By: Brandon Wolfe
For a series so often awash in inertia, “Gladys” opens with a visceral gutpunch. A pair of Guilty Remnant members stop at a gas station so one of the women can use the restroom. The older woman waiting outside, whom we will later learn is the eponymous Gladys, is grabbed by a pair of masked assailants, who take her out to the woods nearby, affix her to a tree with masking tape and proceed to stone her to death with large rocks, blood profusely gushing from the woman’s head. The GR does not speak, but with the life draining out of her, Gladys breaks this vow in order to plead for her life. This falls on deaf ears, as the men chuck the last rock at her head, delivering a fatal blow. This is an ugly scene, unnecessarily so. While the GR have been such a frustrating force, both to the characters within the show and to us out in the viewing audience, seeing this helpless older woman bludgeoned to death is very difficult to watch. I have been asking ‘The Leftovers’ to make me feel something other than sleepy, but this is not what I had in mind.
The death of Gladys has a ripple effect throughout Mapleton. Kevin requests that a curfew be instituted to keep people off the streets after 8:00 PM, enabling him to arrest any members of the GR wandering about to keep them safe. While the mayor supports this idea, the public and the members of the city council all unanimously shoot it down at a town hall meeting, the most outspoken voice in crowd belonging to Dean the dog hunter, which, if nothing else, at least proves definitively that he doesn’t exist only in Kevin’s head, as the series earlier suggested. Kevin has other problems as well. One of his detectives has opted to turn the murder investigation over to the Feds, specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives & Cults (ATFEC). While Kevin struggles to wrest the case back over to his jurisdiction, he learns that Gladys’ body has been sent to the ATFEC and cannot be returned. When he gets the agent now in charge of the investigation on the phone, the man ominously insinuates that he would be happy to send some agents to Mapleton to get rid of the GR once and for all, an offer a shaken Kevin declines. We eventually learn in the episode’s final moments that the ATFEC has no intention of doing anything with Gladys’ body beyond burning it along with all the other bodies of cult members they’ve accumulated.
It’s a bad week for Kevin altogether (not that anyone on ‘The Leftovers’ has good weeks). He has finally, tearfully, decided to pull the trigger on those divorce papers that Laurie presented him with last week. He also appears to be missing white shirts from his closet and he cannot seem to control the functioning of his house alarm, which is either off inexplicably or will not respond to his usual disarm code. It seems as though someone is messing with Kevin, perhaps breaking into his home to steal his shirts like an Underpants Gnome, but later on, when he decides to drunkenly confront the dry cleaner who earlier claimed to not have the shirts in his possession, the man manages to locate them among his inventory when Kevin frightens him (unless he just gave Kevin someone else’s shirts out of fear). But I’ll tell you, between the case of the missing bagels and now the case of the missing shirts, ‘The Leftovers’ is really filling the ‘Breaking Bad’ shaped hole of gripping television.
Gladys’ death causes Laurie to suffer a panic attack, which leads to her GR partner Patti taking her on a little sabbatical. Checking into a motel and awaking to a non-white change of clothes and an invitation from Patti to breakfast, Laurie finds her partner, astonishingly, talking up a storm to her about their mission. It seems that Patti once took Gladys on a similar outing after the death of her son filled her with overpowering emotions, requiring Patti to remind Gladys that the suppression of all feelings is paramount to the GR mission statement. Now that Laurie finds herself similarly filled with forbidden emotion, Patti feels that she also needs a corrective time-out. This scene is the closest the series has come thus far to shining any light on what the GR are all about, even if all we learn from Patti’s speech is that feelings = bad. At least it’s something.
The chief problem with ‘The Leftovers’ is emerging more clearly now. This was sold to us as the story of how the world responds to the Rapture, or at least a Rapture-like event. That is a tantalizing premise for a television series. But ‘The Leftovers’ isn’t really about that event. If anything, that event exists merely as a backdrop, something that is paid lip service to rather than given primary focus. This is really a series about how a weird cult plagues a small town. And not even an interesting weird cult, just a bunch of silent jerks who go around passive-aggressively annoying everyone without letting on why they’re doing it. The GR is wholly uninteresting as an entity and the series is in no great hurry to divulge what they’re really about, and I suspect it wouldn’t make much of a difference if it did. This is an issue because the GR is not just a part of the fabric of the show, they are the driving force behind it and they are far too passive and vaguely defined to sustain this level of prominence.
I don’t know if ‘The Leftovers’ will ever stop shuffling its feet. It sets up little pocket mysteries, like Patti and Laurie dropping off a bag labelled “Neil” on somebody’s front porch, that I can’t imagine anyone will find any investment in getting to the bottom of. As usual, it’s a small handful of performances that carry the day. Christopher Eccleston continues to put in solid work as Reverend Matt, who, rather than seek revenge on the GR for taking his church, has instead devoted himself to praying for the cult, even though his efforts go completely unappreciated. Justin Theroux is still putting in a performance tinged with anger and palpable frustration that makes him an intriguing protagonist even in the face of the crushing nothingness swirling around him. But it’s just not enough. ‘The Leftovers’ remains stuck in neutral and if it can’t get itself in gear soon, HBO will need to break out the masking tape and the rocks.
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