himself. He's important in this third season. There's a machine that can take you to where they went. And is Nora going to go through with it or not? Her insistence on wanting to do that and being with her kids breaks up. Kevin and Nora, we alluded to that. Kevin goes on his journey. She goes on hers build up to the finale is that she is going to do this.

Did you feel that the introduction of a McGuffin machine was, suddenly a turn into sci-fi? Did that feel of a piece with the show, or did you feel like it was a different level of escalation? It's a good question. So by this point, like I said, I was no longer wondering, certainly wasn't the primary concern of mine,

the primary motivation for watching a show is not to figure out what happened. Great. This is why we get along. This is 100%. But the show teaches you to feel that way, right? So then they introduce potentially an answer. And I think one way of viewing that, if you're, you know, if you, if you didn't, if you still want to know what happened is, oh, my, now I'm going to find out what happens. That's, that's science fictiony, right? When they sort of brought this up and Nora at first pretends like she's investigating it as part of her job and, you know, a lot of the show is a lot of the characters, especially Kevin and Nora, kind of the through line is they're not really saying how they really feel at any point during the show.

they're kind of hiding their actual sentiments or lying in certain cases. Their big fight is we never talk about things. Yeah, it's like there are two people who are thrown together and we don't know how to feel about the love story. Is it a love story? Are they ever actually committed to each other? What are the real feelings of these two humans? It is not, it is very unclear.

Are they just refugees in recovery together? Exactly. Even when they're living in Jordan and things seems kind of sunny and you don't really know. So anyways, they introduced this machine. And for me, my question is, is not, is this going to show us? This is going to work? But rather, is this woman so irrevocably broken that she's actually going to go through with this and potentially commit suicide? And is she so incapable of moving on, which is her arc as a character?

Can she move on? And that was so, so it kind of introduced an element of fear for me rather than potential resolution. I did not think they're going to send her through and show us and maybe she's. it's going to work and we'll find out. I was like, oh, no. Yeah. Nora, we might lose Nora. It's so crucial that the show shifted to that perspective

because Kevin is a phenomenal protagonist and Justin Throw is truly God tier on this. He's really good on this. And I think kind of overlooked and underrated because he doesn't do a ton. I mean, outside of, he doesn't act a lot of he writes and things, but like his performance is incredible. But his character, if you really think about how it's organized,

I mean, he's the main character of the book. and the show left the book after the first season entirely. He's adjacent. He's the chief of police in a town. So his son is in one place and his daughter's suffering and choking out weird kids in high school while they J-O and his wife is in the cult. But he is just kind of coping and punching things and jogging.

She lost everything. And she is the fulcrum for this. Because if we're trying to understand what the world that has lost is doing, she's our character for it. So that shift was crucial. I think you just said it so succinctly. It's like, can she live? Can she live?

Because if she dies doing this, then in a way, she's reuniting with her kids. But if that's her only goal. So we're here. It's called The Book of Nora. It aired in June of 2017. Directed by Mimi Leader, story by Tom Speziali and Damon Lindeloff. Tom Spisieli is a crucial producer on the show. He's in the writer's room, but also the guy who kind of took the crazy ideas and figured out

how to make them work, a very practical guy and producer. The teleplay was by Tom Perada and Damon Lindeloff, who wrote the pilot as well. So it was a full circle moment. The episode begins with just Carrie Coon's face, which is probably better than most special effects, delivering a monologue about who she is and why she's going to do this. It is an incredibly sobering start for an episode that when I was rewatching it, I feel like I must have felt this tenfold the first time. Just is tonally a different planet than the show we've been watching for this season, right?

it is much more understated, it's much more direct. Yeah, it is also for her character. Like, I think, and this is, it's such a beautiful portrayal, and it's so accurate to, I think, people who are depressed are going through grief or whatnot.

It's, you watch her talking about her kids and why she's doing this, and sort of, you know, holding up the newspaper and all that. And I remember, I remember thinking, this is how this woman has felt the entire time. And she has covered it up. And she's been funny.

