Inhabiting the Unknown
A spiritual successor to Lost refocuses our attention not on solving life’s mysteries, but living with them.
Review by Jake Casale
I have flickering memories of my first taste of mystery stories. My love for the genre emerged around the same time as my slightly neurotic completionist tendencies, leading to bookshelves upon bookshelves stuffed with whatever series had arrested my attention at that moment. As a first grader, I religiously collected The Boxcar Children, which starred a group of siblings who moonlighted as amateur sleuths on school holidays. I soon graduated to both The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, which…also centered on children who fancied themselves as detectives, except with the wherewithal to manage it as a co-curricular activity. Ever a promiscuous reader, I flitted away to other genres as the years went on, but the old attraction stirred back to life when I discovered the television series Lost as a teenager. Famous for its labyrinthine mythology and endless riddles, that show inspired a passionate fan community that was even more famously divided over Lost’s finale, with many perceiving that the show failed to satisfactorily answer many of the narrative knots it wove over its run.
While I loved Lost, finale included, for its impeccable character work, it also invited my adolescent brain to face a curious quandary that more age and experience had already begun stirring up outside the television screen: what should I do with mysteries that don’t get answered?
That question – or more accurately, that dialogue – has gone on to define a decent share of my ongoing spiritual and existential journey. I was surprised earlier this year to find another apparently mystery-drenched show, The Leftovers, angling to add itself to the conversation. The Leftovers aired on HBO exactly a decade ago, running for three seasons. Coincidentally, its co-creator and sole showrunner, Damon Lindelhof, also served in a co-creator and co-showrunner role on Lost. This made discovering and watching The Leftovers feel like picking up an old relationship that had lain dormant for so long that each party barely recognized the other. But, as we began to converse, glimmers of continuity between our past and present selves manifested.
The Leftovers follows the aftermath of a mysterious incident known as The Departure, in which two percent of the world’s population inexplicably vanished. The concept sounds dystopian and/or steeped in science fiction, but to me, the show only barely fits either of those descriptors. For one, the world’s sociopolitical status quo remains mostly intact after The Departure. Society doesn’t dramatically decline in terms of infrastructure or distribution of power, but undergoes a psychological reorientation – the result of a collective, traumatic encounter with the unknown. Likewise, the show is not concerned with offering a technical explanation of how and why The Departure occurred, and so avoids spinning itself as a tale about the consequences of technological or scientific innovation. Neither does it offer a coherent divine cause, though the plot is drawn forward by a series of ambiguous, borderline supernatural occurrences that circle the main characters like vultures.
The Leftovers contends that a world is not believable by its explainability, but by how truthfully its people inhabit it.
Instead, the show is interested in the unruly melange of contradictory human responses to uncertainty – the impulses to ignore and to soothe, the drive to make meaning, the madness of the slow gnaw of anger and grief, and even the self-immolating urge to embrace existential defeat. These find expression in various character arcs among the ensemble cast, with central focus going to Justin Theroux’s police chief Kevin Garvey and Carrie Coon’s grieving government worker Nora Durst, unlucky enough to lose her entire family in The Departure. The two find solace in each other after Kevin’s wife deserts him to join a cult that refuses to join humanity in “moving on” from The Departure. Kevin and Nora’s attempts to stitch together a semblance of stability are frequently undermined by their own wounds and a compounding series of supernatural events following Kevin, who some (including Nora’s brother Matt, an Episcopal priest) eventually believe is a Christ-figure destined to thwart a future catastrophe. As the action ramps up around the oft-bewildered Kevin and Nora, from disappearances and hallucinations to inadvertent killings and maybe-resurrections, one has the sense of witnessing the seeds of a religious mythos in the process of being planted—but The Leftovers rarely beckons the viewer to categorize, dissect, or otherwise impose comprehensibility onto its metaphysics. There is simply a swirl of boggling and enigmatic occurrences that may mean something, or everything, or could just as plausibly mean nothing.
This is not the narrative direction I expected from the man who weathered the Losties’ collective ire at his (perceived) failure to build a legibly airtight world; rather than re-litigating that competency, Lindelhof appears to have reformulated the terms of the accusation. The Leftovers contends that a world is not believable by its explainability, but by how truthfully its people inhabit it. Lindelhof’s creative vision remains fascinated by how otherworldly intrusions disrupt human life, but it is the human response to the disruption that is in focus. It took me about a season and a half to realize this, so ready was I to scan for clues and threads to a taut tapestry I was sure lay just beneath the surface. But as the story developed (and once the second season’s opening credits song, “Let the Mystery Be”, had rolled a few times), I began to settle into the narrative contours of ambiguity that were intended to highlight the main event: the interlocking journeys of shattered people all seeking to plant their feet in the best way they know how.
Ironically, Lost tried to articulate a similar aim for itself at its conclusion, but the weight of its storytelling sprawl worked against its ability to sell the point, along with what some took as a surprise, heavy-handed spiritualization of human connection at the very end. Lindelhof and his team probably didn’t help matters by publicly setting audience expectations for all-encompassing answers that never fully came. It seems, with The Leftovers, that he learned how to better proportion story ingredients in accordance with his intentions, while opting this time for a more jagged and ambivalent—if ultimately quietly hopeful—interpretation of human relationships. As a result, The Leftovers taps into something of the truth of living with the unexplainable, in all its terror, frustration, and moments of fullness.
I suspect my worldview differs from Lindelhof’s, but perhaps, as I have slowly come to appreciate the hidden beauty in that tension, so too did he.
Jake Casale lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 and has worked on public health/health systems strengthening efforts both domestically and abroad. He currently works as an analyst for digital health company Cohere Health.
The Leftovers was created by Damon Lindelhof and Tom Perrotta for HBO. It can be streamed on Max.
