By: Brandon Wolfe
It would appear that Kevin Garvey is a bit more messed up in the head than we quite realized. While we had previously been made aware of gaps in his memory, resulting in those lost shirts and the appearance of that irate dog tied to his front porch, we see this week that Kevin’s lost time appears to be more dangerous than anyone thought. Awoken by Dean the dog-shooting mystery man (whose appearances often seem to coincide with Kevin’s forgotten escapades), Kevin finds himself in the middle of the woods. When he asks Dean how he got there, a confused and somewhat hurt Dean fills him in: the two of them kidnapped Patti, the silently snide leader of the Guilty Remnant, the night before, roughed her up and tied her to a chair in a cabin Kevin that visited as a child. Dean wants to know what happens next, but a stunned Kevin is still trying to process what happened before.
Kevin implores Patti that he is sorry for what he has done and asks that they just forget about the whole thing. But Patti breaks her vow of silence to bitterly spit in Kevin’s face (after literally spitting in his face) that the first thing she will do upon returning to civilization will be to tell the authorities what Kevin has done to her, seeing to it that he will lose both his job and custody of his daughter. Dean, who notes that he considers himself something of a guardian angel (perhaps a loaded turn of phrase, since we learn from Patti that the GR couldn’t find any records of his existence prior to his appearance in Mapleton), submits to Kevin that Patti must die. Kevin does not like this idea. He still considers himself a decent man, in spite of whatever he did while in his fugue state. Retreating briefly into the woods, Kevin finally locates his missing white shirts, all of them decorating the trees like ‘Blair Witch’ stick figures. These episodes of Kevin’s have been going on for some time now and are getting worse. Kevin returns to the cabin to find that Dean has made the decision for him and has placed a plastic bag over Patti’s head, slowly killing her. Kevin fights off Dean and saves Patti’s life, not that this endears him to her any more.
This little standoff threatens to make ‘The Leftovers’ interesting for a bit. Kevin’s elusive dark side and his hostile tête-à-tête with a suddenly very talkative Patti give this listless series a momentary shot in the arm. When Patti does open her mouth, she spews venom, and you start to realize how wasted the GR are rendered as opposing forces by the decision to keep them silent. As Kevin talks to Patti, he asks about the GR’s mission and Patti ultimately brings us back to the series’ default state of eye-glazing tediousness by going off on an endless, vaguely worded monologue about the GR’s modus operandi that Kevin rightly calls out as a bunch of B.S. But the show calling itself out for its characters’ blathered, obliquely defined nonsense doesn’t correct the problem that the show employs blathered, obliquely defined nonsense far too often.
We do get a few nuggets of interest from the conversation. Gladys’ murder a few episodes back wasn’t performed by anti-GR vigilantes as previously thought, but by the GR themselves. The group seeks to make martyrs of themselves, which is precisely why Patti actively goads Kevin into killing her. But Kevin won’t do it. He takes out a large knife and approaches her ominously, yet it’s just for dramatic effect as he uses it to cut her free from her binds. Patti isn’t giving up that easily, however, so she takes a shard of glass from the floor and plunges it into her own throat, leaving Kevin helpless to save her. It’s a shocking moment to be sure, but it doesn’t feel properly earned, and it removes Patti, one of the more interesting characters on the show even when largely silent, from the equation, which won’t assist ‘The Leftovers’ in its quest to make me stop yawning.
In other Garvey/GR news (since these are the only two elements that ‘The Leftovers’ finds to be of interest), Jill Garvey has chosen to grill her dad’s new girlfriend, Nora Durst, about that gun Jill noticed in her purse weeks earlier. The gun is gone now that Nora has let go of her pain subsequent to her encounter with Holy Wayne, a development that seems to trouble Jill enough to send her into the arms of the GR and a reunion with her mother. Nothing about this reveal makes a lot of sense. The crux of Jill’s decision seems to be her inability to comprehend how Nora, someone who lost everything to the Departure, could move forward with her life. Considering that Jill didn’t lose anyone to the Departure (at least not directly and permanently), her having such an extreme reaction to the concept of someone else letting go of grief seems a leap. But then, the series hasn’t made any convincing argument on why anyone would join the GR, so why should it start now? At least this will make one obnoxious teenager on this show silent.
Hopefully the show will do a better job of keeping Liv Tyler’s Meg silent. When we meet her this week, she is viciously attacking Rev. Matt and shouting obscenities over something he wrote in his flyers about her mother, who passed away the day before the Departure. Liv Tyler, never the strongest actress in the business to begin with, is insufferably shrill in her screeching fits. Laurie Garvey tells Meg (non-verbally, of course; Laurie has yet to break her vow of silence once in the series, undoubtedly building to a big moment in the future when she does) that violence is for the weak and that she must apologize to Matt for her actions, which she does, grudgingly. But talking is now in Meg’s blood, so she chooses to continue gabbing to Laurie out loud before being harshly chastised to shut up. Yet before she is silenced, Meg reveals that the GR is planning a big event for Memorial Day, an event that involves many of those life-model replicas mentioned in the margins of the series. As with everything on ‘The Leftovers’ (and as is Damon Lindelof’s wont), we must make do with irksomely enigmatic hints at things to come rather than anything concrete. And considering that the series was just renewed for a second season, expect everything to get drawn out beyond all reason. Except unlike ‘Lost’, the meager mysteries of ‘The Leftovers’ are virtually impossible to care about, so the show’s stall tactics and parceled-out information neglect to do it a single favor. Pity the show doesn’t realize that.
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