And she's been, you know, she's survived. And she's tried to build a new family and did all these things. And, but ultimately, this was always there underneath. And when she, so there's like this level of honesty to the delivery of it that is just jarring. Especially because if you're invested in the character, so invested in character at this point. And it's heartbreaking. It's truly heartbreaking. It's exposed and it's naked.

like she soon will be. I mean, it is of a piece of that. I also think it's worth noting that in the end of the previous episode, all the last craziness happens where Kevin kills himself again, goes back to the underworld, defeats whatever, nuclear bombs rain down, and the floods that are going to ruin, the end of the earth, stop, and dad says, now what? Now what is living? And it's a perfect setup for this, that all that other stuff is off the board now, and now we're just with Nora. And so Nora goes into this machine, it's almost at this point, speaking about like hanging a lantern on it. It's like intentional fuckery, right? They're like the low grade whatever is might make you nauseous while this, it's just nonsense. It's intentionally sci-fi gobbledygook. And Damon has talked about

how he'd watch the fly. So he was thinking about that. Also interestingly, like the machine is called the LADR, which they don't say, I think, so much in the show, but it's the latter. And the theme of the season, beginning with the great disappointment, the Australian cult where the woman keeps climbing the ladder. So that's a piece of it as well. we're told like she might become a fossil. They show the fossil. They show the previous fossil. She's going to be in a nude in a like a hamster sphere that fills with fluid.

People love dying and being reborn in fluid on the show. I mean, generally, we all do, but on the show particularly. Classic leftovers, though, it's not the sci-fi that matters from that scene. It's the goodbye Madlibs with Matt. Did that get you on the watch? I love that scene. Matt lives. we haven't really

and this is his only appearance in the finale Christopher Eccleston recently True Detective turned me into the Leo meme when he appeared on scene on the camera Yeah

On screen rather Doing his weird American accent again Just don't ask him to say Lari He's so good on this show He's so good He's so good But anyways When they're sitting by the water

In the parking lot She's in a robe He writes her obituary letting them laugh together the way they did. The Department of Sudden Diary. And be funny and a little bit rye and a little bit nerdy. And you suddenly, like, you see these, these, you are these two characters who they've always been. It's so beautiful.

I feel like you get a sense of their relationship, why this is so meaningful, why it was so meaningful that he was there. it's magical. I love that moment. And it also like, there's a lot of repetition in this episode, I think, intentionally of reminding us of like breaking through, pushing forward. And the scene where Matt is basically like, I am now, I know nothing. And what a release that is to let go. And that's important for what comes next. Beautifully shot, intensely shot scene of what happens to her in this machine.

She looks up as the water's about to cover her mouth. And is she shouting and she's saying stop and we cut to blue something. sky. What is your impression of what has happened at this point? At that point, I thought she called it. Called it. Chikined out. Yeah. Because then we immediately smashed the blue sky, a white bird, and we do the scene again that started, that ended the premiere. Where she rides a bike, birds, none. Does the name Kevin mean anything to you? Is this, is this Apex Mountain for the name Kevin? You know what I was thinking? You don't, you don't see a lot of Kevin's these days. No, maybe generationally, like there's a whole bunch of Kevin's.

who are like six or seven now because from the finale of this. I actually love that his name is Kevin though because it's such a like mystical character. It's so serious. He's the Messiah and his name is just Kevin. It works in the leftovers in Game of Thrones when there was a Kevin Lannister. I was like, that's lazy. Here it's good. Basically, there's a Kevin in town.

And Sarah, who is 100% Nora, there's no doubt about that, freaks. Well, first she eats like a very very. very runny egg sandwich, which I wondered if is that like watchman previewing with the points of the egg. But then she packs everything. She's got mad money in the coffee in the coffee can. And then there's a knock on the door. She's not fast enough. And it's old-ass Kevin. Now, before we get into the specifics, how do you feel about the aging and the makeup? I am so glad you brought this up. It's very important. I thought it was good. It's pretty good. So that is the thing that really jumped out to me on the rewatch because I think when I expected to

rewatch it, I was like, ah, I bet this is not that good. It's really well done. They knew that if they were going to be these people for an hour, they had to get it right. Could not be distracting. Could not be distracting. So they did it pretty subtly in some ways. I was reading

about, subtly to our eyes. It seems like it was absolutely insane behind the scenes, like to get her older hair. The wig. They spent tens of thousands of dollars for a wig of real hair from a woman who had gray hair but had never once dyed it. I would have thought the wig would be the easy part and the skin would be the... Oh my God, the wigs.

Wigs are expensive. But like the skin part, yeah, they were like, they had conversations about like how she hasn't taken care of her skin, like in the sun, sunscreen and stuff. Yeah, for a moment, I'm like, hey now. And it's like, oh, no, okay. And I don't... When you consider that we have so much evidence of how fucking fit Justin Thoreau is, the fact that he looks a little bit like he's let himself go and eaten

a carb is important. A little bit, but the final scene, which obviously we'll get to, he is wearing black skinny jeans

and I'm like, that was the one, I was like, I don't know if old Justin Throw, old chief would still be wearing the skinny jeans. First of all,

it's the future. We don't know what fashion trends are like. Maybe he's dressed like an old guy then, you know? Like, things are so different.

