By: Brandon Wolfe
Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) has flitted around the edges of ‘The Leftovers’ for awhile now. The brother of the troubled (said as though anyone on this show isn’t) Reverend Matt Jamison, Nora had the rare distinction of losing her entire family in the Departure. If that wasn’t enough, her brother took it upon himself recently to reveal to Nora that her husband had been carrying on an affair with their children’s preschool teacher prior to being taken. On this ceaseless downer of a series, an episode all about Nora didn’t seem like it would help matters, yet “Guest” is the best episode of ‘The Leftovers’ produced as of yet. It proves engaging in a way that this series usually struggles to achieve.
Similar to the show’s previous character showcase, the less successful (but still superior by ‘Leftovers’ standards) Rev. Matt one-shot “Two Boats and a Helicopter”, “Guest” takes the spotlight off of the Garvey family and the Guilty Remnant and shines it on Nora, who is revealed to be an understandably troubled individual. Our first look into Nora’s life in this episode finds her hiring an escort from an ad in the back of a seedy publication. When the woman arrives at Nora’s house, she is offered $3,000 to shoot Nora point-blank in her Kevlar-covered chest, an offer the escort accepts with deep hesitation. This is how Nora spends her nights. Her days are spent working for the Department of Sudden Departure, surveying those who lost loved ones on October 14th and have filed claims to be compensated for the loss. Nora’s job requires her to subject each claimant to 150 highly personal questions before funds are awarded. Designed to determine possible patterns among the departed, the questions range from the dietary habits of those taken to whether or not they ever contemplated suicide. For someone wallowing in as much profound pain as Nora, this is not an ideal job, as it constantly forces her to confront Departure-related grief rather than escape it. Yet it seems the deliberate application of pain, be it physical or emotional, functions as a coping mechanism for this tortured soul.
After a brief, awkward encounter with Kevin at City Hall, where both are present to file their respective divorce papers and Nora requests Kevin’s company on an impromptu trip to Miami before distractedly dismissing his daughter’s very existence, Nora is off to the Big Apple for the Departure Related Occupations and Practices (DROP) conference, an annual gathering where experts and professionals convene in a fancy hotel to discuss the state of their unique field. While checking in, Nora is given a Guest pass when hers isn’t present, assured by the unhelpful woman at the registration table that she can try to find it inside on the person who took it. Nora, a deep reservoir of anger always bubbling just beneath her calm exterior, makes it her mission to track down her badge. But, unlike the similar hunts for missing bagels and shirts that this show has tried to sell us before, Nora’s hunt for the badge thief is actually fairly compelling, especially after she is thrown out of the hotel when her imposter trashes the downstairs bar, security being only aware of the name on the perpetrator’s badge.
When a desperate attempt to sneak back into the conference in time for her panel fails, Nora implores the hotel’s manager and security team to check and see if a fake Nora Durst is sitting in her seat onstage. As it turns out, there is, and the imposter instantly begins grandstanding about what a sham the Department of Sudden Departure is before she is ejected from the premises. With that all behind her, Nora enjoys a much-needed drink at the bar previously trashed in her name, when she meets Patrick Johansen, the author of a current bestseller about dealing with the Departure, something he experienced by losing a whopping four family members, yet appears to be in much better spirits than Nora, who attacks him for his inequitable nonchalance in the face of her own debilitating pain.
A bald mystery man (Tom Noonan) overhears the exchange and offers to show Nora just why Patrick was so dispassionate. Escorting her to a rundown apartment, Nora is told that she must pay $1,000 to learn the truth. She consents to the PayPal transaction and is then presented with Holy Wayne, who offers to absolve Nora of her pain, an ability he has claimed to possess in previous episodes. After a long, creepy embrace, we see Nora resume her previous life, only now there’s a lightness to her. She is even capable of smiling now, a previously unthinkable gesture. We are left to wonder if Wayne really is some sort of sin-eater for the terminally depressed or if he merely wields the power of suggestion to great effect.
The greatest strength of “Guest” is Carrie Coon’s performance. Nora is such a raw, exposed nerve, always seemingly on the verge of blowing up or crumbling apart, that she effortlessly commands our attention, and the path she finds herself on here is genuinely intriguing. The surprise reveal of Wayne, who has seemed to be one of many half-cooked, half-forgotten threads on this show, pays off and finally renders him worthy of our attention. And if yet another party sequence that devolves into a sex-and-drug-filled bacchanal suggests that either people in the ‘Leftovers’ world party harder than Andrew W.K. or the show’s writers don’t know how parties work in the real world, at least there isn’t anything as profoundly dull going on as has become customary on this series.
One of the other grabbers of “Guest” is the way it gives us pieces of how the world functions in light of the Departure, something this show all too often neglects to do because it’s so busy following the Guilty Remnant around to document their passive-aggressive silent treatment. A rather obnoxious fellow at the conference makes Nora’s acquaintance and states that his business is producing Bereavement Figures, lifelike replicas of the departed that can be purchased for $40,000 for grieving families to bury and gain a measure of closure from. The series has alluded to this practice before, but it fleshes out the details here, even showing us a television commercial for the service. Similarly, the practice of surveying families is also an interesting concept, and the presence of protestors and assorted loonies picketing the conference feels like such an altogether plausible outcome to how society would react if an event like this actually transpired (also plausible are the conspiracy theories that the departed pope has since been spotted hiding out in a basement).
Centering the focus on a different character each week could be the thing that keeps ‘The Leftovers’ humming along. It doesn’t seem to have many interesting characters, but Nora didn’t seem like an interesting character either until she was given the floor. Using one character at a time as a window into a different corner of this world might be a stronger approach than the broader, yet oddly more limiting, scope the show has been using thus far. I just want ‘The Leftovers’ to keep me awake more consistently. When I put it down in writing like that, it doesn’t seem like asking too much.
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