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Naja
Member
06-28-2003
| Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - 10:19 pm 
Kitt, I am pretty sure it's the latest ep since it was playing on the channel. It was a scene where some guy realizes he is locked in some kind of bunker.
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Sanfranjoshfan
Member
09-17-2000
| Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - 11:33 am
The latest episode did contain some great funny moments....funny as in bizarre, unexpected and surreal with "Huh-WHAT?! moments"....it wasn't slapstick or "sitcom funny".
I personally thought Patti being SOC was hysterical!
Anyone starting to watch it now, remember, it is not a mystery about explaining what happened....it's a drama about how people react to something that came without warning and changed the lives of everyone on earth in an instant. Something that was both tragic and literally impossible...
Just imagine if 2% of the world's population vanished in the blink of an eye and there was no explanation. No one even knew where to start to find out why. No forensics, no clues, no motive no witnesses...they are all just "gone". (That would come to about 6.5 million people in the US alone.)
How would that affect you? What would you do if you never knew why? How would your world view change?
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Sanfranjoshfan
Member
09-17-2000
| Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - 11:33 am
Uncle_Ricky, that was a great story!
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Kitt
Member
09-05-2000
| Sunday, June 04, 2017 - 11:48 pm
I caught up and watched the finale. I thought it completed the journey nicely, that life still went on for these people even though the departure took them such different ways.
Perhaps the most difficult thing to accept if that happened would be that something so unexpected could happen once, and never again. That really - apart from knowing the people had gone - they lived, or could have lived, "normal" lives.
I'm not sure if the show might have been better without the supernatural parts (except the main disappearance). I loved that Kevin's dad was completely wrong about the flood, for instance, and it was just a storm. And I'm still not sure what happened with Kevin when he died, if he died, or if the heart problem was meant to reveal that his deaths were a metaphor for a heart attack type thing where you "see the light" and your brain basically tries to fill the gap with weird fragments from your memory. And perhaps we aren't meant to know for sure.
One thing though, for me, it's hard to relate to a kind of religious ending. That Nora's family are "in a better place." That'll take a while to settle in, to see if I can place that in a different way. I like it in a scifi sense, but I don't know if that message somehow negates something for me... hard to put into words.
Anyway I look forward to you guys chatting about it.
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Sanfranjoshfan
Member
09-17-2000
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 1:50 am
"Perhaps the most difficult thing to accept if that happened would be that something so unexpected could happen once, and never again."
I think that since this "departure" had never happened before in human history (that's a long, long, long time!) no once could ever be sure that it would never happen again. No one could take the world for granted as casually as they used because everyone would know that something impossible was now known to be possible. The security the world had was based on the notion that it was impossible for it to happen the first time. Once that lined was crossed, everyone's security of our world's reality flew out the window.
"And I'm still not sure what happened with Kevin when he died, if he died, or if the heart problem was meant to reveal that his deaths were a metaphor for a heart attack type thing where you "see the light" and your brain basically tries to fill the gap with weird fragments from your memory. And perhaps we aren't meant to know for sure. "
I think the entire series was meant to be taken 100% literally. It was a series that put regular people into an inexplicable situation which magnified their shared experience in a way that brought everyone's innermost feelings/demons to the surface. It's not the kind of thing one could take stoically. It broke people. It made people stop trusting the very existence of those they love. It was an amazing journey through an unexplainable event and I just can't accept that it could be explained away with some kind of metaphor. To me, that would be like shoving this epic vision into a tiny little boring box.
"One thing though, for me, it's hard to relate to a kind of religious ending. That Nora's family are "in a better place.""
I didn't see it that way at all. I don't think Nora said they were in a better place, she just realized that they had all "moved on" during the previous 7 years since the departure. By the time Nora saw her kids again, they had spent the last half of their entire lives moving on. Nora didn't meant they they were in a better place, just that she (Nora) was no longer part of their world. Her showing up in the middle of their new lives would have caused a great deal of pain for them and herself. When one's "dead" wife shows up after her husband is remarried and he and his children are finally happy again it will end badly for some or all of the people involved. She said she was a ghost in that world, and that's what she was...a painful part of their past that they had moved on from. I think if she had gone there days or weeks after the departure she wouldn't have felt that way.
Nora finally got it that she had to move on, too. She spent her whole post departure existence trying to reclaim the past and when she finally did, she found that it had moved on without her.
This episode was great. Nora on that bike, back and forth over and over. And her climbing the hill to save the goat and then falling and rolling back down only to drag herself back up...now that was a metaphor that made sense to me. As I saw it, she was in a constant struggle to hang onto her past while the world was constantly trying to push her forward. She finally did "get it" but it took her traveling to other side of reality and back to realize it.
This finale was spectacular. No neat little bow of an explanation but certainly some closure for the characters. And for me!
I tend to feel less emotional watching shows where a loved one dies than I do when a loved one returns. I think that's because I've lost so many people in my life that in some sad way I "got used to it" to some extent. However, a lost loved one's unexpected return gets me every time because it's not as common as the tragedies I've lived through. The people I have survived don't come back....but when I watch a moving show like The Leftovers, I can honestly say I know what it would feel like. Nora finally letting go and allowing herself to accept the love Kevin had for her was truly touching.