Also, Nora's leather jacket. That's got to be like an $8,000 leather jacket. How about her fucking, like, her artist studio

with like a distressed chipped crockery? I mean, everything is. Everything. Everything's incredible. And if we want to do a podcast about Justin Thro's boots, like the shot that lingers with me an international assassin

as he puts on the perfect assassin suit. Oh my God. But he's wearing his fucking like super slick like Milan runway boots. Looks so good. Just outrageous. Okay, so Kevin is there. And the first thing that some people might bump on is he acts as if they only met once. Yeah.

Outside of the dance. And he was just passing through. He saw her riding a bike. And he always wanted to see what would happen if they had that dance. And she's like, what the fuck? And this is incredible, I think, for the viewer, especially the first time I remember thinking this, because if we're to believe that she went through a machine,

which, you know, first viewing, I was like, to Lindelof show, maybe, who knows, maybe she doesn't remember things. Or where are we? Is she in a different universe? So for him to do it, there's certain things you have to accept in religion and in the leftovers. You have to buy this, and where are you with this? Well, so I remember my experience of,

watching it, wondering all of the possible explanations you're getting to, which is like, maybe this is a different Kevin, maybe this is a different timeline, maybe it never happened, maybe it's a dream, whatever. But, and this is, Justin Thoreau's performance is so excellent. I don't, there's a certain point while he's talking that you realize he's lying. Yep. And he is playing a guy who's lying. He's doing a bit. is trying not to break.

And then he starts breaking. By the time you get to the wedding, he's fully, you know. He's aware. He's self-aware. Or he's presenting that he's- There's little pauses. There's little, I don't know what you're talking about. And you're like, okay.

How do you know my kids? That's creepy. You're doing a bit. But at the beginning, I was totally discombobulated by it. It is. But it speaks to something we're going to say this again before we're done here. Like, what's beautiful about this is that it is a crazy left-field plot twist, but it doesn't matter. Right.

It doesn't matter. All that matters is he's tongue-tied and in love with someone. And whatever he's saying, we'll get there. We'll figure it out. It's pitch perfect in how it is revealed. I love it. You cut you right. What matters is how he feels, why he's there.

And that comes across the moment the door opens, and you see the look of relief in his eyes that he finally found her. And you read about the creation of this episode, I think the decision was he didn't intend to say this or I think he even says some version of this in the story but he didn't know what else to do because he was so scared of what would be he just played dumb

because he just wanted to extend the time of the Kevin. Okay, so he's like come to a dance with me because then we can finally have our dance. She's like, what the fuck? She goes to a payphone and makes a call. Glad to see pay phones have survived into the year 29 or 30, whatever it is. And who does she call?

Our friend, Lori. And do you remember how we left Lori in season three? Thought she had plunged into the ocean forever. Yes. What a delight. Well, I don't know, maybe you weren't delighted. I was so relieved. Oh, I was relieved.

Okay, yeah. There will be no Lori slander on this podcast. I didn't love, I remember when it's implied that she kills herself. Yes, scuba diving. Scoob diving after hearing that that's a good way to do it. I remember not feeling happy with that decision watching the show when it happened. It didn't make sense to me.

It didn't feel like the proper arc for the character. This isn't even about like I'm a tied to his character. I like her. I want to live. I was just like, this doesn't feel quite right. So the reveal that she's on the other end of the phone call holding Jill's baby. Her granddaughter.

I mean, my heart melted. And that she's her therapist. She's still Nora's therapist. somehow. And she's still funny and dry and... And it's so essential because life goes on, which is ultimately where this show landed. It's ridiculous. It's confounding. It's stupid, but it goes on. And like, there's these little reminders of that beat by beat in this episode. I also, I keep pointed to that vulture story. Like, it's amazing to get insight into the debate about the fate of Lori and how people were like violently upset one way or the other. And part of being a successful

storyteller in TV is somehow having like an exorcensory weather vein and being like, no, this is correct. Because I think you're right. I think that it's incredible way to leave a character hanging and very in keeping with the show, but it's wrong. It would be wrong for that to have happened. It just, yeah, it didn't feel like her, her, everyone, you know, has their own individual arc as it pertains to how do you deal with this horrible thing that happened? And hers didn't, it didn't make sense to me that it would end that way. Um, so I, loved seeing her. I loved the way their

conversation unfolds, which was tonally, again, this is really what you love about season two and three. It's a different tone in that, like, Lori gives her shit. It's funny. She is like... People who know each other, razz each other. Even amidst the darkness

and this super weird, and you know, it's a very serious and intense moment. Nora's been out of Kevin's life for many years. She's clearly panicking. She's freaking out. she's trying to run away. She calls Lori. She's saying,

you know, Zinni's trying to give me to go to this dance. And Lori's like, kind of sounds like you want to go to the dance. Yeah. And it's so funny.

And she says, same time next week, and Nora hangs up the phone violently, and I wrote in my notes, life is so annoying. Yeah. And the way Carrie Coon

plays this whole episode as someone who is just not, it's slapstick. She's like, how dare you? Everything was perfect. Yeah. She thought she could do a thing.

She thought she could run away and then just curate and just live in a tiny box and it would be fine, but these fucking other people, which is what life is. We even get a scene of, you know, it's again another one of these repetitive beats where she takes a bath and then is locked in the bathroom and then breaks, leaves a tub or a ladder future machine and breaks through to a world where someone loves her, although we don't fully get that yet.

She goes to the dance, it's a wedding. And one subtle thing that I loved is that, to me, was a callback to the pilot, because as a scene in the pilot, Liv Tyler and her fiancé, go to dinner, and she's like, the wedding is the party. He's like, no, the wedding is the vows.

And he's like, she's like, you're wrong. The wedding is the party. And he's like, it's a dance. And she's like, it's a wedding. Well, they're both right. It's just semantics. And it's about what two people agreed to call something. He keeps it up.

She says, you're really going to keep this up. He keeps it up. And we get some very economical data dump about what happened to every other character, which very thoughtful, very respectful. of the audience. I wanted that. I needed to know. I thought that was really important. And it's a beautiful scene. Otis Redding is playing and they kind of get what Kevin's always wanted.

They get a traditional first date and dance and you feel them fall in love with each other again. If you really just map it out and you think of this as being that traditional first date, it is one of the craziest love stories ever told on television because of the order in which everything happens to get to. Because you get to this moment and it's such a payoff and then ultimately the final scene is the real payoff. But it's like, wait, how do we feel so strongly about these two people? But then this is really the first time they're just being straight up. It's insane. Also, this was the moment, I think, in the first viewing where I was like, how long is this episode? And this is what we're doing?

Now, I'm happy. Second viewing? It's champion. Champion move. It's brilliant. But this is a 70-minute episode of television. where an older woman bikes a lot. Like, this dance scene is so long.

Yeah. It's so, so, so long. But that's what we're doing. I should say that I learned in the Vulture article that the ladder machine cost $100,000. Just that set. Stop. Really? Yeah, they fucking went for it.

So they saved money elsewhere. But yeah. Can I tell you something, though, about the sort of what I just said, which is it's like one of the craziest love stories. Yeah. Did you feel like before the finale that the season was, the series rather was a love story at all? Fantastic question.

No. I agree with you and I say this a lot about shows teaching you how to watch them. I think the other thing about fineries that can be very discomforting for the audience is up to that point, we as viewers carry our own head canon version of what a show is. I'm like, oh, this is a show about Kevin or it's about grief or it's about supernatural religion or belief. The finale is when there's no more wondering. The finale is when the people who make the show tell you what the show was about. And I think that probably could have caused some bumping, you know, or some like, I'm not, wait, what were we watching the whole time?

I think the beauty of this show is that in a way, their love story, if it is a love story, is only this episode. Everything else is just shared trauma and processing or not processing or denial together. It's an interesting way of thinking about it because as I watched this and reflected on the first two seasons, all three seasons. I wanted them to be together the entire time. So in some ways, that is a love story. Yeah,

it's fan service. But until the end, I was never convinced that they should be together or that either of them actually wanted to be together. Even, again, we talked about this in the happy moments,

you're always like, well, they're kind of not telling the truth to each other, talking around each other, they're hiding a lot from each other. So there's a lot drawing these characters together. They're both great. They're likable.

They're funny. They have great moments together. But you don't really believe them or believe that that's the point of the show until the end, which is so interesting. I totally agree with you. And I think one of the most devastating things in that final season in the, I think it's the Good Day Melbourne episode where they break up. And that's the last time they see each other until this episode. What I remembered was their fight in the hotel room and hotels once again being this like liminal space between worlds. I remember their fight being devastating.