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Kitt
Member
09-05-2000
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 10:13 am
The quotes on "in a better place" were mine, Nora didn't say that, but it seemed like perhaps that was the message they were trying to portray, that the family was happy where they were. So I guess not so much in a better place but in an equivalently happy place. Somewhere where you could just let them be and know they were ok. Perhaps rather than a religious idea of "heaven," it would be more like someone who gives a child up for adoption and then finds they're with a really happy family. That's a more comfortable way for me to look at it.
I was thinking about you, Sanfran, yesterday, because the whole experience of this show must be very different when you have seen so many people die, often quite quickly. It's probably why you and Uncle Ricky felt so much empathy towards the characters. For me, while I still feel empathy over the not knowing part of their story, and a certain extent over their losses, that's very different to knowing from experience how feelings and emotions progress over time when there is such uncertainty over who you could lose next, or whether it might be you. That's much more akin to what was going on in this story.
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Sanfranjoshfan
Member
09-17-2000
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 12:43 pm
"So I guess not so much in a better place but in an equivalently happy place."
Come to think of it, I can see one way to interpret it as her family being in a "better place"..if "place" refers to "state of mind" rather than location. Her family was happy because they were living in the present. Nora was lost and conflicted because she was still living in a past which no longer existed.
"I was thinking about you, Sanfran, yesterday, because the whole experience of this show must be very different when you have seen so many people die, often quite quickly."
I appreciate that thought and you are correct. There were times in the 80s that I'd see friends/acquaintances in the obits of the free weekly gay newspaper and those obits were the first I'd heard about their "departures". Most weeks there was "only" one or two people I knew or recognized but a few times there were four at once. I'd go have a coffee and read that paper when it came out on Thursdays and find that people I knew were gone. Just gone. They were part of my world one day and then they weren't...and my world would suddenly feel a little smaller. I don't remember how many times I reached for the phone to call a particular person only to remember in mid-reach that that person just wasn't there anymore.
Back to the show...
One thing bothered me in this episode. Nora said that after "going through" she found herself alone in a world just like this one, only it was mostly empty and abandoned and she discovered that she was in a world where all the departed had gone and from their POV everyone else had vanished. It made me wonder about that crying baby who vanished from the car seat of his mother's car in the opening scene of the series. That parking lot did also show a boy standing there in background saying "Dad? Dad?" so I just have to assume that boy's father found the baby.
I kind of wish they had included a flashback of a couple of "the departed" from their point of view. It would have been interesting to have at least have gotten a peek at the "other side" where 98% of the population "vanished".
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 12:46 pm
Very astute analysis Kitt and SFJF - thank you for sharing! I hesitate to add anything because the two of you did an excellent job.
But Kitt's acknowledgment of how many people SFJF has seen die touched a nerve for me, too. That whole period in the '80s and '90s when we lost so many friends to AIDS grows slightly dimmer with each passing year, but the vividness of those losses are never really far from the forefront of our minds (I'll take the liberty of speaking on behalf of SFJF about this somewhat unique phenomenon).
A couple of years ago I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life. In it, I dreamt that I had reunited with Lincoln, my best friend in high school. I was weeping with joy and relief that he was still alive and I scolded him for not letting me know that he was still living, even though he had disappeared from my life in early 1989.
But then I woke up. And the feeling was so crushingly painful to accept.
Then, earlier this year, someone suggested that I consult the publicrecords.com website to see if I could locate Lincoln's name. (I was that naive that it never occurred to me that such a website might exist.)
Anyway, I did find Lincoln's name and learned he had died on October 22, 1992. I then wrote to the Los Angeles County Registrar's office to buy a copy of his death certificate.
All these years I had assumed Lincoln had died of AIDS, but I had always held out a tiny bit of hope that he had just moved away and he'd opted to lose touch with me and that somehow, some way, we'd reconnect sometime in our respective futures.
But when the copy of his death certificate arrived in the mail, I felt such a huge sadness that my assumption was correct. A part of me wished the "Cause of Death" section might reveal something else, such as a traffic accident. Somehow I thought the confirmation of his death would be less tragic if I'd been wrong about the cause.
I thought a lot about Lincoln as I watched "The Leftovers" because one day I was wishing him Happy New Year on 1/1/89 and then, after that day, we never saw or spoke to one another again. I'm pretty sure he didn't want me to see him deteriorate and that meant I never got the chance to say goodbye. The hurt of not being able to do that haunts me still. 
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 12:55 pm
SFJF - I was composing my post at the same time your 12:43pm post appeared!
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Kitt
Member
09-05-2000
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 1:02 pm
Thanks for sharing, both of you, I appreciate it. I can't imagine.
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Kitt
Member
09-05-2000
| Monday, June 05, 2017 - 2:26 pm
Following on from your thought about the baby, Sanfran, Laurie was pregnant at the time of the disappearance, and the foetus disappeared. Maybe they should have thought more about the ending when they said that would happen, because that would be a harsh reality for Laurie if she hears what happened. (Or perhaps not, for her, as she seemed quite detached from it (and everything), but if other pregnant mothers heard.)
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