And it is when you rewatch it. But the most devastating line to me on my rewatch was when Kevin leaves, and he leaves her alone crying, and his father pulls up in a van to take him off on some crazy drown yourself on the floods mission. And his father says, are you here alone? And Thoreau plays it brilliantly. And he says, yes. And in a way, they've always been alone. Yeah. Until this moment.

But even in this moment, this moment breaks because she's like, I can't do this if you're lying to me. We've talked about how unconventional this show is and they don't lean on any traditional tropes. But there is a pretty universal concept behind this, the love story aspect of it, which is you can't be with someone until you work through your own shit. Totally. Yes. And that's what this episode is about. And it becomes, again, this works for the leftovers.

And after 28 episodes, I don't think it works for any other show. What is the process of getting back to each other? Is it him being honest? Yes. but is it also her freeing a scapegoat who is entangled in a fence because of its sins and she takes them on and then just feeds it? Yeah, it's that too. They did both. So she has some bike hijinks.

And then when she feeds the goat food, the goat's trying to eat the love messages. Oh, the birds don't come back. We should talk about that. Not only the birds not come back, the nun is fucking some guy. Incredible. Lies to her face. And it's like, there's a good story. Meanwhile, she's been lying, you know, at the beginning, the scientists are like, we don't believe you.

This is a recurring motif. The next morning, Kevin shows up. One unanswered question is, he took a taxi. Is the taxi waiting the whole time, or do they send the taxi home? You don't see the taxi in the final shot when they're kind of outside. Okay. But it could be just out of the... Well, see, I hate ambiguity.

I need to know. So he's honest. And Thoreau plays this brilliantly. And he's just like, I, you know, I just didn't, sorry, I just saw my all caps note, Nuns be fucking. I don't think that's. That scene is very funny. It's really funny.

So much of what happens this episode is funny. Although you kind of just, the hijinks is it. And I do think. Her falling off the bike. Other than some slightly on the nose metaphors, it softens her to, like, she's just getting punched around, literally falling off a bike, climbing up a hill. to by the end, you almost feel like when Thoreau comes at the end,

when Kevin's Hart comes at the end and confronts her, she's like, all right. She says, all right. It's such a good point because you remember, the violence that happens to her, I mean, violence is a big word, but she falls off her bike and it fucking hurts, and Lori's annoying, and she slips in the mud,

and the nun is an asshole, and all this stuff. This is a woman who was so controlling in her grief that she hired people to shoot her in the chest to feel things and to feel pain, and she controlled it, and it spins so out of control. And again, that's tonal, right? Because this episode could be played so differently.

But with the jaunty music and the soul music and the colors and the light and the color palette is totally different. It plays differently. It's really important that she says, what's the last thing she says before Kevin shows up? Is she talking to the goat? She says, eat this, you idiot.

He shows up, and he explains the truth, right? That he has spent every one of his two-week vacations walking through Australia looking for her. Some notebook stuff right there. That is. The two-week vacations got me. That is heavy, heavy shit. It's interesting twinning here too, though,

because she has spent all this time searching for a way to get back to her kids. And that's, you know, our takeaway from this episode is that's stubbornness, right? She needs to let go of that. But we don't feel that way about him, that his obsession and his belief is noble and romantic. His obsession isn't about grief.

It's about building. Yeah, I mean, so like, you know, her obsession is, again, this sort of theme of how do we, how do you move on from this horrible thing that happened with him? The obsession, which is revealed now that he was obsessed with Feinier, he believed that she was alive. His journey as a character is totally different from hers. and actually, I think, getting to the point where he knew he wanted to be with her so abashally, so unabashedly, so clearly, so straightforwardly to the point where he would do this, to the point where he would believe what she tells him at the end, we'll get to that, that is where, like, that's the whole point for him. It's not about moving on with his life because nothing happened to Kevin. I mean, that's the craziest thing about the leftovers. It's a story about 2% of the world leaving and all the people dealing with that grief and like how do you live in a world where horrible things happen and reckoning with that and how do you go on with your lives?

The main character doesn't suffer loss. It's an enormous point. His son fucks up, but is fine. His daughter is fine. His ex-wife, people divorce? Yeah. Did her new husband shoot him in the stomach point blank and kill him? And he came back to life?

Sure, but who's perfect? He's a steady job. It's a hundred percent right. His arc is he becomes a believer. He goes from being a skeptic to a believer, but what does he believe in? And I think the crucial thing that he says that allows her to open the door to him

and make him tea, it's not that he's honest, generally speaking, is that he says, I refuse to believe that you're gone. That makes sense to her. She has spent her life refusing to believe that her children were gone.

So they see each other. They recognize each other. They're connected on that. And then they go inside. And then we, get. Let's just take a second here. One of the craziest shows in television history ends with a two-person conversation over tea. Is that the craziest thing about it? It's so good. It's so perfect. And you talked about the show's willingness to shed characters and storylines, just that everything

is shed by the end. And it's just those two people, visually, just the way it's shot, all of it. And it It's those two people who, yeah, it's amazing. I don't know. I'd love it so much. Carrie Coon's performance is Hall of Fame. Incredible. Hall of Fame performance. I think also, again, my love of the show has only been enhanced by my love of the creative

process that made it, that feels so special. And I'm just so in awe of. And if you read behind the scenes or talk to people involved in it, at least when they sketched out this idea of the machine and everything, And I, this is all, this is reported in New York Magazine. I'm sure there's more nuance than I'm not getting. But it does seem like the broad strokes of it were, Damon got very excited about showing the shadow world,

showing what it looked like. Tom Perada, who wrote the book, was adamant. You cannot do that. That violates the spirit of the book, which is about embracing ambiguity and impossibility of unknowing. And my buddy Patrick Somerville, who is in the room, at least according to this reporting, bridged the gap and said, what if she just told us?

And that breaks every rule of TV. You're supposed to show and not tell. What if she just told us? So good. And it becomes a story. So she tells us in this brilliant monologue, everything that happened when she woke up naked in a world where 98% of the people vanished. And she walks through a shadow world.

And I getting chills talking about it because there's no version of it that films that world that would ever equal this. Completely agree. Impossible to imagine. Yeah. And after many months or years of journeying, she takes a boat and she gets back to Mapleton, New York and what does she see? She sees her family. They moved on.

There's a, she sees her kids, her ex-husband, he's with a new wife, and they look happy. And she struck by that. The fact that, like, they, she lost everything. They just lost her. And they've gone on with their lives. The thing that she could not do that she spent the entire series being incapable of doing. and it just completely, completely changes her. She realizes that everything that she knew is inverted,

that they were the lucky ones. They kept most of the people in their world. They lost everything. Also that her children were fortunate because they had each other and they had their father and that they were capable of doing, as you said, the thing that she couldn't do. So in her telling of the story,

she doesn't speak to them. She vanishes and she finds the inventor of the machine, Hank Van Egan is the name of the editor of this episode and convinces him to build the machine again and send her back. And she did want to see Kevin. She thought of him, but she couldn't do it. Too much time had passed, et cetera.

Okay, so this monologue ends. You, Mina Kimes, in 2017, and now, 2024, do you believe her? I believe that Kevin believes her, which is the point. Yes. I mean, I'm not trying to copy. out, but yeah, I do think it is worth

addressing the do we believe her part in addition to, which is not the point of the show, the point of the show, I believe, point of the story. And this is all that ultimately matters to me at the end is when Kevin says, I believe you and the look on her face and the camera and the tight shot and just the melting

of the eyes and even just talking about it, the intense satisfaction and it's funny because like you know we talk about a lot of when you talk about the idea

of like a series finale I feel like you're always wrestling with how much you want to satisfy fans and make people happy right I don't and it's crazy because as I'm telling this I think this is literally the most satisfying feeling

I could have possibly had watching an ending even though on its face I don't think most people would describe this as fan service or no one had any idea what they were being given.

It's not pandering. No. But it, again, it filled literally everything I could have wanted from the ending and the feeling it gave me. So that, and that, you know, the way everything about it. But as far as whether I believe her, I think what's really amazing about Carrie Coon's performance, and I think a lot of it is, her performance is that monologue, but also who she is as a character is because

the character is so frankly weird and smart and whimsical it's entirely believable that a woman like that would just make up a story like that and tell it in the vivid detail that she does. So I think probably I lean

towards the idea. I am a person who thinks who viewed the you talked to this earlier the show as one thing happening and then everything after that happening being real. And because of that, I don't believe that anything happened to her because I feel like, again,

after the everything that happens on the show is explainable. I think you're right. And I think that what you said, I was, I'm glad you brought up this idea that only one weird thing happened and everything else is true, but anything else could be interpreted one of two ways. What she says is a fairy tale. And fairy tales are the foundation of myth, which is the foundation of religion, right? Like we just choose to believe or not.

It's a nicer story, as the nun says. Everything she says emotionally in that story is true. And she's describing acceptance. She's describing the long and uncomfortable and unplanned journey towards a place of some kind of acceptance and peace. And how she chooses to communicate it is her own way, in the same way that two people who are in mourning, one religious and one who isn't religious could talk to each other

in a way that I think can be empathetic and they can recognize things, even if they use different language to describe it. And ultimately what the show comes down to is what it was from the beginning. This is a show that kept a full-time religious scholar, Reza Aslan, in the room. You know, it's about belief. And the most beautiful thing that you could say is what he says.

It's not just that I believe you, it's that I believe you, I'm here. There's nothing else. He has nothing else to offer her. There's nothing he could do no act of traveling to the underworld like Orpheus to retrieve anything for her. She's done the underworld stuff on her own time. It's incredibly simple and it's profound, which I just think is continuing to knock my socks off, especially at going down this path of other TV finale,

that often try to reach for larger significance in ways that I admire, but are rarely as direct as this is. The resolution of the show was never going to be, we get the explanation, or these two people like fall in love, I have a family and do all this stuff, Although that's, you know, probably, you know, they do fall in love. But it's rather Nora moves on and Kevin finds faith. That was the whole, for both of these two characters who are on two different journeys with different trajectories, that is as close to resolution as you're going to get.

And the fact that they so elegantly achieved both of those things with that conversation, with the moment where they connect and he says that to her, which is, you know, what is religion, if not love and belief, this case being about a person and not about spirituality, but it's something that Kevin was lacking the entire series. And then the look she gives him at the end, what is that look? And that palpable sense of like just relief and feeling welcomed and feeling whatever loved and the belief in that love and the actual love, what is that if not? moving on. It's the first time the show, it's what, 28 episodes? It's the first time

of the show you actually believe Nora's moved on. Yes, absolutely. The last two minutes of the show, until then, you do not believe this woman has moved on. No, and somehow the show holds space for the idea that some people don't. We've seen people fall along the wayside of the show. Ultimately, it's

a choice. I mean, when Kevin has the big fight with her, he's like, you can't move on because then you won't be a victim anymore. And it's, what goes unsaid is that that's easier for her. It's awful, but it's familiar, and it's easier. But we're past that now. And I, the show, there's a reading of the show that is wrong, and is facile, but it's like, the show is contemptuous of anything organized or, you know, God is a man on a sex boat who gets eaten by a lion.

And Patty Levin, you know, in the International Assassin, he's like, she's like, what do you think I'm doing here, Kevin? And he's like, you destroy families. And she loves it. Like, you know, there's very few things in the show that are bedrock throughout other than, like, if you show, empathy, you're going to get smacked in the nose for it, and fathers are monsters. Like, those are the kind of through lines. But, but, but, but, families are chosen in this show. Religion and beliefs are cherry-picked. You can be a nun and have sex with someone. You can find your own version of what a family means and build it, and it's just as meaningful. And there's a flexibility to it that is inspiring,

but it's also like, it's fucking hard and scary, right? To lose the certainty and to slide into that. And for a show to be causing us to say these things and think about these things when it's two people having tea? Come on. I mean, the only thing the show is actually contemptuous of is nihilism, which goes back to our discussion of season one

and why, you know, the guilty remnant is, I mean, there is, like I said, there is nothing redeemable about the guilty remnant. That is clearly, that signifies everything that this show despises, which is giving up, and I don't want to say, giving up is the wrong way to put it,

this sort of refuge, of everything that you just said, the idea that people can move on, that they can find families, that they can find love, that they can heal, that they can believe, all of these things that, you know, that the guilty remnant is opposed to all of those things.

But the ultimate embrace of that, I mean, at the end, it's so perfect to me, and I think it would have been, if they had gone in any direction but ambiguity, it would have been flawed because it would have,

obscured the whole in the entire point of the show and the actual resolution. I totally agree. I think it's also on the meta behind the camera level, it's just a brilliant refutation of what what some toxic fandom turned lost into. And what I mean is let's say the if you believe the story, if somehow you get lost on that rabbit hole of like there was a machine, then you go down an even worse rabbit hole of like, if he could build a machine, why didn't you bring everyone back. Like, wait, what? You know, it asks those kind of rediddy questions. Yeah. But the show doesn't care about that. That's not the show. We move past that. And I think that's healthier because it leaves us in the emotional place we're talking about. And then, I mean,

that's the show. The big smile, there's tears. We see the scapegoat who's freed and eating carrots. One bird comes home, and then they all come home. And it's not like the messages of love around the world. We don't know about them, but we know about this one. Yeah. One of the things, as we wrap up, that I found really striking on the rewatch was for a show that, and it was covered this way when it debuted, that seemed very much about like a post-9-11 kind of how do we heal,

how do we deal with things like that, is revealed to me and watching it again to be like a really rare piece of art that reflects forward. Because watching it, even the first season, and like the fight in the park at the end of the pilot

between like the Normies and the Guilty Remnant, this show is as much about like post-Trump America and post-pandemic or pandemic America as it is about 9-11 in ways that I was like kind of freaked out by. You mean it resonates. It resonates. It is not about it because nobody knew, but it's it found something in like it raised its like Ben Franklin kite into the whatever and it's got a lightning strike from something that it was deeper or true in a way that I found very haunting. I think that that's really interesting. I think the way I would describe it. and why I think you're right is it's not post-apocalyptic.

So, like, post-apocalyptic shows, like Station 11 or whatever. Yeah. From by the leftovers, Patrick Somerville. Right, purely, which is great. It's a great show. Purely, like, okay, what happens after? How do you survive? You and I have been talking about this show

and how it wrestles with that theme of how do you go on? How do you continue? How do you cope? And the show is certainly about that. But what it's also about is how do you live? with uncertainty. Like in most post-alocopoeuvre shows, they know what happened.

These horrible mushroom zombies are on Earth or whatever. And we can fight them. Yeah. But the leftovers, nobody understands what happened and thus it could happen again at any time. And that is a much better metaphor for living in a world with chaos or grief or death

because choosing to start a new family to love someone, to embrace faith the way Kevin does at the end. It's not just about moving on, it's about accepting the risk that comes with moving on. And being present with what you can control. And saying, we're here now. I love you, you love me.

Let's just do this, even though horrible stuff happens every day. Totally. The central fictional conceit of the leftovers is, my God, anybody could go away at any moment. The central non-fictional conceit of living on earth is also that. That's what's so wild about the show, or they're wrestling with this as if this is some sort of impossible thing, but that's actually

just being alive. And that really resonates. And I think particularly your point about, like, one big event that sucks up all the oxygen and defines, like, that's, if you're looking at the show purely through a therapy lens, which is how I look through everything, you know, we hate uncertainty. All of us hate uncertainty. We have anxiety because of uncertainty, and we have catastrophic thinking to fill the hole. So it's like, at least I know we're all going to die. That in some ways, like Nora being like, I just have to be with my children instead of being alive, it's reassuring to be that unhappy because you have certainty in it.

This show just at its core is saying like, nope, sorry, it's just going to go on. It's just going to go on. And what are you going to do about it? Yeah. If you're Nora, after you've lost everything, it's easier, it was easier to not introduce someone, accept someone into your life that you might lose again. but at the end, she makes the choice to do so.

And that's why she's the bravest girl in the world. She is. And that's also why this is one of the great finales of all time. I think we clearly have telegraphed our answer to the final question as to whether the show stuck the landing. We don't even need to go through the categories of like if it was if it wobbled, if it got it together, if it didn't, if we thought differently in retrospect. No notes. I mean, literally, no. I think this is a masterpiece.

I do. I think it's a masterpiece too. I don't remember what I said at the time, but I think it's grown in stature. And I think that just as a creative achievement, and I include now for all the haters, I agree with you that the journey of the first season, if you take it as a complete work of transformation,

of a process, of moving through something, both creatively and then for the characters, I think it's stunning. And I think for a show to be so rich in plot, and character and events and craziness and memeable moments and all the stuff that we look for in TV, but to essentially be about the brokenness of being alive, Bravo. It's all we're looking for, really, in art and in podcasts. So do you leave this room feeling inspired about the world or feeling like, are you just season one, Kevin, about to punch something?

No, watching this episode this week, I felt, and even knowing how it ends, but watching it again, watching the conclusion that the characters come to, the choice that they make, to live in the moment, to love each other, to believe things, to take risks, to be vulnerable. I found it immensely affecting because those are choices we all have to make every day. Even those of us who aren't experiencing grief or who are living in easier circumstances than others, life's hard, life's scary. Especially for those of us who are Eagles fans. And so watching this has really helped me just be more open-minded about a new season and a new set of coordinators. I like that. Thank you, Mina, for joining me, and thank you for suggesting this, because this show is not originally in the lineup for the

first run of these, and it sets a very high bar that I think would be worth reflecting back on as we talk about other fineries going forward. I'm glad this podcast is a living reminder. This episode of Stick the Landing was produced by Kai Emmullen and Kai Grady, and our theme music was composed by my good friend, Giancarlo Volcano.